The Wall(46)

‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’m sure. There is land in front of us and about fifteen degrees to the left. At first I thought I was imagining it but I’m definitely not. It’s an island.’

Hughes stopped rowing, I let go of the tiller and we both joined Hifa at the front of the boat. My first thought was: she’s wrong. There was a short smudgy line on the horizon but the thing it most looked like was a bank of cloud. One of those mirages, those imagined solid shapes which were so tormenting at sea. I stood and looked a bit more. I took off my glasses, thought about wiping them, thought better of it and put them back on. Actually, maybe …

‘It’s land,’ said Hughes, and hugged Hifa. They did a clumsy little jig. I still wasn’t sure. My desperate wish to believe them made me reluctant to believe them. I kept looking. The line did not move or wave or blur as clouds tended to. I kept looking. Almost with reluctance, I gave in to hope and admitted to myself: yes, it was land. Land!

Hughes and I went back to the oars and took one each. We started to row in the direction of the land. There was no immediate way of guessing its distance, since high ground would be visible from much further away than low; it could be thirty kilometres, it could be as little as three to five. My guess was that it was low land and not too far. My reasoning was that high ground might accumulate its own weather, wisps of cloud above the highest point.

The wind was from the side and the boat rocked and bumped as we headed towards the miracle of land. Sometimes the oars would catch too deep, sometimes they would miss altogether. It made rowing even harder work than usual. Since we were put to sea blisters had formed on my hands, then burst, and the raw skin underneath was acutely painful. We took the oars for half an hour at a time, Hifa and James joining in. The Captain came out of the back of the boat to watch.

All I could think of was how easy it would have been to miss the island altogether. It was pure luck. In the night we would have gone straight by without the merest inkling of its presence. So much of our new life was about luck.

We rowed for a couple of hours and the island was close now, a few hundred metres away. The next problem became clear to all of us at the same time. I looked at Hifa and Hughes and James and they looked back at me. The Captain was standing right at the front of the lifeboat.

‘No no no,’ said Hughes.

It was easy to see what he meant. There was nowhere to land. The island – beachless, like every coastline in the world after the Change – rose vertically out of the sea. All that was left of the low island it had formerly been was the upper part of its main hill. Or rather, hills, three of them, a triple-peaked mass. The three slopes were bare rock. The wind and waves smashed into them and if we went in too close, we would be smashed against them too. Even on a sunny, calm day, with a powerful ship able to hold its own against the winds and currents, it didn’t look as if it would be possible to get a foothold, not on this side of the island. In our boat and with our resources we would have no chance.

The Captain turned around.

‘This isn’t the only possible angle of approach,’ he said. That made sense. We would pull back, give it some space, take a tour around the island and see if there was anywhere we could land. Hifa turned the boat to the side and I stepped away from the oars to let James go solo. There was no rush now; we’d take as long as we needed. This might be our best chance of medium-term survival and we didn’t want to skip past it in any hurry. At the same time, I felt a deep, almost nauseous sense of dread. My gut was telling me that there would be nothing to look at. The island was too steep, too rocky, a cliff in the middle of the ocean; I desperately wanted there to be a landing point, but I couldn’t imagine what it would look like. The rowing was hard, even harder than it had been before, and as we turned to manoeuvre around the island the waves came from all points of the compass so that the boat bucked and rocked more wildly than ever. This is impossible, I thought, we will never be able to land here.

I was half right. As we went around it became clear that the island was variations on a theme: vertical stone. It wasn’t just unsafe to land, it was unsafe to get too close. A shipwreckers’ dream of an island. And yet I was half wrong too, because as we came round into the lee of the island, hidden from the wind, in the sudden still and quiet, I saw the first good thing I had seen since we were put to sea: a flotilla of boats, floating together in the unexpected calm.





20




The strangest thing about the next few days was how quickly we got used to our new life. I tried to keep a low profile and set myself the task of finding out what this all was, what it meant – who these people were and how they had got here. The floating community had sixteen members, before we arrived. They had eight sea-going vessels tied together and a couple of floating structures which were not seaworthy, not in any kind of weather, but were float-worthy. The community had not been a plan, more a series of accidents and coincidences. The first three boats had arrived in the lee of the island before the last winter began and had taken shelter, and then had found that the supply of protein (fish) and water (rain) could sustain them, and had stayed. The other boats – the other Others – had arrived piecemeal and over time. Their crews were from nowhere and anywhere. I’d been brought up not to think about the Others in terms of where they came from or who they were, to ignore all that – they were just Others. But maybe, now that I was one of them, they weren’t Others any more? If I was an Other and they were Others perhaps none of us were Others but instead we were a new Us. It was confusing.