The Wall(47)
Members of the floating community couldn’t go ashore, but they, we, were safe in the calm. It was nobody’s idea of an ideal life but it was a life that could be lived. Traps, catchments and lines were all over the floating craft, in their hundreds: for food, I saw to my amazement, they were quite well supplied. The big lack was in fuel: there were only tiny quantities of wood, which was too precious to burn, and an equally tiny quantity of diesel fuel brought by one of the boats. It wasn’t clear what to do with that so it was being kept for emergencies.
The second day after our arrival, I was walking around the rafts trying to understand how it all worked and I came to the side of the community furthest from the sunken island. This was the biggest of all the rafts. A woman with wild black and grey hair was squatting as she wrestled with something I couldn’t see clearly but which was still alive and fighting.
‘I’m not going to pretend that looks good,’ I said. The woman laughed. The sea life made it difficult to tell how old people were but she was maybe in her mid-forties, strong-looking and intent on her work. I now had a better view of what she was doing. She had trapped a seagull in a net; she broke its neck with a single expert wring. You could see she had done this many times before. The bird went limp and the woman’s shoulders dropped with relief. She gestured at me to sit so I did.
‘What’s the worst thing you ever ate in your life?’ she said, half smiling, as she started to pull feathers off the bird. She spoke good English with a lilt, an accent from somewhere far away and a rhythm which had something not-English underneath it.
‘You mean, before I got here?’
She laughed at that too.
‘I don’t really remember,’ I said. On the Wall, thinking about food had been a means of escape, a technique for casting your imagination into the future, into a time when you weren’t on the Wall any more. At sea, thinking about food had become a form of nostalgia, of time travel back to a safer place. On the Wall, thinking about food made you feel better. Out here, it made you feel worse. ‘To be honest, looking back, it all seems pretty good now. I had some stews and things I thought were impossible to eat but I’d give anything to have them today.’
‘Whatever it was, gull is nastier. Believe it. A rank taste and a bitter taste. As bad as you can imagine. Game bird and fish. At the same time. Tough too. Juice runs when you sink your teeth in. Blood, salt, duck, fish oil. Hard to swallow. And that’s if you cook it. We can’t use fire so we have to eat it raw. That’s so much worse. Trick is to leave it to dry. It’s still hard to chew but the flavour changes. You can get it down without gagging. Like jerky or pemmican. Fish-duck jerky. We store it for when we’re low on protein. No choice.’
No choice. That made sense. It was true for most things on the sea. Her boat – it seemed to be hers, though the sense of ownership might be a function of her strength of personality rather than anything more formal – was a large improvised raft made of wood. There were nets strung in the air all around the boat to catch birds, and lines hanging off it all around in the water to catch fish. Rainwater catchment vessels were dotted all over the vessel. Including me, there were six or seven people on this raft, two of them solemn children who had been given, or had given themselves, the job of finishing off any birds or fish brought into the boat: they carried clublike sticks with a thickened metal piece on the end. The children took sidelong glances at me when they thought I wouldn’t notice. It was as if I too was a form of non-human life which might at any moment need to be whacked on the head. Killed and eaten too, maybe. Did children have thoughts like that? Or was imaginative darkness of that sort an adult thing? I didn’t know enough about them to know. The next time I caught the boy peeking at me I smiled and winked back. He quickly looked away.
Beyond the children were three girls, older than the children but not old enough to count as adults. I never saw them more than a stride or two away from each other. They spent most of their time whispering to each other, conspiring or sharing secrets. It was hard to know what those secrets would be, in a place like this; but maybe that made having them all the more important. They were not sisters – their ethnicities were visibly different – but they spoke a shared language which was not English. The shortest and most confident of them acted as their spokesperson and interlocutor. The girls were slowly and desultorily lifting fishing lines out of the water and checking them. They had the air of teenagers who are pretending to be busy in order to prevent adults from giving them something more demanding to do.
‘I’m Mara,’ the woman said, as she kept plucking the seagull. ‘I’m married to him.’ She pointed across to a man who was moving towards us, the same age as her, also wiry, also tough, his beard scissors-clipped and orderly. The floating people had their own technique for crossing the ropes and nets between the rafts: instead of slowing down and picking their way carefully, they sped up and put their feet so precisely on the knots and firmer planks that they seemed to skip over the water. This man was so confident on the tricky passage between rafts that he was brisk and delicate, like a goat on a steep hillside. Once he was on the big raft he had a few words with the teenagers, then a few words with the children, and then he came to Mara and me and squatted down in front of us.
‘I’m Kellan,’ he said. He had the same up-and-down, not-quite-English lilt as his partner. Kellan didn’t say he was in charge; he didn’t have to. I knew already that there were people here who knew a lot about how to live at sea, and it was clear that I had now met two of them. I got the story later. Kellan and Mara had been raised by two sets of parents who were keen sailors before the Change; they met at sea, across on the far side of the Atlantic; they more or less grew up on boats. You felt that the closer you stayed to them, the better your chances of keeping alive.