The Wall(50)

In addition to all the seaweed we found three areas with a good quantity of scallops. These were frustrating, because the shells were beautiful and big, broader than an outstretched palm, but then when you opened them the shellfish was nothing but a dab of red coral and a coin-sized blob of meat. The rule sometimes seemed that the bigger and more promising the shell, the smaller the yield of edible scallop. The fact that they were delicious, tangy and sweet and subtle, was a cruel trick; such hard work to get them, but so small, but so good … They were excellent for morale, though, especially with the new supply of seaweed to vary the diet of seabirds and mackerel.

Kellan had been waiting for a while to investigate the sea bed, but hadn’t done so because there was nobody able to do it. We could tell that there had once been more people in the floating community. The subject was never discussed. If enough time went past, I was planning to ask what had happened to the rest of them; to ask in detail, I mean, because I could guess the rough outline. They had sailed away looking for some solid ground and had not come back. Perhaps some of them had succeeded in getting to land in the south. It wasn’t impossible. It was also possible some of them had died trying to get over the Wall. I didn’t want to think about that too much.

James did some diving too, but he was a poor swimmer and wasn’t fit, so he didn’t bring up much of anything. Hifa was better but she got cold quickly and she was doing such good work with the fishing that it was a more effective use of her time. As for the Captain, he wasn’t well enough yet to swim let alone to dive, so he spent most of the day working on the nets, repairing them. He sat on a plastic crate on the side of the raft and picked over the lines and nets. When he saw a weak spot he set to the task of stitching and sewing it back together: an incongruous sight but somehow an ancient one too, the fisherman fixing his tools. The children were frightened of him at the start but after a few days began going over to sit beside him and watch him work. They were fascinated by his facial scars. I once saw him sitting on his plastic crate while two of them, standing in front of him, reached out and touched them, very carefully, as if he might suddenly change his mind and leap up at them. It occurred to me that he was the only one of us who had left children behind. I had no feelings about that: his choices were what they were. The teenage girls sometimes went over too and sat with him; he had a language in common with one of them. I could occasionally hear the two of them laugh together. He gave them small jobs testing the repaired lines or feeling over the nets to look for weak spots for him to inspect.

In general I avoided the Captain. Since we had been put to sea, since the time he had said why he had done what he did, I don’t think I had heard him utter twenty sentences. He was as quiet in the community as he had been on the lifeboat, and it was hard to know what he thought. I found it difficult to believe that he would prefer being on the open sea to being here, though. One day we went diving near the section of raft where he was mending his nets, and when I came up I was only a few feet away from him. I dried myself and wrapped myself in the space blanket and shivered myself back to warmth. Hughes went to get some dried fish from Mara’s big raft. I stood hopping and jiggling. He was passing a net through his hands, looking for holes and damage. He did not look at me. But I had something I wanted to know.

‘Do you ever think about it? What they would do if they knew who we are?’ I said to him. I think the subtext of that was: do you, an expert in deception for many years, feel any remorse about this new deceit?

‘They do know. I told them,’ he said.

I should have been used to being surprised by what the Captain did, but that proved I still didn’t have the measure of him. I stopped still.

‘You could have got us all killed. More likely than not.’

He shrugged. ‘No more lies.’

‘Your lies.’

‘Everybody’s lies.’

I thought about it for a moment.

‘What did they say?’

‘They told me that they have a saying here: nothing before the sea was real.’

This conversation with the Captain was one I replayed over and over afterwards. I thought about it for all the time we were on the rafts; I especially brooded on what the Captain had said, no more lies. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I eventually realised that was the closest he would ever get to an apology. He wouldn’t say he was sorry for his lies. He didn’t feel it. But he would say, no more lies. His life of lies on the Wall had used him up. Nothing before the sea was real. Nothing before this, here and now, was real. I could understand why they might say that, if they had reconciled themselves to life out here. To me, it felt the other way around: life before this was real, but the sea was a dream or delirium. An afterlife.

I noticed that the Captain stayed well clear of Kellan and made no attempt to be in charge or to lead. The only adult he regularly spoke to was Hifa, because she was doing most of the work of setting up and checking the nets and lines.

‘What do you talk about?’ I asked her one night. By tacit agreement, the rest of the community let us use the back of the lifeboat as our place to sleep when it wasn’t raining. When it rained they needed the cover. So although there was no privacy by day, we were able to be intimate in the evening. That meant that the days had a shape, company and work by light and just the two of us by night.

‘Nets. Ropes. Fishing. He knows about it, he used to fish back where he came from.’