The Wall(52)

I was wrong. The storm never built from that first great thrash. The wind and rain came again and again, but did not grow in intensity and was never more than a series of frightening but brief squalls. We braced ourselves for the weather to build to a crisis, but it didn’t happen. The squalls came at irregular intervals, sometimes no more than two minutes apart, sometimes with lulls of fifteen or twenty minutes, followed by a longer and more violent but still manageable gust. I think the island deflected just enough of the storm’s force, changed its nature just enough, to save us. I felt sick but didn’t actually throw up and was helped (I’m not proud of this) by the fact that Hifa began to look a little green too.

Three small squalls came together, each a little longer than the last, the waves rocking us so little now that no new water was being splashed in. There was a pause of more than twenty minutes and then the shortest, smallest burst of wind and rain so far. The storm was passing. We had survived. The rafts would not be torn apart. The community would keep going. I could have cried with relief. Hifa was still looking green but I reached out and squeezed her arm and got up and left the awning and then left the lifeboat to go and look around.

Kellan was still standing on the side of the rafts closest to the island, closest to the storm. He couldn’t have been there the whole time, I thought, that would be superhuman; he must have kept coming in and out as the squalls moved on. Elsewhere on the rafts people were coming out of shelters, stretching, beginning to tidy up and straighten up. In the distance the skies moved from a much lighter grey than before to, at the horizon, a paint-roller swipe of bright blue. He turned to me and smiled.

‘Told you,’ he said.

‘I was worried,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But look.’ He held out his hand and pointed at the horizon as if he owned it, still smiling, then slowly swung his extended arm from one side of the horizon to the other, and then kept turning and pointing, a single broad swipe, doing a full 360-degree tour of the sea and sky, as if he were revealing his handiwork, the world he had made. When he got to the seaward side of the boat, in the direction where the storm had gone, his face changed, and because I was looking at him and laughing, it was as if what happened began there, with his expression changing, looking, for the first time since I had known him, not just frightened but more than frightened, aghast, blanching, horrified. I turned to look too and I saw, coming in our direction into the weather and the wind, battering against the waves, a big ship, heading straight at us. A gust of wind and rain, the final one of that storm, came and went, and I stood there and got soaked while it passed, wishing that when the sky cleared, the impossible boat would have gone and we would laugh about the shared hallucination. My heart was beating so fast that my chest hurt. It was a ghost boat, something from a dream or nightmare, a phantasm of the rain and mist. We were seeing things. But the squall moved past us and when it did the ship was still there, still coming, still pointed towards us like a knife. It had lights on the mast and rigging; the same five lights in a triangular pattern that I had seen weeks before, at night on the open sea. This was the same ship.





22




My first thought was: maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe they’ll just want to join us … but that didn’t make sense. There could be any number of people on a ship that size, and at the fewest there wouldn’t be fewer than say fifteen or twenty, and fifteen adults was too many. Maybe they were coming in peace? But there was, even at first sight, a feeling that they weren’t coming in peace. If that ship had been a person they would have been staring at us as they approached, bristling with aggression, looking for any excuse to start a fight.

Kellan did not move and did not speak. He just kept looking at the ship. The rest of the community was now seeing what we were seeing. Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare. Even the children stopped what they were doing. There wasn’t a face that didn’t seem racked with apprehension. I had sometimes imagined that other arrivals might come to the rafts, but had pictured them arriving the same way we came in the lifeboat, desperate and barely surviving and grateful for any respite from the sea. We had been even more grateful when we found we could be useful and had skills and manpower to contribute. I could imagine a repeat of that. I hadn’t imagined this, though. What this ship looked like, more than anything else, was a warship.

The Captain came out from one of the shacks in the middle of the raft and took in what was happening. He went to the end of the community closest to the approaching ship. It was now about two kilometres away. Visibility had been poor during the storm. This ship could only have come across us by chance, just as it had only been by chance that our lifeboat had come to that place. Unless they had naval charts and were looking for the island; in which case they might be professionals, might even be Guards. Perhaps they were looking for us? Our case had been debated, somebody in authority had decided we had been treated unfairly, and the Guards had been sent to look for us and bring us home? This wild thought came to me from nowhere and I suddenly felt sick with hope. Guards sent to save us, Guards sent to save us, I told myself, my mouth dry with fear and longing. I wanted to tell Hifa but knew that I couldn’t because I was probably wrong and if I was I would have done a bad thing, given her the hope and then given her the despair. So I stood and stared, speechless, with the rest of them, my feelings strobing between fear and hope. We had no way of defending ourselves, there was nothing we could do.