Arcadia (23 page)

“Mum?”

“Careful. Watch where you put your feet.”

“Where are we going?” Left is the way past the Club to the Abbey road. Right doesn't go anywhere, just around the back of the Beach to the quay.

“It's only for a little while, I promise.”

“What is?”

“I'm putting you on the boat.”

He stiffens. His legs lock. “You can't.”

She drags him forward again. “Not for long.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees a grimy battered-looking sailing boat splattered all over with gull poo and the smeary fuzz of lichen, tied up inside the quay by the ferry steps. It's the boat that used to be off the south end of the island. She's brought it round, while he was off explaining his brilliant idea to Silvia.

His brilliant idea.

“I'll stay in Parson's,” he says. “I won't look outside. I swear.”

“There's a cabin at the front,” she says. “I'm going to have to lock you in there. I'm sorry, Rory, but you understand why, don't you?”

“I won't even look at the windows. Please, Mum.”

“It's the only safe place.” She's got hold of him really hard now. “It's not for long. I just need to collect a couple more things.”

She's marching him along the quay. A gull takes off from the boat's railing as they approach. At the top of the steps he makes a proper effort to break her grip. She grabs him harder than he'd have thought possible. A moment later and she's wrestling him down, and it's all he can do not to fall off the steps completely. He can hear himself protesting increasingly desperately. A sense of unspecified disaster is beginning to take hold. He can't exactly let himself think about why it's so but he knows with perfect certainty that he shouldn't get on this boat. It's not making any difference. She won't listen to him. There's a moment of teetering clumsiness as she brings him alongside and then they're aboard, the deck wobbling, the bitter stench of fuel everywhere. They're almost fighting each other now. He's too little, though. The bag of comics has gotten itself wrapped around his arms like a ball and chain, she's got hold of his wrists too, and once his hands are trapped there's nothing he can do. He loses his footing in the steep companionway which goes down to the cabin and for a moment he's actually dangling and kicking before she drops him into a stripped-out space of stained plastic and bits of foam padding. There's no way out. He thinks he's crying now as he pleads with her, he can't tell. She comes down after him, picks him off the floor, and carries and shoves him through a narrow space between two moldy bunks to a tiny door. Here she stops, finally. They're both gasping.

“You'll have your comics,” she says. “It won't be for long. I'm sorry, Rory sweetheart.”

Unthinkable consequences are spinning around his head, so vast and black he can't speak. She opens the tiny door of the forward cabin. Beyond it is a dim squashed space rank with condensation and neglect.

“Mum, listen to me.”

She bundles him inside. There's a hatch overhead but it's almost black with age and dirt.

“Don't shut me in here,” he says. The fight's gone out of him. It's too serious for fighting now.

“I'll be as quick as I can,” she says, very shakily.

“Mum!” She slams the tiny door. He hears the latch rattle. He hears a padlock click. “Please!”

  *  *  *  

It's a bit like the silty water in a rock pool. When you swirl it around the sand gets caught up in the water and the whole pool goes cloudy, you can't see anything. You have to not touch it for a while. If you wait and don't do anything the sand settles, and then you can see all the way to the bottom, crystal clear.

He sits quietly for a while after she goes, and so he begins to see what's going to happen.

He whacks the door and the hatch a few times each. The door feels flimsy but it's not flimsy enough. He ends up hurting his hands. Perhaps he could try harder but he doesn't. He sits again, wondering why.

Eventually, of course, they come.

It all happens very quickly. He's been thinking about what he'll do when it happens: sitting in his damp dull prison, thinking. Or trying to. In the event, when he hears low urgent voices and then feet on the steps, and then the boat wobbles and scrapes as they jump aboard, he just goes on sitting, holding the bag of comics on his lap. He's amazed at himself and at the world. Three voices chatter hurriedly around the boat. Lines rattle. Once steps come close and the locked door shakes, for a moment. The fenders squeal. Motion grips the boat. Quietly, he takes one of the comics out of the bag. There isn't enough light from the filthy hatch to read by. He opens it anyway and stares silently at the pages and has the sudden knowledge that everything's inside out. The comics were once more vivid and wonderful than anything in the whole real world; now they aren't. His life has become a story instead of a life.

He remembers thinking once that this was what he always wanted.

W
hat's weird is that he never says anything.

Briar Hill, a bright autumn morning, a few days ago, gathering blackberries and sloes: he watched Ol walk away to his death, knowing he ought to stop him but not knowing how. The right moment kept slipping by, too fast to catch.

It's the same now. If he'd just shouted out
then,
a moment ago—
Help! Let me out!
—this whole unthinkable turn of events might have stopped and gone into reverse. But he never does, because
now
the moment is gone.

There was a point soon after they were under way when he heard shouting coming across the water, voices screaming from the island. That was the moment. He could have jumped up and banged on the door. He can see himself doing it, the sequence of actions, panel by panel. Bang, shout:
Hey! I'm in here!
They'd have realized what they'd done and let him out, and then something else would have happened, over the page: they'd have dropped him off at the beach on Sansen, maybe, or put him ashore in the dinghy. If there is a dinghy.

But it didn't happen. He was waiting for it to happen and it never did.

He has a little cry. Not for long: he's feeling too sick. They must be out beyond the edge of the world by now. In the no-man's-land, the vacuum. The graveyard. They're a speck in the big grey swell. There's no engine sound. They're sailing. The boat's wallowing and lurching in that queasily sluggish way which means the wind's behind. The comics slide around on the dismal bunk. Feet bang overhead and from time to time vague shadows further blot out the grimy light from the hatch.

At one stage the locked door rattles sharply and he hears Silvia say something in Italian. Obviously this is another moment when he ought to shout out—
It's me!
—or
was
another moment: it's gone almost as soon as it happens. What could he say, anyway? They're not going to take him back now.

Or ever, perhaps. Like Ol.

Eventually he hears muttering and scraping at the door and then a couple of very loud whacks, so loud they make him forget his nausea and sit up cross-legged on the bunk. After the fourth or fifth whack there's a metallic pop, and a crack appears in the door near the handle. One more whack shakes the handle loose. The lock falls out, the door bangs open, and there's Silvia, a mallet in one hand and a screwdriver in the other and a look on her face as close to surprise as Rory will ever see. The sea sounds twice as loud with the door open.

Her look changes to a dry smile.

“I had a feeling,” she says.

  *  *  *  

They don't turn back. Rory climbs unsteadily up the companionway and looks over the stern and there's nothing there but waves, dazzling hills of water. Lino whoops at him and slaps his back. Per, at the wheel, still gripping his massive walking stick, only scowls. He doesn't know what they're saying to each other but he can tell from Per's face that he wouldn't turn the boat around even if they asked him to. The hills rear up behind him, dark on their shadowed side, relentless, wave after wave. He's not so much seasick as plain terrified. The boat bangs and squeaks and judders and plunges off the back of each wave like it's going to fall forever. It's not even that windy, it's just the ocean swell. He always hated it, even when he hadn't just been kidnapped. He retreats below and crams himself into a corner of the main cabin, bracing himself against cold plastic.

“I don't like it either.” Silvia sits beside him. “We're people of the roads, my people. Not like those two up there.” Lino's scrambling all over the deck. They can hear him going back and forth all the time; it's like listening to mice in the ceiling. “Per was a sailor, you know. It was his job. He worked on the big boats, all over the world. And Lino grew up by the sea. Like you.”

Perhaps she's trying to make him feel better by sitting and talking with him. He's too sick and miserable to notice.

“It doesn't help you so much?” She ruffles his hair, like she did earlier that morning, outside the Hotel. It can't have been the same day, he thinks, or the same world. How'd he end up here? “That's OK. I think it's right to be afraid of the sea. It's the opposite of us. Those two, they're the strange ones.”

He's hardly said anything to her. What he wants to say is
I want to go home
. He wants to whine like Pink. But you can't talk to Silvia like that. She's not his mother. They don't care what he wants. He's caught up in their journey, small and useless as a burr. He's not going home. He won't be at the Abbey later on, or in his bed after that. His mother's not going to tuck him in tonight.

Silvia watches him for a moment and then just carries on.

“I was born a long way from the sea. Do you know Romania? No? That's where I was born. In a house on wheels. A car like a little house. What's the word in English? Anyway. So I was even born on the road. Nineteen eighty-four. How old are you?” She only waits a little. “No, I remember. Ten?”

He nods, finally.

“Only ten,” she says to herself, like it's hard to believe.

Why's she talking about this? Why isn't she saying sorry to him, telling him it's all been a stupid mistake, explaining how she's going to fix it and put him back where he's supposed to be?

She pulls her knees up on the seat next to him and settles close. “You don't know about the history in Europe, then. You're much too young. Romania, where I was born, it's a country in east Europe. Thirty years ago, this whole part of the world, it's a completely different place. The Iron Curtain. Have you heard about the Iron Curtain?”

He shakes his head. No one's ever talked to him like this before.

“All the countries in this part of Europe, we were like little children, and Russia is the mother. Yes? Telling us what to do. Saying, No, you can't leave the house, you can't go outside to play, you stay here where I watch you all the time. In Romania all the people are like that, like children. And my people, the Roma, we're the smallest. The slaves of slaves. The Russians spit on the Romanians and the Romanians spit on the gypsies. Then one day, when I was a small child, Russia got sick and died. All the children were left with no . . .”

She looks at Rory and thinks better of finishing the sentence.

“So, all those countries, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, they don't know what to do. No one knows what's happening, what rules there are now. For the Roma, my people, there was nothing. No money, no work, nowhere to live. My parents disappeared maybe, or died, I don't know what happened. I live in the streets. In a little box, under a bridge. This is the oldest thing I remember. My box, and water coming from a broken pipe. I remember the sound of dogs. Trucks crossing the bridge in the night,
brrrmmm
. I live like that, by the road. Can you imagine?”

She waits quite a long time, watching him fixedly.

“You feel sad without your mother?” she says, eventually.

He gives a stiff little nod.

Perhaps she's finally noticed what she's done to him. But she doesn't do any of those things grown-ups usually do when they're pretending to comfort you: no hugs or pats or
poor-you
s. She shrugs, looks at her nails. They're filthy. Then she goes on talking about herself.

“You know I'm an orphan? It's the same word in Romanian.
Orfan
. I remember the day people came and took me to the orphanage. Nineteen ninety. I'm six years old.

“It's very young, yes? They come with a big white car and take me from my box under the bridge. I scream, I fight like this.” She waves her arms wildly in the air and makes her greasy hair flap around. “That night I'm locked in a room with other girls. All white Slavic girls. All our hair cut off. They say horrible things to me, pinch me so I can't go to sleep, blame me every time there is a noise. I didn't even have a mother but I cried for being alone.”