The Raft: A Novel (10 page)

By the time the men returned in the morning, the beached mother was dead. I had no idea when she’d slipped away. When I struggled awake, just after sunrise, she was no longer breathing. The men arrived with two drums of oil. They dug a trench around the body with shovels. As the morning went on, a small crowd began to form around the carcass, no one speaking but everyone scrutinising the scene. I wondered if, like me, they were waiting for nothing else but to
feel
something. To feel anything.

I stood back from the crowd, up on the embankment, watching from afar. The large black lump didn’t look like the same whale from the night before. The awe was gone, and with it the notions of fallen gods, of mystic giants, and other such romances of the heart and mind. Now, surrounded by people and exposed by the sobering light of day, it looked like nothing more than a big, dead animal. A rotting husk.

I felt nothing.

I looked over my shoulder. Gideon was near the tents, sitting on a wooden bench and cleaning his tools. To my left, Daniel had perched himself on the branch of a tree, giving himself the best view; the crowd around the whale had already deepened so that some in the back were struggling to see anything.

Four men climbed atop the whale and had the drums passed up to them. One of the men said something to the crowd, perhaps warning that the fire would be large, but from where I was standing I couldn’t hear anything. Two men to a drum, they proceeded to lift them and tip them over. The slick black oil ran like treacle. They walked the length of the whale, making sure that all of it was covered in the dense fluid. Some of the oil dripped and ran out like thin black tentacles into the ocean. The men climbed off the whale and held up their hands, ordering everyone to stand back.

A tug on the sleeve of my shirt.

Beside me was the same girl I had seen at my tent in the early hours of the morning, two days earlier. She was still clutching her furry companion.

“Hello,” I said to her. “Hello bear,” I added, tugging twice on its brown ear. A moaning sound came from her throat and she pointed up to the white house on the hill. She was probably mute; I hadn’t yet heard a sound come from her and her lack of speech seemed to extend beyond mere shyness. Nevertheless, it was clear I’d been summoned.

I glanced at the crowd on the beach below, nodded to Daniel to let him know I was leaving, and trekked over the embankment up to the house on the hill.

“We’ve been concerned,” said one of the heads from behind their long steel table. “There have been inconsistencies.”

I shifted in the uncomfortable chair. Once again, the plugs and wires siphoned my thoughts and squirted them into the big grey box beside me. It rumbled like some anxious creature, foaming out its reports.

My first thought was that the summonsing was connected to my night alongside the whale. The Body had its eyes: we were always being observed, no matter where we were and what we were doing. I’d often spot someone staring a little too long, making a note, loitering where they clearly had nothing better to do than spy.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” the woman said. “This isn’t about last night. That does not concern us now, though we will continue to monitor your inconsistent behaviour. What concerns us is more serious, I’m afraid.”

My mind was blank and I frowned, trying to recall. Then it dawned upon me: Moneta. Her story.

“You were seen with Moneta in the garden.”

“Moneta asked me for a favour. To move a few pots,” I said.

“But what did you speak about? You were seen conversing for quite some time.”

I wasn’t certain how to respond. I couldn’t betray Moneta by telling them everything, and yet I couldn’t keep it from them either. The machine would read my anxiety.

“She spoke about her plants,” I said as calmly as I could. “She was worried about them.”

“What was she worried about?”

“They aren’t growing properly. She’s been having some problems with the dahlias. She spoke about how some plants need to be near other plants, particular ones, that attention needs to be paid to the partnerships.”

“Partnerships?”

“Between the plants.”

They said nothing for a while, scratching notes in their dockets.

“Was that all?” one of them asked.

“Moneta’s getting old. It’s difficult to understand some of the things she says.” Again, they scrawled in their dockets. “I’ll be more careful next time, though, not to indulge an old woman’s careless conversation.”

“Well, unfortunately, the problem is even greater than that. Moneta has gone missing …”

They paused, waiting for a physical response. They didn’t get what they expected; my sudden surprise registered on the machine, and thus, so did my alibi.

“She hasn’t been seen since yesterday and it seems you were the second-last person to speak with her. We’ve questioned the assistant, but he says he doesn’t know. We’ve sent scouts. We’ve looked everywhere. We are not pleased by how things have transpired. The conversations and such. You can understand our concern, yes?”

“Yes.”

I thought about Moneta. She had offered no thoughts about leaving. And then I remembered what she had said, the curious finality of her words.
A story I need to tell. To both someone else and myself, one last time.

“We need you to be very careful over the next few days,” said the man with the metal gadget on his head. “We’ll be keeping a closer eye on some of your actions. Until this is all cleared up, of course.”

“Of course.”

I wondered whether The Body had made it all up, said that she’d disappeared in order to test me in some way, but I too was capable of providing my analyses of others; they were puzzled and troubled, all right. They weren’t faking it. They said nothing and had me sit for a couple of minutes while they looked for any fluctuations in my report. They waited for some secret to slip through the cracks of my subconscious and into their mechanical mind reader.

“That’s all for now,” said the old man at the end of the table. “We may need to call you back, soon. Do not go far.”

I walked back from the house and picked through my memory of Moneta’s story, but could recall no hints of a plan to escape. It was difficult enough to believe a woman of her age could get very far. Behind the beach was nothing but steep mountains and barren, endless roads. We were fenced in, they’d told us. The Body had its eyes (enough eyes to know I had spoken to her in the first place) and even the most careful of us would be captured before covering any meaningful distance.

I looked back to make sure I wasn’t being followed. All I could see was the roof of the white farmhouse as it sank into the shrubby knoll. I slid on the muddy footpath and stepped onto the skewed stairs leading to the encampment of tents on the beach.

I still had the letter.

Checking over both shoulders, I slipped inside my tent. I zipped up behind me, lifted a pile of books from my shelf and grabbed the letter. I sat on my bed and tore open the short side of the envelope. Carefully, I reached inside and slid out folded sheets of white paper. I unfolded the pages and read Moneta’s words.

Flipping the final page, I saw nothing else. I read her letter again and then fanned out the pages on the bed. I leaned back on my pillow and looked up at the ceiling. A moth was tacked in the corner—it had been there for two days. I stared at it until its furry body and flat grey wings became sharper—almost hyper-real—the perfect emblem of a tattered and unmoved world.

It seemed ludicrous to accept that Moneta had somehow received someone else’s memory, like a radio transmitter picking up some unknown signal.

It couldn’t be possible, I told myself.

It didn’t make sense.

I sat up on my bed and rubbed my face, wondering what to do next. My eyes swept the tent, seeking familiar things, things I recognised and could rely on to simply be what they were. My broken umbrella. My box of pictures. My blunt knife. But whereas once they might have served to balance me, they now sat like cold dead stones at the bottom of the ocean. Magic charms that had lost their magic. They held no power, didn’t mean anything, and I no longer knew why I’d once thought to keep them.

Stepping outside, I looked about; the area was quiet and empty. I thought about telling someone about the letter, but who, and why? Besides, that seemed the wrong thing to do. And who would believe it? I wasn’t even sure I did, though the letter had suffered no lack of coherency.

As I walked, the commune remained eerily still. Everyone was at the whale and many strange contraptions, rigs and workstations stood unattended. There was always an array of tasks to be managed in the commune. Anyone with a proclivity for handiwork had been assigned to the building of the tent frames and furniture. Evening meals were prepared by four men who recalled they had once been Swedish and had worked as chefs. A team washed our dirty clothes in vats of filtered seawater provided by the overseers of a rickety, clanging desalination system. A group of fishermen made and hauled the lave nets and three women sat on stools outside the infirmary, waiting to tend to the occasional broken bone or fever. Nothing was ever adorned or embellished. A stick of primed wood never saw a lick of paint and nor was a meal ever garnished. The commune was a place of bareness. A practical bone yard. And now, without a soul in sight, the place was even gloomier than usual. It seemed for a moment that all activity had not been postponed but permanently abandoned, as if everyone, all at once, had come to the realisation they’d been living on a stage of cardboard props, none of which really worked at all.