“It won’t let us!” screams Madie.
The boat lurches from left to right, buffeted by waves and troughs. They are lying on the floor, rolling and crashing into the side of the boat as it rises and falls with a sinister cracking sound, they are drenched by the slapping of the water. Liam and Matteo cry out at the same time, there’s a leak, the father envisages all the impossible solutions, final seconds, their little boat damaged, the wood giving way, he squeezes the edge with all his strength as if that could hold the boat together, Don’t kill my children, his head shaking as he roars, No, no, and meets Madie’s horror-stricken gaze.
“It’s going to eat us!” screams Liam.
“No!” But Pata is losing faith and his voice cracks.
He starts to get up, nearly stumbles into the water, bangs into Matteo next to him. He squeezes his shoulder, and sways when he sees the knife in the boy’s hand. Matteo?
The crazed look on his boy’s face.
“If I go for him, you’ll have time to land.”
“What?”
He reaches out his hand to grab him. The boy leaps away. Jumps overboard, and the father had no time to do a thing. Matteo was there next to him—and a second later, an absence, not even a second went by, nor does he hear the sound of his body hitting the water.
Then Pata’s roar, and Madie’s, and Liam’s. All three of them saw.
The waters swirling, and the foam, suddenly moving away, leaving the half-drowned boat, to plunge a few yards further away. The sun glinting off the flash of the knife blade, and the cries, of the beast, of the boy, the water red around them, all is vain, the father doesn’t listen, doesn’t look, won’t, he has picked up the oars and is rowing like a condemned man toward land.
-
Only Liam and the father had the strength to drag the beast’s body onto the shore, a creature over six feet long, it was stupid but Pata couldn’t help figuring its length, that of a bed, roughly, that was it, six feet of power and rage. The mother and the girls are weeping helplessly as they watch them tugging the gray mass, scored with knife wounds, blood still flowing. They don’t want to go closer. The father sobs as he slices open the animal’s belly and empties it, throwing the guts into the sea. He cuts its head off cautiously, as if its sharp teeth could still tear off his arm. Fucking monster… Liam is kneeling next to him, his big eyes full of silent tears. His hands curved over the gleaming skin—if he could tear it off, shred upon shred, if the beast were still alive, if it could feel pain the way he does, piercing his heart, a knife wound, a strangling. Pata next to him carves and cuts, slices, skins, a bit more than he needs to, for sure, anger, despair. Liam agrees:
“We’ll eat the whole goddamn thing.”
He hides his disgust, the nauseating smell, the viscous flesh he is reluctant to touch. The father gestures toward the fire and he skewers hunks of flesh onto wooden stakes and puts them on to roast. Not hungry. And yet. Despite the sorrow, despite the shock which has silenced them all, when the air fills with the smell of fish they go closer, for three days they’ve been eating the last crumbs of pancakes and potatoes, a few blackberries, and air, they hate themselves, the way their gazes are riveted on the fire, their weak, famished bellies, the saliva at the corners of their lips. Pata goes on slicing, they’ll cook the surplus during the night and take it with them the next day, so that it will have served some purpose—to allow them to land, to eat, it had saved them, at last. His hands tremble on the knife blade.
They have not found Matteo’s body. Perhaps drifting, perhaps twenty feet under. The father doesn’t know. He took the others to shelter on the island, surrounding the keening mother, to keep her from diving in, he murmured in her ear to convince her, and so that the girls would not hear, He’s dead, Madie, he’s dead, you have to look after the girls now, you hear me? Jumping in the water won’t bring him back. And she wails with despondency, her suffering greater than the open sky when it rains, her arms straight in front of her. He had to calm her like a little child. Wept with her when she said:
“Another one. Another one.”
Pata keeps busy, so as not to think. The fire, the boat turned on its side on the shore to provide shelter for the night, the image of the beast floating on the surface of the water, then carving it up. He goes from one child to the next with a tender word, a smile, a caress.
“I’m hungry,” says Sidonie.
“It’s almost ready.”
When he comes to the mother he hesitates. If she looked up she would see his unsure, questioning, imploring step; but Madie doesn’t look up. She has withdrawn into herself, curled around her despair, her eyes hidden behind her palms, and suddenly the father is fascinated by her hands, those of an old woman of forty, with blue, protruding veins, spots on her skin that shine yellow, hands that have been clinging too hard to the boat these last days and which look as if they will never open again, curled like claws. And so he moves on, without making a sound or a gesture, he leans over the baby in Emily’s arms, next to the mother, strokes the girl’s cheek, let’s hope the fish will be good. Liam has begun to pass it around, filling their metal bowls. They eat in silence.
Afterwards the little girls get up. Emily puts the baby in Madie’s arms and runs with Sidonie, her legs stiff after so many days, the stop yesterday did not completely revive them. Before long the father hears them laughing. He hurries over—and stops. To say what? What, at the age of five or six, do they understand of death and sorrow? Of course they saw dead animals back on their island, drowned rats, hens the mother was preparing for dinner. But that wasn’t death. They only know absence.
Tomorrow they will ask where Matteo is, the way they did with Lotte, and he’ll have to keep from shouting at them, how stupid they are, they saw it for themselves, and they were told that Lotte was dead, and now Matteo, too, is dead, dead, DEAD. But they are stubborn. Sidonie insists Lotte is in the sea with the fish. I’d like to go there too, she proclaims in her clear, chiming voice. The mother turns pale.
“Be quiet!”
Sidonie looks down, gazes silently at the surface of the water, looking for a familiar shadow, does not know it cannot be, splashes with her hand as if to attract something—what, thinks Pata, corpses, fantasies—miracles. Her innocence appalls and enchants him at the same time: if only they, too, the father and mother, could be content with absence. Take note. Lotte is no longer here, nor is Matteo. Something new is beginning.
But the night lays bare the falsehood, and Pata cannot sleep for grief, with Madie stifling her sobs on the other side of the fire, both of them incapable of speaking or helping each other, a wall between them, for everything they don’t want to say to each other in front of the children. Liam has burrowed beneath a blanket so that no one can see him. Ten times the father gets up to go and look at the little girls and find courage there; they have drifted off to sleep, smiling, and their peaceful faces console him for a brief moment, what can be consoled, a balm on a patch of his heart, a soothing breath on a burn. Maybe they are not even unhappy. They cried, earlier, because they were afraid; but sorrow? How will they miss Matteo? Sidonie, as she lies down, says to Emily: