And then.
There are times when nothing goes as it should.
Because, for a start, the fish aren’t biting. No matter how they bait the hooks with bits of raw potato, and cast to the left, to the right, or let the lines trail behind the boat, all they manage to catch after all that is a tiny little mackerel no bigger than a hand. Noah gets annoyed.
“It’s because of the oars, and the noise they make!”
“The other day I was rowing, too, and you caught some,” says Louie. “Am I supposed to stop just so you can fish, is that it?”
They don’t speak for a few minutes. Noah has pulled in his line, and sits with his arms crossed.
“You’re not going to catch any like that,” hisses Louie.
“They’re not biting, anyway. It’s not a good day.”
“But look,” says Perrine, “we’re almost at the island. And… oh!”
“What is it?”
She starts whispering suddenly.
“There must be people there, you can see a hut.”
“Why are you whispering?” asks Noah.
“We don’t know who it is.”
“So?”
“What if they’re people like Ades?”
Noah stiffens. You think so? She doesn’t answer. Louie stops rowing. All three squint into the distance, trying to make out something more precise, something to reassure them, a family waving their arms, a dog playing.
“Do you see any people?”
“No. Just a hut.”
“Maybe there’s no one there.”
“Maybe.”
“What should we do?”
Louie wrinkles his nose: night is falling, they can’t see very well.
“We’ll stop here.”
“Here?” exclaims Perrine.
She spreads her arms, doesn’t need to say any more: to anchor here, only a few hundred yards from the shore, when in fifteen minutes they could have their feet in the sand. Louie shakes his head:
“We don’t know.”
“But what if there’s no one?”
“We don’t know. In any case, we don’t have any fish. We can fish tomorrow morning and when we’ve caught some we’ll go on to the island, okay?”
Not okay. But it’s pointless to say anything.
“You always get to decide,” protests Noah.
“Because you two don’t even know what you’re doing.”
“That’s not true.”
A jab with an elbow, a punch. Perrine raises her hands, Stop it! They turn their backs on each other again, until they think they see some slight movement on the island. All three hurry to kneel by the side of the boat, but darkness is falling over them, hiding the little coast with each minute that goes by. So they lie on the floorboards, gazing at the stars, dreaming about tomorrow, and the feeling of warm sand between their toes, and how when at last they can stretch their legs they will run, and there will be grilled fish, and they picture the fruit they will find—some sort of impossible Eden, the kind you imagine one evening until at daybreak you are disillusioned; every time. Sleep comes late; they’re too tired, and too excited. The hens have been asleep for a long time, their heads tucked beneath their wings.
-
Very short night. Very faint nudge against Louie’s shoulder. Noah murmurs, Can we start fishing?
“But it’s not light out yet,” murmurs his older brother, eyes half open as he senses the gray dawn; in the distance, strands of yellow cloud mingle with the rays of the rising sun.
“Yes it is, almost. This is the right time to go fishing.”
What does he know, Noah, he’s just saying things. But Louie is too sleepy to protest, and he sits up slowly, at the same time as Perrine, who gives a stretch. The rocking of the boat lulls them, a regular cadence, left, right, left, right. Noah doesn’t feel seasick anymore.
“Do we have anything to eat?” Louie asks Perrine.
She rummages in the bag, hands each of them an egg.
“Yuck,” says Noah. “Eggs again.”
The hens look at them with their round eyes, heads tilted, waiting for the shells. Perrine pours them some water in a saucer and strokes the head of one of them.
“You see, they’re tame, now.”
They gaze fascinated at the sunrise, minute upon minute, second upon second even, as the sphere of light appears from below the horizon. The dazzle of sunlight on the water forces them to close their eyes from time to time, they shield them with their hands, and eventually turn away.
On the other side is the island. They can see it better now. An island with greenery: trees, and thickets. Their stomachs rumble at the thought they might find fruit; they wish they could be there already. They stare avidly at the hut, but there’s still no sign of movement anywhere around it. And yet yesterday, they thought there had been.
Illusion.
“Come on,” says Louie, “let’s try and catch some fish first.”
So again they cast their tiny lines, little nylon threads which the sea encloses and strokes, their colorless lures floating and bobbing on the surface. But Noah was wrong: once again the lines remain slack. Sometimes a line dips down and they sit up and pull it towards them—only mirages, every time, the hook is empty and the potato bait remains intact.
“Who cares about the fish,” Noah complains after a while.
But Louie is intractable.
“We have to keep trying.”
“Never mind,” says Perrine. “If we can go cook the potatoes we didn’t have time to do before we left, that would already be a good thing.”
“Let’s wait for a while.”
“I’m sick of this,” Noah sighs, bringing his fishing pole back on board.
“With you it’s just the same as with mushrooms, if there aren’t loads of them right away, you get annoyed.
“Yeah, but I don’t like mushrooms, anyway.”
The boy leans over the edge, toward the anchor chain. Shall I pull it up?
“Go ahead,” says Louie, exasperated, “we’ll keep going for a while.”
They hear the familiar creaking, Noah’s breathing imitating Pata’s and Louie’s, Heave, he says, and Perrine helps him with the anchor, at that very moment out of the corner of his eye Louie sees something moving by her fishing pole. He shouts and points to it.
“Perrine, your line!”
He stands up suddenly when he sees the line go taut. His initial reflex, before the others have even realized, is to climb over the seat to grab the pole that is about to flip up and over; but then, once his hands have closed around the wood, he freezes. It’s not the weight of the creature on the other end of the hook that worries him, no, even if the line is stretched fit to snap. It’s something else, something weird.
He can’t explain what it could be.
But it’s pulling too hard and the pole has bent down to touch the water.
He cries out.
“That’s no fish on the hook!”
“What?” Noah says, alarmed.
Louie hands the pole to Perrine and hurries toward the oars.
“It’s shaking too much! It’s not a fish!”
“But what is it?”
The older boy doesn’t answer. He plunges the oars in the water to move the boat away quickly, he doesn’t know why, it’s just a danger he can sense around them, underneath them, he screams at Perrine:
“Let go of your pole! Let it go!”
The little girl, leaning over the water to try and hold her pole straight, stands up now, astonished. Really? At the same time, emerging from the sea with a gigantic thrust, with a burst of spray clear across the boat, comes an arm, fingers curved, an arm then an upper body, a head with its mouth open as if to roar, streaming, enormous, targeting Perrine for sure, until it falls back in the water a few inches from the terrified little girl.