The Wreck of the Zanzibar Read online

  He still doesn’t know about Molly, and he’s still down there now talking to Joseph Hannibal.

  There’s something about Joseph Hannibal, something I don’t like, but I’m not sure what it is. One thing I am sure of though. As soon as he’s gone Father’s going to have something to say, and when he does I wouldn’t want to be in Billy’s shoes.

  I’m trying to stay awake by writing this, so I can warn him about Molly, but my eyes are pricking and I can hardly keep them open.

  FEBRUARY 15TH

  THIS IS THE WORST DAY OF MY WHOLE LIFE. IT began well. Joseph Hannibal left the house this morning at last. I thought he’d sail away on the evening tide and that would be the end of him. I was wrong. Billy has gone with him. Even as I write it, I can hardly believe it. Billy has gone.

  It all began just after Joseph Hannibal left. We’ve had arguments before, Billy and me, but never like this. He didn’t seem a bit sad when I told him, at last, about Molly and her calf. He just said that I should have been there, or Mother; that it wasn’t his fault. I got angry and shouted at him. Billy just shrugged and walked off. I hate it when he does that. I raced after him and grabbed him. He turned on me and told me I was taking Father’s side against him. I knew then that it was all because of Joseph Hannibal. It’s as if he’s split us apart. Billy thinks that everything about him is wonderful, that he’s doing what a proper man should. He won’t hear a word against him.

  This afternoon Billy and Father had their expected set-to about Molly. Father roared and of course Billy shouted back at him. He wasn’t going to stay and be a cowman all his life, he had better things to be doing. I’ve never seen Billy like it. The angrier he became, the more he seemed to grow. Nose to nose in the kitchen he was as big as Father. Father said he’d strap him if he didn’t hold his tongue and Billy just stared at him and said nothing, his eyes like steel. Mother came between them and Billy stormed out. I followed him.

  We went to Rushy Bay where we always go to talk when we don’t want anyone else to hear. We sat on the sand together, and that was when he told me. He’d been talking to Joseph Hannibal. Joseph Hannibal had asked the skipper of the General Lee and the skipper had agreed: Billy could join the ship as cabin boy.

  ‘I’m going, Laura,’ Billy said. ‘I was thinking about it all last night. And not just because of Father, either. It’s a big world out there and I’m going to see it. This could be my only chance.’

  And I could see that he meant it, that I couldn’t argue him round. I tried all the same. I begged him to stay. I even said I’d go with him. He shook his head and looked away. I know Billy so well, better than he knows me, I think. Once he’s made up his mind there’s no stopping him. I knew it was hopeless.

  He put his arm around me and told me he was sorry, that I’d be all right. He’d write to me, and when he comes back he’s going to bring me lots of things from America, from China, from the frozen North. When I cried he hugged me very tight and said he’d go now, just as he was. He didn’t want to have to go home again.

  ‘You’ll tell Mother?’ he said. ‘You’ll say goodbye for me?’

  I walked in silence with him down past the church to the quay. We saw Father paring a hedge up in the field where Molly had died. Billy looked at him and said nothing. He was close to tears. He turned away.

  ‘And say goodbye to Granny May too,’ he said. From the quayside we looked across at St Mary’s. We could see the masts of the General Lee.

  ‘She’s a fine ship,’ he said. ‘A fast ship. She’ll take me all over the world, Joseph Hannibal said.’

  He smoothed my hair and told me to go home without looking back. I cried all the way home, not so much because Billy was gone and I might never see him again, but because he didn’t want me to go with him.

  This evening, from the top of Samson Hill, I watched the General Lee sail out past St Agnes. Billy was right. She was a fine ship. I knew he’d be looking back at Bryher and he knew I’d be up on Samson Hill. I could feel his eyes on me. I shivered, not from cold, but because I knew then as I know now, that I’ll never see Billy again. Her sails were red in the last of the sun, as red as any blood.

  I said nothing till just before supper, when Mother asked where Billy was. I told her as gently as I knew how. She sat down and her eyes were suddenly empty of life.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. And that was all.

  Father was working late in the boathouse. He came in a few minutes ago. I was sitting on the stairs when she told him.

  ‘You drove him away,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘He’ll be back,’ said Father. ‘You’ll see.’

  Mother turned away from him. She didn’t believe him, and neither do I.

  JULY 21ST

  MY HOUSE IS NOT MY HOME ANY MORE. IT’S A place I live in. My island is a prison and I am quite alone. Mother and Father are strangers to each other. Billy has been gone for over four months now. There’s been no letter, no word. We scarcely ever speak of him. It’s as if he never lived.

  I went to his room this morning and found Mother sitting on his bed staring at the wall, rocking back and forth. She had his blue jersey on her lap. I went and sat beside her. She tried to smile but couldn’t. She hasn’t smiled since Billy left.

  I do the morning milking on my own now. That’s when I most miss Billy. I talk to the cows and they listen. Maybe they understand too – I hope so. They’re not milking at all well – I think perhaps they’re missing Billy, like everyone else. They aren’t eating properly either. Their coats are staring, and they’re not licking themselves. They’re just not how they should be.

  JULY 30TH

  IN CHURCH TODAY I WAS LISTENING TO THE vicar. It was as if he was speaking just to me. He said we mustn’t hope for anything at all in this life, only in the next life. I think I understand what he means. You only get disappointed if you hope.

  Every night – like tonight, when I’ve finished this – I lie in the darkness and hope and pray that Billy will come back. I pray out loud, just in case God can’t hear me hoping. And every morning, as soon as I wake up, I go to the window and hope to see him running up the path. But each day he isn’t there makes even hoping more hopeless.

  JULY 31ST

  EVEN MY OTHER HOPE HAS COME TO NOTHING. I hoped that, with Billy gone, I might at last be allowed to take his place in the gig. I finally plucked up courage enough to ask the chief. He said I had to ask Father. I waited until he was doing the evening milking – he’s always gentler when he’s up with the cows. He was with Rosie in the barn.

  ‘There’s something wrong with these cows,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘Hardly a bucketful between the lot of them. They go on like this, we’re in real trouble, real trouble. They’ve not been right, none of them, not since Billy left, none of us have.’

  His eyes were filled with tears when he looked up at me. ‘Mother’s right,’ he said. ‘It was my fault Billy went away.’

  ‘No it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘It was Joseph Hannibal.’ It was only half the truth, and Father knew it. He went back to his milking.

  I asked him then what I had come to ask him. I knew I shouldn’t but I had to. He was on his feet at once shouting at me. Rosie kicked out in alarm and the bucket went over.

  ‘Is that all you ever think about?’ he roared. ‘Your brother’s run off to sea. Every cow I’ve got is sick. It’s these cows put food in your belly, girl, you know that?’ I knew that. Of course I knew that. ‘They die. We die. They’re all we’ve got. And you come fussing to me about the gig. How many times have I told you? There’s never been a girl rowed out in the gig, not on this island, not on any island. And you’ll not be the first, do you hear me?’

  I ran off with him still shouting after me. I never thought I could think it. I never thought I could write it, but I hate my father.

  AUGUST 23RD

  ROSIE IS VERY SICK. THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT it now. She’s thinner ever
y day. She’s stopped milking entirely. We sell what we can – a little to everyone. Until now the cows always made enough milk for the whole island. We’re the only people with milking cows. They rely on us for their milk – they always have done. Now with Molly gone and Rosie poorly we just haven’t got enough to go around. We’ve still got Celandine and Petal, but Petal’s not in milk and Celandine’s giving precious little. Father says if anything happens to either of them we’re done for. All we can do, he says, is to hope and pray for a wreck. So that’s what I’m doing, hoping and praying for a wreck.

  I long for Mother to tell me that everything will be all right, even if she doesn’t mean it. But she’s stopped saying anything. I think maybe she’s dying inside.

  I went to the top of Samson Hill this evening and looked out to the open sea. There was a big swell building, and the sky was very low and grey over the sea.

  I tried to make my eyes see over the horizon as far as America. It’s the closest I can get to Billy. He was out there somewhere on that sea. I could feel it. I could feel he was still alive and I was suddenly happy in spite of everything. I just wish he would come back home. If only he would, then everything would be all right again. I’m sure of it.

  SEPTEMBER 6TH

  A GREAT STORM IS GATHERING, THE SEAS huge, the skies full of anger.

  We went to fetch Granny May this morning. Her roof looks as if it might blow off at any time. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to be a trouble. Mother paid her no heed and we took an arm each and brought her home.

  All day we huddled together around the fire in the kitchen trying not to listen to the howling outside. Father saw to the cows today. He’s shut them in the shed now, out of the storm.

  It’s a high tide tonight. Father says there’ll be flooding. The sea will pour in across from Great Porth and make another island of us – it’s happened before.

  On nights like this, when I was little, I used to go into Billy’s room, climb into his bed and we’d talk till morning. We could pretend we weren’t frightened and if we pretended hard enough, then we weren’t.

  Now I sit alone on my bed and listen to the roar of the storm outside and the whistle of the wind in the windows and I am afraid. I can only think of all that sea pounding our little island, trying to suck us down and sink us forever. I am so afraid.

  Where are you, Billy? Where are you? Why did you go and leave me?

  SEPTEMBER 7TH

  THE STORM HAS PASSED, BUT IT HAS RUINED us utterly. I went out early to milk the cows. The meadows were a great lake and the cowshed on the hillside had gone. The gate into the meadows was off its hinges. There were no cows to be seen, not at first. Then I saw them. Celandine and Petal were lying drowned and swollen where the sea had left them, legs stiff in the air. I ran home.

  No one would believe me, because they didn’t want to believe me. I didn’t want to believe me. They followed me out. Father knelt beside them in the shallows and sobbed. Granny May and Mother led him home, his head in his hands.

  I stroked the white patch on Petal’s neck, where I always patted her after milking. She was so cold. Her big, blue eyes gazed up at me, unseeing. I ran off and later found myself outside Granny May’s house. Her whole roof had gone this time, but that wasn’t all. When I went round the side I saw the end of the cottage had collapsed around the chimney. Next to it the Jenkins’ house too was beyond repair, like a giant had trampled all over it.

  I walked all around the island. Hardly a house had survived intact. When I got home I found the hen-house gone, the hens with it, and the kitchen window had been blown in.

  Several boats, not ours, thank God, have been driven on to the rocks and smashed to pieces, and the chief has lost his crabber altogether. Bryher is wrecked. It’s like a nightmare. I want to wake up and find none of it is true. We are all ruined and done for and we shall have to leave. Everyone says so – except Granny May. But she hasn’t been told about her house yet. Father won’t do it and Mother won’t do it. They just can’t bring themselves to tell her, and neither can I.

  When Granny May had gone up to bed this evening Father said, ‘It’s like the beginning of the end. In a few years’ time Bryher will be like Samson and Tean, abandoned and deserted, left to the rabbits and the birds.’

  He cried and I knew I didn’t hate him any more, I knew I loved him still. Mother won’t cry. I’ve never seen Mother cry. She put her arms around Father and held him, and that’s the first time she’s done that since Billy left.

  SEPTEMBER 8TH

  TODAY I FOUND A TURTLE. I THINK IT’S CALLED a leatherback turtle. I found one once before, but it was dead. This one has been washed up alive.

  Father had sent me down to collect driftwood on Rushy Bay. He said there’d be plenty about after a storm like that. He was right.

  I’d been there for half an hour or so heaping up the wood, before I noticed the turtle in the tideline of piled seaweed. I thought at first he was just a washed-up tree stump covered in seaweed.

  He was upside down on the sand. I pulled the seaweed off him. His eyes were open, unblinking. He was more dead than alive, I thought. His flippers were quite still, and held out to the clouds above as if he was worshipping them. He was massive, as long as this bed, and wider. He had a face like a two hundred year old man, wizened and wrinkled and wise with a gently-smiling mouth.

  I looked around, and there were more gulls gathering. They were silent, watching, waiting; and I knew well enough what they were waiting for. I pulled away more of the seaweed and saw that the gulls had been at him already. There was blood under his neck where the skin had been pecked. I had got there just in time. I bombarded the gulls with pebbles and they flew off protesting noisily, leaving me alone with my turtle.

  I knew it would be impossible to roll him over, but I tried anyway. I could rock him back and forth on his shell, but I could not turn him over, no matter how hard I tried. After a while I gave up and sat down beside him on the sand. His eyes kept closing slowly as if he was dropping off to sleep, or maybe he was dying – I couldn’t be sure. I stroked him under his chin where I thought he would like it, keeping my hand well away from his mouth.

  A great curling stormwave broke and came tumbling towards us. When it went hissing back over the sand, it left behind a broken spar. It was as if the sea was telling me what to do. I dragged the spar up the beach. Then I saw the turtle’s head go back and his eyes closed. I’ve often seen seabirds like that. Once their heads go back there’s nothing you can do. But I couldn’t just let him die. I couldn’t. I shouted at him. I shook him. I told him he wasn’t to die, that I’d turn him over somehow, that it wouldn’t be long.

  I dug a deep hole in the sand beside him. I would lever him up and topple him in. I drove the spar into the sand underneath his shell. I drove it in again and again, until it was as deep as I could get it. I hauled back on it and felt him shift. I threw all my weight on it and at last he tumbled over into the hole, and the right way up, too. But when I scrambled over to him, his head lay limp in the sand, his eyes closed to the world. There wasn’t a flicker of life about him. He was dead. I was quite sure of it now. It’s silly, I know – I had only known him for a few minutes – but I felt I had lost a friend.

  I made a pillow of soft sea lettuce for his head and knelt beside him. I cried till there were no more tears to cry. And then I saw the gulls were back. They knew too. I screamed at them, but they just glared at me and moved in closer.

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘No!’

  I would never let them have him, never. I piled a mountain of seaweed on top of him and my driftwood on top of that. The next tide would take him away. I left him and went home.

  I went back to Rushy Bay this evening, at high tide, just before nightfall, to see if my turtle was gone. He was still there. The high tide had not been high enough. The gulls were gone though, all of them. I really don’t know what made me want to see his face once more. I pulled the wood and seaweed away until I could see the t
op of his head. As I looked it moved and lifted. He was blinking up at me. He was alive again! I could have kissed him, really I could. But I didn’t quite dare.

  He’s still there now, all covered up against the gulls, I hope. In the morning . . .

  I had to stop writing because Father just came in. He hardly ever comes in my room, so I knew at once something was wrong.

  ‘You all right?’ he said, standing in the doorway. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Old man Jenkins. He said he saw you down on Rushy Bay.’

  ‘I was just collecting the wood,’ I told him, as calmly as I could, ‘like you said I should.’ I find lying so difficult. I’m just not good at it.

  ‘He thought you were crying, crying your eyes out, he says.’

  ‘I was not,’ I said, but I dared not look at him. I pretended to go on writing in my diary.

  ‘You are telling me the truth, Laura?’ He knew I wasn’t, he knew it.

  ‘Course,’ I said. I just wished he would go.

  ‘What do you find to write in that diary of yours?’ he asked.

  ‘Things,’ I said. ‘Just things.’

  And he went out and shut the door behind him. He knows something, but he doesn’t know what. I’m going to have to be very careful. If Father finds out about the turtle, I’m in trouble. He’s only got to go down to Rushy Bay and look. That turtle would just be food to him, and to anyone else who finds him. We’re all hungry, everyone is getting hungrier every day. I should tell him. I know I should. But I can’t do it. I just can’t let them eat him.