22
Yes. Travelling hopefully. That’s what Peggy used to say. And she no doubt got it from somebody else who used to say it. We’re all travelling hopefully, and often that part is better than the actual arriving.
We were on the last leg of the journey now, and soon we’d be there, and all the hopes would turn into realities, and maybe also into disappointments. I didn’t see how City Island could ever live up to Peggy’s promises for it. I thought I might just prefer to go on travelling and being hopeful forever. Always journeying but never arriving anywhere.
‘How about that, Peggy?’ I asked her, when I’d recovered from the worst of the effects of drinking kelpie juice. ‘How about we just keep on going when we see City Island, go sailing on forever?’
‘I think that might get a little tedious after a while, Martin.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The thing about travelling hopefully is that to do it, you need a destination. If you don’t have anywhere to get to, or any expectations of the place, you’re not travelling hopefully any more – just travelling … pointlessly.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Even Cloud Hunters, who never stop travelling, always have an object in view – the next cloud bank, the next island.’
‘We could travel in the hope of … adventures.’
‘You’ve not had enough of them yet, Marty?’
‘I’ll never have enough of them, Peg.’
‘Well, I have. I’m going to lie down. You keep watch. Gemma can take the wheel.’
She went below. She was doing a lot of sleeping these days. Old age, she said, catching up with her, overtaking her even. But then she’d been old since I’d first known her; I didn’t know why it was bothering her now.
I got a line and threw it over the side and Angelica came and joined me and we fished for lunch as the boat sailed along.
‘Will we soon be there, Martin?’
‘A few more days.’
‘It’s going to be strange.’
‘Yes, I think so too.’
‘Like nothing I’ve never known. Martin …’
‘Hmm?’
‘I’ve got to confess something to you – some of those rat-skinning stories I told you –’
‘What about them?’
‘I may have exaggerated a little. They weren’t all, well – true.’
That made me smile.
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said.
‘You knew?’
‘Yeah. I know everyone thinks I’m gullible. But even I’m not that bad.’
‘I only told them to you because you wanted me to.’
‘I know. And they were pretty good stories as well. I really liked listening to them.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. A lot.’
‘You want me to tell you another one?’
‘OK. If you’ve got any.’
‘OK. One last and final rat-skinning story, before we get to City Island. Now, this is a true one, that really happened.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
But I never did hear it. We were interrupted. Alain had uncoiled himself from the hammock he had been swinging in and he loped over to the deck rail. He hopped up onto it, holding onto the rigging for balance. Then he pointed towards an approaching craft.
‘Gemma – close the solars. It’s Cloud Hunters again.’
She did as he asked. Out of the mist haze a cloud-hunting boat approached us, its decks wet with water and vapour, rolling heavily on the thermals, as if its holding tanks were full.
‘Hey! Hey!’
Alain shouted and waved as he perched up on the deck rail. Figures appeared at the rail of the cloud-hunting boat – a man, a girl, a woman holding a child, and a lean and tattooed tracker.
‘My God … I don’t believe …’
And the next thing, he leapt from the rail and out into space – he air-swam a few dozen strokes and then he was by the cloud-hunting boat, and they were hauling him on board like a netted fish – like some long-hunted, rare and invaluable species that they had all but abandoned hope of ever finding.
Because it was his family. It was their boat.
Peggy must have felt the boat come to a stop, or heard the commotion, because she came back up on deck, stiff-kneed and little cranky.
‘What have we stopped for? What’s going on?’
Then she saw the Cloud Hunters, and she saw Alain among them.
‘Well … well, now …’
But her smile soon changed, because the next moment the tracker in the Cloud Hunting boat was leaping from their boat to ours, a knife in his hand.
‘I’ll slit their throats,’ he yelled. ‘Every one of them!’
But Alain came after him.
‘No!’ he said. ‘No! They aren’t the ones who kidnapped me. They’re the ones who saved me!’
And the tracker stopped in – well, his tracks – and lowered the knife, which had been about to slit Peggy’s throat, and he displayed a row of perfectly white teeth, framed in a smile, and said, ‘Madam, how charming to meet you. What an absolute treat. You saved our boy from war and violence, all of which we loathe –’
‘Evidently …’ Peggy said.
‘Allow us to express our undying gratitude.’
‘I’m glad I’m still alive to receive your undying gratitude,’ Peggy said. ‘It was a close thing for a moment there.’
‘Charmed, madam,’ the tracker said. ‘Totally charmed.’
And he reached out, took Peggy’s hand, formally kissed it, then returned it to her, and all as if he was in a lounge suit and tie in some elegant drawing room, instead of half-naked, covered in tattoos and scars, and on a battered old boat in the middle of the sky.
Well, if we thought we were getting on our way any time soon after that, we thought wrong. Oh yes. We had to go on board the cloud-hunting boat and drink green tea and eat sky-shrimp, and then the best, sweetest water, kept for special occasions, was brought out. When that happened, Peggy – not wanting to be outdone with the hospitality – sent me back to our boat for our final bottle of old Ben Harley’s private stash, and she presented it to the Cloud Hunters, who were all for opening it straight away, but she said no, not while small children were around, but maybe when their boat was safely tied up at a quiet island somewhere they should pop the cork and give it a go, and there’d be no cause to worry about any midges.
Alain sat cross-legged on the deck, just as the rest of his family did, and he recounted all that had happened to him, his abduction, his time in the Liberation Enlightenment Army as a child soldier, about the massacre (omitting the details as he didn’t wish to upset his sister) and how he had finally found us and we had found him, and how we had spotted the cloud-hunting boat a while back, but thought that we had lost it.
‘And where were you headed, Alain?’ his mother asked. ‘Where were you going to?’
‘We’re all going to City Island, ma’am,’ I said. ‘To school there. The government’s paying for everyone to get educated who wants to be. It’s all free and we’re enrolling. Peggy’s taking us there. She says it’ll change our lives, and give us big chances. Right, Peggy?’
‘It’s more than that, Martin,’ she said. ‘You’ll be able to understand and appreciate things.’
The Cloud Hunters fell silent. I think it was that word – education. Education widened your horizons, but it also took you away from your roots, your background; it could turn the past and your origins into places to which you would never again quite belong.
‘Education, Eldar …’ Alain’s mother whispered to his solemn-faced father. ‘Remember what we said –?’
‘I know what was said,’ he snapped.
Alain looked across at him.
‘Of course, I shall stay here now,’ Alain said. ‘Help with the boat, hunt the clouds …’
His mother slowly shook her head. She turned to her daughter.
‘Beth, get your things.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do as I tell you.’
She was the youngest of us all – apart from the baby. She couldn’t have been more than nine.
‘Dear lady,’ Alain’s mother said. ‘Can you take our daughter with you too?’
Peggy looked horrified.
‘Another one? I thought I was just getting rid of one, not acquiring another!’
‘Mother, I’m staying here now. I’m not going with them.’
‘You must, Alain. It’s what we want for you.’
‘It’s not what I want.’
‘Yes, it is – isn’t it?’
And the sad truth was that she was right. He’d seen too much and known too much to go back to being a Cloud Hunter; he had things to do, a world to change, and he needed to discover how to do it. He could go into government, become a politician, fight for the rights of the unrepresented minorities – the Cloud Hunters, the sky-roaming gypsies, the rootless and homeless, the dispossessed. You can’t unlearn what you know, and he’d learned too much already to go back.
‘But we’ll stay together … ?’ he said.
‘End of the term,’ his father told him. ‘City Island. You come to the western harbour and we’ll be waiting for you.’
‘And we’ll go cloud-hunting … ?’
‘Of course. What else would we do?’
‘All right. Mother, Father, Corbis …’ (Which, apparently was the name of the tracker.)
They embraced each other and said goodbye. Alain took his sister’s hand and we returned to Peggy’s boat.
‘Alain –’
‘Father?’
‘The scars –’ He indicated those unavoidable, unmistakeable scars that all Cloud Hunters bore, running from eyes to mouth. ‘Wear them with pride.’
‘I will,’ Alain said. ‘Always.’
And then the Cloud Hunters were gone, on their way.
Angelica was holding the little girl’s hand.
‘You don’t have any scars, Beth, do you?’
‘I’m too young yet,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have them one day.’
Yet I doubted that. I didn’t think she would. She’d be educated and absorbed into ordinary society – the first person of cloud-hunting origin not to go through the rites of initiation. No one would ever know where she had come from or who her parents had been.
She cried when the boat vanished into the distance. She seemed quite inconsolable. Alain tried to comfort her, but nothing worked.
‘Beth,’ Angelica said, ‘would you like to hear a story?’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Rat-skinning,’ Angelica said.
‘Is it a true story?’ Beth said.
‘Yes,’ Angelica said. ‘At least it is in places.’
In my opinion, that’s about the best you can expect from any story – if it’s true in enough places, then even if the rest is lies, it somehow becomes true all over.
‘Come and sit on my lap and I’ll tell it to you.’
‘OK, Angelica,’ I said.
‘Martin! Not you.’
‘Only joking …’
Beth sat by her and Angelica told her the story. The next time I looked into the sky, the Cloud Hunters could not be seen. They had evaporated, completely.
Peggy stood looking at us all.
‘It’s getting a little crowded on this boat,’ she said. ‘Still, never mind, we’ll be there soon. You start up the solars then. I’m taking another nap.’
And she went back down below.