Chapter 20

ASKY VISITED MOST nights, when it was easy to slip about the decks unseen. He told them the Marilyn was owned by his Great-uncle Enoch, who always took the smallest, cheapest crew he could.

“They eat chips when they’re off duty and watch satellite TV in the mess. Only person who comes down to this deck is me. If you stay quiet, you ought to be all right down here.”

He brought them food – fruit and nuts and crackers, hidden under his T-shirt – and blankets to sleep on. Water was the only problem. Big bottles were hard to hide under a shirt, and Asky could never bring enough, so when it rained they collected the water that ran off the cover of the lifeboat.

Sometimes they rolled back the corner of the lifeboat cover, on the seaward side, and breathed the clean sea air. Esme would stand on tiptoe, poking her nose as high as she could, as if searching for the scent of something. If it was still enough, Carlos would fly alongside them in the starlight, then sit and preen every feather, grumbling to himself about “Salt! Salt!”

Dog and Asky would watch the waves rolling along the side of the boat or look up at the stars. Asky had lots to say about stars. “They’re like the sun, only a long way away. The sun is a star, just really close.”

All the patterns the stars made in the sky had names. “There’s Orion. He’s always easy to find, that old boy. There’s his belt. See? No?”

Dog shook her head. Asky took her hand and pointed with it. “There, those three big ’uns. And the big orange one, that’s his shoulder, yeah?”

Dog nodded. She could see Orion now, standing tall, with one arm raised above his head.

“They show the way, stars do,” Asky said. “That’s how the old seafarin’ boys used to navigate. None of your satellite navigation in those days, they just followed the stars!”

Dog didn’t know what satellite navigation was, but now she knew what stars were. She watched how they moved across the sky in the night and disappeared below the horizon, in the very direction the Marilyn was headed.

When it was too cold, or too wet, which it often was, they sat in the torchlight under the lifeboat cover. Asky thought of questions that Dog could answer with a nod, a shake or a shrug. Even though she couldn’t speak, Dog felt that she was talking to a human for the first time in her life.

“So, your mum and dad dead then?”

Dog shrugged and thought of Marmalade’s picture – of Gikita and Dawa; had people like that been her parents?

“Were you born in the old port?”

Asky meant the city where the pet shop was. She realized that she now knew she hadn’t been born there, that there had been something before Uncle and the pet shop. She shook her head.

“I bet you were born somewhere exciting. Like Carlos’s jungle, eh?” Asky said.

Dog smiled: perhaps that was true. She nodded her head again.

“Maybe you hatched from an egg? What do you think?”

Carlos coughed and stopped preening. He looked at Dog and Asky with one eye then the other. “Hatched from an egg!” he exclaimed, in Asky’s voice, adding, “No! No! No!” in his own.

He looked so horrified that Asky and Dog burst out laughing.

“Rude,” said Carlos, and turned his back on them. “Very, very.”