Soon after we were boarded, the first supplies and reinforcements arrived. We heard the commotion and went outside. It was a relief to be out of the cinema room. It was starting to smell of sweat and was always hot and close, and even though you couldn’t see steam rising from all the bodies in there, I couldn’t help but imagine it.

On deck, the pirates were waiting. A third little boat was making its way towards the yacht. There was only one man in it, but there were also two goats, and that was a surreal sight, believe me. It was welcome, too, though. There was something awful about being on that yacht in the middle of the ocean, with all that blue blankness stretched out around us. What’s the word? Agoraphobia? I think so. And then, at the same time, the opposite thing. Claustrophobia. On the one hand, we were trapped on what was really quite a small boat, with these pirates everywhere. On the other hand, there was nothing but sea and sky around us, right to the horizon.

Thinking about that made me dizzy, so when the little boat appeared, a dot far away that moved slowly closer, it was like we became a bit more anchored somehow. Like the boat was tracing a line that joined us to something else – another ship, land.

What I mean is, I looked at that boat and I didn’t only think about the boat; I thought about the place it came from. I thought about land, earth. A beach, or a port. It wasn’t just a boat: it was a possibility of another place.

Then, when I saw the goats, I stopped having those kind of philosophical thoughts and I just stared. This guy chugged up to the diving platform, standing by the outboard motor, the goats in front of him, dark-furred and white-bearded, bleating at the low waves. The sun was setting behind him, which just added to the craziness, red lava pouring on to the sea over the horizon, setting it on fire.

It was goats, on a boat, in the middle of the sea. I’ll never forget it.

Also on the new wooden boat were boxes of all sorts of stuff. The first two boats had heaps of boxes, too, as it turned out. I guess all this cargo had come from the mother ship, as Tony called it.

There were:

Like, a hundred cartons of cigarettes, at least.

Massive cartons of dried pasta.

A gas stove.

Tins with French writing on them.

Lots of bottles of booze.

Thousands – I mean, thousands – of litres of water in big bottles.

All of these things were in just huge quantities, which I didn’t take as a good sign at all. And I could tell from the look on the stepmother’s face that she didn’t, either. I found out after, from Farouz, that all this stuff came from a French container ship that the pirates had taken the previous month. It was clever, really, to reuse the spoils from a previous mission. Actually, I don’t know why I say really, because, as I quickly learned, the pirates were very clever indeed. And very organised.

So yeah, it was smart. And it meant, I realised sickly, that they could be here a long time.

Right then, though, I was watching the pirates carting cigarettes – they loved cigarettes – up into the yacht, watching them drive the two goats up on to the deck, where they tethered them.

It was total chaos, as you can imagine. The goats did not want to get on the yacht, and they resisted the pirates’ attempts to move them, squealing in a creepily human way and kicking. When one of the goats was finally forced on to the diving platform, it bolted, clattering on its unsteady hooves through the door, into the dining room. One of the pirates had to plunge in after it, and emerged a few minutes later, cursing, bleeding for some reason from his nose, pushing the complaining goat ahead of him. It was a good half an hour before the goats were tied up.

We moved as far away from the animals as we could. Already, one of them had shat on the mahogany slats of the deck. I could smell them, too, that sour, musky smell of animals that feed on grass.

— I make good curry with goats, said Felipe, who up till this point hadn’t said very much.

— Goats? said the stepmother.

— Yes. It’s quite sensible, if you think about it, said Dad. They don’t have to worry about meat perishing, and the goats supply milk as well as –

— Oh, shut up, James, said the stepmother.

 

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