We head out on Ma’s favourite boat, Licorice Stix. Two small black hulls with a strong net slung between them, great for hauling back stuff we need, and behind that a little deck area with an actual ship’s wheel for steering. We hoist the sail and Ma takes over steering and chatting to her friend Dizzy while me and Jaguar go and stretch out on the net under the shade of the sail. It’s a couple of hours across the inland sea to where the sunken city lies on the old surf coast.
We lie on our stomachs, watching the water skim along under us. Ma hoists the jib and we move even faster, so fast that my dangling arms is wet from the spray coming off the hulls and my fingers slap a stinging wave every now and then. I stick my face right through a net square and pretend I’m a seabird flying and skimming over the waves looking for fish to dive on.
Jag says a shark once came up from the sea below and nudged him right in the butt through this net, but I’ve never seen a shark do that. Jag is unnaturally afraid of sharks. Like there’s a regular fear of sharks that will make you careful, and then there’s Jag-level screaming if a bit of seaweed touches his leg fear of sharks. Crocs too. Jag’s afraid of going in the water, even though he likes swimming in the pool on our beach as much as me.
Jag asks me all about the croc on the end of the fish, so I tell him the story of how I caught it, and then how I pulled it in in front of a whole village, and Marta told me off for hauling a croc into her boat, so then I have to tell him about the boy who took it for me, so then I have to tell him about how all the kids in the village were hiding, and that makes me tell him how strange the villagers were acting, and that makes me tell him about the guy that followed us out to make sure we’d finished our snooping around.
‘Neoma!’ Ma calls. ‘Don’t you be telling stories about our Ockery Islands neighbours!’
‘It’s all true, Ma. You can ask Marta. We’s prolly lucky to be alive!’
‘I will be asking Marta. Now pick a building to head to, something that might have some good salvage.’
On the horizon is the tall buildings of the old surf coast, now flooded by the risen sea.
Jag sits up and swings his arm around straight out like it’s a magic finder of things and yells, ‘That one!’ He’s pointing at the Ocean Tower.
‘Went there last month,’ Aunty Dizzy says.
‘The Silver Water!’ I say. It’s shorter, but the tall buildings get too many salvagers.
‘Silver Water it is!’ Ma says and heads Licorice that way.
Most of the surf coast din’t get moved out of like the areas around it, coz they had a big sea wall. The surf coast was where the rich people lived, pretending they was safe from the flooding that was washing out the poorer coastal towns and making salty swamps of farmland. But Cyclone Summer sent six cyclones nose to tail and destroyed it. Survivors moved inland to a mountain range same as the poor people. But the sea rose so quick they din’t get to take everything they owned. Then when they were camping out on the ranges in tents bad diseases came and most of them got sick, so they wasn’t able to come back and clear out their stuff anyway.
My ma was there, and when my da got sick, he stole a little rubber boat and put Ma in it, and me, jus’ a baby, and told Ma to row inland as far as she could. She rowed for three days and then found Marta’s cottage on the hill and people who would help her. She says it was the seagulls picking through the rubbish that made everyone in the mountain refugee camp sick, and there weren’t enough drugs in all the world to kill the new kind of sickness the seagulls brought. We’re very careful with rubbish now. Never leave anything out the seagulls might come down for. My da said he would follow us when he got better. Ma left the little rubber boat tied to a treetop next to the sea wall for three months, she says, but he never did come. Or maybe he came looking and went right past. One day, she left me with Marta and sailed back to the ranges to look for him. She never tells me what she found, but I think what she saw that day makes her think he died.
If I was a seabird for real, I could skim over to those mountains and have me a good old look around and maybe understand what it was that made her give up on Da ever coming to find us.
