We follow Saleesi winding and ducking through laneways and market stalls and piles of rubbish and poor people begging. Finally we’s heading down swaying gangplanks to the pontoons where we left Licorice.
There’s noise down there, on the pontoons, shouting, feet on boards, shapes of people running along the pontoons. Solar lanterns swing from poles lighting everything in a swaying moving light, so dark shapes of people is lit up, and then the rolling sea, and then shapes again. Torches flash across Licorice and Uncle Croc is in those light flashes, his jaws wide and snapping at people trying to board.
I grab Saleesi. ‘We have to swim in from the other side!’ I tell her.
We all look at the dark water below. It’s a drop from this gangway down into a gap between pontoons far below, not as far as my last jump, maybe only a couple of floors of an old tower block, and then a swim under the floating pontoons, and then under Uncle Croc and Licorice’s hulls.
‘Sharks,’ Saleesi says, and her face is pale in the weak light, and why wouldn’t it be, she’s tussled with the biggest of sharks.
‘Sharks and that croc,’ Jag says, and of course he ain’t going in the night water out on the wide sea, not with his fear of sharks and crocs.
Me then, only I can do the swim, but how do I get Jag and Saleesi to the boat? Out in the night there’s a pontoon with swinging lanterns, further up the hull of this mega ship. Those lanterns is going up and down so much, showing that the pontoon’s too rough for boats to tie off to. It’s catching much more of the swell than back here. If I could get Licorice going, I can do a sweep past that wild pontoon. Slow enough so maybe I could pick them up. I point. ‘Reckon you can hang on to that until I get Licorice there?’ I ask.
Saleesi with her most excellent sea legs nods.
Jag jus’ croaks, ‘Uhh …’
I don’t wait for his yes. I climb between the ropes of the gangway and leap into the dark.
Down I go. Warm wet night air whistling past my ears. Slap! Hard water stings my shins where they’re hauled into my body and I’m sinking down and the rolling wave slams me at the hull, rough and scrapey with rust and barnacles. I din’t think the water would be swirling this way on the landward side of the ship. I kick hard to the surface, grab a lungful of air and get wiped across the hull again. This hull is moving, not fast but faster than it seemed from above. Fast enough to suck me under, churn me through a motor and spit me out the back?
I hope not!
I put my feet against it and push off hard, swim flat out, and break the suction of the ship. Then I have to dive under a pontoon and up the other side. Light flashes over me and I worry that people will see me, but I’m jus’ a dark wet head in a dark wet sea and no one cries out. I dive under another pontoon. Waves roll and crash into my mouth jus’ when I think it’s safe to take a breath, then push me back against the pontoon. I don’t know that I’m a strong enough swimmer to get to Licorice, now I’m here. Ma’s always saying I bite off more than I can chew, and maybe this bite is too big for me.
I push off the pontoon, swim hard, duck under another roll that pushes me back. I’m getting nowhere. But I take a breath and keep trying. Eventually Licorice will come to me. She’s being towed along by the ship’s pontoon, and the whole Valley of the Sun moving slowly along.
I’m small and light and I’m a good floater. I think people who float good forget how hard it is for people who don’t float to swim. Jag don’t float. He sinks. When he goes in the sea he has to thrash around jus’ to stay afloat. Me, I jus’ cycle my legs slowly or lie on my back and flutter my hands. Swimming is easy for me. This is why it’s me in the water, swimming to save my two friends, and I can’t let them down. Jus’ like Saleesi will swing that big knife for me, or Jag would be taken so far away for me, I can’t let them down. I pull with my arms and kick with my legs and try to figure out the swell. I take a breath, duck and swim under the pontoon where all the noise is coming from, the feet slapping and the shouting.
Most of it’s in Valley of the Sun language, but then a man screams and says in my language, ‘I ain’t trying again! It tried to take my arm off!’
‘Fetch a gun. We’ll have to shoot it,’ someone else says.
I’m kinda responsible for Uncle Croc. He wasn’t to know better when he boarded in his cove, and he’s had to deal with a trappy net, an old pirate and a shark. It’s not his fault he does croc things. He don’t deserve to die for it.
