his mates.
Maybe nobody would come upon the mess on the rail? The strangers on the ferry meant nothing and could do nothing to him.
A piece of bread flew in a large arc above his head. As it fell towards the waves a seagull caught it and swallowed it with what sounded like a very contented shriek. Raf looked up but could not see the bread-thrower. He did not even know that there was another deck. All he could see was the captain’s cabin, the aerials and the radar masts (or whatever those gadgets were called) on top of it, and two vibrating chimneys at the back.
He waited for another piece of bread, checked that the seagull’s response was as expected and then carried on towards the back of the ferry. It was less windy there, in fact it felt quite pleasantly sheltered behind the captain’s cabin. All the other passengers — a few families with small children — were gathered there, running after their brats and entertaining themselves by worrying about their little treasures falling into the sea.
There was no point in going to his friends to tell them about the sheltered spot. Max always had to sit at the very top like all people with an x or a y in their name, and Samo and Alfonz were just his hangers-on.
And so am I, even though I’m sulking at the opposite end of the ship, he said to himself. It was rarely so annoying to be right.
It was all very simple: school had finished and with it their four years together. Max had organised a farewell party, which he said was going to be super mega. He and Samo were always together anyway, so it was not hard to choose his first guest. Alfonz had money and home-made schnapps. Raf was included because of Max’s bad conscience. He had been copying from Raf in nearly every written test in the past few years and even though they were not friends — neither of them would call their relationship a friendship — Max succumbed to guilt and invited the boy who was almost solely responsible for his education. Raf could not quite remember exactly when it had all started. But he did remember that from the second year on he always had to first quickly answer his own questions and then go onto Max’s.
Maybe I do have just a little bit of a character left, thought Raf. If I were a complete slave I would have finished Max’s assignment first and then gone onto my own.
He smiled. He was getting used to these sarcastic little thoughts which had started coming to him sometime around the onset of puberty, at the end of junior school. The unpleasant feelings were gone now and he started to take in the clear blue sky in all its beauty again. Yes, the dark thoughts had started in that black hole in the middle of the ferry — a flash of a feeling, too fleeting to be registered, of being caught in a dark, narrow place — and the freshness of the early afternoon had blown them away.
It would be a typical sort of party. First they would drink too much and then they would throw up. Parties were just an unpleasant duty to him, one you have to carry out so that you can brag about it later. Another strange and morbid thought?
He decided to return to the front of the ferry. Their remarks about his long absence were bound to be bad enough as it was.
The seagull was quite far off now. The feeding had finished. Raf slowed down and looked up. Nothing. He remembered the stains on the rail and tried to find them. He could not. If he could not find them without looking really closely then it was not worth mentioning and he had worried needlessly earlier.
He returned to the other three, who were still laughing at their plans for the party that night when the whole villa would be at their disposal.
“…and we’ll smash everything!” Max was just finishing another brag. “Tomorrow, everybody will be able to see what fun we had just by looking at the place!”
Ana broke the last piece of bread into two pieces that were almost too small, in order to delay the time when the seagull would start to screech. And indeed, when the bread was finished, the bird gave her a good telling off before slipping back, where it looked around ever so casually as if it would never again even think of casting a glance towards the ship or her — me interested in bread? Never!
Holidays, said Ana to herself. Oh, what a holiday this was going to be! Her mum and dad did want the best for her and she really had been looking rather anaemic all spring. But they had sent her to this god-forsaken island with only one ferry a day, to stay for two whole months with an uncle she had never seen before!
She called him uncle, even though in fact he was not her mother’s brother, but her mother’s uncle. Ana tried to remember what she should be calling him but could not really think of a suitable expression. Great uncle? They never said much about him at home and during all this reflection, for which she had plenty of time on her journey, she suddenly started feeling that her parents avoided mentioning him. No, she could not prove it, but still… She thought it was interesting how parents always think they can hide certain things from their children.
She waved to the seagull and it looked at her for a moment before deciding not to pay any more attention to her. She felt cold. The sun was beginning to set and it was still only early summer. To top it all she was sitting on the most open part of the ferry, where the breeze was at its strongest.
The euphoria which had warmed her in the first half of the day, was cooling too. Her first holiday alone! She had felt good in spite of the isolated island and the relative whom she imagined to be an old weirdo — and had then felt guilty for her thoughts. The great feeling of freedom more than made up for all the worries she had had, waking up every morning for the last seven days wondering whether she could manage on her own.
She had been travelling for most of the day and everything was going according to plan, restoring her confidence and suppressing the dark feeling which tried to creep into her every time she looked around the deck. How empty the ferry was! On the way to the first port of call, the passengers were literally treading on each other’s toes and now she was nearly alone. As if the whole of the civilisation was just a great crowd of people, tightly packed against each other like grapes and all around them nothing. A beautiful nothing: the sea, the sun and the vibrating metal under her feet.
She went down to the main deck and checked that her case was still in the hiding place she had managed to squeeze it into earlier. It was peeping from behind the air vent out of which gushed the stench of the cars below. The lock had not been tampered with. She shook the case and was again astonished at how heavy it was. It was a good thing that her father had offered her his big Samsonite otherwise she would have never been able to squeeze in all the clothes her mother had got out for her.
She reached into her canvas bag — screech went the seagull (she had completely forgotten about him) — and took out the earphones for her walkman. Before she could put them on she had to let her long hair down. She left the walkman itself in the bag, felt for the switch and managed to press the right button. She started wandering aimlessly in the same direction as the ferry. Because of the noise of the engines she had to reach into her bag once more to turn the volume up.
A weak, feeble voice came gently from everywhere. A strange feeling: the sea, ferry and a voice belonging to nobody around there. Well, it did belong to somebody somewhere but that did not matter. This was the only tape her mother never had any objections to.
On the cover there was a praying angel.
She had secretly bought another tape, with two angels making love and put it in a blank cover.
Why on earth did she remember that? The picture of the two intertwined bodies, rather muscular for supposedly such ethereal beings. Almost like the man sleeping on the bench in front of her, who was dressed in Bermuda shorts with a brightly coloured pattern and an equally colourful T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves. She looked at the eagle — it too was probably flexing its muscles and stretching its wings, yuck! — and then at the rest of its owner, which was a bit rude and certainly a sin, as her mother was always reminding her. She even had to lean on the rail for a moment in order to get a better view of the whole. The sin had only one redeeming feature: he was asleep. What harm could one single look do?
By observing her schoolfriends she had learned how very rarely punishment for sins actually came and even when it did it could be attributed to other causes. But she knew all the time that it was different for her. There was a line separating her from them.
She noticed a helmet and a leather sleeve under the bench. A motorcyclist. She remembered some of her neighbours roaring down the street on heavy motorbikes and she pursed her lips. That was enough.
She went on.
“Hey, a chick!”
Max was the first to notice her. He had always had a good eye for such things and claimed that his looks
