try a third time. Slowly, I sit up. I crawl across the room until I reach him. I kneel and put one hand to his chest. The wet fabric is cold. No movement. No breath. His head is slumped into his chest.
‘No, no, no …’
The baby’s head jerks up. He gasps and his eyes flicker. I gasp too, then laugh with relief. My hands fumble with the straps.
‘Oh lovie, come on now …’
I lift the limp weight of him up to my chest. As I hold him, he shivers and cries once. Legs and back protesting, I carry the baby to the sofa and sit with him. He doesn’t cry again, but the shiver returns. I take a blanket and wrap it around us, rubbing his back and kissing his head. The warmth allows his shiver to blossom. It scares me that his tiny body is shaking so hard, as though it might shake apart. At length his blue eyes open, and he picks his head up.
For a minute there is calm in the room. Just me and the baby, looking into each other’s eyes. Then he starts to cry. It’s small at first, but he soon warms to it. Outside, the storm has passed. The saloon has windows on all sides. The sun is beating down over endless ocean. There are no boats or ships, no islands.
‘Abigail?’
It’s silly to call for her, my voice no louder than the baby. If Abigail were able, she would have come already. She must be busy. I swaddle him with the blanket. He kicks, trying to be free. I arrange the cushions so he won’t roll off the sofa.
I bend to pick up Abigail’s novel. It’s been soaked and half-dried in a shaft of sun. The pages are warped and stuck together. I try to smooth it into shape and find it’s not a novel at all.
TEN STRANGE LESSONS
Dispatches from the Frontier of Physics
I wonder what Abigail makes of it. She was a curious child, a question-asker. Like her father, I think, though I don’t remember Abigail’s father at all. I do my best to close the book, but it keeps springing open at the page where it landed in the storm.
I read:
The passage of time is perhaps the clearest, most common-sense aspect of our daily lives. We wake in the morning and go to bed at night. The space in between is obvious to us. But the closer we look, the more ‘time’ seems to disappear. Our newest theories suggest that time itself is an illusion. It is simply not real.
I set the book down. I don’t understand any of it. Wrapping my dressing gown around me, I open the doors onto the deck. I’ve had trouble walking on the boat; my balance isn’t good. Now the ocean is so calm I barely notice it. The varnish is hot and tacky under my bare feet.
‘Abigail?’
All around me the ocean laps at the hull. I put my hands on the railing, queen of all I survey. I don’t like the sea; I never learned to swim. There’s something about not being able to see through the waves to what’s underneath. It’s not just the fear of drowning. It’s the size of the sea, the way it seems to go on forever. It makes me feel small, the opposite of sitting in a room surrounded by chairs, lampshades and yesterday’s newspapers. Those things are there for me. The sea isn’t there for anyone.
I trudge to the back of the boat and look down, trying to remember what’s different about the picture. There’s no white water …
The engine is quiet.
I remember the sound of the engine. Almost musical – a drone-like hum and, under that, a different vibration, a slow thrum-thrum-thrum like a pulse, a bass note that changed tempo depending how fast we were going. Now there is silence, but we’re not in port. I don’t know anything about sailing, but I think the water looks deep.
I turn around to the stairs on the left of the cabin doors and carefully start to climb. I’ve only been up these stairs once, when Abigail wanted to take photographs of me pretending to drive. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was up here, hiding from his responsibilities with the baby, using all those dials and levers and flashing lights as an excuse not to do any real work. I open the door to the cockpit.
‘Hello?’
There is nobody. The engine is off, and the lights are off. I flick a couple of switches. Nothing happens. I hobble back down to the deck. The sun is so strong it could pin me to the deck, and the baby is still crying.
‘Abigail?’
I walk the strip of deck that runs down the side of the saloon, up to the bow of the ship. There is no one here, nothing to see except the glare off the polished wood.
Except, near the railings are a pair of shoes. The laces are still tied, as though someone kicked them off in a hurry. They’re wet, bleeding twin puddles onto the deck. I look at the shoes for a long moment, trying to remember where I’ve seen them before. They are running shoes, neon yellow, the sort a young woman would wear …
But I can’t remember.
I look over the side of the boat to see its name, painted blue on the white hull.
MNEMOSYNE
A memory surfaces of the first time we went to see the boat.
‘How do you pronounce it?’ Abigail had asked, looking at the painted name.
‘Nemmo-sign,’ he said, with confidence.
‘Nem-oss-inny,’ I said at the same moment. He ignored me. I don’t know where that came from.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I’ll change the name when we get her back to England. Something classic like Discovery.’
Eejit.
I shuffle back down the boat and let myself into the cabin. It’s hot in here. When the engine was running, you could come in from outside and feel the cool air. I close the door and turn to see Rene sitting on the sofa next to the baby, stroking his head. She looks up at the sound.
‘Hello?’
‘Rene? What are you doing here?’
‘I dunno. I just woke up. Who are you?’
‘It’s me, Ella.’ I stare down at Rene’s frown for a long moment. ‘Ella Campbell.’
‘Ella? Naw.’
‘I am, honest.’ I walk over and sit on the sofa, with the baby between us. Rene is still wearing her school uniform – pleated skirt and knee-high socks, white cotton blouse. My friend peers at my face, brows knitting together.
‘Oh aye, it is you, Ellie. You cut your hair short. You look like your nan.’
‘You remember my nan?’
‘She lived in that single-end on Gourlay Street. She made us buttery rollies that one time.’
I haven’t thought of Gourlay Street, my nan, or buttery rollies for a long time. Rene’s reappearance is like looking under a floorboard and finding a biscuit tin of childhood treasures. I have questions, but the baby chooses this moment to make a
