The Boat

The sun slips down below the curved horizon, painting a path of glowing tangerine across the dark blue sea, illuminating a three-metre diameter inflatable boat bobbing around on the choppy water. Sixteen people are sitting in a circle, their backs pressed against the sides of the fragile vessel. Fourteen of them have their eyes closed. Several of the sleepers are sliding down where they sit, slumping onto the next one’s shoulder; muttering in their sleep; drooling. The fifteenth is beside a small engine, bought from fishermen, holding limply onto the miniature wheel. But he’s not steering and the engine is switched off. In his other hand he’s holding something round and shiny. From time to time he stares at it in disbelief. See his pupils. They’re huge like two black planets. See the whites turned pink and veiny. See the sweat pouring down his face even though the darkening evening is chilly. The 900 milligrams of Lyrica he took before the voyage was supposed to give him stamina and courage. Now the face of his first primary school teacher is looming across the water, duplicated a thousand times, each of them saying,                                                                          “Tarek! Pay attention!”                                                                                                                             He turns away from the faces, looks down into the flat bottom of the boat, where curled up between the sand-encrusted trainers of the sleepers is the puppy he found when he was seven, the one his father drowned.                                                                                                             The sixteenth occupant of the boat is a woman of twenty years. Inside her navy blue holdall with a white stripe is the secret seventeenth traveller, a three-month-old baby girl. And buried inside this bold young woman is an even bolder woman. Her name is Tin Hanan. She has been jumping between bodies since her own death 1,700 years ago. When the mountain dweller who she had inhabited for ninety years took her last breath, Queen Tin Hanan, being curious about urban life, flew to the city and chose this about-to-be-born girl, who would be named Yara, seeing the potential in her. But Tin Hanan is angry. Yara wasn’t supposed to leave the country. The Tuareg queen would never even imagine abandoning the land where she ruled a vast tribe, over thousands of square kilometres of desert.                         As Yara boarded the inflatable twelve hours ago, Tin Hanan struggled to stop her from getting in, but without success. The mother had done as she pleased, placing her holdall with its precious cargo between her feet, smiling as she pictured her foul-tempered violent husband awakening to find her gone.                                                                                                                            The faces of the schoolteacher have sunk into the waves, but the puppy remains, whimpering a little. Tarek tells it to be quiet for it may wake the fourteen sleepers and they will check the time and remind him that he promised they would reach Spain in two hours, and now twelve have passed. Then he will have to tell them that just after they lost sight of the North African coast he discovered that the compass was broken.