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Category: Caroline

MIMOUNA by Caroline Thomas

PART ONE          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 despite the chill of the darkening evening.  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. But though her skin is smooth and unlined, there is something ancient within her, not merely traces of ancestral DNA, but something very much alive and kicking. Shadows of frustration and anger flit across her sharp cheekbones, but they’re not the emotions of this bold twenty-year-old, they’re the emotions of an even bolder woman, a leader, a queen. Her name is Tin Hanan.  Since her own death around 1,700 years ago she has been jumping between bodies.                                 Two decades ago, when the mountain dweller who she’d inhabited for ninety one 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. But now Tin Hanan is furious. 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 young woman had done as she pleased, placing her navy blue holdall with a white stripe between her feet, smiling as she pictured her foul-tempered violent husband awakening to find her gone. And not only her. For inside the holdall with a white stripe is the secret seventeenth traveller, a three-month-old baby girl.                                                                                                                                 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‘ll check the time and remind him that he promised they’d 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.

The Island – Part 3 – by Caroline Thomas

“I was only five when I lost my mother, not that there was much to lose.  Yara, for that was her name, had been reduced to nothing by Oumaima’s magic. A couple adopted me and I lived in their forest home somewhere between here and the west coast. I don’t know exactly where. I’m disorientated by all the changes here since I left the island sixty five years ago. The couple were kind, and insisted on getting me educated. But all through those years I missed my mother, and I became weary of the mischief done by the island’s interior. It poked at my flesh, disrupted my studying, disturbed my thoughts.”                                                                                                                     

I don’t mention how I also missed Tin Hanan, the queen of my world for the first five years of life. The woman doesn’t mind me talking about the island, though. She seems to understand perfectly why she has to lock her doors and close the blinds at sunset. She has to stay here so she’s accepted it. The island is the beast she lives with, and on. It gives her her livelihood, her existence, and as long as she’s careful it doesn’t harm her. She asks me what happened to the other fourteen passengers on the circular boat.                                                                      

Pt 2 – The Beach by Caroline Thomas

Everyone is talking at once. Some want to wait out at sea until dark, then go onto the beach. Others want to go along the coast to find an empty place to land. Still others are adamant about landing right away while there are still just a few people on the beach. In the end it is Tarek who will decide, for he is the pilot and the owner of their circular steed. Tarek has stopped hallucinating, but he’s befuddled by lack of sleep, and overwhelmed by the responsibility, on this, his first trip as a smuggler. Also creeping in is the growing realisation that without a compass or the astronomical knowledge of Yara, he may never, after dropping off his human cargo, find his way home. Even if he owned a phone with a navigation device he couldn’t risk using it, for the authorities would track the signal and arrest him for people-smuggling. He falls into panic as he pictures himself in a prison cell being beaten by guards, then is more disturbed by the very real sound of his stomach growling with hunger.

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…

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