Nicolas stocked the galley with dried mango and banana and strawberry and pumpkin smuggled from The Laboratory. It was for our journey together.
“And from now on, matey, you must call me Captain Gollum.” Gollum salutes me. The cap on his head is embossed with gold braid and bears the emblem of the Guardian of Justice and Peace. He has changed out of his rags and is wearing Nicolas’s shirt and a pair of his trousers. How dare he!
“Take those clothes off,” I hiss.
“They’re mine now. Fit for a captain.” Gollum struts on the deck. The shirt hangs loosely and the trousers are held up by a piece of rope. “Come, let’s have a look at that shoulder of yours.”
I pull my shoulder back and stand upright while he rips canvas from an old sail.
“Strip. I need to see what I’m working with here.” Gollum has a hard glint in his eye.
I take a deep breath and fix my gaze on the two devil horns on his forehead. I yank off my dress and stand naked in the warm air. Nicolas is the only boy who has ever seen me without my clothes, or touched my skin. And now this Reject.
He stares at my bare chest and colour rises in his face. He touches my shoulder and feels along the bone above my chest. The skin on his fingers is rough, but he probes gently.
“It’s your collar bone. I’ve seen the same kind of injury on the Pulaks.”
The Pulaks of Mangeria are harnessed in pairs and pull taxis squashed full with passengers. Most of the Pulaks are not able to serve in their trade for longer than seven years. Then they are taken to the Reject dumps, broken and crippled.
Gollum knuckle-taps along my bone. “You’re lucky. Those poor buggers never get a chance to heal. This isn’t such a big deal. In a couple of months the bones will knit good as new.” He stands behind me for a moment, and then laughs. “So, you’re just a smelly old drudge! The Machine decided you’d wipe Posh kids’ arses and scrub their floors.”
I fold my hands over the numbers at the base of my spine. I am no longer a drudge – the mark on my spine is dead. But this boy will always be a Reject, a nothing. He was never meant to be anything.
He twists the canvas around my back, immobilising my shoulder. He makes a sling and straps one arm against my body. He pulls on my dress, leaving my other arm free.
“Come now, Captain Gollum,” I say. “You must set sail away from the sun. And tonight Reader will tell you how to plot a course home by the stars. I’ll go below and cook some food. You can trust that it will be most tasty.”
And when I can manage this sloop on my own, I’ll poison you and watch you rip your guts to ribbons, vomiting to death. You won’t have the chance to sell me to the Locusts when we get home.
“Yes, of course I trust you, Drudge.” Gollum laughs.
The days drift into each other, a pattern of unrelenting sun and vicious storms. The sloop is tossed between the wind and towering waves in a spiteful game that often blows us off course. Some days there is not a whisper of a breeze, and the seacraft bobs stagnant in a sea smothered in a mass of plastic.
Plastic bottles and packets and containers for as far as the eye can see on the dead sea. Bubbling blankets of plastic mush. Rotting green and black and yellow, a lifeboat for the flies that feast on its trapped filth.
Back in Mangeria, everything is made of plastic. The air smells of plastic. My food tastes of plastic. When I sweat, my skin is coated with abnormally shiny beads. And here on the sea we are besieged by the old world’s plastic legacy.
On these calm days, we take the oars and try and free the sloop from the prison of plastic. But it is useless. So we wait for a wind to rise and fill our sails.
I have made it my duty to cook breakfast for Gollum at sunrise when he ends his evening shift. Boiled oats, a spoonful of spit and a sprinkling of spite. The food is ready for him on deck once he has set the sloop on its morning course, and is done washing himself.
Under the blistering sky, he scrubs his hairy body with our precious water, singing bawdy songs that infect my ears. He keeps his captain’s cap on when he bathes, never removes it. During the long, hot days, he sleeps restlessly, sprawled out over the hatch to the galley where our supplies are kept – a rat guarding its food.
If I surprise him while he is washing, he never covers himself. He does not care if I see him – his scarred back, legs all knees, thin body. It has grown in terrified spurts and formed weirdly in places. When he catches me looking at him, he sings even louder. He is more Savage than any person I have known. I envy his defiance. Mine is sapping away with the endless days on the sea.
He eats with a ferocious appetite, shoving food into his face with dirty fingers as though he suspects someone might steal away his bowl before he is finished. “Is there any more porridge? A slab or two of mango? You can’t expect your captain to only eat banana for breakfast.” His stomach is never full.
I do not eat with him. I tell myself that the sight of him guzzling our food disgusts me. But food repels me now, especially the smell. When I was an orphan in Section O, I could not stop stuffing my face. How Kitty would laugh if she could see me now, gagging at the sweet smell of my favourite strawberry.
Maybe Kitty is free now, feasting herself fat on mango.
Maybe my beautiful friend is missing me too.
My sickness is worse in the morning. There are days when I have to turn away from cooking breakfast and race on deck to hurl into the sea. I am an empty sack; my energy has leaked from my bones.
“You never eat, Drudge. Are you sick?” Gollum shovels porridge into his mouth. “When I slaved at the pleasure clubs for one of my masters, I saw girls and boys like you who also never ate. Some pleasure workers had the sickness, a grubby gift from their Posh patrons.” He runs his hands together. “The rub-a-dub-dub, they called it. They were fit only for the dumps. Diseased and useless.”
Gollum’s eyes slide over my body.
“Girls weren’t always sick, mind you. Just gone down the river. They ate very little during the first months, tried to hide the swelling. But their bellies grew until they got rid of their burden. Another of my masters dabbled in that line of work. A lucrative trade. Then, if the Locusts didn’t catch the slaggets under the bridge, they came back to work at the clubs. The lucky ones.”
I touch my stomach. “I like to wait until Reader wakes. He prefers not to eat alone.”
Most of the days are calm; the storms come at night. Reader and I huddle down below in our berths, bolts drawn against any treachery. Gollum stays on deck. He says he likes the storms. I cross my fingers and hope he gets swept into the sea.
He watches me watching him. And takes to wearing a waist harness attached to the mast when the sea is rough. And hides the galley knives. I keep a broken bottle under my mattress. And wait for my collar bone to heal. Plain-purl. Plain-purl. Plain-purl. Faster, faster. Knit those bones.
Reader spends the early part of the evenings instructing Gollum where to sail and, when the course is set, the old man leaves him to get some sleep. I hear them, sometimes, as I toss about in my berth trying to ease the burn in my chest.
“Tell me how the stars are arranged against the sky so that I can direct you. I have an excellent star chart in this travel history by a brave fellow called Joshua Slocum, who navigated these oceans in a sloop just like ours hundreds of years ago. What do you see tonight, my captain?”
Reader has told me he merely humours Gollum, calling him “my captain”. But as time passes, I sense he says it out of respect. He tells me Gollum is a fine sailor. As a young boy, Gollum was bonded to a Reject master who worked for the Scavvies. Then he moved on to various other trades, some dark and terrible. Our captain has perfected many crafts. I do not want to hear about his horrible talents.
At first Gollum scoffed at Reader: “What can those stupid dots in old