Diana Jones - The Homeward Bounders

“Well, I’ll tell you about my Home,” I said. “You may recognise something. First, my name’s Jamie H—”

But he raised his skeleton hand again. “Please. We do not give names. We think it is not permitted.”

Here, one of his crew came to the door and did a jabber-jabber. He was a man too, but I saw why I had taken him for a monkey. He was so stick-thin. He was more or less naked too, and the parts of him that weren’t burnt dark brown were covered with hair. Men are very like monkeys really.

The Dutchman listened for a little. Then he said, “Ja, ja,” and got up and went out.

It was not very interesting in the cabin and it smelt of mould, so after a bit I got up and went on deck too. The sea was there, all round. It gave me the pip at first, just like the wide-open cattle country. But you get used to it quite soon. The sailors were all scrambling about the rakish masts above me. They were struggling with the great black torn sails, and they seemed to be trying to hoist a few more. Every so often, a rotten rope would snap. There would be some resigned jabber, and they would mend it and carry on. This made it quite a long business, getting any extra sails up.

The Dutchman was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the reason for all this pother. It was another ship, a beauty, about midway between us and the horizon. It was like an arrow or a bird, that ship – like everything quick and beautiful. I had to gasp when I saw it. It had a bank of white sails, white as a swan. But, as I watched, I could see frenzied activity among those white sails. Shortly, a whole lot more white sails came up, some above, some overlapping the others, until there were so many sails up that you thought the thing was going to topple over and sink from sheer top-heaviness. Like that, the white ship turned and, with a bit of a waggle, like a hasty lady, made her way over the horizon. Our sails were still not set.

The Dutchman sighed heavily. “Always they go. They think we are unlucky.”

“Are you?” I asked, rather worried on my own account.

“Only to ourselves,” he sighed. He gave out some jabbering. The monkeys up aloft gave up struggling with the sails and came down to the deck again.

After that, I was sure they would be thinking of breakfast. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and I was starving. Well, I suppose a Homeward Bounder can never exactly starve, but put it this way: it never feels that way, and my stomach was rolling. But time went on, and nobody said a word about food. The monkeys lay about, or carved blocks of wood, or mended ropes. The Dutchman strode up and down. In the end, I got so desperate that I asked him right out.

He stopped striding and looked at me sadly. “Eating? That we gave up long ago. There is no need to eat. A Homeward Bounder does not die.”

“I know,” I said. “But it makes you feel a whole lot more comfortable. Look at you. You all look like walking skeletons.”

“That is true,” he admitted. “But it is hard to take on board provisions when you sail on, and ever on.”

I saw the force of that. “Don’t you ever fetch up on land then?” And I was suddenly terrified. Suppose I was stuck on this ship, too, for ever, without any food.

“Sometimes we go to land, ja,” the Dutchman admitted. “When we come through a Boundary and we can tell we have time, we find an island where is privacy, and we land. We eat then sometimes. We may eat maybe when we come to land to put you ashore.”

That relieved my mind considerably. “You should eat,” I said earnestly. “Do, to please me. Can’t you catch fish, or something?”

He changed the subject. Perhaps he thought catching fish was not permitted. He thought no end of things were not permitted. I had opportunity to know how many things, because I was on that ship for days. And a more uncomfortable time I hope never to spend. Everything about that ship was rotten. It was half waterlogged. Water squeezed out of the boards when you trod on them and mould grew on everything. And nobody cared. That was what got me so annoyed. True, I could see they’d been at this game for ages, a hundred times longer than I had, and they had a right to be miserable. But they took it to such lengths!

“Can’t you wear a few more clothes?” I said to a monkey every so often. “Where’s your self-respect?”

He would just look at me and jabber. None of them spoke much English. After a bit, I began to ask it in another sort of way, because it got colder. Fog hung in the air and made the damp ship even wetter. I shivered. But the monkeys just shrugged. They were past caring.

I thought it was another piece of the same when I looked over the side of the ship on about the fourth foggy day. By then, anything would have been interesting. I noticed there were two big iron holes there, in the front, each with a length of rusty chain dangling out of them. I had seen pictures of ships. I knew what should have been there.

“Don’t you even carry anchors?” I asked the Dutchman. “How do you stop?”

“No,” he said. “We threw them away long ago.”

I was so hungry that it made me snappish. “What a stupid thing to do!” I said. “That’s you lot all over, with your stupid negative attitude! Can’t you think positive for once? You wouldn’t be in half this mess if you did. Fancy throwing anchors away!”

He just stood there, looking at me sadly and, I thought, sort of meaningly. And suddenly I remembered the crowned anchor on the front of the Old Fort. I knew better than to mention Them to him by then. He never would come straight out like I did and call them Them. He always put it impersonally: it is not permitted. But of course he knew that anchors had something to do with Them – probably better than I did. “Oh, I see,” I said. “Sorry.”

“We took them off,” he said, “to show that we are without hope. Hope is an anchor, you know.”

A bit of good came of this, though. He got worried about me, I think. He thought I was young and ignorant and hot-headed. He asked me what kind of Boundary I had come in by. “I am afraid,” he said, “that you may have got on a circuit that is sea only, and next time I will not be by. I shall put you on land, because I think it is not permitted for us to stay in company, but you may still end up in the water all the same.”

Oh he was a cheery fellow. But kind. I told him about the stone Boundary and the strange sign.

“That is all right,” he said. “That is RANDOM. Look for the same again and you will unlikely be drowned.”

It turned out that he knew no end more signs than I did. I suspect that he’d been Homeward Bound so long that he may even have invented some of them. He wrote them all out for me with a rusty nail on his cabin door. They were mostly general ones like UNFRIENDLY and GOOD CLIMATE. I gave him a few particular ones I knew in return, including one I thought would be really useful: YOU CAN NICK FOOD HERE.

“I thank you,” he said solemnly.

A day later, thank goodness, we came to some land. It was not my idea of heaven. I could hardly see it in the fog, for a start, and what I could see was wet rocks and spouts of wave breaking over them. It made me feel the ship was not so bad after all.

“Maybe we should go on a bit,” I said nervously to the Dutchman. “This looks rough. It could break your ship up.”

He stood sombrely beside me, with his navy coat and his beard and his hair all dewed with fog, watching the spouting waves come nearer through the whiteness. “The ship does not break,” he said. “It does not matter. There are seven holes in the underside and still we float. We cannot stop. We go on floating and sailing for ever.” Then he did something I never thought to see him do. He took his fist out of his pocket and he shook it, shook it savagely in the air. “And we know why!” he shouted out. “All for a game. A game!”