Читать книгу Exile - Ciler ilhan - Страница 16

Wreck

I told mum. ‘This boat is not safe, it won’t take us there and back,’ I said. ‘Let’s not board it,’ I said. ‘I have a bad feeling about it!’. ‘You think you know better than your father? He says it’s safe,’ she said. ‘Now stop complaining and help me get these pies on board,’ she said. ‘Buzzing like a hornet around my head again,’ she said. My big brother made fun of me, saying, ‘well, she a girl isn’t she, scaredy-cat’. My kid brother – he’s the only one who opened his eyes and looked at me.

All of a sudden the weather turned. A storm broke out of nowhere; how and where, we never understood. Mum can’t swim. My big brother jumped after his father who fell overboard. They didn’t surface. But I felt a strength from within, I swam, and swam, and swam.

My big sister – she’d dug her heels in, refusing to get on the boat with us. She hates the sea. She’d run away and hidden again, risking a beating by dad on our return. She called the coastguard when the storm broke. They pulled me aboard, not far from the shore, just as the strength in my arms failed.

Mum, dad, my big brother... it’s not them... but I feel like cutting off that hand of mine which slipped out of my fourteen-year-old brother’s grip.