The Island [antikvár]

The boat lay at anchor, as still as if it had been welded to the surface of the sea. Normally, this far out, there would be long, rolling groundswells - offspring of far-distant storms — that would cause the boat to rise and fall, the horizon constantly to change. But, for more than a week, a high-pressure system had squatted over the Atlantic from Haiti to Bermuda. The sky was empty even of fair-weather clouds, and the reflection of the midday sun made the water look as solid as polished steel. To the east, a splinter of grey hung, shimmering, suspended a millimetre above the edge of the world: the refracted image of a small island just beyond the horizon. To the west, nothing but waves of heat rising, dancing. Two men stood in the stern, fishing with monofilament hand-lines. They wore ragged shorts, filthy white T-shirts, and wide-brimmed straw hats. Now and then, one or the other would dip a bucket off the stern and pour water on the deck, to cool the Fibreglass beneath their bare feet. Between them, over the socket where the fighting chair would fit, was a makeshift table of upturned liquor cartons, covered with fish-heads, guts, and skeins of thawing pilchards. Each man held his fishing hand out over the stern, to prevent the line from chafing on the brass rub-rail, and felt 9