Ark Noon

The water was all around me and I was drowning.
I heard a shrieking cry and looking up I saw a hawk hovering above the water beneath the full, grey clouds. It was the day before my fourteenth birthday and it was the first hawk I’d ever seen. That’s the truth. I’d never seen any bird or animal before I saw that hawk.
But then maybe it’s not the complete truth to say I was drowning. I was suffocating. That’s a better word; I was suffocating in the water. It was everywhere, a desert of water all around me broken only by the occasional pathetic peak of hill breaking the surface. Me in my small boat bobbing in the water, a dot in the vast wet expanse. And in the distance, to the north east, were the dry un-sunk Pennines.
The hawk remained hovering above me. It seemed like it was caught there, trapped in immovability, hesitating. I should have told it there were no fish in the water, that it wouldn’t get a scrap of dinner today. There wasn’t a single fish in the dirty everywhere water just like there wasn’t a single mouse or rabbit for its dinner on the measly bits of land that were left. God knows how far it had flown to get here and hover there hoping to see a flash of shimmering silver in the murk. Where have you come from hawk? When did you last eat? Tell me what’s out there? I was mesmerised by its still beauty, its hopeless dedication to finding food.
I knew it was a hawk because I’d seen enough pictures of them in Father Leigh’s books. His shed is piled full of books, all kinds, encyclopaedias and novels, manuals and poetry, magazines and biographies. Most of them are damp and he only ever reads one really; his old tattered bible.
Dad says we owe our lives to Father Leigh. He saved us when the flood first came. He brought us to the cottage and he gave me my name. They only had an old crisp box to put me in, a deep flimsy box, and dad said when he pulled us on to his boat that Father Leigh took off his own coat though he must have been freezing with all the rain, and folded it into the crisp box then laid me down in it. “There,” he said, “he’s in his own little ark now.” And he kept calling me that every day after until eventually even dad stopped calling me David and started calling me Ark. Sometimes I even forget my name is David. Some days he calls me his Dark Ark because my hair and eyes are both black. Once he told me that I was like my mother. “She was a Spaniard,” he said and after he said that I took one of his atlases and looked up where Spain had been and found it there like a swollen leg kicking out of the side of what had been Europe.
Father Leigh is mad. He spends every day in his shed tearing out pages from his old books, not reading them, just crossing out words and making new sentences then gently laying them onto the pages of his bible and gluing them down, replacing the old words with his new meaningless ones. Some pages just have a few words left surrounded by black lines obscuring the old words. He calls it his ‘bible for a wet world’ and he says one day he’ll be thanked for all the work he’s doing. I doubt it though. He’s getting old and I reckon soon enough it’ll just end up like all his other books, mouldy and damp and never read and used to fuel the fire by dad.
The hawk suddenly shrieked and the sound made me jump so my boat rocked and I knocked my oar so it made a plopping sound as it hit the water. I looked up and saw the hawk wheeling away and then I heard a slosh of something cutting into the water in answer to the plopping of my oar and looked north, past the gap in the copse of half submerged and drooping water heavy oaks I’d been drifting through and I saw them. I knew immediately what they were. Wavers.
There was one low sleek boat and I could see about six men on board it, the little sun there was glinting from their polished bone helmets. Dad always says that you know a Waver from those bone helmets. He says, and I thought he said it to scare me to being on my guard, to not row openly and blindly, that those helmets are the tops of the skulls of all the children they’ve killed. I never thought it was true but there they were, six men, their heads crowned with broken polished skulls.
I went stiff. I gripped my oars so they didn’t fall again and I wondered if they’d heard that first stupid plop. The hawk was gone, far away, looking for fish where the water grows less dark and dirty and merges with the encroaching sea. I heard them talking. From within the copse it sounded like grunts and growls. Then the harsh heavy laughter of men who laugh at terrible things like burning homes and battered bodies. I was imagining that, I know. My hands would have shaken if I wasn’t gripping the oars so tightly. But because I couldn’t move, because I was stuck there praying they didn’t see me, I didn’t do what I knew I should do and slowly turn my boat away and row back west, silently, carefully and get home to the cottage and warn dad. Instead, like an idiot, I stayed there and watched as one of them, one with a long bedraggled grey beard turned his head away from whatever joke the others were laughing at and his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed and he focused on the copse of oaks and I knew he was looking through the gap in the trees and then I saw his eyes widen and his mouth open, saying something. The others turned and followed his pointing arm and every one of them looked directly at me. And I didn’t care then, I pulled on my oars clumsily and I didn’t care about the splash and spray they made because I knew then that the Wavers had seen me.