What I Was by Meg Rosoff Page A

were off, Finn handling the tiller and sail, and me singing pirate songs and ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?’ to amuse him.
    He frowned at me. ‘I’m doing all the work while you sit there making a horrible noise.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said happily, delivering a lusty chorus at twice my usual volume.
    Finn grimaced. ‘Come on, let’s switch over. That ought to shut you up.’
    ‘I can’t sail.’
    ‘I’ll teach you.’
    And suddenly there it was. The smile.
    Awkwardly, we swapped places. Finn handed me a rope and a length of tiller and told me to hold both steady. ‘Feel for the balance between them,’ he told me.
    I had no idea what he meant, and at first I struggled against wind and waves with every ounce of strength I possessed. To no avail. We proceeded in fits and starts, jerking along like an old car in the wrong gear, stopping and starting and swinging awkwardly left and right. Finn leant back and focused on the middle distance, smiling a little and refusing to help, and just as I was ready to give up, our forward motion turned tight and clean and straight and suddenly, against all expectation, we were sailing. I was sailing! The little boat sped along and together we soared, with the slap of the sea against the bow, the wind coming over the port side nearly in front of us, the sail taut as a trampoline. Speed and a slim wedge of terror made me reckless, ecstatic, for the three or four minutes it took before I headed the boat up too close to the wind and lost hold of the tiller. My moment of oneness with wind and sea ceased. The momentum of the boat jammed the tiller up into the far corner of the stern where I couldn’t hope to reach. I hung on to my rope for dear life, despite the fact that the boat was now tipped up at a terrible angle, hurtling along, taking water in over the side.
    ‘Let go of the sail!’ I could hear Finn shouting, but my limbs had gone rigid, my eyes half-shut in a paralysed prayer for salvation, my hands locked obstinately around the rope. It took an almighty heave for him to pull the line from my hands and set it free, which had the magical effect of flattening the boat almost instantly. The tiller, suddenly loose and friendly, swung gently into his hand, and with a few minor adjustments we were sailing once more. He motioned me back to my place at the bow, uncharacteristically triumphant. If I hadn’t known better I might have suspected him of proving a point: something about the very thin line between positive forward motion and chaos, panic, death.
    Then again, maybe not.
    Trying to think inside Finn’s head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees. Finn was more likely thinking about the not-so-thin line between someone who knew how to sail and someone who didn’t.
    But I harboured no ill feelings; ballast was a role I embraced happily. By now the wind had picked up and I leant over the side, hypnotized by the flashes of sunlight on the dark sea as it rushed under our bow, by its green-black opacity. We’d been sailing north along the coast, out less than an hour, and already I’d forgotten our goal.
    ‘Look there.’ Finn pointed left at a shallow cove surrounded by collapsing cliffs – great shelves of chalk and clay sliding down on to the beach. ‘That’s where the habour was.’ I turned to look, squinting to focus better, while he neatly changed direction, angling the boat away from the shore.
    We were about three hundred yards off the beach when suddenly I could see something ahead, something dark and looming just above the water line. I pointed, but Finn had already altered our course. As we approached I could see that it was man-made, but by the time I recognized it as the fort, the sea was trying to smash us to smithereens against it. Finn steered hard and swung us round the rampart as if it were a racing marker, an uncharacteristically reckless move, I thought, on the