She'd been on boats before. They all smelt the same and they all had those horrid wooden slat benches which soaked up the sea water and froze your thighs through whatever you were wearing. Every boat swayed and ducked under her in the same nauseating jig. Each one hummed and stuttered more than a child explaining himself to his mother. But this boat made her queasy.
The upper deck was off-limits, understood. Shouldn't stand too close to the larger windows, understood. It's best to just lay down on the lumpy little cot in the corner and not move at all. Fair. She could live with that if it meant that weird old man would stop lecturing her.
The churning fog of nausea in her stomach however, was bringing her patience to a boil. She'd been keeping her mouth shut for common sense's sake and following the old man's instructions for some days now. And she couldn't remember the last time she'd been able to use a shower since leaving her home; the old man had been watching her closer than a hawk and gave off the atmosphere of someone who'd be willing to put her through much worse if need be.
She really couldn't remember last washing herself.
Trish jumped up off the cot in disgust and poured herself a glass of water from the small sink crammed into the cabin's miniature kitchen.
Her mother had taken her dolphin watching once, on a boat of course. She never had to go below deck though and could only remember the sensation of her lifejacket's Velcro rubbing against her little 7-year-old chin. They may have seen dolphins. If they had they weren't impressive enough to be remembered. Apparently, dolphins are common around Capri, not that she had a good view out of the tiny round windows of the cabin.
She sat back down on the cot, her bare feet against the cold wooden floor and a full glass in one hand.
The cabin door opened.
The old man stood in the doorway with a pair of binoculars around his neck and his spectacles fogged from the sea spray above deck. With the door open Trish caught a scent of the sea, that rich scent of rotted seaweed, pure salt and the faint smell of earth from the approaching island. The man didn't move from his place and merely let his lazy eyes drift from Trish to the largest window; the only one with a latch, still locked tight and partially covered by a tea towel. Trish followed his gaze and slowly got to her feet.
"Is there anything you need?"
The old man smiled kindly up at her. "No. Anything I can do for you?"
Trish considered this.
Maybe she had seen dolphins that day. Just really really far off.
Trish snapped her wrist forward, dumping her water into the old man's face. He stumbled back in surprise but didn't shout out, only swiped a hand in the air in front of him as fast as anything to grasp blindly at her. His hand just grazed the fabric of Trish's shirt as she darted past him and up the narrow stairs leading down to the cabin floor and across the ship's deck, slick with sea spray and frosted with salt. It was an old boat, small, and perfectly inconspicuous for shipping her from the mainland. It was also the same model her grandfather had owned, a boat she'd been on all of one time, but her mother's father cared enough for her to make sure she knew what to do and where to be if it were necessary to evacuate at short notice. At very short notice Trish ducked to the right of the deck and hopped over the horrid wooden benches and rim of the deck and down onto a small safety raft which was waiting for her and she pulled the ropes from their tethers and dropped the raft into the ocean with leaping little waves of bright crystalline green and hauled the oars into place just as the old man above yelled something indistinct but she couldn't hear him because she had already pushed away from the boat and was drifting across the surface of one, really really big puddle full of filthy noisy boats and people and dolphins. The wind raked across her face and spat salt into her mouth and her eyes but she didn't face away from it, she didn't even push her hair from her eyes because it was the same wind which had blown her and her mother's hair into their faces and the salt from the Mediterranean mixed with the salt from her tears which she certainly was not shedding and glued her choppy fringe to her temples as choppier waves leapt up at and over the edge of the raft to soak her extraordinarily expensive ankle-length skirt but again she didn't care. She wasn't going towards Capri, and she didn't think the mainland was in this direction either, but she was going somewhere. Somewhere very fast. And then.
"Not at all. I'm just a little bit nervous." Trish said, running a finger over the rim of her glass.
The man's kindly face didn't shift, and he replied evenly, "If there was something I could say to console you, believe me I would say it.". He didn't look like the kind of man to lie.
She'd first met him at her own house. She'd stepped out of her family's slick black car having been driven back from the hospital to find a slicker blacker car parked beside it. The man she met in her living room wasn't familiar and he wasn't kindly and didn't smile then she walked in. That man talked to her driver, and then to her Grandfather once he got back from the hospital. She stayed in her room and counted photographs on her walls.
12 of herself. 12 difference outfits, almost as many hairstyles.
4 of her with school friends. The photos grinned back, but no names came to mind.
9 of her Mother. She wished she'd taken more.
The voices in the other room were growing louder and her Grandfather's found a quality unfamiliar to Trish's ears. It was the grandfather of the voice her mother had used when Trish had stolen her best dress from her wardrobe and played in it out in the garden in the mud after a rainy night.
Trish looked down at her clothing and grimaced. Black wasn't her colour and her mother knew it. She didn't even own a black skirt.
The unsmiling man herded her out of the house before she could see her grandfather again and took her into the car. The better car. This car had a cupboard in the wall with iced drinks in it. Two men sat opposite her in the strange little room within the better car, one with an old-timey hat and an odd tattoo around his eye, the other much older and smaller in frame.
The older one handed some paperwork back to the odd man and smiled at Trish.
The older man didn't lie. He didn't stop talking to Trish until they reached the first safehouse a couple hours later and talked about everything the first man had been arguing about with her grandfather earlier.
The information sank into her mind like silt to the bottom of a slow-moving river. Or slices of lemon in a glass of lemonade. She didn't let any of the rising bubbles show on her face and kept her eyes locked with the little old man slowly explaining her life to her.
She didn't flinch once. She made her mother proud.
Trish flinched. The nausea of the boat ride gave way to the vertigo of suddenly stepping foot on solid ground and she tottered across to where the old man waited for her, having finished paying off the harbour-keeper.
It was pleasantly cool outside the cabin's walls and she could hear gulls down the coast line. There were few people in sight besides a handful of tourists outside the cafés and some fishing-types closer to the cliffs.
"I think this shirt is too small for me." she said, tugging at the thin white fabric she'd sorrowfully pulled over her actual clothing.
The old man absently waved her complaint away and began walking up the docks, trailing his mop and bucket behind him. "You'll only have to wear it for a short time so bear with it."
The shirt was not too small, it was perfectly sized for her disguising needs. Trish had simply felt like she could vomit when she'd seen herself briefly in a reflective surface when leaving the boat dressed as a common janitor. She scowled and pulled the little matching white mask up over her face as far as it would go to in a small but heartfelt attempt hide herself from anyone in the harbour.
The two settled on a spot picked out by the old man and got to work. There wasn't much to complain about since the ground had finally stopped bobbing under her feet and she wasn't stuffed into either a car, a boat or a particularly glorified shed. After some minutes of dreamily waving a mop over cobblestones Trish's ears prickled. She squinted up at the hills behind the town.
"Did that sound like gunfire?" she asked.
"If it was it's far off and none of our business." The old man didn't look away from the street floor, completely engrossed in his work.
Trish rested her chin on her mop's handle and kept her eyes on the roads twisting into the island's lush green heights above them. Her mother had loved the islands and would talk about her youth spent drifting among them like some migratory bird with an estate worth more than a small town. It wasn't those conversations she missed the most. Trish wasn't much of a talker anyway. It was more the look she'd get whenever she spoke back at the meaner kids at school, or helped her mother carry a particularly heavy pile of books across the house, or bounced right back up again after grazing her knee.
Her mother loved her for those little moments of strength.
Just like your father.
She'd say, and then stroke her hair.
Trish decided then and there, with her chin on a broom handle and her hair stuffed under a cleaner's cap, that these men coming to collect her like an animal between zoos weren't going to make her feel like anything less than her mother's daughter.
And she would make her proud.