the one he had just uttered, were somehow comforting to Alex, whose yearning for society had increased.
‘Thank you, Makishi. In that case, I shall.’
Later they was passing between archipelagos and atolls decorated with bird cages and bamboo umbrella stands. At one lonely island he found a shivering little Attican boy, whom he rescued and took aboard. It seemed from some drawings the child made in the dust that he had been marooned by pirates. Pirates? Why had no one warned him about pirates?
On a later island where the bird cages were draped in feathers he found inhabitants, more of the fisherfolk, who used cricket bats to paddle their island canoes and floating light bulbs to moor them in the bay. The child seemed to know them so Alex passed the boy on to them.
Alex spent the night with them and enjoyed an evening of dancing and creaky singing beneath paper lanterns that glowed with a faint light and were found by him to contain fireflies. It was here the dragon returned and swooped down to swallow a long line of the lanterns. This brought the inhabitants out of their huts. They spent the next hour throwing marbles at the dragon, trying to drive it away. Alex pretended to join them. No one noticed that he wasn’t trying very hard to hit the target.
The dragon, on seeing him, gave him a hurt look and Alex, knowing he owed this creature his life and breath, felt a little ashamed.
After the dragon had been chased away the grumbling Atticans unveiled some strange contraptions. It seemed they had forgotten to wheel out their dragon-scarers to guard their lanterns while they enjoyed their festivities. The dragon-scarers were made of bicycle parts, bits of vacuum cleaners, old radios, lawn mowers, kitchen utensils, gardening tools and electric fans. These were fashioned into giant mobiles which moved in the slightest draught. Wheels spun and worked arms and levers and ratchets, which had the giant dragon-scarers swinging their arms and rolling their heads, as if they were live creatures.
On yet another archipelago was a forest of artificial Christmas trees decorated with tinsel and paper chains. This brought a lump to his throat as it reminded him of his family, now far away. It was on the beach of an island such as this that he was attacked by what he thought were scarecrows, but turned out to be Guy Fawkes dummies. Christmas tree angels saved him by flying in like a swarm of sparrows and hampering the efforts of the guys until Alex had launched his raft and set out to sea again.
One morning he woke to find calmer waters than usual and there on the horizon was a thin black line. He knew then that he was coming to the end of his voyage. That black line was the lip of the other side of the Great Water Tank. In the space beyond were the vague shapes of objects of a far place.
It was on these inland waters, which the bortrekker had called the Farside Roads, that Alex encountered another craft. It was very similar to his own makeshift vessel and was sailing the other way. Those on board were not Atticans, but a boy a little older than himself and a girl about his age. They had obviously entered into the spirit of seafaring, being dressed in naval attire, the boy with a white peaked cap with an anchor badge on it, and the girl in a blue-and-white striped jersey and navy-blue knee-length trousers.
‘Ahoy there!’ called the boy. ‘You a real person?’
‘Yes,’ cried Alex. ‘You?’
‘Yes. We’re lost.’
‘So am I – or I was.’
‘Weird place, ain’t it?’
The girl called, ‘We’re looking for our old attic.’
Alex didn’t know what to say to that. Naturally he didn’t know where their personal trapdoor might lie.
As they passed by one another, Alex said, ‘You should find a bortrekker or a board-comber. They’ll help you.’
‘Thanks,’ the boy replied. ‘A bortrekker, eh?’
‘Yes – like me.’
‘We met an attic boy who called himself a rafter king,’ called the girl, ‘who was climbing up there.’ Her eyes swept the roof space. ‘He said he was once human, but he wasn’t much help in the end. Apparently there’s quite a few of them, up in the roof space. He said he’d lived up in the rafters too long and had a little hut up there. He told us he’d become a rafter king to stay out of the way of the Removal Firm. Do you know them?’