The League of Sharks (3 page)

Junk stared. Taking in the devastation all around him. His mouth was dry. He stared at the top of his mother's head. ‘Ma,' he said in a small voice, unsure if he should speak at all but unable not to say something.

Janice Doyle didn't move for several long, awful moments. Then, slowly, infinitesimally slowly, she raised her head and for the first time in days she looked into her son's eyes. He held her gaze, desperately hoping that she would reach out to him and be his mother again. Then, like film of a raindrop hitting a leaf in extreme slow motion, a tear, a single fat tear, grew in the corner of his mother's eye. Junk couldn't look anywhere else. He was fixated on that tear. He watched it grow and swell until it had no choice but to submit to the laws of nature and gravity and it fell. It slid down Janice Doyle's cheek,
cutting a path through the white of the flour until it reached her chin and fell to the ground. His mother's lips parted ever so slightly. He could hardly hear her voice but it was deafening:

‘I wish
you
were dead.'

Junk swallowed that, banished it to the black pit within, and then he turned and he walked away.

*

He went to his room and grabbed his hurling kitbag. It used to be his father's and his grandfather's before that. He hesitated. Maybe he didn't deserve it now. Then he remembered he hadn't done anything except try to save his sister. He grabbed clothes from drawers and stuffed them into the bag. He crouched by the skirting board in the corner and prised a section loose. Behind it he kept his precious things in a green metal lock box, including eighty-seven euros and change. He threw that in the bag too and hefted it on to his shoulder.

He paused in the doorway and looked back one last time. He knew he'd never see this room again. Bitter tears streamed down his cheeks and he scraped them away with his sleeve.

*

He went back downstairs but avoided going anywhere near the kitchen. He turned back on himself at the foot of the stairs and lifted the latch on the pale green door that led into the boot room. He threw on his coat and his boots and left through the side entrance. Outside it was raining hard. He put up his hood and crossed a patch of sodden
earth to his father's workshop, where he stood on tiptoes so he could see inside.

His father had his back to the window. It was warm in his workshop. Music was playing. Tom Waits. His father would always play that when he was feeling doleful. Junk saw that his father was working on a small ornate box of walnut with pearl inlay. This was going to be Ambeline's Christmas present. A beautiful box for all the cheap pieces of tacky, crappy jewellery she collected from the front of magazines, like any girl her age. That was so like his father. Always had to finish what he had begun. Even though there was no point. Now the recipient of the box was gone. Junk knew that in a day or so that box would be in Ambeline's bedroom, sitting on the shelves her father had made for her before she was born. Junk's eyes were red, but the tears were lost to the rain now.

Inside the workshop, Dominic heard or sensed something and turned to the window. But there was no one there. Junk had already left.

*

Junk walked east from Murroughtoohy until he reached the main road. He walked for three hours in the blackest of black nights. The rain was so hard he could feel every individual drop as they struck his face like a million pinpricks. He came across an articulated lorry parked up at the side of the road. He climbed up to take a peek through a slit in the cab's interior curtains and saw the driver asleep in a cot inside.

Junk found a shallow nook at the front of the trailer
behind the cab. It was just deep enough for him to shelter inside and get out of the rain. He pulled his sodden coat around himself and fell asleep.

*

He was woken a few hours later as the lorry's engine roared to life with a shudder. Junk was numb with cold but his little nook gave him some protection from the elements as the lorry pulled away, the driver oblivious to his stowaway.

*

The lorry drove to Galway, to the docks there, arriving just before first light. Junk pulled back deeper into the recesses of his little nook as a small, doughy man wearing a high-vis tabard and carrying an official-looking clipboard in an officious sort of way approached the driver. The man sported a comb-over that twirled and danced in the early-morning breeze and would not stay in place no matter how many times he patted it down.

The wind carried the voices of the two men away from Junk so he couldn't really hear what was being said apart from the occasional word. One thing he did hear was that the lorry was bound for somewhere called ‘Kroona'. He didn't know where that was, but it sounded as good a place as any.

Kroona turned out to be A Coruña in northern Spain. Junk managed to stow away successfully. Many illegal immigrants try to sneak into Ireland. Very few people try to smuggle themselves out.

Even though he had left Murroughtoohy without any sort of plan other than to get far, far away, on the journey across the Channel an idea started to form in his mind. He would find him. He would find the giant who took his sister and he would bring him home to Murroughtoohy, dead or alive, and he would lay him down in front of his mother and say:

‘This is who killed Ambeline. You see – I was telling the truth.'

When he reached Spain and got off the boat, he realized he didn't have the first idea how to find the man, but how many hairless silver tattooed giants with massive scars across their faces could there be in the world? He found an Internet cafe and stared at a search page for several minutes, trying to work out how to start. He typed in ‘scars' and got some interesting results. Interesting as
in sick and demented. The woman at the next terminal glanced at his screen, glanced at him and then quickly moved away. After searching for scars, giants and hairlessness, he spent the best part of two hours looking for references to the tattoo. He found nothing helpful and in the end decided that he wouldn't find the answers via a keyboard, in a book or by staying in one place. He figured the answers were out there somewhere in the world and he would have to go to them.

He decided that the tattoo of the shark fin and five stars suggested some connection to the sea, so that was where he would concentrate his search. He went to the harbour and hung around, trying to make friends with the local fishermen. This wasn't easy, seeing as he spoke absolutely no Spanish. But gradually he picked up a few words here and there and there were enough Spaniards about who spoke English.

His eighty-seven euros and change lasted long enough for him to start picking up some casual work. Usually cleaning out the boats after their return from sea. It was dirty, stinking work that paid little, but Junk was a hard worker and that was a virtue that was appreciated here.

To begin with his lack of age raised a few eyebrows and the odd direct question, but Junk sidestepped the realm of direct answers as much as he could. When he came across someone who was too interested in why he was there and seemingly parentless, he would just move somewhere else.

He moved from one port to another and worked
every sort of boat going. Over the next three years he travelled the globe, working on fishing boats, trawlers, dredgers, ferries, cruise ships and tugs. In that time Junk grew taller, broader and stronger, looking more like his father every day. By the time he was fifteen, Junk could pass for eighteen without raising a single questioning eyebrow. His skin had become darker from working in the elements. Day after day of intense sunlight burning down on him and the continual spray of seawater had roughened his skin, aging him. His verdant green eyes stood out even more because of his tanned face. He was an intense and serious-looking young man though still crowned by an explosion of wild black hair, which was forever flopping over his eyes.

He had been all around the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, and spent most of a year in South America. Now he spoke eight languages, not one of them fluently, not even English any more. Sometimes he would go for months without talking to another English speaker, but he would get by in pidgin French or strangled Russian or a smattering of Arabic. Somehow the multinational seafarers could always find some common ground when it came to language.

*

For a long time, he found no trace of the scarred giant. No one he met had heard of such a man or recognized the tattoo that Junk would reproduce quickly and expertly on a napkin or the back of a menu or beer mat when the moment called for it. Then one night in Valparaíso, Chile,
in a rundown waterfront bar, he met a grizzled sea dog by the name of Salvador de Valdivia, who took a shine to Junk when he discovered he was Irish and swore blind that he himself was descended from Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme, Irish–Chilean hero of the nineteenth-century Chilean War of Independence. Salvador was an old drunk with his best seafaring years far behind him, but he and Junk got talking nonetheless. Salvador's English wasn't bad, but his attempts at mimicking Junk's admittedly fading Irish accent made him sound Jamaican. He didn't recognize the description of the giant and pointed out that it was unlikely he would ever forget such an individual, but when Junk drew the tattoo for him the old man gasped, muttered to himself in Spanish and started nodding excitedly. This he had seen.

‘Where?' asked Junk, his heart pounding violently in his chest. Frustratingly the old man couldn't remember immediately. He squeezed his rheumy eyes shut and tapped his rough sandpapery fingertips against his leathery, corrugated forehead as if he could jar the memory loose, and maybe he could because after a moment he sat up, arms raised triumphantly.

‘
La Liga de los Tiburones
!' he shouted.

It took Junk a moment to translate: ‘The League of the Sharks?' he said.

‘
Sí
, the League of Sharks,' said Salvador. ‘This is their symbol.'

Junk couldn't believe it. After all this time, at last, a
lead. Something. He looked at the old man. ‘What is it? What is the League of Sharks?'

Salvador shrugged. ‘I don't know.'

‘What d'you mean you don't know?' asked Junk petulantly.

‘La Liga de los Tiburones is older than me. Is ancient. My grandfather told me about it when I was a child. His grandfather told him.'

‘So it's Chilean?'

‘No.' The old man shook his head.

Junk sighed with frustration and forced a level tone into his voice. ‘So where does it come from?'

‘I don't know. Nobody knows.'

‘Somebody must know.'

‘No,' said Salvador. ‘It's a legend as old as the sea. A myth lost in time.'

Junk sighed. He didn't understand.

The old man went on. ‘The stories my grandfather would tell me were about sharks who walked like men … who stepped out from the sea and walked on land.' The old man stuck out his lower lip apologetic-ally and shrugged. ‘But they are just stories. Nothing more.'

‘Where would I go to find out more about La Liga de los Tiburones?'

The old man shook his head. He didn't have an answer.

*

As Junk walked away from the waterfront bar that night he was filled with a bleak sense of failure. After
all this time he finally had a lead, but one that led nowhere.

No!

Junk rejected his negativity. He had a lead. Slight as it was, it was more than he had when he woke up that morning. More than he'd had for a thousand mornings. He had something. He had La Liga de los Tiburones.

*

In each country he visited from then on he would find a bar or a cafe or any place where people congregated and he would find an old-timer like Salvador, who loved to talk for the price of a bottle of aquavit in Göteborg, cheap wine in Marseilles or Metaxa in Kerkyra. He would let them do the drinking and the talking. He would refill their glass and listen. He would ask about La Liga de los Tiburones and legends of the sea. Especially ones that involved strange creatures. Most times he would get nothing, but every now and again he would hear a story about fish who could walk on land like men, talk like men. He would hear stories about whale-men who were thirty metres tall or women with tentacles instead of legs. The majority of these stories were embellished half-truths, their genesis lost to time and imagination.

But eventually Junk realized there were elements that kept being repeated, whether the story was told in Valparaíso or Saint Petersburg or Bangkok.

He met an old British merchant navy man called Ian in Tampico on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Ian had heard of La Liga de los Tiburones. He said it had many names:
De Bond van de Haaien in Dutch; sha yu tuan dui in Mandarin; O Adelfóthta tou Karcarión in Greek; Shaark Ki Sangha in Hindi, but all of them meant the same thing: the League of Sharks.

Junk sighed. He had heard these before. ‘I know what I'm looking for now,' he said. ‘But I'm no closer to finding it. Every country seems to have some connection to the League of Sharks. They don't seem to come from anywhere in particular.'

‘Which is odd, if you stop to think about it,' observed Ian. ‘Lots of countries or religions share myths. Jesus and Mohammed are basically the same person, but they all adapt the stories to suit their own proclivities.' It wasn't quite the right word but Junk chose not to correct him and Ian carried on. ‘But the stories about the shark league are all the same, whether you hear them from a Turk or a Chinaman.'

Junk thought about this for a moment and it was true, though he wasn't sure if that meant anything.

‘There's one place you could try, if you haven't already,' said Ian.

Junk listened eagerly.

‘Ionian Sea … south of Corfu. I've never stopped to count them up, but if you poked me with a stick and made me, I'd guess I've heard more stories connected to that part of the world than anywhere else.'