Sky Run by Alex Shearer Page A

there. I made myself a sleep mask out of an old piece of cloth. Martin made himself one too. Peggy said boys should be able to sew as well and she showed us both how. She said the days when girls got stuck with the sewing were long gone and she wasn’t letting them come back without a struggle.
    So we left old, sad, mad, not-so-bad Angus behind us, and Peggy checked the charts and said we were sailing right, and had our bearings accurate, and so on we went.
    It was a lazy sort of progress, as Peggy’s old boat was never built for speed; it’s too chubby round the middle and it sits in the air like a fat old sky-whale, solid and slow and unsinkable-looking. If it had a steam engine it would chug along, but it doesn’t, so it kind of chugs but without the chugging, if you get what I mean.
    There wasn’t a whole lot by way of scenery at the beginning of our journey. We weren’t in an interesting part of the system and were still days and days from the Main Drift. It was all little islands and floating rocks and bits of junk and debris passing by on the solar wind. And there were sky-fish and jellies and all the usual, and here and there some sky-crabs clinging on, with more legs than a creature could ever reasonably have a use for, to the undersides of the islands.
    â€˜Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m getting hungry,’ Peggy announced in her usual way. ‘Whose turn is it?’
    Well, it was Martin’s. And he was perfectly happy to get on with it.
    â€˜I’ll throw a line over the side,’ he said. ‘See what I get.’
    Because that was about all there was to eat: sky-fish. I mean, I’ve heard Peggy say about people who lived on nothing but vegetables and would never eat a fish not even to save their lives. But there’s not a great deal of choice here. It’s fish or hungry. Sure, we had a few veg and things on board that came from Peggy’s greenhouse, and there were some pots along the deck with a few herbs and basics growing in them, but it would never have kept you going. So it was fish, fish, and sometimes, for a change, fish, when you were travelling. You couldn’t change the meal, just the way it was cooked.
    So Martin threw a couple of lines over and I did the same while Peggy lay down in her hammock on the deck, slung between the mast and a rigging line, as she said (as ever) that she was old bones and had to take it easy in the afternoons so as to ward off the arthritis and cramps.
    It didn’t take us long to wind in a couple of sky-fish and soon we had ingredients aplenty. (Which is a word a little like
apace
.)
    â€˜That should do it, Martin,’ I said. But no. He wouldn’t listen.
    â€˜Couple more,’ he said. ‘Don’t have enough yet.’
    Well, the fact is, when it comes to the cooking, that Martin has one problem – he always makes too much. He can cook all right. For his age he’s a pretty fine chef. But his eyes are bigger than his stomach, and my stomach, and Peggy’s stomach. So there’s always leftovers and it’s always getting wasted and ends up going off or getting thrown away.
    Now, back on Peggy’s island, that didn’t matter. All the waste went into the composter and she’d use it for growing her fruit and veg. But out here in the middle of the sky, there was nowhere for it to go except over the side. Which shouldn’t have been a problem – you might think. But you’d think wrong, just like we did. And wrong thinking brings consequences, every time.

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sky-shark
    GEMMA CONTINUES:
    I left him to it. That’s the rule. When you’re stuck with the cooking you get on with it and no interference. There’s not really the space in the galley for two cooks anyway, and besides, according to Peggy, they spoil the broth. Although, on the other side of the coin, two heads are better than one and many hands make light work. Peggy says it