Free Not the Same Sky by Evelyn Conlon Page A

avoid shouting matches that could frighten girls. He went up on deck and watched Bridget Joyce whispering to her bird.
    By now there were many strange birds so she had several choices. There were small ones and big ones, white, grey, black, and ones full of plumage, ducking and diving, flying beside the boat or flying at it, swooping their bodies in time with the flap of the sails. Bridget did not mind that some people knew she talked to them. But today she was also interested in a great whale that was following them earnestly but without curiosity. Charles told her as much as he knew about them, and she occasionally looked at him in her way and then back to the whale.
    ‘Are you liking classes?’ Charles asked.
    ‘Yes. We have books at home.’
    ‘And where is home?’ Charles used the same tense as Bridget.
    ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said, and went back to looking at the whale.
    He wasn’t sure if he had made an unforgivable intrusion into her world.
    ‘I like the map,’ she said. ‘Birds fly whatever way they want through the map. They don’t care. But they always know where they are going. See the way they take off. It’s like the way a hat takes off from your head in the wind. But the hat falls. They don’t. They’re made to fly, they trap the wind and use it. It’s like swimming. It’s like us on this boat. We’re flying through the water, they’re flying through the air. I like it best when they’re above my head, like this,’ and she put her head back to look at the birds above her.
    Charles did not know if he was expected to answer this.
    ‘Did you look at birds at home too?’ he asked.
    ‘Not as much. There was more to do.’
    ‘Would you like a glass of lime? I could get you one.’
    ‘Yes, please.’
    Charles was suddenly afraid and was glad to have something practical to do. He brought Bridget down after she had finished her lime and put her beside Honora.
    That evening he filled his log, all quiet below after a placid dusk. But early the next morning an unheralded storm blew up suddenly. It followed after what had been an unsatisfactory windless two days. It tossed their ship and the equilibrium that had worked itself into their, by now, acceptable days of cleaning, eating, learning and dancing. The dancing had worked out well, except of course during storms. Complaints and necessary punishment too were now down to a minimum. Cantankerousness among the few was becoming bearable. The off days of individual girls were diminishing into the whole. But this storm caught them unawares, and for that very reason, brought a sharp edge of hopelessness with it.
    Bridget Joyce was not surprised by it, she had been expecting it. The birds had told her the previous evening, in particular the tern that fluffed the feathers on its chest when expecting a change. So while others cried at the ferocity of it and tried to keep themselves strapped into their berths—pointless with all the getting in and out to be sick, if they could even move—Bridget lay on her bed, her body straightened and thought about the birds. When it eased somewhat, she would go back up to find out what they were saying now. They were lucky it was daytime. It never seemed so bad when there was light outside. Even if they could not see it in their quarters below brightness, they knew it was there. The boat rolled and slid and groaned sometimes when hit by a particularly large wave. Doors banged, cups and the small belongings of girls could be heard thudding to the ground. The breaking glass tinkled. Below, even more below than the girls, one trunk had freed itself and hit the others sporadically as it slid from side to side. The girls tended to each other as best they could. Those with sturdy stomachs helped those who had succumbed to dry retching. And just when it looked as if it could not get worse, the storm turned itself up and became even more frightening.
    ‘Are we going to die?’
    ‘No,’ Charles said. ‘This is now