About the Author

Majid Salim was born in 1976, and is a media freelancer. His

work has previously been published by Springer-Verlag, and he
has been published in the Guardian newspaper. The Tides of
Reality is his first novel. He lives in Birmingham with his wife
and children.

This book is dedicated to my wife and children.

Copyright Majid Salim

The right of Majid Salim to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British
Library.

ISBN 978 178455 071 4

www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2015)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LB

Printed and bound in Great Britain

6

Acknowledgments
Robert Temple & Shauna Haslewood of Blue Phoenix.

One
The sea and the sky were dead grey. You would be forgiven
for thinking that it was night, but it was not night. It was
morning. Great scholars have remarked in times gone by that
this unrelenting darkness can instil madness in the hearts of
men. Could that be true?
It was far from land, and the sea did not know the crisp
taste of shores, only its own depth. Waves serrated against
each other in triangles, knowing no rocks to crash into, no
shores to snap them into life, knowing no beaches to smother
and calm them, knowing no cliffs to smash into, to shake
their sanities. They knew only the abject stupor of murmuring
into and out of each others wavelengths, which is not
knowing anything at all.
This far out in the open sea was like a reverse desert,
where you would wish often for drought. There was no
knowledge in this sea, just dead water under an ashen sky
laden with dark grey, pregnant clouds, which hung heavy in
the air, but never rained. The air out here smelled heavy and
stale, like a world once beautiful gone sour. On the horizon
curtains of fog were coming in from the East, carried by a
bitter westward wind.
Presently a ship, smothered in fog, can be seen on the
horizon. It was not sailing with purpose, but was adrift, being
moved across the face of the waters as if it had surrendered to
the abject pointlessness of attempting ever to navigate such a
mire.
Now we know a ship exists. But what else do we know
about it?

It is not a philosophical abstraction, which exists in the

pure content of a philosophers thought. It is a ship of
tangibility, a wooden one bound with nails and decorated
with the marks of lengthy servitude on uneasy tides. Nobody
would know how to identify this ship. To some, it would be a
large pirate brigantine, with the foremast square rigged,
sailing from the warmer seas of Malta to attack French
merchant vessels in the cold, wintry North Sea, each and
every inhabitant rotten to the core and armed to the teeth. To
others, it would be a Scottish schooner, rounding Cape Wrath
and passing through Hebrides and Bailey on its way to
Southwest Iceland. To a third party it might be a British Navy
frigate, with its lethal gun decks exposed for war but
unmanned, whilst all its honourable sailors slept off
drunkenness. But nobody knows for certain what this ship
looks like, other than it was intimidatingly vast, wooden and
supporting four huge sails. It was festooned with knotted
ropes and coloured merchant signalling flags dangled from its
deck in great numbers, like words strung together in some
alien semiotic sentence that no human or sailor could
understand. We may well struggle to see the name of the
ship, painted on its side, in huge faded lettering, a product of
a ship that had weathered too many murderous storms and too
few victimless battles. Many eyes will battle each other and
their own minds to resolve the blurs into consensually agreed
letters of the alphabet, so we would all know and agree its
name. We may never know what this ship was called, and if
the sailors on board knew, they never mentioned it to each
other in any formal or informal conversation.
But let us not dwell on the ships name; it can remain
The Ship. Let us instead delve into its inhabitants.
The sailors were in some way, completely damned. They
had all been awake for hours, but not one of them had risen
from their hammocks, and the ship was untended. There was
an odour of humanity amongst the restless bodies, as there
always would be on any male dominated vessel. But there
was another psychic odour, like a steam or smoke, that had

10

clouded their senses and through which they could only see
each other as hazy, depressed, frightened forms, with dead
eyes and a shared knowledge that they were together fighting
some kind of internal war with whatever forces in their own
minds wanted to suppress them. It was as if they were
originally luminous beings, but had now become trapped in
the prison of their own corporeal bodies, with all their
attendant armpit stenches, bad breath, uncleaned teeth, itchy
scalps, and various manifold disgusting odours that would
make any person anywhere else instantly retch. They could
not make eye contact with each other even if they wanted to,
for the shared knowledge of their plight would lead simply to
aggression, confrontation, argument and violence. So they lay
there, still and cold from the many drafts through a ship of
this size and age, each experiencing a private misery that they
knew each of the others was enduring, but which none of
them could talk about without a risk of gnawing at each
others brains with harsh language.
Another hour passed, and eventually one man started
crying. They said nothing, but looked on with expressions
between empathy and personal despair. Everybody felt
trapped, and nobody felt they could help anyone else.
When he recovered his composure, the sailor summoned
the courage to speak. He addressed no individual in
particular, but the collective consciousness of the men in the
hope that they could fathom an answer.
What are we doing? he asked.
Nobody replied. A minute passed, then he spoke again,
this time with a faint panic in his voice.
We need to know what we are doing. We cant stay in
our hammocks forever. What do we know?
A minute passed, whilst the men digested this.
We know that we are damned, said another sailor.
Yes we are, the original replied, but that doesnt help.
We need to know who we are. Who are we?
Were sailors.
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