This is a story set in Malta and Europe in the near future. In the form of a letter from a mother to her daughter Maddy, it shows a family trying to navigate the crisis in the region caused by a rapidly warming climate.

See previous chapters in the story and read a note by the story's author.

The first few days of the trip were almost like a holiday. 

I had sailed up the east coast of Sicily with friends the previous year and the idea was to retrace that journey, then follow the west coast of Italy northwards towards Rome where we would meet Dad’s mate, Anselmo. 

We had a few weeks’ worth of canned and dry food, bottled water and even a small water distillation unit – Mum and Dad had been quietly stocking up ever since the first troubles. We planned to supplement those stocks as much as we could by fishing along the way. 

We were worried that we might get caught in a Mediterranean hurricane, or ‘medicane’ as they’d come to be called (they had become almost yearly features in the autumn, caused by persistently high sea temperatures after the long hot summers). Luckily, apart from a minor squall, we were lucky enough to enjoy mild weather throughout the journey.

Tom and I steered in shifts; sometimes Mum took one too if the weather was good. After we showed her how, she was also in charge of fishing, and we were usually pulling a line with a few hooks behind us. We tried using lures, flies and small fish as bait, and we didn’t do too badly, I guess, though not quite enough to make us self-sufficient. We caught a small fish or two a day, and on the third day, somewhere off the coast north of Catania, something that looked like a small tuna, about 8kg. 

That was a good day. 

We cooked what we could of it that evening – not easy on a tiny galley stove. Mum tried to preserve the rest in salt; we forced ourselves to eat it a few days later, but something had obviously gone a little wrong… it was close to inedible. 

Before we made our run for it we were all on plant-based diets, like most people with a conscience at the end of the ’20s; but we all understood that we’d eat whatever we needed to during our trip given the emergency. Can’t say I enjoyed the return to fish too much, especially after it became our main source of food for a couple of weeks.

We had seen jellyfish blooms before, but this was on another level. Photo: Shutterstock.com

I’ll never forget that we travelled through a sea of jellyfish around that time. 

For a good hour, the entire sea was a horrible pink as far as you could see in every direction – poisonous ‘mauve stinger’ jellyfish crammed against each other so tight that the very sea spray stung with their venom. 

As kids in Malta we’d seen blooms before… they had become more common as we fished down the food chain and heated up the sea; but this was on another level, and unusual at this time of the year. 

We had to shut the engines off: I was afraid the intake would get blocked. We also pulled the fishing lines up as the hooks were starting to snag jellyfish instead, and it was hopeless to expect to find live fish in that horrible mess anyway. 

If that was an unpleasant experience, it had nothing on the one we went through the following day. 

They were both face down in the water...

I was at the tiller and Tom called out to me that there was something floating off the starboard side ahead. I saw a partially submerged mass and steered towards it, thinking it might be anything from a turtle to something hopefully useful that might have fallen off a container ship. Tom and Mum were at the side of the boat looking out expectantly at it, and I saw the anticipation drain from their faces before I could make out what they were looking at. 

They were both face down in the water – a man in an ancient Liverpool football kit with ‘Salah 11’ written on the back, and a child in a tracksuit, still clinging to a faded orange life jacket. 

We stared at them in silence as we drifted slowly past them. There were a few small fish sheltering in the tiny patch of shade that they made. 

Then Tom, looking at that moment a lot smaller and younger than his 17 years, said “aren’t we going to…?”

Mum put her arm around him and held him a little closer.

Part seven of We are not angry enough will appear on Friday, January 28. See previous chapters in the story and read a note by the story's author.