An extract from Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson

Small Boat is shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. Read an extract from the opening chapter here

Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.

The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?

Small Boat is published in the UK by Small Axes.

Written by Vincent Delecroix

Published February 25, 2025

I didn’t ask you to leave, I said.

It was your idea, and if you didn’t want to get your feet wet, love, you shouldn’t have embarked. I didn’t push you into the water, I didn’t fetch you from your village or field or ruin of a suburb and put you in your wretched leaky boat, and now the water’s up to your ankles, I get it that you’re frightened, and you want me to save you and you’re impatient. You’re counting on me. But I didn’t ask you for any of that. So you’ll just have to grin and bear it and let me get on with my job.

And apparently these thoughts were so strong that I actually spoke them out loud, the first bit, at least, certainly if the recordings are to be believed and there’s no reason not to believe them. I accept that.

While I was at it I should perhaps have added things like ‘I’m not God Almighty either’, which must have been what was in my mind, and I could have actually said it. I could have said ‘There are guys like you everywhere tonight, forty small boats supposedly sinking at the same time in the Channel and I can’t see to everyone at once. So you’ll have to be patient, love, or tell all the others that are sinking to calm down and get off their phones so I can just look after you; you go ahead and call all the others, since you’ve got a phone, all those people climbing into battered old boats with no compass or flares, thirty at once on a raft that can scarcely take the weight of five, no instruments, nothing to steer by, no knowledge of the sea, along with their women and children.

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These guys are unbelievable, one minute they jump in the water, the next they’re practically shouting at you for not throwing them the lifebuoy fast enough

But in the end I said to Julien, who was next to me: These guys are unbelievable, one minute they jump in the water, the next they’re practically shouting at you for not throwing them the lifebuoy fast enough, cheeky, I call it. He smiled and plunged back into his book. Leaky, more like, he remarked. That’s the sort of joke that raised a laugh at 3 am.

That joke didn’t get recorded; it probably wouldn’t have looked too good, and Julien can rest easy: no one’s going to call him a monster for making a joke about inflatable dinghies springing leaks. Besides, on the phone recordings you can only hear my voice, unluckily for me.

After that I went back to my screens, my PC, my microphone, thinking surely they should be happy; they wanted to get to England, they’re there now, in British waters, in a British vessel by now, wrapped up like sweeties in gold paper; they can continue their conversation in English to their hearts’ content.

But in the end the currents brought their bodies back into French waters.

So now they were floating on the investigator’s desk, at the Coast Guard office. There were twenty-seven of them to be exact, including a little girl, scattered among the ballpoint pens, the note blocks, folders, floating round the police inspector’s computer, including also the body of the man who had called me fourteen times that night and who now, obviously, had fallen silent. The sea was calm on the surface of the desk, no wind, no swell, and alongside the bodies only orderly piles of paper.

While she was playing me the recordings, the policewoman sometimes stared hard at me, sometimes gazed out of the window at I know not what, because from my signal station all I ever saw was the sea, and given a choice I would much rather, like today, look out at a stretch of road with a building site, some workers, Africans mostly, but at least they were alive, not wet and chilled to the bone, not women, not children, so I was ok looking at all that, while they played me the recording of the voice saying Please, please and me saying Calm down, help is coming.

The policewoman wore her hair tied back severely in a pony tail, exactly like me, I thought, and sat up straight like me, a bit like a soldier, with coat-rack shoulders as Eric used to say, the same look, if that makes sense, but ten years older, her in her blue police pullover and me in my own clothes, obviously, a ridiculous sweatshirt, and trainers, as though I’d just come back from my morning run, looking like a kid even with my severe pony tail, like some sulky, stony-faced school kid summoned before the head teacher. And I expect it was this absurd and vaguely humiliating resemblance, this caricature, this depressing, unsparing image of what I must actually look like, staring me in the face, that made it so hard for me to like her, so easy to dislike, in fact, though in any case there was no question, in this situation, of liking her.

Vincent Delecroix
*© Francesca Mantovani*

As she showed me into her office she had said, Thank you for coming of your own accord, your boss has so far refused to give us your contact details. She added, Your colleague, apparently, the one on duty with you that night, has not shown a similar – the same – but she hesitated over what should come next, Conscientiousness perhaps, or maybe Courage, or even Moral Scruple, or Sense of Duty, but she couldn’t find quite the right words, so she corrected herself saying, ‘Has not chosen to do so, as yet.’

And, fortunately, she did not ask me why I had chosen to take this step, as she finally put it, and why I had turned up like this of my own free will, before the judge and quite possibly the police came to my house anyway to take me away in front of my little girl and put me in the dock on a charge of failure to assist a person in danger or some such; anyway, fortunately, she did not ask me why, after dropping Léa off with my parents that morning, I had got in my car and driven to the coastguard station at Cherbourg, a four-hour drive from Boulogne, a motorway stop for an insipid coffee, on the surface of which I saw little dinghies bobbing about but actually they were biscuit crumbs, and all around me people silently pointing at me behind my back, a call to my parents to check everything was ok with my daughter, if she was upset about not going to school, another to the police to say I’m coming, I’m on the road, surprised when they don’t answer in English at the other end, no voice saying Please, please, no one screaming in the background, just We will wait for you, as reasonable shipwrecked people should have said, sitting it out quietly, since there wasn’t much else they could do anyway except pray and keep their eyes peeled for a boat. We will wait for you, they would have said calmly, instead of continuing their endless, pointless pleading, refusing to understand the difference between being in French waters and being in British waters – instead of calling fourteen times in two hours to say they were sinking, instead of annoying me by saying it over and over again, as if it was me that didn’t understand, when I did. I understood perfectly, your feet are in the water but it’s English water, not French, and yes I know they’re both equally cold, so set your sights in that direction if you still know your north from your south.

Lucky then that she didn’t ask me why I’d finally decided to come, because I wouldn’t have known what to say, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have used words like Moral Scruple or Sense of Duty, definitely not Courage, words like Exhaustion and Nausea more likely, and definitely Anger like Shame.

Small Boat

By: Vincent Delecroix
Translated by: Helen Stevenson
Published by: Small Axes

November 2021: an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsizes in the Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board. How and why did it happen?