Dead Water (30 page)

Imagine this: a husband driven mad by jealousy. A casualty of passion. A husband who loved too much. Rishi takes the Browning from the top of the dresser. He checks the safety. ‘Vinod.’

Vinod turns.

Rishi shoots him in the face, and the hammer snips a neat wedge from the webbing that stretches between his thumb and forefinger. Sucking at his bloody hand, Rishi bends down and retrieves the gun.

Vinod is squatting on the bed, weaving from side to side, in thrall to a private music. His left eye is sunken and bleeding. Rishi hefts the gun in his left hand and shoots his old friend a second time, through the nose. Vinod nods at Rishi as though he understands, as though he approves. He opens his mouth. No sound comes. He lies down on the bed, over his wife.

Rishi secures the safety catch and puts the gun back on the sideboard. It is done. Safia has died in the arms of her husband. Once people are safely dead, the toothless old men of Chhaphandi are a sentimental lot. Rishi can rely on them to make something Shakespearean from this mess.

He goes downstairs, out of the door, and round the cars parked under the lean-to. He climbs up on the flatbed of the pickup and releases the drum. He hauls down a few lengths of chain. He drags it under Yash’s arms a couple of times and secures the hook as tight as he can to the chain. He operates the winch and Yash’s body thumps and scrapes its way on to the flatbed of the truck.

He climbs up into the cab. The keys are in the ignition. He puts the pickup into gear. He rocks the heavy vehicle up the track and turns on to the highway, under the peeling sign for Apollo tyres.

The brickworks are only ten minutes’ drive away. Rishi turns off at the patch of hard-standing and rocks the truck gently down the embankment and on to the lane, lined with margosa trees, that leads to the kilns. He turns off the headlights. He eases through the abandoned workers’ camp, fingers numb around the steering wheel. He parks up and tries to catch his breath. The air enters him in fits and jags. If it is air. Most of it is water. A muscle in his head beats and beats against the backs of his eyes. He learns to breathe through the contractions. He is only weeping, after all. A man who weeps is not broken. This is what he tells himself.

The key to the shipping container is hidden in its old place. Rishi unlocks and removes the padlock and tugs at the doors.

Yash hangs from his chain like the winning fish at a weigh-in. Rishi pulls a lever, the pickup’s engine changes tone, and the crane extends its stubby pneumatic arm. Yash glides gently over and on to the earth directly over the lip of the container door. Rishi unfastens the hook and uses the motor to haul the chain out from under the corpse. He straddles the body and heaves, gathering the body into the dark.

He empties drums of kerosene over the floor. The container is watertight and leans slightly, so that the liquid pools in one corner, by the door. Rishi stumbles around in the dark, grabbing and feeling for cans and canisters, unscrewing and tipping, until the atmosphere inside the container – all solvent and alcohol – threatens to overcome him. He stumbles out over the lip of the door, swings it shut, and uses the padlock to secure it again.

Kerosene has a high ignition point. You can’t set light to kerosene with a naked flame. But you can set light to petrol. From the pickup’s toolbox he pulls out a length of hose. He uses the hose to siphon petrol out of the fuel tank and lets it puddle under the pallets stacked against the container.

Rishi has no matches and there are no matches in the glove compartment. He remembers the cigarette lighter in the truck’s dashboard. He turns the engine over, pushes the coil in to heat it, and when it is red hot he touches it to the wet earth. The petrol ignites with a sound like a crashing wave. Flames leap up around the pallets.

Rishi turns away and runs. He does not see the explosion. He does not see the container swell suddenly; how it loses its hard edges, and how, for just an instant, it turns soft and belly-like. He feels the concussion. He feels the rush of air against his skin as the container doors come open. There is a sigh on the in-rushing air as, behind him, the shipping container inhales.

He knows without looking that the innards of the container are aglow, white-hot, the contents charred beyond recognition. Not that anyone will sift through it all, because what would be the point? A few old buckets. Tools. Fuel oil. Kerosene. The leavings of a dead concern.

Yash, left where he was, naked and defenestrated, would have inspired nothing but contempt. Imagine it now, though. Picture it: Yash Yadav, who killed his lover and her husband, then fled into the night! This is a figure to conjure with...

Rishi walks east along the highway. There are no cars at this time of night, and no Tempos. Only the trucks ply back and forth across this vast country and this vaster night. When their lights approach he steps off the road. Sometimes the road has good ditches and he lies down in them to hide. Sometimes there are no ditches and he stumbles into a wilderness of tall grass, cow shit and shredded tyres. He conceals himself as best he can, shifting as the headlights approach and pick out for him the galloping inadequacies of his hiding place.

Rishi, the clodhopper, coming late to everything, serviceable and slow – Rishi has no part in this tale. He must not feature. He must not be pictured. He must not be imagined. He must be erased.

He comes to the peeling sign for Apollo tyres.

He thinks it is going to be hard, the thing he has to do; but the muscle in his head contracts, contracts, contracts, and deep knowledge overcomes him. He was born for this. All his life he has been building to this. He washes away the little bit of Yash’s blood that he finds drying on the step by the front door. He climbs the stairs and enters the bedroom and smudges and polishes, shifts and drapes and angles bodies and objects the way he must if this is going to work. He works steadily and without emotion. He knows what he is doing. He has practised this many times. He has sat, hour after hour, surrounded by old engraving tools, scissors and scrapers, sanders and fillers, practising for this moment. Years he has spent, cutting and printing, rubbing and scraping. No way he could have known, until this moment, that it was all for this. That all his paper games were preparing him for these rooms, these limbs, these stains.

He leaves the house and, with the key from the sideboard, he unlocks Yash’s Opel Corsa. He climbs in behind the wheel, leans over, and stows the Browning Hi-Power in the glove compartment.

He turns the key in the ignition.

He feathers the accelerator and puts the car into gear.

The Sher Shah Suri Marg stretches before him. Agra. Delhi. Mumbai. Rishi settles himself against the Opel’s comfortable upholstery. The car feels sporty under his hands.

A mile down the road he comes to a bridge over the river. It is the river they played in as children, but the bridge is new. He leans over and opens the glove compartment. He pulls out the Browning and hurls it off the bridge.

It hits the water.

It hits the water.

It hits the water.

He weeps, remembering picnics on a green riverbank. He thinks about friendship. He thinks about family. He weeps away these timeless values. These constants of a man’s life dissolve in his tears and when they are gone, they leave him whole. They leave him healed. This is what he tells himself. He restarts the engine. He moves up gear after gear after gear.

A mile on, with the road empty before and behind him, he experiments with the radio. A little later, when the road surface improves, he sees what the Opel’s fifth gear can do. A mile further on, he gets the air conditioning to work. It begins to rain, a poison shower, and the windscreen wipers come on automatically to sweep the rain away. The pounding in his head has eased. His labour is done. He thinks about his sister, about friendship and green water, and games that did not end but only soured. Tearless now, emptied out, he knows that he must live with tonight’s issue, and that this will be possible.

So he heads west, owing nothing. He was born Rishi Ansari, but that is all anyone knows, or remembers, and soon enough they will forget even that. He has never been very important. He reaches around his neck and pulls out the talisman he has worn since childhood. A silver dollar. Round the edge: AADI + RAM. His brothers. He must enter this new world the same way he entered the last one: with nothing at all. He understands this. He opens the window and throws the dollar on its leather thong into the rushing downpour.

There. At last. He wipes his eyes. He wipes his face. He is a perfect blank.

David Brooks considers himself an explorer; and after so many adventures above the snowline or carrying his own water, it’s a shock to him to learn that life under sail is anything other than a privileged species of caravanning. A couple of weeks’ back and forth to Melville Island across the normally calm Arafura Sea uncovers how little he knows.

He says to her, as they struggle to reef sails in a hail of spray, ‘This place is really shallow. Fifty metres tops.’

‘Other line.’

‘Because, look,’ he laughs. ‘These waves make no fucking sense.’

‘Other line!’

The wind generator falls to the foredeck. It lands at her feet.

‘Fuck’s sake, Dad.’

David’s daughter Ester grew up by the sea. She has photographs of herself as a toddler, netting for eels in the culverts behind the house in Carrum Downs, south of Melbourne. There was no EastLink then and she remembers pasture stretching all the way to the horizon either side of the Mornington Peninsula Freeway. She remembers crushing herbs underfoot and the smell of them rising. She remembers ducks, swans, rails, pelicans, rare migrants from northern Asia. She remembers wading through tall grass and losing sight of the road the way you lose sight of land in a small boat. She remembers levels, sluices, rats. She remembers low embankments and, behind them, the weight of the ocean. Where Ester spent her childhood the sea is higher than the land.

Stuck at home with her mother – a kind, humourless woman, given, since the separation, to prolonged, cheerless affairs with predatory junior academics – Ester has grown up hammering at the world as though it were a TV screen. It is her father’s fault. Just often enough to inflame her frustration, David Brooks reappears and flies Ester out for weekends to the less travelled parts of the earth. Surabaya. Yangon. Kuching. For the sake of the child, as he would have it: the roundedness of her education.

David Brooks returned to Oman after the 1970 coup brought Sultan Said’s son, Qaboos, to power. A former British Desert Intelligence Officer, he soon fell in with Anthony Ashworth and the rest of the new sultan’s nascent intelligence community. Bankrolled by the British, Qaboos’s regime was replying to the long-standing communist rebellion in the south of the country by building roads and hospitals and schools. Teams of Royal Engineers dug wells for Dhofari villagers. Japanese transistor radios were handed out in Salalah’s markets. Former rebels were granted amnesty if they joined irregular units organized and trained by the SAS. Quitting the army, David continued to work as a civilian consultant. He met Ann, Ester’s mother, while working for the public affairs office of Moyse Line.

In the summer of 1999 Ester passes her Higher School Certificate and David, by way of congratulation, sends her an air ticket to Darwin. He says he has a surprise for her.

They arrange for David to meet her at the airport, but of course he doesn’t show. Instead, there’s this Pakistani cab driver holding up a sign, but Ester walks straight past him without seeing. They run into each other once everyone else has departed. The cabbie says: ‘This is going to cost extra.’ Ester doesn’t have any money and just gets in the cab. The cabbie drives her to the Novotel on the Esplanade, opposite Bicentennial Park. David’s in the bar in a shirt and tie drinking Budweiser from a bottle and reading Ken Follett’s
The Pillars of the Earth
. David won’t take any shit from the cabbie. Ester leaves them arguing and goes up to the desk to check in. A minute later David comes up beside her, flashing an American Airlines credit card. ‘Any incidentals, charge this.’ He drops the card on the desk and the clerk, busy at his terminal, glances at the unfamiliar plastic, fudges his typing, has to start over. ‘One moment, sir, I need to make an impression.’

‘You do that.’ David picks up the card and plays with it, tapping each corner in turn against the counter. The cab driver has vanished.

‘Sir?’

‘Yes?’

‘Your card?’

‘Sure.’

The desk clerk gives Ester a plastic key.

‘Mind you take her bags up to her room.’

‘I can manage –’

‘You’re coming with me, kiddo.’ David heads for the revolving door. He isn’t getting any younger. You can tell from his walk which is his bad leg.

Ester glances towards the bar. ‘Don’t forget your book.’

‘Wasn’t mine.’

David isn’t much over forty, heavy across the shoulders, a regular at the Sydney Harbour swim, and since Ester last saw him his hair has turned to steel. It doesn’t age him at all. If anything, it makes him look taller. This is as well: at five foot seven and with one calf-bone shorter than the other, he’s a good six inches shorter than his daughter. He takes her round by Packard Street to where his friend’s yacht is moored: a sloop with a fractional rig, he says, ten metres on the button. ‘You’ll see.’ He sheds his tie in concession to the afternoon heat, rolls it around his fingers, and dumps it in his trouser pocket. Years pounding the wilderness, clinging to the chicken-strap of the company Toyota, have given him a taste for business clothes. They are his holiday gear: a chance to sharpen up.