Dead Water (31 page)

‘Where’s your jacket?’

‘Back at the hotel. I’m staying with you, kiddo.’ In fact, he has a room at the Mantra, next door. ‘Come round and use the pool in the morning and I’ll show you the charts.’

‘Is it okay? Can I use the pool?’

He pulls a face: ‘
Can you use the pool?
’ He takes her arm and points into the marina. ‘There.’ Ester knows by now that David’s surprise is more for him than for her.

You don’t set sail from Darwin to Timor without amassing a boxful of official paper. David’s business acquaintance, Rishi Ansari, who’s lent them his boat, has found a way around the worst of the bureaucratic headaches by entering them in a five-month rally to Langkawi, the idea being they’ll withdraw after the first leg.

Race day comes round. Departure times are staggered to let the more serious contenders get ahead of the flotilla. Ester and David set sail after lunch.

There is very little wind. The ocean surface is either butter-flat or with an oily swell so light it hardly rocks the boat. David spends dawn and dusk on the roof of the cockpit reading
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
, while Ester potters, rearranging their gear, fixing the fiddle rails back on the stove where they flew off during their stormy acclimatization in the Arafura. Woman’s work. Ester suspects that the boat – well equipped but badly arranged – has never before been out of sight of land.

‘I don’t suppose Rishi even knows how to take it out of the harbour,’ David says. ‘It’s a status thing with him. Self-made man and all that.’

‘Expensive.’

‘He’s done well. Import–export. We did some work together in Singapore.’

She says: ‘Dad, you should look at what I’m doing.’ This, after all, is why she is here, isn’t it? To teach him to sail. David, sun-dazzled and dizzy, peers earnestly into cupboards and drawers and chests.

Storms appear on the horizon: white anvils with skirts of dirty cloud. One passes overhead, and they cut through the rain-lashed water at about six knots. Otherwise the cloud towers travel around them with agonizing slowness, in no prevailing direction, as though they were alive: motile. Ester and David sit watching them for hours, trying to gauge how the waves are going to develop – but they never do.

Rounding the north-eastern corner of Timor they find the current running against them; it throws up an uncomfortable chop. By now, though, David’s confidence is up. The weather map shows a system approaching with strong southerlies and David wants to ride the front into Dili before heavy rain traps them in Baucau. Ester raises all the sail they have and the wind, running at about twenty knots, drives them along their route so smoothly, so precisely, they feel as though they are being towed.

Ester sees the easterly before it hits: a darkening of the sea racing towards them like the shock wave of an explosion. Suddenly the wind is coming at them from two directions at once. The whole boat shivers and rears, and the waves, no longer square-on, thunk the hull: a fleshy sound.

Ester yells at David to disconnect the wind vane. She steers by hand, trying to keep the waves square to the stern. David shouts at her to put the helm over. She knows it’s the wrong thing to do. Still, some reflex twitches: she does as she is told. The genoa backwinds against the spreader tip. Contesting forces hold the canvas utterly rigid: a metal sheet hammered into shape. Then the sail rips from head to foot.

They heave to and settle down to wait out the squall. Ester lashes the tiller. They set storm sails. Now that the boat has its prow to the waves, they no longer seem to tower so steeply and the fleshy smack of wave against hull isn’t nearly as sickening as it was. The rain comes sheeting down and David manhandles Ester off the deck. Inside the cockpit, Ester sees that he is laughing. ‘Here.’ He pulls a couple of tins of beer from the cooler and hands her one. She cracks it open and swings her way aft to stare at the rain.

‘Dad.’

He is sitting at the chart table with his back to her, legs hooked around the bench. Head in his hands. Still laughing.

‘Dad.’ Ester looks back out of the window, not believing what she has seen. At first there is only sea. Then, as the swell rolls under them, tipping them forward, the horizon wheels into view. What’s left of it. The thing bearing down on them already takes up half the sky.

Ester throws her tin at him: ‘
Dad
.’

David bumps against her as the bow of their little boat rises, pressing them against the companionway door. The boat trembles and flexes as the wave rolls under them. They tip forward.

It can only be a ship. It looks more like a building.

David pushes past Ester, tripping her over. She topples and cracks her head on the table. He yanks the door open and pulls himself into the cockpit. Rain blows into the cabin. The boat tilts. The rain changes direction. Ester’s head throbs. She’s going to be sick.

David shouts something. How the air is gone.

He clambers inside.

‘What?’

‘Flare gun!’ It’s already in his hand. He’s learned his way around the new storage, after all. The boat tilts. He braces himself against the companionway door and fires. Against spray and grey water the flare is about as impressive as a kid’s sparkler. It hits the side of the wall and explodes.

The waves crash and spit. There is no sky. The wall is perfectly vertical, as though cemented to the ocean floor. Everything goes dark.

A few years later – Christmas Day, 2004 – David laughs and lifts his can of Coke, toasting the memory. ‘And if that’s not enough, some cunt turns a hose on us.’ Below the hotel verandah, Phuket’s feral dogs are fighting among the restaurant’s bins.

Ester remembers the white jet hitting her father full in the chest, knocking him across the afterdeck. He wrapped his arms around a winch housing as the hose played over him, forcing him back against the lifeline. The jet changed direction. It hit the moulding around the companionway door, spraying sea water into the cabin, plugging her mouth...

‘They were using the hose to push us away.’ David drains his Coke. ‘Bastards probably saved our lives.’ He leans back in his chair, arms behind his head. He wants to show off his swimmer’s muscles to Peter, sitting opposite him: a South African yachtsman, a great red tower of a man.

Peter’s skin cooks more than it tans. There is a swollen quality to him, like a roast tomato, ready to burst. He is fit enough: big enough to wield his weight. Ester feels sorry for his family, having to share their cabin with all that bulk. Peter draws heavily on a local cigarette, turns towards where the dogs are hiding, and throws the butt over the balustrade. He pauses, waiting for a reaction from the shadows. Nothing. ‘They were trying to get rid of you.’

‘They were trying to push us away.’

‘They thought you were pirates.’

‘On a ten-metre sloop?’

‘Should they care what you are? They’re a whale. You’re fry.’ David’s not finished his story. ‘Soon after, we found the engine wouldn’t start.’

The ignition-key housing was cracked. Whenever water got into it, it shorted the circuit and the diesel tried to turn over. Tried, but couldn’t: they’d left the engine in gear to jam the propeller while they sailed. Now there wasn’t enough life in the batteries to start the engine; and without the engine they had no way to charge the batteries. ‘In a storm, in the middle of a shipping lane...’

Normally, David manages to make this a funny story: a joke told against himself. Tonight it’s different. It’s ugly. A brag. A bid for attention. Ester gets up from her chair. ‘I’m going to say goodnight.’

John and Sarah, the elderly English couple sitting next to her, wish her sweet dreams.

Ester’s departure has an immediate effect upon David. He leans back precariously, rights himself; his front chair legs click against the floor tiles. ‘Bright and early in Rawai, yes?’

Ester smiles, says nothing. He watches her go. You can see how nervous he is, how much he fears his daughter’s disapproval. They met at the airport this morning and she has yet really to meet his eye. Ester wants this holiday to work. She needs her father back in her life, but she can wind him up a little. She owes him that.

Sarah, sensing an awkwardness, applies the linctus of her conversation: ‘Rawai! Such a lovely spot.’

‘We’re going scuba diving.’

‘Lovely.’

There are only diehards left on the verandah now. David Brooks. Kevin from San Francisco. Peter the South African. John and Sarah, the quiet, elderly couple from England (their eyes too bright, their smiles too polite; they’ve heard all these stories before).

Kevin tells his tale: ‘All these bloodcurdling things I kept hearing about the local pirates got me so scared, I did that thing, you know? You scatter a box of tacks over the deck before turning in for the night? About two in the morning a lump of driftwood knocks against the hull. I go running out, wrench in hand, barefoot...’

The story raises a chuckle. Nothing raucous. In their drunk, they have become philosophers.

Sarah says: ‘Half the time they’re just trying to sell you fish.’

‘They boarded me.’

All eyes on David again.

‘This kid and his old man. In harbour, of course. These things almost always happen in harbour. No one ever says that.’

Grumbles of assent.

‘Kid had a gun. I don’t know guns. Some sort of gun. Not a handgun.’

‘Ay-Kay.’ Peter wants them all to know he’s on first-name terms with assault weapons.

‘It wasn’t so bad. They wanted money, cigarettes. My boat was just a hire. Very simple. Old. No fancy electronics. But it gets under your skin. The old man showing you photo-booth snaps of his kids while his eldest pokes you in the ribs with a gun muzzle. I don’t suppose it was even loaded.’

‘Probably bloody was.’ Peter again. ‘As well that you stayed calm.’

‘Calm?’ David frowns, staring at the table. ‘I was scared.’

It’s John’s turn. The elderly Englishman. God forbid he and his wife ever attempt to return home: their England’s long gone. He pulls a book out of the pocket of his navy-blue blazer and shows it to them: a battered paperback with a two-tone cover. He holds it up for them to see. He’s presenting it to them. He’s
making a presentation
. Behind the unparodiable precision of his costume – blazer, whites and deck shoes: the ex-colonial yachtsman abroad – you get a glimpse, in this moment, of what lies beneath. The regional manager. The systems analyst. One of British manufacturing’s trusty but surplus second lieutenants.

‘Tarutao’s a Thai prison island that got mislaid in the last war. One day the supply ships simply stopped coming.’ John says that starving prisoners and warders joined forces and turned to piracy to survive, establishing a pirate dynasty that’s even today the scourge of the Andaman Sea. ‘Jolly good read,’ he assures the company, hauling himself out of his chair. The book is by a local novelist. John found it in Phuket Used Books in Mueang.

Perhaps John’s book report is a parting shot: a way of saying he doesn’t believe a word of the stories he’s heard this evening. David would like to think so. Better that than an old man chuntering on, out of his depth.

‘Come along, John.’ Hooking her arm in his, Sarah leads him away.

At about 2 a.m., Ester wakes to find there is just one soda water left in her fridge. It is one of those cans that practically vanish in your fist, good for diluting a single G&T. She knows she should drink more water and that she’ll suffer for it in the morning if she doesn’t, but she hasn’t the energy to go downstairs to the Coke machine. She just cracks open the can, slugs it down, and crashes out again.

About 5 a.m. she stumbles off to the toilet and after that she manages to sleep – only to be woken, around 8 a.m., by the bed. It’s shaking.

By the time she comes fully awake the tremors have stopped. Twenty minutes later they start up again. In the light threading through bamboo blinds she watches her little turquoise Schweppes can jangle its way to the edge of the bedside table, and off. She gets up, kicks the can under the bed with her heel, and heads to the bathroom a second time. The tremors are a novelty for her: unnerving, but not strong.

In flip-flops, bathing suit, bikini and sarong, and with a belly full of paracetamol, she heads over to the beach-side Starbucks. She carries her double-shot latte to a table with a view of the beach. The water is running out. Kids are jumping in and out of rock pools exposed by the tide. She doesn’t pay this much attention until, halfway through her coffee, she finds tourists leaning across her table for the view. The sea has not merely withdrawn. It has vanished. There are fish flopping about on the rocks.

People are walking where the sea should be. Even the locals are gathering to look. She follows them, the cup still in her hand. Crusts of wet sand give under her heels as she heads for the rocks of the exposed seabed. She passes a local man and his son; they are gathering huge fish in a carrier bag. She comes to the rocks. They are too sharp for her feet. She stands there, chugging coffee, looking out to where the sea has gone. Now, if it went away so quickly –

Yes: it’s coming back.

Children run back up the beach, squealing. Now everyone is running. There is a piece of driftwood rolling about in the surf. Something happens to Ester’s eyes – there’s a small snapping sensation as they adjust to the scale of the thing – and she sees that the piece of wood is a boat. There are people in it. She turns and runs back to Starbucks, out of the way of the water. She doesn’t run fast, as though admitting the size of the oncoming wave will add to its strength. People are standing around the bar. She pushes in among them. Nobody pays any attention to her. They have eyes only for the water. She shoulders her way through and out of the building and across the street. There’s a tremendous bang as the wave hits the sea wall. Safely on the other side, and in the shade of a concrete stairway, Ester dares to look around. Spray fills the sky: the wall has contained the waters. There are people on the road, leaning on each other, knocked breathless, shocked. Others are laughing.

Something rises behind them. Something black and absolutely flat: a metal sheet. Foam fizzes along the sheet’s leading edge, and it falls. Vehicles topple over. The sky is white. A wall of dirty black foam punches its way across the road towards Ester, shaking chairs and palm fronds and people and a couple of dinky purple sofas in its fists: Starbucks’ entire contents, fittings, staff and clientele.