Dead Water (34 page)

Inside the bar a Brazilian six-piece sets up. A parrot screeches.

‘It’s a robot.’

Ester draws a fine grey pashmina away from her hair and settles it around her shoulders. ‘You’re kidding.’ This evening she is anything but little-girl-lost. Impossible to think of her as a dead colleague’s child. ‘Time it.’

‘Really?’

‘Every three minutes,’ Havard tells her, ‘like clockwork. Go on. And the lawn around the pool is AstroTurf.’

They find a table. The walls of the bar are hung with photographs taken from old travel books. A lot of boats disgorging hemp sacks and balsa crates on to a lot of ramshackle quays. Joseph Conrad shading into Graham Greene shading into Humphrey Bogart in
The African Queen
. ‘All this –’ Havard waves at the walls. Crates and sacks and stacks and barrels, little boats and little harbours. ‘All this is gone. Everything ends up in a box these days.’

Heavy men like great black towers, sweating in the sun.

‘Eric ended it all. All those dreams of running away to sea. He turned the whole world into – oh, I don’t know. A branch of Wal-Mart.’

There’s nothing Ester can do for the line in Oman, but Dubai is less than a day’s drive away. In the megaports of Port Rashid and Jebel Ali, the two biggest deep-water facilities on earth, there is work for her. ‘If you want it. In the offices of Dubai Trade.’

He brings up the website on his Palm:
Dubai’s one-stop web portal for shipping agents, freight forwarders, air agents, clearing agents, hauliers, free-zone companies and import communities.
‘It would be something different,’ he says.

He tells her stories about Dubai. How its amphibious architectural wonders – The Palm and The World and all the rest – are already silting up. How its high-rises have to be built slightly corkscrewed so that, as the desert sun moves around the wet concrete, the structure will set true. He delivers each anecdote in the same bland, amused way, as though doling out sweets to a child. Havard has had close colleagues since Peder Halstad, but no lieutenants. He has been photographed with beautiful women, but he has never married. He is telegenic and no stranger to celebrity photo shoots, gossip columns, and even movie premieres. For all that, he is still a shipping man: by definition a grey, elusive man in an even more grey and elusive industry. He is more like his father than he will ever admit.

Ester says: ‘I’ll think about it.’

The next day Havard takes her to the beach. Muscat’s surfing beach feels more remote than it actually is. No one’s ever built tall here and it doesn’t take much to hide the city. A line of palms. A shallow dune. The mountains beyond are hidden by storms. The sky is pearled, heavy with dust from the interior. They sit in the sand, eating flatbread, drinking wine. Iranian apples. Baklavas.

Ester watches the waves. She watches the kitesurfers spin and fly; their wings are perfect Cs, sickling the blue air. Each component of the view makes a distinct and separate impression upon her. There’s a secret here she’s not getting. Some relationship between body strength and wind and wave. An invisible magic that every so often snatches gravity away and turns this wet and furious activity into something else: an aerial acrobatics. ‘I’d like to try that.’

It is as though someone else spoke. Someone who knows her better than she knows herself. She stares and stares.

The kites give a true picture of the wind; the surfers a true picture of the waves. Connecting them are monofilament lines, invisible and strong, like propositions in logic. The argument hums through those lines. The secret vibrates through them. How wind and waves relate. She wants to be out there. She wants to understand. Not surf, not fly, not spin, not trick her way into anything. Just understand. ‘I’ve got to try that,’ she says.

That night Havard takes her back to his house in Ruwi. The floors are so highly polished it feels as though she is walking on glass. The doors are lacquered and as reflective as mirrors: as they talk their way into their first clinch she keeps glimpsing, in dark connecting rooms, suave couples whose quiet intimacies exclude her.

The living room is the size of an airport lounge. There are piles of travel books, histories, big picture books about local crafts. In place of ornaments, scattered around the living room, on the corners of shelves and propped in corners, there are whale bones. Ribs like cutlasses. A single vertebra the size and approximate shape of a kitchen stool. Havard is already dressed, waiting for her to surface. He tells her, ‘The locals must have chopped it up to get rid of the stink. They must have buried most of it. Anyway, they dragged this bit of spinal cord into the lagoon and that’s where I found it. It still had a nylon rope running through it. I searched and searched, but I never found its skull.’

As he talks, he undresses her. He wants them to do it in the middle of the room. He feels her spine. He feels its whole length, and round, and in, mouth suckered to her little tit.

Her eyes are wide open. She barely blinks. ‘Oh,’ she sighs, as he enters her, ‘go on, then.’ She imagines villagers waking one morning to find a whale beached on their shore. The flesh rots but the bones remain. They persist. In the dunes: they circulate. ‘Fuck me.’

‘You’re crying.’

‘Fuck me.’ She imagines them, hauling at it. ‘Fuck me, if you’re going to.’ Dragging it from place to place. Disturbed by it. Inspired.

Tuesday, 15 March 2005

The kite moves truly to the wind; the board moves truly to the wave. Between them, caught there, the body flexes, seeking an accommodation. The secret – how wind and wave are one – wracks the body, runs through the body, then vanishes, leaves the body trembling, the mind amnesiac.

Every weekend Ester tries to drown herself in the shallows of a Dubai surfing beach the ex-pats have christened Wollongong. She sines. She sputters. She splashes into the sea. You can tell she’s a novice from her brand-new gear. A Concept Air SLE kite. An F One wakeboard, too narrow for a beginner.

The rich dilettantes who’ve taken ownership of Wollongong think nothing of buying a fresh quiver every six months. Overgrown kids who care about this season’s colours. SLEs in a particular shade of lime. They’re engineers, mainly, from South Africa. Management consultants. IT bandits. They drive their balloon-tyred pickups right up to the water. ‘What do you do?’ they ask her, over coffee, over Pepsi, over Mountain Dew. They expect her to say that she’s a PA or something. A junior oil executive. At very least, an English teacher.

Ester’s a clerk. Each morning she gets in her rental car and joins the slow shunt past private surgeries and road-mending crews into Jebel Ali. ‘I proofread the names of the ships.’

Some of them say, ‘Is that all?’ Others dig themselves even deeper: ‘Is it interesting?’ Everyone asks her, ‘How long are you going to do that?’ and she replies, ‘I don’t know. It’s my job.’

She wears her more than sun-bleached hair in a fussy, feathery, Tank Girl topknot. Her narrow features show interested boys what she will look like when she’s old. She is very thin and deliciously sun-damaged. Like everyone, she hides her eyes behind shades, but you can glimpse little laughter lines at their corners. She looks at you with a kind of glee, as though she was this huge bird, wondering which end to pick you up by.

Havard said he was going to find Ester an apartment, but she’s still got her all-right room in the Golden Tulip Seeb Hotel, a couple of miles from the airport. When she’s not at the beach she spends the time tapping away at her laptop, chatting online with friends back home. She assumes the knock at her door is the maid wanting to come in and make the bed. It isn’t.

David smiles. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘look at you.’

He opens his arms for a hug.

They eat at a restaurant in the Madinat Jumeirah. The Madinat’s a resort complex: a Venetian fantasy dropped wholesale into the desert, there to convince the tourists that Dubai, fifty years ago, was something more than a small fort and a malarial creek. It takes the cabbie a good half-hour to work out which of its forty-four restaurants David’s booked a table at.

Father and daughter look as if they’re on their way to a wedding reception. David is wearing an ice-cream suit and no tie; Ester’s in a sunflower-yellow dress, her hair done up in a bun secured with an artificial sunflower: an exceptionally lovely stewardess from an Asian airline.

‘December 2004. A severely corroded Moyse Line shipping container turns up unscheduled at a tiny shallow-water quay in Rawai. You remember. Phuket.’

Ester finds her voice. ‘We were going to go diving.’

‘Inside the container the dock-workers find a mummified corpse. You weren’t the first to find Eric Moyse, Ester. The Thai police were. The corpse has no ID but there’s a notebook stuffed with addresses and Phuket’s chief of police, who’s no slouch, gets on the phone and contacts every address he can decipher. Ness Ziona. Farnborough. Groom Lake. 85 Albert Embankment. And the call comes back: leave the body alone. Leave the can alone. Leave everything the fuck alone. Why? Because 85 Albert Embankment is the headquarters of MI6, Langley is the home of the CIA, Ness Ziona is home to the Israel Institute for Biological Research, Qinetiq is based in Farnborough, and Groom Lake is slap-bang in the middle of Area 51. A couple of weeks later, a bunch of us descend on Phuket, all of us with our wives and our children in tow, our swimming trunks, our factor 20. All of us hungry for a peek inside the container.’

‘You were working.’

David makes a face. ‘When am I not working?’

Ester doesn’t want to think about how lonely her father’s life has been over the years. She doesn’t want to feel sorry for him. ‘Where’ve you been?’

David clasps his hands in front of him: a dumbshow of sincerity. ‘Eric Moyse was a good man. This is something everyone agrees on. During the Second World War he handled sensitive cargoes for the Allies. Some of those cargoes were weaponized. Most weren’t. For the most part Eric handled wastes and surpluses. Stuff that no one, at that time, knew how to dispose of. After the war Eric developed a system for hiding sensitive military-industrial wastes in the global shipping system. Things it’s best people don’t open, but valuable enough you can’t throw them away. Chemical and biological weapons. Fissiles. You know those amnesty bins the police roll out for kids to throw their guns and knives away? Moyse Line is a bin for WMD.’

‘Is this an answer? This is you telling me why you disappeared?’ ‘Yes.’ He reaches for her hand.

‘I
mourned
you!’

‘It is an explanation. Listen. Dead Water was only ever a temporary arrangement. A hold-over from the war. Nobody wanted to use Dead Water longer than they had to. After the war, one by one, Eric’s clients began withdrawing their cans from the programme. But it’s like jumbling the lock on a suitcase. Jumbling’s the easy part. The difficulty, if you don’t have the combination, is getting the damned thing open again. If you wanted your can back, you had to ask Eric. And Eric wouldn’t tell anyone the combination. You have to remember the times. Cuba. Angola. The paranoia back then. The way Eric saw it, he was saving the world from itself.’ He reaches into his jacket and pulls out an ugly square of reddish stuff. A leather pouch. Inside there is a notebook, covered in the same leather, and inside that a handful of water-damaged photographs.

‘The morning of the tsunami, very early, I was in Rawai. I was talking with the chief of police there. He gave me this.’

David lays his hands over the notebook. He does not open it. ‘Dead Water.’

‘Speak normal.’

‘This book contains the combinations, the algorithms, to operate Dead Water. Eric had it with him in the can. You want to hide a leaf? Stick it in a tree. You want to hide a code? Hide it in a maths book.’ He opens the notebook and shows her. The pages are written over multiple times in a dizzying palimpsest. There is more than one hand at work here; even a child’s crayon drawings. David closes the book. He says: ‘I can’t bear my home any more.’

David has a bungalow in Mona Vale, less than twenty miles north of Sydney. ‘I can’t bear the sound of the sea. The waves.’ The tsunami has given him nightmares. He’s sleeping most nights on the floor of a friend’s apartment in Eastlakes, where the early-morning roar of incoming Qantas red-eyes provides him with the alibi he needs for his worsening insomnia. ‘They’ll declare me dead in a few weeks. I want you to have the bungalow. Everything the solicitors offer you, take it. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m catered for.’

Ester is trying not to cry. ‘Will I see you again?’

‘Of course you’ll see me again.’ He holds out his hand. He wants her to take it. He wants her to touch him. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

Day after day, without cease, sensitive cargoes drift around the earth.
Merdif Chiba
.
Mitsubishi Spirit
.
Morning Emperor
.
Moyse Bluethroat
.
Moyse Skua
. ‘All we’re interested in,’ David tells her, ‘is Havard’s well-being. Havard is the public face of the company, but you have to understand, Ester, the line is big. We, the people I work for, we’re something else.’

‘Spies.’

‘Government liaison.’

‘Where were you?’

‘I’m sorry, Ester. I’m truly sorry. But I had to disappear. Dead Water has to be kept a secret. Especially from Havard. Look what happened to his dad. We can’t let him put himself through what Eric went through. We don’t dare.’

Ester looks into her father’s eyes.

‘You can help us,’ he says. ‘You can help us to help him.’

From this point on, pretty much everything in Ester’s life becomes contingent upon everything else. If she wants to stay, if she wants to prove herself useful in this indeterminate adult world, then it is up to her to carve a place out for herself.

Havard returns to Muscat. They spend a few evenings together. After a couple of weeks, in this city or that, Dubai, Muscat, they find themselves sharing a bed.

Ester’s father phones her every day, never from the same number. Ester confirms Havard’s safety. His wellness. His fitness. It occurs to Ester that her father, or whatever shadowy interest he represents, has hired her as Havard’s jailer; but she is by now so disoriented she doesn’t even feel able to tell Havard about David’s reappearance. David’s told her not to, and why would she disobey him? She has been manoeuvred into a place from which ordinary, honest communication strikes her as both arduous and risky.