Debatable Land (11 page)

Nick hired a bicycle from a man with strong hair like a wig and a frangipane blossom behind his ear with a Biro. When he was a mile or so away from the beach where he had left the others, he smelt garlic and pork and the gluey richness of
haricots
. The café door was held and fixed open by a springy growth of vetch that had grown around it so that it could not move. Hens came and went through the plastic ribbons that covered the doorway. Black coffee had burnt near by that day.

‘Can I get some water?’ he asked, his thirst woken by the sound of falling water splashing down the mountainside behind.

A woman brought him bottled water. He paid the comparatively large bill in the way you had to in these islands, without translation into any other currency. Nick as a rule bought little and appreciated much that came free, so he understood a certain fairness as he took in the shining moss wet as a bath sponge, the ticking undergrowth that tipped towards flat black rocks, the fungi white like cheese stacked at the side of the cafe’s window at which quivered gingham curtains.

Leaving the bike with the woman, Nick pushed in his green metal chair. It twanged as it hit the table. The island was full of reverberations. The inanimate seemed to react as though it lived.

If he found any snails he would be pleased but what he sought most of all was the heart of the island.

He held on to fibrous palm trunks as he made his way up to the water he heard. Soon his sweat was mixing with the mist of water that a deep waterfall dispels as it falls down. From up here the cove where he had left the others was not dark but the green of water over white sand, the colour that is most associated with the Pacific, the colour of lull within a reef; beyond the reef he saw the blue ocean, almost violet against this inner sequestered blue that was not blue either, or not the celestial, European blue. This was a colour not of contemplation but of sensation. It did not calm the eyes so much as stretch and drench them.

He was now deafened by the falling water above him, though he could see no pool. The rock seemed to repossess the water as it struck. The plants all about were colonised by other plants. Petals seemed so fat with water you might snap them off and suck them. The growth of green all around was so full of itself it ripened, rotted and germinated in the one season.

In fact, seasons, offering the appropriate system for natural life and death, were too orderly for this profusion.

Ardent Spirit
looked flat and small and white from here among the green and noise and wet. Her two empty masts were all that made her more than a white gap on the water. If he took off his misted specs and screwed up his eyes so that his lashes caught prisms among themselves, Nick could hallucinate that he saw Elspeth on the boat and what looked like children.

He began to move about on his hands and knees among the ferns and mosses, lifting them carefully as you lift tissue from a botanical illustration. When he had collected the various snails into his Dijon-mustard glass, taken from the boat’s rubbish, he looked up at the fractioned sun through the palms and set off down towards his bicycle. He had just finished making a lid for the glass with a handkerchief when he heard the hungry yelp of a dog.

It would soon be dark. They could not leave the reef by night or they might misjudge the narrow channel that had been dynamited through it for the passage of boats. Warm abrupt rain came. When he looked up at the crown of the waterfall it was surrounded by a vehement double rainbow. The impression was of a shrine for a shakily authenticated miracle.

The bike spurted sparkling water from its wheels as he freewheeled through new puddles on his way down to the beach where the others lay. Gabriel was on her back with her forearms flexed behind her to take her weight. Twice Logan reached and seemed to remove things as small as insects from her, with the dissatisfied absorption of a sharp-eyed bird. Alec lay some way from the other two.

‘Nick, you are a timepiece in yourself,’ said Logan. ‘Will you give us a hand, now you’re here, with this thing?’

They stowed the shopping, pulled on sweatshirts, and plucked out the crabs that had made it into the Zodiac. Some crabs had died and been eaten by small scavengers during the afternoon.

Gabriel sat up in the bow while the men launched, held and climbed into the rubber boat. Nick lowered the engine and started it, steering towards
Ardent Spirit
.

She grew as they approached her. By the time they touched her side she was their home again, their burden and their way of escape.

‘You are the mollusc man, Nick,’ said Logan later. ‘Perhaps you can tell us what to do with the splendid creature currently parking its custard off the stern.’

Nick thought of the three land snails he had found after his hunting under fizzing ferns. He had released them. They were all specimens of the dominant carnivorous snail, at different stages in its lifecycle. The idea that a raptor might in its youth impersonate its victim seemed intelligent and horrible to Nick. He had found two large edible snails mating in a mess of froth, and one half eaten, the size of a cow’s tongue, loose but muscular.

The lights on the mainmast and spars gave enough light to show the markings of the shell and its resident, when they hauled it up. Large and primitive – what a hopeless combination for a mild-mannered marine creature. Nick stroked its mottled probes and received a polite response. But the poor thing was lolling loose in its shell. Besides, it too had been half eaten, by something that appeared to have had pincers. Even within, the flesh of the big shell was skewbald.

‘Soak it in bleach or cleaning soda, I should, Nick. The shell, that is, after you’ve pulled out the beast. We shan’t eat it. Use the flesh for bait when you lay the lines tonight.’ Logan was at the charts with his dividers, plotting their course at the chart table. ‘What can we expect to eat, Gabriel?’

‘Dorado ceviche and noodles.’ Gabriel was enjoying the galley still, and, since this afternoon, working for Logan had become something full of promise to her. She turned the flesh of the fish in its souse of lime juice and chilli. Having stripped the skin off half a dozen tomatoes she had frisked through boiling water, she chopped them and laid them around the shrinking, whitening dorado slivers. The smallness of the galley and the adaptations of technique and habit it demanded of her conventional repertoire exerted a challenge over her that she felt, now while the ship was at rest, to be laid out clear as a trajectory set in stars. She dared the sea to show her up. Yet she was also relieved that the galley was a place where Logan did not often come. The element of fear that went with her being drawn to him needed some cessation. It is wearying to serve at all times, even when it is sweet most of the time to do so.

Charts have the unimprovable truth of discovery in their words. They admit that little is yet known though much said, and most of it fearful. Not much advance has been made, when you look at the charts, since the time when plumb lines were all the sonar there was. No satellite steering but a sextant, Logan thought, as his mind and body had been cleared to do, of the sea and its conquest by men.

‘The only real advance is in the killing of pain,’ Logan would say, when he spoke to men who did not go to sea. ‘Where you might have had to knock a man out with your fist if he got hurt, now you can carry morphine and just shoot him up.’

The morphine was kept with the guns, in a safe hidden behind the tantalus. It was the boat builder’s joke, though it did not bear repetition. Logan and Elspeth knew about it; no one else.

‘Huahine tomorrow?’ asked Sandro. These islands were like suburbs to him, different from one another in small ways but not so different from home, and full of people who did not mix with one another except in the most intimate ways, for love or work.

‘Six o’clock start. We’ll shoot clear of the reef like a bullet from a gun. Say hello to your mother from us all, Gabriel, if you’re going to do the words for home now.’ She had actually been coming into the saloon, but she apprehended that he did not at present want her visible, and she found a way of making the thought a romantic one. Perhaps he was thinking of how best to tell his wife.

Gabriel’s suntan deepened pinkly. That was all a blush could now do to her. Not even Sandro had mentioned her talking into the tape recorder. She smiled at Logan from along her eyes, as though to put him down. Elspeth watched him for irritation but he just grinned and went back to making pencilled lists of figures.

‘Anyone mind if I put the generator on for a while?’ asked Nick.

‘Fire ahead,’ replied Logan. Nick looked around, but permission had been given and no one questioned it.

He checked the generator, made a solution of soda crystals in a polythene bucket and wedged the bucket in the lazarette. When he had, he hoped, pierced the big sea snail mortally, he felt for its anchorage of muscle and severed it. The snail that fell overboard was dappled like a new fawn and as long, two feet of stretched dead muscle gone slowly slack in pain. He put the shell in the crystal solution. It was a hot night now.

To drown out the sound of the generator that gave them the benefits of artificial heat, light and cold, Logan put a tape into the machine. The solemn glorious pomp of Purcell’s ‘Dead March for Queen Mary’ rolled over the water.

To its accompaniment Logan and Alec each began to plan his own funeral. Elspeth lay on her bunk with her mouth stuffed full of sheet so that she would make no noise.

‘I like film music,’ said Sandro. ‘It’s good.’ He made a roll-up and took it out to sit in the bow where the bowsprit would have been in an older boat. He hung his legs over the edge and leant through the rail to look at the phosphorescence when it came to wipe the water with a winged gauze that lit and sank, lit up, lifted, and sank.

In the stern stood Alec, feeling the boat swing slightly but giddily in the context of all those profligate stars. The lights on the island that had seemed mysterious before had become things to name and recognise. He was already collecting the place in order to feel in his heart he had been there. Yet he had left no trace there but some money, and it would leave no trace on him unless he somehow took its qualities and defined them. Already this definition would make the place artificial, a kind of double or false coin. Perhaps that was how places survived, by striking images of themselves just a little off the true. In the pursuit of others’ false coinages of a place looted of its privacy, the form of travel arises that narrows the mind. It was his fear that this was how successful people managed to preserve their stock, by manufacturing false personae in whose lee to live in peace.

To paint such a place and convey it with truth, he thought, you would need to pitch the spectrum deepest at its green-blue-indigo-violet arches; to paint its people fairly their beauty should be shown like that of cats or horses. Otherwise a chill crept in, for the people seemed to carry a stillness that was sculptural; it was the land that buzzed with layers of movement, that seemed muscled.

The burring of the generator was a cosy noise, a sound like the passing of a goods train without end. The chunky noise seemed to recall the decent things of life on land away from this indifferent glamour of sea and sky.

‘And don’t,’ came Logan’s voice, lowered and compressed, ‘invite your little friends again. You must learn to stop saying yes. Only people with nothing can safely say yes.’ The intensity had sliced all the Englishness from his tone. A frontiersman was speaking, a lone wolf, a decent man among lowlifes. There was a pained actorish quality to what Alec wished he were not hearing. Surely Logan was speaking lines.

Elspeth seemed to have her own script that at last, with a noise somewhat like the bark of a dog, led them both into silence. Alec had not dared do more than sink to his haunches in the stern and concentrate upon the island’s lights so hard that, when later he came to sleep, the formation of the lights, roughly that of the Southern Cross, was burnt inside his eyelids.

Through the hatch of their cabin as he walked by it in the dark wishing he might have flown, he saw Logan’s arm slung down over the side of his bunk, so that his own sleeping hand might hold his wife’s.

Alec cleaned his teeth with salt water to save drinking water and went to bed with his mouth plump and skinless, burned with salt. He awoke with a hard throat. He thought that if he could cough he would bring up razor shells of salt.

The fo’c’sle was an arrowhead of old air. Alec could not get comfortable. In the night he heard a sound just beyond the human register that might have been an insect or an expiring star. He feared that it might be tinnitus. Ever since Muriel Bruce had been stricken by tinnitus, he had waited for the insistent co-resident in his head, another note to add to those of regret and conscience.

Muriel outlasted the Commander.

‘It was as one might have wished,’ she said, over tea a week after her brother had been gathered. ‘If it had been me the first to go, he could never have set a tray.’

The dog Dunvegan was long dead, but not gone. Alec’s most enthusiastic taxidermist friend from the museum had compromised between his own affection for nineteenth-century anthropomorphism and the respect in which his owners held Dunvegan; the dog was as solid and hard-packed as he had been in life, the height of a nursing chair, and he stared out of glass eyes on to the decline of human powers, his black-lipped jaw set in the smile his owners swore he had in life. He was a ton-weight and had not been lifted since being placed at the foot of a curtain in the window’s bow. His presence, ugly, heavy, not very clean, had been a continuing comfort.