Playing with Water (9 page)

When the fisherman hits a fish he makes sure it is safely impaled through a substantial part of its body so that once on the catch-line it will not be torn off if snagged on a rock or kicked by a flipper. He passes it down the spear and onto the cord. Two-thirds along its length the line has a brass swivel spliced in to prevent the fish’s body acting like a propeller in the water and winding the line up into kinks. The fish is now pushed over the swivel until it reaches the stop at the end of the cord. In practice the whole action of hitting a fish, sweeping it back along spear and line and reloading the gun takes a matter of seconds during which time the hunter, who may still be deep under water, is looking about him for fresh prey even as he rises for air.

One night not long after my arrival on Tiwarik I wake just after the moon has set. I get up and go out. There is nobody else on the island; Arman has not come over to fish. I am glad since I am not in the mood tonight. Leaving my spear gun tucked into the roof I walk down to the beach through swirls of fireflies. I do not know why fireflies are more plentiful on some nights than on others, nor why phosphorescent plankton in the sea should be equally variable. Maybe the weather, the temperature or barometric pressure have something to do with it; maybe it is merely a matter of season. At any rate the night is now moonless, overcast, utterly black except that in the blackness swim these constant or winking insect lights.

I walk on into the still water which is the same temperature as the air and can hardly be felt except as a weight. I go on; the water comes up to my chest. Almost without noticing it I have stopped breathing and find myself heading downwards into equal black in which the stellate points of tendril and plankton whirl and glow. The island and the sea are not after all separate entities but one continuous medium. In a while I no longer know for certain if my head is breaking through into air or water. Somewhere in this spangled firmament I take breaths. I know only there is a great lid over this universe, or else an unyielding bottom beneath it, and that if I keep heading up or down for long enough my head will strike one or the other but that if I steer a middle course I could keep on for ever, dazzled by these infinite motes, by my passage through a void in which mill the atoms of creation. In this pre-Genesis my mind floats off and out. There is no longer any body left to move in this nothing, only a cloud of electrons rapturously adrift in chaos.

Intoxicated, I am aware of motionless points of light. I find I am on my back. The overcast is dissolving and stars are coming through. Gradually their constant candlepower outlines the dark heave of Tiwarik and everything reorients itself according to old conceptions of gravity. The island has revealed another accuracy in its name but now its bulk settles the right way up. Fathoms below my soles lie the familiar marauding teeth and chitinous beaks among
the great sierras of coral. Far above me the forest and grasses shed down their drifts of fireflies, a twinkling dandruff eddying lazily in and out of the thorny brushwood above the shoreline boulders.

I love this place.

The more familiar it becomes the more the reef surrounding Tiwarik is unknowable, a disclosure of that
mare incognitum
without whose liquid setting the island would be a stone instead of a jewel. At Kansulay I was intrigued by the spectacle of Lolang Mating’s ruined hut shimmering with cold fire, but they exist here beneath the sea, too, such luminous fungi. And just as in the woods one sees a glow and shines a torch to reveal some undistinguished mould, deep underwater a coral hill may bulk with a beacon on its peak which is much harder to find. In the dark I mark the place and switch the torch on but at the instant of light everything springs slightly to one side. Eventually I track it down: a tiny nodule of jelly lost among a tuft of weed. Still stranger are the lights on the sea bed which bring me down with my belly on the sand, flattened beneath black fathoms. That steady incandescence is surely a lure put forth by some poisonous predator bunched in waiting beneath the sand like a buried ray trailing its white quill. But no; it is so invisible by torchlight it needs a long minute finally to see it: something shaped like a sodden wisp of cellophane which, enveloped in dark once more, pumps out light as an insignificant flower its scent.

What is it for, this light? To entice, to warn, proclaim? We are in a foreign place and nothing may be taken even as language, still less as translatable. The light may simply be part of the creature’s outline, much as a dog’s four legs go towards defining its shape. On the other hand it may not be a creature at all but a fragment of one, a tatter mimicking autonomy like the severed tail of a lizard or the crawling blushes which run and pool on the skin of a dead squid. It brings me down with my nose to the sand time and time again. If scientists are right in claiming that algae were for
aeons the only living things on the newly cooling Earth, maybe what we see now is the scattered remnants of a former splendour, much as a skein of incandescent gas a few light years across may mark all that remains of an entire galaxy.

And now it is at night that the old Earth lives on, threadily, at night and in the tropic seas. To take a torch down among the reefs at night is to experience still other things which suggest an ancient broodingness, a fragmented hegemony from whose visible signs you cannot construct a whole. Even if that were not so you would be chilled by the sound filling your ears. It is that of a million creatures fiercely being alive. At times it seems like the noise of limitless frying, the preparing of a million dinners. At others there is an insistent, manic quality to its gravelly roar like hearing a huge crowd in a far stadium, its voice surging in waves so the imagination half supplies unseeable events, half thinks to make out individual words. Just so on a Roman evening must the villagers of that city’s outskirts have heard the barbarities of the Colosseum several miles away borne to them on the soft summer wind.

The volume of this steady underwater black noise is evidence of activity and violence far beyond what you can see with a torch. Above it are individually-separable squeaks, grunts and flutings. Something drums abruptly its thoracic sac. Something else makes a nearly human yawn. A shrill groan has you turning in shock, torch thrust out defensively to see whatever carnage is about to embroil you and there is nothing. Nothing but doused incandescent points, the nocturnal species you already know, a crab scurrying.

You soon recognise that, just as on land, at night other creatures emerge and prowl the sea lanes. The hunter of fish down among the reefs with a torch and spear gun gets to know them, a different set of threats and prey. He is on the whole not after them; he is more intent on looking into holes and nooks to find the big fish he can seldom catch by day when they are alert and on the move. There is experience involved in knowing how to get them out since the holes through which they can be glimpsed may be too small, the
real entrance hard to find. Useless to fire a spear into a fish that cannot be retrieved. There is experience, too, in knowing the sort of rock formations it is worth going down to inspect at close range.

But the real skill is learning to see things and knowing what it is you are looking at. When I was a novice with a spear gun I would go out on patrols with a skilled mentor. I would pass over bare rocks and featureless seabed and seconds later he would pass over the same patch which for him became a rich fishing-ground. His spear would streak before my eyes and quiver fifteen feet below into a patch of sand which would suddenly heave and flap and flash the undersides of white wing. In those days I would not have known how to deal with a ray even had I been able to spot it and would have risked the thrilling (and sometimes fatal) poisons of its lashing sting. But not being able to see it until it writhed around a steel rod was a clear sign of how far I was from being self-sufficient as a fisherman. And now, I think, if I went out with a neophyte he might in turn wonder that I saw things he knew were not there.

Of course I am still not seeing much of what there is; and allowing that far more experienced fishermen than I miss things I am made thoughtful by the rustlings in the marine undergrowth at night, at the constant roar of sound, at the evidence my eyes cannot see and my ears cannot hear of an unknown universe. I am always surprised at people’s surprise when they discover that the sunless depths of the great undersea trenches are not after all barren wastelands. It is evidence on their part not only of a lack of imagination but of a profound sensory chauvinism, a certainty that what would be a blind and crushing void for humans must also be for other creatures. At different wavelengths of vision and sound, with other gamuts of olfactory response, an ancient world lives on in invisible splendour. We are too dogged by Genesis, by our own myth of the absolute polarity of dark and light, of the one meaning death and the other life, absence and Presence. Being prisoners of an extensive set of such dualisms has led us to deny what they cannot encompass. The cure for this is to slip into black tropical waters at night and head on down. Through eye and ear
pour exclamations; but as evidence of the world down there they are only as the faint scratches in a radio astronomer’s headphones are to an invisible galaxy of suns. It is a magnificently alien world which cannot be apprehended by terrestrial instincts alone. It is difficult to recognise a universe from inside another.

Even in broad light of day the island itself, despite its smallness, offers unexpected asides. It hints at more than surfaces. It took a while to discover that there is an enchanted place on Tiwarik, one which will remain for ever unfound by any ordinary stroller or scrambler since it is inaccessible except from the sea.

On the side of the island away from the mainland where the ocean lies empty the cliffs fall sheer into a tumble of boulders awash with suckings and surges. At one particular point the angle increases beyond the vertical and there is an overhang beneath which a spit of flat rock no more than a yard or two across juts into the sea and so low it is covered at high tide. Here, invisible from above, I can lie on my stomach with my nose practically in the water and gaze straight down eighty-one feet to where the island’s roots disappear into sand. With the sun at the correct angle and with no wind to ruffle its surface the water becomes a block of glass and through it I can follow a map of the land of Drune.

Drune is essentially a desert country between two mountain ranges. It is a plateau from which the inhabitants raise their eyes in every direction towards the great peaks which glitter in the rarefied sun, surrounding and defining the place of their birth. From these heights tumble boulder-strewn gorges, screes of eroded rock. Harsh though its outlines are in large-scale terms this is no sterile lunar landscape. A closer view shows the mountains to be densely wooded in places with thickets of emerald gymnosperms, stands of amber fern-trees, forests of wand. At the mountains’ foot along the edge of the desert are little white jumbled villages whose people live industrious but not
grinding lives, tending their flocks and cultivating their terraces. They are respectful of but not terrorised by the vast birds which live in deep and mysterious caves in the mountains. These sleek-winged creatures traverse their skies at immense speed, occasionally pausing to nuzzle a village with their beaks, overturning houses by the hundred in clouds of dust, or browsing on the forests high in the hills. Drune.

Why Drune? I wonder as soon as the name suggests itself. And then I remember back and back to long, shapeless, mesmeric hours on a swing beneath whose oak seat was an area cobbled from pieces of broken flagstones. Above this I would slump, arms hooked around the ropes, head hanging nearly between my knees, swinging gently backwards and forwards until I became hypnotised by the coming and going of the ground beneath. I was a child of secret lands and arcane languages and from the cockpit of my aircraft I soon identified the patterned landscape of Drune. I knew each hedgerow of moss bulging up between the triangles and polygons of its fields; I knew each crack which was a highway leading between its towns and every hairline fracture which was a wandering path down which the villagers went their ways.

Sometimes I lay on my stomach across the seat and wound myself higher and higher off the ground until the ropes above me bunched and creaked. At maximum altitude I would begin my spiralling descent. High above Drune my little plane spun and spun while the countryfolk beneath stood in the fields with their heads thrown back and their mouths open. The spectacle! The control! Would he ever pull up in time! He always did, even though his head was plump with blood from the G-forces of his spin and he had broken through some barrier beyond instruments and clocks and had entered Drune itself, a different world where his whole body resonated with weird and piercing sense-impressions. It was Drune he loved to visit, and it was
Drune
because he loved playing with letters and in its own spelling Drune was Under.

That the demon pilot of Drune was also an inveterate sketcher of imaginary islands now seems perfectly consistent.
Already he had begun his search for a land but it was not the traditional land of escape. It was not at all to be a place of comforting evasion but of harsh and abrupt edges, of ravishing and awful gulfs under skies of tropic blue but blown through always by that sad dark wind – in short, a land he might at last recognise as his own.

There was a curious legend at my first school, that country house among the South Downs. The house was one of those built without proper cellars but with a semi-basement lit by barred, ground-level windows with downwardly sloping embrasures inside. As far as I can remember this basement was largely given over to kitchens and laundry rooms and suchlike; if we went down there towards bedtime wearing a dressing-gown and a suitably pathetic expression there was usually a large woman with rolled sleeves to say ‘Poor child’ and give us a mug of unsweetened cocoa (sugar was still on ration) and a piece of bread and dripping. But anyone who then watched the poor child sipping his cocoa would have seen him wander about, his eyes on the floor, chewing abstractedly. He would roam through cavernous rooms forbidden him by daylight staring at the flagstones, peeping behind stacks of wicker laundry baskets held together by parchment thongs, straying if he were brave enough into the furthest unlit recesses brooded over by immense spiders and mouldering ping-pong tables stacked against the wall. He would be slightly emboldened by being a conspirator, for he was on a special mission which had been previously arranged in the dormitories up under the roof. The mission was to find the Lost Cellars.

The myth of the Lost Cellars was one of the first things a boy heard as a newcomer to the school. In effect it said that somewhere beneath the school was a whole level which at some time in the past had been deliberately walled up and forgotten about in an act of collective amnesia. What was down there was the subject of endless speculation in the dormitories after lights-out, ranging from boys murdered
by a long-dead headmaster to an idiot daughter of the present Latin master who was chained there with an iron mug and a tame rat which had worn its teeth down to stubs trying to gnaw through her shackles. Unfortunately we never found any evidence for there being access to these nether regions: no new cement in the joints between stones, no iron rings, no fresh plaster. This did not stop the speculation, naturally, nor the handing-on of the myth. But we soon became busy with our cordite collections and with the Army surplus equipment which was then so cheap and plentiful: signal lamps and walkie-talkies were the most popular with their great batteries wrapped in brown paper beneath layers of varnish and what looked like laminations of fat.

The Latin master’s idiot daughter is there to this day no doubt, fulfilling her unenviable destiny of representing unfinished psychic business. Her father must long since have died for even then he had been nearing retirement. But his daughter is not one day older. Very beautiful, very wild, she talks all day to her toothless rat, staring into the darkness with atrophied eyes and relaying to him with great clarity the events of the bright visions wherein she lives. For even as she hangs in her chains her freedom is complete, as witness the power she has to escape the Lost Cellars, cross nearly forty years and seven thousand miles to present herself on Tiwarik one night where she steps straight into my mind.

The odd thing was that when I moved to my second school, to the island amid suburbia, nearly the first myth I encountered was that of the Second Cellars. In this building the first cellars were proper underground ones without any windows and access to them was not limited since they held the changing-rooms and the hobbies room, the boot-room and the boiler-room in addition to a good many poky unlit annexes full of burst suitcases and mildewed copies of Ovid with ‘P. Binsted, Summer 1938’ on the flyleaf.

These cellars were reached conventionally from inside by a flight of stairs which was merely a continuation (on a far less grand scale) of the main staircase. Outside, a tradesmen’s stone flight led up again into daylight. It was at
the bottom of this flight that the evidence for the Second Cellars was strongest. There was a large flagstone which rocked hollowly under the combined weight of three boys (two, if one of them were ‘Slug’ Summerbee). Nobody had ever seen this flag lifted but it was known for a fact that an unnamed head boy had once been sent down to the cellars on some errand during morning classes and had seen a firm line of wet footprints leading from the stone’s edge and along the passage to the boiler-room. This added greatly to the awe and horror in which we held old Bisley, whose duties in addition to acting as school groundsman were to tend the school boilers and clean the school’s shoes. To help him with all this – for he was truly an old man all brown skin and sinews – was a mysterious younger man believed to be his illegitimate son. This was a sort of Heathcliff figure with long blueblack Brylcreemed hair and tattooes on his forearms. He looked like a gypsy and when he smiled he showed brilliant white teeth. He rode an AJS motorcycle with sinister skill and was rumoured to be able to make any girl pregnant simply by passing her in a corridor and smiling. Nobody knew where he and his unofficial father lived. Maybe they didn’t live in the Second Cellars but they definitely knew something about them.