Submergence (11 page)

‘The biosphere is the dermis. All life and regeneration in our world
belongs to it. Thick as it seems to us, with our histories of evolution and extinction, exploration and colonisation, the abiotic mantle is several hundred times thicker.’ She drew another scale showing how nearly all the biosphere was in the ocean.

‘We exist only as a film on the water,’ she said. ‘Of course, this goes against the religion of the Garden of Eden and the canon of political documents ending with the international law of the sea which promote the primacy of man on the planet. Just take a look at it,’ she said, running the pencil again over the lines and curves. ‘We’re nature’s brief experiment with self-awareness. Any study of the ocean and what lies beneath it should serve notice of how easily the planet might shrug us off.’

‘Wow,’ he said.

‘We use the words “sea” and “ocean” interchangeably in English, and that’s fine, I do it myself, “sea” is a powerful word. A yacht belongs to the sea, it’s aimed always to the next port of call. Surfers likewise belong to the sea, not the ocean. You saw how tiny they were on the waves today. How they’re spun around like in a washing machine when they fall off their boards. Sometimes they’re ground into the bottom. When they ride out a wave, it carries them home, to land. The sea has its transformative power, its own history. I told you my mother is from Martinique. For Martiniquans the history of the sea is slavery. The sea goes across, that’s the point. The sea is a pause between one land-bound adventure and another. It joins lands. The ocean goes down and joins worlds.’

She had not even begun with chemosynthetic life and the rest – the refractory molecules of anoxgenic photoheterophotic bacteria – but she could not recall having spoken so acutely with a lover. Perhaps it was because they were so close to the Atlantic, or that he lived in Africa and she would not see him again, or perhaps it was the opposite, that she would see him all the time.

They talked into the night and were awake to each other. The uprightness of the chairs worked against intimacy. There had already been a
consummation and their courtship was subsequent; in talk, not in the silence of touching.

He felt a brittleness inside him. He was not able to share his career with her, and it was the imbalance in their conversation that perhaps made him speak about the Midgard serpent, which lived so enormously in the ocean the Norsemen believed it encircled the world.

‘Do you know the story?’

‘Vaguely,’ she said, ‘hardly.’

‘The bond which held the Midgard serpent in was the weight of the sea itself, which was too heavy to push away. The serpent had a sister and a brother. The sister, Hel, became Death. She was given power by Thor to send the dead into nine separate worlds. Her table was made of hunger, the walls of her house were built with agony, and the mortar was horror. The serpent’s brother was the wolf Fenrir. He was bound by chains made of the opening and clamping of fish gills, the footfall of a lynx, the roots of stones under a glacier, the moods of bears and the droplets on the talons of an eagle dropping down on a lamb.

‘Of these three siblings it was the Midgard serpent who remained alive in longest in the sea.’ He smiled. ‘I mean the ocean.’

‘Who was the father?’ she asked.

‘Loki, the god of mischief. Of course, he ended up badly too. Odin had him chained to a rock and venom spat into his face.

‘His writhing caused earthquakes underwater.’

She got up and stretched herself.

‘The Greeks,’ she said, touching her toes, ‘believed in Okeanos, the ocean about the equator shown on the shield of Achilles which kept the known world afloat.’

She told him this and they spoke about Atlantis. She said nothing of Sumer and Enki; Abzu was as private to her as numbers were.

She instead spiralled down the axis of time in the ocean. She held up for him the example of the orange roughy.

‘It is a fish that takes forty years to reach maturity and lives to one
hundred years on the seamounts, but it has been fished nearly to extinction in a generation.

‘Let’s say the Atlantic is 160 million years old,’ she continued. ‘It might be older. We appeared less than one million years ago. We walked in yesterday. It’s not much of a claim. Yet somewhere in the Atlantic right now and in the other oceans, some man, I’m sorry, it’s always a man isn’t it, some man is smashing up a seamount more ancient than any greenwood on land, which he can’t see and refuses to value.’

She was taken aback at her own vehemence. She stopped, then began again. ‘Tens of thousands of seamounts have been destroyed in our lifetime. Any seamount is sure to be demolished the moment it is located. The chains of those bottom trawlers will break into powder the cold-water corals and sponges which were there before there was an English language and which contain in them the most powerful antibiotics and chemicals which might be used for cancer treatment. If this was happening in a science-fiction world we would see it clearly for what it is, but we don’t because it’s happening here and now. It’s obscured by the money someone is making off it. Scientists are partly to blame. We’re always raising our hands after the destruction has taken place. There are scientists who become industrial collaborators, bringing out tailored research for one company or another. I’m lucky to be working at a depth beyond the reach of industry. They want the manganese nodules, gold and fuels that are in the deep, but they’re too expensive to get at now. There’s still some undisturbed time,’ and as she said this she was thinking very precisely of the abyss, its compass, duration, its secrets: of species of hagfish older than the Atlantic, who lived on those sunk from above and tied themselves in knots so as to give their jaws purchase on the rotting and blanched forms of the dead.

It was already dark. They sat at the desk in silence. It had begun to snow; again the winter night, again the illuminated sign above the hotel door spilling out.

These few facts and reflections, which had not even touched on
biomathematics, nonetheless set in front of them a common question, which they were too tired to see: is man the joker god Loki, who must be bound in chains?

They had different understandings of time and space. He worked on the surface, the outside of the world. For him, everything was in flux. He was tasking agents to infiltrate mosques in Somalia and along the Swahili coast. He was concerned with alleys, beliefs, incendiary devices; with months, weeks, days, with indelible hours. For her, an age was an instant. She was interested in the base of the corrosive saltwater column, delimiting through mathematics the other living world which has existed in darkness and in continental dimensions for hundreds of millions of years.

‘Open your eyes. Open them.’

He did so. It was morning. The smoke-blackened room was empty except for a mujahid – from Chechnya by the look of him – who was squatting by the door breaking apart a Zastava machine gun and placing the pieces in a satchel. The colour coming through the windows and door was blue. Yusuf was dressed like a Mogadishu Bakara market trader in jeans, sandals and a short-sleeved shirt, sunglasses tucked in the pocket. Only the scars of a flesh wound on his neck hinted at his cause and fight.

‘You’re alive. Good. Drink this,’ Yusuf said, and passed him a cup of water.

He drank from it.

The Chechnyan brought over the satchel with the gun in it and, at Yusuf’s command, held the oil lamp close to James’s face, close enough to feel the heat of the glass. Yusuf moved in behind the lamp. He had shaved off his beard in the night. His face had become massive, scarred.

‘Why are you here?’ Yusuf asked, in Arabic and the broken English he had learned in Peshawar.

‘I’ve told your men,’ he replied, in Arabic. ‘I’m a water engineer.’ To his own ears, his voice sounded weak and faraway. ‘I wanted, I want, to plan a water system for Kismayo. I was invited.’

‘Not to do something else?’

‘No.’

‘We are fighting a war here.’

‘I understand, but your people need water.’

Your people. Did Yusuf have any people?

There was the sound of laughter from outside, rare laughter, but it altered nothing in there. There was no equality between them. Yusuf was a Somali, never tiresome about black and white, always superior.

The man’s teeth were yellow in the dankness, rodent yellow. The eyes were yellow also, from a liver complaint. Big eyes: he was one of those brigands who never blinked when he pulled a pistol on an unfortunate.

He identified it as a Ceska, a beautiful gun, easy to handle. It must have been a Somali army officer’s sidearm from when the country was a client state of the USSR. The grip had been painted over with enamel flowers, most probably in Afghanistan.

‘Is your work important to you?’

‘Yes, very much,’ he said, and like a prayer he said to himself, water be my cover, water cover me.

Yusuf touched the tattoo on his arm with the pistol. A parachute. The regimental badge.

‘What is this?’ Yusuf asked.

‘A mistake. I had it done when I was young.’

‘Coming here was a mistake.’

The pistol was jammed deeper into his face. He felt the 0 on his cheek, pressed to his teeth.

‘Please, don’t. I am needed. Please, please.’ He wept. He was
shameless. Standing in the sea at the moment he believed was his death he had said nothing, yet now he thought he would say anything to survive, or perhaps he did not believe Yusuf would pull the trigger. The sky was not closing in, he was not turning, no, the pistol was exploratory, another way of getting to know him.

‘You have children?’

‘No children.’

‘A wife?’

‘I am not married. My employees rely on me, and so do …’

‘We will call you Mr Water,’ Yusuf said, decisively.

‘My name is James. I need to make a phone call to my family. I need to let them know I am alive. We can organise a deal. I am worth more alive than dead. I am worth a sum of money.’

Yusuf held the Ceska by its flowery grip as if to pistol-whip him. ‘When we want to know about water, you will tell us. My men wanted to put you to death. I said no, Islam looks gently on the merciful, and your work is merciful. What nation are you?’

‘British.’

‘Correct. You are British and you are worth nothing. There is no money. The Spanish they pay, the Germans they pay, the British they never pay.’

Yusuf broke into long recitations in Somali. After some time, he made an aside in Arabic. ‘How sweet it would be at Eid, if instead of slaughtering an animal in the name of Allah, we would slaughter an unbeliever.’

Involuntarily, James shook. It was a shattered fairytale. Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll cut off his fucking head. Fictions, none of them buoyant. Yusuf believed that Allah had hung an invisible curtain from the top of the sky to the bottom, separating the believers from the unbelievers. He was looking for quarantine, not Leviathan.

‘Do you drink alcohol, Mr Water?’

‘Yes, I drink.’

‘Alcohol separates you from the Creator.’

‘No doubt,’ he said. He was rotted through, anyone could see that; his kidneys infected, his piss sea green, and the sun was coming, illuminating the doorway, the shrine in the courtyard, but he wanted a tumbler of whisky, Macallan, Bell’s, Paddy, whatever; some ice, the bottle left open on the floor beside him.

‘It is important to me that you are treated generously. It is Allah’s wish,’ Yusuf said.

‘Thank you,’ he said, lowering his eyes.

Yusuf demanded submission and James offered it, while the truth of their exchange was that the Somali had ordered him to be held hostage, to be laid in his own waste, and to be beaten there. He had lost a tooth, another two were loose, his nose was broken, his ribs fractured. They had sliced open his hand and shoulder with a blade and in another tussle a mujahid had reached in and grabbed his cock and balls and yanked down on them, tearing a muscle.

It was true. He was worth nothing. Yusuf already had his passport, phone, electronic tablet and his watch. Her Majesty’s Government would never pay for his release. They would not even acknowledge the kidnapping in his case, unless forced to do so by a precise piece of reporting.

Somalia was dried up. The rains had failed. The people were dying of thirst, and he knew better than any real engineer that he was alive only on the promise of water. He was grateful to live on as Mr Water.