Soon they were swimming side by side, out towards the end of the point and the open sea beyond. Every sixth stroke allowed him a brief glimpse of her, head down, arms arcing like a windmill into the water as she powered her way through the waves. He focused on his breathing and technique, made sure he pointed his toes and kept his elbows bent on the curve of the stroke, as if the instructor was walking the edge of the pool beside him, calling out, correcting, urging him on even as his lungs began to explode. He would not fall behind. He would keep up and be there with her, even as she found her rhythm and pushed on again.
By the time she relented and pulled up he was over twenty metres behind and breathing hard. They must have been going at it for over half an hour, easily fifteen hundred metres, maybe more, based on his normal pace. He swam to her and began treading water. They looked back to the coast. Distance over water is always exaggerated, but it looked as if they were a lot further out than they should be, two or even three kilometres. The fort was just a blemish on the white ligament of beach. He pulled up his goggles, rinsed them out, put them back over his eyes and plunged his head into the water. Suspended particles of sediment spun in a random dance all around him, a fraction only of the billions of tonnes of red mud and silt ripped from the heart of the continent by the spring rains and pumped into the sea like blood. He pulled his head out of the water.
‘We should start back,’ he said.
After twenty minutes of hard swimming, they were, it seemed, even further out to sea. He touched her foot and pulled up. She lifted her head from the water. He bobbed next to her and stretched his arms out to triangulate on the fort and a small hill to the east that should have been somewhere not far inland from the hotel.
‘We’re getting pushed out by the current from the river,’ he said finally. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, her breath coming in short gasps. She looked worried.
‘We should swim parallel to the current, not against it, and try to break out of it.’ He pointed towards the hill and the place where he figured the hotel should be.
They made good progress through the water. Both instinctively slowed their stroke rate and breathing to conserve energy. She was a strong swimmer, but now she was tiring and he slowed to stay with her. The combination of a freshening sea breeze and an opposing current began to build the height of the waves, and they had to work up each steepening wall of water before falling down the long backside into the trough and then back up into the next face. They were expending almost as much effort working across the waves as they had going directly against the current.
They stopped again to rest and gauge progress. They were now even further out. They had been in the water for almost two hours. Clouds covered the sky, and the surface of the water was no longer blue, but the colour of dull iron. The air was getting cooler. Helena was shivering. She wrapped her arms around herself, frog-kicking beside him. He pulled her to him and rubbed her back and arms with his hands, trying to create some friction to warm her muscles.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said to himself as much as her. ‘It’s just like a rip. If we keep moving along the shore, we should find a place where the current starts to ease, and maybe flows back in, like an eddy.’
‘Physics,’ she said, teeth chattering.
‘Exactly.’
They started swimming.
By the time the sun was touching the edge of the water, they had been dragged further away from shore; how far he could no longer estimate with any hope of accuracy. Any detail along the coast had melted away, and all that remained was a dark strip of low-lying topography, darker than the churning water, increasingly obscured by the peaks of the building waves. The swell sucked them from crest to trough and then launched them back into the darkening heavens, the first shorelights appearing now in brief, flickering glimpses.
He concentrated on his technique, tried to optimise every movement. Now he swam almost constantly with eyes above the churning surface, keeping her close. They had slowed considerably, perhaps down to a couple of hundred metres through the water every ten minutes. Gone was the powerful technique of a sliced forward entry; her stroke was now slow and deliberate – each arm seemed to hover in the air for a moment before it fell with a splash into the water ahead, to be replaced a while later by the other, equally tired, equally limp, to fall in its turn into the water, as she urged herself forwards, scouring the last joules of energy from dwindling reserves. They were exhausting themselves and losing ground. At least they seemed to be moving laterally along the shore. Somewhere the current had to ease and turn back in on itself.
A faint metallic sound cut through the water, like a steel nail tapping on a tin cup. At first, he ignored it – just the noise of the water playing on his ears. But slowly, it got louder. And then there was no mistaking it – a propeller, closing fast, probably from seaward.
He pushed his head up and out of the water and yelled to Helena to stop. He was in a trough between two waves, dark water in every direction. He waited for the swell to catapult him upwards and, as it did, he swung himself around towards the sound. White spume snaked across a field of corrugated liquid that stretched away as far as he could see. Again, he used the brief seconds on the wave’s crest to scan the churning water. He called to Helena to do the same.
‘I think there’s a boat coming,’ he shouted. ‘Keep your eyes open.’
Again and again, he rode the swell up and each time he could see nothing but the embers of the horizon and the roiling surface of the Gulf of Guinea.
‘There it is!’ she yelled from the top of a mountain of water. For the briefest moment, her goggles flashed red and pink before she tumbled down the backside of the wave. Up he went, straining to see in the direction she had signalled.
And there it was, a black sliver bouncing over the surface. It was only a hundred metres or so away, ploughing its way to shore, white spray shooting from its bow as it sliced through the waves. Two figures stood in the boat, rocking back and forth to steady themselves against the roll of the swell, fishermen returning home after a day on the banks.
He called out to them. Each time he neared the crest of a wave he pushed his body up from the water with two strong kicks and yelled and waved his arms over his head in the universal sign of distress. Helena had moved half a wavelength away, so that each time he was sucked back down into a trough, she was on a crest, waving and calling out to the fishermen.
The boat was closing now. But it was making for a destination further west, so that as the craft came closer to shore, it also drifted further away from them. The boat’s engine chugged away against the current, puff-puffing little clouds of blue smoke that dissipated quickly in the wind. Every few seconds, a white sheet of spray erupted from the bow and covered the men as the boat lurched from trough to peak, the red, green and yellow stripes along the hull now clearly visible. He screamed louder, pushed himself up and out of the water with all his force. Please just look over here. Surely, you’ve got to see us. Still the boat lurched along, the men intent on home, perhaps already thinking of wives, children, lovers waiting, a warm fire and hot food. He yelled until his throat was raw, until he could produce only a coarse rasp.
And then it was clear that they were not going to stop. He watched in silence as the craft shrank away and then finally dissolved into the cantor set of lights blinking on the shore.
‘Assholes,’ he breathed.
He sculled his way towards her and put his arm around her waist. She was cold and shivering uncontrollably. He pulled her to him and held her close, rubbing her arms and back, trying to force heat into her body. He looked at his watch. They’d been in the water almost three and a half hours now. The danger of hypothermia was real. If they didn’t get out of the water soon, they would be in real trouble. And as he held her and rubbed her arms and back, he realised: we could die here. How stupid that would be.
They tried to go on, but after their efforts to attract the boat they were both almos
t exhausted. Her shoulders and back had cramped up, and she could now only manoeuvre with her legs. ‘I’m sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m sorry.’
She lashed herself to his back, piggy-back style, her hands gripping his shoulders, and he tried to pull her along, breast-stroking like some crippled four-legged mutant frog. It would help to keep her warm, and they had to keep going, east, parallel with the current, away from the mouth of the river.
After what felt like an hour but was probably only a few minutes, he noticed that she had stopped kicking. Her full weight was now on him, and he could feel his strength draining away with the extra effort.
‘Hel,’ he said between breaths. ‘You OK?’
She tightened her arms around him a moment, just a pulse. She was fading. He asked her about her studies, but she just mumbled something about statistics and tailed off into silence.
‘What should we name our kids?’ he said, labouring beneath her.
‘I like Adam,’ she said, brighter. ‘And Ethan.’
‘And for a girl?’
‘I’m not going to have girls.’
‘What do you have against girls?’
‘Nothing. I just know I’m going to have boys.’
‘Humour me.’
‘Beryl. My mother’s middle name.’
‘Beryl it is,’ he said.
‘Ethan.’
‘OK. Ethan.’
By now it was very dark. He tried to decipher the clusters of lights strung along the shore, to identify some landmark by which to judge their position, but nothing was familiar or known. Finally, he settled on a jumble of closely spaced white and yellow lights, brighter than the rest, almost dead ahead, and held this point fixed, as if it could provide succour simply by being there. He was near exhaustion. His limbs felt like sag rubber. The lights on the shore, his compass, divided and drifted apart like some back-lit micro-organism asexually reproducing under the microscope, fusing again only when he summoned the effort to refocus his eyes. He knew that he was flirting with the edge of consciousness. Helena had not spoken for a long time.
And then she said: ‘It’s getting warmer. I can feel it.’
She was right. The wind had dropped. The sea was warming. They must be moving into shallower water. He looked at his cardinal point on the shore. Within the cluster, one intensely bright point of light blinked behind the edge of the waves, a cool Rigel blue, separate and distinct from the smaller stars in the whorl. The lights were breaking up, separating.
‘We’ve hit the back-current,’ he said. A final reserve of glycogen pumped into his body from deep within. ‘We’re being pulled back towards the shore.’
Helena tightened her grip on his shoulders and said: ‘I think I can swim now.’
She slipped off his back and began a slow steady sidestroke. Soon they were making good progress towards the shore. The water continued to warm, and the current was pulling them along quickly now. A flat moon peeked out from behind the clouds, splashed molten gunmetal across the surface of the sea.
They made shore on a dark, tree-fringed beach a few hundred metres from a small boat harbour. The wind had died off almost completely now and a gentle surf washed them like drifting corpses into the shallows and up on to the beach. They lay side by side on the sand, prostrate supplicants, chastised but unrepentant.
The next day, they sat in the hotel restaurant and ordered breakfast. They were the only people in the place.
‘It was funny, yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was quite prepared to die. I was surprised. It didn’t seem difficult at all.’
He cracked open the steaming shell of a boiled egg. ‘Funny? I don’t think so.’
‘What I mean is, now that we are together, I am not afraid of the future. Whatever it brings.’ She sipped her tea and looked out of the window. After a time, she said: ‘Do you think there are sharks here?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I expect so.’
‘We were lucky,’ she said.
‘We were stupid.’
She smiled. ‘Thank you for going back and getting our rucksacks last night.’
He had found them just where they had left them the day before, on the sand near the rocky edge of the little bay at Elmina point.
‘My camera was in there. Our wedding photos.’
‘I guess we got lucky,’ he said.
‘Yes, we are,’ she said still looking out of the window.
‘People here are very honest.’
‘I meant we’re lucky to be alive. To have found each other in all of this…’ she swept her arm towards the beach and the sea ‘…this confusion.’
‘The improbability of life.’
‘Impossibility, more like. Boltzmann knew that.’
‘Entropy.’
She nodded.
‘Please don’t go,’ he said.
March 13th. Geneva
I drop the manuscript on to the bed beside me. It’s still dark out, no traffic yet. My phone buzzes. I reach for it, knock the empty whisky bottle from the side table. I don’t remember drinking that much, but it explains the pounding in my head. I pick up my phone and, after a few attempts, get the print recognition to work. The thing lights up, this tether to the way the world wants me to be. It’s a message from Maria: Be there. Don’t be late. This is IMPORTANT.
I consider calling her, decide I can’t deal with another of those conversations right now. About how I am the worst thing that ever happened to her, such a disappointment, about how everything is just so difficult, always a battle. I type out two letters: O and K. Press send.
I sit a while staring at the wall. Fear creeps over me like the cold air flowing from the window I forgot to close last night.
I Google this guy Ludwig Boltzmann. Austrian physicist, developed the theory of entropy, encapsulated in his (apparently) famous equation S = k Log W, which describes the inexorable tendency of the universe to move from highly ordered states to more disordered ones. This impulse towards disorder or randomness is what drives the apparent forward movement of time, or at least that’s what Wikipedia claims. Suffering from bipolar disorder, Boltzmann hanged himself in 1906 in Duino, near Trieste, at the age of fifty-two. Jesus, fifty-two. But who cares, right? We’ve all got our own lives to lead, our own problems.
Still, it makes me think, all of it. Those stories of my parents in Africa. Guess that’s what he intended, reaching out from oblivion like this. I never doubted that he loved her, that they loved each other. You could see they were compatible. Even as a kid I could tell. You could just feel it, whenever you were around them. Everyone did. And then something went wrong. Events just got in the way, I guess. That tendency to disorder.
That’s sure what happened with me and Maria. I don’t know if we ever were right for each other, not fundamentally, like my mum and dad were. It felt like we were, at the beginning. But it hasn’t been like that for a long time. She just doesn’t understand me. And looking back, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t think she ever did. I sure as hell don’t understand her.
Problem is, we never talked about it. We never set out any rules. We just tripped along, day by day, hoping that the physical attraction and the buzz would be enough, but we never established how we would do it together. Any of it. And then, one day, I realised that we were both just chasing our own ideas of life. And whatever overlap there might have been at the beginning, whatever intersection Rachel provided us, had just corroded away. At least my old man, he had something with my mum, some kind of connection. Some kind of glory.
I met Constantina on the internet. One of those dating sites. I signed up while I was still with Maria. I wasn’t looking for anything other than sex, certainly not any kind of serious relationship. It was a bit of a joke, actually. I never thought something would come of it. All I put on my profile was: Don’t want everything to be a f—ing competition. That was it. That and an old picture of me that I like. Constantina replied the next day and we met a week later at a pub down by the river. She
was an absolute knockout, and we talked a long time about nothing in particular, nothing serious. We fucked on the first date.
But now she wants more. A lot more than I can give her. She’s ten years younger than me, for one thing. A different time in her life. She wants kids, a man who will be a good husband. That used to mean something different to what it means now. Well, no thanks. I’ve fallen into that well, tasted that domestic poison. Felt the fire die inside me.
Jesus, sometimes I sure do wish my mum had been around to talk to me when I was growing up. I reckon she had it all figured. Sounds like my old man thought the same, the things he wrote. So, what the hell happened? What went wrong?
I wonder if Boltzmann ever considered the role of stupidity as a driving force in entropy. God knows, a lot of the disorder I’ve seen has been a result of just plain stupid things that people did, sometimes knowingly, often not. Maybe that’s why the symbol for entropy is a capital S. It’s pretty much the one thing I’ve come to understand. That people are stupid. There you go. A rule to live by. Understand that and you can explain just about everything. A hell of a lot more useful as a construct for modelling the world, I figure, than Boltzmann’s equation.
Before the Revolution
The engineer’s father was from that stronger generation when being a man was still important, when the differences between the sexes were real and understood and valued.
The engineer had never seen his father, who was a lawyer, cry. Not once, not ever. He’d seen him angry, and bitter, and many times as a boy he’d seen him drunk, stumbling about the house, knocking over furniture and spilling stuff on the floor, and a few times, when he wasn’t supposed to and had crept downstairs after bedtime drawn by the shrieks and the hard, brutal whispers, he’d seen his father raise his hand and his mother turn her head and cower in the corner. But he’d never seen him cry. Now there were websites with names like Man Up that encouraged men to show their feelings, to blubber like little girls. He wondered what his father would have thought of this, what he would have said. Probably nothing. Just a grunt, or, if he was drunk, he might have said something like, ‘Fucking feminists. Trying to cut our balls off, so they can sew them on and pretend they’re men.’ As a boy, he’d always wondered just what such an operation might entail, and where exactly the scrotum, and presumably the penis, would attach (the feminine form in all its glorious complexity then still a terrifying unknown), and how, once accomplished, that might allow them, over time, to be transformed into men.
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