Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘I fired my client.’

  She frowned. She looked good like that, he thought. Naked and frowning. ‘Why?’

  The engineer stood looking at her. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘So are you,’ she said, smiling now.

  ‘We should go back,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I love my wife,’ he said.

  ‘I know. You have a very beautiful family.’

  He sat facing the water, pulled his knees up to his chest.

  She shifted, sat beside him. He could feel the warm softness of her hip against his.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she said after a while.

  ‘We should get back,’ he said. He stood and started towards the water. She followed.

  Later that afternoon, after they had fed Adam and put him down for his nap, the engineer was sitting in the living room, reading a book. Francine came to him. She took off her clothes and stood naked before him. He did not tell her to go away, to put her clothes back on. He sat and looked at her face and breasts and her long, tanned legs. When she stepped closer, he reached up and explored the topography of her body with his hands. She parted her legs and moaned. And when she kneeled in front of him and started undoing his shorts, he did not stop her. When she took him in her mouth, he closed his eyes, and when she mounted him, he did not tell her to stop, nor did he tell her that he loved his wife. And when she shuddered and cried out, he bucked into her as if he were a man of twenty again.

  They stayed like that a long time, holding each other in the coolness of the afternoon breeze. After, when they went to check on Adam, he wasn’t in his room. They looked through every room in the house, the sand box where he liked to play, the woods around the house. When they finally found him, he was standing on the lakebed beside the dock, looking up at the surface of the water, his mouth open in a little round ‘o’, his blond hair gently swaying in the bottom currents, his face pale and strangely coloured by the lake water.

  The engineer jumped in and pulled his son out of the water and lay him on the dock and administered CPR for more than an hour, pounding the little boy’s chest until the ribs broke, shouting his despair to the empty heavens. Then he carried the boy’s lifeless body to the boat and laid him inside and started the engine and started down the lake.

  March 17th. London

  I wake up early. I’m nearly halfway to work by the time I realise I don’t work anymore. This whole thing with Dad’s manuscript and Maria threatening to take Rachel away has got me rattled. Last night I made the mistake of rereading that last story, the one about Adam dying. All night I dreamed about it, him standing on the bottom, looking up through that green water, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get to him. It was as if my limbs had turned to hardwood.

  I get off at Kew, and it’s a nice day so I decide to walk around Kew Gardens for a while. I haven’t been here for years, not since Maria and I brought Rachel. She was seven, I think. Three years ago, then. Makes you think. About time and all. It’s all you have, and yet you can never hold on to even a small piece of it.

  We are all weak. No one is strong. Not even the people you look up to because you think they somehow have strength where you have not. I know my old man was weak, that he was flawed. No wonder he and Mum never talked about it, about how Adam died. Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t even imagine. I really can’t. To live with that inside you. There must have been a big part of him that didn’t want me to ever read this. I can imagine him wrestling with it. Wanting to create a legacy, a memory of the way he would have wanted to be remembered, rather than being straight with the truth. Because the truth is hard. It hurts. People don’t want to tell it about themselves, and they don’t want to know it about others. Much preferred is the pleasant fiction, the confirmed bias, the mainstream ideal. No one wants to admit that we are all fucked up, that we are all imperfect, vain, frightened, too easily flattered, so readily tempted. Christ, I sound like the Old Testament.

  And yet we go on with our fictions, our made-up lives, trying to mirror some television or internet ideal of who we should be, what we should look like, how we should act. It’s worse now than when I was a kid, I can see that with Rachel. Everything is instantaneous now, universal. Twenty million views in an hour. A hundred million likes. Groupthink has arrived, only a few decades late, and in a more perfect form. It crosses borders and knows no barriers of language or time. And even in the coarsening of every message, the same artifice prevails, stronger than ever. This is how I want you to see me. Not how I really am. I am neither as mean, as screwed-up, as perfect, as strong or sexy or rich or smart or victimised as I would want you to believe. Everything is an exaggeration, a fabrication, a portrait for the king. Trust no one. Not even yourself.

  I am inside the big glasshouse when my phone rings. It’s Maria. I answer. I listen. She hangs up before I have a chance to reply. There’s not much for me to say, anyway. I close my phone, drop it into my pocket, keep walking.

  It’s not until I reach the exit that I process what’s just happened. Maria has filed for sole custody of Rachel. Somehow, she knows I’ve quit my job. And Troy has filed assault charges against me. I don’t stand a chance, and she knows it.

  Red Sea

  The day the work was to begin, the engineer rose before the sun. The camp was dark and quiet. He dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and walked barefoot to the rocky cove to snorkel the reef for the last time. The salt crust of the sebkha was cool under his feet. As he walked, the sky lightened. Beyond the low dunes, a barren desert coastline stretched away towards Arabia and the red edge of the world as day came.

  The sea was flat and calm and not yet as blue as it would become later in the day when the sun was at its highest and the breeze would come up and carry the mauves and violets and deep aquamarines arcing from the surface to his eyes. All of this, the blueing sky and the mirror white of the flats and the blue surface of the sea, he determined he would never forget. And of everything else that lay hidden like some childhood treasure beneath that surface, he would make it so he would remember it for the rest of his life.

  By the time he reached the water’s edge, the first radians of the sun’s disc had pierced the horizon. A lone freighter tracked across the mirage, heading west, bound, he guessed, for Suez. He thought of Helena, wondered what she was doing, who she was with – but as he had so many times over the past few days, he pushed the thought away before it could be answered.

  The engineer pulled on his fins and mask and slipped into the water. In the shallows, the water was warm. As he waded out, he could feel the cooler, deeper water envelop his legs. Then he was in and swimming hard. After weeks of this, his shoulders were strong, his technique improved. He surged ahead, felt the power in his body. His breath rasped through the snorkel tube as he cut the tense morning surface. The sea churned and swirled in his ears. The water was very clear, as clear as any he had seen anywhere, here or in the Med or the Caribbean. Beneath, sand gave way to the first corals, scattered, fist-sized blooms of soft crimson and polyp green.

  Fish approached, inquisitive and unafraid, nibbled the skin of his arms. At the reef slope, where the water deepened, he lifted his head and looked back towards the shore. Morning sun lit the rocks of the point. He could see the new orange survey flags fluttering on the near shore, and beyond, the work camp, the generator, the portable cabins, the excavators and water tanks, men and equipment stirring now; all of this come overland from Cairo and already covered over in a layer of Sinai dust so thick that for a moment he imagined that the desert had reclaimed these intrusions, pulled them in and swallowed them up.

  He took a deep breath and plunged down into the cooler water below.

  A swarm of pink-and-lilac basslets engulfed him. Silver mackerel shimmied past, too many to count. He reached out for them, fingers searching through the blue, but they slipped deeper and filtered away into the coral canopy below. He followed them down, the weight of the sea pressin
g in his ears, the coral reaching up towards him. A prehistoric leatherjacket peered out at him from its staghorn hide, mouthing words he could not hear, then retreated into the darkness. All around were trumpetfish, wrasses of every colour and pattern, transparent skeletal cardinalfish, schools of yellowtail scad, damsels so exquisite as to have been crafted by genius. And hovering in the dark water just beyond the slope, their eyes lambent and cold, a pair of reef sharks, separate as the sea itself.

  He burst to the surface, filled his lungs. He had drifted out and towards the point. Plenty of time still. He took off his mask, spat into the visor, ran his fingers along the glass, rinsed it out and sealed it back to his face. Then he breathed deep, exhaled, sucked in another lungful of air and dived down until he was just above the pitted stems and branches of the canopy. Face down, arms and legs splayed wide, he floated in the brine and peered down into the swirling maze.

  A trance of blue and yellow flashed past his mask and, for a moment, he thought he would lose his balance and tumble out to sea. After the sand and rock and monotonous desert sky, it was as if the solar spectrum had ruptured and spat its photons into the ocean to be made flesh and scale. Above, the sky-lit surface rippled and warped in the breeze he knew was there, but could not breathe. And what struck him, this last morning, as he felt the oxygen in his body burn away and his mind start to drift, was that all of this life, this wealth, this fierce display, was impossible, and the workings of it all, the delicate, ever-changing equilibrium of light and energy and matter, he could not fathom. As with so much in his life, he saw everything, could describe its physics, the workings of its growth and reproduction and death even, but of its essence, he understood nothing. Here, in this small cove on the southern coast of the Sinai Peninsula, he swam within a small and perfect mystery whose secrets he was about to destroy.

  Three weeks before, he’d stood outside the boardroom and run through the presentation in his mind one more time. Under his arm, the charts and graphs summarising two months’ work, all that he’d learned and seen reduced to the compact and precise language of his trade: bathymetrics, monitoring points, distributions of species of concern, predicted impact zones, proposed mitigation measures, development options.

  He ran his finger under the collar of his shirt, rubbed away some of the dead skin from the back of his neck. When he looked up, the secretary was watching him. She was dressed in a spotless grey hijab. Her face was young but severe, wrapped tight in an off-white headscarf that lent her complexion a greyish pallor that reminded him of shark skin. She frowned. He smiled at her, aware of his own appearance. He hadn’t had time to cut his hair since returning from Sinai, and its unruly curl had been bleached by thirty-one days of salt and sun. That morning, he’d cut himself shaving with the cheap, plastic disposable razor, and the two nicks still oozed blood. His suit was wrinkled after weeks folded in his case.

  ‘You are the engineer?’ she said in English.

  He pulled out one of his business cards, placed it on the desk before her. ‘Aiwa,’ he said. Yes. ‘Ezeyika.’ Hello.

  She glanced at the card a moment, raised her eyes again. ‘You are expecting someone else, also?’ she replied in English, ignoring his Egyptian slang.

  ‘Someone else?’

  ‘Your senior.’

  ‘No. Just me.’

  She stared at him for a time. Looked right into his eyes. It was unusual for a Muslim woman to challenge male authority with such brazen and forceful eye contact. He looked away first.

  She waited another moment and then she said: ‘The board is meeting now. Wait, please.’

  He nodded and sat, feeling suddenly alone in the world.

  In the end, they kept him waiting for almost two hours.

  When he was finally ushered into the room, the first thing that hit him was the smell: half-eaten falafel and the sharp waft of Egyptian cigarettes mingled with an overpowering odour of stale sweat. It was a fifth-floor office, with grimy metal-framed windows that looked out across a narrow street to a row of Nasser-era apartment buildings, their afterthought balconies strung with drying laundry, the walls studded with the buzzing hives of dripping retrofit air-conditioning units. He couldn’t see the sky. The room was hot – hotter than the waiting room, despite the single ancient AC system wheezing in the corner.

  Eight faces looked up at him from around a long conference table. Ahmed, his direct contact, the one he’d negotiated the contract with, stared up at him from the far end of the table. The engineer smiled. Ahmed sat expressionless.

  The chairman raised his eyebrows, puffed out his cheeks and lit a cigarette. His skin was pitted and shone with sweat. ‘Welcome, young man,’ he said, exhaling smoke, waving his cigarette towards an empty chair at the end of the table.

  The engineer, who no longer felt young in any way, placed his folio of charts on the easel nearby and sat in the indicated place. Sweat bloomed in the backs of his knees and at his temples and soaked his shirtfront. Nothing about this project had gone to plan. The field work had been much more difficult than he’d expected. Approvals from the ministry had taken more than twice as long as he’d allowed for, and now he was more than two weeks late and well over budget. He’d only just finished the last graphics for the presentation a few hours earlier. They were rushed and inexpert.

  ‘Please,’ said Ahmed.

  The engineer stood, took a breath, flipped over the first page. He faced his audience. Other than Ahmed, they were complete strangers.

  The chairman butted out his cigarette, looked down the length of the table at him. ‘Begin,’ he said.

  There were to be no introductions.

  He tried his best. He presented all the data, described the predicted impacts. He offered alternatives. A cove ten kilometres further east where the coral was much less dense, with a natural channel out to sea. That one he’d swum half a dozen times, verifying the details himself. And another natural harbour, or the start of one, five kilometres further along again, larger than the primary site and almost barren of coral. Both of these alternatives would provide similar levels of shelter during winter storms. The further option had larger capacity, and in both, the damage to the reef would be much less, almost negligible for the further option. He had also secured preliminary approval for these options. As he turned over each page, the tick of the AC grew louder, the silence in the room deeper.

  He flipped over the final chart. ‘Questions?’ he said.

  There had been none.

  After almost three-quarters of an hour in the water, he clambered up on to the rocks and towelled dry. The sun was higher in the sky now and it was already hot. Out by the reef edge, the cutter-suction dredge manoeuvred into position, a rusty spoil barge in tow. A thin line of black smoke rose from its grey funnel into the flawless blue sky. Voices skipped out over the water, crewmen preparing the ship for the day’s work, and then the clank-clank-clank of the anchor chain running through the hawser pipe. The engineer stood on the shore and watched the dredge drop its great spider-like stanchions into the water. The cutter suction head, a gaping maw filled with rotating blades and grinders, dropped into position. Stanchions were secured. The spoil barge was tied alongside and the slurry hose attached and made fast. They were ready.

  Thick black smoke belched from the ship’s funnel and drifted inland on the sea breeze towards the rocky hills. The sound of the engines rose and fell as the cutters bit into the reef. Not long after, he watched the first spoil, a thick slurry the colour of vomit, spew from the discharge pipe and shudder into the barge.

  He turned away and walked back up across the sebkha towards camp. The groan of the dredge followed him on the sea breeze. He felt faint. It would not take long. By the end of the day, he would be back in Cairo and on the way back to Cyprus, the money they owed him deposited in his account. And the reef would be gone, the cove dredged out to make way for the new marina. Maybe she would still be there waiting for him, but he doubted it.

  March 18th. London


  I’ve just read my old man’s story about the reef in Egypt. This one was handwritten, and was dated October 25th, 2002, Egypt. He doesn’t write another story again for a long time. Ten years until the next one, and then only three more in the sixteen years before he dies, all in the last week of his life. It’s as if the fire went out, whatever was pushing him to write.

  The reef story has a sketch of the coastline at the bottom of the second page, with what seem to be sampling points shown with arrows. He coloured it, too, with areas of sebkha and reef shaded in yellow and blue pencil. The word ‘slut’ is scrawled across the bottom of the page. The letters are pressed into the paper from repeated tracings, so that its mirror is embossed on the back of the leaf. I’ve been sitting here with my eyes closed, feeling the ridges on the back of the paper with my fingertips.

  I brought up satellite images of the Sinai on Google Maps, zoomed in, made my way along the coast. I think I found the place he was describing. There is a big marina with three hotels clustered around it, and you can even see ranks of sunbeds covering the beach just beyond the rocky point. There are reefs a kilometre offshore, patches of lighter blue showing through dark sea blue.

  What follows is not another of Dad’s stories, but a newspaper clipping, faded a deep yellow, the paper brittle, poor quality, taped to a sheet of A4 writing paper. It’s from the Cyprus Daily Mail, the island’s English-language newspaper, dated the next day, October 26th, 2002. It reads simply:

  A man and a woman were killed yesterday near the village of Kakopetria when their car left the road. It took emergency services over three hours to reach the car, which fell almost three hundred metres into a steep wooded valley. The dead have been identified as Mr Velimir Kontosky, twenty-six, the son of a Russian aristocrat and distant cousin of the last tsar, and Mrs Helena Scofield, forty-four, Canadian, the wife of an expatriate engineer working for a Cyprus-based offshore company.