The Sea Bed

by Marele Day

  ‘Reptiles can stay still for long periods of time,’ the little boy responded bravely. This did not sway the carp, however.

  They ordered the boy to review the data, examine the parts once again and see if a different whole could be assembled from them. ‘Do not bring a dragon back here a second time,’ the head carp said sternly.

  The boy set off once again. Out here on his own, away from the critical eye of the carp, he could play and be fanciful. He could even let the mission drop. But the boy wouldn’t let go till he’d exhausted all possibilities. If he couldn’t convince the carp of the dragon he’d put the creature in his own private cupboard where things that didn’t fit anywhere else were thrown in higgledy-piggledy.

  The boy focused on the parts that he’d assembled into a dragon. He had a strange feeling that the carp were watching, waiting for him to make a mistake.

  Yugen stopped, caught hold of himself. Imaginary carp were discussing an imaginary dragon. He picked up a grain of rice from the shrine altar, pressed his fingertips against its hardness, placed it in his mouth and tasted it. Rice. All his senses confirmed it.

  The monk looked at the dragon again. It hadn’t gone away. It even appeared to have moved a little.

  24

  Sea folk

  Lilli sat at the back of the bus, creating a long stretch of space between herself and the driver, as if he were her personal chauffeur. It was a new touring-style vehicle with panoramic windows. The wipers made fans of clarity on the rain-speckled windscreen.

  The humidity of Boat Harbour had turned into a fine misting drizzle. The wet season was usually finished by now, leaving the summer days hot, dry and stif ling. The moistness pervaded everything, only air-conditioning kept it at bay. On the air-conditioned bus it was cool and quiet.

  As the built-up area thinned out, so did the traff ic. Occasionally on the dark ribbon of road a truck passed, spraying the side of the bus with rain. The buses heading south departed on the hour from Boat Harbour. It was a thirty-five-minute ride, then a ten-minute walk to the Sea Folk Museum.

  Lilli had a new set of timetables and studied them as if she were a quiz contestant and this was her special subject. Some of the Boat Harbour transport information was available on the internet. Lilli had printed this out and brought it with her. She loved the tiny print, the orderliness of columns, the neat efficiency of timetables, their assurance and beautiful certainty. The local ferry timetables were available only in hard copy, from the terminal itself. The one for her island was on a single sheet of paper.

  Another truck went past, its wheels churning water. Lilli longed for a full-blown storm. The smell of ozone, the boom of thunder, cuts of lightning. She loved to be woken by the sound of it pelting on the roof. This misty drizzle did not wake her. It was insipid, tired, had no energy. In the sea the sound of it disappeared.

  Lilli checked her watch. Three minutes to go. She moved closer to the front door. Up ahead she could see a bus shelter. There was nothing else around except for roads cutting into neat green countryside.

  ‘Sea Folk Museum next stop,’ the driver announced through his microphone. He pulled over and opened the doors.

  Lilli nodded and said ‘Thank you’ as she alighted.

  ‘Down there to the left.’

  When his passenger was safely on the ground the driver continued on his way.

  Lilli put up her umbrella. The air was damp and salty. She took the side road that wound through grassland and copses to arrive at the Sea Folk Museum. It was built on the edge of a plateau, a hedge of dense dark foliage providing protection from the drop to the ocean below. On a sunny day you’d be able to see for miles.

  Lilli wondered when the need for such a museum had become apparent. There had been nothing like this when she left. Still, she was grateful for its existence, a way of easing herself back in.

  When she had paid the entrance fee and stepped into the exhibition area, the first thing Lilli noticed was the dryness. In this museum that celebrated fishing men and diving women, there was no water, no ocean.

  Lilli used to imagine what it would be like if the entire ocean drained away and you could see everything at a glance— the mountains of rocks, forests of seaweed, sandy plains, the shallow cradles where stingrays lay. It would be so much easier for the divers; they could just walk along and pick up all the abalone and shellfish. You might even be able to see the sea palace.

  Perhaps you could ladle the water out of the ocean the same way Cedar ladled soup out of the big pot. If everyone brought a bucket it could easily be done. Lilli decided to discuss the matter with Cedar one day on the way back to the house.

  ‘Well,’ said Cedar, ‘the pot empties but the bowls get full.’

  Hmm. Lilli was carrying Cedar’s big fins, holding them in her arms as if they were a pair of dolls.

  ‘We could pour the water onto the garden.’

  Lilli loved these walking conversations with Cedar. Walking together, talking together. They would pass the ball of conversation backwards and forwards till they reached the house. Lilli’s legs never noticed the steep climb up the hill, nor did her arms complain about the heavy fins when she and Cedar were talking about Big Things.

  Cedar considered the proposition. When they were almost at the house she said: ‘What about the fish? Where would they live if there was no ocean?’

  Ah, the fish. Lilli hadn’t thought about them. A shellfish could last for a while out of water. You didn’t see it die, it just started to smell after a day or two. A fish, on the other hand, you did see. It lay on its side, mouth open. Every so often it leapt into the air, sometimes even did a somersault, coming back down on its other side. Grandfather hit the fish at the base of its head, to stop it dancing.

  ‘And what about us?’ Cedar asked Lilli as she took the fins and rinsed them under the tap with fresh water. ‘What would the divers do with no ocean?’

  Here in the museum was the divers’ life with no ocean. Everything else but—the tools they used, the talisman, baskets, buckets, clothes, and artificial replicas of the divers themselves.

  The ceiling was made of curved timbers coming together like fingertips touching. It resembled the upturned hull of a large fishing boat. The wood was a rich warm brown like the cedar chest of drawers in the house on the island. Suspended from the ceiling was a real boat with fibreglass models of fishermen.

  They were standing up in the boat, wearing skirts of bamboo fibre. The man in the middle had a bamboo hat while the rest of them wore headbands. Some held long rods. Their eyes were fixed, looking into a sea of air. The one with the hat had a short manicured beard. He was looking straight at Lilli. She couldn’t help returning the eye contact. He was well-built, like all the fishermen, broad shoulders, narrow waist. Toned.

  Lilli caught hold of her foolishness and turned her attention elsewhere.

  She gazed at the timber ribbing once again, remembered looking up through blue for the bottom of the boat, lungs screaming for air, climbing through the water to its shark-like shape. Cedar said that it got easier, that your lungs learned, your body and mind learned. But it was never as beautiful as that first time with the sea princess. Her ears didn’t hurt then, her lungs weren’t hungry. She was safe and warm, and the sea was studded with stars.

  On the mezzanine level, above the exhibits, was a glassed-in office area. A man was sitting at a computer. Lilli could see his head and shoulders, the top of the screen. Behind him stood a man in a suit. The two of them had been looking at Lilli, she could tell by the suddenness with which they averted their eyes.

  Lilli began making her way around the exhibits, the replicas and inanimate objects, starting with a perspex box in which lay a polished abalone shell and what looked like a finger of limestone wedged under it. The first primitive diving tool. In the next box was a whole array of instruments. Lilli recognised the large prising tool, a combination of crowbar and knife.

  Cedar called the prising tool her samurai sword. Unlike the fins,
she never let Lilli carry it. With this tool Cedar probed the narrow crevices in rocks, deftly sliding it under an abalone and slicing through the muscle keeping the creature attached to the rock. Then she tucked the samurai sword back into her belt and carried the abalone up to her f loating tub.

  Beside the display of tools was a chart showing the distribution of diving women. Silhouettes of heads marked the few remaining outposts, the last refuges of an endangered species. In Lilli’s own lifetime, the number of active divers had decreased by 70 per cent, with mostly only grandmothers left. The decline in population was due to ‘a reduction in sea resources, and more attractive job opportunities for the younger generation’.

  How dismissive was that simple sentence, bland, impersonal, diminishing.

  Lilli turned to the inverted figure of a deep-water woman, who brought back a sense of the individual lives that the commentary glossed over. The boat from which she dived was on a metal frame suspended from the ceiling high above, to give a perspective of how far she had to swim to reach the seabed. The diving woman carried a stone weight attached to a pulley to allow her to descend swiftly. Around her waist was a lifeline.

  The man in the boat was her tender, usually her husband, the one who watched out for her. He was attuned to his wife’s diving habits, with how long she stayed underwater, ready to respond to her signal when she needed to be pulled up.

  In the museum this harmonious union was forever captured in fibreglass. Great-grandmother and Great-grandfather had been such a pair. In the stories they never fought or argued. ‘If she made him angry he might leave her down there,’ joked Cedar. When she was skilled enough Cedar became a deepwater woman too, with Grandfather tending her.

  It was always this way, the man in the boat and the woman in the water. It never occurred to Lilli that there were diving men till she saw one on TV. She asked Cedar why on the island all the divers were women.

  ‘We don’t feel the cold so much,’ Cedar explained.

  ‘The men could wear something warm,’ suggested Lilli.

  ‘They could,’ replied Cedar, ‘but there is another thing. We are much more careful in the sea. The men are prone to accidents.’

  When Lilli asked Grandfather she got a slightly different story. His grandfather had told him that men went out fishing in their boats and the women stayed near the shore collecting seaweed and shellfish. In ancient times both men and women dived. For island people the sea was their source of food. Not only did they eat what it provided but they traded fish, abalone, bêche-de-mer. Some of the sea folk were itinerant, travelling in small boats, gathering shellfish, drying them then selling them to merchants. Male divers joined deep-ocean fishing f leets. Or they went far away and dived for pearls. Many of them died.

  ‘Were they not being careful?’ asked Lilli.

  Grandfather looked towards the horizon. ‘Their tenders weren’t always,’ he said finally.

  Lilli moved to the last exhibition, a life-size fibreglass figure in full dress—white bonnet tied around her chin, skirt, blouse, thick white gloves. She was one of the shore divers who worked in groups. Her gloved hands were holding onto a wooden bucket. You could just see her prising tool, its weight resting on the lip of the bucket. Rope was wound around the bucket, one end of it tucked into a band around the diving woman’s waist. Her bare legs looked vulnerable. On the f loor in front of her was strewn brown and red synthetic seaweed, a few shells. You could see the edge of silver foil upon which the seaweed was mounted, keeping it in a neat hedge.

  The white uniform seemed to be wet. It clung to the fibreglass body, following the contours of the heavy old breasts, the stoutness of arms and legs. The woman’s face was sunburnt and shiny, her cheeks like autumn apples. From the diver’s waist hung a net bag for her catch. It spread out over the curve of her stomach.

  The diving woman was not smiling. She looked both annoyed and stiff, as if being disturbed at her work. She was standing apart from the two-dimensional divers behind her. Why had she been singled out? Some of the women in the background print were gathered around a fire on the beach, a few bending over, drying their long hair. Others already had land clothes on, their hair dressed, coiled up. A few divers were still in the water on the other side of the charcoal rocks. Their backs were pink in the pale blue sea. They wore small white scarves to keep their hair back but were otherwise naked.

  ‘You don’t want your hair getting in the way,’ said Cedar, tucking hers under a bonnet. ‘You don’t want creatures mistaking it for seaweed, or for anything else they can grab hold of.’

  In very early times divers covered their bodies in striking tattoos, to protect them from sea monsters. Lilli wondered whether they were stripes that resembled ribbons of seaweed, perhaps big circles of fish mouths, eyes. Camouf lage, protection. The illusion of being bigger, bolder, more frightening. Or blending in with the surroundings, hiding in the ordinary.

  Keeping predators away would have been of vital importance in the days before goggles, when divers could see only blurred shapes. They could be bitten by big fish, accidentally tread on stingrays and other bottom-dwelling creatures. In the old photos the feet of diving women were scarred with cuts and other injuries.

  Goggles, fins. Each innovation made the hard work of diving easier. The women had stopped short of air tanks when they saw how quickly the abalone stocks could be depleted. If they were able to stay down for that long at a time all the abalone would be gone in one summer. The furthest they had come was the wetsuit. Not only did it offer protection and warmth but it extended the season so that the divers could work in colder water.

  There were no wetsuits in the Sea Folk Museum.

  Lilli could just remember them arriving on the island, the last in the bay to adopt them. Discussion as to whether to allow wetsuits had gone on for months. The reason for and against was the same: it would make the work more efficient.

  In an effort to satisfy both sides, wetsuits were limited to one per household. Some of the most senior grandmothers refused to wear something that resembled the headless shadow of a person. It showed a lack of respect for the sea.

  It was so exciting the day the wetsuits came. In boxes, on a special boat. All the divers, even the husbands, were down at the port. There was a special ceremony to bless them, with the priest waving branches of sacred leaves.

  Lilli was wary of Cedar’s wetsuit to begin with, it looked so menacing. Cedar encouraged her to touch the suit, get to know it. Cedar said that when she put it on it felt like an allover corset holding everything in, but in the water the suit became surprisingly f lexible.

  ‘What would my mother think of this?’ Cedar said, walking around in it. Cedar became young again when she remembered the Great Ones. Her eyes brighter and her voice playful.

  Sometimes when Cedar was reminiscing she seemed to forget Lilli was there or what they were doing. She could be in the middle of taking washing off the line and she’d stop, with a pair of half-folded trousers hugged to her chest. The old days came filing out of her mouth as if they had been cooped up for years and were finally allowed to go for a run. Then the words stopped and Cedar would stare into space, her mind off somewhere in the past. The photo of Cedar and Pearlie as young divers always made Cedar’s mind wander off. ‘The happiest time of my life,’ she said. But her voice drifted into sadness. Lilli had to bring her back by wiggling her fingers in front of Cedar’s face.

  When there were just the two of them Lilli asked Cedar about Mitsi. ‘Was it my fault?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Cedar reassured her. ‘It was no-one’s fault. Mitsi was different, that’s all, right from the beginning. She was fragile, delicate; not robust like island babies usually are.’ Cedar recalled giving birth to her. ‘It happened when I was diving. I felt the contractions and swam into shallow water. I couldn’t believe it at first, she was coming far too early. Pearlie ran to the village to fetch the midwife but Mitsi slipped out before they even got back. Such a tiny little thing she was. My wa
ter baby.’ Cedar smiled fondly. ‘My little sea princess.’ Then Cedar’s face crumpled. ‘Despite her early arrival she decided she didn’t want to be here after all.’ She looked down at her lap, perhaps remembering when the baby was safe and sound inside her. Somehow Lilli knew to let Cedar be.

  No-one else talked about Mitsi. It was as if she had never existed. Lilli couldn’t even find any photos of her. What did Mitsi look like? Lilli wanted to know.

  ‘Like you. Slender and pretty. Exactly the same,’ Cedar replied.

  ‘Is that why people pretend I’m not there?’ asked Lilli.

  ‘Oh Lilli, that’s not true. You’re just imagining it.’

  But she wasn’t. Now Lilli knew—it was because she reminded them of a ghost.

  Cedar, on the other hand, was glorified after she died, became a legend. She was the best diver of her generation. She had long breath, spent more time under than resting on the surface, gathered lots of seaweed and knew where to find abalone. In her head she carried a map of the seabed and made adjustments for its seasonal changes. She was not afraid of reaching into potentially dangerous crevices.

  Cedar’s last dive was also Lilli’s. They were with a group of divers in a boat used to provide better access to offshore reefs and difficult-to-reach places. When the boat anchored, the women headed for their own favourite spots, their lifelines connected to buoys. Lilli remained on the boat as lookout.

  Although Cedar had long breath she usually didn’t stay under for more than a minute. If only Grandfather had still been alive. He would have known after ninety seconds that something was wrong. Lilli counted to a hundred and eighty, watching the buoy, looking all around to see if Cedar surfaced.

  Finally she left the boat unattended and dived in. She swam towards the buoy, found the lifeline. It disappeared into seaweed. Lilli had to go down there, into those slimy fronds.