by Lee Murray
Gilly yells and waves. He is standing on the reef, a big pāua in each hand. Good meat lies in their flat shells. I swim quickly and climb out onto the rocks, the spray of the big-sea waves splashing over us. Gilly hands me one of the shellfish and scoops the meat out of the other shell.
‘Didya see it?’ I ask.
The pāua shrieks in wordless terror until Gilly bites its brain off at the stem and spits it into the lagoon.
‘See what?’ he asks.
I strip the second pāua out of its protective shell and bite the brain off. At home, Mother fries the brains in coconut oil and sprinkles them with flakes of dried chili. Out here, we just spit them out.
‘Strange fish,’ I explain and bite into the firm meat of the pāua. It grips the rocks like a limpet, so they’re all muscle.
‘You’re a strange fish,’ Gilly replies.
‘Nah, there was a fish, with a weird head and it looked like it was dead, but still swimming.’
Gilly looks out into the lagoon. The water is emerald green and still in the sunlight. ‘Dead fish?’ he echoes.
‘Yeah. It looked half rotted, but still swimming.’
The sea, always such a safe place and a part of everything I know, now feels filled with unknown dangers. Gilly shivers as if he feels it too.
‘Maybe it washed over the reef in the high tide?’ Gilly says. We both look out past the breakers and the swell. The deep water is shades darker and the fishing canoes are laying their nets.
‘We should tell Sarny,’ I say. We should tell Sarny. He says he’s the smartest person in the village, so he must be.
‘Did it try and eat you?’ Gilly asks around a mouthful of pāua meat.
‘Maybe.’ It had teeth. Things with teeth always want to eat you. I tear a chunk off my own pāua and chew it.
‘Wanna work on the boat?’ Gilly asks, his pāua chomped down already.
‘Sure.’ The boat is our project. A canoe of our own, one we can take past the breakers on the reef and maybe, one day, sail to another island. Sarny says there are other islands, so there must be.
We stand together on the wave bashed coral, neither of us ready to dive into the lagoon and swim for the beach.
Gilly laughs, ‘You scared?’
‘Nah.’ I try to laugh too, but my throat has closed up.
‘We gonna stand here till high tide?’
I manage a loose smile. ‘You can wait till the canoes come in, ask them to rescue you.’
‘Or when they come by, you tell them you forgot how to swim,’ Gilly suggests.
‘Last one back has to sled the pig mud to the far field!’ I spring off the rock and into the lagoon. I dive deep and swim hard. Arms and legs curling and dragging me through the water. Faster than a spear. Faster than a striking fish. Faster than—
Gilly swims up beside me, his eyes slitted against the water. We race, both of us reaching out and pulling hard. The sand turns white under us and we run out of the water and on to the beach, laughing at our fear.
‘Beat you,’ Gilly says, his chest heaving with the exertion of the swim.
‘Only cos I let you win,’ I reply. Gilly just shakes his head.
Little Oolee comes running down the beach. She’s half our age and I remember when she was new. Wrinkled, dark, and fresh as a warm egg.
‘Hey! C’mere!’ Oolee yells, waving her arms. We walk towards her, old enough not to run just because a little girl demands it.
‘What?’ Gilly says as the three of us come together on the sand.
‘Booa killed a fish. It come up outta the water. Was on the beach and walking to the village.’
Yesterday, we would have laughed. Told Oolee that Booa was full of it. Not today though. Not after what I’d seen. ‘Was it dead and rotten looking?’ I ask and Oolee’s eyes go wide.
‘Yeah…’ she breathes. ‘Wait, how’d you know that?’ She scowls at me, hands settling on her hips in imitation of Mother.
‘Cos we’re older,’ I reply. ‘Where’s this funny fish?’
Oolee turns on her heel and skips down the beach. We follow and take the path back through the trees and to the village.
Everyone not out fishing has gathered round Booa and his catch. He’s standing there, shaking his fishing spear and looking like he killed a whale on his own.
I ignore Booa and stare at the carcass. The fish is long and draped in loose skin. I crouch and look at it in detail. The head is on an angle, but it has a neck, like some of the things that swim but don’t make good eating.
‘You seen anything like that?’ Booa asks, expecting us to be impressed by his trophy.
‘Yeah,’ I reply. Looking up, I stare at Booa, answering his challenge with one of my own.
Taking a deep breath, I straighten up. ‘I saw it. Came up on me in the lagoon.’
‘Nah,’ Booa waves my words away as if they were flies.
‘Yeah it did,’ Gilly comes to my defence. He’s good like that. If he told Booa the sand was green, I’d agree with him, too.
An elder shuffles forward and pokes the corpse with her stick. ‘Is gotta bad smell to it,’ she warns.
‘It was dead before Booa speared it,’ Gilly says.
‘Nah!’ Booa snaps.
‘Where’d it come from?’ Oolee asks.
‘Deep sea,’ I reply. ‘Out by the horizon. Same place all things come from.’
‘And to which all things return.’ Sarny has come from somewhere, and will tell us what he knows.
‘What is it, Sarny?’ I ask.
‘It’s a dead soul, returned to the sea. Didn’t burn up in the sky-fire, so got washed up here.’
A murmuring goes through the villagers. We all step back, even Booa looks less pleased with his catch.
Sarny stares at the thing’s sagging skin. ‘Burn it. Burn it to dirt and take what remains out past the fishing grounds and let the sea take it.’
We stack wood, coconut husks, and branches to make a fire. Sarny brings hot coals from a cooking fire. No one volunteers to bring the dead fish to the pyre.
‘Booa killed it,’ Gilly says. ‘He should drag it over.’
‘You scared?’ Booa asks him. He knows what to say to make Gilly do something stupid.
Gilly walks over to the dead fish and grabs it by its twin tails. Walking backwards, he drags it through the sand to the fire. ‘Give us a hand,’ he says to me. I look at the thing’s head. Remembering those teeth and the way it came at me.
‘You take the tails, I’ll get the head,’ Gilly drops the thing with a splat and walks past me. I don’t say anything, feeling stupid for being afraid. I grab the tails; they feel soft and slimy under my hands. Gilly’s trying to get a grip on the head. The soft body sags in the middle. He sets it down and gets a handful of the loose grey skin. Together, we lift the body.
‘Gah!’ Gilly lets out a yell and the fish hits the sand.
‘Too slimy for you?’ I tease him. Gilly is staring at his hand and I see blood dripping.
‘You okay?’ my arms are getting tired, so I drop the tails and give the dead thing a wide berth on my way to check on Gilly.
‘Yeah, there’s spines in it. Under the skin, they slid out and got me.’
‘Well, be careful.’ I examine his hand. There’s a line of four punctures running from the heel up to the base of his webbed fingers. Blood oozes out as he pushes at the flesh.
‘You’ll live I reckon.’
‘Let’s burn this thing and work on the canoe.’ Gilly shakes the last of the pain out of his hand and takes a more careful grip on the fish.
We watch it burn, black smoke twisting in the air and giving off a choking stink.
‘Smells like Booa,’ I say, and Gilly grins.
We leave the fire to do its work. We can come back later and scrape up the dirt and then
one of the fishermen can take it way out and dump it.
Our canoe lies in the trees at the far end of the lagoon. We have spent months charring and chipping the heart out of a fallen tree. It is good to work and see the log become more boat-shaped, it keeps us going knowing we are making something that will always be.
When we arrive at the canoe, it is infested with crabs. They hiss at us so Gilly uses his axe and scrapes the smaller ones off the log. The crabs have long arms with pincer-claws that can snip off a finger. The bigger ones rise up on their legs, standing as high as my waist and they charge at us. Their claws sing and crash. We smash them with our axes and drive them back.
At night, the crabs come out of the rocks and shallow water of the lagoon and gather up the charcoal scraps left from our work hollowing out the canoe. They use the charred black chunks to mark symbols on the round stones under the trees. Even Sarny doesn’t know what the crabs’ writing means. Once the crabs are swept aside, we get to work. Yesterday, we burned more of the tree, and now we chip the charred heart-wood out of it. Each cut releases a scent like burning blood and we settle into a rhythm of chopping.
By the time the sun is high overhead, my arms are aching from the work and I straighten, stretching my back and squinting in the bright daylight. Gilly is still chopping, each blow like the thudding pulse of a heart. The beat falters and a moment later, Gilly crumples. I drop my axe. ‘Gilly?’
I rush to his side and crouch down. My friend’s face is grey and his eyes are clouded. ‘Gilly?’ No response. I shake him, feeling the slick coolness of his skin under my touch. The crabs have gathered again, they clack their claws in a drumming rhythm that sounds like a burial chant.
I yell for help until everyone comes to lift Gilly and carry him home. I spend the rest of the day sitting with Mother and Oolee outside the hut where he lies. As the sun descends and the sky burns, Gilly dies.
No one drinks kava or watches the streaming lights in the curtains of green fire that night. I hear the songs of grief and sorrow, the waiata that mark the passing of one of our own. In my pain, I cannot tell if it is the women of the village singing, or if the keening wail comes from my own throat.
In the morning, Gilly’s skin is slack and pale, like the strange fish that poisoned him. Sarny gathers wood and rebuilds the pyre. I stand watching, my eyes streaming from the acrid smoke as Gilly burns to black dirt on the white sand.
‘We must take the remains out towards the horizon,’ Sarny says to the gathered village. ‘We will be rid of the curse when the last of the ashes are lost in the sea far from here.’
I take a gourd and scoop up Gilly’s ashes and the white sand. When I am done, only the swirls in the beach remain for the tide to devour.
Our canoe smells of burnt blood. The crabs have written all over the wood in rows of charcoal symbols. I take a paddle from one of the beached fishing boats and put the ash gourd into the canoe. It is too heavy for me to slide down the beach, but I cannot ask for help. Sarny, Mother, and the elders will tell me to stay in the village until my grief washes away on the tide.
Sitting in the canoe that Gilly and I will never finish, I cry. I see his face when I close my eyes and I hear his laugh in every brush of the waves on the sand.
The canoe rocks from side to side and I grab the edges in panic. The prow of the narrow boat rises and then I feel it move. The sand around the boat is thick with crabs. They move in silence, burrowing under the boat, rocking the canoe as they lift the dugout with me in it. Passing from pincer to claw, I am carried on a rippling tide of red shells to the water. The canoe floats. I take up the paddle and push out through the low breakers of the lagoon.
I follow the path of the fishing canoes through the narrow gap in the reef where the ocean surges. I paddle hard, alternating between sides and watching for the moment when I will be caught by the outward flow of the sea. If I do this right, the water will carry me beyond the reef’s coral teeth. Time it wrong and the coral will eat my canoe and me, too.
I should be afraid; paddling out of the lagoon is dangerous and only experienced fishermen do it. The boys learning to set nets and handle boats on the open water always crouch in the prow and try not to scream when they go out.
Spray erupts in a howling geyser as waves explode against the coral jaw of the reef. My paddle strikes air as the sea drops away. I almost fall on my face. Kneeling in the bottom of the canoe, I watch the sea and brace for the crash. The water hits the bottom of the canoe like it were a flat stone. The slap of it jars my bones.
I paddle hard as my canoe climbs the slope of the next oncoming wave. The carved tip of the boat rises almost vertical and I have to stop paddling and grab the urn of Gilly’s ashes to save them from falling into the storm of white foam.
Then the water calms and the canoe bobs in the swirling current until I take up the paddle again. Rhythmic strokes push the canoe through the water. I tell myself it is like swimming, I am faster than a fish, faster than a spear…
Away from the boiling sea, howling in the throat of the reef, I push on, turning and heading parallel to the island that has been my entire world. Driving the canoe forward, when I look up again, the land is gone and the sun is moving low across the sky. I must let the burning orb travel without me; to follow it would be to go in a circle or go blind. Sarny has many theories about what the sun will do to those who try to make sense of its wanderings.
I paddle until my body aches and the skin on my palms has swollen into bubbles from the friction of the oars. The searing day has dried the skin of my arms and back into rough scales.
The sea is endless. The horizon is a lie. Have I gone far enough to die without returning to the shore as a rotting fish? If I scatter the sand and ashes of Gilly here, will it be far enough away to keep my village safe?
I keep paddling: the horizon is where I must go. Far enough to have no doubt and no grief. During one breath, the sun is a tumbling red circle of spinning fire, the next it has plunged into the sea and I am sure I hear the hiss of its quenching. The sky burns in a searing curtain of green and purple light. The smear of the moon twists like an eel and the streaks of light, the souls of the dead being cleansed or punished, fall through the veil.
The bottomless water around me, so dark in the light of the sun, now shines with the reflected aura of the burning sky. Things rise, and bring their own luminescence with them. Worms as long as the reef twist and turn as they rise to the surface. Their bodies glow with a bright blue light. Clouds of fish, each one a disc no larger than my hand, move as a single body. A side expands, becoming a point and then, like stretched seeweed, what remained below springs to catch up. Where the cloud flowed a moment before, a dark mouth snaps shut and my blood runs cold.
Feeding whales.
Each behemoth could easily inhale my tiny canoe and devour me without chewing. A ring of tentacles surrounds each gaping maw. Those mouths, as wide and dark as the pit, reach out and snatch fish from the swarm of fleeing creatures.
Terror paralyses me, and I can do nothing except await the fate rising from below. A mountain of black flesh breaks the water and I choke on the stink of its exhalation. Salt water and mucus rain down from the whale’s blow. The creature is an island in the night, cloaked in strange weeds and writhing polyps that seem to speak in a myriad of voices. Do they sing and cry under the water? Or is it only when the whale breaks the surface that they are given voice?
I dare not listen, the voices are too close to my own and I am afraid of what they will tell me. I lift my paddle and cut the water, again and again, pushing the canoe away from the mass of black flesh that is larger than the sun.
In my wake, the whale finishes its cycle of rise, exhale and plunge again. The waves of its passing make a new current and the canoe zips through the shimmering water so fast my eyes water from the wind. I paddle on. There is nothing else to do. I wonder about diving over the side and swimming down un
til I can no longer see or feel. What is down there in the endless darkness of the deepest ocean? Are there other worlds? Does the water have a different surface, with canoes like mine skimming across it under the same staggering sun? The unmeasurable cadence of the sky, the solid certainty of the water and the land have not always been. Sarny tells me this and I believe him. There is change and the forms of our world are fluid. We come from the sea and to the sea we will return.
The current of the whale’s wake has faded, though my speed has increased. A new force is drawing me forward and when I look up, the sky is closer. Rows of rippling green light wave overhead and dip to touch the sea. Lightning arcs between sky and water in blinding forks of dark-light. The other worlds are not beneath my canoe, hidden beneath an abyss of ocean; they are above me. I am at the bottom of the sea, looking up through the unfathomable depths and wondering at the surface world.
I stand up, my paddle extended for balance as I reach towards the sky. The vault of the heavens twists, spiralling into a sinkhole, a swirling darkness that sucks all water and all life into the black centre. I drop my paddle and snatch up the gourd of Gilly’s ashes.
‘Let us go on together,’ I say, and the canoe tilts into the sky.
There is no falling or rising for me, instead the sky and the ocean moves around the fixed point of a single star, blazing in the void. Then everything flies apart. Air becomes water, water becomes fire, and fire becomes earth. I am lying on a beach of black sand. I crawl away from the foam-lipped edge of the sea, which hisses and reaches for me. There are squat trees here that lean in close to each other, and carry the whispers of the waves to unseen ears.
I find Gilly’s urn in the sand, the clay seal still unbroken. My grief drowns the instant of hope that perhaps here, he would be again.
This is far enough, the sky is dark at last. Populated by a scattering of tiny shards that glitter with a cold disdain.
The black sands will take Gilly’s dark ashes and make them their own. I claw at the seal. It refuses to tear and there are no rocks to smash the gourd.