by Giles Foden
He put down his box and went inside. The ceiling in the living room had caved in. There was plaster all over the floor, and a smell of damp from where rain had fallen. Small black spiders were running over the debris. He found a cabinet with a drawer full of old seashells, mainly trochus and conch. In the lower cupboard was an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph and two 78s, warped and covered in a thick layer of dust. Their labels were indecipherable.
He went back to collect the remainder of his boxes and other equipment before exploring the rest of the house. In the kitchen, which was a palace of dust, he discovered an ancient yellow refrigerator. Paraffin-driven, its door was open: he could see the clapped-out old burner and heat-exchange tubes underneath. There was also a table and three chairs, with tattered wicker seats.
He returned to the door and brought in his boxes one by one, piling them up by the table. Pieces of tarnished cutlery lay about on the floor, amid leaves and the husks of coconuts.
The house had two bedrooms. One was empty – except for a nesting bird, which fluttered round the room as he entered, then made its escape through the hatch-like window. There was no glass, and from the solid coral frame it looked as if there never had been. In the other bedroom, which was larger, the remains of a black-and-white striped mattress were decaying in a corner. There didn’t appear to be any kind of bathroom.
He wondered when the place had last been inhabited. Perhaps not for thirty years. Later, he discovered signs of more recent occupancy: a rusty Coke can and some silver foil, maybe a chewing-gum wrapper. Other objects slowly revealed themselves as he went over the house again. A ragged mess that might once have been a blanket; a framed photograph, its glass all cracked, of the young British queen; a dented stove-kettle; a vase, surprisingly intact; the wooden frame of a hand-mirror … Eventually he abandoned his search, conscious that he ought to make arrangements for sleeping and eating before nightfall. He also wanted to find the spring that Leggatt had mentioned.
He set off into the deep thickets of the coral-rag forest, savouring the moist greenness that filled his nostrils. There were no paths to be seen, just the rag’s curtain of close-knit leaf, punctuated every now and then by taller jack-fruits, banyans and frangipanis. Every way he chose seemed closed. He pressed on till mounting obstructions – fallen trees, binding branches of giant fern, large, slippery rocks covered in moss – and gathering darkness (it was later than he thought) forced him to turn back. There was no sign of any spring. He realised that a proper survey of the island would need time and planning. Tonight, he reasoned, he would drink bottled water.
He decided to sleep in the tiny little mosque adjoining the house. It was cleaner and less decrepit than the house, despite being much older. He wondered about making a fire and heating some proper food. But in the end he just ate some beans from a can, washed down with swigs of beer. He lit the hurricane lamp, using more matches than he would have liked. He laid out his sleeping bag on the stone floor of the narrow building, then spread his sheet sleeping bag on top of that and, after removing his T-shirt, climbed inside.
The hurricane lamp guttered beside him. For about half an hour, he just lay there on his side, looking at the lamp and listening to the waves, which were much louder than at the Macpherson. He seemed to see the pattern of the waves in the reflected flames of the lamp – shifting from side to side, impossible to fix as they engulfed the wick or crept up over the mantle. He closed his eyes and tried to think of Miranda, but all he could see (even behind his closed lids) were the sinister giggles of the flame.
*
In the morning, he woke with a start to a rustling sound. Through the arched doorway he saw, caught in a shaft of sunlight, a very large, pinkish-brown crab dragging a fragment of coconut shell across the clearing. He sat up and watched it for a while. Then, summoning resolve from drowsiness, he stood up and wandered outside. The crab, about the size and colour of a baseball glove, reacted with alarm to his presence and began to sidle away.
He couldn’t decide what to do first. Go fishing – make sure he’d got some protein? Do the big tour? Dig a latrine? Clean up the house and move in properly? He decided to go for a swim and a wash while he thought about it. Then he realised that he had forgotten to bring any soap or shampoo, or even his toothbrush. He would have to swill out his mouth with saltwater instead. He walked down to the beach – into the surf, then, thinking something, retreated and took off his shorts, dropping them on the sand. Who was there to see him, after all? He dived in.
After swimming a while, he began to rub his naked body in the ocean: his face, under his arms, his butt, his genitals. Then he swam up and down some more, to wake himself up. He was conscious of a peculiar feeling, the drag of his dick in the water in the cold currents. Then he realised something else about his body. The ankle he had scratched on arrival was stinging again. On getting out, he knelt down on the beach, just above the surf-line, and inspected the cut. It was bright red and, he could see, in danger of becoming infected. He regretted that he had not packed any antiseptic cream in his supplies either.
He replaced his shorts and put on a T-shirt. The sun was already up. He pulled on some socks and his heavy boots, feeling how strange it was to do this in sunlight. Then he went into the forest again, this time carrying the hand-axe. He had been planning to cut some wood for a fire – but there was plenty simply to be gathered up. He picked some dry pieces. These – when he returned to the house some ten minutes later, having gathered some tinder grass and applied his cigarette lighter to the pile on the beach – kindled pretty easily. He boiled some water for coffee, wondering what to eat for his breakfast. Settling in the end for another cookie, he sat on a piece of driftwood dipping it into the lukewarm coffee. His food supplies were woefully inadequate, he was beginning to realise. Time to get fishing then. He looked at the sea and, unlacing his boots, considered the prospect. Using a spinner or lure, that would be easiest. That would save him having to dig for bait.
Fishing turned out to be far more difficult than he had imagined. He spent most of the morning sitting on a rock by the boat, without a single bite. Finally, after much changing of lures, he pulled out a small parrotfish. He wondered whether to eat it or to use it as a bait-fish, eventually deciding to cut off the head and use only that for bait. The rest he saved, wrapping it up in a palm frond and putting it in the shade to keep fresh. Returning to the beach, he took off the lure and tied on a big hook. At least he wouldn’t have to keep recasting now.
The head of the parrotfish yielded startling results. In quick succession he pulled out two wahoo and a baby shark. He now had too much. Too much wahoo, he said to himself. But he was happy that he had proved it was possible, happy that he had proved he could be a survivor. He filleted one wahoo. One wahoo is enough for you, he sang, out loud this time, before frying it in cooking oil and pepper. Accompanied by boiled rice and a cup of black tea, it made a passable lunch.
He felt, however, that he shouldn’t have boiled his bottled water for the rice. This little self-chastisement spurred him on to search for the spring. He donned jeans for the expedition and put his boots back on. Off he set, panga in hand, aping the intrepid explorer. There was something maze-like about the rag forest, and it was half an hour before he found the semblance of an old path. At the end was an algae-covered rock, with water running over it. Someone, long ago, had hacked out a space in the rock to enable a utensil to be placed underneath. It was then he realised that the intrepid explorer had brought no container. He retraced his steps to fetch the boiling billy and an empty plastic water bottle. The bottle would not fit in the space in the rock, and he spilt a little from the billy on the way back.
The sun was very hot now. He became aware of other omissions: he hadn’t brought sunblock, or a hat. He really was very unprepared. Why did he think things would just pan out for him? All life’s experience said otherwise.
His head aching, he went to the mosque for a sleep, feeling a bit foolish. It really was very hot. He coul
d hear thumping, and could hardly tell if this was the noise of the water in coral caverns beneath the island or the blood in his head.
He slept for longer than he meant to. It was almost dusk when he woke. Lighting the storm lamp, he went into the house. The lamp made antler shapes on the rough plastered walls. He saw the horn of the phonograph, and decided he would try to get it working. He took the machine, which was surprisingly heavy, into the kitchen. Opening another bottle of beer, he sat there supping and fiddling. Eventually, somewhat to his surprise, he fixed the spring back into the winder. After wiping the dust off it with his shirt, he put on one of the 78s. What came out of the horn was tum-tum music, ukelele, and that made him happy. He drank more beer and lit a cigarette. Right now, he reflected, some marijuana would be nice too, what with the superb darkness outside and the noise of the breakers and the palm trees. He wondered if any grew wild on the island. He played the tum-tum again and then put on the other record. This time it was an Englishwoman’s voice, high and reedy, and much scratchier than the ukelele. He couldn’t make out all the words but the chorus was clear enough:
This demon desert lover
You don’t want to discover
Mustapha! The Moor!
He does things you’ll abhor.
At the end the accompaniment, which was piano and sax, suddenly stopped; the woman’s voice, in a hoarse, over-dramatic whisper, reprised the chorus with a twist …
This demon desert lover
You keep him under cover
Mustapha! The Moor!
Take care you don’t want more.
The song gave him the creeps. There was something disturbing about the Englishwoman’s voice. He played the tum-tum a third time to get the other one out of his head before bunking down in the mosque.
*
The island was about two miles in diameter. It was dominated by the lighthouse. On the morning of the second day, he climbed to the top. The edifice was built from the same material as the house: crushed coral mixed with cement and painted white. The wooden door at the bottom was stuck. On getting inside, which took a hard shove, he found a dead fish eagle on the first step. It had obviously flown in and got trapped.
He counted as he climbed: thirty-three steps in all. In the room at the top, he was surprised to find the lamp and its reflectors unbroken. The instrument, he divined, was oil-powered. He wondered whether he could get it going with his paraffin.
He stayed up there for almost an hour, surveying the sea’s terrifying immensity. Only the vague haze of Zanzibar proper rescued him from sensations of being utterly alone. Yet there was also something appealing in the spectacle. The idea that through hermit-like withdrawal suffering might be avoided attracted him so powerfully it was almost frightening.
But what had he suffered, after all, he reflected on making his way down the winding stairway. The loss of a father? That came to everyone in the end, as Miranda had said. It struck him it was something they had in common. She’d seemed a bit raw and vulnerable about it when they’d talked. In his case, the pain had lessened some lately, but his dad’s death remained a kind of watershed, a moment when everything changed.
Later in the day, he walked out onto an amazing bar of sand that appeared as the tide receded. Cresting the reef and several miles in length, it seemed to reveal itself as he walked along, as if his footsteps made the water retreat. It fell away, waves in the ocean on the left of the reef, ripples in the lagoon on the right. With a certain narcissism, perceived and readily conceded, he introduced himself into two episodes of a Biblical nature, stories his mother’s sect were apt to link: Moses’s parting of the waters, Jesus’s walking upon them. Except … except that winding his way back along that tremendous bar, the sand became really too hot to walk on at all. He was soon hopping, hopping, hopping: Nick the dervish, Nick the whirling sufi.
Elsewhere on the island, in the cool of early evening, he rediscovered the same nub of copper he’d moored his boat to during the business with Leggatt and the poachers. He remembered, again, something the old man had told him about the stump of metal: how it was part of the old telegraph system that connected the mainland to imperial Britain. Cape Town–Durban– Mombasa–Dar–Zanzibar–Aden–Cyprus … London. The old order, connected by thousands of miles of steel on the seabed, a wired world that existed long before fibre optics and the Internet.
Walking back to the house, he realised his ankle was throbbing. Crouching down again, but in the jungle path this time, he saw that it had become infected. He squeezed a little pus out of it. Delicately, using the edge of a leaf, he scraped it off before continuing on his journey.
That evening, opening his ledger, he made an account of the food that would have been available to the true castaway. He’d opened a coconut but the milk tasted gross, and the flesh no better. Neither were the young pawpaws edible, being still bitter and milky. He had considered trapping or spearing one of the big crabs. But it was easier to fish, now that he had the knack for it. And the way the crabs hung round rotting vegetation made him think they would probably taste rank. Eyes darting sideways as they hunkered over white shreds of coconut flesh, they looked like hoodlums at a street corner.
He read over his paltry list of produce. Relying on nature left much to be desired. Inadequate as they’d previously appeared, he was now very glad of his supplies. Of the lemons especially. He liked the way they stung his lips, which had become cracked from the sun. He thought of it as a punishment, that sting, but he didn’t know what for. Before going to bed, he daubed some of the juice on his suppurating ankle. Maybe it could help that, too.
*
The third day. A day to dive, and this proved some experience. Leggatt was right. The Lyly reef was spectacular indeed: a mass of colours, richer than any coral he’d yet seen, and populated by a wide variety of sea life. In one place a moray eel, lunging from a hole, bared its fangs at him. Elsewhere he saw a labyrinth fish of the genus Anabas: the rare climbing fish that resembled a perch except that it could travel over land on its spiny gill covers and pectoral fins.
He didn’t plan to stay down a long time; but it was very tempting. Luckily, the highlight of the dive was one that saved him using up his tank. Where the reef joined the base of the island, he noticed that the current sucked in and out in an unusual manner. He swam closer. On further investigation, he discovered an opening. It was just big enough for a man’s body to fit through – a man’s body without scuba tanks on his back. He hovered there for a few minutes, watching the water go in and out. The noise of his own breathing was loud in his skull. Then he thought he’d risk it.
Taking a deep gasp of the mixture, he reached and turned off his regulator. He shrugged off the tank harness and tied it to a spur of coral. He knew that what he was doing was dangerous. He just needed to keep calm, he thought. But already, during the time it had taken to remove the harness, he had begun to run out of air. He had done things the wrong way round. His head pounding, his chest feeling as if a heavy weight had been dropped on it, he held the mouthpiece to his lips and, turning on the supply again, took another burst. Bubbles flew up. Waste. But he hadn’t time to think about that. Already he was insinuating himself into the hole, the fear he would run out of breath strong inside him.
Now he was inside, and there was a small space above him. Air! He dared not believe it … but it was too late, anyway. He was already taking in a big, joyous, double lungful. Humectant was the word for it, since it was stale, marine air he was sucking in so powerfully, air born of too long a contact with the green-dripping walls of the place. He swam forward a little in the sloshing water, till he came to a shelving bank of smooth, slippery rock. He had to take off his fins to stand. His toes sank into an oozing substance.
There was a dim light. He could see that the cave was about four metres wide and some twenty or thirty twisting metres in length. Perhaps it was longer, there may have been further chambers and corridors. It was hard to see. What he could see was about three to four m
etres high in some parts, less elsewhere. He shivered. The source of the light was deeper in the cave. He moved forward carefully, edging his toes through the ooze on the floor. Obscured by what seemed like vegetation, the light came from a circular space in the ceiling. He considered trying to climb up, but on touching the walls he found them to be covered with thick green slime.
As he removed his hand, he was shocked to see that there were chisel marks, some kind of writing there. He scraped away the mucus, dark green goo, flicking it from his palm. Yes. Curling Arabic script, etched into the rock. What did it say? He felt his lack of knowledge like a pressure on the temples – an almost painful sense of whole worlds and cultures that had been closed off to him.
*
The next morning, he discovered that all trace of infection had gone from his ankle wound. The lemon juice had done its work. Or maybe it was the ooze in the cave. He’d heard of stuff like that. Whatever was the case, there was no sign of suppuration any longer, just a thin red tick: a nice scab. He traced it, that night, with his finger, under the flickering storm lamp, under the roof of the crumbling house.
Something about the script, the writing on the wall, had made him move into the house, leaving the mosque to its ancient holiness. It didn’t seem proper to doss down in a place where people had once prayed.
The cave gave him something on which to focus. He went down there again the following day, with his ledger and a ballpoint pen sealed in several garbage bags, thinking he might copy out some of the writing. But it was no good. The pages of the ledger immediately began to absorb moisture from the wet air, like a sponge. He put it back in the bags. He couldn’t really make out the characters, anyway. They were too subtle and seemed to change in the sea-green light even as he looked at them.