Seas of South Africa

by Philip Roy

  It was a little work getting the doors of the garage open and the car out. It coughed blue smoke when it started, showing that it hadn’t been out for a while. Like its owners, the car was from a different age. They were excited when we all climbed in. I sat in the back, with Hollie on my lap. Seaweed rode on the roof. Edgar never went above thirty miles an hour. I watched the speedometer. But after walking for two days, it felt like we were in a race.

  “Is that really your seagull?” Edgar asked.

  I nodded. “His name is Seaweed.” It was the third time he had asked me that. He just couldn’t get his head around it.

  “And he’s going to climb into your submarine with you, is he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the dog, too?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at me in the rear-view mirror. His eyes were lit up. “Well, I have got to see that.”

  “Won’t you be lonely at sea, Alfred?” said Nancy after a while. Her voice was high and squeaky.

  “No, m’love,” said Edgar. “He’s got a crew.” He nodded towards Hollie and the roof.

  “Oh, yes.”

  I sat back and watched the scenery. I could hear the patter of Seaweed’s feet on the roof. He was jumping off and landing. Nobody seemed to mind. Hollie was sticking his head out the window. I couldn’t help wondering what Edgar and Nancy thought of Nelson Mandela. So I asked them.

  “He was a good leader!” said Edgar loudly.

  “He’s a very nice man,” said Nancy. She sounded genuine.

  “He taught us a thing or two,” said Edgar. “I must say, I was surprised.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I remember when Mandela was a young man. Things looked quite different then, you see. We thought he was a terrorist. He certainly was a militant. He went up north and learned all about guerilla tactics. Then he came back and stirred up all sorts of trouble. He was not like Mahatma Gandhi. Not at all. So we thought he was a violent man. I remember when he went to prison. And I thought to myself, well, that’s probably where he belongs.”

  Edgar stared at me through the rear-view mirror, as if we were having a conversation across a table. I hoped he was watching the road. “Of course I was wrong about him. And Apartheid was a terrible abuse of power. That’s a shame we live with now. I dare say we should have known better then. It was the way we were raised. My father thought that black people were monkeys.”

  He stared at me again. I think he was waiting for my reaction.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes. It was crazy. It was real hatred. And it ran deep. You’ll still find it in some places if you go looking for it. South Africa is a divided country. Always has been. Now it’s more violent than ever. You might think it’s the built-up anger, after all those years of being kept down. But that’s not it. It’s random, senseless acts of violence today, not aimed at any goal in particular. It’s a hatred of a different kind. We’ve got a long road ahead. That’s the name of his book, isn’t it . . . what is it, love?”

  “Long Walk to Freedom, dear.”

  “Long Walk to Freedom. That’s it. Twenty-seven years behind bars! Then he became president of the country!” Edgar shook his head with disbelief. “You don’t make that happen unless you’ve got something special in you. I think he did. He turned the country right around. We used to have two official languages. Now we have eleven! How many do we know, love?”

  “Two, my dear.”

  “Two! Afrikaans and English. A long road ahead.”

  “A Long Walk to Freedom, dear.”

  “I know.”

  We drove in silence for a while. I stared out the window. I imagined sitting down at a table together with Edgar, Nancy, Los, and Katharina. I wondered what the conversation would be like. Then I tried to imagine Edgar’s father. I pictured a mean, nasty, unfriendly, and unhappy man. Apartheid was born out of hatred. He would have believed in it completely.

  We arrived at Richards Bay in the early afternoon. I warned Edgar and Nancy about the pirates, and suggested they drop me off on the outskirts of town, but they would not hear of it. Nothing was going to keep Edgar from seeing the sub. I told them to drive along the coal mounds. They knew where that was.

  “Richards Bay is growing in leaps and bounds,” said Edgar. “Used to be it was just gold in South Africa. And diamonds. Now, it’s aluminum, titanium, and everything else. Look, here we are. Good Lord, it’s three times what it used to be.”

  “My sub is in a tiny cove, over there.” I pointed. I pulled the binoculars out of the bag and scanned the harbour.

  “Any trouble out there?” said Edgar. He sounded ready for a fight.

  “I hope not.”

  He parked the car on the side of the road and we climbed over the tracks and reached the bank. I saw them both stare at the empty water. I wondered if they thought for a moment that I was crazy, that I was just making it all up. I wouldn’t blame them if they did.

  “I’ll have to swim down and bring it up. It could take about fifteen minutes. I have to pump out the water that will pour into it when I climb in. And that takes a little while. Don’t be alarmed when I don’t come right back up, okay?”

  They both stared at the water with shock.

  “Wait now!” said Edgar. “You’re going to swim down there . . . how far is it?”

  “Sixty feet.”

  “You’re going to swim down sixty feet, climb in, pump out the water, and bring the whole machine to the surface?”

  “Yes.” I started breathing. “Will you keep an eye on Hollie for me?”

  “We will indeed. Alfred?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know what you’re doing, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then . . .” Edgar looked at his watch. “We’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

  “More or less.”

  I slipped into the water and went under. I heard Hollie bark as the water filled my ears. How glad I was to see my sub still lying there. When I reached it, I grabbed the wheel of the hatch and prepared myself. Every second mattered. If I made even a slight mistake, the sub would flood entirely and take much longer to empty, and I’d have to return to the surface to wait, and all of my things that I had hung out of water’s reach would get soaked, except for the compartments in the stern, which were sealed. I focused my complete attention on what I was doing, spun the wheel, lifted the hatch, shoved myself inside with the water rushing in, stopped myself from falling by grabbing the ladder inside, pulled down the hatch, and sealed it. I was fast! Going in was faster than climbing out. I jumped down and found only a foot and a half of water inside. The sump pumps were running. I’d be on the surface in ten minutes.

  I came up slowly, watching through the periscope as it broke the surface, just in case any vessel had come into the area while I was under. Edgar and Nancy were standing on the bank with Hollie and Seaweed. The coast was clear. I surfaced awash, with the portal just a couple of feet above. They would still be able to see the hull under water, standing so close to it. I opened the hatch.

  They were staring as if an ugly monster had come up from the deep. In truth, the sub could have used a good scrubbing. Less than two weeks on the bottom of a warm harbour and all sorts of sea life had started to make their home on it. I particularly hated barnacles, because they would cut my skin when I was climbing on and off the hull, or even just sitting on it. I would have to find a secluded cove somewhere and give the hull a really good scrub. It would take a few days to do it properly. At the moment, the growth on the hull, plus the seaweed that got caught on the way up, and the dolphin nose that Ziegfried had welded to the front to make the sub faster, made the sub look like a living creature, or a dead one. Edgar and Nancy stared with their mouths hanging open.

  “I guess I was faster,” I said.

  Edgar broke from his trance and stared at his watch. “Ten minutes.”

  “That’s a submarine!” said Nancy, as if she were learning about it for the
first time.

  I swam to the bank and climbed up. “I’d better get going. There are people looking for me. I don’t want to give them the chance to find me.”

  “Where will you go next?” Edgar asked.

  “I’d like to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll run into rough seas around the Cape, my son. That shore has been wrecking ships for hundreds of years. You’d better be awfully careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Drop us a postcard, will you? Sometime you’re on shore. From anywhere. Just mail it to Nancy and Edgar in Greytown. The postman will know where to bring it.”

  “I will. Thank you for letting us stay at your house, and for feeding us.”

  “It was a pleasure,” said Nancy.

  “Any time,” said Edgar. He shook my hand.

  I held the bag over my head, slipped into the water, and swam to the sub. Hollie swam beside me. I carried him in, climbed out, and called Seaweed. He flew over, looked inside the portal, tapped his beak on the hatch, and dropped inside. Edgar and Nancy laughed and clapped from the bank. I waved. “Thank you!”

  “Safe travels!” they called.

  I pulled down the hatch and sealed it, went to the controls, and sat down. I let water into the tanks to sink a few more feet, then sailed out of the harbour like that. From mid-harbour, through the periscope, I saw Edgar and Nancy climb into their car. There was no one else around. The pirates weren’t here. Had they given up? More likely, they were just searching somewhere else.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I WAS WASHING money in the river—five-hundred and one-thousand naira bills, from Nigeria. It looked like more money than it probably was. We were sitting on the bank of a lovely river that emptied into the Indian Ocean somewhere along the southeast coast of South Africa. It was very beautiful. The coast grew more beautiful the further west we sailed—more rivers, more trees, more birds, more green and brown mountains close to the beach. This was a different world from inland South Africa, a different planet from Johannesburg.

  There were blood spots all over the money still, and I couldn’t seem to scrub them off. In fact, the harder I scrubbed, the bloodier they became. And then, the blood began to pour out of the holes and run into the river, and the river turned red. What was going on? Then, the pirate who had been murdered came walking up the beach. Blood poured from the holes in his clothes. What is going on, I asked? Nancy appeared. “Oh, let me take that into the kitchen where I can clean it properly,” she said. I looked down at the money bleeding in my hands, but didn’t want to give it to her. Then the woman from the road appeared across the river, smiled at me, and said: “Don’t worry. Appreciate your life.” And finally I knew, with enormous relief, that I was in a dream.

  I woke on my cot in the sub. I raised my head and saw Hollie chewing on a stick, and Seaweed in a deep sleep. It was dark in the observation window. Now, I remembered. We were sitting on the bottom at three hundred feet. We were offshore from the Mkambati Nature Reserve. We had moored in a deserted cove and taken a long walk on a rocky beach. It had been windy and very beautiful. There had been a lot of strange-looking birds, and deer with horns that were twisted around like licorice sticks. It was an isolated corner of the coast. Most of the beaches we had passed in the Durban area either had people on them, or no place to moor the sub.

  Just off shore from the Mkambati Reserve, was a sunken Portuguese galleon from the sixteenth century, lying in shallow water. I planned to look for it after breakfast, and practise diving there if I could find it. There were a lot of shipwrecks in South Africa. We had sailed over some already. I was pretty sure I had even found the outline of a submarine, on sonar. It was lying on the bottom at seven hundred feet, so we couldn’t get close to it. It was probably a German sub from the First World War. There were lots of them in South African waters, resting on the bottom for almost a hundred years, their crews still inside. How I wished I could have seen one up close.

  I made pancakes. That reminded me of Los. I wondered how he was doing now. Was he talking yet? Was he sitting up? As soon as I washed the rest of the African money, I would write to him and send it.

  After breakfast, we rose to the surface. I took a look through the periscope before surfacing. It was clear. However, the moment the portal broke the surface, the radar started beeping. I glanced at the screen. There were three vessels offshore, about five miles out. That was no big deal; there had been lots of freighters and sailboats along the southern coast. But a small item caught my attention. It was probably nothing, just that two of the vessels were moving faster than the third, and appeared to be closing in on it from opposite directions, as if they were surrounding it. There were lots of things that could explain that, and it probably wasn’t anything, but it gave me a funny feeling in my gut. What if it were the pirates, and they were attacking a sailboat, like Maggie’s? I knew it probably wasn’t that, but what if it were?

  It wouldn’t take long to find out.

  So, I cranked up the engine and headed out to look. I already knew that two of the signals were just smaller boats, not ships, because they were moving so fast. Unless they were naval ships on exercise, which they could be, although I hadn’t seen a single South African navy ship yet. And if they were, we would turn on our tail in a hurry. Likely they’d just think we were a local motorboat. They wouldn’t know we were a submarine unless they saw us.

  From three miles away, I stood on the portal with the binoculars and took a look. There were two outboard motorboats, similar to the ones I had seen the pirates use before. They had come from opposite directions to meet a larger inboard motorboat. Perhaps they were just fishermen out sport fishing. Or perhaps they were shark diving. My guidebook said it was popular here. Tourists went down in cages while bloody meat was dangled over the sides of a boat. It was one way to get into the middle of a shark-feeding frenzy without being the meal.

  But the motorboats never seemed to actually meet the larger boat, only to come close. That seemed strange. Why would they keep a distance? Unless, maybe they weren’t friendly?

  Anyone watching on radar would know we were coming. That didn’t bother me too much because we could disappear easily enough. But from two miles away, I switched to battery power, slipped beneath the surface, and approached at periscope depth. Now, we would have suddenly disappeared from their radar. Anyone paying attention would have found that strange. The last thing I saw before I sealed the hatch and went inside was the two motorboats spinning circles around the bigger boat.

  From a mile and a half away, I thought I saw a flash of light through the periscope. It might have been the glare of the sun reflecting through the lens. We were approaching at eighteen knots, our fastest speed under water. They wouldn’t know we were coming now unless they were staring at a sonar screen, which was extremely unlikely. None of the boats turned to meet us. But the two motorboats had stopped circling the other boat and were sitting in the water on opposite sides of it, about a hundred feet away. And then I saw the flash again. This time, I knew what it was. It was a rifle firing, from the boat in the centre. I turned the periscope to look at one of the smaller boats. It was the pirates! I was sure of it. There were six of them in the boat. It was them! They were heavily armed, and were shooting back. They were trying to seize the boat in the centre, but the crew was fighting back.

  I looked at the boat on the other side. There were just two pirates on board. They were shooting, too, but not as much as they could have. They obviously wanted the boat, so they were trying not to fill it with holes. I scanned the boat in the centre more closely. I saw only one man in it. He was taking cover, and firing back whenever he could. He wasn’t making it easy for them. I was glad. I wanted to help him.

  We were close now. It was time to dive deeper, or steer away, or cut the power. I had to choose. But I hesitated. The pirates in the first boat moved closer, and fired into the cabin of the bigger boat. This time, the captain didn’t fire back
, and I wondered if he had been hit. I swung the periscope quickly to look at the other motorboat. They were firing, too. We were so close now. I had to make a decision.

  I should have turned. It’s what I would normally have done. But I didn’t. I wanted to let them know we were here, that the captain in the centre was not alone. Then, maybe they would back off. Or maybe they would chase me instead, and the captain could head for shore, if he was able.

  Two hundred feet away, and closing fast, I raised our nose and broke the surface with the portal. As soon as we had air, I hit the engine switch and cranked it up all the way. I wanted the extra power so that we could come in as fast as possible, and churn up the water in between the pirates and the centre boat. That would make it much more difficult for them to shoot straight. I aimed by looking through the periscope, then pulled it down at the last minute. I didn’t want it to get damaged if they shot at us, which they were surely going to do.

  But that is not what happened. Just at the time I figured we were passing between the two boats, I heard a terribly loud bang, and something struck the bow really hard. It shook the whole sub. It must have been a grenade. They must have seen us coming, after all, and threw the grenade just as we were passing. It was well-timed. I sure hoped it didn’t cause us any serious damage.

  No, it wasn’t that. A couple of hundred feet beyond the boats, I climbed the portal, opened the hatch, and looked back. I couldn’t believe what I saw. There, in the water, were pieces of the motorboat. It had been cut in two. All of the six pirates were in the water. They must have moved closer to the centre boat just as we came through. Had they not seen us coming at all?

  My heart was racing. What if they couldn’t swim? What if they were going to drown?

  I swung around in an arc until we were approaching them again, then cut the engine, shut the batteries off, and scanned the water with the binoculars. As we drifted closer, I saw four men swimming or holding on to pieces of the boat. Where were the other two? I grabbed the lifebuoy, but was too far away to throw it. But I didn’t want to move any closer, or the pirates would climb onto the hull and kill me. What should I do? What should I do?