Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  He had pheasant, she sole. They kept looking at each other, leaning, peering. The wind subsided and the snow fell thickly through the fog, as though it were falling underwater. The sheep moved out there in the whiteness, behind the railings. It was a winter afternoon of the old world, old Europe, weightless for Danny and James. The split logs burned on the fire with the bark on them, the resin sputtered; they imagined wolves in the wood, the paths to the outlying village and church tangled. Every breath they took drew them closer to the nativity which repeated: the Annunciation to the shepherds, the straw arranged in the manger, the smell of animals, the bleating, the star shining bright.

  More wine was poured for them into crystal glasses. The tables were square and set at an angle. From the chandelier, they looked like dice. The dishes were dots denoting numbers. The guests at the other tables had their own stories, occasionally they flashed a piece of cutlery, but they were in the background; her eyes ran across them as across hypertext.

  She saw him presently. She was seduced, although there was something that was not true. The man sitting across from her, so boyishly tucking into his dessert, was concealing another history. She did not know what, she had no reference, only that the bones in his soft hands were broken, and he was scarred about the nose and the ear. There was some shutting down in him. His eyes showed it. He had been abraded by the world.

  They took coffee in the bar. Another guest slotted euros into a vintage jukebox which had on it a picture of Johnny Hallyday.

  They had no choice. I believe when I fall in love with you it will be forever.

  She rolled her eyes.

  ‘Even so,’ he said, and raised his cup.

  She stared at him. His pupils were dilated, the effect darker. She was a little drunk.

  They parted at the foot of the stairs. She went up and he went out into an afternoon that appeared to have no up or down. The snow swirled. He could not see his way forward. He heard the sheep. He thought he had arrived at the railings, but a few more steps brought him back to the hotel. All that was visible of the building was the sign over the entrance spelling out its name in light bulbs, and the green figurines of mermaids backed by dark green tiles of the highest quality purloined from a Persian mosque.

  Without warning he was battered with conflicting emotions and identities, as if a train had braked hard and all the baggage had come crashing down on top of him. He took the lift up. He closed the cage door and pressed in the button. It was a rosewood box, slightly larger than a coffin. He tried not to notice the ascent. He sat in his room, staring out of the window and only occasionally shifting his focus from the blankness to the icicles hanging down. He did not draw the curtains when it got dark and allowed the maid who came to turn down his bed only to switch on a lamp and to bring him a bottle of water and a pot of hot chocolate.

  She worked into the evening. She was befuddled by the alcohol, by him. Maths was like playing the piano, in a way. You had to keep practising to keep fluent and supple; eventually the discipline became a pleasure.

  She turned on the television and watched a tennis match being played at the Albert Hall in London. The acoustics in the hall were such that the man’s serve sounded like a detonation.

  He was hauled up by his wrists and made to stand. His legs shook.

  ‘I’ll shit myself,’ he said.

  His bowels softened; a watery mess flowed down the inside of his thighs.

  There was shouting in Somali. He was struck in the back of the head and in the face and doused in seawater. He was dragged into an alley. It was blinding. He could not look up. The sand burned and was littered with thorns and with glistening donkey droppings and palm fronds. There were wattle-and-daub shacks on either side. He heard children playing. He sensed the women stopping as he passed. He was nauseous. His head spun. He tried to concentrate on the feet of the man in front of him. He said to himself, the flip-flops are red, they are red, the calloused heel lifts, now it strikes the sand, now it lifts.

  They came out into the open. The wind gusted. Crabs scuttled back to holes in the sand. When he finally raised his head and looked at the world he saw surf exploding on a reef and a monumental orange sun hovering over the Indian Ocean.

  The fighters got on their knees and prayed to Mecca.

  After some minutes one of them stood up. ‘We will kill you now,’ he said, without emotion.

  They pushed him towards the sea. He saw it. They would shoot him in the water. There would be no need for a shroud.

  When his body was drained they could dump it in the infidels’ cemetery. With what prayer, with what damnable prayer?

  The fighters were young and thin, but he was too weak to take advantage. He was a white man in a part of Somalia controlled by jihadists. Even if he cracked heads, snapped necks and took a gun, there was no place to run. So, he straightened himself and prepared to die.

  But how does a man do that? Nature is pre-contracted, her demands beyond negotiation. You cannot wish yourself immortal any more than you can bid the apples come in May, or the leaves stick in October. A terminal illness at least gives you a chance to say goodbye to your family, friends and acquaintances. A violent death is something else. It is a maelstrom. Its waters turn quickly, they spiral down, the sky is blotted out and there is no time to make a phone call or take a bow.

  He wanted to lay out his memories on the sand like photographs; to leave a message for the world and take a lesson from it. But he was turning, he was going down, the whaleboat was splintering, the waters were freezing. The flotsam people clung to in life, which kept them afloat in the world, were fictions found in stories. He reached for them. He recited the Lord’s Prayer.

  They pushed him into deeper water. It was almost up to his waist. Look how the dirt is lifting in filaments from your feet, he said to himself, the filth is lifting, and he glimpsed himself, it was difficult to describe, underwater, in a stovepipe hat, a whaler thrown overboard, sinking to the bottom, an eel roped where his intestines had been, with, in the grainy distance, a whaling vessel going down, in imitation of the slave ship Danny described, perhaps, except with a hawk nailed to its mast, the archangelic shriek silenced … thy will be done, in earth as it is heaven.

  They took their hands off him. He looked out over the sea. Submarines go across. They keep to the shallows. There were many things he had not properly imagined. Death was one, the ocean was another. It was fitting, comforting even. The earth really was the ocean. Danny had taught him another way of looking at things, how being made of saline solution, a jelly with pin-like bones, he was yet alien to the greater part of the planet that was saltwater. He looked up. He glimpsed a gull. They lifted their weapons. He had no strength left. He hated them, and was ashamed of himself.

  ‘Allah u Akbar!’

  There was a burst of gunfire. He fell into the sea. The bullets went into the sky. He was on his knees in the water. He thrashed forward. He cried out and pulled off his soiled kikoi and washed himself between his legs. His tears moved the fighters. One of them waded after him and took off his own headscarf and wrapped it around him, so that he would not be naked when they carried him back to land.

  She was a morning person, he was not.

  His phone rang before dawn. His first waking word was a profanity. ‘Yes? Who is it?’

  ‘I’m heading down to the beach for a swim. Will you join me?’

  ‘At this hour? In the snow?’ He sat up. ‘OK,’ then, ‘I shan’t swim.’

  ‘See you downstairs,’ she said cheerfully, and rang off.

  It was the first light of a clear day. The patches of ice were all covered up. The snow came up over their boots. There were boar hunters in the woods; gunshots could be heard coming from the direction of the church and the village. The pines were rimed with salt, the holly berries shone blood red. On the beach the snow gave way to spindrift and then to the return of long breaking waves. He carried towels and an extra sweater. He was uncertain if she would actually swim. He did not know
her travels had taken her in the opposite direction to him, that her voyages had moved her closer to the Inuit and further from the Carib.

  The sand was firm. Their footsteps filled with water after them.

  ‘This is just the place to have a dog,’ he said. ‘They could run for miles.’

  ‘I don’t like dogs.’

  His heart sank. She was harsh. What was he doing on the beach at this hour?

  When he was a boy, the family priest, an Irishman, had told him: James, there is never a moment in a life when a selfish heart is satisfied.

  He wanted a country life. He wanted a cottage. He wanted a garden. He wanted gundogs and horses. Perhaps it was a feint, a way of dealing with his career. What did he need?

  She caught his fallen expression. He was a spy, but utterly readable. ‘Cheer up. I could learn to love a dog. Singular.’

  He smiled at her. He felt they needed to hold on to one another or they would be swept apart and not find each other again. They stood and looked out over the crescent-shaped expanse of the Atlantic.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ she said. Unexpectedly, she reached up and touched his cheek.

  She moved fluently and without hesitation. She pulled off her wellington boots and socks, her fleece-lined tracksuit trousers. She wore light knickers with a darker trim. Her hips were wide. Her skin rose at once to the new day in ranges of goose pimples. She took off her wax jacket, scarf and woollen hat. She peeled off her cashmere sweater and was naked. She ran and dived into the sea. A wave crashed over her. She did not shout or call out as he expected she would. She lay herself down and stretched out between the waves. Her fists were clenched. She held onto the water. Then she kicked away in a front crawl. She was a strong swimmer, stronger than he was. She swam in line with the shore, then stood up and ran out, her feet catching on the shells and gravel. Her nipples were large and brown and pulled tight with the cold. She was youthful in the thickening of her belly, and her broad shoulders in the winter sun made her frame momentarily appear to be facets of a gem. She took off her knickers and rubbed her chest down with one towel while he rubbed her legs and hips with the other. Her hair was wet across her face. She dressed as quickly as she had undressed. She could not speak for breathing. They set off towards the hotel at a fast pace.

  Without any indication it could be otherwise, he went up the stairs with her to her suite. She drew a bath. He turned on the television. When the bath was full and he heard her laying back in it he became distracted and after some minutes, as if pulled by orbital forces, he undressed and went into the bathroom and slid in with her, so the suds spilled out over the tiles. She embraced him and they lay together and then rose and he made love to her over the sink. She pushed him out and took his manhood and handed him off over her belly, up to her chest.

  There was then that unforgiving moment which follows the coming before. She dreaded it. It was so often a disappointment and many times worse. She fucked and instantly deduced it had been the act only. She returned to herself, to Flinders, to the scientist. But no such rift opened between Danny and James that might have obliged them to walk separately out of the bathroom. The tiles on the floor stayed sure, affixed one to the other, and there was only tenderness between them.

  They dozed hand in hand in bed. Later, she found a condom in one of her bags and peeled it onto him in a similar motion to how she had unpeeled her sweater on the beach, and they made love steadily. A while later it was more powerful. It was as if they were screwing each other to a place where the body is spent and the true affair can begin.

  *

  It was a morning on Christmas week and it might have been absolute zero outside, with everything slowed and congealed into superatoms. He was unconcerned with emailing Legoland. She put her work aside. They ordered sweet, buttery porridge, juice and coffee. The suite was rearranged around them, the fire lighted. For that short day they were curled together on a blue and silver embroidered sofa. They chose to watch A Matter of Life and Death, with David Niven in the lead. An opening sequence of the universe cut to Squadron Leader Peter Carter, his burning Lancaster bomber plane dropping into the English Channel, giving his last thoughts to June, an American radio operator:

  ‘But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity.’ Andy Marvell, what a marvel. What’s your name?

  Carter jumped from the Lancaster without a parachute, expecting to die. The next scene showed him climbing out of the sea and wandering in dunes not unlike those around the Hotel Atlantic. By fault of angels, who missed him in the pea-soup fog, Carter miraculously survived into a technicolour so intense, the first technicolour of British cinema, that the sofa became colourless and the wintry sky outside, which was prismatic when they sat down, cloudless, with wisps of orange, turned to gruel.

  In Francis Bacon’s work New Atlantis there is a description of perspective-houses:

  where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations; and of all colours: and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rainbows (as it is in gems and prisms), but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. Also of colourations of light; all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours all demonstrations of shadows. We find also divers means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light originally from divers bodies. We procure means of seeing objects afar off; as in heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off; and things afar off as near; making feigned distances. We have also help for the sight, far above spectacles and glasses in use. We have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, grains and flaws in gems, which cannot otherwise be seen.

  It is common knowledge that Osama bin Laden was born into a rich Saudi family. It is less known that the family fortune was invested in Western banks in contravention of Islamic law. If Osama had been born a poor Saudi, things might have been different. So would they be if he was born into a rich family in another country. If he had been an Italian industrialist’s son, for example, he might have exercised his religious feeling by becoming a priest in the Order of Daniel Comboni, whose motto is Africa or Death!

  It would not have been possible for that alternate Osama, Father Giacomo Ladini, to stray so far from the sanctity of life.

  He had lain down beside the trench and had a dream so lifelike he could not believe it was his alone. It was a Lenten carnival. A Christ-like figure on a float was leading a crowd of young people in a dance. The music was techno. The street was narrow. Bodies were pressed up against old buildings. There were shouts in German and French. It might have been the pharmaceutical town of Basel. The Christ spelled out a message in hand movements like the hand movements of the flagellants who marched through Rhineland towns during the Black Death spelling out I am a liar, a thief, an adulterer, except that these hand movements were not confessional: the Christ and the crowd repeated over and over with their hands a thousand years of love, a thousand years of peace.

  The faces were diverse. They were moved by a common happiness. Then there was a pop of a suicide bomber’s vest, a drawing in of air, and an exhaling, so that the carnival float, the Christ, and many in the crowd were reduced to shreds.

  They carried him from the sea to a whitewashed mosque separated from the beach by a wall of coral and lava stone. It was an old mosque; the first believers in Kismayo were buried in a shrine in the courtyard. The doors and window frames were intricately carved from planks of mango wood.

  They put him on a cement floor in a smoke-blackened room at the back of the mosque. He was nauseous. There was ringing in his ears. A pile of mobile phones on a carpet vibrated, stirring motes of fecal dust and frankincense in light that slanted down from windows which were barred but held no glass. His v
ision blurred. When he came to a lantern cast the same room more richly, so at first sight the faces of the commander and the fighters were like those in a Netherlandish painting.

  The commander was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. He recognised him as Yusuf Mohamud al-Afghani, a forward commander of al-Qaeda in Somalia: thickset for a Somali, but with the usual Somali vanity, the hair crimped and made to shine like a songbird, like a jazz singer, the beard short and smoothed with ointments and dyed with henna, so that its underside was ginger.

  Hair was the quality of the Pakistanis sat on either side of Yusuf: it curled and spilled astrakhan-like from their faces and shoulders and down their forearms and wrists and knuckles and piled in a greasy sheen under their headscarves.

  He counted a dozen others in the room, most were Somali boys with very white teeth. Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers were stacked against one wall, sacks of frankincense piled high against another. Some of the men sat on crates of ammunition. A cheap Chinese clock with a picture of the Grand Mosque in Mecca on its dial hung over the door.

  On the wall behind Yusuf was a framed page of the Koran, a newspaper cutting of Osama bin Laden before his submergence, and a poster of the French footballer Thierry Henry playing for Arsenal. There were rat droppings. There was litter. A teakettle simmered on a low paraffin flame in the centre. Beside it were bowls, a pot of steaming rice, sacks of chickpeas, sweets, and sultanas brought by boat from Karachi. It was a badger sett: close, mephitic and possessing the threat of danger, Netherlandish brushstrokes painting the faces with depths and shadows.