The View from Mount Dog
Page 10
‘Night diving?’
‘It’s much better. The fish are asleep there in the corals. You go down and shine your flashlight and there they are. They don’t move much. You can put the end of your spear this close’ – he held his hands six inches apart – ‘and pum! Big fish, too; you’ll see.’
‘Isn’t it very – well – dark?’
‘We will bring my cousin in a boat and borrow a pressure-lamp. It’s not necessary, the lamp, but it makes it more easy for you the first time. Also we will have our flashlights. You have flashlight?’
‘Just a cheap Chinese thing. It isn’t waterproof, though.’
‘Of course. But we will make it.’
Waterproofing torches by means of adding another, slightly larger diameter, lens and encasing it all in a length of motorcycle inner tube was merely one more of Badoy’s skills. Two nights later you lowered yourself from a tiny boat into the black waters above what in daytime was a familiar reef. And there it was, pressing in all around you amid the fitful sparks of plankton gingered into momentary luminescence by tiny eddies and swirls. There it was, swimming upwards at you from those pitch depths. Certainly it had been preparing itself in instalments: the first time you saw a moray eel fix you with its blank and white-rimmed eye and bare its ragged teeth at you and at nothing else; the first time a sea-snake came swimming rapidly up in clear water to investigate you alone; the first time you speared but did not kill a stonefish whose poisoned spines could inflict agonising wounds and you were left on a tossing ocean trying to manoeuvre the twisting creature down the spear and back along the nylon line away from your naked feet. Pangs they were when in warm tropic seas a quick cold current ran over your body. But this black gulf which concealed all such things and no doubt many worse made for a fear which did not easily pass.
Then Badoy’s torch flashed on and the pressure-lamp outlined his downward-swimming, purposeful body in sad green light like something which could not be followed but which you pursued anyway for your own safety, imagining always, imagining the very worst that could happen: the accident which sent your spear thudding into his body, the bent-nail fluke making it impossible to pull out and which would mean finding transport in the middle of the night (hardly likely in Anilao where the only vehicle was a battered motorcycle) to take a mortally stricken Badoy eighteen miles over atrocious tracks to the only hospital where, if rumour were to be believed, they often performed major surgery by candlelight with the aid only of dozens of ampoules of local anaesthetic since somebody had sold the nitrous oxide on the black market.
But here is Badoy’s torch and then Badoy himself, alive and well, flashing his light briefly on the end of your line to see what you have caught and, doing likewise, you discover his own line already weighty with the big reef fish you dream of getting by day. And again you follow him down, but this time the excitement takes over when you flash your own torch unbelievingly into a hole and there not more than two feet away is a good solid half-kilo goatfish, one of the mullet family, its chin barbels twitching in the sudden light. Then your spear pocks through him and you have air enough left in your lungs to sweep him back along spear and line with a now practised gesture, trap your torch between your legs as you reload so as to see where to catch the stretched elastic, regain a lost few feet of depth and move on to the next hole, which contains nothing but a dark red slate-pencil urchin you have never seen by day. And so back up to the surface where the night now seems darker than the sea beneath you except for the single star of the pressure-lamp some way off and the air is almost cold in comparison with the water. You have suddenly shifted elements.
And the excitement never failed even though the fear lurched up before submerging again beneath sheer physical pleasure and interest. You always came back exhausted after three, four and once five hours of working the reefs in darkness but never without some fresh knowledge of the sea and its creatures. Often you returned with handsome fish, many times with cuts and stabs and hydroid burns, various parts of your body embedded with the snapped-off tips of brittle black sea-urchin spines. (‘Piss on them, that’s the best,’ said Badoy the first time. ‘It dissolves them.’ ‘How can I possibly? They’re here.’ ‘Forget them. They dissolve anyway in a couple of days.’)
The moments of fear were almost always those when you allowed your imagination to intrude. The sudden confrontations with marine hazards were moments of extreme busyness, of co-ordinating spear and breathing; the fright only came later. You have never been phobic about the dark or of being alone, but there were times when both lightless boat and Badoy himself disappeared for upwards of an hour and you were quite alone in a black sea beneath a black sky sometimes not even knowing where the shore was since you were too far out for the breakers to be audible above the local slop of water. Then you felt – not fear, exactly, but a desolation, an abandonment such as prefigured a way of dying which might well turn out to be your very own, unlocatably small between a black space and a black deep. How, then, to explain that this doleful panic could turn, now and again, into the greatest exhilaration and send you plunging recklessly downwards with your torch switched off so that the twinkling of plankton beyond your mask were the stars in a downward firmament traversed by the brilliant comet of your spear-tip? And then, perhaps, far away at an unguessable distance off to one side a brief flash like the dimmest green lightning as Badoy’s torch-beam outlined a range of coral like a bank of cloud.
All this time you knew how happy you were by the way the question ‘how long can it last?’ re-posed itself in a variety of ways. Privately your hope was that the manager of the electricity co-operative had indeed embezzled your salary, maybe in so doing prolonging your stay indefinitely (for it costs next to nothing to live simply in a place like Anilao). But what of Badoy? He frequently referred to his plans for working abroad – in Saudi Arabia, in America, in Australia – anywhere overseas, really, where visa requirements and work-permit laws could be got round, fluffed over or just plain flouted. Did you think his chances of getting a honeymoon visa and then overstaying and going to ground as an illegal immigrant were better in Australia or the US? was one of his ways of starting these conversations.
‘But what about your wife, Badoy?’
‘She stays here, of course.’
‘But surely you’ll miss each other badly?’ (Was this inquisitiveness or mischief?) ‘You may be gone a year. More’, you added, thinking of gaol, ‘or less’, thinking of deportation.
‘Three maybe, perhaps five. Of course. But the money…. What else can we do? Without work there is no future for me here in Anilao. She will be happy because of the money.’
‘But what kind of work could you do in a place like Saudi Arabia?’
‘Oh, anything. Construction, labouring, working in the restaurants for other foreigners like me. It doesn’t matter.’
‘But it may be hundreds of miles from the sea. No more spear-fishing.’
‘Alas.’
And finally in a gloomy outburst: ‘I don’t want to live as a fisherman all my life. I want something better than this place. I want to see the world.’
How uneasy were such conversations, which would recur practically verbatim and with your own lines beginning ‘But …’. Even more uneasy were they when his wife was present, the looks of hopelessness she shot at him, at you. The atmosphere became heavy with the sense that there was a great inaccuracy somewhere, that you did not understand who was being reproached for what, if anyone were: he for longingly talking of desertion, he for battening inertly off his wife in Anilao, or you for treason in possibly aiding his going. Your own selfishness appalled you, the degree to which you wished to hold another person’s life static to make a background against which you could do your plentiful discovering, your peregrinations. Struck then by the image of Badoy’s marvellous talents and skills which he ironically so undervalued lying unused or even deteriorating in the blazing heat of an Arabian construction site, you were made sadder still. It became but a small
step from raising practical objections concerning the difficulty of legally working abroad to finding yourself entertaining fantasies masquerading as plans to build a large fishing-boat of which Badoy could be the skipper while you – what? – held ropes and jumped over the side, dog-like, to retrieve lost paddles? It was absurd. Yet it was never quite enough to laugh at such plans, because self-mockery, too, has that quality of ringing as if round an empty room. The real self has opportunely just left, closing the door, and can be heard outside in the passage obtusely heading back towards the television room and fantasy.
II
And so in due time your probation ended and you finally reached Tagud. It turned out to be smaller even than Anilao, its greater dependence on the sea reflected by the purposeful way in which the bleached huts had their piles driven into the sand above the high-tide mark and hugged the shore in a straggling line, scorning to spread inland among the sheltering palms. Behind the village rose a mountain whose steep sides were partly forested. A mile offshore was a tiny uninhabited island whose general shape and jungled cap were an aping in miniature of the mountain opposite. In between ran seas whose purples indicated their depth.
‘Bad currents,’ said Badoy succinctly. ‘We will take a lot of rice and water and live on the island. You will like it there; very good corals.’
The first two days there were a continuation of your Anilao spear-fishing but now in paradisal guise. The corals were richer, steeper, the water clearer, the fish grander. Who has never hung above such reefs in the early light of morning, steeped in the bliss of altitude, has missed a vital fraction of the world’s beauty. On one side the floor of the sea rises to become the rocks of shore; on the other it falls now shallowly through hillocks of coral – twenty-foot crags like model mountain ranges – now steeply in gorges and vertical cliffs slashed by crevasses into ever-purpler depths of invisibility. On the way down this magnificent descent are ledges of blond sand and creamy patches of coral fragments making irregularly spaced steps on a grand stairway down. Such now is your physical familiarity with what you lovingly see that you appraise each of these steps. ‘I could reach that…. I might just get down to that one…. I’d never make the bluish one, not at my age. Fifteen, sixteen fathoms and then straight back up, all right; but twenty-five fathoms, never.’ Yet, even if you will now never be able to get down much beyond a hundred feet without mechanical assistance, how beautiful it is as the light becomes stronger and higher; how bushy and furred those cliffs with multiform varieties of plant, how mysterious the brilliant fish moving isolate or in small flocks at all levels in this fluid mass like birds, how splendid the little sharks eighty feet beneath your soles and flexing like rubber daggers moving haft-foremost. This astounding medium sustains it all; it bears you up, in it you float, entranced by a paradigm of inwardness and depth.
But the fear was not long in returning. You could feel it coming each time you crossed back from the island to Tagud and met Badoy’s family and the other fishermen of the community. They radiated a competence so great it immediately annulled your own pride at having acquired a small skill of your own. It soon became clear that this arose not from a disparity in your respective expertness with a spear-gun, superior though theirs was, but from their use of something which was evidently what Badoy had been leading you towards right from the beginning.
The compressor.
‘When I come back home here to Tagud,’ Badoy said one morning, ‘I must seriously catch fish so I can sell them and bring the money to my wife in Anilao. I must work.’
So playtime was declared over; there were livings to be earned. Either you went on dabbling on your own or else you followed Badoy on to the last stage.
‘It’s exciting,’ he urged. ‘It’s the best. Far better than what we’ve been doing.’
You felt a pang at this easy devaluation of weeks of pleasure.
‘Far better?’
‘Not far better; that’s still very good,’ Badoy said encouragingly. ‘But you can get bigger catches of bigger fish because you can go so deep and stay down there for hours maybe.’
‘How deep?’
‘Maybe two hundred and fifty, three hundred and fifty feet sometimes.’
Good God. ‘Is it very difficult?’
‘Not so. With practice a week or less. We will try later today when the boat comes back.’
Later that day you examined the compressor. The system was simplicity itself. The boat’s propeller shaft could be disengaged and a fan-belt slipped over a pulley so that the engine now drove a small air-compressor from which led two thin polythene hoses each hundreds of feet long.
‘That’s all it is,’ said Badoy. ‘You control the air-flow by biting with your teeth, and when your mouth aches you squeeze a loop of the tube between your fingers like this. It needs a bit of practice to learn how to regulate it automatically.’
‘No valves or anything?’
‘No.’
‘What about depth-gauges?’
‘Do you have one?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Neither do we. We learn to judge how deep we are from the pressure on the body and the colour of the water. We must also judge how long we have been down. Do you have a diver’s watch? No? Did you know if you come up quickly from deep it hurts your joints like rheumatism? There is a man here in Tagud who was very drunk all night and he went down the next morning without sleep and still drunk and I think he comes up too quickly maybe. But he is now, what, paralysed from here…. Did you know about this danger?’
Did you know? Good God, had you not heard about the bends when you were at school and since read the elaborate safety-codes for scuba diving? The carefully worked-out pauses for decompression at each depth, to be minutely timed on obligatory chunky watches? The depth-gauges and knives and nose-clips and wet-suits and cylinders and weighted belts and flippers and reduction valves and compasses and underwater flares and so on and so on: the expensive accoutrements of those who quite reasonably wished to take their pleasures safely.
‘We will try now,’ said Badoy.
‘Oh…. What happens if the engine fails? It’s always running out of fuel.’
‘There’s a reserve air-tank here.’ He pointed to a pitted and rust-corroded cylinder lashed to the side of the boat with nylon line.
‘How long will that last?’
‘Three minutes maybe?’
‘So if you’re at two hundred feet you’ve got three minutes to surface?’
‘We won’t go that deep. This is your first time. Easy practice only.’
‘What happens if that fan-belt breaks? It looks pretty frayed to me.’
‘Same thing. You will know. For a moment the air stops completely and then it comes again but less, so you will know it is reserve. Now, put the tube around your body twice and loop it over two times only to hold it and bite the end in your teeth.’
With the engine running the compressor sent a huge draught of stink into your mouth, less air than the flavour under pressure of diesel oil and polythene tubing whose walls were infiltrated with colonies of yeasts. You retched.
‘Don’t worry. Up here the pressure is very great. Later when you have practice you will go down to sixty, seventy feet and the air comes just right. But when you go down to three hundred you must suck it in, the pressure is so few. Very tired, your lungs. Now, ready?’
And because you weren’t ready you floundered about in the topmost yard of water like a beginner learning to swim. It was hard to remember to do so much at once: clench your teeth to breathe normally, equalise the pressure in your ears, ignore the stink and head down beneath the throbbing wooden hull of the boat. A moment’s inattention and the air would burst into your stomach, your mouth open and sea flood into nose and mask; you would flail to the surface, choking and pouring and belching great gouts of diesel stench while the loose end of the tube whipped about in the water hissing and bubbling. And Badoy’s colleagues, teenagers mostly, would peer down laughing.
Hours later and shivering with exhaustion you found the boat again, bringing with you about four kilos of fish on your line. You should have been overjoyed but you were tetchy, jilted, cold and getting colder still as you sat on deck in the night air while the compressor chugged on and still Badoy didn’t return. Then at last the green patches of light growing under the sea and flashing intermittently like electrical storms in tropical clouds seen from high-flying aircraft: the gladiators returning. And here they were, whooping on the surface in the dark, chattering excitedly, swapping stories while their abandoned air-hoses spurted and threshed in the water, then coming in over the side and needing help to pull in their nylon catch-lines with twenty kilos of fish threaded on each: rays, small sharks, groupers, cuttlefish, vast parrot-fish, surgeon fish, a middling octopus, the meat from a giant clam.