So it came to colour your days on the island. Enclosing the mere practice of swimming down and staying at sixty feet without a spear-gun but with your lungs overinflated with oily air, the jaws of that vice: not to be left out on the one hand and on the other the compressor. And always from somewhere afar off in the mind that ringing of an empty room, that fear which had reverberated for as long as you could bear to remember, reminding you that you were full of the wrong stuff. Sleep, snatched mostly during the days’ intense heat, now became obsessionally haunted, shot through with descriptions and apprehensions:
It is just completely terrifying.
Two hundred and fifty feet overhead is brilliant sunshine. The sea is flat calm. Stray half-beaks and flying fish will be breaking the surface almost from sheer light-heartedness, flirting with that nebulous barricade between the two abysses.
But down here the pressure is like dark blue cement, transparent, unset, squeezing in from all sides against mask, hands, ears, genitals. You are in its grasp.
‘Of the two kinds of eel the white one – you know, with the black spots? – that’s the worst. The black one is bad but it does not attack so often. You must look for the separate lump of coral on the bottom, small like this room and maybe no more than two or three metres high, like an island? They like those for their nests. Sometimes there is the head of the eel sticking out and watching you. If he is about as thick as your leg here, he will be about two metres long and very strong. If his head is up like this – like a snake going to bite? – ay, he is dangerous. He will keep maybe his last half inside his house; with the rest he will attack. His teeth, they will take everything from your arm-bone, so you must remain to four feet of him and put your spear in the mouth here. That is his weakest, but you must be ready for a big fight. He is almost impossible to kill with one shot because the brain is very small and behind the eyes. Sometimes the tip of your spear goes up through the roof of his mouth and destroys the brain – ay, very lucky – but his body is stupid and doesn’t know he is dead already. If you hit him in the head, he will always pull back into his house and he will take your spear with him. He’s very hard to pull out then, and your spear will bend like plastic. But sometimes when we are swimming around we look for a coral like that and we look for a tail sticking out. When we see it we are happy because he is so easy then and we shoot to the tail, pum! because when the eel feels it he only wants to get away. He will not attack like that even if he is thick like my stomach here. He thinks only of the spear in the tail and leave his house to swim away from the pain. Always he swim away from the pain.’
Away from the pain is straight up, away from this pressing liquid cell: up, up like a frail pink rocket trailing silver platters of diesel air which come wobbling up for half a minute after you first lie on the surface, feeling the sun on your face again, even now hardly believing in the world you have just escaped. But impossible: that exit route is blocked off by knowledge like a concrete lid over your head, knowledge of what happens to your body if you surface like that from an hour at forty fathoms. The images haunt: the agonising fizzing in the joints, perhaps the haemorrhaging in the skull, the crippling, the vegetable future. It is yet another vice (down unbearable, up impossible) each of whose jaws is dreadful. There is no room for panic down here. Better to discharge it all while you are asleep so it later lets you concentrate on the only thing that counts: that thin polythene tube wrapped twice around your body, the sighing end clamped between your aching jaws. The compressor.
Down there on the right where the sea-bed shelves steeply towards the violet drop which is the brink of a five-hundred-fathom deep, towards the edge of that monstrous chasm the stink comes sluggishly through the tube. You’re now at over three hundred feet, and the compressor can’t cope. You drag the air into your lungs as through a miraculous chink in those dark blue walls. Afterwards, when you are on your way back up the shelf keeping a wary eye open for eels hidden in the myriad holes you peer into and slowly decompressing, the air-flow gradually increases. Until the first glimpse far above and some way off: that black lozenge with the twinkling outline which is the keel of the boat, home of the compressor, fount of all nourishment the taking of which makes your jaws ache around its stenching nipple. Right now, though, that mechanical breast is far away, and only from the thinly flowing taste do you know that it is still alive.
And how infinitely further that sunlit western world of safety and back-up systems and fail-safe. The scuba rules, the diving codes, the union regulations. Here they are not worth the drift of plankton and diatoms past the face-plate. Here there is nothing but a polythene tube in the mouth and a home-made catapult, nothing but the actuality of the moment pressing in with stray threads of scald from invisible stinging tendrils which drift through all tropical oceans as if from some single titanic and long-dismantled jellyfish, some toxic Kraken whose fibres still circulate the globe. Much later, if you are lucky (and because day has now magically elided into night) the banter round the driftwood fire, roasting your catch under a starry sky which still seems to draw you upwards hours after you have left the water:
‘Ay, Badoy, I thought you couldn’t manage him so I shot him in the gills here but it only made him madder.’ Blurts of laughter.
‘And that hammerhead? I guess he was just shy. Big, though, wasn’t he?’
The sharks. Some are not at all shy. You are there at a hundred and fifty feet investigating a cavern beneath an overhanging mountain of coral, trying to spot something edible with all the time the knowledge that you yourself may be the most obviously edible thing for fathoms. There is something in there, too: a big grouper perhaps, like that monster a week or two ago. It was just such a cave, and you were similarly trying to screw up enough courage to go inside, when a bulk of shadow detached itself and suddenly a gigantic flat eye moved like a dinner plate slowly across the cave mouth followed by a wall of dark red scales with one or two parasites attached. If a pin could snare a wild boar, then maybe a metre of elastic-driven rod filched from the core of an electric power cable might have some effect on a creature that huge, but you were not about to try to see.
And amid such reflections the sense of shadow behind and, turning, you see the shark watching from about twenty feet away. Everything looks bigger underwater and this is a twelve-foot Tiger the size of a submarine. And instantly the word ‘requiem’ flashes in the brain since the Tiger is one of the requiem family which in turn is one of the worst. The very word makes the liquid blue cement on all sides congeal and press coldly in, squeezing the upper arms involuntarily to your chest, squeezing the mind.
‘They don’t attack so often, sharks. Usually there is plenty of food for them down there, so they are not always hungry. But he is curious. He wants to know if you are worth attacking. He is attracted to light things, so we wear dark shirts and jogging pants when we dive, but sometimes he sees the soles of the feet in the distance. When he stays like that about twenty feet away, just watching, you must keep like him flat in the water, not upright. Because his mouth is underneath he needs to come at an angle when he attacks, so you must make it difficult for him by lying in the water with your head towards him. Always face him. Always watch his eyes: they look dead but they see everything. You keep your spear-gun pointed at him and you never take your eyes off him. If he moves round, you follow him round too, with the tip of your spear. He doesn’t know what it is. He sees your goggles or mask and he sees your spear and he can’t make his mind up if they will be dangerous to him if he attacks. Usually sharks just go away when they see you are so ready for them. But if he comes closer still maybe you will soon have to fire your spear. The only place is here, in the gills, because the rest of him is too hard and your spear will bounce off. If you hit him in the gills, he will go away; he doesn’t like that. Also the end of his nose is sensitive, and he doesn’t like to be hit there. If you get him in the gills slightly from behind, it’ll go in. You’ll lose you spear and your catch, but it is worth it. If you miss the gi
lls? Ay, ha, I think you must not make a mistake. You are very alone down there.’
Maybe you fire and maybe the shark does go away, but there you still are, a hundred and fifty feet down without a spear and holding a useless length of wood like a child’s toy with two impotently dangling strips of rubber, hyperventilating with a plastic hose stuck in your mouth and more or less at the mercy of whatever else turns up. You may have remembered to give three sharp tugs on the hose, and if by some extraordinary fluke someone in the boat was actually holding it at that moment and there was a spare air-line it might just have brought a colleague plunging down to your assistance. But what would he find? A pale figure in a wet cement cell holding a piece of wood. Then the slow, humiliating escorted swim back up the sloping coral shelf, pausing to decompress, waiting down there while your brain is still full of shark and everything inside is screaming at you to go, go, get up, get out of it, until at long last your head breaks the surface into the blinding lights and a ring of anxious faces. ‘What was it? What was the problem? You have lost your spear.’
‘Shark. A massive goddamned shark.’ Your voice is squeaky with air under pressure, your jaw aches so much from clenching the tube that you can’t enunciate properly and your teeth no longer meet each other in the way they did, feeling lumpy and displaced to one side as after dentistry.
‘Shark? Oh, what kind?’
And you know whatever species you say these boy gladiators in torn cotton will be immensely good-natured and agree it was high time to stop anyway because the compressor’s getting low in fuel and we should maybe land and cook some fish. And always you wondered what it would have taken to make them just a little bit worried. Until that day you found out.
III
Well, night it was, to be accurate; for the choking practice-sessions and the worst of the haunted dreams were past and you had graduated to night-diving with the compressor. Much of the fear now could be held down by exhilaration: self-pleasure at doing things automatically so your body could take care of itself leaving your mind freer to speculate, enjoy, and attend to getting a good night’s catch. For the fish down there were indeed bigger, though in that speckled darkness as docile as the little painted ones of the shallows when night came.
In point of fact the darker it was the better for spear-fishing, so sometimes you fished in the early part of the evening before the moon rose, coming back to the island at about midnight, the tarpaulin shelter stretched over sticks glinting in the starlight as one person set about making a fire and another began sorting and threading the catch for sale early next morning. At other times, though, the moon would rise as the sun set and you would all have to wait until it disappeared from the sky. On such occasions everybody slept when night fell at seven-thirty; everybody but you, of course, who would achieve an unreal doze at midnight, needing to be shaken awake at one-forty. And at that moment, as reality began to edge in to take the place of whatever dream, the very last thing you wanted was to get up, scramble through black surf into a boat, go out across a black sea beneath a black sky and go down and down with a torch and a spear-gun and a polythene tube in your mouth, the compressor overhead thudding the stink into you so that even next day you could taste it while belching after lunch.
Yet once out there in the dark off Badoy’s village, balancing in the narrow boat while by flashes of torchlight masks and goggles are checked, spear-guns sorted, the coils of air-line kicked into more or less neat piles and the engine stopped so the boatman can disconnect the propeller shaft and slip the frayed fan-belt over the compressor’s pulley, something changes. Amid those full black waters which so directly oppose the low ebb of your vitality and will the image crosses your mind of what people are doing at that moment in your own birthplace. It is nearly lunchtime there, and those dull shopping malls will be crowded, utterly safe with familiar names and products, utterly reassuring if you could ever suspend spleen and ennui. And the thought comes: what you are really doing is living against all that. The world is full of nest-builders and settlers-down but you will never be one of them. For you, only these present wrenches of pain and pure fear and glimpses of magnificent wildness will one day remind you that any of it was real; that it was not all fantasy and television, it was not all insulation; that the reefs beneath are there always. Do you crave a violent end? the mind runs on insistently in the darkness. But the compressor has started and Badoy is already in the water, his line hissing. Maybe; but not now, oh, not now this night….
You should remember every detail of that dive, but you don’t. There were just the two of you working an unfamiliar stretch around the seaward side of the island. As you submerged there was a flash of distant lightning which lit the mountain on the mainland, partially obscured by the black bulk of the island in the foreground, then you headed down with Badoy, two abreast, into the dark. The sea-bed here revealed by your glancing torches was different: the same coral varieties but more mountainous and fissured in their formation. There were fewer slopes and inclines, more cliff-faces and crevasses. Badoy worked one side of a ridge, you the other. Often you caught sight of his torchlight although not the beam itself, fitful green lightnings on the far side of crags. The catch increased steadily. It was more difficult terrain but more rewarding. The steep gorges were silvery with hydroids, stinging ferns which waved in the currents; to get into them you had to swim on edge, and the back of the elbow holding the spear-gun was repeatedly wealed. Making your way about became more and more difficult as the drag on your catch-line increased. Adding a three-kilo grouper made it still harder.
And always the nerves alert, the quick flicker of glance for the least movement, for the white-rimmed eye moving in the eel’s lair as a dot among all those undulating forests. The click of unseen crabs, the grunt of a creature disturbed, the directionless drumming on some thoracic air-sac. No longer can you hear the compressor’s distant thump, and it seems like half an hour since you last saw Badoy’s light or heard the far metallic ring of his spear-point on rock. You are investigating a black diagonal cleft little more than a foot wide. A yard inside and it turns to the right. There is nothing in this pocket other than small white pebbles on its floor, and it is precisely those white pebbles which should be telling you about the thick olive snake embedded among them which you mistake for – what? – the tail of a ray, perhaps. So automatic has become the sighting, the firing, the hauling-in of fresh trophies that you fire without thinking; then the thought, too late, catches up.
The spear is snatched from you so fast that its cocking lug and the first foot of nylon line take skin off your fingers. It lodges at the back of the cleft, quivering as whatever it is tries to drag it round the corner. Then amid the clouds of silt you glimpse what it has struck into and another, darker cloud comes billowing around the corner to engulf you. Octopus. The one creature of which Badoy has spoken with real fear.
‘I don’t like the feeling on your hand,’ he once said after winkling a tiny octopus from its hole with a steel prod at low tide. ‘They stick to you.’ He lifted up his hand with its dark parasite wrapped around it like a clot of leeches. ‘This one is too small; but even a little bit bigger – say, the head the size of half my fist? – and they will bite pieces out of you. That mouth, that beak you remove when you eat them, it’s very strong and sharp. The big ones will always try to pull you towards the beak to tear you.’
But even so you are already trying to get hold of the end of the spear, reaching right-handedly into the cleft to rescue that precious weapon, still perhaps not sure of the power and size of the creature you have engaged with and which still lies hidden around the corner. Only when you feel a second tentacle close over your forearm, wrapping it together with the spear and tugging you irresistibly forward, do you realise how truly awful is the mistake you have made and how likely it is to prove fatal. For there is a degree of strength which you know cannot be resisted for long. You know from so many encounters over the months with even insignificant-looking sea-creatures how powerf
ul the small muscle of a clam is, how resistant to dying a little eel. And now you feel your arm being compressed, the skin being dragged forward towards the hand as if it were a long glove being pulled off and simultaneously your right shoulder catching half into the mouth of the cleft, your head desperately averted over it and wedging at an angle against the rock outside so that slowly the mask is being crushed sideways across your face and immediately the water spurts in to fill the face-plate and your nose.
Now, with your head bent back over right shoulder, left cheek ground flat against the coral, everything is dark. By some miracle your left hand still holds the torch, but it is pointing uselessly into the sepia-filled cave. The pulling stops for a moment but does not ease while both creatures take stock of the damage and plan tactics for the immediate future. But you have no tactics and very little future. A grain of reason makes you bring your left hand as far away from the hole as possible and, reaching back behind you, you fire a regular three dots of light in random directions. Your heart-rate is way up and your respiration crazy, panting the rank air out into your skewed mask in the hope that the pressure will empty it of water again but it can only half-empty it: the seal between face and rubber is too weak on one side to stop the in-flood of that liquid black cement.
An age passes; you are locked and entombed, your neck cannot be far from breaking. Then something touches your hand holding the torch. You flail it wildly, trying to shake loose this new tentacle. Badoy’s light breaks across your head and he comes round to peer in at your face-plate and, by God, he’s grinning as if to say: ‘Ay, now you’re learning the trade.’ And somewhere inside his lair the octopus senses reinforcements have arrived and his pull increases again. Then suddenly your air stops. The tube is pinched between you and the mouth of the hole, perhaps at the rim of your mask, perhaps lower down your body. You wave desperately with the torch, making confused gestures towards your head like someone with an arm amputated at the wrist. Badoy, incredible Badoy, notices straight away amid all else that your bubbles have stopped. He reaches over and pulls your mask right off and the cement crashes into your eyes, nose, mouth, then you feel a stabbing at your lips: another tube gushing diesel stink. You grip it in your teeth and suck and choke and suck and open your eyes. There in front of you is Badoy’s face, slightly blurred now that your mask has gone. He hangs there in his little olive-lensed goggles, grinning and grinning until he reaches over and gently pulls the air-hose from your mouth and puts it back in his own for a few breaths. Then he makes a gesture you cannot understand because he, too, is holding his torch in the hand that makes it and it stabs wildly. He thrusts the air-line back in your mouth and disappears behind you. His light vanishes.
The View from Mount Dog Page 11