Dead Water

by Ings, Simon

  He thinks about Vibeke. This girl he took under his wing. This girl he shaped so strangely. He has always assumed that what he did with her was motivated by care, even love. The cameras. The maps. Papers in the Geografisk Tidsskrift. Lying in the arms of the women of the Dorchester, he can no longer be so sure of his motives. What, after all, did Vibeke become in the end? (He has begun, unconsciously, to think of her in the past tense.) A vagabond. A woman closer to her animals and birds than to the people of the islands. An Arctic nymph – or an Arctic witch. A scarfed girl shod in heavy boots. Not feminine at all.

  This is what keeps him awake, troubled and oh-so-fascinatingly mysterious between the sheets. The thought that all his care and encouragement of Vibeke Dunfjeld might after all have been directed against her sex, against her power, against her womanhood. That he took a girl he was afraid of loving and year by year made her unlovable.

  A bomb lands near the building. Light wheels, sunlight under water, as the chandeliers swing. Another explosion whomps the dining room. A plate topples off the edge and lands on the floor by Eric’s hand. Instinctively he catches it as it bounces. It pulses for a second between his fingers as though it were made of rubber. The harmonics die away, damped in his thick-fingered grip, leaving him holding a dish greasy with turbot and cheese.

  There is applause.

  Eric thinks of his smart, chilly bedroom on the roof, thinner-walled, and several degrees colder, than the apartments below. He says: ‘I wonder if my room will survive.’

  Pamela’s little voice is hot in his ear: ‘I shouldn’t worry about that tonight, dear.’

  Wharfingers with hooks for hands beetle four-limbed among the boxes, barrels and bails of Tooley Street. Case-hooks of hardened steel, splithandled, piratical and huge, tug and trawl the city’s goods about its rumbling yards. Hands of leather, gristle, chipped bone and scar tissue wield hooks aloft, careless and savage, as shifts retire and shifts awake: ceaseless waves of burdened men. Gutters run with weak beer, vomit, essences, sump oil, spit. From Tooley Street, Eric Moyse makes desultory sorties into the terraces: a nervous stranger with a thick accent, apologetic and uncomfortable. Resting wharfingers and cracked old men, oblivious so far to the injunctions posted up on public buildings – ‘Keep mum she’s not so dumb!’, ‘Talk less, you never know!’ – whisper behind his back and cast around, uneasy, for the nearest policeman.

  They should recognize Eric by now. He comes here three times a week at least to explore and explain, traipsing back and forth from London Bridge to Rotherhithe, Shad Thames to the Old Kent Road: anywhere there’s a knot of refugee Norse blood. It is a solitary and dispiriting business to be hunting one woman in a city of exiles and refugees, firewatchers, fantasists, Blimpish ex-cavalrymen, calculators, damp-handed cadets. Hopeless, anyway, to be looking for Vibeke as though she were some child mislaid in a market! She might be anywhere. Processing refugees in Fife. Translating decrypts in some nameless Nissen hut in the home counties.

  So, steadily, inexorably, Eric’s original quest falls away and his visits to this ‘little Norway’ acquire their own justification. He learns his way around the streets of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe by smell. Lavender from Yardley’s. Fruit from Hartley’s. Baking from Peek Frean’s. Over all, the stench of tanneries. Walking by wharfs and factories, breathing the spicy miasma of lime and decay spilling from James Garner and Sons and Barrow, Hepburn and Gale, Eric finds himself ever more at ease in this place. Something draws him here. Some as yet unformed idea. A magnetism. A hope.

  On Tower Bridge Road, at the mouths of alleys and in the porticoes of defunct shops, local children, saving up for Saturday’s tuppenny rush at the cinema, build grottoes out of fruit boxes lined with shredded grass. They arrange daisies and dandelions in small vases filched from their mothers’ mantelpieces. They prop holy pictures, even cigarette cards, behind a stub of candle. They sit by their shrines like sadhus. It is a form of begging: they kick the grottoes to pieces and scamper off if a policeman happens by.

  In the shadow of a railway viaduct a different kind of grotto is tended by two boys – twins, by the look of them, wilder than the rest and darkerskinned. They have no pictures, no candles. They create no mood. The boys are obviously idiots. They have grasped that their crate is a kind of box and that boxes are for putting things in, but that’s as far as their arrested understanding takes them. One fills their crate with shoeboxes and the other fills the shoeboxes with matchboxes. They have no jar, and were you to drop a copper or two on the pavement beside them – Eric has done this, many times – they will either ignore it or, less often, one will pick it up and slip it into a matchbox, one coin per matchbox, as though preparing the apparatus for a complex three-dimensional game.

  Eric, fascinated, hunkers down to watch. The boys stack and fill their boxes methodically. Boxes in boxes in boxes. Eric stares. Something is taking shape inside him: a bright new idea that will propel him beyond the confines of this silly war and into the future.

  The sirens sound.

  The street is already emptied out. (The locals have their own, private early warning system: old men sit in their backyards, watching air-raid signals shuttling up the railway lines from Kent.) Eric stands. The nearest shelter’s obvious enough: the viaduct’s only a few yards off. ‘Come on!’

  The twins, oblivious, persevere with their little boxes, their shrine to who knows what private divinity.

  Evening has gathered, yellowing the sky, stripping the blue from every shadow. The first detonations shiver the air: the guns in Southwark Park have opened up. Shadows shimmy across the road. A warden springs out at him, waving his arms. The blast is so close Eric doesn’t even hear it and the warden vanishes in a cloud so white it must be flour.

  Eric turns back towards the boys and their grotto. The children have vanished. A wriggle of shadow cees and esses around their shrine: their perfect cube, their intricate, perfectly squared-off stack of boxes. The shadow vanishes. The air stinks of vinegar. Eric walks through clouds of pearly white. There are bells. White figures move amidst the clouds. Some are on fire. He finds himself on Tower Bridge. In the river, just a few hundred yards away, a boat is burning fiercely. He retreats.

  In Tooley Street, London’s larder fries in coconut oil, palm oil, fat. Walls of yellow heat corral him into reservoirs of smoking grain and bails of burning twigs. Drums and barrels burst and jump, cartoon-like, at his approach. Canvas sheets flame and spin like Hollywood dancers. All the variety of the material world sings to him.

  Another blast, very close, hurls him to his knees. He cannot breathe. The mess and chaos of the port, its complexity and industry, evaporate before the flames and, with a terrible abruptness, the whole landscape flips, like one of those trick geometrical figures, into something mean and disordered: a rubbish tip on fire.

  The air rushes in from behind, urging Eric towards the flames’ bright centre. He knows he must run. He cannot move. He is fixed to the spot by a strange and burdensome thought. The fire will sweep all this away. These heaps and stacks and barrows of jumbled stuff. It will clean the slate for a more ordered world. A cleaner trade. Contained. No stench of sweat, no broken limbs, no sores, no sprains. No ham-boned supermen rolling drunk of a Friday night on wages that their children never see.

  The future, when it comes, will come in boxes. From port to port, big, square-built ships will carry ever bigger quantities of the future about the earth. Great cranes will lift the future from open holds and deposit it on trucks and railway locomotives, and they will bear the future inland, to every town, every settlement. Ships that today are shackled, constipated, squeezing out their goods for weeks on end on the backs of men made beasts, will then evacuate themselves in a matter of hours! Eric pictures them: great tanker hulls converted to dry storage...

  For a moment, the white core of the fire is obscured by smoke as thick and black as ink dropped in water. An autumnal smell – burning stubblefields – sweeps thickly over him, as though the season itself wer
e come to carry him out of time. Eric finds his feet and staggers, propelled towards the future. Boxes. Boxes and boxes and boxes in boxes, boxes everywhere and every box the same. He falls to his knees, buckling under the weight of his vision, and crawls through the litter of the old world: swatches of banana hemp and drifts of ash and the stubs of hand-rolled cigarettes and burlap threads and, here and there, surreal and precious, the greenish heads of discarded pub-lunch prawns. He has to stand. He lies with his back against the rippling tar of the road while heat rolls over him like blankets. He has to sleep. The vision is bigger than he is. It overcomes him.

  Presently, out of the rain of ash, the red drizzle of molten shrapnel, something else impends. A tower. A statue. An angel. ‘Moyse?’

  Something human. Vast. Red.

  ‘Eric!’

  Stalin. Satan. A red death.

  ‘Eric, come on! Come on...’A bearded balloon swims drunkenly toward him. Two eyes veer and vanish. Eric feels himself gripped under the arms. A ring around his chest. He’s lifted. He staggers as an invisible muscle rasps round him, round and round, drawing him clear of the sucking blaze. His heels drag against hot cobblestones. He feels under him, around him, a muscular labour, as though a motor were trying to drive his hull of flesh out of its doldrum channel and into clear water, and it comes to him, by some faint signature of breath and muscular rhythm, that this figure is a man, a man he knows. If only he could –

  ‘Eric! Heaven’s sake, move!’

  Eric struggles and frees himself. He kneels and wraps frail arms around his old friend’s legs. ‘Oh...’ He looks up through his tears, blinks salt and ash away and there, haloed by the bright sulphurous light of the future, is Peder Halstad.

  Part Three

  NINE

  Sion: a suburb of Mumbai.

  Centuries ago the Jesuits built a chapel here and named it after Mount Zion in Jerusalem. The chapel has vanished, and even the British fort on its hill, which once marked the boundary between Bombay and Salsette Island, is vandalized and done, its few remaining timbers scored and scorched. Close your eyes. The drone of the Eastern Express Highway competes with the rustle of used prophylactics. Open them. Woods. Parrots. Broken paths and exposed plumbing.

  To the east, in the shadow of the K. J. Somaiya Institute of Engineering and Information Technology, a slum line sheathes the railway line to Chunabhatti. To the west, suburbs nibble like a grey leprosy at the skirts of Maharashtra Nature Park.

  The dead boys, Abhik and Kaneer, becalmed, take the chapel for their own and lick their wounds with a forked tongue. They are accomplished djinn by now. They shape the narratives through which they flow. Still, their parents’ murder remains an open wound: a mystery they cannot yet explain.

  Lovely Auntie Roopa has rented a cramped apartment for herself and her son overlooking the rain trees and casual cricketers of Shivaji Park. The plumbing here is bad: she has to wait until 2.00 a.m. to have a shit. Day after day, while Nitesh is hauled, at some expense, from one bin to another – nursery, breakfast club, supper club, homework club, school – Roopa sits slumped in front of the television. The TV is the family that no longer speaks to her. The TV is the circle of friends she no longer has. Now and again she dabs at her ruined mouth with a balled-up tissue. Her spit comes away pink as fragments of tooth circulate in her gums.

  Her dentures lie forgotten in the bottom of a drawer. She watches movies. Bollywood noirs. Frustrated at her inaction, her defeat, Abhik and Kaneer break her television. It’s an old cathode-ray tube model, and it takes no more than a tail-flick to damage the set.

  And if this was the kind of movie Roopa spends her days watching, there would be an important beat here. The dead boys would rip off the back of the set and there, tucked into the housing, taped there, would be a brandnew Glock wrapped in an oilcloth and about one hundred thousand rupees in small denomination bills. The discovery would signal a new act.

  This is not a movie. The boys achieve precisely nothing. The first thing Roopa does when she discovers the TV isn’t working is to phone the rental company. By lunchtime there they are again, Auntie Roopa, baby Nitesh, dead Abhik, dead Kaneer, eating vada pav sandwiches in front of an LG flat-screen, watching a rerun of The Stoneman Murders. Vikram Gokhale plays Roopa’s dad.

  The green Honda is gone. Vinod is gone. Yash Yadav himself is gone: disappeared, scot-free. As for mum and dad, no one living even brings them to mind any more. The Nankars may as well have never lived. What more can Roopa do? There’s only so much that djinn can ask of one small, broken woman.

  Feeling sorry for themselves, Abhik and Kaneer take themselves off again to the ruins of the Chapel of Zion and curl up in the litter there. Bags of glue. Old needles. Shitty tissues. Shattered rum bottles. Glass flecks sting the eyes and disturb the sleep of every glue-sniffing vagrant who passes out in this place.

  ‘I told her to make the chapattis and then, when she was leaning over the bowl, kneading the dough, I took the pan from the wall and I lifted it over my head and I brought it down on her head and it rang like a bell.’

  The boys flex, steeped in horror and pity, and the failure of the world.

  ‘I expected her to fall over. That was the idea. To fall over empty, eyes shut. She didn’t fall over. She leant there over the bowl, like she was waiting. Then she wailed. She lifted her hands and they looked wrong, like an old woman’s hands, because they were covered in wet dough. She put her hands around my waist and called me darling.’

  The boys wrap themselves around each other, weeping bright and bitter tears.

  ‘I got the kerosene from out the corner and the cap came off easily enough and I upended it over her, wanting it to be done, for a line to be drawn. But I couldn’t find the matches. She was moving about the room on all fours, her sari was getting in her way, it was caught under her knees, she could only move her arms, she was turning around and around like she had lost something, and I said to her, “Where are the matches?” I noticed that she was breathing in this strange way, like she was straining the air through her teeth. Anyway, I found the matches.’

  All Abhik and Kaneer ever wanted was stories and hot milk. Cuddles now and then. A warm pallet. They’ve got stories now, all right.

  ‘By this time she had got around the whole room on all fours, spreading the kerosene, so when I dropped the match on her the fire spilled off her on to the floor and the whole room went up, pushing me out of the room, and the worst of it is she is following me, she’s standing in the doorway, burning, her hands, burning, pressed either side of the doorframe, and her head, burning, smoking like a chimney, the hair all gone, her eyes gone like cooked eggs but moving and her skin all white.’

  Stories are their lifeblood now, their oxygen, their life support. Stories are their home. Their bricks. Their clay.

  ‘She came into the room. Very gentle tread she had. Small feet. The room was filling with smoke, black, tarry, tasty, it rolled over her head. Wild it was, and when it went it was like it left this doll behind, and it was this doll came knelt down in front of me. Well, I forgot myself. And I did this thing. Look. I laid it on her head, you see, laid it there as though she were still my wife. Even though it was burning. Even though there was nothing there. Bone. Aah –’ He gasps, hiding his face behind a crummy hand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Ogan blinks, smearing his useless hand across a stubbled cheek. ‘Got something in my eye.’

  Saturday, 12 February, 2000: eight in the morning

  Ogan Seth, wife-killer, flees to Mumbai’s port area. Hiding his ruined hand under bandages and blarney, he talks his way aboard a dhow bound across the Indian Ocean for Muscat, in Oman. Fabrics, mainly. Spices. Machine parts. Break bulk. ‘You’ll have to sleep on deck.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Under that Hilux there,’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll give you passage. Food. No pay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Sign here.’

  Easy. Ogan�
�s mark, his ‘X’, is much the same whichever hand he writes with.

  ‘You’ve a bedroll?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well. See what you can find.’

  At night Ogan lies, whimpering and sleepless, wrapped inside an

  ‘antique’ rug.

  (Rug / US$22.4 SQF / 168 SQF).

  The boat’s dangerously overloaded, of course. The way it wallows whenever there’s a chop puts Ogan in mind of horses struggling across a river, nostrils flaring, in the curry westerns he used to enjoy with his wife when –

  Anyway.

  Captain Egaz Nageen’s a Thai who barely knows port from starboard. For sure, his paperwork’s a forge or fudge. He spends all day studying seamanship manuals when he thinks no one is looking.

  • Speak loudly and clearly when delivering your report.

  • Even if you cannot properly identify the object seen smelled or heard say what you think at that moment.

  • When searching for an object scan the sky the sea and the horizon from left to right and from top to bottom and from bottom to top and from right to left and back again.

  • Remain at the helm until entirely relieved.

  No one’s fooled.

  The voyage is peaceful enough, but the engine’s underperforming and the crossing takes the best part of a week. Nageen says they’ll put in at Ras al Hadd to resupply. It turns out he’s always had this trip in mind, that he fancies himself as some sort of self-educated world traveller. A stolen library book, concealed among his clothes, says: