Dead Water

by Ings, Simon

  An explosion has taken away the back wall of the kitchen. The inside is a maze of tangled metal, vents and dangling wires. The swing doors to the dining room are blocked, but something has punched a neat hole through the plasterboard wall. She crawls through. The dining room is under about a foot of slurry. The flood has stacked the entire contents of the room against the left-hand wall. Twenty tables, a hundred chairs. The tower leans, wobbles and falls. Spray scuds the ceiling. It falls as rain as Ester pulls her way towards the lobby.

  People are fleeing the hotel. If you time it right, you can run out of the main lobby and get far enough up the road to be beyond the reach of the waves. The sea is still ugly. Surges just a couple of feet high are more than strong enough to wield sheets of corrugated iron like scythes. People are shouting instructions and warnings. Their voices keep getting lost in the din of the helicopter as it buzzes the beach, back and forth, filming the destruction.

  Ester leaves the hotel. By now she feels as though she’s hobbling on stumps. She’s kept her dressing gown. Some people out here are naked. Others are fully clothed and sit surrounded by luggage, as though at any moment a plane might arrive and pluck them off the hillside. People squat by the roadside with their backs to the sea, staring sullenly at nothing. A truck passes, full of women and children. Word has gone round there’s another big wave on the way. Someone jumps up and points out to sea, triggering Mexican waves and screams and pointless, circular running. Most people here have no fight left.

  Ambulances pass her on their way up the hill. She picks up her pace. If they find David first and he is injured and they carry him away, it might be days before she finds him. She picks a dirt path and goes exploring. There’s a chance David wasn’t in the hotel when the waves struck. There’s a chance he went for a walk, a chance that he didn’t choose to explore the beach.

  A local man passes her, carrying a heavy pan. It has scrapings of rice in it. He’s been bringing food to the survivors. He glances back at her, looks her up and down, and says something in Thai.

  ‘I don’t –’

  He shuffles his feet, nods at her, and walks away. She watches him go. There, on the path: he has left her his shoes.

  It finally dawns on Ester that perhaps David is in Rawai. It would be just like him to have gone there at the crack of dawn, bossing the scuba guides around, checking, double-checking, triple-checking their gear. She knows her hope is crazy. Still, she turns around and hobbles down the hill, back to town.

  The sea is calm and glittering grey: a sheet of foil. The waves have swept cars and tuk-tuks off the streets and stripped the leaves from the trees. There is a surface cleanliness about everything, but each building is either a gaping concrete shell or a rubbish heap, and already there is a smell over everything: not rotten, but wrong. The smell of deep ocean.

  There are vehicles running along the coastline now, all heading in the opposite direction. Beyond the town, the traffic dribbles away to nothing. Still, she presses ahead. Her legs aren’t working properly. They are bleeding again, everywhere, all over.

  Sand covers the road, and she is just about to sit down in it, she is putting her hand out to steady herself, when two things happen. She sees that the sand is gritted with tiny fragments of glass, like shattered Christmas baubles; and just ahead of her, she sees a Toyota. Bungee-roped to the back of it there’s a mountain bike. A Marin. Ester laughs, and stamps a tattoo of thanks to the cargo gods. She wrestles the bike to the ground.

  The coast is not as she remembers it. Here and there, in puddles, things flap and shiver. The skies are empty: these stranded fish will die long before the birds return to finish them off. Shoals of shrimps have left vivid streaks in the earth: great strings of pink. There is much bare earth where the vegetation has been torn away. There are no dogs.

  She expects the ground to be a quagmire but the water has run clean off the land, stripping it so that the going is easy. The earth and the sand have formed a mottled map over the road, a two-tone, dun-coloured thing, ancient and weathered and smooth as velum. It is obvious, after only an hour of this, that she is lost. This is, literally, a new country. There are no trees.

  She crosses a riverbed. There is no bridge, no sign of a bridge, and the riverbed is inexplicably dry. Ester climbs off her bike. This has to be Rawai. Only there are no buildings. Stiff and sore and thirsty, she drops her bike in the dirt and casts around for the line of the road. There is nothing at all.

  A flat dribble of earth and sand spreads in a brown-paper fan before the sea. Where the earth and the sea meet, a shipping container sits beached half out of the water. One of its doors has come open. It swings to and fro in the wind, squealing.

  She is very thirsty. Her forehead throbs. The skin there feels as tight as a steel plate. Raw from the sun, she shakes out her dressing gown and wraps it around herself. The wind whips the gown around her legs. For a while she hesitates. There is only one possible refuge David could have found here, and there it is, half in, half out of the surf, its doors swinging in the wind. Once she looks inside the container and does not find him, then that is the end. Her father will be irretrievably lost.

  The container is old and rusted and lacks any obvious markings. It is so dilapidated she wonders if it might not have sunk long before and been lifted from the seabed by the great waves. She catches hold of the door as it swings in the wind. It’s heavier than she expects. She staggers, taking its weight, and opens it wide.

  She steps inside the can. Impossible to imagine there is a rear wall to this thing. Its darkness goes on forever. Her bare feet slap the plywood floor: a fragile sound. She moves forward. Seawater swills around her feet. The container groans. It yawns. She stares into the darkness and she sees, just a few feet away from her, a shadow. A man, or the form of a man.

  It is not David. It is somebody else.

  FIFTEEN

  Missing men. Spilled containers. Ships run aground. The Indian Ocean tsunami has thrown Moyse Line into chaos. At Muscat airport Tanya Dix, PA to the company president Havard Moyse, waits for Ester by the gate. No easy, ex-cabin crew courtesy from her. Ester feels instantly put in her place as Tanya, clicking her way towards the VIP lounge, rattles off a series of questions Ester cannot possibly answer. What is she here for? Who does she need to see? What does she need? When by? She thinks Ester’s a businesswoman. Ester follows her through the airport’s semirestricted spaces, past glass-walled rooms stuck over with lining paper. Through the gaps Ester glimpses grey-faced US soldiers, crates of Tanuf mineral water, rucksacks as big as body bags. ‘Do you know where you’re staying?’

  Ester wants to cry.

  In the VIP lounge, Ester’s luggage is waiting for her. Tanya uses her phone. ‘Where the hell is the chopper?’ she says, pouring Ester an apple juice one-handed from a carton into a heavy crystal tumbler. ‘Here.’ She kicks the fridge door shut. ‘No point waiting for service in this hole. Hello ?’

  Ester has never flown in a helicopter before, let alone over the Empty Quarter. The clouds scattered below them cast shadows on the sand: regular pools of blue in a desert that’s as pink as a rose.

  The airstrip is exactly that: a narrow corridor of dirt, surrounded by a camel fence. There are landing lights but no amenities. A four-by-four – one of those new, low-slung Land Rovers – is waiting for her. The driver’s door opens and out steps the most beautiful boy Ester has ever seen.‘Ester Brooks.’ He’s like a fawn.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘How was the journey, Ester?’

  Bambi’s name is Tim. Tim has been working in the A’Sharqiya region of Oman for four years and, up close, you can see the damage his skin has taken from the sun. The desert is not kind to white beauty. ‘Have you been to Oman before?’

  Tim gives her his two-minute orientation. People call Oman a Gulf state, but most of the country faces east across the Indian Ocean. Its western border is drawn ruler-straight, gifting it a considerable chunk of Arabia’s Empty Quarter. For practical purposes the cou
ntry is little more than a fertile strip sandwiched between a mountain range and the sea. Tim’s done this before, a lot. He might be an air steward describing the safety features of a plane.

  Like Tanya, Tim thinks Ester’s here on business. Ester doesn’t want the embarrassment of having to explain what she’s really doing – that she’s here to receive condolences for her father’s death – so she keeps him talking.

  It takes time to develop an eye for the beauties of this place, but Tim’s been here four years now and he has no plans to leave. He points out the sights as they drive. Patterns in the rocks strewn either side of the road suggest an ancient settlement. Heaps of stones gathered here and there are pre-Islamic grave mounds. This was a city, once.

  There is a cliff, and a path, and at the bottom of the path there is a jetty, and a boat. After hours of airborne sedation, Ester finds the going slippy and difficult. Things here are as simple and crude and remote as she was warned they would be. There aren’t many billionaires invite you to their hideaway with advice to bring sensible footwear.

  Their boat to the island is a spruce, speedy runabout of a sort very familiar to this Melbourne child. For some minutes they drive parallel to the cliff-face. The swell, as waves collide and redouble, is nauseating. It doesn’t help that Tim wants to show Ester a recent wreck. A trawler came to grief last year against these rocks and it’s still reasonably intact. It comes in and out of focus through the turquoise water as they rise and fall. An engine block. A funnel. Then they are away, round the bend and into open sea, following the waves south-east to the tiny island Havard – after much prickly negotiation with the Omani government – has made his own.

  The island’s high rocks suggest a Hearst-scale gothic hideaway, but the back of the island is broken and crinkled and there are bays filled with sand imported from the interior.

  The buildings are stone: traditional structures that blend comfortably into the stark landscape. The palms are fed desalinated water. A plastic liner surrounds each grove, keeping out the salt of the sea. ‘If you see a dying palm,’ Tim tells Ester, as they coast towards the beach, ‘it means seawater’s penetrated the water table. You won’t see that here but you will every place else.’ Before 1971, Tim tells her, there were no metalled roads outside the capital, Muscat. No schools. No hospitals. Oman’s coastal highway – the first – is hardly development gone mad, but it has wounded the landscape, and all along Oman’s seaboard the date palms are dying as aquifers are diverted to supply the hotels and resorts the new road has made possible.

  Tim thinks Ester’s here to write about the island. Havard Moyse spends most of his year in Dubai and frequently lets out his island home to holidaymakers.

  Tim uses a walkie-talkie to call ahead. Havard Moyse, sixty years old and looking forty, waits for them in a cove overlooking the ocean. The scene is photogenic to the point of parody. A lone, barefooted figure in cargo pants and a loose white shirt, Havard stares across the blue ocean as though posing for a book cover. Sunlight catches in hair bleached more by the desert sun than age. The effect, so kitsch, so religiose – so breathtaking – renders Ester speechless, and perhaps this is why Havard takes her for a newly arrived guest. ‘Do you kitesurf? No? Tim can give you a lesson. We have an hour or two before sundown, don’t we, Tim? You must stretch out after your journey. Where’ve you come from?’ His warmth is so unforced, his solicitude so flattering, Ester is tempted to play along.

  Tim is there to lever them back on track.

  Havard’s face falls. ‘Ester, I’m so sorry. It’s the desert. It does things to the mind.’

  Havard’s patter sees them from the cove, along a sandy path and a few concrete steps, to a pavilion made of palm wattle. There are sofas and, on a carved sandalwood table, a plate of Turkish delight and a silver bucket full of crushed ice and cans of Mountain Dew. ‘I hope you’ve got a sweet tooth,’ says Havard, casting a critical eye over this minimal hospitality.

  They sit. They talk about the tsunami. How can they not? Moyse Line lost dozens in facilities along the coast of Tamil Nadu, plus a handful at sea. It is strange to hear Havard talk about ‘his people’ in this way: as though a shipping line were like any other kind of business. The truth, the great open secret, is that global shipping concerns like Moyse Line boast barely any physical reality at all. Moyse Line occupies two floors above a private art gallery on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. Less than twenty people inhabit its shabby white rooms, and most of them are in public relations. Havard Moyse’s ships, sailing under the convenient dayglo flags of one landlocked tuppenny nation or another, are chartered from companies registered in islands in the Caribbean. Their crews are hired by agents in Jakarta and São Paulo. The seamen who carry his containers around the earth are effectively stateless and spend their lives in steel cabinets. Shore leave is a thing of myth: since 9/11 most countries will not even let them off their boat. The truckers work for a thousand and one small-time companies.

  Havard leans forward, hands clasped. ‘Not to know what happened. Not to know where. To not have a body to mourn. I’m sorry, it’s not my place to talk about these things.’

  Of course it is. It is why she is here: Havard knew her father.

  ‘It was after the coup.’ Havard reminisces. ‘In London. We were staying at the same hotel. The Dorchester, on Park Lane. He was minding the old Sultan there.’

  The little David told Ester about his work with Moyse Line – Dhofar, the coup, bin Taimur, Tony Ashworth to dinner – has convinced Ester that the line is embroiled in Oman’s shadowy, if benign, government apparatus. It’s not the only company in this position. Sultan Qaboos famously mortgaged his country to British oil interests to pay for his roads and hospitals and schools. There are worse ways to pull a country out of poverty. ‘I never got to know David that well,’ Havard concedes. ‘He ran interference for me in Singapore. Counter-piracy, I mean. Until MALSINDO cleaned the Strait.’

  It’s so much Dutch to her, but she can see that Havard means well.

  ‘He helped look for Eric Moyse, my father, when he disappeared.’

  Ester hides her surprise behind her drinks can. She swallows hard. ‘Dad didn’t tell me that.’

  Havard smiles, trying to put her at ease. ‘He wasn’t supposed to. Anyway, we didn’t find him. You did.’

  Ester stares into her soda, remembering.

  The container has cracked, letting in the heat and stink of the beach. But the corpse’s eyes have sunk long since. Light pools uselessly in the empty, leather-lined sockets. Seated there, upright yet settled, a deathly misshape, his head erect, his tongue black fabric chewed half-off by dusty, tombstone teeth, Eric Moyse, missing these thirty years, confronts her: the robber of his tomb –

  ‘You can imagine the speculation there’s been in the press.’

  Is this why she is here? To be briefed? To be cautioned to silence?

  Havard says: ‘Eric’s container was adapted so that it could be opened from the inside. It wasn’t his tomb. I wish the papers wouldn’t call it that. He lived in it. Hid out in it. It does happen. Traffickers use cans all the time, and not everyone travels steerage.’

  ‘What was he doing in there?’

  ‘I think he was hiding.’

  ‘Who from?’

  Havard shrugs. If he’s afraid of her speaking to the press, he shows no sign of it. ‘Us. Me. Who else is there? The line.’

  Havard’s seen his dad. It was on the news. He’s travelled to Phuket. Was driven through its splintered streets, to the Vachira Phuket Hospital. Saw his father mummified: rictal, drawn, but still his dad, his flesh turned to reddish leather, his hair to wool, his fingers into sticks. A doll, in other words. Time’s plaything, unwrapped after thirty years of faceless, nameless circling. Eric Moyse, founder of Moyse Line. Impossible to imagine the character of his son’s dreams now.

  Come nightfall, Havard phones London. Lyndon Ferry, Moyse Line’s director of public affairs, is still at his desk. Havard says: ‘I don’t think she
knows.’

  A silence as Lyndon thinks this through. ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So we think her father really died in the tsunami?’

  ‘Ester certainly thinks so. For God’s sake, Lyndon, a quarter of a million people perished. What are the chances David walked away?’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about probabilities. We’ve got David’s daughter stumbling upon Eric Moyse’s container.’

  This is ungainsayable. ‘I still think we’re looking at a simple coincidence. Think about it, Lyndon. I gave David the assignment to Phuket. So what if he made a holiday out of it? So what if he took his daughter with him? He wasn’t the only one.’

  Lyndon laughs, without humour. ‘You’re right there. It was quite a circus, from what I hear.’

  ‘So Ester’s finding the container – yes, that’s a coincidence. A big one. But it’s a coincidence that was waiting to happen. If it hadn’t been her it could have been any one of a number of people. That South African wasn’t far behind.’

  ‘What about this daughter of his? What’s her name? Ester?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Do you think she took anything out of the can? Any keepsakes?’

  ‘Lyndon, she’s twenty years old. What she saw, it scared her half to death.’

  ‘There must be something has been lifted from the can,’ Lyndon says. ‘Otherwise...’ He trails off.

  ‘Otherwise what?’ Havard’s never really bought into the idea that Eric Moyse would have spent the years of his hermitage writing out, in fair hand, all his lifetime’s secrets. ‘Eric kept Dead Water in his head for thirty years and when the pressure finally became too much he ran away to sea where nobody could find him. God knows how many years he lived hidden in that can. Why would he ever choose to write his secrets down?’