Dead Water
Page 36
In boxer shorts and barefoot he zig-zags east along the beach in the last of the light, following the tracks of turtles as they scoop their way up to the dunes to lay their eggs. The ground is covered in circular depressions where the young have dug up through the sand and away.
Back at the waterline the sea crushes its colours into the sand.
David thinks of Eric Moyse in his container, crossing from ocean to ocean and in and out of deep-water facilities from Rotterdam to Kaohsiung. Unrooted from everything, sensitive cargoes move, silent and unseen, over the earth. Or they do not move: a mystery that tantalized the crews of the Dobbs and the Fram. Dead water. It has not escaped his notice that, after all these years, and having committed so many trivial and not so trivial betrayals, and having sacrificed so very much of both himself and others, he has ended up, today, barely twelve hours’ drive from where his journey started more than forty years ago. Bitumen and metal dust. Italia.
He goes back to the car and checks his phone. There are no messages.
He gathers driftwood for a fire. He comes upon a smooth grey piece from an old dhow. A decoration, a repeated spiral pattern, has been chiselled into the wood. He traces the figures with his finger. This way. That. This way. That. His finger races round the wood, chopping waves into froth: no headway here.
He lays the fragment down in the light of the fire, takes a picture of it with his phone, then tosses it into the flames.
Whatever else her father has done, he has been a good teacher. The first thing Ester does, she throws away her mobile phone. Next, she has to ditch the Land Rover.
She makes it out of Muscat easily enough and passes over the hills of Sohar in the last of evening, the copper-green of the earth turned mossy by the dying light. To either side of her rise hedgerows of plastic bunting. The road is up. The road is closed. She joins a tailback of Shinas-bound traffic composed almost exclusively of Toyota Hiluxes. Where the plastic hedges meet in a tangle of rusted cementation rods and gray drainage pipes a dented tin sign sends them trailing cluelessly, nose to tail, into the desert.
For twenty minutes Ester follows the cars in front into the wilderness. But a glance at the cabin compass finally convinces her that they are doubling back on themselves. They are curving back towards Sinbad’s emerald mountains. They are lost. For a while, mesmerized by their collective folly, she follows the car in front and the traffic snakes out ahead of her, and it weaves obediently behind, and the whole convoy wriggles across the desert like a line of ants.
The spell breaks. Ester wrestles the wheel around and heads off on her own, southwards, into the dark. The cars behind follow her, obedient as chicks. She accelerates. The vehicle behind her catches her up, flashing its headlights, entreating her to slow down. It is not good to be followed like this.
She turns the wheel an eighth-turn to the right and holds it there. A minute passes. Another. She’s driving one-handed, peering into the dark, ready at a moment’s notice to grab the wheel and wrench it round to avoid an acacia tree, a big stone, a fault in the rock. The ground refuses to surprise and another minute passes. Now, to her right, she makes out a string of headlamps sweeping by her side window into the dark. She holds her hand steady on the wheel, exerting the gentlest pressure, and in another minute she has the traffic stream dead ahead of her.
Another minute and the traffic flow is on her left and she is merging gently in. The car that has been tailgating her nuzzles in three cars behind and the traffic behind it merges where it can – and then she loses sight of where the flows are blending.
For a while she orbits, an obedient mote, in the circus she has made. Then she cuts her lights, drops into manual, and floors the accelerator. This time she is too quick, too impetuous for anyone to follow. In the rearview mirror she sees that the gap she left in the circle is already healed.
She does not want to reveal her position, so rather than flash her brake lights she lets the Land Rover coast to a stop. She climbs out. The ground is flat and rippled and hot through her trainers. The Land Rover’s bodywork tings and crackles as it cools.
In the distance the great wheel she has made in the desert endures, vehicles following each other bumper to bumper. She wonders how long it will last. This eddy. This gyre. How turbulence maintains itself. Why the oceans do not cease to turn.
She waits for it to disappear – a bright snake, all glass and glitter, eating its own tail. She waits for morning. She waits to be alone. Once she is alone, she’ll torch the car. Once she’s torched the car, she’ll walk away.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks go to men and families I cannot name (they know who they are), and to two I can: Anna Davis and Nic Cheetham towed this story into clear water.
S. I.
London, 2011
‘The truth is, everything in this universe has its regular waves and tides. Electricity, sound, the wind, and I believe every part of organic nature will be brought some day within this law. But my philosophy teaches me, and I firmly believe it, that the laws which govern animated beings will be ultimately found to be at bottom the same with those which rule inanimate nature, and, as I entertain a profound conviction of the littleness of our kind, and of the curious enormity of creation, I am quite ready to receive with pleasure any basis for a systematic conception of it all.’
Henry Adams to his brother Charles, October 1863