Ariel, Zed and the Secret of Life

by Anna Fienberg

  He paused as Ariel lurched over to them. ‘The way I see it,’ he continued, ‘is there’s weather everywhere the world over.’ And he stared off into the grey, his eyes as loose and floating as unlatched windows.

  ‘But for God’s sake, there’s things like gyrocompasses and radar and echo sounders!’ shouted Zed.

  McGull looked bored. ‘I never understood all that. I’ve always been more interested in other things. Like shells. I’ve got a fine shell collection, you know.’

  Ariel stopped her swaying and looked at him curiously. ‘But didn’t you listen when your author told you about the sea?’

  ‘I only picked up the bits that tickled me. The rest just went—’ and he passed a hand above his head.

  ‘I suppose that’s why you’re an Island sailor and not some famous captain in a book,’ grinned Ariel.

  ‘Aye, just the to-ing and fro-ing, that’s what I like. I wasn’t interested in all that map-reading and studying my writer tried to make me do. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, as they say.’

  ‘What an earth are you talking about?’ cried Zed, his eyes racing between the two. The world had gone mad, he was sure. The sea had drowned the sky, the Captain was crazy and the girl, well, who’d expect anything sensible from such a babbler?

  God, it was amazing, he thought, that reality was finally becoming even more monstrous than his imaginings.

  ‘We’ll just have to ride it out!’ yelled Ariel to Zed. ‘Just lean with the waves. Imagine you’re a bird gliding with the wind!’

  Zed had a sudden picture of the bird in his dream. The waves around him were rising, towering. An acid bile rose to his throat and he closed his eyes.

  And since there was no other solution that he could see, Zed fainted.

  With the dawn, the sky returned to its proper place above and the sea sank to a gentle swell below. And just as it should, the horizon sliced a neat line between them, its sharp edge glinting and dancing with sunrise.

  Zed opened one eye, stretched and looked about him. The boat was bathed in sunlight and the smell of freshly brewed tea. He felt a faint stirring of optimism, and wondered if this was what people felt who claimed they’d come back from the dead.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ cried Ariel, bringing steaming mugs up on deck. ‘We rode it out. But I must admit, sometimes I thought the boat was going to bust. In the bad bits, McGull started singing sea shanties about drowned sailors and weeping widows.’ Ariel laughed and handed Zed his tea.

  Zed shifted irritably, the quiet calm feeling he’d just found, broken. Why did this girl’s emotions always have to be so loud? Did she have to say everything she was thinking? Sometimes Zed felt heavy with feelings, like a full bathtub from which no-one ever pulled the plug. Even his name, Zedinov, you could only say heavily, like a low note on the French horn. His mother, he knew, had fancied him as a ballet dancer, excitingly artistic with roses in his teeth. Instead, he’d come out the lowest note in the orchestra, with no high leaps in him, only gravity.

  But Ariel was still talking. ‘No, it was awesome. All that power and fury sizzling in your blood. Like being hooked up to a piece of electricity. I felt as strong as a lion roaring in the wind.’

  ‘You looked like a lunatic roaring in the wind to me,’ said Zed.

  Ariel slammed down her tea. ‘Why are you such a miserable spoilsport?’ she hissed.

  ‘How can you be so ecstatic after shaking hands with Death?’ he replied.

  Zed and Ariel sipped their tea in silence.

  After a moment Ariel said, ‘But did you really think we were going to drown? My mother would never have sent us to the Island if she’d thought it would be dangerous.’

  Zedinov sighed. How could this girl have such total confidence in another human being? It was ridiculous. ‘Your mother can’t control the world, you know. Accidents do happen, even in such delightful, safe little storms as that one. We’re not all characters in one of her damn books, for God’s sake!’

  Ariel shifted uneasily. At times she did wonder about the extent of her mother’s powers, and it made her feel uncomfortable. Mothers, of course, were usually powerful: they decided what country you went to, what hotels you stayed in, they formed your tastes, chose your clothes. But to have a mother who also invented characters, well, it made you stop and think. How much could anyone really make their own selves up? Was she, Ariel, still herself, as unwritten upon and charged with pure Ariel molecules as the day she was born? Having a mother who was a writer certainly made her thoughts wander in strange directions. She’d definitely take this up with Concetta when she got home. With a shiver, she realised that home seemed, already, light years away.

  Overhead a seagull arched and dived, its loud squawk cracking the air like an announcement.

  ‘See that?’ cried the Captain coming toward them. ‘That gull means we’re near land, you know—we’ll see the Island this morning, or McGull’s not my name!’

  He rubbed his hands together and grinned. In the dull early light the black bristles of his short beard blended together so that his face looked smudged with dirt. It probably was, thought Zed, judging by the grey state of his shirt.

  ‘And how are we all this morning?’ he boomed. ‘The lassie looks no worse for our adventure, but you look a bit peaky, Zed.’

  ‘I’ve got a constitution like a lion, my mother says,’ Ariel stated proudly.

  ‘Ariel’s just got no imagination,’ retorted Zed. ‘She can’t imagine death by drowning, or watery graves—and so they don’t exist for her. Well I have a very vivid imagination, and I have just spent the most uncomfortable night of my life.’

  ‘Aye,’ sighed McGull, who, as usual, was not really concentrating on what was being said, being far more interested in the beautiful morning. But feeling that something was due, he searched for one of his proverbs which were as necessary to him as full stops are to the ends of sentences. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s belly-ache,’ he said, ‘or something like that.’ And, feeling particularly pleased with himself, he wandered off to make some breakfast.

  Ariel was the first to spy the dark form rising out of the water. Like a sudden question mark it interrupted the smooth line of the horizon. Ariel’s skin began to tingle. Still too distant for the softening effect of detail, the Island emerged, sombre and impenetrable.

  Zed sidled over to stand near Ariel. They leant in silence against the rails, their eyes straining into the distance.

  ‘Not long now and you’ll be picking coconuts!’ called McGull from the helm.

  But as they drew nearer, only the tall grey cliffs of the coastline came into view. Dark crags rose steeply from the water, unannounced by a curly reef or the comfortable compromise of a pebbled beach. So swiftly did the cliffs climb from the sea that Ariel, watching, imagined a pulse of movement, just hidden.

  She shivered. The boat, circling the base of the cliffs, was swept into the shadow cast by the peaks. It was suddenly dusk-dark, and, as they chugged through the slapping sea, Ariel felt that those solid backs of stone welcomed no-one.

  She thought again of her mother. Concetta would be sitting up in bed now, sipping tea. Lancelot would be there too, clambering over the pillows and upsetting the pot with his usual deadly aim.

  Ariel felt a tug in her chest. She glanced at Zed, whose face looked as stiff as the granite cliffs above. Suddenly she felt completely alone—something she’d never felt before. Certainly she’d been cut off from the kids at school—she’d felt different, strange—but she’d always had someone familiar and warm to return to. Here, everyone was a stranger. She wondered if this was how Zed usually felt.

  Looking up, she saw that the coastline was changing. Granite cliffs were softening into hills furred with forest. Groves of fruit trees were laid out on smooth slopes and, with a lift of her heart, Ariel spied bright blotches of colour splashed against the green. Then, as the boat rounded the coast into the north, the sun lit up the Island like a spotlight swinging onto a stage.
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  Ariel and Zed blinked. Before them lay a beach fringed with palm trees. Its arms curved toward them, brilliant in glistening sand. On all her travels, Ariel had never seen a sea of this colour, a blue so rich and pure it seemed to come from the hearts of a million opals.

  At the far end of the beach there was a small jetty, and now the boat was heading toward it.

  ‘A man’s home is his castle!’ cried Captain McGull.

  ‘… As they say,’ whispered Zed and Ariel together, and for the first time in five days, Zed smiled.

  5. ISLAND SECRETS

  THE ISLAND was shaped like a half moon with Opal Beach, as Ariel called it, taking an enormous bite out of the northern side. Near the beach, on a small hill purple with bougainvillea, lived Captain McGull. He had a splendid view of the sea on one side, and from his verandah that ran right around the house he could see across to the town.

  From McGull’s house, the town sparkled against the blue curtain of sky. It was perched high on a hill, its white buildings rounded and burrowed and humped, following the curves of the land. A long row of white steps, cut neatly into the earth, led down from the town to a small bay below.

  To the east of the town there were canefields and orange groves and a banana plantation; higher up on the slopes, nutmeg, chives and pimento trees grew. (You could always tell a pimento tree when you saw one, McGull said, from the spicy clove smell of the leaves.) Along the north-eastern tip lay the rainforest, lush and soft with moss that grew like small velvet paws along the rocky shelves.

  This top half of the Island, with its hollow belly of beach, its green fields and forest, was always awash with light. It was the other side of the Island, the convex back of the half moon, that shut out the sun’s rays like a secret. Only a few tufts of grass grew on the granite cliffs that rose high, blocking half the day’s light, and deep inside their bowels were caves as black as a bat’s wing. McGull said no-one ever visited this side of the Island. The caves were said to be dangerous, and the darkness was not to be disturbed. There was a feeling on the Island—never spoken or discussed, but as strong as the need to stay alive—that the light blessing the northern side depended upon the untouched darkness of the other.

  ‘I feel like a steamed vegetable here!’ gasped Zed.

  The tropical air was still and heavy, hanging in sheets of haze. Zed licked the sweat from his lip and glared after Ariel and McGull. They were climbing at a quick pace up the hill, and Zed could hear Ariel going on about some plant or other in that excited voice of hers. She probably wasn’t even sweating.

  They had left the sea breeze well behind; now the air grew so thick and honeyed, it was almost chewable.

  ‘Nowhere,’ muttered Zed to himself, ‘not even the Egyptian desert was ever as hot as this.’

  It was not a burning kind of heat—that sharp sunlight that can be cut off by a square of shade. It was wet and engulfing, like an animal’s breath, and it formed droplets of moisture that hung from the edges of leaves like tears.

  Ariel, who was trying to keep up with the Captain, pretended not to hear Zed’s mutters. But she was shocked, too, by the heat. It was so foreign and insistent and rich. The scent of frangipani and cloves nestled in pockets of air that every now and then drifted past. And, as regular as a heartbeat, came the trilling throb of cicadas.

  ‘Wait for me!’ called Zed, clambering over bushes and roots.

  Captain McGull was striding ahead, his big hands snapping at vines and slapping at overgrown ferns. He paused at Zed’s cry, and looked back.

  ‘Nearly there now,’ he said, ‘just up and over the hill and then you can feast your eyes, lad!’

  ‘Is it always this hot?’ puffed Zed.

  ‘Pretty much,’ beamed the Captain, as if this were good news. ‘Even the lizards have to keep moving or they’d melt. But it does rain every afternoon—pours down in buckets—and then the sun blazes out again. Everything glows after the rain, giving it a good polish. Aye, it’s the best little island in the world, this one.’

  The Captain flung out his arms as if to embrace the horizon, and his eyes shone. Here on the Island his vagueness disappeared and he dived into the under-growth as if it were his natural habitat, like a busy crab slipping into the sand.

  Now the trees were closing in overhead and, in the tunnel of green, cicadas boomed. Ariel saw parrots, green and red, flashing through the trees, and when she stopped for a moment a butterfly alighted on her arm.

  ‘Look, Zed!’ she cried. The butterfly glittered emerald in the sun.

  Rivulets of sweat were running down Zed’s cheeks, and his curls were plastered to his head. She was reminded of the first night she met him. She watched him now plucking uncomfortably at the strap of his bag, the plastic strip slipping across the wet surface of his shoulder.

  ‘Couldn’t we wait for a taxi?’ he muttered. ‘Horrible heat,’ he went on, ‘these places swarm with germs, you know. Whole place is a Petri dish for cultivating bacteria.’ He slapped his thigh and examined his palm. A huge flattened mosquito clung to it, spotted with blood.

  ‘Humph!’ he exclaimed knowingly, and opened his bag. He took out a bottle marked ‘Quinine Tablets for Malaria’ and swallowed two. Resignedly, he continued up the hill.

  Soon Ariel and the Captain were hidden from view by giant ferns and strangler vines as thick as trunks. Zed tripped over a root and for a while he just lay there, where he fell. ‘YOUNG BOY LOST IN TROPICAL JUNGLE’, the headlines would read. ‘ABANDONED BY MOTHER, DEVOURED BY MOSQUITOS, BOY STARVES TO DEATH. MOTHER STRICKEN’. That would teach her to carry him around like a parcel and drop him at the most convenient spot.

  But the image of his skeletal body festering in the tropical sun was not, after all, cheering. He wondered why he spent so much time imagining his own death to punish someone else. His mother probably would hardly notice if he were gone. Once she’d said he was the most depressing child that’d ever lived. Often, Zed’s day-dreams of death—trapped under a rock in a rising tide, bitten by a venomous snake (there must be thousands here), swallowed by a Great White Shark—were so real, he was amazed when he re-emerged and found himself whole, slightly dazed, but alive. Still, it was only a matter of time, he knew, until Destiny found him and struck him down. Zed would not live past forty, he was certain.

  Well, look at his father—he had only been that age, and everyone said Zed took after his Dad. ‘As alike as two pins,’ they’d said, and ‘he got his curls from Mack.’ (When Zed was little he’d often wondered if that was why his father had gone bald.)

  ‘Ze-ed!’ came Ariel’s voice. ‘Hurry up! What are you doing?’

  Zed sighed and hauled himself up. He inspected his knee which was grazed, damn it, and hobbled off toward the voice.

  When he neared the crest of the hill he saw Ariel, her hair damp and smoothed flat behind her ears. Her face was red and shiny, and she looked fizzy with excitement. Zed’s heart sank.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come and see the house!’

  Captain McGull’s house stood in a small clearing. It rose up from fountains of bougainvillea like a brightly-wrapped sweet.

  Each wall was painted a different, glowing colour. Even the trimmings—the doorframes, windowsills, every slat of the elegant shutters—varied in hue, from blue to gold to a roof of sunset red. It was like seeing a rainbow at close range. It was the most cheerful house Ariel had ever seen.

  They climbed up the steps to the verandah and turned to admire with the Captain his splendid view.

  Coconut palms and spreading umbrella trees meshed into a mat of green that rolled down to the ocean below. Dotted in the green were the small red eyes of the lychee trees, heavy with scarlet fruit. There were blood plants with white blossoms and strange trees with orange and pink leaves pretending to be petals.

  This place, Ariel decided, was certainly more alive than most.

  ‘Just as well I brought my sunglasses, or I’d go blind here,’ mumbled Zed. He was squinting at the landscape, and
his face looked pale and moonish against the palette of colour around him. Like some frail night animal he stood with his shoulders hunched in and his head lowered, as if the surrounding glare could swallow him whole.

  The Captain opened the door with a flourish. ‘Welcome to McGull’s hideaway!’ he boomed.

  Inside, surprisingly, was cool and fresh. The front and back doors were left open in a friendly manner and the shaded verandah cooled the passing breezes.

  Ariel walked into what she supposed was the living room and flopped into one of the wicker chairs.

  She sighed happily. It’s astonishing, really, she thought, just how at home she felt. That old seagrass matting on the floor seemed like hers (even the tea stain in the corner), the comfortable wicker chairs and the heady scent of frangipanis wafting through the windows were all somehow terribly familiar, but exciting, as if they were messengers from some very deep and important part of herself. She felt a little bit wild and free as she sat in her wicker chair, smelling the perfumes of the tropical forest outside and twining a loose strand of seagrass matting around her toe.

  The Captain, who had disappeared into the kitchen, returned, rubbing his hands energetically and looking from Ariel to Zed with anticipation. ‘Well now, maties, do you fancy frutta del mare for lunch? Fish is food for the brain, as they say, and a crab in the hand is worth two in the pot—or something like that.’

  ‘What’s frutta del mare?’ asked Zed suspiciously when the Captain had vanished back into the kitchen.

  ‘Fruits of the sea,’ Ariel replied. She’d spent months at a port in Italy where she’d tasted, she reckoned, every single creature that ever swam in the Mediterranean Sea. (Her mother was doing a piece on ‘Sicilian Seafood’ for Tantalising Tours. She’d put on six kilos and begun to talk like a fishwife, but the article had been a hit.)