Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Sandro shared his cabin with Gabriel Shepherd, whom Logan had taken on as cook. She was tactful about being female. So far the only disturbance she had caused him was by her occasional mutterings into a small tape recorder. She was describing the journey to her mother, to whom she regularly sent these tapes. Sandro listened from the lower bunk (he had offered Gabriel the choice of whether to sleep above or below; embarrassment must not even commence in so confined a space or it spreads more treacherously than a silent fart) as she spoke rather shyly into her machine, whose absence of response in the silence sometimes seemed a bit rude. Often, he was struck by how different was Gabriel’s account of things from any he might have given, was giving, he supposed, in a more cryptic way, in what he told Gabriel was his diary but what was in fact the long letter to his mother that he stopped writing only to post and then at once resumed.

  Gabriel was an English girl, come to try out the world, Sandro supposed, before going home to an English man. She spoke in the old-fashioned way and wore a nightgown, under which she undressed, even when the watch system meant her sleeping times came during the day. Nonetheless, although she was slight, Gabriel was tough; she could crack walnuts in her palms and go up in the bosun’s chair’s spinning and creaking harness, where she’d hang at the top of the mast doing chores sixty feet up at a tilt as though she was taking cobwebs off the moon with a feather duster for fun. Sandro listened, not knowing that he did so, for any mention of himself in Gabriel’s tapes. He knew the backs of her legs and her feet’s soles well from lying exhausted in his bunk below hers. Both of them knew the other’s unthinking habits since they had seen one another in states of extreme exhaustion usually shared only by pairs of people who are coupled, and are able only to brush tired shorthand kisses on to one another at the beginning or end of shifts with work or sleepless infant.

  It was Gabriel’s Englishness, in a way, that had brought out the ill temper of everyone eating breakfast. The relief at leaving hot, expensive Papeete was considerable, like at last having a drink of water or a shower, two things paradoxically rationed at sea.

  The berth at Papeete was no more than a busy road, noisy at night and heavy with the fumes of traffic, beer, fast food, so that living on the boat felt more cramped than it did out at sea, where their accommodation was not exposed to the curiosity of all strangers. At night in their urban berth, a glaring lamp was set up in Ardent Spirit’s shrouds, to discourage drunks from coming aboard to sleep in her sail bin. The hatches had to be shut, or pranksters would creep over the deck to drop cigarettes or worse in on sleepers, so it was suffocatingly hot below. The harbour water had a skin of oil that made the water move slowly and left black smears of dead rainbow on the white hulls of the boats lolling, tied stern-to up to the pavement along which roamed tourists in various stages of disillusion with the place, a paradise handled.

  Only when approached as any other colonial town did Papeete begin to reveal such charm as it had. The decontraction associated with earthly delights withers when it is a question of affording the water or the apple, but not both. The dissension in the saloon of Ardent Spirit, that first morning for all six together at sea, concerned cheese.

  The cheese was from Paris, the city that administered Tahiti. Plastic Port Salut, flown to New Caledonia and brought on a cargo ship to Tahiti from Noumea, with such tropical essentials as heated rollers, fake tan, artificial flowers, pineapple juice and the hair accoutrements known as rats.

  ‘Ten pounds for a piece of cheese that has travelled the world by three different forms of transport, signed all the relevant forms, hung about in at least two warehouses and remains absolutely unchanged by its experiences. It is a narrow-minded cheese,’ said Gabriel, ‘for narrow-minded French consumers.’

  Unpleasant emotions about the French are unleashed by French colonies in some sorts of Briton. In Papeete, it was not hard for the most Francophile to see things reflecting badly on the administrators of the island. Among sights more glancingly combining the best of the cultures here melted together, the stately transvestites walking abreast punctuated in their reined-in strides by a little black poodle, the green pharmacy cross nicely medicinal in a street of boulangeries selling sorbets like frozen inks, in the sheer shade of mountains ribboned with silver waterfalls, there was to be seen a Frenchness that was less seductive and that did not include the people colonised except as they were of use.

  Logan Urquhart was not wholly for spirited opinions in women unless voiced with concision and consonant with his own feelings on the matter. In this case he agreed to the extent that he found the French greedy and pusillanimous while admiring some superficial aspects of their culture. He was wary of going too far this early in a voyage when he had to live so closely with his wife, a Scot who keenly felt the Auld Alliance of blood and philosophical speculation with the French. Elspeth often expressed feelings about the English similar to those Logan held about the French. He wondered sometimes if her talk about the French was not worn like costume jewellery to make herself interesting at little expense. Since, anyhow, he imagined he could predict what Elspeth might say, he prepared himself for a period in the conversation during which he anticipated she might speak; so he began to think of other things, a uxorious habit even more practical on a boat than on dry land.

  It is odd, thought Alec, that this boring conversation is no less boring because we are tipped up in the Pacific Ocean by a miracle of wind and water, moving through their agency to another place we shall fail to understand, discuss clumsily, forget, and then, as time builds lies into beauty recollected, recall transformed. Why did I come here? Why did I think I could change things in my life without changing myself?

  As the tropical day began with its misleading purity to steal into and refresh them all, so they each saw ahead in this early heat of ill-temper the real danger of anger in a confined space and each, without knowing he or she did so, made a delicate concession and turned words through the uncomfortable degrees of angry argument to the pleasant pastime of exchanging differing opinions. The two women, Elspeth and Gabriel, led in this, conceding repeatedly and denying their own seriousness, until each danger was past and every person on board was returned to the position most conducive to peace, forward movement, and the maintenance of the status quo.

  Having come to this extreme place to assess his own life among strangers, Alec felt his misgivings weigh him down. Had he not simply recreated, in farcically condensed form, the difficulties he wished to sort out? Was the extremity of the situation, shut up in a pretty husk with five other souls between planets and sea monsters, not just a newer nightmare, more vulgar because so rich in psychological archetypes?

  Suppose he were casting the play of his own life. Logan, the wooden but powerful rich man, would have to be his father, the fishmonger. Elspeth, who seemed to Alec alternately garrulous and blank, and with something insincere lying in her, was unlike his mother in every way he could think of. It was not possible to think of her saving milk-bottle tops in a heavy silver ball or taking the washing to the steamie in a pram. Neither the stern rectitude of saving, nor its dignified rewards, he thought, could ever have struck so pampered a character as Elspeth.

  Nonetheless she was a diligent housekeeper, if that was what you called a woman who cleaned a boat inside as though the polish and rubbing would cause the thing to grow roots off its keel, flip upright, sprout a chimney and turn into a house. Could Elspeth have undiagnosed hydrophobia? He would try her, perhaps, later.

  Alec’s mother rose at four-thirty to clean the house and his own and her selves. The water she heated up in grey pans you could boil a sheep in, on the old Raeburn fed with coke from a metal scuttle. The noise she made pouring the coke was the noise of steeply dragged shingle under surf. She riddled it with a rod that glowed like a tiger’s tail. Soda crystals fizzed as they went into the water, down the lavatory pan, down the bends of the double sink. He heard her flushing out the house’s dirty secrets, before she came to get started on his own.r />
  Alec being a landlubber and a bohemian prude took Sandro and Gabriel to be lovers. He was that bit older than they were so that he suspected all young people of falling on one another when he was not looking. He thought that they, having so much he feared to have lost, must have everything he had not. He could not see that they were fleeing, often, from the trivial shape of their own thoughts and might wonder what he might have to tell them. Their handsome appearance and physical ease with the ropes and the wheel made Alec feel weighty and exposed if new sails were hoisted when the wind changed. At home he had sailed in small boats; the scale of this one made him afraid of accidents. He was the last to join this company and already he was wondering behind what false exterior to shelter. He had not yet properly left the land.

  For the present, he thought it best to hang like a mackerel does in the water, not visible from below because its silver belly is only a floating mote against the paleness of the sky, not visible from above because its black-mapped blue back is incorporated with the contoured surface of the blue-black sea.

  He continued to cast the central characters in his life from the people he was confined with on Ardent Spirit. If he had met almost no one, he thought, as spoilt as Logan and Elspeth Urquhart, he had met almost no one as unspoilt as Nick Pedersen. For a man as secretive as Alec to share any room with another person might have been unbearable. Like many secretive people, he was inquisitive, and had been through Nick’s belongings one afternoon when Nick was sorting out the inert gas system on the second refrigerator, in the saloon. The other was in the galley and held large items such as joints of meat.

  It was not possible to think of his mother, whose life had after all been damaged and sustained in different ways by the sea, understanding the point of this sumptuously wasteful toy that was for a time his home.

  Their house in Edinburgh was the grey of spurned beaches, made of concrete harled with small pebbles that appeared to have been picked from the noses of hills. It was a house built on quicksand promises, assembled from components, as notionally fit for humans as is a hutch for rabbits. The front door and three windows equalled those on the house’s other half, so you might have folded it together for the doors to kiss and the windows to look into one another’s eyes.

  Alec had a usefully forbidding presence, though he was not tall. His black hair, red cheeks and white skin gave him the crisp appearance of a knave on a playing card. The condensedness of bearing that belongs to dark Celts was coupled in him with a capacity to become invisible, so that not many people saw how much he was taking in at his pale-blue eyes. No one could have guessed how much he took in or how he saved it. His greatest greed was behind his eyes.

  The cleansing of Alec as a child began daily at the basin. His mother checked him over as though she might return him to the shopkeeper if she found a mark. She pushed his poll up the wrong way lest vermin might be resting in the shade of a hair. She soaped behind his big ears and under his small arms, in the cleft of his neck and down the knobs of his spine as though she was cleaning through to the bones.

  One morning, unrewarded by the view down the plug, he strained his eyes up under his smarting lids as his mother skinned him with a flannel seemingly made of thistle-silk – and saw a delightfully shattered world, a dazzling reorganised frost-garden.

  The lower pane of the bathroom window had been installed with modesty not revelation in view. Its thick glass was moulded in a million asterisks, a frozen field of dandelion clocks. If you looked through it at impossibly close range everything – the leaning iron washing-pole, the shed, the other cockle-brown houses – exploded into smithereens. The weatherproofed green shed where Jim’s budgerigars lived became a fountain of bottle-glass, a green fanfare to a newly splintered world.

  This pane of glass was not as limited as its immobility at first led Alec to fear, since within its frame it recorded changing weather and seasons, the times of day, domestic rhythms. In itself nothing but a new way of seeing things, it made of a monotony that had seemed unshakeable something incomprehensibly new that was also comprehensibly familiar. It was as though a ravishing abstraction had grown out of a flowerpot.

  Even long grudging Edinburgh days of sea mist offered themselves to fracture and reinterpretation through that frosted bathroom window. Each child hunts for a solution to the boredom of being no one but itself. Alec’s first answer was a sheet of modesty glass.

  The mania of his mother for cleanliness also played into his hands, or eyes, since the washing line was constantly changing its wardrobe, from dancing white-and-blue teacloths to his father’s white work-coats with their wind-filled arms untypically gesticulating. Once when it was snowing his mother took out the rugs to beat them with her cane carpet-beater, for the fresh snow to suck out the ingrained dirt. The fractured red and yellow of the carpets, the persistent seething flakes, the privacy of what he enjoyed as he pressed his cold face to the starry window, gave him a sense of being real that did not otherwise outlast his dreams.

  That his first self-discovered pleasure took place in a bathroom was much to his mother’s innocent satisfaction. If it was otherwise for his father he gave no word. Strangely, it was part of Alec’s gratification to lock himself in in order to look through the – he thought of it as his – window. He did not speak of the window to either parent, each of whom he now as an adult supposed naturally came to a separate conclusion from the other about their eight-year-old son.

  They thought he lied, but it was just the way he saw things. Alec sensed that he was pale in the bright colours of the modern street, not up-to-the-minute, not developed, his nature not fixed. He was not modern, nor old-fashioned in a way readily understood by modern people.

  He was folding and settling his thoughts, as though ready to stow them for the life to come at sea. What I carry, he thought, is the memory of a time that should not have burned away so fast. What is called progress has consumed the fabric of our towns like fire, where war has not acted the mad dentist. Or does every man feel this as he ages? Our lives have been stretched beyond enduring by history and the result is that people welcome inanition, which is available in more forms than ever before. How I fear the young, although I am not old.

  Alec ascertained that Nick Pedersen possessed a knife with a marlinspike on a lanyard as dirty as the string on his specs, an old green Everyman of The King of the Golden River that smelt of cinnamon and cat, and a Chinagraph pencil tied by, for Nick, rather extravagant nylon twine to a small, plastic-coated book showing commonly seen fish of the Pacific.

  Perhaps Nick was more like Alec’s mother, with his frugality and patience? But his want of possessions was an emancipation not a discipline against gross pleasures, and his patience did not seem to have enclosed and snuffed out the fire of his nature. No, for the moment it must be Elspeth, since she was the consort of the ruling male.

  Alec picked up from the end of his bunk the newspaper he had bought two days ago. He had found it in a supermarket next to a pile of Club International on whose recurrent cover was a pink blonde dressed as a parcel. Browsing among the exhausted saucissons and Normandy butter costing its weight in gold were women more lovely, more exotic and more naked than the pink parcel, who seemed to represent an idea of sex uniquely Anglo-American, at once clean and creepy, more useful in confirming than gratifying masculinity. This look, the pink parcel and all Alec associated with it, he thought deserved the bulbous generic name ‘porno’. He had picked up his newspaper and a small box of violet-scented indigestion cachous; he imagined caches of sweets would be found on a boat, but he would need something to suck if things became miserable. All his life Alec had taken small stolen sweets to bed at the end of wretched days. Sometimes he awoke with a cheek full of syrup, a reservoir of melted comfort.

  The headline on the page of the paper to which he now turned read: ‘Won Chiu Lee s’est pendue dans une boucherie après une dépression de 64 ans.’ It was wonderful to think of the relief death must have brought to her, the peace, the
deliverance from blood and meat and the routine of the butcher’s shop. Remembering the early mornings his father had to work, going to the docks when the sky was brown and the gulls screaming around the boats, Alec tried to translate this memory into its equivalent in a French Polynesian butcher’s shop run by Chinese. All he could think of was the horrible obligation to use every part of the animal but its squeal, which was used up entirely at the time of slaughter, presumably. Supposing each pig to have thirty yards of gut, how many miles of pig’s intestine alone must Won Chiu Lee have washed? Enough to rig a schooner with sails made out of sewn sow’s ears.

  ‘I am writing this,’ Alec’s first sweetheart had written, ‘in my pyjamas.’ In fact she had been dressed, she later told him, in stout boots and a flowered dress that had reached its autumn. That first love was an allumeuse, indiscriminate, involuntary, dejected when her flirtatiousness was pointed out to her, not on account of having been found out, but on account of the lowness of her habit and her addiction to it. It was as though she chewed gum without being aware of it, not merely sappy, minty chewing gum, but the juicy, pink, softer bubble gum that you couldn’t stop yourself winding around your tongue or concentrating into a wad at the tips of your teeth before inflating it into a bubble of precarious rosiness that might burst in your face, and sometimes did.