Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Gabriel was talking into her tape recorder, though he could not hear the words. Nick was leaning down through the fo’c’sle hatch with a pronged piece of white metal like a short crowbar, an inch thick. There remained only a faint bend in the fish hook that had once bent like the elbow of an arm wrestler. Something had been powerful enough almost to pull it straight while they slept.

  Not knowing he knew the words till he said them, Alec said, ‘God knows the breaking strain we had on that line.’

  The people on the boat had become ‘we’ in the face of the sea.

  Chapter 2

  On the boat, Elspeth was thinking out loud. ‘So they introduced a snail to Moorea and the idea was that it would gobble up the huge edible snails that had been introduced artificially themselves, twenty years ago, for food. The giant snail ate everything, not just what it was supposed to. The second wave of foreign snails was even worse, and carnivorous. Species of plant and insect grew scarce as they were eaten up. Now the first, indigenous, island snail is endangered and people come from America and all over to try to track it down and beef it up and train it to fight back in the name of biodiversity. People are wishing they had the old wee nuisance back.’

  ‘What a lot you do know,’ said Logan. He did not like the way she, having perfectly good information, made it implausible in the way she set it out. He did not look women in the face unless he was explaining things to them or setting out to seduce them. Otherwise, in a beautiful voice, he gave orders. He did not need to pitch them high. He was a man for whom people did things, for their own reasons.

  ‘The ecology of islands is fragile that way,’ Nick said, but it was not annoying. They even hoped he would continue. He did not have the polymath’s trick of talking in brightly formed sentence-long paragraphs. He went on eating Weetabix, feeding himself from the front of the spoon. It was a large spoon, no different from a small spoon to him in the matter of eating; had it been an engine part he could have gauged dimension precisely. ‘In small enclosed places with highly organised finite interdependencies you can’t afford to unbalance a single thing.’

  Elspeth and Gabriel were coming by now, the fourth full day in Moorea, to seek one another out. The forgettable conversations that distinguish the domestic female day could not take place at sea, where there were no shopkeepers, no bus drivers, no familiar strangers. Gabriel, being younger than Elspeth, did not need and had not established so many of these links, but Elspeth realised each time she went to sea how she missed such small advances into disinterested warmth.

  The escape provided by these secessions from life on dry land was more partial for the women. The sense of being away and free can shade with a change of wind into the sense of being caught and trapped, painted in to a picture one did not choose to be part of.

  The chopped time of watchkeeping, twenty-four hours divided into six stretches of four, quickly establishes itself. The body adapts by cutting off the dawdling sleep that is rich in enquiry and reconciliation with the day just gone. Even in the deepest sleep, too, the body is attuned to the boat. All through the sleep on a boat, by day or by night, you listen for some clue from the air as to what it intends to do. On a sailing boat this speculation is the medium of all preoccupation. The wind breathes into everything. If it is not there, its absence is felt like a distant but fresh bereavement.

  The company on board were between the land and the sea in their sleeping habits as well as their anchorage; they had not yet begun to work fully on the watch system, although Nick and Sandro tended to split the night between them to listen for dragging on the anchor chain. Nick hoped to see the fish that stripped the hooks each night. All they had caught was a shark pup that was more interesting to gut than to eat. It had fed with such uninvolved gusto that its belly spilled out fifty-seven unmarked silver wrasse, shiny like foil birdscarers. Ardent Spirit was anchored a few hundred yards out from the island; as the day began, the sound of mobilette engines could be heard from the land, and sometimes a papery chopping, palms being cut by machete blades. The flat sea took the noise straight over itself from the high island. There was no modifying shore. Beyond the boat, over the reef, the water crisped and broke, caught from beneath continually, combed to shreds and flung again.

  Gabriel, wound up in a pareo of flowered cotton, seemed nonetheless unexotic, her bare shoulders fine, not private or suggestive. The cloth wound round her was not introspective and alluring like a sari, but to the point, as an Englishwoman will have her clothes, modest, practical and apt as an apron. Her hair was tied up and fixed with a jawed clip. The freckles glowing below brown skin would soon join up to make her the colour of a hazelnut. Elspeth was untidy even in one single piece of cloth; her pareo seemed ill cut. There was an incoherence to the various colours of her skin, tan back, red shoulders, white legs and undersides, that was pitiful, infantile. The high bones of her face were overdramatic for her apologetic demeanour and insistent self-effacement. As two feminine types, the certain and the unsure, they seemed, if only physically, exemplary. The subtle expression of character and habit in feature had begun in Elspeth, being older; Gabriel’s character was apparently of a piece with her wholesome body and face.

  Nick was holding the tender to the side of Ardent Spirit. At the back of the solid rubber boat a powerful outboard engine was clamped to the wooden transom, and resecured by ropes. Disaster beyond the small accident was foreseen on the tender as on the big boat. The extreme provident caution that must accompany adventure is cousin to the theoretical pessimism parents deploy.

  ‘Who’s coming?’ Nick called up to the deck.

  ‘We need oranges and needles.’ Elspeth hung over the wire rail. She was hovering and would not commit herself until she saw what each other person was doing.

  ‘I’ll stay and put up the awning and housekeep the sails. I’ll swim in later, could be, and catch a beer,’ called Sandro who had been to Moorea before and knew it as well as he liked to know a place.

  Logan came up. A silence lay over the others. They waited under his decision.

  ‘I’ll take in the hills one more time,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll do the shopping.’ Gabriel spoke crisply.

  ‘Could we take the Zodiac?’ Alec was not yet familiar enough to state what he wanted without asking what was done in such a place.‘And find a beach maybe and look at fish?’

  Logan looked at him as though assessing a difference between face and market value. Then his own face loosened, and he smiled.

  ‘Sandro, get the diving gear, and pass it to us.’

  Alec had dived before, in grey sea off Kintyre; he had hated it. The complete severance from others, which he had not thought to fear, shocked him. He was surrounded by a greatness to which he was nothing, but not as one is nothing under the stars; under the sea it had been for him like an unmourned death. Down there, he longed to hear words again, to use them, as he had never longed before. Below the upper surface he realised how his inland taste for solitariness was reliant upon the presence of absent others.

  ‘He might prefer a snorkel.’ Elspeth was looking in a deep compartment aft of the life rafts. In it were oxygen canisters, wetsuits, spears, flippers. The snorkel she pulled out, and the little mask, seemed like bath toys. ‘The fish will be pretty right at the top. You can almost just stand and stare at them.’

  She passed the snorkel and mask down to Nick. Her slow soft body met the wire and marked at once, once at the shin and once on the right forearm. In her skin, shine was replacing glow.

  ‘Astonishing how you can pass up what’s really challenging,’ said Logan, ‘but it’s different for women.’

  He was pleased with some timidity in his wife, not having intuited, as she had, Alec’s misgivings about diving.

  ‘The horrendous thing when a person gets the bends,’ he resumed, responding to something in the air he did not know he felt, ‘is the angles they get into in their pain. A guy could snap his arm out of its socket and not feel it. The pain is that bad. They
can dislocate a limb.’ All the time he had a rapt look on his face. He looked like a child telling an important lie. His tone was one of grave reiteration, a tone of amen.

  Everyone who was by the rail listened to hear if he had more to say. When his statements had ebbed, Gabriel, in an exhilarated voice, said, ‘Have we the waterproof fish book? Have we the rug? Have we got money? Petrol can? Antidotes? Just thinking aloud, sorry,’ she said to Elspeth, who had indeed forgotten the hornet-venom antidote syringe her husband required but forgot at all times.

  Elspeth went below.

  Nick, Alec, Gabriel and Logan waited for her in the Zodiac. A flat supply boat came around the tip of the island, leaving a low pinkish welt of smoke. It was heading back for Tahiti. The fan of its wash passed under, through and past Ardent Spirit, and slapped hard on the Zodiac. Nick lowered the flukes of the outboard into the water and settled himself to its port side, with the tiller against his side.

  Logan was checking the dials on the gas tanks of the diving gear. Gabriel had her basket on her knee, and her shoes. Her feet were bare on the floor planks of the Zodiac. In that large air it came to Alec that she had scent in her hair. In her ears she had put pink studs of coral. These did not distract from her air of appropriateness.

  ‘Logan, your antidote, you forgot it,’ called Elspeth. It had not been where she kept it. So often did he lose things he might have hidden them to pass her heavy time.

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ he said, though she heard the harder words within what he said, and began to consider ways of pleasing him in his absence.

  ‘Give me that,’ said Gabriel, putting out her hand for the syringe, ‘I’ll keep it safe. I can administer it too.’

  She was a useful girl.

  Logan unlooped the Zodiac’s stern line. Elspeth threw down her painter, less tidily than she wished. It was one of the things she was trusted to do around the boat. The seamanship required was about sufficient.

  The grey rubber boat turned and set its prow to land, leaving three ‘V’s, two within the frilled widest, behind it. Sandro, cross-legged on white sheets of sail on Ardent Spirit’s foredeck, looked up and waved, smiling with the sail needle curving in his teeth, adding to his smile.

  Elspeth divided by two the time she had anticipated having to herself; in half of it she must make good the rift that had begun to make itself felt between herself and Logan.

  ‘Drop me, I’ll shop, and then you can collect me and take me to any nice beach you find.’ Gabriel spoke firmly. Her back was straight, her hands locked behind her back on to the Zodiac’s port rowlock. There was a chain around her neck, Alec now saw, small as grains of sand, falling into the shadows between her silky bones. As they approached land, she seemed to adapt herself for it, by a transformation effected not with effort but with tact. He tested his interest in her like a man testing a foothold. He sensed that interest taken in her might be what she was used to; women who take tithes will receive them too, well beyond youth, and Gabriel was young.

  ‘I like shopping,’ said Logan. Alec realised that his own interest in the girl might well be a natural response to the more urgent interest of another man. The triteness of the animal life in humans struck him even while he saw from the streaming boat the black and green heights of the island ahead, the grey-green field of serried pineapples, and the jetty from which children jumped, knees up around their ears, smacking into the water and swinging out of it again in glee, never learning the pain of the water’s smack among the shouting and companionship that went with it. I am coming to life, maybe, thought Alec, and must not hold it off.

  Alec resented the way Edinburgh was being trained into new shapes around its residents. Cranes seemed apt and birdlike at the docks, wading among the ships. Stalked into the city, they stood in craters not made by bombs only. The sadistic dentist was getting to work on the too-regular Georgian smile of the New Town. The even-tempered crescents and elucidating squares were an affront to the disjunct spirit of the times. As for the medieval wynds and tenements of the Old Town, they must be rinsed and swilled away to make space for what was to come. Rinse and swill and spit, to make way for colossal bridgework, up-to-date false teeth.

  It is hard for humans, thought Alec in Moorea, to reside within an artificial smile without recourse to something stronger than marital sex or the word of God.

  On the streets at home there are people living like snails without shells, slowly, featurelessly, uncleanly. A house, many of them have learnt, is a fragile thing, a shell, easily crushed. Its removal will remove part of yourself from you.

  Another change had taken place, among the staggering drunks. Loquacious, angry, grandiloquent, falling over, these people had for as long as he could remember congregated near the railway stations and at the warm mouths of tearooms, hairdressers’ shops and matronly hotels. At the docks and in the Old Town they would group, hellishly festive, and allow themselves in the year’s cold seasons to be impounded by such organisations as the Salvation Army and the Mission to Seamen. Many were old soldiers and sailors; some mutilated, though the limbless more often took to music – a mouth organ, a tatty set of pipes and a thrown-down bonnet on the pavement – than to alcohol. The hard drinkers were great talkers and boasters, gesticulating like generals talking strategy. When Alec was a child they were the wounded of a war. The pallid and silent heaps he saw now had been harmed at peace. The heat of carousal the old drunks used to give off had been replaced by a chill where the publicly intoxicated congregated. A drunk on the street would now very likely be middle-class, his desperation floated closer to the surface than in the days of the saving of faces. There are wet trousers where the trousers have been made for the wearer with silver pins and tailor’s chalk.

  Up Gabriel’s neck grew soft pale hairs in a pattern that ended in two arrows that went deep into the stronger hair.

  ‘I’ll shop, too,’ Alec said, seeing these.

  Nick, though he did not discuss what he wanted until it had been established Logan did not need him, was going to look for the conquering snails and some trace, maybe, of their victims.

  ‘Tell you what, Alec, then, you shop and we’ll collect you. It’s an unbeatable experience in these coves,’ said Logan. Gabriel gave Alec the shopping list.

  The Zodiac nosed the jetty. Logan stepped on to the land and tied the boat up. The sureness of his movements was almost balletic, the graceful product of instinct and practice.

  ‘There’s the shop,’ he said to Alec. ‘We’ll walk you up there. I’m tempted to see if we can get a goat slaughtered by the time we set sail. Can you butcher or is it like diving?’

  So he had noticed, not by words but by some bullying intuition.

  ‘I can butcher,’ said Nick.

  The shop smelt of coconut, orangeade, sweat, petrol, beer, and quiet, perpetual frying. It was dark and hot with a concrete floor and muttering deep freezers, one full of parcels of hard meat in paper, the other of frozen vegetable macedoine and fanciful ice-cream desserts with names like minor works of soft music, Fantaisie en Rose, Aubade en Robe de Chocolat. In the low freezer were also kept beauty preparations. The shelves were deep in the attempts of French manufacturers to recreate American food and American food giants to conjure some sophistication. Drums of soda crystals and aggressively named washing powders had been shaped into impromptu chairs on which men sat with soft drinks in cans. A whole wall was dedicated to food for between meals, Cheez Wizz, Cheez Balls, Tandoor Chow Mein Pizza Bites, and sweet drinks. Pineapple and strawberry Nesquik stood next to Eucryl smoker’s tooth powder.

  On a door that must lead in to the back of the shop was the poster of a controlled nuclear explosion at Mururoa atoll – a tall gaseous spire of bruise-coloured uncontrol with an orange heart and a sheer glare of white in its core, reflected in a quiet blue sea and sustained by the outraged blue sky. This poster was sold wherever anything was sold in these islands. It had become a good photograph, a labelled image in place of rage, a picture marketed before the wor
d ‘controlled’ had lost any of its shocking cynicism and still marketed by people almost familiar with this habitual outrage done by the French on land and sea and air and water.

  Insecure wooden crates of Sprite and Lilt were stacked up in the back, with baskets of the rolled-up posters among them. A collection of feather dusters stuck soft and lush from one roll of posters, a polythene petrol-syphoning tube slumbered among others. Through the blue corrugated plastic roof in which tinselly fibres flickered, came the striped light of day. The rich aromas of drains, roasting fish and beer came from the garage at the side of the shop.

  Alec found six hard green oranges in a net and bought some mandarin segments in syrup and a pot of Dundee marmalade to enhance them. By the counter he was amazed to find jars of sweeties he’d not seen for years, among the Chiclets and taffy and Lifesavers; there were nougat prawns, jelly penknives and drunk men’s eyeballs, even Berwick cockles, though here they were labelled Killer Snails in the English and Super Escargots in the French, in deference from one colonising power to another.

  As a small boy, Alec took to visiting the poorer parts of the New Town where people better off and less respectable than his own family lived. They were maybe university people or young doctor couples renting. A fair number of them went without hats. In their rooms at the front you might see a violin or an easel. Cars were infrequent, cats innumerable. A lot of the women in this part of town had their hair down and wore trousers.

  He enjoyed his visits to these parts because they were so different from his own district, because the visits were secret, and, he saw now, because he was attracted by the way of life. Then he just wanted to carry on in his own way without too much attention and these people in their voluntary oddness seemed unlikely to observe him. Alec was averse to confrontation to a degree that kept him continually mildly compromised; he disliked telling the whole truth in case its edge should, no matter how paperily, cut someone. Least of all did he wish to harm – or tell the truth to – his mother.