Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Alec and Elspeth closed the hatches and the companionway cover and were up on deck. The rain came down hard. The boat was twisting and thrashing. Her anchor had dragged. She was veering closer all the time to the red yacht from Panama, newly patched with sticky red paint. In no time, the sea’s nature had changed. The boats approached each other through the battered water, determined as great magnets. Worse than red anti-foul all over the hull would be the crushing impact of boat on boat, which could finish them both off. There was no one to be seen on the red boat.

  Ardent Spirit screwed over the water towards the red boat.

  ‘Alec, bring up the anchor, I’m going to hold her off with the engine, there’s no hope of holding them apart with the hooks.’

  Alec began to set the anchor-chain mechanism to go and Elspeth ran into the fo’c’sle to guide the chain.

  The sea was lifting and suddenly lapsing with a crash. Purple lightning in curtains rolled over the island. An electric heat burst with thunder that never quite stopped between its hard claps. The red boat was close. It seemed futile to attempt to steer against this sea that was rubbing the boats in its jaws.

  The anchor was at last up and Logan able to go to full throttle. He forced the boat astern of the red yacht and kept her off like that. On shore Alec saw a man, it may have been Sandro, standing in front of the thatched huts. Then the lights on shore went out.

  The thunder grew heavier. It never stopped, just grew louder. The blue yacht was thrashing in the waves, pitching at fretful speed up and down on her chain. Suddenly, a light went on in the red boat. Someone was moving about on her. Under the sound of thunder came a long moan of metal. Her engine started, and she began to move, into the creek, away from any rocks there might be on the coast.

  The boat that had felt like a house now felt like balsa to Alec. He heard Ardent Spirit strain and fight the engine. She felt like a thing burning, writhing in the fire, no longer possessed of itself.

  Then, like a bird falling shot from the sky, the squall dropped and was gone.

  ‘Take her back to where we were,’ said Logan to Alec, who took the wheel. He could feel the heavy tug of weather helm in the disturbed water, the sulky disturbed low water fighting the boat’s rational, designed, directedness. The angered water was less biddable than water after calm.

  ‘I’ll drop the hook,’ said Logan, from up by the anchor. ‘Elspeth, get below and check how she pays out. Thank God someone’s had the sense to move that ugly red monster. We could have been matches and dog chow.’

  The sky was calm again, the new stars visible, unshaken. The moon appeared with no aura and no face. It was pale yellow.

  Though the sea was still loose and running at a spate, its waves had sunk.

  Elspeth heard the Zodiac: ‘Sandro, Nick, are you OK?’

  ‘More to the point, are you?’ Sandro held up a Tilley lamp that put his young dark face into deep shadows and made his olive skin glow yellow where the light lay on it. On the thwart of the Zodiac sat Nick, all wet.

  ‘Nick, come and dry, what did you do?’

  ‘Skin dries on its own. I’m great, thanks, Elspeth.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘He swam over to the red boat from his wi – ’

  ‘I just moved the red one a bit,’ interrupted Nick. Both matters he would rather leave, Elspeth saw.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ said Logan. ‘Quick thinking.’

  ‘It could’ve been a bad scene,’ said Nick. He was embarrassed, as he often was, by the response of others to things he did that he could not have done.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Logan. The squall had left clear air but on the boat it thickened. ‘The post office is down. It’s a loss for those of you expecting letters. For me it’s a grave inconvenience.’ The things were evidently not of equal weight. ‘I was wondering if you, Alec, would like to go back to Papeete and do a couple of things for me. I’ll enlighten you about them later.’ When no one else is about, his words suggested.

  It was curious, Alec thought, that he had not asked his wife to do whatever it was for him, if he was not anxious to go back to the town. This voyage, presumably intended as a flight from the implications and involvements of dry land, was taking its time in hauling free of them.

  ‘Elspeth can go with you, if you want.’ If she wants, at all? thought Alec, impressed at the way some men have a habit of declaring the outrageous quite normal and making it so. He was so tired he agreed, will-less. The squall had pulped him. It had had the same effect as the alternating kindness and unpredictable cruelty that break the will of trainee soldiers. Was he becoming Logan’s man in some way?

  Before he slept, he asked Nick, ‘That was your wife?’

  ‘Indeed. And because of your trip to Papeete, I get to see her for more time. Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank Logan,’ said Alec.

  He was too tired to sleep, he thought, but was soon below the glassy thin dreams that presage some sort of test.

  ‘It’s the certificate to show that the bank have returned the bond I placed with the representatives of the French Government. It’s a thing you have to do if you take a boat to an island the French own. They ask for these bonds. Kilo of flesh. When they asked me for it I had a hard time keeping cool. To pay for three feet of the rue Pomare and night after night of polluted air and klaxons seems rich, but there. You seem the type to hold his temper when they take you through the forms.’ Logan was speaking to Alec.

  ‘Will they not need you there?’

  ‘To give the cash, they did. Now they’ve given it back, any fool will do. I just need the duplicate certificate. The bond’s been transferred. It’s back in an account of mine. I just want to show them they can’t go burning up things that I need for the proper conduct of my affairs.’ This odd selection of words struck Alec as showing what money had done to words. ‘I want to keep face.’

  ‘But with my face.’ Alec chanced this remark.

  ‘I’ll give you a covering letter. There’s a word they allow you to choose, a kind of password, as a security precaution, and I’ll enclose it. I’m also giving you telegrams to send to various interests of mine. Do not send them from a post office. Use the bank.’

  Alec used a bank as little as possible, and for such matters as paying a bill. He had no idea a bank could be used as a factotum.

  ‘Here’s the stuff,’ said Logan. Instead of producing it right away, which would surely have been more discreet, he moved the tantalus and swivelled two discs until he had displayed a combination of figures that seemed to satisfy him. He pushed the safe handle down thirty degrees from the straight, and pulled the slow chunky door forward. There was the grey little cupboard.

  ‘If we’d gone on fire like that post office, that safe and what’s inside it would have been all that remained,’ he said. It was a deep safe; before extracting what he wanted, he pulled out a case of brown leather.

  ‘Stupid to have them in a case really,’ he said, ‘as if they’re going to wait till you’ve opened it and only shoot after you’ve armed yourself.’

  He’s showing off, thought Alec. All this performance is a show. Yet he’s packing me off with his wife. What has he in mind? Logan pulled out a stiff package so repeatedly wrapped in transparent polythene that it was blue.

  It was not obviously threatening. Alec couldn’t see what it was. He was fairly sure he’d be told.

  He felt a bump as a rowing boat came alongside and he heard the chatter that he had been vaguely conscious of since the dawn. ‘T-shirts, palm-fibre paintings, truly excellent barbecue pig-out prepared by family only in old ovens . . . T-shirts, all cheap.’ The boys doing the selling were well fed, listless. There were no girls.

  ‘Ah, here she is,’ said Logan. He handed Alec a brown envelope, ungummed. ‘I’ve put a few francs in there too. As we know, Tahiti’s not a cheap place to stay. And I’ve radioed to book you into the Roi Soleil on the Boulevard Pomare. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. Pass me th
at morphine, would you, and I’ll shut up shop.’

  Logan was peaceful for the rest of the day. He seemed recharged by something. It struck Alec that he was not a fully confident man, that he was undergoing some ordeal he did not vouchsafe.

  In the Fokker that flew Elspeth and Alec from Bora Bora’s small airstrip back to Faa’a Airport on Tahiti, they sat next to a Chinese woman who had a trug containing some new kittens and a bouquet of orchids bound together in damp tissue and then in foil. The purple orchids trembled at one end of the basket on her knees; the tiny cats mewed without making a sound. The Zodiac had brought Elspeth and Alec in to shore, where they had caught a bus for the airport, rather uneasy in dry-land clothes and properly shod in a manner neither had seen before in the other. The novelty seemed to hint at an erotic beginning.

  The Air Polynésie hostesses handed out boiled sweets and old issues of French Cosmopolitan. ‘Quand Bébé Arrive,’ read Alec in the magazine on Elspeth’s lap, ‘ce n’est pas la fin de l’amour . . .’ He thought, as he did when he wanted to record the life he was presently living, of Lorna and Sorley.

  Raiatea and Huahine lay so close below the plane that the fronds on the palm trees might be counted. When the plane passed from them back over the water, its shadow refracted neatly.

  At Faa’a, Elspeth put on a cardigan and some scent. She was not a coquettish woman. Nor was Lorna. Alec loved coquettishness in short glimpses and enjoyed it when it was accompanied by guilt. Its operations however were too exhausting for companionship. He supposed his ideal was a natural coquettishness, if it could exist beyond childhood.

  They made a pair that did not match but did not look so mismatched as they stood in the taxi queue at the freezingly air-conditioned Faa’a Airport.

  The Hôtel Roi Soleil displayed a board with slotted-in white removable letters on a ribbed black board. Today it read: ‘Air-Con, Quiet Rooms, Swimming Poll. Modrate prices minutes from all shoping. Tahiti’s most popular night spot, featuring Tiare Apetahi’s Orgestra every night. Full Selection of American, Chinese, Frenchstyle Specialties Trois repas par jour.’

  A desk clerk made them welcome, eating from a tub of snacks that she carried cradled to her to the lift. In the lift was one insistent fly and a brass-framed photograph of the hotel itself taken at a flattering angle and transformed to colour from black-and-white. This technique gave a lift of hyper-real, menacing, domesticity. The arcades of the hotel’s façade looked seductively sleazy. Alec did not know whether Elspeth was to accompany him on his errands, and was more embarrassed by this than by their being sent together by her husband to a hotel.

  ‘Did you see her teeth?’ asked Elspeth.

  ‘The word in Edinburgh used to be that you might as well pull all a woman’s teeth when she wed and save on the dentist.’

  ‘It’s like that here. Some of the most beautiful ones are perfected by false teeth.’

  He looked at Elspeth’s strong big teeth.

  ‘Were you a sweetie eater?’

  ‘In the dark, hiding. Sugar probably does worse things after you’ve cleaned your teeth. I was a midnight muncher. Shoplifted Mojos and Tunnock’s Snowballs I’d pocketed and that had burst so you had to suck them off the cellophane.’

  The lift arrived. The rooms were off the same dark corridor, lit by a circlet of bud fairylights around a mirror at one end.

  The stench of Baygon and Looklens burnt Alec’s eyes as he entered his room. It was a room like a brown drawer, pulled out and left cruelly open to the street. He heard car horns and felt the collected heat of the sun as it hung in the dusty brown curtains. A melting dust lay over everything. The bedspread was brown candlewick.

  ‘Do you have roaches?’ asked Elspeth. ‘I have three to welcome me in the bathroom. Did you see them on the plane?’

  ‘I know they are there and try not to make it any more specific than that. Is your room a different brown?’

  ‘Much the same. I have a bunch of dried flowers. Festal. More durable than a garland.’

  The air-conditioning clattered, wheezed, and brought up the old air.

  ‘It must be noisier for people who haven’t been here before. I mean we knew what not to expect.’

  ‘That’s a dispiriting approach to paradise.’

  ‘When do you have to go to the bank? Have you an appointment?’

  ‘Why do you take this treatment?’ he wanted to ask her about Logan, feeling the familiar aggression towards a person who already accepts abuse, the underside of the impulse to defend and protect.

  ‘It’s at about six, in the cooler time. Will you come?’

  ‘I might shop instead. We’ll need some soap.’

  He went to look. ‘I hadn’t gone into the bathroom yet.’ Did she want to shop for a couple of bars of soap, or was she making it less embarrassing for him?

  The grimy light of the Hôtel Roi Soleil would pinch out the brightest, youngest love, thought Alec. If he were being used he preferred that it should be somewhere remotely pleasant.

  ‘It’s odd,’ he said, ‘that you didn’t visit the Gauguin Museum when you and Logan spent all that time here kitting out the boat. Let’s go there tomorrow.’

  ‘I know you are a painter,’ she said. ‘I am an admirer.’

  This was unexpected, not comfortable. How long had she had this advantage over him? Only one thing could let her off.

  ‘I didn’t know at first that you were you. It’s a name you could find anywhere in the world. Logan doesn’t know.’

  ‘Shall we go to the museum?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ she said, ‘I’m off just now for the soap.’

  The Banque d’Indo-Chine et de Suez was cool, clean, marbled, sweet-smelling, all the hotel was not. Handmaidens in pareos tight as cheongsams stood behind sprays of orchids, daintily working little adding machines. The sensuality that reading and reputation had led him to expect would suffuse the island had struck him only when he saw beautiful individuals. Here in the bank was the sterile temptation of modern sex, sex gone to money. There was nothing sweet about this atmosphere, the sweetness the first European accounts of Tahiti suggested, the sweetness of lagoons below the island’s steep black rock.

  Monsieur Riquet, the manager, seemed to be expecting Alec, and not to mind that he was not Logan. He was formal, pleased to extend the hospitality of his bank. The telegrams were swiftly sent. A flickering clock told the exact time by flipping pages of white marks on black that joined together to make figures. Alec recalled the Hôtel Roi Soleil, and tried to linger a little. But his appointment was over, Monsieur Riquet pointed out, politely not indicating the clock that tapped time away and surely Monsieur would be wishing to return to his hotel?

  Free of his task, at least of its declared demands, he enjoyed the streets of Papeete as he had not on the previous stay when he had been a yachtie, one of a vagrant, unliked community. Now he was able to become his eyes alone.

  A khaki-skinned woman with a mouth like a bud, the upper lip brown, the lower hard pink, swayed by. At each joint she was made so small she looked triple-jointed. Her skin glowed over small bones that seemed filled with air. Her robe of hair was an unnatural lavender red. She wore a handbag and shoes that had been made to perfect a tailleur and apart from them only a white pareo. Alec walked behind her watching the way she flicked a strand of hair back over her shoulder like a lost child flinging rice, to make sure she was followed.

  When he lost her, it was for others, as extreme, as titillatingly unlike one another as could be imagined. Some, even, had fair hair, the garish exciting blonde that suggests much more against skin outwith its own register. It was a hair colour only taken on by a woman wanting to be looked at lewdly. The lewdness, as neon began to hum over Papeete, seemed graceful, even suitable; a personal subversion by the Tahitians of the trade in their beauty. No longer was there a single Tahitian type. Too much blood had been mixed. But the same spirit that condoned the raising of boys as women, rae raes, seemed to condone all sexes turning themselves into a t
hing more artificial, more stirring, even, than flesh, a form of art.

  ‘I’ve booked at the Soupe Chinoise,’ said Elspeth, when he got back. She was in the lobby, watching the other guests, who looked pale and old in the dismal room. His legs were tired from following women, his eyes burned out by looking at them. He had done her husband’s errand. Need he also watch her eat?

  ‘If you’re tired, I’ll bring something back for you,’ she said. She knew he could not do that, of course, he thought as he showered (she had bought Fleurs des Alpes) and put on again the pale suit the bank had kept cool and the streets had broiled.

  Portraits of Chiang Kai-shek and maps of Taiwan covered the walls. The waiters were old Chinese with thin grey moustaches and starched white bellhop jackets. All the food was middling warm and served in silver baths, very slowly, with some surprise, like a lucky dip. The tangs of seafood in the air, of wine and cigars, were more nourishing and delectable than the pieces of pale rockpool contents they chewed and could swallow only with more beer.

  Elspeth said, ‘How shall we go to the museum?’

  ‘When I went, I hitched. But maybe that’s not for you. I checked with the bank manager. He said taxi or bus. I favour bike if you do. It’s by Port Phaeton of all lovely names. There is a garden. There are no paintings, never a one. But I still want to go. Do you?’

  ‘This is a bit you can eat,’ she said. ‘It’s good.’

  ‘It’s a leek,’ said Alec.

  ‘I do want to, yes of course, though I fear it will be sad as homes of the artist often are. The pipe, the hat, the slippers, the cradle, the cup; things are heartless. But I have a taste for re-creations. I like the way they never work, the more authentic the worse. Perhaps there will be something like that tomorrow, a half-eaten meal, a vahine chopping plaster onions for the artist’s evening meal, another grinding pigments by the tapa cloth?’

  ‘I think it’s quite empty, though there’s a tiki, if you like those.’

  ‘If they are not frightening they are plain ugly, but I like the way one gets awe and affection for them, quite hard with an idol.’