Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  Below her, in his bunk, Sandro planned the homecoming he would hit his parents with. He reckoned they could get a few days off if he warned them. Then he was going to take them down to Geyserland and put them up in a motel with sulphur baths. His mother moved stiffly around the kitchen; she insisted on using black pots made of iron that each weighed more than a pig. She cleaned the risotto pans with salt and lemon after the last eater had gone, and sluiced the kitchen down whatever the time. Her hands were impregnated with the smells of bleach and garlic. He would soak the work out of her. He planned the country drives he would take them on if he could borrow a pick-up. He knew a guy with a fruit farm; the farm was a failure, but as far as Sandro knew the guy still had his pick-up.

  ‘It’s the fault of you guys my yield’s got to be pulped or sold cheap for syrup. Kiwi fruit was good gear till the Eyeties come into it. Christ knows what I’m to do with an acreage of hedgehog bollocks that I could’ve kept down to sheep.’

  In the end Sandro’s friend Norm pulled out of kiwi fruit after getting a reasonable deal from a frozen luxury desserts manufacturer who operated by one of the wharves in Auckland and did not go bust till after the cheque to Norm had gone through. Insecurity added ill-temper to the normal Kiwi xenophobia, but Sandro did not mind it for himself; he relished having easy jokes among his friends.

  The types they made out of every nationality other than their own were so crude they could only be jokes. The only place it struck him as bad was with the Maoris; there was a big wide street in Auckland where there was a shop that sold small things you might need, snap-shackles, hammers, buckram tape, and a couple of things for women like soap and disinfectant and nappies. It was a depressed shop, but in its way it flourished. There were two reasons for this: one was that many people forget the thing they most need, and have to buy it unplanned; the other was that people came to the shop, which was named The Necessary, to read its windows.

  Every inch of window space in the shop was taped from within with long messages from the keeper of the shop and those who thought as she did. The messages were addressed to any Maori who might be passing by. ‘You think yous the same but yous not animal scum. Dare to come in show yourselfs not chicken. Fist time I met one of yous he had a bone in the nose no garments to speak of and was illitrtit now it’s the dollar and where does it all go. down the throats of begging men that eats lizards and gets kids twelve a year.’ These notices were written in close, small lettering that moved in and out of capitals like the voice of a blind drunk.

  Sandro had only ever seen non-Maoris reading these notices, which changed frequently and must be brought in by some shoppers. He wondered if Maori passers-by identified the shop for a place of hostility, if it was famously putrid like the tramp whom you stepped over the road not to smell, the one who ate soap and consequently thought he was washing each time he peed in his clothes. Sandro’s mother gave this old guy – Soapy was his name not surprisingly – soap in bargain lots, shrink-wrapped; she hid cakes of cake in with it, for Soapy to eat and get the nutrition.

  He would take his parents away from the town where people feared those different from themselves. He would show his mother and father the hot blue sulphur lakes of Rotorua and in the evening they would have trout he had tickled himself, cleaned and cooked in the blue, like in a restaurant where you did not do the cooking yourself.

  He had grown so used to the talking of Gabriel and found her English voice so uptight that he could not understand it very well. Sleep began to cover him. He heard through the hull the swill inside the waves.

  ‘I’ve met someone very nice here,’ said Gabriel into her tape recorder. ‘I think you would agree.’

  Where the hell did you meet people cooped up in a boat like this, Sandro barely wondered, though he tried to hook into his mind that in the morning he must take a fresh look at that Alec.

  Chapter 8

  The retreating view of Bora Bora was at first fresh and overbright like a paste gem. Ardent Spirit put out to sea, at last, beyond the reef. Land left by boat appears to slip away at the same rate as time. Time comes alongside.

  Every space within the boat was once more loaded for the voyage to Tonga. The last thing they had bought on Bora Bora was a tank of outboard fuel for the dinghy. Elspeth carried it home in a plastic demijohn. It sat fair on the slats in the bottom of the dinghy, plastic top secured by a springy loop on the base. The thread could not have been properly engaged, though, because when she passed the demijohn up to Alec, a little fuel trickled from the neck. On the deck, absorbed at once, it seeped, shockingly wide, over the teak. It was sudden and disproportionate as a nosebleed.

  Gabriel was watching. ‘Don’t worry, Elspeth,’ she called, ‘I’ll clean the deck.’

  So Logan heard, and came, as he would not have had Alec gone below without comment to find the holy stone.

  ‘Lovely work, Gabriel. Careless or what, Elspeth?’

  By the second day at sea, when they were settled into the watch system, the sense of dedication to making a passage involved them all. Thoughts of the boat came before thoughts of themselves. This was so even for Alec who had not lived at sea before.

  Sandro was the lightest and best at handling canvas, so he was busy on the foredeck when he was not doing his turn at the wheel. He slept quite often in the sail bin, a privilege earned by being the one who mended the sails, folded them with Nick or Alec’s help and returned them to their light bags. Sandro had made long trips in boats not merely without the refinements of this one but with only two sails and no cover but tarpaulin. This did not make him despise the elaborateness of this boat, but made him aware of how much more could go wrong on Ardent Spirit. The boat he loved most was a simple metal craft named Joshua. He had never been in her, but looked at her in awe whenever they shared a harbour. She had been around the Horn the wrong way. Her skipper was her sole sailor, though sometimes he travelled with his wife, who was beautiful. Joshua’s surface was fitted at intervals with metal handholds, so that you could sail her in all dimensions, at all angles. She was a hull and sails, tough and refined.

  Sandro remembered to look for signs of an attachment between Alec and Gabriel, but he would rather watch waves than courting couples, so he could not be sure there was not something he’d missed. Nothing was visible to the naked eye, but.

  Once, as he was helming, and the stars were so many they seemed about to join up the dots, he wondered if Gabriel was interested in him. He let it go because he knew the only way to live in a cabin the size of a double coffin with a pretty girl was to cut all that out from day one. Anyhow, he liked Gabriel OK, but she was so English she was foreign to him. ‘Dear Mummy,’ she would say into her machine, talking into it so quietly and politely.

  It made him think her home must be like a nice game of tennis, fluffy white balls of talk moving to and fro between people who knew how to reply and manoeuvre their feet at the same time. She was a pretty girl, helpful and a decent sea cook as far as they could tell in the reasonable weather there had been so far, but sometimes he thought her acts of unselfishness were not made to be accepted and forgotten as they should be on a boat or in a family. She was an orderly girl with white teeth who folded her clothes although she was keeping them stuffed in a sail bag, a nice girl whom he could not fault, did not want to; he watched her for signs of the openness he admired in New Zealand girls and found little of it. By openness he did not mean coarseness, but the adventurous refusal to be upset by new things that distinguished many of the girls he knew, and almost all the ones he’d met at sea. Gabriel was dangling herself in front of life when life was there up ahead of her waiting to be grabbed. He thought she had things the wrong way about. Instead of harnessing life, she was waiting to be harnessed.

  He supposed he could blame it on her being a Pom, but he was not mad about doing that. Still, if there was one race you could roundly abuse, it had to be the Poms. They were truly the root vegetables at the barbecue.

  The ruminative pace continue
d, dayless, divided into blocks of four hours. Nick and Alec did the two till six, Gabriel and Sandro the six till ten, Logan and Elspeth the ten till two, and then again. In practice, everyone was available for an emergency by night or day. Gabriel and Nick did most of the cooking. Alec found that he liked washing clothes in a bucket by hand. For jeans they used salt water so the jeans were never completely dry, because of the hydroptic salt in them.

  ‘The only time I get to read is when I’m at sea,’ Logan would say, before returning below to mark his charts, leaving the book in the wheelhouse. It would be a book of utter dryness, business memoirs of the unimpeachable kind, perhaps, or the analysis of certain stock performances. If someone had given him such a thing, it might be the memoirs of a politician without reputation and with less to come. All of these subjects fertile in good and evil and bursting with lesser skulduggery interested Logan when they were least human. The human content in fiction was what put him off. ‘It’s all lies. Why should people want to read lies? I don’t see it. Poetry, maybe. The point of it is to take your mind off life.’

  Alec looked up at this. They were on a broad reach, an angle to the wind when a sense of almost personal power and strength flows through the people borne by a boat. The water below them was deep as mountains, as cities.

  Alec could not agree that the point of poetry was to take your mind off life, nor was it the point of any other art. When he looked at Logan, who stood at the wheel, blond hair whipping his head, eyes looking into the sun, he realised that Logan’s words had not been the pure expression of his thought. They were what he said on this particular topic, poetry, when it came up. Thought had not entangled them. Logan was a man of whom it was said that he was deep, by people who had never been near water.

  Elspeth read novels, Alec observed. Where was she keeping them and where had she found them?

  He met her eye after her husband had defined the point of poetry. Her look was calm but preoccupied. She might have been answering back in her head, but it was not possible to tell. She sat at her customary highest point in the stern. She had told him she called her position there the coward’s crouch, because she was furthest from the foredeck where the sails were handled, yet could show willing at once with additional winching or the making fast or stowing of ropes.

  ‘Where do you get your books?’ Alec asked Elspeth.

  ‘I swap them with other people on boats. We write where the book travelled from and to and pass them on again. I had a Somerset Maugham that’d been one and a half times round the world. It was a good binding. Most paperbacks are getting crackly or have mould by the end of a circumnavigation. The West Indies finish off most books, too. The suntan oil and the drink combined. The things people fight over are funny.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Alec. He noticed that the skin of her shoulders, nose, collarbones had settled down now and lost its high colour. She was a dark pink brown, and the skin had toughened up. She was weathered, literally, he thought, and it is more becoming to be tanned.

  ‘In the hot parts of the world they will give anything for books about cold places or coldish things, the law or stories set in London. Antarctic and Arctic ordeals are very popular. In the cold parts, it’s steamy tales of slavery, the Deep South, juleps, all that. It must be that people are interested in where they aren’t. And diet books and Shakespeare are the most popular of all.’

  ‘What do you like best?’

  ‘At sea? Or on land?’

  ‘At sea,’ said Alec.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember having been on land.’

  ‘What is it, your favourite?’

  This was the most intimate conversation he had had since speaking to Nick about his son. It was in a way more intimate, since he was showing interest in another person.

  ‘I like dry, sad comedies about the lives of women and children. I find picture books get lost among the sea, though reading about pictures at sea is wonderful. Your mind’s eye is cleaner. Adventure stories, all that, as you would expect, Conrad, Stevenson. I read them on land and remember how I hated the sea and how I miss it. Nothing in all that bowsprit and binnacle lingo. It holds back the human life and reeks of the salt.’

  ‘You mean the lamp?’ asked Alec.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Logan, ‘you just chat away.’

  Elspeth refocused her eyes to find out the source of his ill-temper.

  ‘Take the wheel,’ he said to Elspeth, ‘if you feel you can afford the time.’

  It was halfway through his and her watch and she had forgotten. She put down her book, went into the open wheelhouse and took the wheel from her husband. It was heavy this day and pulling deeply. A slight twisting from under the boat added to the thick bias to port the wheel seemed to show. She let the wheel go momentarily to let it untwist itself so it felt looser in her hands, easier on itself.

  Logan reached over in front of her and held the course, passing the wheel back to her when he had balanced it exactly with the wind. He had a musical sense of the water and the wind and the wheel.

  When he gave her back the wheel the boat almost flew. She would never want to be free of him. He had entrusted her with himself aloof and she must take it for the trust it was.

  ‘Gabriel,’ called Logan, ‘get up here and do yourself some good. Leave those pots.’ But it was Nick in the galley. Gabriel’s brown small face emerged from the sail bin, then the rest of her, in a pair of yellow bloomers with a frill, and no more.

  Alec looked at Logan who said, ‘Get yourself and me a drink. And anyone else who wants.’

  Sandro had worked on boats where the girls went bare all day, and if they were pretty he was fine.

  Alec realised he was the one who was looking for something to say. All along, this expedition had never been spoken of as a holiday, though he supposed that was what it was. Gabriel’s dainty brown near-naked form aroused a holiday feeling. He looked at Logan, a man testing himself for no reason Alec could guess, and decided to say nothing.

  It was an odd holiday for Alec, after all. He had come on this boat to repossess his innocence. The pleased childlike reaction to the sight of Gabriel rising from the sail bin might have been a step towards that recovery.

  ‘Sprite,’ he said to Gabriel, a request and a light compliment.

  ‘I’ll have the same, and Elspeth,’ said Logan. Because the wheel was live but not quarrelsome in her grip, Elspeth was pleased by his assumption of her wants as she would not have been if other things hadn’t been going well. How hard for men to be married to women, she thought. How we talk to each other and the sound does not carry because of the tempests we ourselves set up.

  ‘I’ll take over from you in a while and we’ll put up the biggest spinnaker,’ said Logan. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you.’

  The boat righted herself as the reacher came down, wet all along the lower edge that had sometimes been in the water. The lowering sail came down with a sound like broken bells, a combined ringing and clacking of metal from the blocks and shrouds. Everyone was up top for the setting of the spinnaker, a piece of cloth that looked fine like silk but was made to take the attack of the wind and exploit it. As the poles were set, it began a liquid slapping in the bows, accompanied by a sharp loud rustle. It was like the arrival of a robed queen. The white and silver-grey sail was up to its fullest, high out over the bow of the boat. The silence surrounded only one distinct sound, the running of the water.

  So still and soundless was the huge segment of material that they felt as though they were not moving, although they were going as fast as they had been before.

  The boat cut over the ocean in state so free of interruption as almost to be abstract, achieved by simple practical means. Alec thought that this state was something like the state of the mind when thinking is going well, or work.

  I said to him things that never could be true; it is what one does in love, thought Elspeth, and now I must go with them as the heavy boat goes behind its beautiful,
unbelievable sail.

  Nick had brought up the onions he was peeling, and sat amidships dropping papery skin overboard. They were a day out from Bora Bora, too far from land for a bird to come at once to take the peelings and not far enough south for the albatross.

  Gabriel and Sandro were playing magnetic draughts. She was good at games and very interested in winning. Sandro was good at games but couldn’t care less.

  The silent exertion of the still but hauling spinnaker seemed to extract the force from each particle of air that pushed it from within, pressing on into and displacing at the same time the caves of air it pushed aside as it advanced. It was as hollow and full as a dome looked up into from below, as daunting in its man-made suspension that held apparently apart from trivial man. To look at its top was to strain. Its sway over the space within it and the residents of its haul was architectural. It used air as a sacred building will.

  It was Sandro who was watching the spinnaker when it exploded.

  He looked to Logan, whose anger was such a great part of him, and waited for the reaction to the searing that had been so sudden and violent yet almost silent. It was like seeing a cartoon without its caption, the huge white spinnaker with its silver star being thrashed through by another star, the blue sky.

  ‘It’s past mending,’ Logan murmured. ‘They all go quite soon. It’s the fineness of the fibre.’

  When impersonal events might merit anger, he did not have it where his boat was concerned. He indulged her as he did not his wife.

  Ardent Spirit settled but progressed before the wind.

  Alec wondered whether to say what was in his mind.

  ‘It could be getting tangled round the screw,’ said Sandro. ‘I’ll take a look.’

  ‘Take all her sail down, now,’ said Logan. Nick, Alec, Sandro and Gabriel hauled down canvas, bundled and bound it, while Elspeth held the boat across her previous course a little, hoping that the sail had not wound itself around the shaft that responded to the wheel under the stern; certainly she felt no impediment. The tentacles of even so fine a sail would clog the steering horribly, spinning on to it fast, inextricably and with all its field-sized inertia.