On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  ‘Yeah. But has it occurred to you that…’ he sucked in a breath, ‘…being in harm’s way is what our armed forces actually do? It’s like, their job. The SOLAS rules? Safety of Life at Sea, Cass. Look it up.’ He drew a series of short breaths. ‘And, um…you’re s’posed to front the media and explain things. That’s your job.’

  ‘Taxpayers want us to be frugal, Ron. That’s what we’re doing.’

  Smedley snorted. It cost him a breath. ‘Let’s be honest, hey? You’re motivated by nothing but popularity, Core Resolve’s motivated by nothing but profit—and when Mr Popularity hands over the controls to Mr Profit, you’ve got chaos.’

  Cassius was pumping harder, but disguising it. He could feel Smedley straining to stay level and he loved the secret animal politics of it: Smedley didn’t want to talk to him, but was compelled by deference. And now he was having to work harder to stay in the unwanted conversation. He pushed the pace again, walking Smedley around an invisible room from which he couldn’t escape. He liked to make people talk when they were trying to control their breathing.

  ‘So here’s what I want from you, Ron. I want a chain of communication, but with deniability. You understand?’

  ‘Well…as far as that’s…understandable.’ He was puffing now. Cassius was breaking the fucker down. ‘You want to be told what’s going on and you want to say you had no idea.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. You can manage that?’

  ‘Don’t compromise me, Cass. It’ll come back to bite you.’

  Cassius couldn’t help but laugh at the gasping skinny-arsed bureaucrat. This was what settled the long debates about his future: this right here—a contest of wills. And if they kept feeding him contests of wills he’d win every one of them and he’d die happy.

  ‘You’re right Ron, you are old fashioned. How long till the retirement?’

  ‘Long enough…to give you the shits…till the electorate’s sick of you.’

  Which was not a bad rejoinder for an old bloke, thought Cassius, as he cranked down the gears and left Smedley behind.

  MIDDAY, SATURDAY

  West of Pulau Dana

  The going was smooth once they cleared the inshore chop near Sumba. Isi separated herself from the surfers and did the rounds of her plants.

  She’d seen them glancing at the greenery. It didn’t fit with their preconceptions, the rows of planter boxes, foliage spilling down the outside walls of the cabin. It was perfectly normal to Isi, of course. Life in the Kuta apartment with Joel was incomplete without her plants. In Perth, even in Jakarta, she’d managed to find enough space and sunlight to surround herself with pots and buckets and troughs—anything that would hold soil. Mostly she liked to grow edible greens, though sometimes she’d follow a whim that made her happy: jonquils, frangipani, orchids.

  Joel, to his credit, had understood her need and even encouraged it. They were both aware of the abundant herbs and spices at the local markets in Denpasar: fresh, dried, packaged or handed over in clumps, trailing wet roots and tied with string. But buying them wasn’t the point of it. It was the nurturing and gathering, the tactile business of handling living things—her living things. The pungent smells, the watering, feeding, pruning and re-potting. She picked seeds out of salads when they ate in restaurants, hunting with thumb and forefinger for chillies, capsicum, tomatoes. She could propagate a mint bush from a sprig in a drink, grow lemongrass from the slivered stalk on a curry. Adrift from her upbringing, often adrift at sea, the delicate mooring of a seedling to its soil made her feel centred somehow.

  But in Kuta all they had was an upstairs flat: dark, trapped between concrete walls. The shopkeepers had offered to keep her plants on the small allotments behind their stores, but everything she planted there disappeared.

  The idea had come to her one day as she sat on the wharf, chatting to Joel while they scrubbed grime off the deck with wire brushes. The sun was ferocious: clumps of fat cloud wandered across the sky but never managed to shade it. Isi was sweating freely. Every ten minutes or so she’d stop her work and run the outdoor shower that sprayed cool rainwater from the Java Ridge’s tanks. Under the stream, her clothes soaked and everything glittering in the reborn rain, she knew what to do.

  First she tried a small experiment with basil. Delicate and temperamental, if it could survive on board she felt that more ambitious planting might be possible. She went to the truck depot and bought hose clamps from a man in an Iron Maiden T-shirt. She screwed these into the wall of the Java Ridge’s cabin, high up, away from the salt spray. Then she dropped a plastic pot into each and stood back to admire the crayon-green of the basil leaves against the timber of the phinisi. Next she took a cordless drill and made a fine hole in the sill of the cabin roof above each of the pots. The shavings smelled mysterious and beautiful. She glued short lengths of hose onto the holes so a little rainwater would trickle down and into the pots without disrupting the collection of water for the clients at sea.

  Clean air, sunshine, rainwater. The seedlings would need nothing else, provided she could keep them up out of the hull’s spray.

  For two weeks she fretted over them while Joel took a group of South Africans out to sea. He radioed in frequently—sometimes for business and sometimes for company—and each time she resisted asking him about the progress of her plants.

  When he returned she sped down to the wharf on the scooter, to where the Java Ridge knocked patiently against the bollards while fishermen yelled over the slicking water. And there, lit by the sun’s energy, were her seedlings: a foot taller and vividly green. The only flaw in the operation was the abundance of sun: they’d bolted to seed.

  She harvested a few shoots and immediately set to work: fifteen pots, arrayed along both sides of the cabin this time, and planted with an assortment of coriander, chillies, a peanut creeper, lemon balm, stevia and even a knuckle of ginger under its own veil of shadecloth. She added aloe vera for sunburn and garlic for everything. On the window ledge in the galley, where the filtered light would reach them, she lined up jars of alfalfa and mung beans. She armed Radja with secateurs so he could snip shoots for his cooking, and taught him how and when to prune. And this time she added slow-release fertiliser. It took her three hours in the cool of early morning to get all the pots arranged, Joel watching from the wheelhouse, amused but indifferent. He’d been reading the permaculture book she’d left on board. He told her she was a heliotrope—a flower that followed the sun. She’d giggled like an idiot—only Joel Hughes could find a pick-up line in a book about worms.

  Now she swept the fronds aside to make her way into the wheelhouse. In the haze of early afternoon, she could see land on the horizon, a low dark line between blue and blue.

  As it neared across the shining surface of the ocean, Luke Finley stood alone, staring at the beach that had materialised, the thin white lines of breaking waves. Spray haze low in the sky, birds wheeling. The island was tiny, maybe only a mile long, rising to a peak of bare boulders at one end. It grew larger but in detail it only looked wilder. Just the fringing reef, the beach and the trees. So unlikely, so far from anything, that this shocking explosion of life and colour should rise from the abyssal plains of the ocean floor.

  The engines grew quieter and Luke skipped up the gangway to the bridge. Isi was standing at the controls, gazing at the approaching island. She wanted to take them close enough to have a look, without tangling with some random pinnacle of reef. She looked at him briefly and caught him regarding his reflection in the glass of the wheelhouse windows. She nodded towards the atoll.

  ‘Dana Island.’

  ‘We going in?’

  ‘We can cruise past it. I want to get a sense of what the swell’s doing. It hardly ever breaks here.’

  They watched Dana growing before them. Past the small Indonesian flag fluttering on the canopy over the bow, the coral made a graceful arc around the northern side of the island. Each incoming swell found the edge of the reef and followed it.

  ‘Anyone live
there?’

  ‘No. The Savunese have beliefs about the place. It’s an island of the dead, you know, lost souls and all that. I think you can get a permit to stop there, but no one ever does. They mostly steam through to Raijua.’

  There was a loud clattering sound as heavy feet ascended the steps outside. Carl appeared in the doorway, shirtless and smearing sunscreen over his face like a squirrel grooming.

  ‘Oh my God! That thing is sick! We stopping?’

  Isi sighed. ‘I’m just getting a look at the swell. You’ll do better at Raijua.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding me…’ He watched through the front windows of the wheelhouse as a set formed on the encircling reef. She silently cursed its timing.

  ‘Look at that one! Oh faark!’

  The first wave of the set had lifted majestically, before peeling down the edge of the reef, hollow and perfect. They were close enough now to see the path of whitewater it left in its trail, to draw the imagined lines of their own surfing over its contours. It expelled a cloud of spray, like the exhalation of a living thing, as it collapsed in deep water further on.

  Carl’s tone darkened. ‘Seriously, we have got to get on that.’

  Isi was about to answer him when Neil Finley arrived, stern and watchful behind Carl. He spoke quietly; a man accustomed to being heard. ‘I think the consensus is we’re surfing this.’

  Carl ducked under the arm that Finley had propped against the doorway and disappeared.

  ‘Raijua’s going to be every bit as good and there’s a mooring there. If I anchor here I’m going to damage the reef. And the locals don’t like people visiting.’

  Finley assessed the island over his shoulder. They were close enough now to hear individual waves among the distant roar. ‘Locals?’

  Isi stood firm, hands on hips. She knew she was being tested.

  ‘I don’t see anyone around. Is there a pass in the reef? Let’s put it in the lagoon.’

  She knew there was a pass. She hesitated, long enough for Finley to press his momentum. ‘Good girl. So take us into the lagoon and anchor there. I’m sure there’ll be sand.’

  If he wins now, the entire trip’s going to be a nightmare. ‘No. I’m sorry, but I’m the skipper and I’m not go—’

  ‘I’m the client. I don’t need to remind you how much money we’ve paid.’ His voice was flat and even, reflecting the glacial certainty of those pale blue eyes. Absurdly, she imagined them over a surgical mask, no other point of reference on his face. No wonder he thought he was infallible.

  ‘No.’ Her voice rose slightly. ‘We’re twenty nautical miles from Raijua. You’ll be there in two hours.’

  As she spoke there was a splash. She looked out the port window and saw a shake of brown hair in the water and a floating board. Carl. He slung a few strokes of freestyle to retrieve the board, laughing, then saluted the boat and started paddling towards the island, the rest of them cheering and whistling from the bow, scrambling for fins and wax. She knew she’d lost them.

  ‘Get out,’ she said to Finley. To her surprise, he obliged. Out in the sun, she whistled to Sanusi and pointed to the Zodiac. He tilted his chin slightly in acknowledgment, and began craning the rubber boat into the water. In a few moments he’d circled the Java Ridge to collect the surfers. Isi stood at the rail as the two-stroke exhaust drifted over her, and called down to him in Bahasa. She would take the boat inside the reef and look for an anchorage. He was to come around and join her when he’d dropped them all off.

  The last to leave the boat was Fraggle, smeared in zinc and carrying a heavy water housing for his camera. So ill-adapted to the tropical sun, so freckled and pale. He smiled awkwardly at her, his teeth showing yellow against the chemical white of the zinc.

  ‘Not your fault, eh. You’re not Joel…’ He shrugged and tried the smile again. When she didn’t respond, he took a pair of swim fins in his other hand and jumped overboard.

  Bringing the Java Ridge through the pass in the reef was easy enough. Joel had marked their charts: coordinates that involved lining up a tall dead tree with the odd-shaped pinnacle of red rock at the far end of the island. No trig markers out here, no beacons. Nothing but the accidental symmetry of nature.

  The stern swung around to bring the two features into alignment, the deep passage appearing as an inky stripe through the stained glass of the fringing reef. Beyond lay an emerald pool of calm water, then the white beach and the jungle. As the boat rounded the tip of the reef she could see the six of them in the water, clustered close together waiting for a set. The Finleys, shoulder to shoulder and shirtless. Tim and Leah, also side by side, the female form distinctive among the square male bodies. Fraggle kicking his fins over the coral mosaic of the shallows, pushing the bulky camera housing ahead of himself. And Carl, who’d paddled all the way up the line to sit furthest out. Waiting, staring at the horizon and ignoring the conversation around him. First surf of the trip and he’s already a ball of tension.

  Radja silently moved around the boat to stay in the shade as its angle to the sun changed. The bigger swells breathed as they passed underneath, setting the hanging towels fluttering in the heavy air. Isi had been presented with a choice between Joel’s way—his easygoing accommodation of people—and hers. Her way would be to fight for authority, to lay it down. But what would it gain her to crack the shits so early in the trip? They were expecting her to do it, goading her to. There was no prospect of fellowship from Leah, welded as she was to her boyfriend.

  The Java Ridge slipped into the sheltered lagoon inside the reef. Deep below her, the drone of the diesels reduced to a purr and the bow settled in the water. A lumbering turtle hurried out of the way.

  For now, at least, she had to defy expectation and surprise them.

  Once she and Sanusi had carefully anchored in the sandy bowl of the lagoon, she went aft to the high deck over the stern where the stereo was. One of Joel’s indulgences: huge Japanese lounge speakers bolted to the bulkhead. She lined up a playlist—heavy on bass because it carried further. Then she cranked the dials to send the music over the water to the surfers. Below her, Radja grimaced at the volume. Sanusi’s favourite downtime was crosswords—his way of working on his English. The deafening music would probably irritate him too, but they’d both just have to cope.

  Next, she piled the gear she wanted into the Zodiac and drove it ashore. Her feet sank into the heavy coral sand as she hauled the load up the beach and between the palm trees. Behind the palms she knew there was a clearing, an open flat area with a natural grass cover where she and Joel had camped in the past.

  She went back to the Java Ridge three, four, five times until she had everything piled up in the clearing and sweat was trickling down the small of her back. A high-pitched whistling sound rose from the jungle around the clearing, unwavering like a jet turbine. Sometimes as she worked she would cease to hear it, then a momentary distraction would cause her to focus on it again. Insects, she figured. The spirits of the dead.

  The sweat was stinging her eyes. She could smell her own body now, mingling with the scent of sunscreen. In a little over an hour she’d put up four tents: one for her, one for the couple and two to be shared among the remaining four. The Indo boys would sleep on the boat. She walked the beach looking for stones to make a fireplace. The surfers were visible in the distance, and she let the ripples wash over the tops of her feet as she watched the unwrapping swells on the reef. It was still hypnotic, no matter the hours and the miles; the very idea of this reef, stretched around the point of the atoll. Innumerable tiny lives clinging to a foothold in the empty sea.

  The margin between the deep-water channel and the dry reef platform was narrow, meaning the rideable part of the wave was no more than a couple of metres wide. It was a pocket of physical possibility that was itself travelling at high speed down the side of the reef and the threading surfer had to hold it somehow. Too far forward and momentum would be lost as the wave shouldered over deeper water. Too far back, and the
cyclonic whirl of the barrelling wave would deposit the rider in the razorblade gardens of coral.

  A white blemish appeared in the distant line of blue as someone paddled. She stopped and watched, the music floating past her. The surgeon’s son, behind in the race as the wave gathered power and hollowed out, rushing forward onto the shallowest part of the reef. She knew instinctively he’d passed the point where he should have let go, but the kid was still pushing for it. The wave wasn’t offering an entry anymore but he was still paddling as the guitar line curled into a death spiral. In an instant the sparkling lip picked him up and slammed him down, hard. He went over head first, the board following soon after. Jesus. Going down that way could drive him into the reef, with the heavy back of the wave behind him and shallow water in front. She lost sight of him for a moment, imagined him somersaulting down the line, his body spinning in a cloud of aerated seawater.

  Then he reappeared in the shallows; he’d snapped his legrope and the board had continued on without him. He was swimming—swimming the wrong way because at water level he couldn’t see which way the board had gone.

  Now he was standing and hopping between coral heads, arms outstretched for balance. She could see Sanusi at the stern of the Java Ridge, watching. Sanusi cared a great deal about his work. He unloaded a paddleboard from the deck and made his way over to the surfboard, which had come to rest deep inside the lagoon. He tied it to the paddleboard and set off after Luke, who by now was treading water in the lagoon and catching his breath.

  When Sanusi reached him, Luke rolled onto the board and paddled it towards the Java Ridge. Sanusi dipped slow paddlestrokes beside him, chatting and smiling, untroubled by his injured hand. Isi watched them for a moment then turned back towards the camp with an armful of stones.

  With the tents arrayed around the clearing and the fireplace made, she sat with a towel over her head, watching the others surf. Luke was visible as a lump in one of the hammocks suspended under the awning on the Java Ridge’s main deck. She’d left her sunnies on the boat and now the glare was screwing her face into a squint. Thunderheads were building to the north—the radar had indicated bad weather up there. The system was pushing new swell ahead of itself, each new sequence of waves standing taller than the last: the addictive suspense of the ocean before a front. The waiting.