On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  Onshore, Pulau Dana

  Isi had passed in and out of a restless sleep for a few hours. Her day would often end this way when she was working on the boat: thinking about forecasts and navigation and supplies and personalities. Joel managed to make these routines invisible, as though everyone simply woke up and fell into perfect conditions by accident. That smiling insouciance of his.

  It was him she was thinking about, once she’d run the various checklists in her head. His absence. The opportunity to let go of him, to take a realistic view and call it a day. She’d thought that maybe she loved him, briefly one late afternoon when the sun was casting shadows from the waves back out to sea towards them, and with each passing line of swell they would disappear together into a half-lit world before the tired sun found them again. She’d let him float away that time, absorbed in his thoughts as her mind sifted the evidence: the long shadows, the drift and disappearance of each new line that approached; the way she felt about him and, in short bursts of a harder realism, the contradictions. He’d rescued an entire village after a typhoon. He’d burned down his first flat in Kuta after nodding off on a straw mattress with a lit joint. He’d stared down an American frigate after he was ordered to leave a ‘secure exclusion zone’, making headlines in Australia. He’d walked out on her and drunk himself insensible for three days when she told him she wanted to go off the pill. The answer had eluded her that day in the water, just as it eluded her now.

  She’d veer close to bringing all these strands together, and then the sleep would take her again, robbing her of a conclusion. She’d wake again, add a layer. The rain started, drawing her attention with its small sounds against the tent. Then it intensified, and the steady drumming worked her into drowsiness.

  Finally, she slept.

  The first sounds to reach her were the voices.

  For a time—Isi couldn’t tell how long—the voices were merged in her dreams, irrational and ghostly. But now they were becoming real, taking form.

  Cries.

  They were cries. Male and female, deeper and higher in pitch, but frightened. Pleading. That was what woke her, dragged her mind from the fog. The rain was much heavier now, and the cries wove in and out of its roar.

  She struggled to understand—were they pleading for her personally, or were they just crying out? At first her voice cried back to them, but her dreaming mind couldn’t give form to her replies. She rose from sleep into a restive semi-consciousness, and there were words. Words of supplication, none of them familiar. It was a foreign language, she realised, maybe more than one.

  Now she could hear the surf over the rain, and the voices persisted.

  Now she was emerging from her confused state: now she was conscious.

  She opened her eyes in the darkness and listened. Drops ran down the sides of the tent above her, dimly visible. The voices were rising and falling with the wind that moved the trees overhead and smacked the dried palm fronds of the shelter she’d made between the tents. And now she could hear more than the voices—she could hear a heavy thudding, like a construction noise, heavy banging against something immovable.

  She was tired still, shoulders aching from the work of the previous day. The small coral cuts on her feet stung faintly. It was well before dawn and part of her wanted the sounds to cease, for deep and restorative sleep to return. The trees were slapping and tilting this way and that as the turbulent air rushed over the island.

  She reached out and found the zipper that opened the tent. A feeling of unease was building in her. The voices were real. The dream was now behind her. With her head out, the rain stung her eyes. There were already puddles outside. And then, with perfect clarity, her ambivalence was swept away by a single word.

  Help.

  She threw back the net and found herself running, barefoot and still in the previous day’s boardshorts and singlet. Her thoughts lagged some distance behind her, and she hadn’t yet formed an idea of what she was doing. Out through the scrub around the camp and onto the beach, in the direction she guessed the sound was coming from. She slid sideways in the wet leaves as she broke free of the scrub. Standing on the narrow beach, she tried to hear over the stippling of the downpour on the surface of the lagoon. She’d lost the sounds.

  Then they reappeared, coming from her right, from the point where she knew the reef was. She ran again, landing painfully now and then on half-exposed rocks in the cool white sand. The moon slipped free of the thunderhead and the sea was a great pool of silver. Anything that didn’t reflect the light—the inshore rocks and the nearside of passing swells—appeared to her as black silhouettes. And now she could see there were shapes out at the point, shapes that were starting to define themselves as she neared. She already wanted her suspicions to be wrong.

  The slope of the land towards the point. The clattering palm trees. A single, square rock sitting high on the platform of the intertidal reef and the sea beyond. The night-time shallows pale and phosphorescent like a swimming pool illuminated underwater. A large dark object, out on the reef among the waves, clearly visible through the curtain of the rain. Every line of swell that swept in, reaching shallow water and unfurling from right to left, each of these was a streaking black line that grew thicker as the wave peaked and hollowed. Each would grow, lay claim to the reef and die, but the large object remained in place, an unmoving reference point in the shifting shadows out there. It stayed in position for long enough that she could recognise its outline.

  It was a boat.

  Visible by its profile only, but distinctively a boat of Indonesian manufacture. As it reared up over a foamline, she could recognise the high bow, the low-swept sides and the squared-off timber cabin. It was a big vessel as Indonesian boats go, wallowing squat and cumbersome in the very place the surfers had sat yesterday, a place where a large boat had no business to be. As she watched it she saw that it had begun to move. It was being drawn into the teeth of the breaking waves. The stern was swinging from side to side, a motion that told her the boat was adrift.

  New swells gathered in front of it: first a small wave that spanned the full width of the reef—the one that indicated larger waves would follow—raising enough energy to lift the boat slightly. Its bow lifted again as the wave worked its way under, tipped level then plunged with its stern high in the air. It slumped back down onto the trough as a bigger wave gathered behind.

  Isi was a hundred metres from the end of the beach, where the sand met the low-tide reef. And from there, the boat was another hundred out to sea.

  The voices were louder now, high and low, young and old, and it filled her with horror to hear so many of them. Laid over each other in differing pitches and volumes, marked by their unmistakable distress. Of all the foreign words and phrases being called into the night by all the humans she couldn’t see, she was fixed upon the lone voice that rang clear between and among them: a girl, a small girl surely, crying in perfect English the same word she’d recognised from her bed:

  Help.

  The reef pointed out into the lagoon, narrowing as it extended into the deeper water of the pass. On the open side, the rushing lines of whitewater rolled through a field of white, the chaos of previous waves, and over the shallow coral. On the lee side, in the sandy bowl of the lagoon, the water was calm and darkening again as the moon disappeared.

  The boat was slumped at the stern, the bow pointing skyward. As Isi watched it, the bow climbed towards vertical and she could see people, people falling Christ they’re falling from the cabin roof and the decks. Dark figures against a dark background, but taking form in the helpless splay of their limbs.

  Running now, she squinted harder and her horror mounted.

  There were heads in the water. Dozens of them.

  The splashing of those people was not the ordinary motion of swimming. They were thrashing, all the ones she could see. Thrashing and going nowhere. She stopped, breathing hard. She had to think. She could get in the water but t
he moment she did she was going to be overwhelmed.

  The rain was licking down her spine. She started turning back towards the camp but took one last look at the boat before she ran.

  It was hanging high and vertical with a huge wall of foam bearing down on it. As the foam struck its exposed belly the boat shuddered and came down hard on its stern. Then its downward motion stopped abruptly and the grinding sound reached her soon afterwards—it had struck the reef end-on, and now the shape looked wrong. The stern had broken off completely.

  The boat settled briefly on its starboard side, shook a little under the impact of a smaller wave, then capsized.

  The last glimpse Isi saw before she started running was the upturned timber belly, the wet timbers gleaming with the first light of dawn.

  She ran through the camp, yelling at the tents.

  ‘Get up! Get up!’

  Carl appeared first, followed by Tim and Leah, the Finleys; lastly Fraggle, emerging like a sea monster with his red-brown dreadlocks tumbling over his face and a wrap tied hastily around his waist. Confusion appeared to be his natural state at this hour, but the rest of them looked just as shocked.

  ‘There’s a boat on the reef. People in the water. Heaps of ’em,’ she rushed between breaths. ‘I need…I need five of you to run up to the point and start getting them onto the beach. Someone come with me and we’ll get boards and things from the boat.’

  It took a static moment for this to sink in. Then each of them fished around for clothes and footwear and began to move off, sluggish, whether because of the hour or their disbelief at what they were hearing. Tim appeared at her side and they ran for the Zodiac. The voices were audible again on a swirl of the breeze, and as she ran she heard Tim mutter shit.

  As she raced the inflatable across the lagoon she was tempted to turn directly towards the heads in the water, but she knew it was the less effective option. From the Java Ridge they piled surfboards into the Zodiac. The crew were already moving, either roused by the cries, as Isi had been, or alerted by the noise of the outboard. She grabbed the two medical tubs that Neil Finley had replaced neatly under the bench after his work on Sanusi’s hand.

  Back in the Zodiac she saw that Tim had gathered a pile of towels and a torch. They raced across the lagoon, and again Isi was forced to ignore the pleas for help coming from further out. She ran the Zodiac up onto the beach and threw out everything except the boards. There were people wandering in the half-light now, she could see, some of them the Java Ridge’s guests, and some of them from the stricken boat. Those people were silent: they were wraiths, huddled, or stumbling nowhere in particular on the beach. They didn’t react at all to the rain. The sounds were still behind her, out in the lagoon and on the reef. Voices, growing feeble as the light grew stronger.

  The Finleys appeared on the beach and took the tubs and the towels. As Isi wrenched the throttle to leave the beach behind, she could see Carl and Leah swimming towards a group of exhausted men. She threw the boards over the side near them and sped away.

  On the far side of the lagoon they found an old man, coughing and retching, and hauled him aboard. Because he was light, they kept looking while he lay slumped in the floor of the Zodiac. The dawn was spreading fast now in the east, making a burnished lens of the inshore water. The storm was letting go of the island, moving off to somewhere else over the troubled sea.

  Splashing nearby, hoarse shouts: two teenage boys, unharmed but exhausted. She steered them over the fizzing shallows of the reef. The air moving over her wet clothes chilled her, the first time she remembered feeling cold in weeks. They wove out of the path of an incoming wave, slowed now by the weight of their passengers.

  Isi was gripped by confusion. The voices had stopped. She looped this way and that, searching the surface. Where had all the people gone? They had three. Carl and Leah might have found more than that first group, but there were dozens out there—what had happened? She knew if she and Tim remained near the surf, they could be caught by a wave themselves, so she drove back into the lagoon and ran up onto the beach in the same spot she’d left the gear.

  The rain was finally backing off. By now, the Finleys were working together, bodies laid out before them on beach towels. She could see that Neil had the two tubs open and was sorting through them.

  ‘How many?’ he called to her without looking up. He was counting plastic packets of something. His voice had no more urgency to it than it had in conversation the previous afternoon. This is how he lives, she thought to herself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she stammered. ‘There were a lot of dead out there.’

  ‘How many living, you idiot?’

  She would’ve flared at him if that wasn’t such a fucking indulgence in the circumstances. ‘Not many.’

  He returned to counting and laying out supplies on another towel. She looked back to the Zodiac on the beach. Tim had heaved the old man out and sat him on the sand.

  ‘Neil,’ she said, hating herself for sounding tentative. ‘I don’t know where they all went.’

  He looked up impatiently. ‘Who?’

  ‘Well there were…heads in the water. Heaps of them. Now I can’t find them.’

  Finley sighed, screwed up his face before he replied. ‘You’ve got three. Carl and Leah got six. There’d be, what, fifteen on the beach. The rest have drowned. They’ll be on the bottom. Forget them—twenty-four hours they’ll re-float. You can collect them then.’

  He turned back to what he was doing without another word.

  Isi took Tim again and sped back out to the surf zone, spurred by disbelief. She found a few of the dead, swaying among the coral heads where they’d been entangled by their clothes in the spikes and horns of the reef. Others were wound around pieces of wreckage, or knotted up in each other, like the father she found who’d tied his tiny daughter to himself by his clothing. Gone together. The love in that desperate knot—maybe he’d spared her some terror.

  But for Isi the numbers still didn’t add up. Finley had to be right: they would all be bumping along the floor of the lagoon. In the time she’d been doing this job she’d never had to deal with a drowning, let alone dozens. But it had to be about the living right now.

  She was about to head back when another silhouette broke the surface. A boy, maybe twelve, pushed out wide from the end of the reef.

  Isi saw him from a distance, washing in towards the lagoon with each swell, sucked back out again as the water withdrew. His head was bobbing over and under the surface with the ripples of spent waves, his body floating face-up. His mouth was clear of the surface, still gasping at life. She turned towards him and moments later Tim was pulling him up into the bow of the Zodiac. He was shirtless, his wet hair hanging down over his face, jaw clenched shut and moaning quietly. At first it appeared there was nothing wrong with him, but as Tim lifted him clear of the water and he fell into the boat, he suddenly became quiet and limp.

  ‘Christ!’ blurted Tim. ‘What the fuck just happened?’

  ‘Tim!’ yelled Isi. ‘Tim! Lie him on the edge where it’s soft—gently in case it’s his neck. And hold him steady.’

  For an instant he was frozen in shock and the boy remained awkwardly slumped in the well of the boat.

  ‘Now, Tim.’

  He finally hauled the boy into position and wrapped an arm over him, holding one of the knots on the rope that encircled the boat. Isi throttled again for the beach.

  The Zodiac bounced faintly on the choppy water in the channel, stirring the boy into consciousness once or twice, but it settled again on the sheet glass of the water nearer shore. She had time to look at the boy, his ribs in stark relief as they rose and fell with his shallow breaths. He was wearing boardshorts, a market stall rip-off of the designs the guests were wearing. On his dark skin she saw the scars of childhood cuts that hadn’t healed well. He’d lived a hard life already.

  The light was stronger now and Isi could see Carl and Leah on the sand. They ran into the shallows and carefull
y lifted the boy out of the boat and onto a vacant towel amidst a line of them higher on the beach. Finley’s set up a triage, she realised.

  As the boy was lifted past her she saw that he was conscious again. There was a lump over his temple, striped with a dirty-looking abrasion. She heard him say thank you in English, though it wasn’t clear who he was saying it to.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Isi called to Tim. She wasn’t sure why it mattered.

  Tim looked down at the clenched face. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Hamid.’

  ‘You’re doing well, Hamid.’ He placed a hand on Hamid’s shoulder, smiling false cheer. Isi saw through it, to the trauma that was churning in him. He looked nauseous with shock.

  Back out again. Back across the lagoon, which was filling gradually with wreckage. Isi poked her foot into the middle well of the Zodiac and hooked a mask and snorkel that were lying there.

  ‘Tim, you know how to drive these?’ she yelled over the motor. He nodded. ‘I’m going to jump off at the boat. I want you to get clear of the surf, then come back in if I find anyone. Okay?’

  She angled in from the deep, choppy water of the channel towards the upturned belly of the wreck. The keel profile was instantly familiar to her—it was a phinisi, much like the Java Ridge. The fluted timbers and the curvature, the rolling from side to side; it was more dying whale than boat now.

  The water was shallower in here, moving fast over the coral. With a last look for bodies in the water, she swung a turn next to the hull and jumped off as Tim scrambled down the boat to take the tiller.

  The relative silence underwater suspended the chaos. Rushing bubbles, muffled thumps. Her hair drifted in front of the mask. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the early-morning gloom beneath the surface, the cloudy fizz of the passing waves. The reef was a gorgeous field of plate corals and digitates, parallel crevasses pointing in the direction of the prevailing swell. But the plates were obscured by the turmoil of the breaking waves now.