On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  So much death. She needed to breathe.

  On the surface, the energy of the surf had concentrated a great raft of floating refuse: the aggregated muck that would ordinarily float by when the ocean was at rest. Branches, coconuts, litter, froth and leaves, broken-off weed and soft coral fragments. Drinking straws, chocolate wrappers and twigs; all held in mucosal suspension. A frond caught on the upper edge of the mask, draping itself over her forehead.

  She bumped her knee on a coral head, felt the sting.

  For the first time since she’d woken, Isi was afraid as she approached the upturned boat. It was every bit as big as the Java Ridge, swinging erratically from side to side as the swells battered it. She ducked under and could see where the cabin was wedged into a shallow canyon in the reef, leaving enough space for the hull to wallow on the surface. On one side, the reef was high, almost breaking the surface, but on the other it fell away to deeper water. A strong enough impact could shake it free and send the boat tumbling into the deep. She didn’t want to be anywhere near it if that happened.

  She surfaced again. Tried to steady herself with one flat hand against the slimy curve of the timbers while she banged on the hull with a closed fist, wondered how she would possibly hear a reply as the world roared around her, the howling of the ocean pitched to obliterate any specific sound.

  And she didn’t hear it. She felt it.

  Directly under the hand she’d laid palm-down against the hull, a rapid, fluttering knock: the heartbeat of a bird. For a second she remained there, waiting to feel it again, wondering if she’d imagined it. Then it came again, more insistent, and she knew she had to go under.

  Tim stood at the stern of the Zodiac on the edge of the deeper water, cutting impatient loops. She caught his attention and made a signal that she was going under the boat. She took a breath and dived.

  The access wasn’t difficult. Swimming just above the coral, there was room for her to get under the gunwales, low to the reef with the deck of the boat above her. In the shadow of the boat the light was dim, but she made for the point where the Java Ridge had its hatches, a couple of metres aft of the cabin, and there she found a dark opening above her.

  Inside, her head banged hard against something before she burst loudly into an air pocket. In the darkness she slowed her breathing to regain equilibrium. She could see nothing, but the smell of diesel oil was almost overwhelming. She swept a hand around and felt timber on two sides, then touched a curved metal surface. Greasy. She was in the engine bay.

  She spoke into the darkness. There was no answer but the loud sloshing of water in the confined space.

  She thought about the position of the engine as her hands continued to creep about. It didn’t make sense: the motor was hard up against what would have been the ceiling of the engine space—it had fallen with gravity towards the sea floor. That could only mean it wasn’t moored to its mounts. If it had somehow come adrift and malfunctioned, that might explain why none of her party had been woken in the night by the sound of an approaching vessel—it had been dead in the water.

  Her hands continued on, found something soft. Fabric, flesh beneath.

  She grasped at it. An arm.

  Her fingers darted onwards, found the neck and head. A shroud of billowing shirt. The body drifted limply away from her touch. Reaching out again she felt a bearded jaw, found his eyes and pressed one of them. The feeling of it made her want to retch, but she needed to make sure. No reaction.

  The space was barely wider than her arm span and she knew that his body and hers, and the engine, had left no room for anyone else in there. She took a deep breath of the foul air and dived.

  On the surface again, outside the confines of the boat, she wanted to stay among the sunlit world. But she knocked again, and the reply came once more from inside the hull. This time she thought about the position of the sound. It was much further forward than where she’d been.

  She ducked a wave, measured the distance to the next one. On a heave of new air she went under again, and this time forward, past the dark engine-bay hatch.

  The cabin door. She’d seen phinisis made this way before. The short stairway into the main hold was accessed from inside the wheelhouse. She swam into the tight square space of the wheelhouse and turned herself over so she was facing the stairs. The glass of the cabin windows had shattered, leaving vicious shards in the frames. Plastic bags and water bottles and loose articles of clothing swirled about her like ghosts. She caught a glimpse of the bare and broken console behind the helm, the cavities where navigation equipment had once been mounted. It was completely stripped—as though someone had dumped it in a park for children to play on. What on earth were they thinking?

  She struck her shins once or twice coming up the stairway and saw the moving limbs underwater before she surfaced in the trapped air. Faces. A woman, heavily pregnant, and a small girl. Both in lifejackets.

  She pushed the mask back on her forehead. It was dark, lit only by a vague glow from the stairway and the reef outside. The water sounds were loud in here, the air pocket expanding and contracting with the movements of the boat. Neither the woman nor the child expressed any alarm or relief at her presence. The mother—Isi concluded they were mother and daughter by the way they clung—eyed her with cold exhaustion. Her face, her lips, heavy with the late stages of pregnancy.

  The girl’s eyes were so dark they were visible only by the triangles of white either side of her pupils. Her hair was swept back, probably by the mother’s caring hand, so that it was out of her eyes. She was clutching a plastic shopping bag with very little in it, a knot in the neck of the bag to keep the water out.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. In English, to Isi’s great surprise.

  ‘Hi there. I’m Isi. What’s your name?’

  The woman was watching the exchange in silence.

  ‘Roya. This my mother.’

  ‘What is her name?’ Isi was exaggerating her pronunciation like the tourists in Kuta.

  ‘Shafiqa,’ said Roya. Shah-fee-kah.

  Shafiqa darted a tiny smile in Isi’s direction. ‘Salaam alaikum.’

  ‘Okay Roya. How did you get in here?’

  The boat jolted as a wave hit the hull. Roya looked around in fright, then concentrated.

  ‘Wave come. Boat go over. We go inside here, water come up.’

  They’d have to go out the way they came in. If there was another exit they’d have found it by now.

  ‘Roya, I’m going to take you out of here first. Then I will come back and get your mother. Do you understand?

  ‘Yes,’ she replied carefully. ‘Please wait.’

  She translated for her mother. Isi didn’t know the language. It wasn’t Bahasa, or any of the island dialects. The woman suddenly grabbed her daughter and pressed her face into the girl’s wet hair. She uttered one small word that sounded like consent.

  ‘Yes,’ said Roya again.

  ‘I will go one, two, three, then under—’ She counted off her fingers and mimed a deep breath.

  Roya smiled. ‘Yes.’

  Isi pulled the mask down again but didn’t use the snorkel for fear it would confuse the girl. She was about to go when she realised Roya was still wearing her lifejacket: she carefully untied the straps and lifted it over her head. No light, no whistle.

  Then she counted down, took a breath and grabbed her by the waist, pulling her under. The stairway was directly under their feet, and by inverting her small body Isi was able to point Roya through the opening and out to the open space roofed over by the deck. She followed behind her, again banging her knees and shins on the edges.

  The light was better underneath the deck, and she could see the girl floating against the timbers above her head. She took her hand this time and watched a tiny stream of bubbles escape her mouth. Her eyes were wide with fear but something about her movements suggested to Isi that the girl was able to control it. She pulled her wide of the gunwale and out over the reef, the sunlight now streaming d
own on them from the open sky.

  Isi held Roya down a moment longer as she watched a shadow gather above them: a pulsing grey cloud of foam raced overhead, leaving its lacework on the clear surface. Tiny yellow fish around them swirled in response to the pressure change. As soon as it had passed she kicked for the top, pulling Roya with her.

  On the surface, Roya dragged in a hungry breath and was composed again, her huge dark eyes watchful as Tim raced towards them in the Zodiac. She must have seen a great deal, thought Isi, if the night she’d endured hadn’t completely unravelled her. But there was something more than that about her. Something in the child’s eyes; a stillness.

  Isi let the thought go as Tim grabbed the girl’s arms and swept her into the Zodiac.

  Back in the darkness of the hold she surfaced next to Shafiqa and listened to the urgent pace of her breathing, held both of her hands and breathed with her until the tempo slowed. Then she started by undoing the lifejacket: moving closer to work on the straps, she placed one hand on her belly, the other around her shoulder blades. They were hard and bony despite the swell of her pregnancy.

  ‘Baby?’ she smiled.

  Shafiqa nodded, tried to return the smile.

  ‘Soon?’

  A look of faint puzzlement, apology.

  Isi was nervous this time: Shafiqa was a much bigger object to shift than Roya had been, and they had no language to use. But she had come in this way, and somehow she would have to get back out. Isi mimed the counting and the breath again, and the woman clearly understood.

  She took the mask off her head and ripped off the snorkel, then fitted the mask onto Shafiqa.

  ‘Look,’ she said, and gently tipped her head towards the water. Shafiqa looked from side to side with the lens of the mask in the water, her mouth still clear, like a child inspecting a rock pool. Isi waited for her to look up again.

  ‘Okay?’

  She nodded.

  Isi counted. They breathed. They both slipped under.

  She peered into the blur and knew immediately that they had a problem. Shafiqa had seen the light coming from the stairwell and was trying to turn herself head-first, as Roya had done, to climb through it. But her buoyancy was centred over her hips, and no matter how she tried she couldn’t invert herself, and she wound up curled into an awkward ball. Isi slipped a hand under her and pulled her back into the air space.

  Shafiqa slapped her hands at the surface in frustration as another wave struck the outside of the hull with a crump sound. The water level rose around them and they pressed their heads up towards the hull timbers to stay with the changing space. Isi saw the light from the stairwell change: the wave had shifted the hull. Now she feared their exit could be blocked if the boat slid itself onto some anvil in the reef.

  Her feet kicked into something that felt like cobwebs. She scooped it from her ankle: a nest of tangled fishing line. It could have killed either of them a moment ago.

  She started again with the charades, this time trying to demonstrate that she needed Shafiqa to go feet first. Unbidden thoughts: Joel at a bank somewhere in Perth.

  The counting. The breath.

  Shafiqa plunged straight down, her feet leading vertically into the opening of the stairwell. Working by feel and by a vague sense of where the light was, Isi found the woman’s shoulders and pushed down on them until she was sure her whole body had passed through into the light. She followed, and found her too deep, low against the surface of the reef where the coral was likely to tear into her flesh. Isi gripped her arm and pulled her upwards, but exactly as she did so, a billow of Shafiqa’s robe caught itself on the reef.

  She tried to kick herself free but it made the entanglement worse. Isi knew Shafiqa wouldn’t have much breath, that her terror would be stripping it away even faster. She took the robe in both hands and tore at it, thrashing and kicking and flailing until she felt it come free. Shafiqa’s thigh appeared, a pale flash against the dark canyons of the reef. Forward, forward she hurried her on, as behind them a crowd of fish came in to sift through the grit they’d stirred up in the struggle.

  Isi took hold of the woman’s hips and pushed her towards the sky. Raised around water and intimately adapted to its physics, she couldn’t understand how anyone could be unable to seek the surface. She bashed her knee, yet again, on the coral heads. She couldn’t see the damage without the mask.

  Shafiqa was rising now, clawing at the bonds that held her. Isi wanted to stop and watch the surface, time their run so that they wouldn’t be hit by a wave when they came up, but she couldn’t see enough without the mask, and the urgency of Shafiqa’s thrashing had increased.

  Something was moving across the surface above them. Rhythmic splashes, the stabbing of limbs. Someone was swimming. The current pulled them into the deeper water of the lagoon and the swimmer was gone.

  There was no time for fine judgments. They both broke the surface simultaneously.

  Isi ripped the mask off Shafiqa’s head and secured it around her own neck. Swung round behind Shafiqa and took hold of her, across her chest and under her arms. She floated well, despite her weight, but she was instinctively fighting off Isi’s firm grip. Isi was close to going under. Shafiqa was elbowing her in the head, even landing one stinging blow in her eye. She slapped her once and wondered what the hell they were both doing.

  Where’s the fucking Zodiac?

  She spun around and realised the swimmer on the surface was Tim. He’d anchored the Zodiac in the lagoon behind them, leaving Roya in it. She could see him still stroking hard towards the wreck. He hadn’t seen them.

  She yelled at him but he kept going. The wash off the reef was taking them further into the lagoon, towards the anchored Zodiac and away from the wreck. Tim was going in the opposite direction, slower now as he reached the reef. She yelled again, and again he didn’t hear. As she grappled with the struggling woman in her arms, she watched him step up onto the coral on the inshore side of the hull. It was only knee deep where he stood, and he was bending over, trying to find an opening under the hull.

  Oh God, she thought, he thinks we’re still under there.

  She yelled again, and this time he looked around. As he did so, a heavy avalanche of foam crossed the reef towards the wreck: behind the hull, obscured from his view and rolling fast.

  Panic rose in her throat. He couldn’t see them—why couldn’t he see them? Jesus, their heads were on the surface in the blinding reflection of the sun…The wave was about to hit the hull when he spotted her and raised an arm; shuffled his feet around to dive off the coral head as the wave struck. The wrecked boat shifted forward, chaotic foam washing around it, and Tim disappeared. As the water receded, the hull now lay over the place where he had been. For a long moment he was nowhere to be seen.

  Then he reappeared, screaming. Isi struggled to unscramble her racing thoughts.

  They were drifting steadily nearer to the Zodiac. She couldn’t swim forward to help Tim because she was supporting Shafiqa. She couldn’t swim at all without letting her go. She was going under, sipping at half-breaths as Shafiqa’s panic sapped the strength from her limbs. She lay back and tried to let Shafiqa’s weight rest above her on the surface, kicking her legs to inch them towards the Zodiac.

  By the time they reached it, Isi had caught sight of Tim several times, his head submerging and reappearing as the waves washed through. He hadn’t moved—he should have moved in that current—and his cries were wild and uncontained. She led Shafiqa’s hands to the guide ropes slung around the Zodiac. Satisfied that she had a good grip, Isi climbed aboard and hauled her over the hull and in. Roya watched this process in silence, but immediately cradled her mother’s head once she was safely aboard.

  ‘Are you all right Roya?’ Isi asked as she pulled the anchor.

  The little girl nodded silently.

  ‘Okay, hold on.’

  She drove the boat over to the lagoon side of the wreck, killing the motor to let the boat drift near to Tim. He was shrieki
ng in agony.

  ‘Get it off me!’

  She could see through the shallow water that his right leg was pinned between the gunwale of the boat and the reef. The boat was shifting slightly up and down, but not enough to release the leg, and each downward shift in the hull sent spasms of pain through him.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Roya, stay here with your mum. Tim, I’m gonna drop this next to your foot, all right?’

  With great care she dropped the anchor into the reef beside the trapped leg. Then she let out enough of the anchor rope to ensure the Zodiac would float inside the lagoon and not stray into the surf.

  Pulling the mask onto her face again, she rolled over the warm rubber of the inflatable hull and back into the sea. Her hands reached down the rope until her fingers found the chain, then the anchor, lying beside the big plate coral that Tim had been standing on when he was hit. The curved timber of the gunwale lay across it, and she could see his ankle disappearing under it.

  She pulled the anchor free, reached under the plate and rammed it as hard as she could into the neck that supported the big coral. The first couple of times she succeeded only in raising a cloud of debris, the reef fish again swarming in to inspect her work.

  She surfaced and took a couple of deep breaths. Her next blow cracked the pillar of coral and the fourth broke it. The plate collapsed and the leg tumbled free, Tim’s arms windmilling on the surface to regain his balance. The foot drifted at a sickening angle to the damaged leg. Swirls of blood in the cloudy water drew a mob of the boldest fish to pick at the wounds. She tried not to look: grabbed him at the surface and repeated the sequence she’d used to get Shafiqa aboard.

  When he lay with his body in the well of the boat and his leg up on the red rubber side, she could see the foot was crushed, an ugly scarlet colour between the gouges that the coral had torn through his flesh. Bright blood mingled with the trickling seawater and ran in every direction. And above the foot, near the wide point of his ankle, a blunt stub of bone had broken through, skewing the foot to one side like the end of a broken branch, festooned with little blossoms of coral. Tim was hissing through his teeth, wide-eyed with fear when he raised his head to look at the injury.