by Gavin Young
‘Why healthy?’
‘Because you are away from temptation. If you see the legs of women with short dresses, your mind is distracted from God. That, of course, is bad.’ He thought a moment. ‘Now I know through Islam the purpose of life.’
‘Tell me.’
‘To live for the praising of God.’
But the Haji was not a fanatic; he confessed he felt temptation too much. ‘Japanese and Chinese girls are best, very beautiful. Lucky in Philippines we have all kinds of girls. I have wife and girls. But in Jolo everybody very jealous. If your finger touches a girl’s hand, trouble – a bullet!’ Formerly a heavy drinker himself, he had no objection to my gin, although his attention was inevitably drawn to my occasional clandestine swigs by the delighted cries of Jan and Jalah, who pranced around proclaiming, ‘Gaveen is drinking wine. Give me leetle jeen-jeen.’ The Haji ignored this,’ and was pleased to be able to practise his English, which evidently had once been relatively good. ‘Shakespeare’s language,’ he announced, ‘is not very good. Not good, I mean, according to the best rules of English. Some of his writing is very slum English.’
Shakespeare used slum English, I suggested, when he wanted to convey the language of slum characters. But the Haji was not one for discussion so much as for the release of his long pent-up beliefs. ‘Romeo and Juliet is the best of Shakespeare’s plays,’ he announced to the waves. ‘It has the best rules of English language. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow….” At school we read Chaucer, Poe, Longfellow. “To His Coy Mistress.” Sometimes Wordsworth.’ Just then the face of Small-But-Terrible appeared disconcertingly upside down at the corner of the roof. He shouted something down to us, and the Haji stood up. ‘Time for food again.’
*
That night I couldn’t fall asleep, and spent hours on deck or in the wheelhouse. Jalah slept on the wheelhouse floor on a thin mattress of towels, with a knapsack as pillow. The first night after the Moros had gone, Carlos took the wheel but, because he kept falling asleep, Jalah and Jan made Double Dragon coffee – very weak because there wasn’t much of it, they said.
It had been very rough, they told me, coming to Sandakan from Zamboanga six weeks before. No one could hold the wheel at all easily except Carlos, though apparently even he had suffered. ‘Terrible rains and winds,’ said Jan. ‘Crew all sick. Carlos very hurt in his body. He drink coffee for three days to keep awake. If not, maybe we hit stones. Sometimes kumpits hit big stones in the sea. Big stones. So!’
‘Are there rocks here?’
‘Rocks, yah.’ But I think he meant small islands.
To pass the time, Jalah, who spent much of the day on his bedroll and emerged at night like some nocturnal forest creature, said, ‘You know Magellan?’
‘Yes, he discovered the Philippines.’
‘Yeah, right. He discover us, that’s why Philippines so famous. You want to hear famous song about Magellan?’
‘Yes, please.’
He began to sing a kind of wobbly calypso:
‘In March 12, 1521, Philippine was discovered by Magellan,
They were sailing day and night across the beeg ocean
Until they saw small Limasawa Island.
When Magellan landed in Cebu at noon,
Rajah Humabon welcome on the shore….’
‘This not real words,’ interrupted Jan. ‘Onlee like the words, yah?’
‘Rajah Humabon make them veree happee,
All people will baptize under the church of Christ,
And that’s the beginning of our Catholic life.
‘But Lapu-Lapu is veree bad
To drive Magellan to go back home.
When the battle began at noon,
Bow and arrow versus cannon,
Lapu-Lapu is veree bad, he drive Magellan
To go back home.’
Here Jalah broke off and, with a loud laugh, began to chant:
‘O, Mother Mother
I am seek,
Call the doctor veree queek.
Doctor, doctor, eef I die,
Tell my mother do not cry.’
‘That’s song for keeds,’ said Jan. ‘But Lapu-Lapu was King of Mactan who keel Magellan. Maybe we go to see Cebu Ceety and the island of Rajah Lapu-lapu.’
‘I hope to see that,’ I said.
*
A night or two later I was alone in the wheelhouse with the old helmsman whose name I never learned. His eyelids refused to droop shut like those of Carlos; he stared dutifully, with a wild surmise, at the compass (the only navigational aid we had), or else dead ahead, shading his eyes against the dim compass light – looking, I supposed, for islands, fishing boats or pirates’ pump boats. The Allimpaya’s long nose dipped and rose. The moon was full and beautiful. By 1.00 a.m. it was cold, and I draped my towel over my shoulders like a shawl; the old helmsman had my anorak. The snores of the captain and Anthony Quinn came to us from the cabin that opened out of the wheelhouse. Small-But-Terrible bobbed up from time to time with glasses of watery coffee – loathsome stuff, which forced me to plead with him: ‘Small-But-Terrible, more coffee, please, in goddam water.’
‘Fineesh co-ffee.’ He would grin back and dive below.
The old helmsman said, ‘Mon-kee boy. That boy is small mon-kee.’
Just as I was thinking seriously of sleep, the Haji appeared from the cabin, apparently refreshed by several hours of rest. ‘Who is the Queen of England?’ he asked me. ‘Has she power? What is her name?’
‘She is called Elizabeth.’
‘The first Elizabeth or the second? And the Prince Charles? Which Charles will he be?’
When I told him, he paused and thought for a moment. ‘I saw a very good movie in Zamboanga. The Prince and the Pauper. A very good movie. Mark Twain.’
Suddenly there was Small-But-Terrible, tiptoeing out of the wheelhouse with the rest of the Double Dragon coffee, about as furtively as a wicked uncle in an old melodrama. Coffee fineesh, indeed. He had the gall to wink at me.
My eyes began to close. It was too late for an appraisal of the British royal family or Victorian melodrama.
Thirty three
On the fourth day Jan informed me that the coffee was ‘fineesh’. ‘Ask Small-But-Terrible why,’ I said. Yes, he knew about Small-But-Terrible pinching it, but this wasn’t the problem; the kerosene had run out and we had no way of heating anything. Who could drink cold coffee?
‘Four days from Sandakan and no more kerosene?’
‘Ah, sheep dancing like thees, kerosene go like thees.’ He made a spilling gesture. ‘I fall down, kerosene go.’
I said to myself, ‘The engine is weak, the kerosene is all spilled and there’s little food. How careless can such born sailors be?’
I was irritated and baffled. The Allimpaya had been six or eight weeks in Sandakan – long enough, surely, to buy spare parts for the engine and enough kerosene for emergencies like Jan spilling it, long enough to procure a better variety of food than mouldy rice and strips of dried fish. Malay sailors would have concocted a fiery stew with tomatoes, chillies and onions; Chinese sailors would have cooked noodles and made soup. The Tamil boy cooks on the Herman Mary had whipped up a curry in high seas, and the Starling Cook had done the same in even higher seas on the launch to Malé. The only explanation that made sense to me was that the Allimpaya’s owners were a very stingy lot who paid their crews a minimal food allowance for the sake of a trifling increase in profit. Still, no one was complaining, and Carlos’s beefy physique showed every sign of being well nourished. But suppose we were shipwrecked for a week on one of Jan’s ‘big stones’?
There was a bigger blow to come. A few hours later the captain came to me and, leading me to the bench on the roof-deck, drew me down beside him. He looked embarrassed.
‘I not can go to Zamboanga. Not can go because police take me. This kumpit not legal to go Sandakan to Zamboanga, understand, surr? Veree sorree. If go, I lose kumpit – maybe confiscate. Big problem for me, big loss to owner of
kumpit.’
‘All right. What do you want to do?’
‘More better we stop at small island. Then I put you on small pump boat which take you to Zamboanga.’
This was just what Inspector Ahmat, Dr Lever and others in Sandakan had advised me against. Anything could happen to you on a godforsaken island, they had warned me.
The Haji now arrived to explain things. He said, ‘Not you only will get down at the small island. I also and the charterer will come.’ This was reassuring; I didn’t believe the Haji would be a party to my murder.
‘I also will come,’ the captain said with a comforting flash of his gold tooth.
‘We’ll take the pump boat to Zamboanga,’ the Haji said, ‘leave you there, finish our business and return to kumpit. The captain also. Then we and the kumpit sail on to Cebu City.’ Safer still.
‘When do we arrive at the small island?’ I asked.
‘Noon time today.’ So we’d be in Zamboanga that evening? ‘If we have good luck.’ We would have taken five and a half days from Borneo to Mindanao, but we still had to reach the island and find a boat to ferry us to Zamboanga. There the immigration officers awaited me, but they were the smallest worry of all; they might imprison illegal immigrants, but surely they didn’t kill them, did they? The Haji said he doubted it.
Through the same dazzling azure screen of sea and sky, the Allimpaya pushed on. Standing on the roof with Carlos an hour later, I saw, one after the other, a chain of small islands – first a tiny blur, then an outline of palms, finally a white beach encircling an islet like a collar.
When we were closer to the islands and were about to slip between two of them Carlos pointed ahead and snatched at my arm so roughly that I shouted, ‘Hey!’ His mouth hung open, his slanting eyes had widened with fear, and he quavered, ‘Pirate’.
From the cover of one of the islands a pump boat had appeared and was sliding at right angles across our course. It was still three hundred yards away and low in the water, but I could see the heads and shoulders of three or four men in her, sometimes obscured by the water as the boat rose and fell and her speed tossed up spray.
‘Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.’ Carlos mimed a man firing a machine-gun, then stabbed a finger across his chest to indicate bullets perforating his lungs. ‘Go down,’ he advised.
If Carlos, a local seaman, was scared, I had every right to be, too, but I preferred to seek refuge in the wheelhouse. There I found the captain reading a magazine while Ernesto steered. ‘Captain,’ I said, resisting a strong inclination to lie on the floor (my imagination envisioned the sweep of machine-gun bullets splintering the wooden walls of the wheelhouse), ‘Captain, see that boat? Carlos says they’re pirates.’ I looked as calm as I could.
We had no binoculars now; I pictured mine hanging around the neck of green-eyed Musa as he played deadly hide-and-seek with the Filipino marines on some jungly island. We stared at our fate. The captain, Ernesto, Jalah (who had roused himself from his bedroll at the word ‘pirate’) and I fixed our eyes on that splinter of wood moving low and fast in the sea and now immediately ahead. The more we stared, the more sinister the three or four bent figures in the boat became. I thought I could see the barrels of guns resting on their huddled shoulders. The power of suggestion is immense. Three minutes went by. Then, ‘No pirate,’ said the captain, smiling and returning to his magazine.
Feeling limp, I went out onto the roof-deck to find Carlos. He was hiding in the shade of the wheelhouse and looked up at me with such a penitent expression, like a pet dog conscious that it has done something wrong, that I couldn’t help laughing. ‘No pirate,’ he said dimly. ‘Only look like pirate.’ We watched the pump boat, which had stopped and turned sideways as the Allimpaya passed it. Four islanders were unfolding fishing nets into the water. When they waved, I waved back, filled with a relief topped only by the recent departure of the Moros.
*
The island group we were aiming for was beautiful. Robert Louis Stevenson might have written Treasure Island about the sugar-white sands and soaring palms we soon saw on every side. Among these pocket islands, the captain said, we would rendezvous with the pump boat that would take us to Zamboanga. The Allimpaya crept slowly between islands like turquoise sea jewels, fragments of paradise floating in water as clear as pale-green glass that shimmered as if sprinkled with a million silver mirrors. Small houses on stilts came into view between the palms, and men in sarongs mended nets on the sea’s edge. Outriggers with one or two paddlers hurried across the water or lay in rows on the beach.
‘Jish eesh So-and-So Island,’ said Carlos (I hesitate to give the place its true name and betray its inhabitants). He wrote its name on his palm with my pen. ‘See? Four hour from Zamboanga.’ He held up four fingers.
‘Will you come to Zamboanga, Carlos?’
‘Noa. I shtay this kumpit. Maybe shee you Sheebu Sheetee.’
Soon we nosed in to an island shore where a large conglomeration of houses with atap roofs straggled out through the trees to a brilliant white beach. Here our appearance caused a sensation. Men and children poured out of the trees or houses down to the water’s edge to meet us; behind them in the village, women smiled from windows or verandas and held up their babies. Five or six pump boats came swiftly alongside, and the captain scrambled into one to go ashore.
‘Come to see island?’ he called up to me.
‘Of course.’
Wading ashore barefoot through warm shallows, I might have been Magellan landing at Cebu or James Brooke at Kuching. I may have been the first white man the population had seen. About two hundred Sulu islanders had already gathered on the beach, and others were running up. They surrounded me laughing and shouting, and led me to the village. ‘What are they shouting?’ ‘They say “White man, white man,”’ the captain said. ‘Very simple people, but good. They are speaking Tausuq, language of Sulu.’
A tumult of infants and teenagers ran giggling behind me, and young men, jostling each other, took my elbow to guide me towards a group of houses to which several outriggers had been drawn up. Quickening his pace, the captain disappeared behind the houses with three islanders who clearly knew him and weren’t in the least surprised to see him, and I was left with the mob. Most of the men were naked to the waist and wore brightly coloured headbands and sarongs tucked up like shorts; others wore T-shirts, and a few had American-style caps. They flowed around me like a bronze flood, parting ranks almost under my feet as I walked slowly up the beach. Chattering excitedly, they raised their hands parallel above their heads to indicate how tall they found me; I knew what it was like to be Gulliver in Lilliput, to be a giant in paradise.
Even in paradise the heat was infernal; the midday sun was barely tolerable, beating down like a hammer. I pointed to the sun and shook my head saying, ‘Too hot,’ and the crowd immediately swept me into the shade of the trees and houses. Here it was cooler, but in that confined space the noise echoed and the crowding increased, as did the twitching of inquisitive fingers at my shirt and trousers. Luckily, a sort of discipline was soon imposed by an unexpectedly dramatic intervention. A middle-aged villager in a red baseball cap and an undershirt strode like a pagan high priest into the uproar and raised his arms over his head for attention. A relative silence fell, interspersed with giggles and murmurs, when he put back his head, opened his mouth as though about to eat a bunch of grapes and roared like a sea monster, ‘Go-o-o-ddam, go a-wa-ay, go-o-o-ddamit.’
If he had fired a musket over our heads, the effect might have been the same. The chatter, when it began again, was much reduced. Clearly, the man in the baseball cap was respected both as king and clown; the frown he had worn soon faded, and he began genially ordering boys hither and thither. One ran happily away to return minutes later with cold drinking water in a calabash; others shinned blithely up the nearest coconut palms, sixty to eighty feet high, cutting down several large coconuts. Slithering down the smooth palm trunks, they lopped the tops off the coconuts with pangas the way one
beheads a boiled egg, exposing a pint or so of cool, semi-sweet water. Presented with five or six coconuts, I took one and passed the others around to the crowd.
We didn’t stay long on Treasure Island. Still surrounded by islanders, I threaded my way below the windows and terraces of houses packed with cackling women and saucy smooth-skinned girls with big eyes, whose Muslim smiles, despite the all-seeing eye of Allah, were about as bashful as a wink from Doll Tearsheet. On the beach beyond I found the captain inspecting our outrigger sitting in the shallows. He soon completed his negotiations; the outrigger was quickly launched into the clear shallows, and its driver cranked the outboard engine, which started without a cough and took us out to the Allimpaya. Even then the mob followed us, swimming or in boats. The sea around the kumpit seethed with the damp skins and white teeth of dog-paddling islanders who surrounded us like a chorus of sea dryads. Carlos and Ernesto, minimally assisted by Small-But-Terrible, who badgered me too late for a final Polaroid, handed into the pump boat my luggage, followed by a large, heavy case belonging to Anthony Quinn and a wooden box of the Haji’s tied with string.
Even Jan had decided to come. He stepped shakily into the narrow waist of the wobbling boat, followed by the two others and the captain. I waited to be last, wanting to say goodbye to those nocturnal creatures I’d hardly seen: Jesus, the engineer; José, the cook who had boiled the appalling rice; and Ernesto of the small beard and big moustache. Jalah gave me his address and a hug; Carlos offered a bone-grinding handshake and a quick, brotherly butt on the cheekbone with his head. Small-But-Terrible couldn’t resist a last demonstration of kung-fu, letting lose a kick that misfired and smacked Carlos on the back of the thigh. The last close sight I had of him was the soles of his feet as he rolled about the deck, pushed there impatiently by Carlos as easily as a fighting bull repels an undersized matador.
The kumpit fell away rapidly behind us. The crew stood waving on the roof-deck – Small-But-Terrible seemed to be climbing on Carlos’s back – and the chorus of islanders waved and called from the water or the beach, their sarongs as bright as a border of flowers.