by Jacob Ross
Gull Island disappeared behind him, an arid place of giant cacti, mammoth stones and great rusting tanks once used to melt the fat of whales. The boats would not follow him beyond the island. But his fear grew as it slipped from view. It marked the boundary past which no fisherman would go. What lay beyond was more than ocean.
Then so be it, Deliverance would take him out there – to nowhere if need be – because that was where the dolphin said she wanted him.
Nothing around him now but sea. Now and then a frigate bird would speck the sky. The heavy king line trailed fathoms deep behind the boat, the other end secured against the keelson with Chadoo’s own invention – a cross between a block and tackle and a rigging screw. Now and then he inspected it or watched schools of porpoises and corvally dash past the boat. He scoured the sky for gulls, wishing for their company and noisy laughter.
By the end of the month, they would all be gone, leaving Gull Island dead until their return, same time next year. At times like these, he thought he understood something of the vast unnameable threads that kept the world in equilibrium – the mysterious precision of the forces that synchronised the rise and fall of moon and tide; the times that birds and fishes spawned and died and spawned again.
He had learned to understand the sea. Old Man Tigga was his uncle, and there was his father too. It was in some place named Curaçao that the broken mast of the white man’s yacht had fallen across his spine. Spent his last few years in hatred of his crippled self.
Then, of course, there was their son. They were laughing at a private joke when Skido brought the news. He cried openly. Lisa had reserved the pain and tears for the darkness of their bedroom. The boy was just eleven.
The humming of the king line woke him. He must have fallen deeply asleep, his back against the bow. He’d brought the sail down and secured the tiller at an angle so that while he dozed the boat would move around in a tight circle. Deliverance was rocking like a leaf on the water and the mast was describing crazy arcs above his head. The king line was spooling out so fast, the heat from the friction against the wood raised the scent of burning pine.
Osun pulled himself to his feet, noting that the sun had already gone down and the sky was grey. There was nothing to do but hold his breath and wait for the shuddering check of the line as it reached its end. When it came, it threw him on his back. Osun realised what a monster it must be. Whatever it was, it was running and Deliverance was at its mercy.
Bracing himself against the mast, he crouched low and waited for what he knew was about to come. The creature began to rise. Fast. From below.
This was the moment for which he had been saving his strength. He could imagine no greater glory than returning home, cured of his curse and with something the size of this monster. He could see the crowds on the beach, hear the voices, feel the eyes on him, the hands against his skin. He braced himself.
The ocean quaked.
A sudden swirl of water; the bare glimpse of a dark body. A mighty mass of fin and flesh. A black back curving downwards. And then the flourish of tail-fins just above the water, a movement so incidental it seemed to contradict the enormity of the action, and its consequences. It created a storm that almost swamped the boat and stripped half of Deliverance’s spine away, taking with it the hook, the line and the anchor.
Then, it was gone.
Morning rose over dark water. The sun hung like a bruised eye above the eastern edge of the sea. He had arrived at the place he sought. He knew that by the nature of the water. It was opaque so that no sky was reflected there. Even the movement of the boat was different. The sea tossed like a sleeper trapped in dreams. Between moments of absolute stillness, the wind came in fitful bursts and spun the craft around. It was like that until afternoon.
He waited. At one point he caught sight of three birds that appeared from nowhere, a peculiarly joyous presence in the blank greyness. Yellow bills, perhaps, or white-tails with their beautiful, bright streamers trailing behind. Not terns for sure, or pelicans. They did not fly that beautifully. His heart leapt. They had turned, all three of them, in a slow circle high above his head and then just hung there motionless. Sky boats – flying frigates! Of all the creatures in the world, this was the one he would have most wished to be. Osun watched them slip away, spectre-like, on the wind.
His thoughts returned to the fish. What could it have been? His mind tried to span the dim reaches of the water below. Perhaps a tuna – he had seen how large they could become – over fourteen feet and several thousand pounds. Or perhaps a marlin. But a marlin would not have responded like that. It would have risen and hit the air in a fury of tail and fin and spray. With marlin, it would simply be a matter of time before it tired and he would send the harpoon through bone and flesh, into the small brain. Tunas were simpler; they ran until they drowned.
In the past, he could close his eyes and name a fish by the way it felt on the line. He was sure that he had not met anything like this creature. This – whatever it was – was a silent and sinister intelligence, all the more frightening because he never got to see it. That fish hadn’t escaped him. It was he who had been saved.
He wondered whether even Skido would believe him if he told him about the fish. It did not matter. He felt at ease. Being lost out here wasn’t all that bad. Not bad at all. Not like when Lisa left him. That was the day after he struck her.
With one blow he’d killed everything that had been precious between them, his hand rising and exploding against her face and her eyes wide and unbelieving, because it seemed so senseless, so uncalled for. He’d stood there watching the love drain out of her eyes. Even now, he did not understand why he’d done it.
Perhaps it was the death of the child. Or his guilt. For even if he had not been there when the boy was lifted limp out of the water and laid out on the sand, he believed he had something to do with it. The child had been keeping his secret, hadn’t he? Something for which he’d been forever grateful, and which, he thought, had brought them closer. It was not something he could admit to openly. He’d done it out of a reckless pride to awe Jonah. He’d struck a dolphin, had gone against his own instincts and the knowledge instilled in every child long before they’d learned to bait a hook: that no-one ever struck a dolphin. A person looked into their eyes and knew why. Dolphins did not speak, but they could respond to everything a soul was feeling.
It was no more than an impulse in the presence of his son, a reflex as natural as the stirrings in the groin. The boy was eleven and as perfect a swimmer as anyone had seen – long-boned, lean and strong as a purple reed. Osun had taken him out a mile that Sunday to lift the fish-pots he had laid around the edges of Short Horn. A bright day, he remembered, so bright he had to narrow his eyes down to slits to see anything in the distance. It was the boy who had spotted the cloud of gulls first, a black smudge just above the horizon.
It took them an hour to get there. By then, the mass of migrating corvally that had attracted the gulls had moved further out. It was one of the biggest schools he’d ever seen, creating its own little whirlpool beneath the frenzied feeding of the gulls.
It was not as if he’d travelled this distance for any particular reason. In fact, even if he’d wanted to, he could not do anything but stand with his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gape. He had not carried a net of any sort and the small line under the bow was useless without bait. There was the harpoon, of course, but using it would have been like using a cannon to shoot at mosquitoes. Again, it was the boy who noticed the turmoil in the middle of the moving mass of fish. Osun had to squint hard before he could spot them and when he did it was just the purple backs barely breaking surface, diving and rising in slick succession as they rounded up the fish.
It must have been the oddity of that white body amongst the others that shifted his hand from the boy’s shoulder and turned it towards the harpoon, so that when the dolphins rose and hit the air in that magical, curving chain that was both dance and exultation, his arm was already drawn
full back. They had swum close enough for him to see the sheen of the sun on their skins and that curious ridge that ran along their mouths that made them seem to be perpetually smiling.
The white had disengaged herself in what must have been a display just for himself and Jonah. With a twist of the powerful tail the creature scooped the water from the surface of the sea and fanned it out on the air in a spray so fine it created rainbows in the sun.
He might have paid attention to the shrilling of the child, but he thought it was just his excitement. On the fifth rising, the harpoon perfectly poised, Osun struck.
That cry!
Lord have mercy!
He didn’t know to this day whether it was the dolphin or the boy. He’d turned around and found him crouched low in the boat, his hands grasping his sides as if it was he that had been wounded. Wounded, yes, because the dolphin had not died. And what happened afterwards, well, Jonah was there to prove that he had seen it: its companions did not leave that strangely pale and glistening creature there. They bore it away.
Osun couldn’t tell how long he stood there with the boy staring at the slow procession till the waves and distance hid them.
Those eyes! Lord have mercy, those red eyes. The creature had come close enough for him to look into them. He would never forget those eyes.
It was those eyes he was remembering when, almost exactly one year later, he knelt on the sand and eased the wet head of his child off the piece of tarpaulin.
Lisa had decided to leave him the very day that he confessed about the dolphin and, unable to bear the betrayal in her eyes, he’d turned around and struck her.
Osun rested his eyes on the water and covered his face.
He sat under a stiffening sky. The piece of tarpaulin he’d dug out of the tiny hold took the brunt of the rain when the sky eventually opened up. He could smell the coming storm. The air was tense and crackling with the threat of it. Deliverance was tired. He hoped that she could take it.
He drank the last of his water, ate some dried fish and threw the rest away. Without water, the salted fish would only worsen his thirst. Food was not a worry. He could manage. Anyway, the dolphin should be coming soon.
It was with idle eyes that he watched the boat approaching through the rain. At first he thought it was the white crest of a large wave. Then Deliverance rose on a swell and he saw a yacht, sails trimmed, dipping and rising. Coming his way. They’d seen him. It came close. White faces stared down at him. Suddenly he remembered an old stone church, a tall cross and banks upon banks of pews and he, a small boy, standing before a robed figure, and hundreds of gleaming statues, staring back at him. Osun buried his face between his knees.
Some time after, he opened his eyes and wondered if he had been dreaming. But he looked up and around him and saw the boat disappearing, a white bird, through the mist of rain.
The air was dripping with the suspense of the storm.
Night had returned by the time the sky opened up, and when it did the whole world suddenly came tearing down on him. The images returned, stiffly robed and polished. Osun called them by their names, prayed to them like his mother had taught him, cursed them, and prayed to them again.
Deliverance fought back like a thing possessed. Sometimes he sensed her falling, falling endlessly downwards. Osun died many times, each dizzying fall a new death. He waited for the great engulfing wall of water. It never came. The craft recovered and brought him up again. It was on one of those upward surges that he was sure he heard his name, somebody calling:
Osunyin. Osunyin… Osunyin, Osunyin.
His first name. In full. Like his mother used to call him. Like Lisa always did.
Osunyin. Osunyin… Osunyin Osunyin – a quick succession of breakers dying on a dark reef.
‘Lisa?’ he called back.
Morning. Osun slept through most of the day. When he opened his eyes, the sun was a bright brass coin burning his skin. He heard gulls before he saw them. He’d woken up to a strange peace that was reflected by the calmness of the water on which Deliverance now floated. This thing inside him felt new and delicate. He felt afraid to move lest he should lose it.
How long had he been out here? Three days? Four? It felt like all his life. He hadn’t eaten, but wasn’t hungry. Just tired – tired like Deliverance and, like her, at ease. Nothing moved him now, not even Gull Island when it rose up out of the sea before him. He realised the storm had driven him back. He guided the craft towards the windward side of the island.
The beach curved like a wide grin before him, piled high with shells, mangled bits of clothing, and lengths of wood that were bleached bone-white.
At the last moment, he changed tack and guided Deliverance into the stony leeward harbour. Much quieter there.
Osun sat in the boat until the sun became a burning coal on the very edges of the ocean. The sky smouldered above him with a quiet rage. To die – and to die like this – was beautiful. Quietly, leaving all that beauty behind. For a while he sat there undecided, eyes fixed gratefully on the boat. Deliverance had been good to him.
Stiffly, he clambered over the side of the craft. The world spun. He was much weaker than he’d realised. The foot. He hadn’t thought about the foot. It wasn’t hurting anymore. Couldn’t remember if it ever did these past few days. He climbed up the stone beach and chose one of the great flat boulders there. He wanted to rest. Just a while. Sleep the sleep he hadn’t slept for so many months since he’d taken Lisa away. The stone was warm with the heat it had absorbed during the day, warm with the warmth of life.
Chest bared to the sky, Osun followed its domed curve with his eyes. Another realisation. Everything in life was a circle. Everything important: earth and moon and stars; his head, his heart, life itself. Once opened to make meaning of the world, the mouth became an ‘O’ of sorts. God expressed God’s self in circles.
Some way off, the water was murmuring like a congregation deep in prayer. The stones, stretched out on either side of him, were giant pews. There was a soft humming in his head that drowned the psalming of the sea below. The boats from the shore that he’d escaped were coming, but he was travelling away from them. He was certain they could not catch him. Not now or ever. The Gate was before him, foaming high.
The waves, raising hell above him, were obliging him at last. They froze, and there below he saw it all, exactly as it had been brought to him in dreams. Except the whiteness. Stupid of him to think it was the dolphin. Lisa had been wearing white that last time. In white, that was how he’d dressed her before he’d brought her out here and put her to rest. After he’d struck her again, struggling with himself to stop. But his hand would not allow him. Was better that way, not so? Couldn’ bear to see her leave. Had to make ‘er stay, not so? Else, he would have lost his mind.
Smiling, Osun reached out beneath the waves, touched the whiteness and was covered.
Night came and settled over the island. A fish momentarily broke the surface and struck air before being reclaimed by the water.
A soft wind rocked the boat, cheeked the loose sail out and swung the bow of the craft towards the open sea. It hung there bobbing gently, battered now, but still very much alert with something of the spirit of the man who had so painstakingly created her. A firmer, harder wind took hold of her and glided Deliverance out towards the open water.
A DIFFERENT OCEAN
Sienna loved the play of light on the tiny whisky bottles, frosted by the waves, reshaped by salt and time. She collected them, along with coins and strips of green-caked copper that she scrubbed until they became as bright as the fire that shaped them.
Mornings, she sneaked down to the beach and those pretty things were there amongst the shells, the jellyfish and seaweeds.
The doll had been her greatest find. She’d come upon it one morning – a pale, outlandish flower sprawled against the blackness of the sand. It had half of everything: a single, sea-bleached leg which was cocked up at the sky in a most indecorous manner, one damaged ey
e that followed her movements whichever way she turned, and a portion of an arm. It had half a head of soft, cornyellow hair.
She’d bathed it, dressed it and laid it on a straw bed as she would an ailing friend – as if expecting that it would become whole again.
She named the doll Lucille, thought of her as a sister. In time, she too would acquire sun-coloured hair that floated around her face, hair which she could squint through, comb and part with her fingers and shake in imaginary winds. She and Lucille would live in a blue room with pretty yellow curtains and windows that faced a flush of trees, laden with apples and pears and peaches, all growing on the same branch. Perhaps the tar would seep away from beneath her skin, leaving her as pink as the cheek of the oneeyed doll.
Tan Lin tossed Lucille into the fire the evening Sienna left her outside in the yard. She’d hurried down to the beach to watch the men haul in a giant octopus from the place they called The Mouth.
She bawled and railed while her cousin, Cedric, his face a mix of sympathy and pleasure, poked the sizzling lump of foulsmelling plastic from the fire and placed it at her feet.
‘Chiiiile! Shut dat big black mout ov yours before I close it for good.’ Sienna didn’t wait for the rest of Tan Lin’s words – words whose meaning she might not know exactly, but which would sting her like a splattering of hot oil. She was halfway down the hill and heading for the beach when they came: ‘Petite jamette laide!’
It was only when her feet hit the coolness of the sand and she saw the small crowd at the northern end of the bay that she stopped her bawling. They were standing on the part of the beach that strangers were warned against.
The sign that used to read, DANGER, SUDDEN DROP, in big red letters was still there, but the writing had long been chewed by rust. The sea hid the crater the government had dug there when it promised to build a yacht marina in The Silent. At the end of that election year, the excavating machines had climbed back onto the trucks and never returned. What they left was a patch of darker blue which reminded them of its presence in odd ways: a sudden flush of cold along the stomach of the person who dared to swim across it, or the way a boat or bit of wood would slowly drift towards it, in response to some secret pull. It had already swallowed the lives of two unsuspecting brothers. It was this readiness to suck in anything that possessed a will weaker than its own that made them call it, The Mouth.