Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Despite the skinniness of this living, for all its rigour, there can exist in these rural and marine backwaters a certain ebullience. Not to sentimentalise it, it is that peculiar freedom which descends like a gift on those so constantly menaced that they slip off the burden of mere worry. A strange security results when death is so close a companion. It can be felt while crunching along a beach, a skeleton walking on skeletons with the time machine turning in step, wave-falls and footfalls. A gleeful levity at being so brief, at feeling so exempt. Freedom from what, then? Certainly not from the irreducible pact of living. Rather, from the heaviness of having to share in metropolitan anxieties, the contaminating conspiracy, the yearning. Freedom, too, from the corroding suspicion that the extra time bought by wallbars has already gone on wallbars. The Thousand and One Nights (alf layla wa layla) never meant a literal two-and-three-quarter years but was just an expression for a long time, the eternity spent in staving off the executioner by babbling at him.

  * Koran, 37:48.

  IV

  On into night we went, nakedly starlit, without even the stealth of a light overcast. The equatorial sky blazed with local stories. Little Turtle lay helplessly and wept a stream of stars which fell beyond the sea’s edge. She had been overturned by the turbulent rush of Tig-it, the giant manta whose eye – to other folk in distant lands – was Achemar in the constellation of Eridanus. Little Turtle wept because, being on her back, she could now see only the darkness of Earth and nothing of the guiding sky with its brilliant lamps and beacons and knew she would never reach home. Far away from her was the Brazier with its frozen rag of ionised gases drifting for hundreds of parsecs, through whose smoke Cry-Baby was being passed three times to dry his tears. Into the Brazier had been sprinkled incense, seaweed, fish bones and chips of scented wood. The enchanted perfume filled the heavens, reaching the nostrils even of the Octopus. The Octopus was sunk deep over the horizon, biding his time. He waved his tentacles menacingly, their suckers marked by stars. Now and then, sparks from the Brazier shot across the sky. Whenever these meteors fell into the sea they changed instantly into pearls which sank, still glowing, to await a lucky fisherman.

  Over everything such orderly dramas shed a stark, revealing glare, a million suns lighting up a single Earth night in which a fishing boat was hoping to poach some lobsters from another nation’s territorial waters. The noise of its engine reached all parts of the universe, like the Brazier’s incense. You will remember that sensation, something of stateliness as well as apprehension. The fear of coastguard cutters, naturally: of an impounded boat, confiscated tackle, jail, diplomacy, bureaucrats and fines – whatever else, the fines. But behind all that, like the Octopus hunkered down in his lair beneath the horizon, lay the shadow of the man we had left in his boat. He was there somewhere behind us, still sitting in his broad-brimmed hat, the fishing line with its unbaited hook trailing from his dead hand. Unwaked and unburied, far out beneath the stars he sat, lifting and falling in the long Pacific swell. So must he have sat many thousand times before. Nights of moon, nights of rain, nights of angry chop sending water spilling over the low freeboard, obliging him to loop the line over a copper nail and set to bailing with the plastic motor-oil container. Nights when he could see into the depths with his eyes shut, sense the eddies of 10,000 tails and drop his hook right among them. Cold, too, on other nights, sitting there in the empty wind, now and then fumbling a cigarette alight with the tiny companionable flame which flickered deep in a mayonnaise jar.

  Some nights he and his colleagues would remain within hailing distance, their yellow lights so low in the water they winked out in the troughs of passing wavelets, then on and again off, with the steady persistence of fireflies. The water beneath them might have been empty of life. As if drawn together by a mutual acceptance that no one was going to get fat on this night’s fishing, the boats stayed within conversational distance. Gossip was exchanged, cigarettes, matches, a spare jersey. A flat bottle of rum was passed around. There they would sit in that enclosed world which sprang into being, even in the nowhere of mid-ocean, when men talked like survivors of a series of grim accidents ashore. The sicknesses, the deaths, the separations; the plot of unyielding land whose scant crops were tithed by a landlord; the truant son, the feud with the policeman’s family. Over and over again stories were told that everyone knew. Their retelling, and the long reflective silences falling between each, were a description of that other world whose reach seemed absolute, yet outside which it was still possible to sit. The lamps of land could not always be seen. The fishermen’s night-lights danced their flames within their sooty, improvised chimneys, marking out the coordinates of an existential annexe as temporary as it was shifting. Within it, something invisible and unspoken came into being. For a while the flames were the bars of its cage and it could not escape until the cage fell apart or the blanch of dawn disclosed a loose knot of tired, stiff men floating on the sea. This unspoken, this invisible – which sometimes smelled of tobacco and sometimes as though incense and fish bones were burning – was the pact. It was the silent deal done with the sea and the stars, with what welled up from below and sifted down from above, with immeasurable gulfs. The deal could never be expressed. Into its secret balance nothing weighty was thrown, simply the piecemeal fragments of what each inner mind held in safe-keeping: a particular smile with a hand half raised in neither greeting nor farewell; a receding wave draining sand and fragments of shell from around bare feet and undermining the toes crawlingly; the shimmer of a cooking fire at dusk and a child’s laugh; the gecko’s grating call – the cry the dinosaurs knew and which would not stop until after the human race, when the planet ran down: ‘… loves me, loves me not; loves me …’ (as European children once blew dandelion clocks). And heaped into the balance as these fragments might be, the deal remained always the same, imperturbably. The Octopus’s suckers twinkle; his arms await. They embrace the sky. The playlets overhead are scanned for portents, warnings and news of all kinds. The playlets enacted below are watched by no one and nothing.

  All these things were turned over by the living about the dead, until the lone fisherman bobbing far behind at our wake’s end grew in stature like a fable. There was not a soul aboard without guilt for the uncompromising corpse we had left. His boat was clustered around with spirits: they had been practically visible, perched like transparent vultures along the outriggers and fidgeting at bow and stern. Some would have jumped ship – would even now be swaying atop the black poles supporting Medevina’s tarpaulin roof or hunched on the fuel tank of her temperamental Briggs & Stratton 16 horse-power motor which had already caused us delay and, causing that delay, had engineered the encounter with the unknown suicide who had now adopted us. What trip starting thus could turn out well? So you will no doubt remember the thrill of portent with which you abruptly discovered that the bank of cloud low above the sea to starboard was land, that we were now in foreign waters, that a new playlet was about to begin.

  When the motor falls abruptly silent it is the time for stretching, for scanning the scene with ears as well as eyes. No cutter’s masthead light crawls across the nearby bulk of cliff, no angry hum of motorised pursuit. Just the slap of water under prow and outrigger noses. Our intermittent, eventful journey has brought us here, late; our stubborn captain’s calculations can almost be heard. Half-past one: tide change in thirty-five minutes. We’ll need the anchor. Throughout these archipelagos, in a thousand straits and sounds, channels and passages, the current switches direction. Twice a day it streams, races and eddies, often forming boiling demarcations where two contrary currents intersect. To sit there with divers deployed in relays, working the lobster beds, the boat must remain on station. It cannot be allowed to drift. Our captain must have Bajau blood, they say. He does not even possess a compass, yet he has brought us back over his secret patch of seabed after almost twenty hours of travel. Nobody aboard has the slightest doubt that when the first two men go down, their torch beams will fall on f
amiliar terrain.

  The anchor is thrown over from the prow. It is made of inch-thick reinforcing rods stolen from a construction site, knobby with crude welding and rust. Two men paddle in the slack water to bring the line taut so that when the current begins at tide-turn we will already be nosing into it and can drift no further. With a tyre lever a boy is slipping off the frayed fan belt which drives the propeller shaft. He eases it instead over the pulley of a compressor bolted to the deckboards. This, too, is a rusty lump of engineering. It is connected to a converted cooking-gas cylinder with a twin-nozzled tap. Men are breaking out two coils of thin polythene tubing whose insides are mottled with mould, pushing the ends over the tank’s outlets, tightening clips. The first two divers are already in the water. Their wet knuckles gleam as they hold on to the boat. In addition to T-shirts and shorts, they are wearing home-made goggles carved from wood, the eyepieces set with a lozenge of glass embedded in pink marine epoxy. They carry torches waterproofed by a motorcycle inner tube and lengths of stout wire with one end bent into a sharpened hook. A lidded basket on a rope is handed to each. At the captain’s signal, the still-hot engine is swung, fires, backfires, splutters, blares into life. On its continued running the divers’ lives depend. They will be working at between 60 and 100 feet. Lobsters are most abundant at about 1,000 feet. Puny half-naked men with ramshackle compressors and cheap Chinese flashlights can do no more than skim off the topmost handful, concentrating on the two main species which can be found on these comparatively shallow reefs: slipper lobsters and spiny lobsters.

  The Briggs & Stratton has been throttled back to a slow blatting. The air hoses are tossed to the men in the water and thrash about, fizzing, until caught. Each man folds over the last inch and grips it between his teeth, regulating the air pressure by clenching or relaxing his jaws. In the water’s uppermost 10 or 15 feet they will have to bite quite hard; below that, their grip must gradually slacken to allow more of the foul-tasting air to gush into their mouths and counteract the sea’s growing squeeze. Looking over the edge of the boat, the rest of us follow the small, wavering green puddles of their torchlight until they are extinguished in the blackness beneath.

  We who are left behind. The phrase carries both anxiety and mourning, ready to shift emphasis in an instant, and into the bargain flies a modest pennant of heroism. The sea captain’s wife, her dark-lantern casting up her strained features, paces the widow’s walk on her roof and stares into the gale for her man’s returning gleam. The ground crew watch in silence as the departing squadron lifts from a darkened airfield somewhere in wartime Europe with its cargo of bombs and boys – teenagers, some of them, children sitting or lying prone in vibrating alloy nests. And we, too, go on staring at the patch of sea beneath which our friends have vanished, each mind anxiously drawing on the black surface its own sketches of misadventure. The direction of the tubes and ropes gives no real clue to where the divers might be. The two older men paying out the coils have already put overboard 50 metres apiece, passing it steadily through their hands and easing out kinks as it goes. They are waiting for the tide change, to see which way the boat will swing. The divers went over on the starboard side, the tubes vanish over the stern. Suddenly the men are paying out to port, and, with a shock of re-orientation, you discover the dark mass of land now lies off to the left.

  Can you remember how many times you have watched this? And have yourself gone down with that hissing pipe clenched in your molars until your jaw aches? The torch beam hollows around itself the pale black cell in which you descend, heading down and down. Twinkling dinoflagellates bounce off your bare hands and arms in crumbs of cold light. The spirits of martyred fish, they stream from the invisible plastic tube as though on your trajectory through space you had crossed the path of a meteor shower. Head-down through these summer Perseids you descend, eyes behind the oval glass peering for focal points, imposing patterns on nothingness, until one of the patterns catches. It gives you a queer pick up at the heart to see it harden into a detail of rock with small nocturnal fish going their ways, a cantle of this universe which hides itself from the world above. This place is not simultaneous with the realm of air. It can never be reached by anchors and plumb lines. It happens at different wavelengths and is full of a vividness that remains invisible to the air-breathing human, his ears plugged with water and his eyes as dim as his weakening torch. He is an interloper in a land full of playlets he cannot quite see and stories he just fails to hear. Palps and antennae winnow pheromones from the passing currents. Unsensed, a teeming sexuality surrounds this visitor, who can smell nothing, nor taste anything but mould and exhaust fumes. All he can ever bring back from this ancient domain are beautiful banalities like pearls and lobsters, and even these are more beautiful than he knows.

  You are not going down tonight, though, but instead will sit in the darkened boat with the others left behind. After twenty minutes, the first diver emerges. His basket is hauled aboard and emptied in a cascade of claws and carapaces.

  ‘Okay?’, our captain calls to the man in the water, who has removed his air hose and is taking breaths of clean night air.

  ‘We’re behind the Madonna. The first of those gullies. It’s good.’

  ‘One more and then Mots goes down.’

  The diver’s pale hand waves, replaces the air hose, grabs the empty basket and drags it under the water. A single plywood flipper thrashes the surface briefly and he is gone in a swirl of luminescence. The boys begin picking lobsters out of the bilges, tying their claws with a double loop of plastic straw, packing them into the first of the ice boxes. Among them is the flaccid mass of an octopus. By starlight the boys look for the marks left by the diver’s teeth where he killed it. They are difficult creatures to tease out of a hole and nobody would waste time doing so on a lobster hunt. The diver’s light must have caught it in the open, a dark pink and pallid umbrella flowing desperately over the exposed coral, tentacles searching for a crevice into which to furl itself. It is possible to take them then, to grasp the bulging pulpy head in one hand and bite the narrow neck which joins it to the tentacles. The flesh is tough and rubbery and our diver would have had to remove his air hose before chewing at the creature. If you can detach the octopus entirely from the rock before killing it, it will clamp its arms about yours, pulling its hooked beak towards your hand. Biting at this fleshy club is even less pleasant since it immediately transfers some of its sticky grapples to your head, welding itself over your face as you try to get a mouthful of the vulnerable part. Yet an experienced fisherman can kill a small octopus with his teeth quicker than he can with a knife, for even the sharpest blade can skid off the gristle and gash his own hand.

  The second diver soon surfaces and his basket is emptied. ‘Not far from the Madonna,’ he says as he disappears again. The ‘Madonna’, we all know, is the name someone on a previous trip has given to a curious coral formation, a slender pillar some 15 feet tall which in outline, seen from one aspect, resembles a statue even to the extent of having a texture like the petrified folds of a robe. On her seaward side, the reef falls away into a series of steep gullies, in the first of which our divers are working, and she forms a useful marker.

  When each man has filled two baskets, the divers come in and are spelled by a second pair. Our captain is strict about this. Each pair dives for roughly forty minutes, rests for the same, then goes down for a final forty minutes. Whatever theory he is working on, it bears little relation to the rigid decompression rates on which an alien medical science insists. Transient headaches are a matter of course, yet nobody in his crews ever gets the bends, though there are crippled young men further up the coast. It is mysterious.

  The engine chugs on, the compressor’s worn cylinder clatters, the valve on the tank bleeds with a chattering hiss. The boys go on packing the scrabbling lobsters in ice. A loud sizzle is heard aft. In the galley (a sheet of tin on which stands a cement cooking stove large enough for a single pot) someone has tossed the first pieces of chopp
ed octopus into a work of hot oil. The domestic smell of frying drifts across the boat and over the sea. Faces are dimly illumined by the red glow of the stove’s mouth, across which a hand with a palm-leaf fan flaps rhythmically. The captain and others go on scanning the darkness for the first signs of a coastguard cutter. Yet the deployed divers and the cookery would make a quick getaway impossible, and, after the initial tension, a calm insouciance overtakes us until we almost forget the dead man over the horizon.

  V

  When he quoted the Jesuit, Alzina, Justus Forfex was beginning his short study of sea burial. As he was to relate in his autobiography Viaticum (‘Life has written me, not I my life’), he was shipwrecked eight times in his wanderings between 1842 and 1867. One way and another, he was able to observe burial customs from Subang Gulf through New Castile to what he whimsically dubbed ‘Cholynesia, or the Bile Islands’. He also had the opportunity, over long months’ tattered living off crabs and coconut juice on deserted atolls, to reflect on how the significance of water pervades both soul and body.