Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Those gull-like cries – were they, too, a property of the moving water that surrounded him? Such mournful screams blurred with surf! He wondered whether he had ever seen a seabird land on this atoll. He could not remember for certain. Long ago he had dreamed of turkey-like birds so tame he could catch them with his hands before roasting and devouring their succulent steaks … mere dreams of hunger based on Galapagos tales, that trusting tameness which ought to pose any human being a moral dilemma but which never seemed to. Once broken, the rules of Eden fell in tatters before the rules of self-interest or commerce. Had he not lately read of British entrepreneurs in Antarctic lands? Protestant flint-hearts so weary from clubbing penguins to death that they had taken to driving their sacrificial victims up walkways so that they fell living into the huge cauldrons in which they were rendered down for oil? Again, the far-off cries reached him and, afterwards, a great outburst of drumming.

  It may be that Forbici fell into a doze at this point. He next became aware of the scuff of footsteps passing behind his bush towards the beached craft. The masked figures maintained their silence, the turtle-shell drums were mute. The ebony statue was missing, likewise the figureheads and the children. Once embarked, they pushed off. The boats were rowed a few hundred metres offshore before pausing, the one alongside the other as though in discussion. It suddenly mattered to him to know whether or not he was dreaming. He dragged himself from beneath his bush and tottered down to the coral pool on the islet’s windward side. There, invisible from the boats, he knelt and peered into the water.

  When his eyes had adjusted he could see very clearly the ebony statue lying on the bottom of the shaft among the white pipes of coral. Nearby lay the two figureheads: the great wicker bird with its plumes trailing in the gentle current, the wicker fish with one eye staring fixedly up through the fathoms of pellucid water, mouth agape as though for air. The immense fish he had once thought to trap were bumping at the wicker and ebony with inquisitive snouts.

  Forbici crawled back to his shade and discovered that the boats had also returned. The natives had surely not failed to notice his presence even if they had elected not to interrupt their ritual. He never did learn whether the now-unmasked men had come back to rescue him or to salvage the glass carboys, which would have represented valuable storage containers. As they approached the macrophyllum they certainly fell on the empty flasks with excited shouts before greeting this blackened scarecrow of a human with a certain matter-of-factness. Their language was not wholly opaque to him, for the archipelago’s dialects overlapped in such a way as to leave audible beneath the surface a framework common to all. He heard ‘Aa’, which he knew to be ‘man’. He heard ‘bangsa saddi’, which he interpreted as ‘other race’. They half-carried him to one of the boats and gave him musky water from a gourd. It tasted like nectar.

  The ‘Parergo’ describes at some length the weeks he spent aboard a succession of boats as his wandering rescuers went about their maritime business and allowed him to regain his health. They often saw land but seldom went ashore. They did so for fresh water and, on two occasions, for wild pig. But they were clearly not at home there, venturing only fearfully into the jungle which began almost at the high-tide mark. The endless sea was where they felt most secure, and they knew its ways with respectful intimacy. Their fishing abilities were extraordinary, as was their navigation. Out of nowhere, towards dusk, identical boats would appear and moor alongside each other. Sometimes as many as twenty craft congregated in mid-ocean, a family to each, to celebrate a birthday or a wedding. For a while they formed a floating hamlet or random village. Then at dawn, or after a few days, sails would be hoisted and the houses scatter away again over the horizon.

  As time passed and language became less of a problem, Forbici was less than ever inclined to return to what and where he had been. This congenial way of living, bounded and dictated by nothing but water, was a transcendent version of the sterile and terminal existence his shipwreck had recently thrust upon him. But the time came when a port was nervously approached and they stood out in the roads until he could be transhipped into a schooner. This was bound for Makassar and the unsought curiosity and attention of his own kind. What comes off these last pages of ‘Parergo’ is regret. Yet as if Forbici himself could never make his mind up, it is unclear whether this was regret at leaving his rescuers, for their having rescued him in the first place, or even for something yet larger and vaguer he had perceived but could not write. At some point in his mid-ocean stranding on the atoll, he had ceased to be a European, but neither had he become a true sea-gypsy. Maybe that was the source of regret? Maybe, too, he knew he must either lose the sea for ever or else become it for ever by diving in and omitting to surface again. Hence Arezzo, and the grumpy discourse of his later years.

  Meanwhile, he learned that the ebony statue had been the body of one of their princes, a kind of sea datu, wrapped mummy-like in a single length of sharkskin flayed on the bias in the manner of a peeled orange. Once tightly bound, this skin was given many thick coats of a shellac made from boiled carrageen or similar seaweed mixed with a mucilage extracted from turtle bones and tree sap. This treatment produced the smooth, dully shining black surface he had so easily mistaken for carved wood. The care and ritual the natives had lavished on their chieftain’s body was proper to the awe in which they held the sea and their duty to return their own bodies to its dissolving embrace. To lie buried on land was unthinkable. As he understood more and more, Forbici appreciated the irony of having been cast up in a marine cemetery. Not snapped-off flutes of coral, then, but countless gypsy bones had strewn the bottom of the pool. From time to time he heard again the small, gull-like cries among the sound of the waves, and saw the fat fish sniffing around the wicker figureheads lying companionably near the mummy. Had the children known their fate even as they shrilly begged the island’s spirits for permission to land, rolling their eyes and flapping their wings? He never found out. Or if he did, he never confided it to his ‘Parergo’, with its mood of grieving for unnamed things.

  VI

  The last pair of divers brought their baskets of lobsters to the surface at around 3.30 in the morning. Both the gullies south and north of the Madonna had been worked out, but there were many crevasses yet to be explored. A couple of empty ice chests were left over when the others had been filled.

  ‘That’s enough,’ the captain said.

  ‘There’s another good hour’s darkness left,’ somebody objected.

  An electrical storm far out to sea gave silent glimpses of cloud banks low on one horizon, snapshots of a bruised pearl-and-ginger colour. Otherwise, the night was lit only by constellations. Little Turtle’s river of tears, known elsewhere as the Milky Way, flowed across the sky as though grief were the universe’s most prominent feature. It outshone the other playlets, yet the starlight faded as it fell to earth. The ocean mopped up its dazzle as with thick cloth. In the darkness surrounding the Medevina, little ambient detail was visible. Whenever stray voltages flickered on the landward quarter, the cape off to port stepped forward and back again indecisively. The coastguard’s patrol boats were evidently in another patch of territorial water tonight.

  ‘We shouldn’t push our luck.’

  The boat’s name was a composite of those of Captain Nicomedes and his wife Divina, though the craft was jointly owned by four people who worked it as a cooperative. Medes’ decision to call a halt might have been challenged by any of his three companions who thought it wasteful not to profit by an extra hour and fill the last boxes. Yet nobody objected. It was as though everyone aboard was mindful of the dead fisherman we had left afloat so many hours ago, of the vengeance his spirit might wreak if given the provocation. (You will not have forgotten that when the trip was nearly over and a familiar coastline once more off the bow, one of the divers confessed he wouldn’t have felt easy that night working any new beds further away from the Madonna, whose calcareous lump had given its blessing to our poaching activities.) Spel
l and counter-spell.

  So the air hoses were coiled and stowed; the engine was stopped and reconnected to the propeller shaft; weak, sweet coffee was passed around in the ringing silence. Cigarette ends glowed in relief. An offshore breeze brought distant beach smells of wrack and drying caves. It was laden also with tropic moulds and that perfume of decay which mixes vegetable with flesh, so the image came of an inflated piglet being rolled at the tideline, trotters stiff among weed. The tension that had preceded the diving had gone, the omens were forgotten. Quiet laughter rose from murmured talk. We were not going to be arrested this trip.

  The engine was started and we took up a homeward course. The starlight fell yet more faintly. An overcast was creeping from the east, extinguishing the Octopus’s suckers one by one, then the Brazier, and finally blotting Little Turtle’s tears. The night grew deeper. Though there was scarcely any wind, the sea became suddenly choppier and from this we knew we had left the shelter of the invisible headland and would soon be out of enemy waters. An hour later, we had a tiny running light aloft, dawn seemed no nearer and the chop was sending smacks of spray from the bows to rattle aft against a hunching of plastic raincoats. This was no threatening change in the weather, though; just the patchy moodiness of the sea as it was strained through the archipelago, bounced between land masses, alternately heated and cooled, convected and churned between abyssal currents and shallow races. Soon the coffee’s warmth was long gone and everyone had retreated into himself, wrapped in wet plastic, staring at the same patch of planking or tackle, waiting for the return of daylight and calm water and the implied heat of a rising sun.

  The cold end of a working night, the hypnotic blare of the engine: it must have been these which explained the lack of attention. With a crash the boat suddenly reared and flung everyone sprawling in the bilges. Cries went up and the captain cut the engine. The first thought was of having run aground at full throttle, the constant fear in coral seas where hidden reefs can rise to within inches of the surface. But the bottom was still in the boat and we were not yet floundering in the dark ocean. The captain and the mate hurried forward with torches. According to their curses we had rammed a drifting log, a common hazard in these parts.

  ‘If ever a trip was jinxed …’

  Lights were flashed astern to see what we had overrun. Sure enough, something was rolling in our dispersing wake. The captain was on his knees in the bows, examining the damage. We were holed on the waterline: not a crippling wound, but several square inches of marine ply were stove in. A strong smell of petrol was stealing over the boat. More shouts. A cigarette end was flung judiciously overboard. A spare polythene container of fuel stowed in the bows had been holed by the impact and several gallons had run aft into the bilges before the two men extricated the crushed container and tilted it so that the hole was uppermost.

  You will not have forgotten how everyone set to bailing with every available mug and bowl. The boat’s rocking dead in the water was accompanied by crunchings and creakings from the darkness where the port outrigger lay. Light-beams focused on it. Tangled up in our paired bamboo floats were the tilted spars of a small boat.

  ‘We hit a boat!’

  ‘It wasn’t a log!’

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! This whole damned ocean’s full of abandoned boats tonight.’

  ‘It was a log! Look, you can see it behind us.’

  But beneath the vaporous smell of petrol another, familiar stench was filling the air. A single voice cried out, ‘Oh my God, it’s him!’, and a select chill went through us all. The more trembling beams converged on the torpid object in the sea astern, the more clearly they revealed it as the body we had abandoned some eight hours earlier.

  If, as claimed, there is in the human mind a gambling instinct, a constant assessment of odds, moments of shock reveal it as being definitely more reliant on superstition than on statistics. There was nobody aboard, yourself included, who was not tugged into the rhetorical device of demanding what were the chances of hitting the same boat …? and coming up with the predetermined answer: ‘Astronomical!’ Afterwards, though, on dry land and with a couple of nights’ sleep separating the event from its memory, anyone might soberly have reassessed those chances. The fisherman had been drifting with the current; our captain always went with the current as far as possible. It was the act of a seaman who knows how to lean on nature and save fuel whenever he can. Our collision was unlikely enough, surely, but not so incredible as to make it seem – as it did in the dark with water and petrol bubbling around our bare feet – fated, ordained, even Justice catching up with us. Nobody who lives off the sea remains a rationalist for long. Those of the crew who earlier had consoled their consciences with defiant cries of ‘No time!’ now began planning the truce they would enact with the dead man before his unappeased spirit might ruin us entirely.

  The boat was paddled backwards until his body drifted under the counter. The curious crowded back to view it, thereby making the captain’s repairs easier by lifting the hole in the bows clear of the water. The stink of fuel and decay rolled over us. Nobody dared light a cigarette to make breathing easier. Torn-up rags were tied over faces so we became the masked crew of a plague barge. A rope was belayed around one of the fisherman’s swollen calves. The noose’s friction soon began to slough the skin off, and it seemed likely that his little boat had itself been leaking so that his lower body had steeped in seawater for several hours.

  The hatless corpse had swollen greatly since the moment we had last glimpsed him like a lone King Arthur faring forth to Avalon. His back was now as wide and flat as a slab. The T-shirt stretched across it, advertising a brand of paint, was already going in ovals at the seams. His shorts were likewise cracking as though the buttocks beneath were plumped with silicone. Pathos no longer attached itself to this body, wallowing inert as a bolster. His statuesque silence and exaltation had vanished. Only his hair, the liveliest part, floated and streamed in puffs of current as it once had on windy days.

  ‘This time he must be buried.’

  ‘For certain. I don’t care if he committed suicide. We’re risking our lives until he’s given a Christian burial.’

  ‘Oh don’t start that again, Mots. We don’t know his religion.’

  ‘It’s all one God,’ the dogged voice said. ‘We’ll give him a Christian burial because it’s the only one we know.’

  ‘You know it, do you? The proper service like Father Deme knows?’

  ‘Even Father Demetrio doesn’t necessarily know it. He reads it.’

  The talk went on. It revealed nothing but a universal refusal to touch the decaying body, to turn it face up, to have anything further to do with it other than piously to wish it gone.

  The two boys crawled out on the struts and freed the remains of the fisherman’s boat. Without support the little hulk filled and sank until nothing but the outline of its own bamboo outrigger was visible. Since it was too small for an engine, it had never been registered, and there was no identifying number painted on its bow. Nor was there any way of taking it in tow. The captain ordered it cast adrift and it soon vanished.

  All this time, dawn was slowly breaking above the cloud cover, sending down a stealing greyness as through a suspended sheet of ground glass. Our world took on shape. A loud swirl of water became visible from just beyond an outrigger.

  ‘Oy pating, pating!’, someone shouted, and the additional fear of sharks found a perch next to the other dread spirits already crowding our boat’s superstructure. There was no question now of doing anything with the body except sinking it as hastily as possible. The longer it stayed tied to us, the longer we ourselves would remain bait.

  Meanwhile, the captain and the mate had jury-rigged a repair. The patch was not quite watertight but, with luck, would hold at reduced speed, provided we kept our weight in the stern. They now decided what they might sacrifice to send the dead man to the bottom. The spare anchor could go, and so could the rusty acetylene cylinder used as a reserve
air tank when a third diver was deployed. A discussion broke out as to how much weight was needed to take the corpse down, inflated with gas as it was. The men decided to err on the side of excess. Nobody wanted to see this man ever again although he was probably destined to bob up in many a dream. Now, respectfully, and with the sacrifice of many dollars’ worth of equipment, he was being asked to leave us alone.

  The assorted weights were firmly tied to the end of the rope attached to his leg. At a suggestion, some people took amulets and crosses from their own necks and wound them around the iron. The captain said: ‘I don’t know this service. Let’s say the Ama Namin for the poor fellow, and God give him and us rest.’ Out on the dawning ocean the Lord’s Prayer rose raggedly towards the ground-glass ceiling. The sea was calmer now, and the boat merely wallowed slightly in the swell. Had the sun been up we would no doubt have been revealed once more as surrounded by an iridescent membrane of fuel clawed here and there into holes by catspaws of wind. Swaying on a few planks above unknown fathoms of water, the crew muttered while the grey bowl of air around us began to fill with the sensation of lifting, as though the remaining darkness were rising like helium to dissolve in the sky. Barely waiting for the various murmurs of ‘Amen’ and ‘Siya nawa’, the captain began unhitching the cord that secured his precious boat to its albatross. With a series of loud splashes the weights followed each other into the sea.

  The length of line gave the iron a second or two in which to sink and take up the slack between it and the dead man’s ankle. Then – and how quickly it happened! – the corpse gave a start, a half twist and a sweep of one arm like that of an engrossed snorkeller jerking up for air. For a shutter’s click his face turned towards us, a swollen and eroded Buddha, before he vanished. A collective sigh was heaved; nobody spoke. We continued, mesmerised, to watch the water as though expecting him to reappear.