Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Within a few seconds she was asleep, her hand resting on the stretched fabric of his trousers. Kanan observed her slow regular breathing, then lifted her arm stealthily, looking at the oatmeal colour of her skin against his. Never mind what the Aryans said. Frankly, his colour was more beautiful, he thought – navy blue, like the Lord Krishna’s when he was young, playing with the milkmaids.

  The tide had turned and, ebbing now, flung lacy cloths of bubble on the sand then snatched them back to expose grooves on the beach as sharp and ordered as the ridges down the turtles’ backs. When they came, those great, gravid females it was at midnight, out of mountainous seas, and they laboured harder than any woman in birth. He’d stood beside one as she panted and sighed and then dug for hours, flinging sand in the air with hind limbs that could strike off a human leg with one flick.

  Kanan could see the boat now; it was a kilometre or so offshore, a high-sided rust-red thing without flags. A Malay child from the village was standing at the water’s edge, one foot drawn up and pressed against his knee, the way such children stood when they were uncertain.

  When the turtle had dug her nest and laid the eggs – coming out in a stream as if from a tap at full turn – the Malays would wait until she had finished, covered the nest, smoothed the sand, disguised what she had done there, turned and begun her journey back towards the sea. Then they dug out the eggs and took them home, to eat or to sell. Some were saved, of course – there were laws about it now. But the turtle did not know that, any more than she knew that plunder was taking place, that her huge efforts were being undone even before she had completed the cycle and returned to the sea. The tourists were always outraged, on her behalf. Kanan smiled, recalling the English people who had pleaded with the villagers, then lamented … If only they had felt what he had as the eggs were stolen – that in such a sequence you saw the awesome playfulness of The One, who had invented both turtles and men.

  It was a most poetic sight, that moment when the huge beast re-entered her element. He had watched one – how big? almost three metres long? four hundred kilos in weight – lumber down to the wet sand and lie there, her chin sunk on the beach with fatigue. Dead, she’d seemed. A wave had broken over her head and she’d stirred forward about a metre. Then a moonlit cliff of water had reared and she’d lifted up, spread those great wings and flown, weightless, perfect, up and away into darkness. His guest, Kanan recalled, a professor of colonial history from an English university, had said, still angry about the eggs, ‘Well, that’s that. How much should I tip him?’ A village youth had attached himself to them, acting as guide for the night. He’d made a sour face at the ten dollar note the Englishman had handed him with a curt nod. The English had so many ways of showing their anger.

  Perhaps it was the same young man who had now joined the little boy, and was staring too towards the incoming boat. It was approaching slowly, the water was deep out there but the sandbanks began abruptly. The two were talking to each other, then the younger turned and ran, his brown legs working as if they were pistons.

  Kanan could see the passengers now, massed like insects on the deck. There were hundreds of them.

  ‘Judith,’ he said. He spoke quietly; it was not good to wake somebody abruptly. ‘Judith.’

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  ‘Minou’s boat has come.’

  She was still smiling and blinking. Then she said, ‘Oh, Jesus,’ and sat up.

  The boat was rolling gently in a light swell, motoring at no more than one knot. People in the bows were peering overboard, checking the depth and the possibility of anchorage. The older boy turned and fled north towards the village, and then Minou came into sight running, sinking into the mushy sand close to the sea. She was dragging the orange dinghy, half-inflated. Then she stumbled and went sprawling.

  Judith was aware of flying down the beach, grabbing Minou and wrenching her up out of the glueing sand.

  ‘I couldn’t get it through the coconut trees,’ Minou gasped. ‘It’s so heavy. I had to deflate it again.’ They heaved the dinghy back from the verge. It was unbelievably heavy, but it became lighter when their leg muscles could brace against hard, dry sand. The dinghy panted with them, a sickly breath of rubber exhaling from a hole in its side.

  ‘Quick, get the bung in,’ Judith said.

  ‘Minou’s hands were trembling like an old, sick woman’s as she jabbed the black plug of rubber at the hole. ‘Oars! I couldn’t carry the oars.’

  As Judith skimmed up the beach towards the car she felt herself observed by an elegant white-clad figure. She was half-way back, with the oars, when she realized she had forgotten the air pump and, veering towards the shelter, yelled ‘Get the pump!’ to Kanan.

  Minou had pulled the dinghy a few metres further along the beach until it was almost directly opposite the boat. The orange sides were flaccid, you could sink a fist into them. Judith looked back and saw Kanan disappearing among the coconut trees. ‘He’s getting the pump. We’ll have to wait.’

  Minou sat down abruptly and closed her eyes – she seemed momentarily to have gone to sleep. Then she opened them wide. ‘You mustn’t come with me,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? Oh, God, where is he?’

  Minou had not heard, ‘You mustn’t come,’ she repeated. She was gazing along the beach past Judith’s shoulder. Judith scrambled up and dashed back to the coconut grove.

  Kanan was leaning against the car with his arms crossed, admiring the view.

  ‘What are you doing! Where’s the pump?’Judith shouted.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Just look,’ he replied amiably, gazing in the direction of the sea. There were about fifty men, marching in a body, coming from the village.

  ‘We must help her!’

  ‘Why?’, he said in that same, even tone.

  Why! She could not believe what he was saying. She turned to flee from him but as she did he stretched forward with that easy cricketer’s grace and caught her arm, as if fielding a ball.

  ‘Stay here. You don’t want to get killed. Maybe she does.’

  Judith shook her arm violently to break his grip, then realized she could not. He was even taller than Richard, and had twice her physical strength. But there was a time, once, when she’d wanted to save her own life. She looked up at him, appalled. He smiled, then let her go, and she stood there beside him looking at the dirty sand. He draped his arm over her shoulder and stroked her cheek.

  ‘Don’t look so sad. She is doing what she wants to do. Just watch.’

  ‘She’ll make it without the pump.’ Judith said.

  Minou had launched the floppy dinghy and was rowing towards the boat; the village men had halted, and were milling around now, uncertain of their next move. Minou’s rowing was clumsy, hampered by the lack of tension in the dinghy’s sides but she was moving fast enough, carried towards the boat by the current as much as her own efforts.

  Judith and Kanan moved out of the shade of the coconut trees, half-way down the beach. Some of the fishermen turned and were, Judith guessed, glaring at her. A movement of Kanan’s torso as he squinted against the glare of the sea made her aware that he was enjoying watching this ritual unfold.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you bring the pump?’ she asked. Minou was within twenty metres of the boat now; they could hear people yelling greetings to her, high bird-like calls drifting across the water.

  Kanan’s expression was both pained and amused. ‘It is not my function, or duty. I am a teacher, isn’t it? I don’t pretend to be a hero. If you try to be that which you are not…’ He shrugged.

  The look she gave him hurt, she thought, for he added, ‘The warrior must be brave, the peasant must look after his cow. They are not my people on that boat.’ He was silenced by her inattention.

  Minou had stood up in the dinghy, which rocked in the swell. Her arms were stretched upwards, gymnast-style, for balance or because she was waving, and then she seemed to rise in the air, there was a white explosion, and she was gone.
An invisible hand guided the empty dinghy past the boat and to the north-east, out to sea.

  ‘She jumped,’ Judith said.

  ‘Yes. That, I think, was her intention.’

  Some of the men from the boat had dived overboard to rescue her and were struggling in the water. The current must have been extraordinarily strong, for three heads bobbed along together moving rapidly, but Minou was already fifty metres away. She was wearing those damnedfool overalls, Judith remembered. Once down, twice. It was as if the sky had halted. But there was no third time, as the stories had it, and Minou disappeared completely after the second break for air.

  Kanan fell the pull, the irresistible inward drag as the wave sucked back to itself that which was its own, and the great wheel turned over, spinning individual consciousness, that woman, up and back into the eternal revolving force.

  ‘That is known as Satyagraha,’ he murmured to Judith.

  Her look was uncomprehending.

  ‘Watch,’ he said. ‘Watch what she has done. See what the fishermen do now.’

  The men on the beach broke loose from each other, their communal purpose abandoned; some squatted down and pulled packets of cigarettes from the waist knots of their sarongs and offered them around. They laid their parangs and lengths of pipe and other weapons on the beach and started chatting.

  ‘You see,’ Kanan said. ‘They are satisfied now. They will go back to the village and say “The rich Chinese woman is dead; her ghost will keep the others away from us”. Or something like that. In a while some of them might make a shrine for her. You know, near here there is a shrine to a mermaid whom the fishermen captured about a century ago. She died. If you talk to these people they will tell you stories of their grandfathers who heard the mermaid speak, and who described how beautiful she was. There are always fresh flowers on her grave. And further north, at The Beach of Passionate Love …’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Kanan,’ Judith said.

  She sat down abruptly on the dry squeaky sand and began critically examining her toe-nails, prising away the grit lodged beneath them with a splinter of palm leaf. Her head felt as huge and empty as the inside of a balloon. There was nothing in the world of any interest or importance, except these sand grains wedged between the rounded pads of flesh and her toe-nails. Cleaning them out was fascinating. They dropped, particle by particle, from those huge hard carapaces covering the pink globes of flesh. As she watched, saw her feet become as big as a giant’s, she saw, too, a long way off, approaching her eyes from behind as it were, a scene, a set-piece … she and Richard laughing and running together in bleached summer grass and then another, of tigers, playing with something they had caught, tossing it and leaping after it, in delight. She’d had the dream again, last night. The animals had not turned on one another at the end of their play. The male tiger had broken off the sport and had walked away, slowly, insolently, into the shadows. The female had stared after him, then had cringed down and curled inwards upon herself. The bars of a cage had formed around her, and tightened. Presently she had become a solitary python, coils pinched cruelly by the wire.

  ‘She did it deliberately. She threw herself in,’ Judith said, but it came out only as a croaking whisper and Kanan, who saw her lips move, did not hear.

  The enormous empty space inside Judith’s head began diminishing swiftly until her skull felt its normal size again. But she was cold now, and shivery, and spasms of nausea contracted her chest. She thought, Minou couldn’t stand the frustration any more. She decided that her people weren’t on that boat, that her purpose had been brought to nothing, that she’d have to live alone, playing Hobday’s baby-doll. I don’t even have that despair to grieve over. I just earn my keep, a function without a purpose.

  Kanan squatted in front of her and stared at her forehead until she looked up. ‘Judith,’ he said quietly, ‘your mind has been shocked, isn’t it? It is better if you stand up and walk about slowly.’

  She was chalky-white, the horrible colour of women who have smeared wet rice-powder on their faces. He moved his hand from right to left in front of her face and she looked at it, unblinking.

  Kanan took her elbow, saying, ‘Come, you must try to stand up.’ She was a dead weight, but unresisting, and he got her to her feet and was steadying her when suddenly her face flooded with colour and she wrenched herself away from him, her eyes vivid. ‘Get your hands off me! Stop pushing me around, Kanan!’

  She noticed that he had the supercilious look of a camel in that lofty head of his.

  Then Mr Hussein arrived and introduced himself.

  There was Mr Hussein and any number of policemen. They strode along waving their arms at the villagers as if they were straying chickens, shooing them back to where they belonged. The adults moved off with surly looks, but the children danced around yelling and darting out of reach when a policeman lunged at them.

  Judith put her hands on her hips and glared at Kanan. ‘I will never forgive you for not bringing the pump,’ she said quietly.

  ‘The pump was irrelevant,’ he replied, and returned her look with an expression of mild indifference.

  Judith snorted and kicked at the sand. ‘Well, I now don’t care what you do. I’ve got to do my duty.’ She sighed heavily. ‘This is a bloody good story. I’ll have to speak to Hobday. Where’s the nearest telephone?’ She noted his shrug of ignorance and distaste. ‘Oh, of course you wouldn’t know. I’ll find out from Hussein.’

  Mr Hussein, however, had other ideas, and since he also had twenty-five policemen at his command, whom he had already ordered to board the boat and arrest the captain, it was necessary to stay on the beach.

  24

  The sky had taken on the lilac haze of dusk. Up at the village men were launching the few boats they had left for the night’s fishing. The village headman had already made an official complaint about the police’s commandeering of the other boats, now motoring back and forth, transporting the refugees to shore, where they were made to sit in rows on the beach while officials from the Kuala Trengganu UN refugee office wrote up their blue cards.

  Soldiers had arrived in trucks and were felling the coconut trees so that they could drive on to the beach and load up the boat people for Cherating. The village headman had made an official complaint about the destruction of the trees, the second time arriving importantly, on his bicycle, with a white business shirt over his singlet. Mr Hussein wrote out his complaint in a shorthand notebook while the headman squinted suspiciously at the Roman script.

  Judith walked between the rows of people asking in English and poor French, ‘Does anyone know Minou, the woman who drowned?’ Their faces were closed. They shook their heads at her. Either they did not know Minou or did not understand Judith’s question or did not care to talk. Ralph had said they were always like this when they first landed: ‘Until they work out what’s going to do them most good they’re all deaf and dumb, figuring out the situation.’

  One teenage girl pointed wordlessly towards the rustcoloured boat. Maybe Minou’s family was on board still. How would you know? Mr Hussein had discovered from the captain, who was sitting apart from his cargo and smoking two-handed because his wrists were still manacled, that there were 416 passengers, including a day-old baby and excluding an old man who had jumped overboard near Thailand.

  Nobody prevented Judith from interviewing the captain, who was a crew-cut Hong Kong Chinese, recklessly boastful now that his game was up. In five months he had collected, he told her, six thousand taels of gold and four hundred thousand dollars in cash. American dollars, not Hong Kong. He made sure she got that right. Who were his principals? Who owned the boat or boats? Who organized the trade? What co-operation did he have from Ho Chi Minh City officials? He raised praying hands to his mouth and took a drag on his cigarette: he could not understand any of these questions.

  Did he think he was trading in human misery? He could not understand that either, apparently, and gazed past her shoulder, out to sea, with that still, reflective
sailor’s look. Then he said, ‘My job. Your job’, and jabbed at her scrappy palmful of notes with a cage of fingers. As she stood up he leant back, flinging one curious glance at her from head to foot. ‘You and me the same. We make money from peoples,’ he said and laughed, grating his handcuffs in the direction of the refugees.

  Judith looked at her watch. If they drove like hell in the Citroen she would have half an hour in Kuala Trengganu to telex her story before the paper was put to bed at ten o’clock, Sydney time. ‘They’ll have to remake the front page,’ she said to Kanan, who had gone to sit in the shade. He nodded incuriously, bored.

  ‘Poor old Hobday, I don’t suppose the police have told him yet,’ she mused.

  Kanan watched irritation move across her face and the small, disdainful jerk of her shoulders as she chucked off the unpleasant thought with the movement a dog would make to dislodge a fly. ‘But they will, soon. Hussein’s a fantastic operator. He’ll arrange that.’ She added, ‘Sydney will have to handle the KL end – Hobday – themselves, by phone.’

  Kanan did not bother to nod for this irrelevant piece of information.

  Earlier, when he had asked Mr Hussein some pleasant questions about his family and so forth Judith had said to him, ‘Kanan, I’ll do the interviewing.’ He’d noticed then that she had crescents of sweat under her armpits and beads of it on her upper lip. The crescents were the size of halfmoons now and her face looked as if she’d rubbed it with melted ghee. The Mahabharata said, ‘A wise man will avoid the contaminating society of women as he would the touch of bodies infected with vermin’.

  Judith realized he was still sulking when they reached the car and he refused her request that he should drive, so that she could write her story on the way. Pleats formed between her eyebrows. ‘Look, I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier. I was really pissed off with you for refusing to help. It seemed cowardly.’

  ‘It seemed,’ Kanan replied. She was surprised to discover that he was capable of anger: his voice was now scornful. ‘I explained to you at the time. But you prefer to rush around. All you Westerners rush, rush. Satyagraha – you say “self-sacrifice” – is a very noble act. You would have interfered and maybe prevented her doing the noble thing she had decided upon. Western people know nothing about sacrifice. Even to fast for one week or to be chaste is impossible for you. You have no control over yourselves.’