Back of Beyond (38 page)

SHE:
I told you I don’t have them.

HE:
Yes, you do.

SHE:
I
never
had them.

HE:
I brought them for you. You asked me.

SHE:
I’ve never seen them.

HE:
They were on the pile.

SHE:
Did you move them?

HE:
No. Did you?

SHE:
How could I if I never knew they were there?

(Long pause and sounds of searching through backpacks. Then a sort of embarrassed silence.)

SHE:
I’ve found them.

HE:
I told you they were there.

SHE:
I must have forgotten.

HE:
I wish you’d listen to what I say.

SHE:
Why? Are you always right?

HE:
More often than you think.

SHE:
Why are you being nasty?

HE:
I’m not being nasty. I’m being honest.

SHE:
You’re getting angry now.

HE:
I’m definitely not getting angry.

SHE:
Why are you so angry all the time?

HE:
It’s things like this that make me angry.

SHE:
You must have a very deep anger inside.

HE:
I do not.

SHE:
Why are you so defensive?

HE:
You make me defensive, saying I’m always angry. You always assume I’m wrong.

SHE:
I don’t always assume you’re wrong.

HE:
It’s a pattern. You always do it.

SHE:
What a horrible person you make me out to be.

HE:
You’re not horrible. You just act unpleasantly at times. Like I’m being dishonest. It hurts.

SHE:
Well you’re not always honest.

HE:
Neither are you.

SHE:
And you’ve often hurt me.

HE:
You often hurt yourself.

SHE:
No, I don’t.

HE:
You do. I did nothing to hurt you intentionally.

SHE:
Well—you did anyway.

HE:
I’m sorry. But sometimes that’s your problem, not mine.

SHE:
Oh—very clever.

HE:
It’s not clever at all. It’s the truth.

SHE:
I must be a terrible person..

HE:
No you’re not. You just keep dumping on me, and I’m getting tired of it.

SHE:
I don’t mean to dump on you.

HE:
So why do it?

SHE:
I don’t know.

HE:
Do we have a problem? Something we should talk about?

SHE:
I don’t know.

HE:
Do you still love me?

SHE:
Yes. Do you still love me?

The rest of the conversation was lost to the din of the traffic. We were passing through another village and chaos reigned as usual. They seemed to reach an amicable hiatus though. When I finally turned around they were both asleep, her head on his shoulder. (It’s amazing how little non-incidents like this helped pass the time.)

Bus travel seems endless. People get on, people get off, but the journey goes on forever. The only thing that changed were the occupants of the seat beside me. So far I’d had three Indian companions, each of whom had slept through all the noise, heat, and confusion. I envied them their tranquility.

Then came a spritely young woman, a nurse from Eire, with a wonderful singsong way of talking. All her sentences ended in an upswing of Irish brogue. In spite of five months of backpacking around India from ashram to ashram, she still retained that bright-eyed enthusiasm of the novice traveler. Nothing seemed to phase her. She was totally in love with her life on the road—not a bit of the tired TET anywhere. I envied her too and was sorry to see her leave.

And then Dick Davies arrived, a young Welshman with a prematurely old face, deeply lined and flecked with dark scars. He wore an old suede hat, Australian style with one brim turned up, baggy green corduroys, and a torn leather jacket so stained with grease, food, blood, and mud that it was difficult to tell its original color.

At first I thought that he too would sleep out the journey like my three Indian companions, but our conversation became animated when we compared notes on Kathmandu and the Himalayas.

“I’m a real white-water nut,” he told me with a grin that made his old face suddenly look very young. “Himalayas, Central America, New Zealand, Africa, you name it. I’ve been kayaking there.”

He was a true world wanderer, who had spent most of the last decade of his life seeking out white-water wonderlands all around the globe. I felt envious once again.

“I’ve never done any white-water stuff,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think I’d enjoy it that much.”

He laughed. “It doesn’t make that much difference what you do really. Like anything good in life, you end up pretty much in the same place.”

“And you get there by kayaking.”

“Yeah. Listen, I’m not one of the religious types. Y’know. You’ve met them. Nepal, Ladakh, the south. They’re all over India. They’re all looking for something that makes everything make sense.”

“Centering?”

“Centering? Okay—that’s your word. Call it anything you want. It’s all the same. You know what it is when you get there.”

“And kayaking. That’s what you do.”

“Yeah. But it could be something else—anything.”

The driver had finally turned off the tape. It was really hot now in spite of the breeze through the open windows of the bus. Everyone seemed to be asleep.

“What’s it like? Kayaking.”

Dick smiled and sighed. “It’s a bit of everything. It’s good some days, lousy other times. Like life. You take a knock and you get up and you go again. Each time, it’s better. You learn to trust. You learn to trust yourself, and you learn to trust the water. You never fight her, try to beat her. She’ll always win. You’ve got to read her right—understand her.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Hard work, boyo! You walk each set of the rapids first.”

“Walk?”

“On the edge, on the boulders. Try to see the next one and the one after that. Try to see it all, find out where the rocks are, how wide the chutes, where the keeper waves are—they can be rough—they go backwards—they’ll spin you like a top—like a bloody blender. If there’s rocks underneath, you can bust your legs—chop, chop, chop—smash ’em to pieces. It’s those that don’t do their homework that never get back to brag about it.”

“But what’s it really like? When you’re actually in there heading for the rapids?”

“Lousy. Like you’re going to piss your pants—or worse.”

“Every time?”

“Almost. Sometimes it happens too fast and you don’t have time to think what you’re thinking. You trust your memory—and your instincts. You’ve never got time to make second decisions. If it’s a string of rapids—those are the best—and you come out wrong from the first one, well, you’ve just got to improvise. That’s when you need your instincts. All the stuff you’ve ever learned. One paddle wrong and the bloody thing can be upside down in a twinkling and then you’ve got problems. A whirlie’ll get you sure as mustard if you’re not ready for it. You get in a hole, under a rock and you’re there forever!”

“Is this what you tell people?”

“Hell—that’s just the start!” He paused and lit a bidi cigarette. “You’ve got no idea. You’ve always got to be ready—for anything. Stopper rocks—they flip you, and they’re hard to miss if you don’t get enough of a warning. Then there’s haystacks, souses, satins, eddies, fillies, and spinners. If you hit them wrong they’ll send you twisting all over the shop, right into an eye or something.”

“What’s an eye?”

“You’ll only get to look into a good one once. When you’re being sucked in, round and round, like on the inside of an ice cream cone. And there’s the eye—the black eye—right at the bottom. If you get that close its bye-bye bay, bye-bye.”

“You do this kind of kayaking often?”

“Often as I can.”

I knew I was going to ask him. And I did. “Why this? Why not something a bit safer?”

“Hell, if I knew the answer to that one…”

“You get a high or something? Adrenaline?”

“Yeah, yeah. You get high. Later. But when you’re in it—I don’t know—it’s hard to say what it is. But it gets into you. Even if you don’t do it for weeks—months. There was a year once I never went near white water. My legs were shot. One broken in two places, the other mangled up below the knee. But I knew I’d be back. Once you’ve done it for a while, and once you get the hang of it…”

He paused and sucked on his bidi.

“You’re alive. I’m not kidding. You’re so alive you could bust a nut. I don’t get that feeling from anything else. Not even in bed…y’know. Doesn’t matter who I’m with. I never get it like I get it on a ride—when you’re heading for that edge, right after the riffs, and—even if you’ve done your homework—you still don’t know, there’s no way you can tell—what the hell’s gonna happen next, except that you’re going down, you’re going over the drop, down the chute, and you’re not going to finish until you’re finished—or until she’s finished with you.”

“Why she? Why not it?”

“Oh, it’s a bloody ‘it’ sometimes. Most times it’s an it. You curse the bastard. But like I said…she gets you, she gets into you, and you can’t stop going back. And when the ride’s over. When you get to the back end and she’s calmed out and you’re floating around feeling great and dead cocky…. Well—you know, she just feels like a woman….”

“Like she knows what you’ve done.”

“Yeah. Yeah that’s something like it. Like she knows what you’ve done. Like you’re okay. You got through again…”

“And that you’ll be back.”

“Oh yeah. Hell—yeah. She knows you’ll be back. Just like a woman knows…”

We both sat quietly for a while. Something he’d said brought back a memory.

“Y’know, I almost drowned when I was a kid,” I said. “Near a waterfall. I fell under and couldn’t get back up. I’m sure that stupid experience put me off the idea of messing around on white water.”

“Oh yeah. Well—that can do it.”

“You never got close to drowning?”

He nodded but didn’t seem to want to talk about it. The smoke from his cigarette curled around his hat.

“One time I think I did drown.” He spoke slowly.

“Meaning?”

“Well, I don’t know really. Something strange. Still don’t know what happened….”

I knew he wanted to tell me so I just waited. He lit another cigarette.

“Ah—it was a long time back. When I first got started. I’d only been doing it a few weeks. And I was lousy. I mean lousy. I couldn’t get the hang of it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t come right. Anyway, this one day I was up in Scotland by myself, the Cairngorms, trying to get it right, and everything’s going okay until, hell—I was under the boat and then out of it and I couldn’t touch the bottom and I didn’t know where the hell I was. And jeez, was it cold! Real brass monkey stuff and churning away like mad. Currents all over the place, and I was flippin’ over like a hooked fish. I’d sucked in a lot of water, I couldn’t find the surface. It was black as pitch. I’d got no air left. I knew I was drowning. And all these weird things were happening. You get flashbacks like they tell you—I was crying because I’d broken my mother’s best plate. Then I was on a soccer pitch with the mates. All kinds of stuff. Coming home down the lane from church past the pub and hearing them all singing…and then it all sort of went quiet and it wasn’t like I was in water or anything…it was just okay and there didn’t seem to be much to worry about anymore….”

His cigarette trembled in his fingers. The afternoon sun flickered through a filigree of tree along the roadside.

“And then. Well everything got weird. I wasn’t in the water. I was on the bank, sitting on some sand, and the boat was right by me and it looked fine and I felt fine…I wasn’t even coughing or anything.”

He shook his head and grinned.

“Hell—I dunno what happened. Still don’t. I thought I’d drowned, lost it. Into the great yonder and all that. Weird. I don’t know how the hell I got to be sitting like a Sunday afternoon fisherman on a riverbank with the boat and everything—all together in one piece.”