Debatable Land (2 page)

His blue van, shared with his partner Fordyce Macrae, had shelves of slatted wood in the back, and stalls to hold the buckets firm as he drove on his deliveries over the hills of the city. Anything over he would sell to housewives before he went to work at the shop. He parked the van down by the clock at Canonmills, by the Water of Leith. The women stood in a woolly queue, their net bags ready for the morning’s catch. Every one of them wore a hat on her head, or a headscarf. Hair is a modern accessory. Alec’s father made a parcel of even the smallest purchase, two skate-knobs for a minister’s housekeeper, a single roll of coley for an old man without teeth. Taking the fish in his left hand he placed it dead centre atop the pile of grey-blue paper, and folded it with envelope ends to stop any leaks, pulling out his left hand at the last moment to give a squaring-off slap to the parcel. He made out receipts with care from the pad headed ‘Dundas and Macrae’. Each action came to him easily. He was in his element. The silver streets of Edinburgh in the fresh morning might have been rivers to him.

Mairi was not so aswim. She feared the sea, that had reached her grandfather down from a foredeck at night and pocketed him deep in a net heavy with starfish. The ominous weight of starfish in a net has fishermen miserable before they find a man in it, a drowned comrade become a mass of hungry muscular stars.

Alec she had named Alexander for her grandfather and it was upon him that her hopes of rescue rested, optimistic and transparent as a message in a bottle.

It was not that she disliked fish. She merely wished it in its place. At night when she smelt his father’s and her own mixed sleep it cannot have been that of warm-blooded animals resting between dry sheets and under wool in a house on dry land, but that of seals among weed and wrack. Then perhaps she felt the deck slip and her own grip loosen and the sea open.

Maybe it was on mornings after such nights that she cleaned with even more zeal than usual, abrading and scouring and sluicing until she left the house with a clarity of air and freedom from dust whose unwitting effect was solely marine.

Nick Pedersen had one pair of shorts and a pair of spectacles that were held around his neck on a string black with sweat, salt and oil. He lived at sea and was at home on it wherever there were winds. His calmness and slowness to speech gave him the apparent dullness that was his great advantage in foxing people. He had begun his life on the hot metal presses, in Essex. At these presses, his father had tweezed and dropped letters, spaced them with beautiful tense spaces held open by discretion and metal, and locked them into their formes. When he saw that the work he had pined for was disappearing, Nick told his father of his plan to get out on to the sea and his father had told him to do it while there was still room on the water. He spoke of the sea as though it were a page growing ever more crowded with poorly spaced letters.

Nick was admired in many ports for his patience. He could fix all engines, even the sulkiest, even the engines of fridges. He did not see the need for patience since it was interest that lured him as he dismantled the questions set before him and reassembled them as answers. He had a swot’s face and pirate teeth and the newt-like body often thought of as intellectual. His reputation arrived before him in harbour. Logan had put out the word in ports across the Pacific that there was a place for him if he wanted it on the last leg of
Ardent Spirit
’s voyage from the Panama Canal to New Zealand. Over oceans the gossip travels in bounteous sneezes, chatter reaching islands at dawn, multiplying with the lifting sun and moving off to infect and settle the next atoll before the abrupt darkness. Nick was curious about the boat and joined her in the Marquesas.

Sandro Hughes was a New Zealander. If the Scots are the most emigrated people on earth, the New Zealanders must have most nationals afloat, outside of a navy. The boats of New Zealand outnumber the people on water as do the sheep on land. Sandro’s mother came from North Italy. In Auckland she ran an Italian restaurant called the Check Tablecloth, where she made Italian food with a New Zealand flavour. Lawyers came every night for her oyster cocktail in a sundae glass. One or other handsome son waited at table, combining the mother’s punctilio with the father’s aversion to what he saw as fawning.

Sandro and his brother Luca alternated their periods of absence from the flat on top of the restaurant, to spare their mother the loneliness of life with a man who had decided to resent the native land of a wife he had once chosen for her eyes, her cooking, her forgiving unwillingness to close up against what she did not know. Sandro, at twenty-four, had made it twice to the Panama Canal but the first time his papers were lifted in Colon City and the second time he got drunk with a man who said he was a mercenary though he had no detail of where. In the morning Sandro saw the boat that would have taken him through to the next sea, held in its place in the deep canal by straining ropes and heckled by dirty pilot boats that seemed to threaten its sudden departing smallness among the great precipitous ships of purpose, trade, tourism, national power. He was left behind by these things and did not much care. At last he found
Ardent Spirit
, after reading a postcard on a board in a bar. After five different men had checked him out over two afternoons, he met Logan, who took him on.

Sandro had, instead of the patriotism he might have, had not his mother divided and his father made repulsive such an idea, a high romantic regard for sailing boats. He loved them and learnt quickly the mood of each boat he lived and worked on.
Ardent Spirit
, for instance, had a list to port before certain winds and under certain combinations of canvas. At her best, she sailed more perfectly, more nearly silently, than any boat he had been on. Her ornamental interior he noticed and did not mind, while Nick saw it and was irritated somewhat at details that he felt were pointless enough on land. Sandro forgave the vessel’s fine innards and her well-made solidity, even the sofa cover patterned with stylised marine knots, the shelves battened to measure for books, the tantalus socketed in its cupboard, the rotating captain’s chair plugged with buttons, before a chart table big enough, really, to eat off, to sleep on.

And it was so that above, on deck, such detail lost the note of frivolity although it was incidentally elegant, being entirely bent on purpose and maintained at a level that might be called groomed. Each rope, for fear of catching and holding and thus, at such great weights of sail, tearing off a hand or foot, was coiled invariably, discreetly, concentrically, paid down inside itself – even if it had to be so in exactly the same manner again two minutes later. Winch handles were stowed as though they were sharp knives. The deck was smooth and white and close-set with only the regular golden freckle of brass screws to hold it. Towards the bow the hardly visible curve of the deck took the eye like the wing of a hovering bird as its two sides approached one another precisely, minutely, the tessellation of the pale wood meeting without demarcation.

Sandro shared his cabin with Gabriel Shepherd, whom Logan had taken on as cook. She was tactful about being female. So far the only disturbance she had caused him was by her occasional mutterings into a small tape recorder. She was describing the journey to her mother, to whom she regularly sent these tapes. Sandro listened from the lower bunk (he had offered Gabriel the choice of whether to sleep above or below; embarrassment must not even commence in so confined a space or it spreads more treacherously than a silent fart) as she spoke rather shyly into her machine, whose absence of response in the silence sometimes seemed a bit rude. Often, he was struck by how different was Gabriel’s account of things from any he might have given, was giving, he supposed, in a more cryptic way, in what he told Gabriel was his diary but what was in fact the long letter to his mother that he stopped writing only to post and then at once resumed.

Gabriel was an English girl, come to try out the world, Sandro supposed, before going home to an English man. She spoke in the old-fashioned way and wore a nightgown, under which she undressed, even when the watch system meant her sleeping times came during the day. Nonetheless, although she was slight, Gabriel was tough; she could crack walnuts in her palms and go up in the bosun’s chair’s spinning and creaking harness, where she’d hang at the top of the mast doing chores sixty feet up at a tilt as though she was taking cobwebs off the moon with a feather duster for fun. Sandro listened, not knowing that he did so, for any mention of himself in Gabriel’s tapes. He knew the backs of her legs and her feet’s soles well from lying exhausted in his bunk below hers. Both of them knew the other’s unthinking habits since they had seen one another in states of extreme exhaustion usually shared only by pairs of people who are coupled, and are able only to brush tired shorthand kisses on to one another at the beginning or end of shifts with work or sleepless infant.

It was Gabriel’s Englishness, in a way, that had brought out the ill temper of everyone eating breakfast. The relief at leaving hot, expensive Papeete was considerable, like at last having a drink of water or a shower, two things paradoxically rationed at sea.

The berth at Papeete was no more than a busy road, noisy at night and heavy with the fumes of traffic, beer, fast food, so that living on the boat felt more cramped than it did out at sea, where their accommodation was not exposed to the curiosity of all strangers. At night in their urban berth, a glaring lamp was set up in
Ardent Spirit
’s shrouds, to discourage drunks from coming aboard to sleep in her sail bin. The hatches had to be shut, or pranksters would creep over the deck to drop cigarettes or worse in on sleepers, so it was suffocatingly hot below. The harbour water had a skin of oil that made the water move slowly and left black smears of dead rainbow on the white hulls of the boats lolling, tied stern-to up to the pavement along which roamed tourists in various stages of disillusion with the place, a paradise handled.

Only when approached as any other colonial town did Papeete begin to reveal such charm as it had. The decontraction associated with earthly delights withers when it is a question of affording the water or the apple, but not both. The dissension in the saloon of
Ardent Spirit
, that first morning for all six together at sea, concerned cheese.

The cheese was from Paris, the city that administered Tahiti. Plastic Port Salut, flown to New Caledonia and brought on a cargo ship to Tahiti from Noumea, with such tropical essentials as heated rollers, fake tan, artificial flowers, pineapple juice and the hair accoutrements known as rats.

‘Ten pounds for a piece of cheese that has travelled the world by three different forms of transport, signed all the relevant forms, hung about in at least two warehouses and remains absolutely unchanged by its experiences. It is a narrow-minded cheese,’ said Gabriel, ‘for narrow-minded French consumers.’

Unpleasant emotions about the French are unleashed by French colonies in some sorts of Briton. In Papeete, it was not hard for the most Francophile to see things reflecting badly on the administrators of the island. Among sights more glancingly combining the best of the cultures here melted together, the stately transvestites walking abreast punctuated in their reined-in strides by a little black poodle, the green pharmacy cross nicely medicinal in a street of
boulangeries
selling sorbets like frozen inks, in the sheer shade of mountains ribboned with silver waterfalls, there was to be seen a Frenchness that was less seductive and that did not include the people colonised except as they were of use.

Logan Urquhart was not wholly for spirited opinions in women unless voiced with concision and consonant with his own feelings on the matter. In this case he agreed to the extent that he found the French greedy and pusillanimous while admiring some superficial aspects of their culture. He was wary of going too far this early in a voyage when he had to live so closely with his wife, a Scot who keenly felt the Auld Alliance of blood and philosophical speculation with the French. Elspeth often expressed feelings about the English similar to those Logan held about the French. He wondered sometimes if her talk about the French was not worn like costume jewellery to make herself interesting at little expense. Since, anyhow, he imagined he could predict what Elspeth might say, he prepared himself for a period in the conversation during which he anticipated she might speak; so he began to think of other things, a uxorious habit even more practical on a boat than on dry land.

It is odd, thought Alec, that this boring conversation is no less boring because we are tipped up in the Pacific Ocean by a miracle of wind and water, moving through their agency to another place we shall fail to understand, discuss clumsily, forget, and then, as time builds lies into beauty recollected, recall transformed. Why did I come here? Why did I think I could change things in my life without changing myself?

As the tropical day began with its misleading purity to steal into and refresh them all, so they each saw ahead in this early heat of ill-temper the real danger of anger in a confined space and each, without knowing he or she did so, made a delicate concession and turned words through the uncomfortable degrees of angry argument to the pleasant pastime of exchanging differing opinions. The two women, Elspeth and Gabriel, led in this, conceding repeatedly and denying their own seriousness, until each danger was past and every person on board was returned to the position most conducive to peace, forward movement, and the maintenance of the status quo.

Having come to this extreme place to assess his own life among strangers, Alec felt his misgivings weigh him down. Had he not simply recreated, in farcically condensed form, the difficulties he wished to sort out? Was the extremity of the situation, shut up in a pretty husk with five other souls between planets and sea monsters, not just a newer nightmare, more vulgar because so rich in psychological archetypes?