Debatable Land (25 page)

The shaking under the earth seemed to be intensifying, forming itself around Elspeth. Could her mother and father feel it? Her father was writing in a notebook, her mother watching him with great interest while feeling in her bag for something. More of her mind is in her handbag looking for a cigarette than is with my father, thought Elspeth. She knew she was right. Her mother took out a cigarette and put it in the middle of her mouth, then turned with her back to the wind to coax a flame from her lighter. The dirty smell of lighter fuel spoiled the perfume of tobacco. Her mother put the cigarette between the first two fingers of her right hand and moved her mouth towards the hand, not the other way about. It made her look like an elegant lifesize doll. The smoke she seemed to drink, eat and then breathe out when she had taken all the goodness from it.

Neither parent, apparently, was receiving the persistent throbbing from under the earth. It was now beginning to steam up out of the ground, a beating without sound but reverberant, terribly reminding her of things she had heard of but did not want to understand. Most of all she feared that she was about to be shown something that would change her life. She did not want a changed life. She liked the one she had.

The shaking was not only in the air but in her own bones. Rumours of something she was unprepared to look in the eyes trembled through her legs, up through the basin of her pelvis, making her want to pee and cry at wanting to do so. She wondered if she was going to be sick, but it was not that. The trembling was distant and also inside her, not a fluttering but a deep redistribution of the rhythms of her organs. Something breaking out from below the earth or laying an unbearable burden on it was approaching, and it would arrive through her. She shook. Her face was alive with a concentration that was what Elspeth could in these moments accumulate of prayer, she who had been taught that prayer was not just useless but wrong. Feeling what she took to be the devil, she took up the only remedy she had heard of.

It had to be Elspeth who spoke first.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she said to her parents, believing them omniscient still, and knowing them good.

‘Why did you bring me to this place? It is bad.’

Callum Kerr shook himself for experimenting upon his child. He took her by the hand and walked towards the stone the crows had flown up from. Seeing what he had thought a stone was a dead sheep on its side, the head a bare trophy hanging skew off the sodden fleece, he turned her and they walked a different way. How had the Highlanders marched, men unused to flat fighting in company, preferring the hand-to-hand of skirmish, swordsmen not gunmen?

‘There was a battle here.’

‘Is it that I feel?’

‘It may be. Mother would say not.’

‘Doesn’t she believe in evil?’

‘She would say not. I fear I do. But I know there is good, more certainly.’

‘I’m tired.’

‘You should be. I have the rug. Will you sit on it?’

Callum spread the rug. It was made of mohair and bubbled under its soft long fibres with reassuring stitches that were raised like poodle fur. Elspeth lay down and slept for perhaps ten minutes, stroking a fold of rug again and again. The familiarity of the rug leaked in to her; when she awoke she was no longer trembling.

The sky was too clean, the earth too bare, to hold the complicated terror she had felt. She looked up.

The pouring song of the lark, hardly audible but quite clear, came down to them.

She and her father walked hand in hand over Culloden Moor, telling its inches and the weak parts yards wide where a man who fell would be drowned in black mud, and at half-past three in the afternoon, after eating the paste-and-tomato sandwiches provided by their landlady, they came upon what they could not have expected, the nest of the lark. They saw it from six feet away, noticeable though perfectly camouflaged, exactly because of the perfection of its needlework and fine freckling among the darned and mottled turf of Culloden. They left it alone.

That was the first time I consciously saw a white lie, and it was told by a bird, thought Elspeth, on the boat. The lark that was not singing but guarding the nest ran to and fro holding its wing at an odd angle as though it was broken, just to make the predator it thought we were take
it
and leave the eggs in peace. A white lie made for its nestlings.

Gabriel is not yet hatched, she thought, rocking in her berth inside the boat her father never saw and would have feared for its competence. He had been a man with superstitious, inhibiting misgivings about things that worked; he preferred the gentler challenge of things requiring a bit of going-over before they could be encouraged to splutter into life. He found something a little fascistic about things that worked first time.

The throwing away of a tool or machine because it did not work was decadence itself in his eyes. Something could always give its constituent parts to something else; nothing that was broken could not be saved with time and patience. The execution of the boat would have shocked him with its directness. Machines that worked lost a beauty for him.

‘You sound almost like you are on his side,’ Logan would say, when she defended an underdog, even sometimes a villain, when she pleaded for reprieve for some person or thing that had fallen short of perfect function.

‘I can’t help it, I am like Dad.’ She had not realised it before.

‘Yes, you are. And he is a failure.’ The faint shame about her father she had felt intermittently for years fell away for good on hearing those words. What Logan had said was true for a world that his judgement on her father freed her from for good. The failure of her father struck her as pure and incorruptible, new and flexible and responsive. Success was a metallic thing with a brassy note, failure more modulated, harder to tune, but an instrument for the mutuality of man.

Each extremity of her conclusion was artificial and misleading. She had replaced success with failure as the right way to set about the world.

‘You either ride the tiger, or get eaten,’ Logan said. ‘And your father would get eaten. In the real world.’

‘The Real World’ was the place Logan knew and Elspeth did not. It was home to almost everyone who lived ‘Real Life’, people who understood how the world worked and could explain it to you in sixty words or fewer.

‘My father would get eaten, but the tiger would get tremendous indigestion,’ said Elspeth. ‘He might have to change his stripes.’

‘A leopard changes its spots, not a tiger its stripes. Your father is an idealist.’ Logan left the conversation at the point where it could sink no lower.

‘“Your father is an idealist,”’ repeated Elspeth to herself, almost ready to sleep, testing Logan’s sentence pronounced upon her father in her own game of sentences. It was not offputting enough to get anywhere much in her game of offputting first sentences, addicted novel readers having a taste for reading about failure, whose implications are so free and aerated beside the certainties of success.

Gabriel lay in her bunk, talking into the tape machine, cupping her hands around it as she had cupped her hands around her schoolwork as a girl. Neither secrecy was, or had been, needed.

Below her, in his bunk, Sandro planned the homecoming he would hit his parents with. He reckoned they could get a few days off if he warned them. Then he was going to take them down to Geyserland and put them up in a motel with sulphur baths. His mother moved stiffly around the kitchen; she insisted on using black pots made of iron that each weighed more than a pig. She cleaned the risotto pans with salt and lemon after the last eater had gone, and sluiced the kitchen down whatever the time. Her hands were impregnated with the smells of bleach and garlic. He would soak the work out of her. He planned the country drives he would take them on if he could borrow a pick-up. He knew a guy with a fruit farm; the farm was a failure, but as far as Sandro knew the guy still had his pick-up.

‘It’s the fault of you guys my yield’s got to be pulped or sold cheap for syrup. Kiwi fruit was good gear till the Eyeties come into it. Christ knows what I’m to do with an acreage of hedgehog bollocks that I could’ve kept down to sheep.’

In the end Sandro’s friend Norm pulled out of kiwi fruit after getting a reasonable deal from a frozen luxury desserts manufacturer who operated by one of the wharves in Auckland and did not go bust till after the cheque to Norm had gone through. Insecurity added ill-temper to the normal Kiwi xenophobia, but Sandro did not mind it for himself; he relished having easy jokes among his friends.

The types they made out of every nationality other than their own were so crude they could only be jokes. The only place it struck him as bad was with the Maoris; there was a big wide street in Auckland where there was a shop that sold small things you might need, snap-shackles, hammers, buckram tape, and a couple of things for women like soap and disinfectant and nappies. It was a depressed shop, but in its way it flourished. There were two reasons for this: one was that many people forget the thing they most need, and have to buy it unplanned; the other was that people came to the shop, which was named The Necessary, to read its windows.

Every inch of window space in the shop was taped from within with long messages from the keeper of the shop and those who thought as she did. The messages were addressed to any Maori who might be passing by. ‘You think yous the same but yous not animal scum. Dare to come in show yourselfs not chicken. Fist time I met one of yous he had a bone in the nose no garments to speak of and was illitrtit now it’s the dollar and where does it all go.
down the throats
of begging men that eats lizards and gets kids twelve a year.’ These notices were written in close, small lettering that moved in and out of capitals like the voice of a blind drunk.

Sandro had only ever seen non-Maoris reading these notices, which changed frequently and must be brought in by some shoppers. He wondered if Maori passers-by identified the shop for a place of hostility, if it was famously putrid like the tramp whom you stepped over the road not to smell, the one who ate soap and consequently thought he was washing each time he peed in his clothes. Sandro’s mother gave this old guy – Soapy was his name not surprisingly – soap in bargain lots, shrink-wrapped; she hid cakes of cake in with it, for Soapy to eat and get the nutrition.

He would take his parents away from the town where people feared those different from themselves. He would show his mother and father the hot blue sulphur lakes of Rotorua and in the evening they would have trout he had tickled himself, cleaned and cooked in the blue, like in a restaurant where you did not do the cooking yourself.

He had grown so used to the talking of Gabriel and found her English voice so uptight that he could not understand it very well. Sleep began to cover him. He heard through the hull the swill inside the waves.

‘I’ve met someone very nice here,’ said Gabriel into her tape recorder. ‘I think you would agree.’

Where the hell did you meet people cooped up in a boat like this, Sandro barely wondered, though he tried to hook into his mind that in the morning he must take a fresh look at that Alec.

Chapter 8

The retreating view of Bora Bora was at first fresh and overbright like a paste gem.
Ardent Spirit
put out to sea, at last, beyond the reef. Land left by boat appears to slip away at the same rate as time. Time comes alongside.

Every space within the boat was once more loaded for the voyage to Tonga. The last thing they had bought on Bora Bora was a tank of outboard fuel for the dinghy. Elspeth carried it home in a plastic demijohn. It sat fair on the slats in the bottom of the dinghy, plastic top secured by a springy loop on the base. The thread could not have been properly engaged, though, because when she passed the demijohn up to Alec, a little fuel trickled from the neck. On the deck, absorbed at once, it seeped, shockingly wide, over the teak. It was sudden and disproportionate as a nosebleed.

Gabriel was watching. ‘Don’t worry, Elspeth,’ she called, ‘I’ll clean the deck.’

So Logan heard, and came, as he would not have had Alec gone below without comment to find the holy stone.

‘Lovely work, Gabriel. Careless or what, Elspeth?’

By the second day at sea, when they were settled into the watch system, the sense of dedication to making a passage involved them all. Thoughts of the boat came before thoughts of themselves. This was so even for Alec who had not lived at sea before.

Sandro was the lightest and best at handling canvas, so he was busy on the foredeck when he was not doing his turn at the wheel. He slept quite often in the sail bin, a privilege earned by being the one who mended the sails, folded them with Nick or Alec’s help and returned them to their light bags. Sandro had made long trips in boats not merely without the refinements of this one but with only two sails and no cover but tarpaulin. This did not make him despise the elaborateness of this boat, but made him aware of how much more could go wrong on
Ardent Spirit
. The boat he loved most was a simple metal craft named
Joshua
. He had never been in her, but looked at her in awe whenever they shared a harbour. She had been around the Horn the wrong way. Her skipper was her sole sailor, though sometimes he travelled with his wife, who was beautiful.
Joshua
’s surface was fitted at intervals with metal handholds, so that you could sail her in all dimensions, at all angles. She was a hull and sails, tough and refined.