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Authors: Candia McWilliam

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BOOK: Debatable Land
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Logan looked at him as though assessing a difference between face and market value. Then his own face loosened, and he smiled.

‘Sandro, get the diving gear, and pass it to us.’

Alec had dived before, in grey sea off Kintyre; he had hated it. The complete severance from others, which he had not thought to fear, shocked him. He was surrounded by a greatness to which he was nothing, but not as one is nothing under the stars; under the sea it had been for him like an unmourned death. Down there, he longed to hear words again, to use them, as he had never longed before. Below the upper surface he realised how his inland taste for solitariness was reliant upon the presence of absent others.

‘He might prefer a snorkel.’ Elspeth was looking in a deep compartment aft of the life rafts. In it were oxygen canisters, wetsuits, spears, flippers. The snorkel she pulled out, and the little mask, seemed like bath toys. ‘The fish will be pretty right at the top. You can almost just stand and stare at them.’

She passed the snorkel and mask down to Nick. Her slow soft body met the wire and marked at once, once at the shin and once on the right forearm. In her skin, shine was replacing glow.

‘Astonishing how you can pass up what’s really challenging,’ said Logan, ‘but it’s different for women.’

He was pleased with some timidity in his wife, not having intuited, as she had, Alec’s misgivings about diving.

‘The horrendous thing when a person gets the bends,’ he resumed, responding to something in the air he did not know he felt, ‘is the angles they get into in their pain. A guy could snap his arm out of its socket and not feel it. The pain is that bad. They can dislocate a limb.’ All the time he had a rapt look on his face. He looked like a child telling an important lie. His tone was one of grave reiteration, a tone of amen.

Everyone who was by the rail listened to hear if he had more to say. When his statements had ebbed, Gabriel, in an exhilarated voice, said, ‘Have we the waterproof fish book? Have we the rug? Have we got money? Petrol can? Antidotes? Just thinking aloud, sorry,’ she said to Elspeth, who had indeed forgotten the hornet-venom antidote syringe her husband required but forgot at all times.

Elspeth went below.

Nick, Alec, Gabriel and Logan waited for her in the Zodiac. A flat supply boat came around the tip of the island, leaving a low pinkish welt of smoke. It was heading back for Tahiti. The fan of its wash passed under, through and past
Ardent Spirit
, and slapped hard on the Zodiac. Nick lowered the flukes of the outboard into the water and settled himself to its port side, with the tiller against his side.

Logan was checking the dials on the gas tanks of the diving gear. Gabriel had her basket on her knee, and her shoes. Her feet were bare on the floor planks of the Zodiac. In that large air it came to Alec that she had scent in her hair. In her ears she had put pink studs of coral. These did not distract from her air of appropriateness.

‘Logan, your antidote, you forgot it,’ called Elspeth. It had not been where she kept it. So often did he lose things he might have hidden them to pass her heavy time.

‘Thank you, dear,’ he said, though she heard the harder words within what he said, and began to consider ways of pleasing him in his absence.

‘Give me that,’ said Gabriel, putting out her hand for the syringe, ‘I’ll keep it safe. I can administer it too.’

She was a useful girl.

Logan unlooped the Zodiac’s stern line. Elspeth threw down her painter, less tidily than she wished. It was one of the things she was trusted to do around the boat. The seamanship required was about sufficient.

The grey rubber boat turned and set its prow to land, leaving three ‘V’s, two within the frilled widest, behind it. Sandro, cross-legged on white sheets of sail on
Ardent Spirit
’s foredeck, looked up and waved, smiling with the sail needle curving in his teeth, adding to his smile.

Elspeth divided by two the time she had anticipated having to herself; in half of it she must make good the rift that had begun to make itself felt between herself and Logan.

‘Drop me, I’ll shop, and then you can collect me and take me to any nice beach you find.’ Gabriel spoke firmly. Her back was straight, her hands locked behind her back on to the Zodiac’s port rowlock. There was a chain around her neck, Alec now saw, small as grains of sand, falling into the shadows between her silky bones. As they approached land, she seemed to adapt herself for it, by a transformation effected not with effort but with tact. He tested his interest in her like a man testing a foothold. He sensed that interest taken in her might be what she was used to; women who take tithes will receive them too, well beyond youth, and Gabriel was young.

‘I like shopping,’ said Logan. Alec realised that his own interest in the girl might well be a natural response to the more urgent interest of another man. The triteness of the animal life in humans struck him even while he saw from the streaming boat the black and green heights of the island ahead, the grey-green field of serried pineapples, and the jetty from which children jumped, knees up around their ears, smacking into the water and swinging out of it again in glee, never learning the pain of the water’s smack among the shouting and companionship that went with it. I am coming to life, maybe, thought Alec, and must not hold it off.

 

Alec resented the way Edinburgh was being trained into new shapes around its residents. Cranes seemed apt and birdlike at the docks, wading among the ships. Stalked into the city, they stood in craters not made by bombs only. The sadistic dentist was getting to work on the too-regular Georgian smile of the New Town. The even-tempered crescents and elucidating squares were an affront to the disjunct spirit of the times. As for the medieval wynds and tenements of the Old Town, they must be rinsed and swilled away to make space for what was to come. Rinse and swill and spit, to make way for colossal bridgework, up-to-date false teeth.

It is hard for humans, thought Alec in Moorea, to reside within an artificial smile without recourse to something stronger than marital sex or the word of God.

On the streets at home there are people living like snails without shells, slowly, featurelessly, uncleanly. A house, many of them have learnt, is a fragile thing, a shell, easily crushed. Its removal will remove part of yourself from you.

Another change had taken place, among the staggering drunks. Loquacious, angry, grandiloquent, falling over, these people had for as long as he could remember congregated near the railway stations and at the warm mouths of tearooms, hairdressers’ shops and matronly hotels. At the docks and in the Old Town they would group, hellishly festive, and allow themselves in the year’s cold seasons to be impounded by such organisations as the Salvation Army and the Mission to Seamen. Many were old soldiers and sailors; some mutilated, though the limbless more often took to music – a mouth organ, a tatty set of pipes and a thrown-down bonnet on the pavement – than to alcohol. The hard drinkers were great talkers and boasters, gesticulating like generals talking strategy. When Alec was a child they were the wounded of a war. The pallid and silent heaps he saw now had been harmed at peace. The heat of carousal the old drunks used to give off had been replaced by a chill where the publicly intoxicated congregated. A drunk on the street would now very likely be middle-class, his desperation floated closer to the surface than in the days of the saving of faces. There are wet trousers where the trousers have been made for the wearer with silver pins and tailor’s chalk.

 

Up Gabriel’s neck grew soft pale hairs in a pattern that ended in two arrows that went deep into the stronger hair.

‘I’ll shop, too,’ Alec said, seeing these.

Nick, though he did not discuss what he wanted until it had been established Logan did not need him, was going to look for the conquering snails and some trace, maybe, of their victims.

‘Tell you what, Alec, then, you shop and we’ll collect you. It’s an unbeatable experience in these coves,’ said Logan. Gabriel gave Alec the shopping list.

The Zodiac nosed the jetty. Logan stepped on to the land and tied the boat up. The sureness of his movements was almost balletic, the graceful product of instinct and practice.

‘There’s the shop,’ he said to Alec. ‘We’ll walk you up there. I’m tempted to see if we can get a goat slaughtered by the time we set sail. Can you butcher or is it like diving?’

So he had noticed, not by words but by some bullying intuition.

‘I can butcher,’ said Nick.

The shop smelt of coconut, orangeade, sweat, petrol, beer, and quiet, perpetual frying. It was dark and hot with a concrete floor and muttering deep freezers, one full of parcels of hard meat in paper, the other of frozen vegetable macedoine and fanciful ice-cream desserts with names like minor works of soft music,
Fantaisie en Rose, Aubade en Robe de Chocolat
. In the low freezer were also kept beauty preparations. The shelves were deep in the attempts of French manufacturers to recreate American food and American food giants to conjure some sophistication. Drums of soda crystals and aggressively named washing powders had been shaped into impromptu chairs on which men sat with soft drinks in cans. A whole wall was dedicated to food for between meals, Cheez Wizz, Cheez Balls, Tandoor Chow Mein Pizza Bites, and sweet drinks. Pineapple and strawberry Nesquik stood next to Eucryl smoker’s tooth powder.

On a door that must lead in to the back of the shop was the poster of a controlled nuclear explosion at Mururoa atoll – a tall gaseous spire of bruise-coloured uncontrol with an orange heart and a sheer glare of white in its core, reflected in a quiet blue sea and sustained by the outraged blue sky. This poster was sold wherever anything was sold in these islands. It had become a good photograph, a labelled image in place of rage, a picture marketed before the word ‘controlled’ had lost any of its shocking cynicism and still marketed by people almost familiar with this habitual outrage done by the French on land and sea and air and water.

Insecure wooden crates of Sprite and Lilt were stacked up in the back, with baskets of the rolled-up posters among them. A collection of feather dusters stuck soft and lush from one roll of posters, a polythene petrol-syphoning tube slumbered among others. Through the blue corrugated plastic roof in which tinselly fibres flickered, came the striped light of day. The rich aromas of drains, roasting fish and beer came from the garage at the side of the shop.

Alec found six hard green oranges in a net and bought some mandarin segments in syrup and a pot of Dundee marmalade to enhance them. By the counter he was amazed to find jars of sweeties he’d not seen for years, among the Chiclets and taffy and Lifesavers; there were nougat prawns, jelly penknives and drunk men’s eyeballs, even Berwick cockles, though here they were labelled Killer Snails in the English and
Super Escargots
in the French, in deference from one colonising power to another.

 

As a small boy, Alec took to visiting the poorer parts of the New Town where people better off and less respectable than his own family lived. They were maybe university people or young doctor couples renting. A fair number of them went without hats. In their rooms at the front you might see a violin or an easel. Cars were infrequent, cats innumerable. A lot of the women in this part of town had their hair down and wore trousers.

He enjoyed his visits to these parts because they were so different from his own district, because the visits were secret, and, he saw now, because he was attracted by the way of life. Then he just wanted to carry on in his own way without too much attention and these people in their voluntary oddness seemed unlikely to observe him. Alec was averse to confrontation to a degree that kept him continually mildly compromised; he disliked telling the whole truth in case its edge should, no matter how paperily, cut someone. Least of all did he wish to harm – or tell the truth to – his mother.

Her legs by now had eely varicose veins up behind her knees. Her black hair had a wing of white. The shadows round her eyes had always been dark but they were no longer matched by her high colour. She had much disliked a year spent cleaning clams on the gutting floor, the clattering shells and pluggy, featureless creatures.

‘At least fish have an expression. A clam has no features. There is nothing to get to know,’ she said to Alec, a remark he only now, as he thought of her under this shady heated afternoon’s remembering mood, recognised as either dangerous or sad. She would have been horrified had he suggested to her that she was implying a wish to gut only creatures familiar to her.

It was rather that she was casting about for something to meet her eye. She was lonely in a way that is part of the sort of marriage she and his father made. Alec was no companion for her. In her idea of him, her ambition for his future, she had, with considerable sacrifice, resigned herself to his life’s betterment, as she saw it, at the expense of their closeness. She wanted him to become the sort of young man who did not know women like herself, although she also wished him to retain in himself her backbone and steely standards.

She was not, either, a demonstrative woman. Tears she retained by working in her house until their time had passed over.

Alec took pennies from his father and mother, from small stores hidden in places unknown to the other but known to him. He could smell out pennies anywhere with their copper and verdigris tang.

BOOK: Debatable Land
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