Foe (19 page)

Though
his skin is warm, I must search here and there before I find the
pulse in his throat. It is faint, as if his heart beat in a far-off
place. I tug lightly at his hair. It is indeed like lambswool.

His
teeth are clenched. I press a fingernail between the upper and lower
rows, trying to part them. Face down I lie on the floor beside him,
the smell of old dust in my nostrils.

After
a long while, so long I might even have been asleep, he stirs and
sighs and turns on to his side. The sound his body makes is faint and
dry, like leaves falling over leaves. I raise a hand to his face. His
teeth part. I press closer, and with an ear to his mouth lie waiting.

At
first there is nothing. Then, if I can ignore the beating of my own
heart, I begin to hear the faintest faraway roar: as she said, the
roar of waves in a seashell; and over that, as if once or twice a
violinstring were touched, the whine of the wind and the cry of a
bird.

Closer
I press, listening for other sounds: the chirp of sparrows, the thud
of a mattock, the call of a voice. From his mouth, without a breath,
issue the sounds of the island.

* *

At
one corner of the house, above head-height, a plaque is bolted to the
wall.
Daniel
Defoe
,
Author
,
are the words, white on blue, and then more writing too small to
read.

I
enter. Though it is a bright autumn day, light does not penetrate
these walls. On the landing stumble over the body, light as straw, of
a woman or a girl. The room is darker than before; but, groping along
the mantel, I find the stub of a candle and light it. It bums with a
dull blue flame.

The
couple in the bed lie face to face, her head in the crook of his arm.

Friday,
in his alcove, has turned to the wall. About his neck -I had not
observed this before -is a scar like a necklace, left by a r9pe or
chain.

The
table is bare save for two dusty plates and a pitcher. On the floor
is a dispatch box with brass hinges and clasp. I lift it on to the
table and open it. The yellowed topmost leaf crumbles in a neat
half-moon under my thumb. Bringing the candle nearer, I read the
first words of the tall, looping script: 'Dear Mr Foe, At last I
could row no further.'

With
a sigh, making barely a splash, I slip overboard. Gripped by the
current, the boat bobs away, drawn south toward the realm of the
whales and eternal ice. Around me on the waters are the petals cast
by Friday.

I
strike out toward the dark cliffs of the island; but something dull
and heavy gropes at my leg, something caresses my arm. I am in the
great bed of seaweed: the fronds rise and fall with the swell.

With
a sigh, with barely a splash, I duck my head under the water. Hauling
myself hand over hand down the trunks, I descend, petals floating
around me like a rain of snowflakes.

The
dark mass of the wreck is flecked here and there with white. It is
huge, greater than the leviathan: a hulk shorn of masts, split across
the middle, banked on all sides with sand. The timbers are black, the
hole even blacker that gives entry. If the kraken lurks anywhere, it
lurks here, watching out of its stony hooded undersea eyes.

Sand
rises in slow flurries around my feet. There are no swarms of gay
little fish. I enter the hole.

I
am below deck, the port side of the ship beneath my feet, feeling my
way along beams and struts soggy to the touch. The stub of candle
hangs on a string around my neck. I hold it up before me like a
talisman, though it sheds no light.

Something
soft obstructs me, perhaps a shark, a dead shark overgrown with pulpy
flowers of the sea, or the body of a guardian wrapped in rotting
fabric, turn after turn. On hands and knees I creep past it.

I
had not thought the sea could be dirty. But the sand under my hands
is soft, dank, slimy, outside the circulation of the waters. It is
like the mud of Flanders, in which generations of grenadiers now lie
dead, trampled in the postures of sleep. If I am still for more than
a moment I begin to sink, inch by inch.

I
come to a bulkhead and a stairway. The door at the head of the
stairway is closed; but when I put a shoulder to it and push, the
wall of water yields and I can enter.

It
is not a country bath-house. In the black space of this cabin the
water is still and dead, the same water as yesterday, as last year,
as three hundred years ago. Susan Barton and her dead captain, fat as
pigs in their white nightclothes, their limbs extending stiffly from
their trunks, their hands, puckered from long immersion, held out in
blessing, float like stars against the low roof. I crawl beneath
them.

In
the last corner, under the transoms, half buried in sand, his knees
drawn up, his hands between his thighs, I come to Friday.

I
tug his woolly hair, finger the chain about his throat. 'Friday,' I
say, I try to say, kneeling over him, sinking hands and knees into
the ooze, 'what is this ship?'

But
this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is
caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where
bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

He
turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The
skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a
fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in.

His
mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without. breath,
without interruption. It Rows up through his body and out upon me; it
passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and
shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of
the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my
eyelids, against the skin of my face.