Playing with Water (30 page)

We are at about a hundred and twenty feet, to judge from the pressure, the species of fish and occasional plants. Even
at midday the light down here is muted to the dimmest blue. The extravagance of foliage swaying in the brightness of the upper water becomes, at this depth, the occasional bank of dark weed whose colour is lost because the lens of water above them filters out practically all red and orange light wavelengths. But the holes in the rocks are full of fish and the increasingly large stretches of sand are not deserts at all. They are alive with shellfish making their purposeful, wavering tracks, with swaying garden eels growing like beds of reeds ready to retract into their holes, with fish drowsing motionlessly just above the seabed while those species which are active at night cruise restlessly above them in the dark. Every so often I turn round completely, flashing the light behind me to surprise anything which has been attracted to the activity and has warily approached. By this method I have already speared (lucky shot) a small barracuda two feet long and viciously toothed and now I turn and am confronted with the large silver platter of a
mabilog
, a roundish fish of the pampano family which tries too late to shy away from the light. It has already turned when my spear takes it from behind through one open gill and going clean out through its mouth. It is too big to thread alive onto the catch-line, its struggles would be a great hindrance, so I kill it by putting a finger and thumb up under its gill-covers and pinching its heart shut. This is a good quick method but it is unfortunately only practicable for certain species. Some fish are too large to allow one’s fingertips to meet inside while others have razor edges to their gill-covers.

At this point two immense spurs of rock extend like roots from the island, anchoring Tiwarik to the sound. Between these mountain ranges there is a deep ravine floored with sand. I now fly slowly along this valley as through the skies of Drune itself, studying its floor from a few feet up. I must be at a hundred and fifty feet now for the air from the compressor somewhere far overhead no longer gushes into my mouth but leaks sluggishly. If for any reason I had to quicken my respiration rate I should have to drag the air into my lungs. If I were alone on the machine this would not happen before a hundred and eighty feet but the
compressor is old and cannot cope with the two of us much deeper than this. So I drift slowly through the night skies of Drune trailing my mouldy bubbles when suddenly I spot a pair of eyes in the sand. There are all sorts of eyes down here – crabs’ eyes, shrimps’ eyes, tiny glitters of sentient ruby – but only rays have them that large and closely set in a lump like a cockpit canopy. Now I can make out the faint edge of its buried body, the long tail with what looks for all the world like an old-fashioned black and white quill fishingfloat. This quill is the animal’s lure, sticking up from the sand, so unignorable that even knowing what it is one is half tempted to pull it up. I am surprised; I had not known
pagi
lay up for the night as deep as this. It will need a careful shot. I want to kill him outright because he is big, about a metre from wingtip to wingtip, and with that surface area he can displace a powerful amount of water if he struggles. Above all I do not wish to engage with his sting. This is a backward-angled thorn on the dorsal surface of the tail nearer its root than its tip, and for this reason appears poorly sited and unmenacing. This is until one has seen a ray’s rubberlike flexibility with which it can lash its entire body back on itself and sting a creature immediately in front of its head. It would therefore be a bad mistake to hold a stingray’s head thinking that the sting itself was safely down at the other end.

I draw a careful bead between its eyes and fire. The creature explodes in billows of silt which at once obscure it. The nylon line between my fingers snaps tight, goes suddenly limp. I fear the ray has shaken loose the barb and escaped with a headache but the line tautens as I gain a few feet of altitude and there, arising from the spreading cloud below, is the great grey diamond of my prey, showing flashes of white underside as its wingtips curl like the rim of a galvanised bowler hat. Soon the spastic curling changes to regular waves rippling fore-to-aft as if the messages of its dying brain had been reduced to a basic sine-wave pattern. Much relieved I swim off a few metres to a patch of undisturbed sand and settle the ray on the bottom. I lean my weight on the spear and drive its tip right through the fish. This produces no further effect so keeping one hand on the
end of the spear I flatten myself to one side, knife in the other hand, and with a strong slash at arm’s length cut through its tail just in front of the sting and slice backwards, carving off the gleaming white thorn which even in this lost wilderness I push point downwards into the sand out of sheer habit.

The only problem with this prize is its weight and resistance in the water but it can’t be helped. It is not worth going up yet. I have lost all sense of time. Now and again I think to see torch-flashes like migraine warnings from somewhere ahead, off to one side, even above me. I picture the four of us each hanging at unequal heights in this dense void at the end of a plastic umbilicus while far overhead the two boats keep pace in silence. By now they will have rounded the island and be heading out towards the mainland. Down here at the bottom the sea’s arcades extend on all sides, infinite in their possibility. A cuttlefish floats in the water beside me in that hunched posture they adopt in readiness for flight; the head up and the body angled slightly down almost as a horse’s head sits on its neck. The large intelligent eyes with their crumpled pupils watch me thoughtfully and it sets up its ‘passing cloud’ defence, hoping to disconcert me with the shimmers of colour crawling over its skin. I nod to it down there, grateful my companions can’t see me failing to shoot a good-sized
bagulan
. All at once I know too well that sound of the spear going through its crisp bony plate like a nail through styrofoam, the sight of the explosion of ink.

I feel as though I can go on for ever down here letting my light play over this prodigious landscape. I am sure that with a bit of practice I would even be able to survive without breathing like those fabled yogis who bury themselves for months. What a difference between lying in a premature grave staring up at a wooden lid and moving in these blissful ranges. The only thing is I am gradually becoming aware of a change in the sea: it is beginning to smell rather, and it takes me a moment or two to identify the smell as being not unlike hot flux. Maybe somebody is soldering down here. Also, somewhere a long way off, my head has begun to ache. It is no problem, though. It is all a
matter (I tell myself) of keeping one’s head.
If
… Now that takes me back to my second school where Rudyard Kipling’s poem was framed and hung above the dining hall door.
If you can keep your head
… What makes me think of that down here? The weirdest thing. I find myself reflecting further on the whole ethic of that particular school, with its treatment of literature as either morally uplifting or punishment (
Sweet Auburn
…) and its dotty militarism. Why, one had only to look at the names of the dormitories. What were they, taken in order from the end of the corridor? Haig, Kitchener, Beatty, rather than Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg … Rosenberg?
Isaac
Rosenberg? You must be joking. What about that first school in Sussex, though, what were its dormitories called? Wellington, Marlborough … More dead warriors, the whole playing-fields-of-Eton ethos.

Somewhere my body shoots a two-kilo grouper, by itself worth forty pesos in the market at Malubog tomorrow, while my brain struggles to be fair. No, Wellington and Marlborough were followed by Oundle so they must have been referring to public schools. Collectively they represented a much more realistic aspiration for the baby scholars sleeping in them. Who on earth would want to be Haig? ‘If you can keep your head,’ though. What a deeply foolish poem by an often good writer and how typical that our headmaster – like many others of his ilk, no doubt – should have thought it worth hanging up to inspire his little grey-shorted troops. My mind jumps to the South Vietnam-Cambodian border in 1971, to the so-called Parrot’s Beak and the province of Svay Rieng whose territory Congress had repeatedly been assured no American soldier had ever violated. I am reading the flak-jacket of a black US Marine. Carefully written in large magic-marker lettering it says:
If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs they probably know something you don’t, fuckhead.
How I wish I had known that in 1953.

Is that a shark or a submarine my light picks up? It is neither. I swim through the space where it wasn’t. The concussions of my heart reach me through the water. As if from afar on a warm summer night the crowd cheers in the Roman Colosseum, a constant roar, a million mandibles
applauding. Thumbs down: throw him to the sharks. Good old shark, the raptor of the deep.

Raptor of the deep? My brain is trying to tell my mind something but my body gets in the way, shooting a sea-snake in the head. Always shooting things, my body. Why? It’s silly; you can’t eat sea-snakes, any fool knows that. I make a mental note to punish my body for that later but it seems a bit preoccupied at present with the smell of soldering and an ache in its head. ‘If you can keep your head’, indeed. That’s exactly what
not
to do. One should make every effort to lose one’s head for good and all and give oneself up to the rapture. Only look at it … I shine my torch around. What I see brings the run of tears to my eyes. They trickle down inside my mask and make the sides of my nose itch as I contemplate the sublime otherness of this place: the solemn architecture of Drune softened by the bunches of coloured weeds disposed with consummate artistry at exactly the right points to gladden the spirits. From a million windows wink a million eyes. Motes and beams dance luminously in the streets, hang their fragile violet banners in the air, float diaphanous buntings which glow in the dark and disappear at the flash of a torch like insubstantial green phlegms. I am in it at last, in it and of it, the underlying real. Another quotation floats out from behind a rock in letters of fire, this one by William Burroughs, a writer whose greatness brings further tears to my eyes. ‘A psychotic is a guy who has just found out what’s going on.’ Right.
Right
. Exactly. Only the truly mad understand the underlying real. Perfect wisdom for flak-jackets.

Now the entire picture is becoming brighter. The colours are coming out of their shells, stretching and glowing. De Chirico himself sits on a tussock of concrete moss and designs it all. He is a little bald Italian with half-moon spectacles and something inside wonders whether he really looked like that but it hardly matters because there he is, pulling from his mouth a string of words which glow nacreously like the pearls I can see they are: ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art.’ There is a
pause. Then he brings out a final triumphant sentence which glitters and stings the eye: ‘The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter.’ The truth of this overwhelms me. It cannot be denied. Is not the proof all around me? Soulless and untroubled beauty is here in abundance. Gratefully I offer de Chirico the mouthpiece of my hookah for a puff but it turns out I am myself inside the hookah because the smoke comes out of the end as bubbles, which is wrong. The smoke must be
outside
. Sadly I replace the tube and de Chirico vanishes.

Far off a light beckons.

I swim towards it and the arcades ascend obligingly, taking me with them. I am sure I am no longer swimming though. It is far more like the progress in a dream, an effortless gliding through the black press of fathoms. I realise why this is. In reality water is not solid at all but layered like flaky pastry. Providing one finds one of the horizontal seams between its strata one can shoot through as if expressed between sheets of oiled rubber. More than ever I am sure I could manage down here without breathing but I am doing so well with my effortless gliding I decide to wait for next time before acquiring another new skill. One thing at a time, this is of the essence. Meanwhile my practised hunter’s body is spearing and spearing, killing and killing until the catch-line is more like a sheet anchor I am towing, a dead weight which retards even my sliding progress.

A light closes on me. I flash my own at it. A terrifying insect face with huge beetle eyes stares back, mouth parts extruding a bubbling proboscis. Its name is Arman and it reaches out a pale claw to touch my shoulder before making a downward jabbing gesture. I grin at it and water rushes into my mouth. I had forgotten there was water out there. I swallow it and follow Arman the beetle. An eternity scuds by in which my body begins to pass back messages. Out of the incoherent weight of there being
something
I disentangle one or two definites: I am cold, I am immensely tired, my jaw aches, my head aches, the forearm holding the spear gun aches. We are heading down, steadily down
and down. As we do so my body is strangely lightening while an oppressive melancholy grows. I am losing something, there is a loss, something recedes. Almost vertically downwards now, deeper and deeper until my head bursts with a roar against the bottom. I wonder what we are doing here but rest for a while in pain. Then a light blazes nearby and, flashing my own in reply, I see Arman the beetle approach with a headache. He reaches out a limb and gently plucks out my own proboscis. This time water does not gush into my mouth but rinses in and out. His voice reaches me. I can hear him perfectly but cannot understand the words.

‘Enough,’ he is saying. ‘
Ay
, very cold. Also my head aches.’

As if reminded, his headache leaps across and settles on top of the one already in my own skull. His light splits into many parts, his voice into others. In a sickish lurch the universe rights itself and drains away leaving me in my proper mind but with a raging head lolling in the black water next to a boat. The engine’s throb is silent. Intoy is standing up in the prow coiling in Arman’s air-hose, Danding in the stern does the same for mine. A tug at my waist reminds me and I unloop it, weakly, put out a hand and clutch at the bamboo outrigger.