Playing with Water (31 page)

‘My head aches too,’ I say, but with difficulty because my mouth is misshapen, the teeth on one side no longer meeting as they used to and the tongue blundering in so unfamiliar a cavity.

‘Maybe the wind carried some exhaust into the compressor.
Monoksyde. Ay
, very bad.’ He laughs. ‘I think maybe I get a little crazy down there.’

‘Me too.’ I thought it was nitrogen rather than monoxide which made that happen. ‘Christ, my head.’ I vomit into the sea, voiding what feels like half a gallon of hot saline over my upper arms and chest as I cling to the rocking wood.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Arman is asking. ‘Four hours we are down there. Very long.’

‘Where are we?’

‘Guess where. No? Sabay.’

‘
Sabay?
’

‘Right. We’ve crossed right over. Look there.’

A mile away across the strait, so faint and lost in the night
as to be all but out of sight, glows the hurricane lamp I left burning back on Tiwarik.

Somehow I heave myself on board. I am still not able to rid myself of a memory which goes on insisting I was heading downwards when I surfaced, that this upper air, this night is in the wrong place, that the entire universe has been stood on its head.
Tiwarik
. We inspect the haul by the light of our now dim torches. My own catch-line says it all. First the three mangled fish, then a dozen weighing about a pound each, the ray, a splendid grouper. Thereafter my catch becomes more and more bizarre.

‘You’re going to eat this?’ Danding indicates the sea-snake.

‘Well …’ The evidence is that my head had indeed been lost down there. The snake is followed by a small sea-cucumber, a selection of insignificant aquarium fish and finally some carefully threaded bunches of weed. The last item is a lump of abraded red coral which has a hole in it large enough to admit the fluke of my spear. Arman and Danding laugh. They have seen such things before.

‘Don’t worry,’ Arman says. ‘We should have come up earlier. Never mind, you’ve got some
huli
. That’s a good forty-peso fish you’ve got there.’ He pokes the grouper with a toe. ‘Maybe fifty if there’s not much else in the market.’

Suddenly I realise what I am crouching over. Lying along the bottom of the boat, intermittently visible between thwarts and decking, is a great grey corpse. A shark.

‘Arman?’ I cry. ‘You didn’t …?’

But he had. He explains he noticed this five-footer which was obviously interested in his catch and momentarily being presented with the creature’s soft gill-slits a mere metre away had fired his spear from behind and slightly downwards into the gill, the only possible point of entry into that tough hide. Immediately the shark had rolled in the water instead of darting away and tearing itself free had spun and wrapped the spear around itself like a wire collar. Evidently its own struggles had driven the point into some vital organ for thereafter it had rapidly become feebler enabling Arman to tow it up. He had continued the dive with my spare spear. It was a truly astonishing feat of
strength and nerve; the insides of both forearms were raw as if sandpapered by that thrashing hide. I give my own account of the shark which mutilated my catch and show the evidence. It is almost certainly the same animal.

‘We’ll soon know,’ says Danding. ‘When we cut it open we will find the missing halves of your fish.’

The other boat with our three companions is long gone. Danding ferries me back to Tiwarik on my insistence: I need to be by myself. On the way Intoy praises me extravagantly for my ray, putting his finger into its mean little slit of a mouth. I think he feels I need consoling in the face of Arman’s amazing triumph and for that I am grateful. I bequeath him and Danding my entire catch except for a couple of fish for my own breakfast. I am full of residues: of disorientation, of headache, of being so outrageously bested by Arman. Of course it was competitive, how could it not have been? Left alone I stare sleeplessly up at the thatch and reflect on the underwater journey we have made, on the barricades of reason I crossed. I have no real idea where I am. Endless black water is still flowing around and through me.

In the morning my headache has more or less gone but I am sluggish and subdued as if not merely my body had been flattened beneath the incalculable tonnage separating the place where I sit from the distant village of Sabay. For an entire morning the world seems oddly two-dimensional while somewhere inside there persists that conviction of the world’s being inverted. I am sure I was heading downwards when I came up. It takes many hours for this certainty to fade during which time the landscape fattens out again and things gradually take on depth. I am reoriented.

In the afternoon I walk to the top of the bluff overlooking the beach and sit in the sun like an invalid or the survivor of a bad accident made thoughtful. The island feels warm and reassuring beneath my back but then it turns scornful of my stupidity. Your element is the air, it says, blowing its
grasses across my face. Your element is the sun which falls in brilliant crimson on your closed eyelids. You may carry them safely with you beneath the sea as long as you don’t surrender them to the compressor. You relied so much on mechanical assistance you lost touch with your proper element and equally lost touch with the sea. Instead of heightened awareness you experienced mere hallucination. You may extend the limits of your landscape to take you beneath the sea but only if you go down unassisted. Lungfuls of air, a hut on an island. That is all. That is enough.

Why bother? I ask the island in return. Why the undergoing of extremes to see a few things a little differently? What need of such harshness?

No answer. The grasses continue to brush my face, the sun to fall on my shut eyes. Far off below the sea crumbles and crumbles away at the shingle.

To live alone on a coral-fringed island in the South China Sea might stand for some Europeans as a consummate antithesis to their own lives, almost as a romantic ideal. In fact the notion of a ‘paradise island’ has long since stopped being an aesthetic judgement and has become instead a tourist industry description, a travel brochure category like ‘handicrafts capital’ or ‘cultural Mecca’ or ‘popular resort’: if that is what enough people call it, then that is what it is. Obligatory, then, for a paradise island in these parts are white sand, coconut palms, ice for the drinks, a beach shop selling sun lotion, barbecues and disco music at nightfall.

Tiwarik is not a paradise island. It has only discomfort to offer. Its single white beach is a shifting bank of sharp coral rubble. The drinking water arrives sun-hot from the mainland, tasting of plastic jerrycan and brackish from the well there. The flies are often bad. The shingle bank is used as a restaurant and lavatory by passing fishermen and the remains of their improvised meals provide the island’s insect life as well as the hermit crabs with cheer and sustenance. The
cogon
fields are home to two species of snake. Large ragged centipedes are common. Often they can be seen through the slats of the floor making their way across the earth beneath the hut. Sometimes they climb up at night. Once I was woken by one lying across my forehead; it bit me savagely when I brushed it off. I cut that one vengefully in half and in the morning the two halves still preserved a semblance of life. Intoy tells me you have to bury them separately otherwise they will crawl together and join back up again. I tell him this is a simple matter to test but all subsequent observations do nothing to discourage his belief.

It would therefore be a rare person who could incorporate
Tiwarik’s painful reality into his dream of alternative living. The ruse which might be employed in Manila of choosing not to see what one looks at would hardly be open to him here, that trick performed by the tourist busloads as they pass. On Tiwarik this person would also be immune to the terminal lassitude of tropical provinces which afflicts so many Westerners, turning them to drink and despondency and indefinitely postponing the writing of soulful letters home. He would on the contrary be filled with a sense of urgency, aware always that he is seeing and doing things just in time.

For occasionally on Tiwarik the detonations of dynamite fishers lose their free-enterprise innocence and acquire menace. I hear them as not merely an assault on a pocket of food but as part of the increasing barrage sustained against the natural world under the often specious guise of feeding the massing mouths of humanity. At such times my aversion to meat seems likely to extend to fish and for a while I hate this whole bloodletting process by which I have come to know and watch the sea. But a camera is no substitute for a hunter’s spear: it gets in the way of the eye. Therein lies an irony.

At other times the explosions jar the balance at a deeper level, hinting at threat and unease. They suggest a different kind of encroachment, the very blatancy of their echoes drawing attention to their unlawfulness. One day Arman will look back and be amazed at the freedom he had to go about his daily life with bombs and poison. Sooner or later political control will come. It will come to me, too. The very oddness of my presence and lack of any plausible cover story draws attention to me as effectively as dynamite. In a world besotted by control – and hence phobic about its lack – the days of the stranger who can spend his time alone on an island may be numbered.

Already I can look back and see that many of the things I did in my twenties are virtually impossible today. I once worked a passage from Manaus to Recife aboard a German tramp steamer, the
Hilde Mittmann
, scrubbing down the engine-room walls in exchange for food and a bunk. At night I sat in the forepeak or walked the deck while the pilot,
taken on in mid-river one afternoon and conversant with the ever-changing sandbars and shoals of the Amazon, took us close enough into the bank to send showers of seeds and leaves bursting in through portholes and jalousies to lie on the bunks. It was on one of those nights that the ship’s wireless officer, a gruff, square lady who shared her cabin with an ape, left her door open for a breath of air and was desolated by the sight of her companion’s hairy backside flashing skyward as he clutched at a passing branch and regained his freedom. In Belém I took spells of duty in the hold as Brazilian stevedores unloaded sacks of pepper. Beside me, visibly to hand, was the Captain’s revolver (unloaded) as a deterrent to theft. The rich oily smell of hot peppercorns still evokes the pungent memory of those days.

Similarly, I worked a passage from Singapore to Labuan Island and on to Sarawak aboard a freighter. On Labuan I went to the cottage hospital – a cool thatched building with a verandah all round it in whose shade pregnant women chatted as butterflies drifted in and out – to have a deep splinter removed from my foot. The young Malaysian doctor sent to deal with me turned out to have been trained at St Stephen’s, Fulham Road at the time when I had been working there and we recognised one another on sight. A few nights later I was standing at the ship’s rail staring out past a natural gas burn-off flare in mid-ocean towards the unseen coast of Borneo, tired after a day spent re-stacking sacks of copra in the hold. The world suddenly seemed blissfully full of adventure and possibility, my passage through it an intent drift in the course of which it was entirely to be expected that one would bump into fragments of a previous life in London on tiny tropical islands. By day I leaned over the side during breaks from work and watched the flying fish burst like pheasants, late and at unexpected angles, from under the ship’s forefoot and skim away across the aquamarine. It was hypnotic, the blinding white scud of foam sliding across the vision and vanishing astern. Tears of pleasure rose to my eyes. I had found a vocation as wanderer and seafarer.

Nowadays, I think, such casual journeyings have become more difficult. Not only has the world’s merchant
navy changed its habits since containerisation but security and union regulations lay down strict guidelines for crewing. Throughout this century the wide-open world which people were once remarkably free to wander if they had the time and inclination (little money was needed) has shrunk and shrunk. Air travel has become nearly obligatory: there is often no alternative. The lemming habits of tourists do, it is true, help define the areas of the world the rest of us may avoid; but governments and even local expectations can sometimes make it hard to escape being treated like a tourist who has merely had the misfortune to become separated from his party.

I am thankful to have been alive in an age when it was still just possible to be footloose without having to join either package tours to Seven Asian Cities or marijuana trails to Khatmandu. Meanwhile the explosions which lift little exclamation marks in the straits off Tiwarik remind me of lawlessness but also of the massing infantry of control which societies are so anxious to deploy and which on all sides is poised to rush in and occupy the remaining hinterlands. For the special wildness of Tiwarik will be thoroughly and finally dispersed the day silence falls and it is designated an official nature reserve or a scuba-diving resort.

‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,’ Hopkins wrote of the cutting down of the poplars at Binsey, firmly in the English literary tradition which associates landscape with loss. But now from a very un-English landscape and with the sensation of hearing great sawings, bulldozings and demolitions borne on the wind from somewhere over the horizon, I pass on that disheartening thought to my bereft counterpart in fifty years’ time as he contemplates beds of dead corals beneath a sea as empty of fish as the summer lanes of England will be of butterflies. It will always be too late for each generation to see all the previous generation saw.

Sooner or later I shall have to visit England, see people.
Such trips fill me with mixed pleasure and dread. There is that imperceptibly widening gulf between oneself and family and friends, the crack of black water opening up as between a departing ship and the quay. This is an absurd perspective, of course. Such things are relative, neither the ship nor quay stands still. But with the passing of each lump of time it becomes apparent that we are bound on gently divergent courses. It is a melancholy fact. I am attuned to another climate, other sounds, different smells.

In particular I am attuned to a different speed. The last time I was in London I was bemused and stunned by it. I stood on kerbsides unable to remember where I was going, what I was supposed to be doing, who I was. There were too many clothes on my body, my shoes pinched, the air was cold and stank of fumes. After the lively silences of Kansulay and Tiwarik the battering traffic blotted me out. It seemed there was no space left in which to think, in which to move. I must have looked like any hick or bumpkin forlorn in the great metropolis, a city I had once known quite well and even on occasion liked for its quiet backwaters, its libraries and abandoned wharves. Now the sea felt immeasurably far away and it was in any case the wrong sea: freezing green-grey masses of water trawled for great numb cod rather than the basking gulfs, the individual prey stalked like lovers through coralline waters.

In rhetorical moments I say: ‘I don’t know how on earth people can live in England.’ What I actually mean, of course, is that I no longer know of any way in which I could. I have lost the knowledge of how to get by in a predominantly urban society. I am no longer intrigued enough by its arcana, blandished enough by its pleasures, consoled enough by its facilities. Provided the climate is warm I don’t mind a leaky roof, washing dishes in the sea, fetching water on my shoulder. They are neither pleasures nor hardships, simply the minimal terms on which one lives in a way one chooses in a landscape of one’s choice.

Thirty-five years ago I would look wistfully at the milk-float arriving outside the school kitchens. It had come of its own accord from another world, a world beyond the gates
where people were free to do as they wanted. That world was not so much the territory of adults as the location of an unstructured freedom of choice. There, people could get up and leave rooms without asking permission; they could legitimately find themselves in a shop at ten o’clock in the morning; get on a bus, go to the cinema; they weren’t forced to say prayers or write letters. Nowadays when I am in England the sense of once again being captive in an institution grows on me. I strain as if to catch the faintest signs of life seven thousand miles away, the light and freedom for which I yearn. I panic. Perhaps I may never escape the uniform shopping malls, the fast-food bars, the sheer civic determination of it all. Some unsuspected law or sudden edict will prevent my leaving so that for the rest of my life I shall have to languish in dullness, overeaten, overmedicated, overinsured, overanxious. As the red buses hiss past in the rain and the double glazing shudders to the harmonics of their engines I ache and ache for the sea, to go back to work deep in the fish-mines. I long for the forest where the
komokons
call and the great bats fly, for lost companions.

One summer day, many years ago in Oxford, I had sat at luncheon with Robert Graves, then Poetry Professor. The great man had dried shaving soap in his right ear and three days’ silver stubble. The ordeal of Encaenia was over, his year’s duty done. I imagine he itched to shed his borrowed finery and get back to Majorca. He asked me what I wanted to do or be and my reply irritated him.

‘But it seems to me you
are
a poet,’ he said dismissively, as if certain things might be taken for granted while I ought at least to have come up with a more amusing suggestion. All right for him; I secretly burned with pleasure for a long time. It was the only compliment of my life whose manner of payment made it almost credible.

Years later Arman helps me back on board the
Jhon-Jhon
after three hours’ fishing. Our haul is not by any means spectacular, his better than mine but not by much. I scarcely give it a thought, it is a workaday morning’s food-gathering. As Intoy starts the engine and heads the boat for Tiwarik to drop me off Arman says, staring at his home village’s distant shoreline:

‘You know, if you had been born in Sabay you would have been as good as anyone and a lot better than most. But starting when you were, what? Forty …?’

He makes my belated change of profession sound a sad error rather than a bizarre affectation. The compliment overwhelms me. I am so pleased I can hardly bear myself. One might remain a poet for life without writing much more than the odd sonnet. But to be a hunter one had to hunt: one had to go down and get food and come back up, time and time again.

‘Look at us,’ says Arman, meaning the people of Sabay. ‘How old am I? Twenty-eight next birthday. And the others? Hardly any of them twenty-five, most twenty, twenty-one. The people here don’t usually go on spear fishing much beyond thirty, you notice. It’s too hard, it’s a young man’s business. They go on to dynamite, hook-and-line, nets, fish-traps.’

‘I know. I’ve left it too late.’

‘To become the best, of course. You’ll never be that. That’s why I said you ought to have been born here. Plenty of boys born here, ay, they don’t want to fish, they’re frightened or they don’t like the sea so they plant rice and hunt
baboy damu
instead. But the ones who do want to fish are watching and learning for fifteen years.’

There is no catching up, of course. Defensively I say to the scudding water:

‘Well, old Inso is still spear fishing and he’s fifty-six.’

‘Surely. There are several men around here even older than him who still take their
panà
out. And they’re good, not just because they’re so experienced but like you they’ve got something which keeps them good even when their wind’s going and they’ve no longer any stomach for tackling the big eels. They love it. That’s what makes the difference. Ha, I’ve watched you so many times. I’ve seen you go down straight past a
bantol
or a ray hidden in the sand and I wonder if you’ve gone blind. But I think you just like being down there. I think often you are not so interested in killing fish.’