Submergence (24 page)

He knew he had to keep his wits about him. He had resisted the Stockholm syndrome. He was repelled by the Muslim men around him, who chained and beat him, who called him miisteer watir and yet saw him as unclean – monkey, rat, waste – and would not touch him except in violence and gave him drink and food on a plate and cup which were his alone and considered dirty and not to be touched by anyone else, and they would not endow a smile on him. He spat at them when they were knelt in prayer with their backs turned. They were not worth more than spit to him. He spat at them the way he had masturbated in his jail in Kismayo, to invigorate and separate himself from them. It was all the sordid means he had available.

Their minds were weak. They misrepresented their religion. The jihad had trammelled them. They lied to others and to themselves. They had no strategy. Their choice was to fight on and kill more innocents or be annihilated. It was obvious they would choose oblivion over surrender. There was an emptiness in their expressions, which came from not entertaining any doubts. Some of the Somali boys had already died to the world the way Saif had. They were like the bleached and opened badlands. Not dead, not alive. Scarred. They recorded their martyrdom videos outside the shepherd’s hut, with the cypress tree in the background.

They were copying the Heaven’s Gate cult in America, the first group to document suicides with video testimony. Its members found a collective determination to take their own lives having visited a funfair earlier in the day. They made their video testimony and jumped the earth to a shooting star, so they believed, while their bodies remained on the bunks in California; the bodies, flesh, hair, the mint $5 bill they each had folded in their pocket, their brand new running shoes. They
died in shifts, assisting each other. The last members had no one to clean up the vomit from the phenobarbital and vodka they drank, or to remove the plastic bags from their heads which suffocated them.

He stopped. Maybe he had the same dullness in him, maybe he had fallen in a crack. His stories always circled back to death rites. The tap of an axe on a boy’s spine.

They drove for a day without stopping and the lorry set them down in a village on the coast south of Kismayo. He was shackled to the wooden railing of a shark-fishing dhow. They sailed south through a night and into the day. The wind was against them. The sea was rough. The fishermen moved barefoot on the dhow, adjusting and readjusting the lateen sail. He was sure they were sailing south to the al-Qaeda training camps in the mangrove swamps around Ras Kamboni, on the border with Kenya.

His shackles had enough play for him to lean out over the water and catch the sea spray. He could also move out of the sun, but it was not possible to stop himself from being rubbed raw. They were far enough from the land for him to wonder at the depth of the water. His guards brought him a bucket to wash himself and looked away when he performed (there was no other word) his toilet.

The boat listed under its unseemly cargo. There were more men at arms now, and the shark men, there were goats, nets and hooks, a brazier on which fish were cooked, and a basket of rice, bananas and mangoes. The arms in the hold were covered with the bodies of black fin sharks and lemon sharks.

‘But, as they went farther,’ Thomas More continues, in
Utopia
, ‘a new scene opened, all things grew milder, the air less burning, the soil more verdant, and even the beasts were less wild.’

The dhow had no motor. There was just the slop of the Indian Ocean as it gave, and the stink of the sharks and the shark oil used to caulk the hull. The fishermen had been at sea for a month. They had smoked the shark and marlins over fires on uninhabited islands, where they also made lime from the coral, burning it to such a temperature that it burst when they poured sea water on it.

The next night his shitting was endless. They gave him a can of Fanta. The heavens were hidden behind the clouds. They aimed the dhow out to sea to avoid the reefs and the shallows that would ground a boat in the finest mud. It began to howl. Rain swept in. He slid about on the deck and banged against the sides. Saif and the others were curled up like insects about to die, all armoured and repentant. He heard their prayers issuing forth and could not help but think of the disciples on the Sea of Galilee in a storm. There was only one last living shark aboard, slapping its tail against the deck. The coast lay far away in the night, hot, unlit, as the badlands had been unlit. It was not the winter grey of the French coast, it was another coast entirely; which for centuries a mongrel mix of shark men, traders and clerics had sailed up and down. The Bajunis, keeping close to their unknown islands, the Somalis, the Swahili peoples from as far south as Mozambique, the Comorians, Malagasy, Portuguese and Omanis, the Chinese fleet, the Yemenis, Persians, Gujaratis and Malays.

The pirate Edward England captured treasure from a pilgrim ship sailing to Jeddah and buried it on the Somali coast. England had dug a hole in a dry ravine and laid the treasure chest under a rock there. It was never found. The captain’s crew mutinied and put him ashore on a desert island off Madagascar, on account of his uncommon sense of mercy (for a pirate), and England circled there, searching for water and something to eat. His thinking must have been much more depressed than that of a conman beaten and left in a ditch outside Verona, who, with a ducat stitched in his dress, dusted himself down and walked back over the Alps to Munich in the spring sunshine.

He looked across the raging sea. Somewhere was the gold and jewels meant for Mecca, unopened, without glitter. Oh, the scale of things was planetary for him then, Somalia was mighty, yet just a piece of the main, the sea larger still; the ocean sank away under him.

James cradled his drink, sipped it like life. Fanta, fanta, fantasy, fantastic, it was orange nectar, a bubbling drink of New Atlantis, and though he was in mortal peril, or because he was, he had a rising sense of excitement, as if buoyed into the
Arabian Nights
, and it comforted him to place the seasick holy warriors of al-Qaeda not a clash of civilisations, but a bunch of brigands who would get what was coming to them.

Professor Danielle Flinders, biomathematics, self-organisation
, was what it said on her official Imperial College webpage. She was one of the world’s leading researchers on population dynamics of microbial life in the oceans. The microscopic was phantom and massive to her and her lectures were popular because they ranged widely beyond maths to take in biology, physics, geology; even philosophy and literature.

She had written him a letter in which she very seriously claimed that an understanding of microbial life in the deep was necessary for human survival on the planet:

Without that knowledge, we will not be able to comprehend the scale of life on earth, or its ability to regenerate. The fact that life can exist in the darkness, on chemicals, changes our understanding about life everywhere else in the universe.

She was a senior scientist, not the chief scientist. That was perfect. She had responsibility for her work, with none of the bureaucratic burdens
of the chief scientist, whose job it was to balance the personalities and goals of those who want sediment core samples, those who want sweeping measurement of the water column, and those who are after one particular deep-sea fish. She had been a chief scientist once. It had been a disaster. She had her father’s brains, not his easygoing charm. She was brittle. She excelled, but suffered no fools. That was one problem. The other had been with politically correct individuals. She was black to them, carrying the burden of black history, the meagreness of black science, and they could not bear to criticise her openly. That had led to miscommunication, passive-aggressive behaviour, and recriminations when the expedition failed. It was easier with the French. They appreciated her fluency. They perceived her coolness as elegance and warmed to the intensity she brought to her work.

She kept fit in London, and more so at sea. When it was said she punched her way through a science cruise, it was only the punishment she delivered to the punch-bag in the boat’s gym. She built up her cardiovascular strength. When her work was finished she had in the past fallen in with a scientist or a deckhand. Whatever the stolen pleasures of the bunk, she would end the arrangement directly when the ship returned to port.

Though the Fanta was warm and he was chained like a dog and the sharks in the hold were buried in salt, there was something alive and enormous in being set sail on the ocean, something about the flight of the dhow in the wind and no other force, and the smoothness of the deck, where shoes were forbidden, and the planking had been polished by bare feet over a long time.

To set sail was another of the smaller truths. There was landlessness, rocking. The harpooner’s cry of
thar she blows!
was another way of
saying there she breathes. He lived in a time when no ships sailed the line, when there was no sail cloth, no rope, no horses or carts in the ports, while aboard the supertankers were freezers the size of an admiral’s state rooms, filled with meats and fruits; metal cupboards with cartons of treated milk wrapped in plastic, which were a long way advanced from the crates of spring water, wines, almonds, lemons, dry bread and all manner of sauces for salted meat in the stores of eighteenth-century vessels.

The storm abated. The prayers and mutterings continued. There was the rhythmic dousing of barnacles encrusted on the hull and a noise of the planking giving under the weight of the water.

Then it was day, the sun struck the sea. He watched the seabirds touch the crest of the swells, always on the wing. He saw a whale shark big enough to swallow a Jonah, hoovering the life that was invisible to the naked eye. There were gold markings on its back, which the fishermen believed were coins sprinkled by Allah as a reward to the fish for being toothless and having no appetite for meat.