Submergence (8 page)

She worked into the evening. She was befuddled by the alcohol, by him. Maths was like playing the piano, in a way. You had to keep practising to keep fluent and supple; eventually the discipline became a pleasure.

She turned on the television and watched a tennis match being played at the Albert Hall in London. The acoustics in the hall were such that the man’s serve sounded like a detonation.

He was hauled up by his wrists and made to stand. His legs shook.

‘I’ll shit myself,’ he said.

His bowels softened; a watery mess flowed down the inside of his thighs.

There was shouting in Somali. He was struck in the back of the head and in the face and doused in seawater. He was dragged into an alley. It was blinding. He could not look up. The sand burned and was littered with thorns and with glistening donkey droppings and palm fronds. There were wattle-and-daub shacks on either side. He heard children playing. He sensed the women stopping as he passed. He was nauseous. His head spun. He tried to concentrate on the feet of the man in front of him. He said to himself, the flip-flops are red, they are red, the calloused heel lifts, now it strikes the sand, now it lifts.

They came out into the open. The wind gusted. Crabs scuttled back to holes in the sand. When he finally raised his head and looked at the world he saw surf exploding on a reef and a monumental orange sun hovering over the Indian Ocean.

The fighters got on their knees and prayed to Mecca.

After some minutes one of them stood up. ‘We will kill you now,’ he said, without emotion.

They pushed him towards the sea. He saw it. They would shoot him in the water. There would be no need for a shroud.

When his body was drained they could dump it in the infidels’ cemetery. With what prayer, with what damnable prayer?

The fighters were young and thin, but he was too weak to take advantage. He was a white man in a part of Somalia controlled by jihadists. Even if he cracked heads, snapped necks and took a gun, there was no place to run. So, he straightened himself and prepared to die.

But how does a man do that? Nature is pre-contracted, her demands beyond negotiation. You cannot wish yourself immortal any more than you can bid the apples come in May, or the leaves stick in October. A terminal illness at least gives you a chance to say goodbye to your family, friends and acquaintances. A violent death is something else. It is a maelstrom. Its waters turn quickly, they spiral down, the sky is blotted out and there is no time to make a phone call or take a bow.

He wanted to lay out his memories on the sand like photographs; to leave a message for the world and take a lesson from it. But he was turning, he was going down, the whaleboat was splintering, the waters were freezing. The flotsam people clung to in life, which kept them afloat in the world, were fictions found in stories. He reached for them. He recited the Lord’s Prayer.

They pushed him into deeper water. It was almost up to his waist. Look how the dirt is lifting in filaments from your feet, he said to himself, the filth is lifting, and he glimpsed himself, it was difficult to describe, underwater, in a stovepipe hat, a whaler thrown overboard, sinking to the bottom, an eel roped where his intestines had been, with, in the grainy distance, a whaling vessel going down, in imitation of the slave ship Danny described, perhaps, except with a hawk nailed to
its mast, the archangelic shriek silenced … thy will be done, in earth as it is heaven.

They took their hands off him. He looked out over the sea. Submarines go across. They keep to the shallows. There were many things he had not properly imagined. Death was one, the ocean was another. It was fitting, comforting even. The earth really was the ocean. Danny had taught him another way of looking at things, how being made of saline solution, a jelly with pin-like bones, he was yet alien to the greater part of the planet that was saltwater. He looked up. He glimpsed a gull. They lifted their weapons. He had no strength left. He hated them, and was ashamed of himself.

‘
Allah u Akbar
!’

There was a burst of gunfire. He fell into the sea. The bullets went into the sky. He was on his knees in the water. He thrashed forward. He cried out and pulled off his soiled kikoi and washed himself between his legs. His tears moved the fighters. One of them waded after him and took off his own headscarf and wrapped it around him, so that he would not be naked when they carried him back to land.

She was a morning person, he was not.

His phone rang before dawn. His first waking word was a profanity. ‘Yes? Who is it?’

‘I’m heading down to the beach for a swim. Will you join me?’

‘At this hour? In the snow?’ He sat up. ‘OK,’ then, ‘I shan’t swim.’

‘See you downstairs,’ she said cheerfully, and rang off.

It was the first light of a clear day. The patches of ice were all covered up. The snow came up over their boots. There were boar hunters in the woods; gunshots could be heard coming from the direction of the church and the village. The pines were rimed with salt, the holly berries shone
blood red. On the beach the snow gave way to spindrift and then to the return of long breaking waves. He carried towels and an extra sweater. He was uncertain if she would actually swim. He did not know her travels had taken her in the opposite direction to him, that her voyages had moved her closer to the Inuit and further from the Carib.

The sand was firm. Their footsteps filled with water after them.

‘This is just the place to have a dog,’ he said. ‘They could run for miles.’

‘I don’t like dogs.’

His heart sank. She was harsh. What was he doing on the beach at this hour?

When he was a boy, the family priest, an Irishman, had told him: James, there is never a moment in a life when a selfish heart is satisfied.

He wanted a country life. He wanted a cottage. He wanted a garden. He wanted gundogs and horses. Perhaps it was a feint, a way of dealing with his career. What did he need?

She caught his fallen expression. He was a spy, but utterly readable. ‘Cheer up. I could learn to love a dog. Singular.’

He smiled at her. He felt they needed to hold on to one another or they would be swept apart and not find each other again. They stood and looked out over the crescent-shaped expanse of the Atlantic.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ she said. Unexpectedly, she reached up and touched his cheek.

She moved fluently and without hesitation. She pulled off her wellington boots and socks, her fleece-lined tracksuit trousers. She wore light knickers with a darker trim. Her hips were wide. Her skin rose at once to the new day in ranges of goose pimples. She took off her wax jacket, scarf and woollen hat. She peeled off her cashmere sweater and was naked. She ran and dived into the sea. A wave crashed over her. She did not shout or call out as he expected she would. She lay herself down and stretched out between the waves. Her fists were clenched. She held onto the water. Then she kicked away in a front
crawl. She was a strong swimmer, stronger than he was. She swam in line with the shore, then stood up and ran out, her feet catching on the shells and gravel. Her nipples were large and brown and pulled tight with the cold. She was youthful in the thickening of her belly, and her broad shoulders in the winter sun made her frame momentarily appear to be facets of a gem. She took off her knickers and rubbed her chest down with one towel while he rubbed her legs and hips with the other. Her hair was wet across her face. She dressed as quickly as she had undressed. She could not speak for breathing. They set off towards the hotel at a fast pace.

Without any indication it could be otherwise, he went up the stairs with her to her suite. She drew a bath. He turned on the television. When the bath was full and he heard her laying back in it he became distracted and after some minutes, as if pulled by orbital forces, he undressed and went into the bathroom and slid in with her, so the suds spilled out over the tiles. She embraced him and they lay together and then rose and he made love to her over the sink. She pushed him out and took his manhood and handed him off over her belly, up to her chest.

There was then that unforgiving moment which follows the coming before. She dreaded it. It was so often a disappointment and many times worse. She fucked and instantly deduced it had been the act only. She returned to herself, to Flinders, to the scientist. But no such rift opened between Danny and James that might have obliged them to walk separately out of the bathroom. The tiles on the floor stayed sure, affixed one to the other, and there was only tenderness between them.

They dozed hand in hand in bed. Later, she found a condom in one of her bags and peeled it onto him in a similar motion to how she had unpeeled her sweater on the beach, and they made love steadily. A while later it was more powerful. It was as if they were screwing each other to a place where the body is spent and the true affair can begin.

*

It was a morning on Christmas week and it might have been absolute zero outside, with everything slowed and congealed into superatoms. He was unconcerned with emailing Legoland. She put her work aside. They ordered sweet, buttery porridge, juice and coffee. The suite was rearranged around them, the fire lighted. For that short day they were curled together on a blue and silver embroidered sofa. They chose to watch
A Matter of Life and Death
, with David Niven in the lead. An opening sequence of the universe cut to Squadron Leader Peter Carter, his burning Lancaster bomber plane dropping into the English Channel, giving his last thoughts to June, an American radio operator:

‘But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity.’ Andy Marvell, what a marvel. What’s your name?

Carter jumped from the Lancaster without a parachute, expecting to die. The next scene showed him climbing out of the sea and wandering in dunes not unlike those around the Hotel Atlantic. By fault of angels, who missed him in the pea-soup fog, Carter miraculously survived into a technicolour so intense, the first technicolour of British cinema, that the sofa became colourless and the wintry sky outside, which was prismatic when they sat down, cloudless, with wisps of orange, turned to gruel.