Pent-up voraciousness, induced by three weeks’ protracted starvation, had finally been given rein and, inflamed by the assault on every sense, would brook neither company nor interruption until primal need had been appeased. It would not take long though, for craving far outstripped capacity for shrunken, unaccustomed stomachs to take their fill, and though having dreamt obsessively for days on days of bountiful provisions, a small salted fish would prove more than adequate.
Apart from me, only Mick and Bob Cunningham were not eating. Having ignored Clarie’s repeated warnings to rehydrate more slowly, the two of them had guzzled the water, determined at a single sitting to gain definitive relief from the torment of their thirst. The consequences were now all too apparent, as Mick sat almost on the fire, shivering and groaning at the spasms of pain that ripped across his abdomen, while Cunningham lay curled up on the sand on the edge of the darkness, semi-conscious and clutching at his stomach.
Big Sam, fully sated, wiped his arm across his mouth and eyed the fish, barely started, which I held between my trembling hands. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘He’s gone and done the same as Bob and Mick, ain’t he.’ Less a question than a statement of fact, Mac’s voice came out muffled as he spoke without looking up from his efforts to fill his mouth as quickly and as fully as he could manage. ‘Drank too much too quick, didn’t he.’
‘I told you, Cub,’ Clarie looked up across the fire and shook his head briefly at me, ‘gotta take it slow with the water. Your body isn’t used to it.’
‘It isn’t that,’ I muttered, stung suddenly by the implication that I had disregarded their collective prudence. ‘I drank about the same as you all did.’
‘What’s up with you then? Too salty for you? Officer boys mebbe only take their fish with lemon!’ Mac snorted scornfully and then began to cough, spraying the fire with bits of fish. It fizzled and snapped its protest.
I became aware that Fraser had stopped eating and was staring sidelong at me with dark concern. ‘Eat it, Cub. Be needing your help tomorrow.’ He sniffed noisily, as though vaguely embarrassed by his admission. ‘Need to try and build the water purifier back up again.’ He nodded at me curtly, before tearing off another mouthful from his own piece of fish.
I got stiffly to my feet, lurching with the effort at not putting my hands down on the sand. Though perversely my body would not take it, it was unthinkable that I should therefore cast aside the food which, appallingly, I could not consume. And the brunt of their attention, either solicitous or sneering, was more than I could bear. I shrugged and turned away, stumbling off towards the beach, into the darkness and away from the flickering circle of the fire’s light.
I got about ten yards before Fraser caught me by the arm.
‘You mustn’t give up now,’ he said gruffly. He paused and put his head on one side. ‘Joe wouldn’t’ve had it.’
‘It isn’t that,’ I blurted out, too loudly.
‘What then?’
‘I’m all backed up.’ He did not understand me and I could sense, rather than see, the enquiry on his face. He waited. ‘I can’t go… I can’t eat. I haven’t been… God, with everybody watching… I just couldn’t go. And now I’m gagging… when I try to eat… I can’t swallow…’ my voice, rising in panic, cracked as it all came out in a rush, surprising me.
‘Since when?’
I hesitated, though I knew full well. ‘Since we set out.’
‘Since we set out? On the lifeboat? These last three weeks?’
I looked away, down the beach, into the darkness, and Fraser continued to stare at me incredulously. Eventually, he looked down, exhaling slowly. His hand went up to behind the back of his neck and he rubbed it slowly. There was a moment’s silence and I crossed my arms, putting my hands up beneath my armpits. Suddenly cold. I realised that I was rocking slightly, from my heels to the balls of my feet and back again, and that I had clenched my teeth together, determined to stop them as they began to chatter, perhaps as much in fearful anticipation of his measured prognosis, as by my lack of insulation.
‘You’re gonna have to get it out.’ His voice was harsh but somehow, the grim resolve behind it was reassuring, as if by offering a solution, he was confident that there was a cure. He waited for me to speak, to show that I knew what he meant, but I could do nothing more than stand in front of him, cowed and shivering, as the slow subsiding panic that had gripped my body was rapidly replaced by a sharp stab of terror at the thought of what his suggestion might entail. My mind, shot and quivering, resolutely recoiled from trying to piece together the slightest picture of how it could be done. So I did not reply.
When he spoke again, his tone was gentler, patient. ‘You’ll have to get yourself a shell. Flat-edged. You’re gonna have to scrape it out. Go down the beach, into the shallows.’ He put his hands, palms up, between us. ‘Be bastard painful but you’re gonna have to relieve it somehow.’
The pain was excruciating. Cowering from it, alone and in the darkness, I crouched on the sand, pushing the shrieking rebellion of my mind towards it. Afraid of dipping in and out of consciousness, I had hunkered down by the water’s edge, fearful of collapsing, and perhaps drowning, in so humiliating an occupation, so I hovered on the foreshore in the thinning, spittled covering of receding foam. The nails on my free hand tore into the bony narrowness of my buttock and I dared myself to do it, my other hand wavering, shaking uncontrollably, and blenching at the task. Heat prickled across my body and convulsing with the pain of it, I screamed out low, ragged groans of agonised effort, grating and grinding my teeth, gasping hoarsely at the bitterness of having to endure. My body, fraught and fragile, spasmed, every weakened muscle repulsed by so harrowing an intrusion, and the ground swam up before me. I fell forwards, whimpering, into the water, time and time again. Once unstopped and relieved of the solid, heavy clagging in my bowels, the flow of excrement and blood was constant. I sat in the shallows, moaning softly, as the salty water bathed me, stinging an unsoothing sympathy, until I realised that shock had exempted all other feeling and now I could barely move from cold.
Still hampered by my body’s bloody effluence, I staggered, lamed and limping, up the beach and found the others huddling under various bits of canvas that had been salvaged from the remnants of our sail. They lay bunched, as close as they could get to the dying embers of the fire and despite themselves, had resorted to shuddering up together to try to generate some warmth. I crept down and found a place by Slim, thankful for the cover of the darkness and the inevitable self-concern of exhausted men, struggling to sleep in the extreme discomfort of implacable cold.
Bare-boned and wet, I trembled at the contact with the chill severity of the sand, flinching against every movement as my wounds continued still to ooze their fluid. I clenched my teeth. McGrath had been wrong, I told myself. I had lasted out the ocean. This hideous physical anguish, this too, would pass. The barren land, it would not be the last place on earth my eyes encountered and the faces of these men around me, so intolerably familiar, not the last that I would ever look upon. For somewhere yet, low and distant, echoing within labyrinths of grey delirium that laid its constant siege to my rational mind, I still could hear Joe whistling. He was still here.
I would get back. I had a debt to honour. I squeezed my eyes tightly closed, grimacing at the pain, and summoning the little control I had left on the restless disquiet of my mind, I deliberately directed all the sentience of my being inwards, down beneath the layers of grief, of agony, of horror, to safeguard in the solace of his memory, the resolution he had come to represent.
I could not risk going near the thought of him as dead. That I had buried him. I could not believe in it. I would not. His became a nebulous presence, a finite absence, an indispensable influence who was simply, physically, somewhere else. Whose connection with me I would not accept as done. And rather than gaze upon the empty blackness of his non-existence, I closed my mind to the loss of him, to the small responsibility I feared I bore
for it, and in doing so, I severed my emotional being from my consciousness: smothering it, denying it a life.
From that point on, I did not go near his grave. I began to live by rote. I catered for my physical needs. I concentrated on my daily occupation. I forgot to speak. Fought not to think. And I got by.
Slowly, very slowly, I learned to eat again. The lacerations to my backside began to heal, though the damage I had caused to the muscles there rendered them completely ineffectual and I was plagued by the constancy of rank and trickling secretions.
As each blistering day followed the bleak coldness of the nights, I gained marginally, as did we all, in physical strength. And with the provision of water and with food, we calmed and settled to a new and, in contrast, mentally less demanding existence. And while we did so, the sun’s keen and constant pounding beat time into irrelevance. I lost track of it, of the hours, of the passing of the days. We spent them, for the most part, seeking out whatever shade the dunes and rocks afforded. Dozing. Watching the horizon. And the horrors of one night’s fetid dreams saturating fretful, shivery sleep were the same as the next. And the next. The perfect arc of Moses’ body, etched into the moon; the gentle undulation of a boat with nothing on it save for the gaping skulls of men; and a small, gold compass, glinting momentarily, as it slipped from between the fingers of a large, clenched up hand.
For those first few abstract days of hazy scepticism as to the reality of our relief, the only matter of any consequence was that we now had reliable, if not entirely free-flowing, access to that which we had been so gruesomely denied. Water. For the moment, it was enough. Water. The want of it had taken each one of us by the neck and forced us through the vale of death. And there, the garbs of social conscience, of sanity, of our fragile humanity, like the flesh about our bones, had dropped away. Water. Now, its slow sustaining influence wrought an uneasy restoration, a gradual reawakening to the consciousness each of us had once presented to the world as personality. The inhibitions of social behaviour revived as water crept its way once more across our bodies’ fibre, engendering life and energy, relieving the vicious concentrate that had so reduced blood and muscle, mind and heart.
In our new environment, provided with this most fundamental of panaceas, we fought to shut away what we had seen and heard on the boat. What had been said and what had been done. It could be ignored. We began to busy ourselves. There were things we could be doing. But it could not be undone and it could not be forgotten. Though it began to take on an abstract unreality as time quietly gave it distance, each one among us carried the guilt of complicity in the hideous unfolding of the trauma which had so exposed us, and the bearing of none would stand up to close examination. Except, I thought, for Joe. And so we looked upon each other with scaleless eyes and maintained a civil distance.
The all-consuming obsession for water slowly began to fade and though still a luxury in the desert heat, the drinking of it again became an easy habit. Clarie stopped hounding us about taking our rehydration slowly. Some among us were even confident enough now in its existence and our right to it to complain about its quality, for the liquid that the tribesmen poured into our salvaged tins and cups was black and silty, grained with sand. Fraser was petitioned constantly by Clarie and by Billy to ask the tribesmen where the oasis actually was, so that we might go ourselves and skim away a more palatable top water, and when the captain’s voice was added to the clamour, he was eventually persuaded to try. Reluctantly and in his laborious tongue, Fraser tried to question our blue-robed intermediary, but the latter’s stony face and defensive eyes reflected a suspicious unwillingness to show any understanding.
Consequently, Fraser became more determined to try to reconstruct our water distillery device with the bits and pieces from the boat that had been washed up on the shore. We had found the fuel tank but the length of piping screwed on to it had snapped along the shaft and there was scarcely enough of it left to make a spout. Steam escaped too readily as the cooling mechanism was reduced, and the irregular splashes of water that did drop into the waiting tin proved inconsequential. Besides, we needed an abundance of driftwood to get a good fire blazing and there was little to be found along the wastes of barren beach. What we did collect was all too precious, for the nights brought bitter cold and a meagre fire remained our only source of comfort. And to the further puzzlement of our hosts, we needed it to continue to cook the fish we bartered for, while they looked on, bemused at what they must have considered an unnecessary nicety of custom.
Clarie remained almost equally committed to the idea that we should try to rebuild our boat, or at least some kind of vessel that might get us off the beach and further down the coast, in the hope of finding further signs of civilisation. He enlisted the support of the skipper and of Tomas, and argued with all-comers as to the necessity of not burning up the larger planks of washed up wood from the lifeboat. The younger and more credulous ones among us, Tomas, Wallace, Jack and me, took advantage of the cooler hours at first light and in the evening to help him comb the beach for bits of rigging and lengths of rope and painter that we might use to tie the shafts together. But our explorations were limited by our lassitude and our discoveries therefore few and far between. The frayed and knotted pieces spewed up by the ungracious ocean proved anyway to be of little use.
Hot, and finally frustrated by the lack of suitable material, after many slow and heavy days of tedious trial and error, we were forced to concede that the chances of making any real progress with either project remained proportionately slim. And yet the efforts we expended, almost certainly for Fraser and definitely for me, had been necessary for the preservation of our sanity and the fragile optimism that making land had lent us. We toiled to keep alive the theory that this relatively safe haven was merely another interval, another episodic part in a voyage of misfortune that surely, would eventually conclude in our repatriation. In the short term, we were alive. We were safe. There was water and there was food. There was far worse than this. And yet every day, all the days, the eyes of every man among us restlessly returned, time and time again, to the horizon, scanning, scouring for the slightest sign of hope that we were not, would not be, forgotten. But none came.
For the time being at least, it seemed that our new companions would have to share their home. Their community, which consisted of about eighty men, women and children in total, accepted our presence alongside them with gradually lessening wariness. We gave them all we had in return for our keep and, as we quickly ran out of actual objects to exchange for their enforced hospitality, we offered them instead piecemeal and at first pathetic attempts to help them with their labours.
Their primary concern lay with fishing, and though their methods were apparently unsophisticated, they had what appeared to be a satisfactory rate of success. At each low tide, they staked out their nets to form a set of squares. One side of each square they left incomplete thereby trapping, with the flow and ebb of the following tide, a sizeable quota of their daily catch. The fish were then gutted and liberally salted to be eaten raw or to be stored in salt-lined holes dug deep in to the desert sand, a sand that stretched away endlessly beyond the dunes: an empty, soulless nullity of colourless, lifeless sand.
With the revival of a little strength and eager to show willing in recompense for their stilted generosity, we offered help, worthless as it was, with both the fishing and the digging of the pits. Patient and impassive, they let us try, grinning between themselves a quiet amusement at our unschooled incompetence.
But that they were so determined to catch and store so many fish, much more than was apparently necessary to feed their number, as we became more conscious of it, perplexed us. It did not appear that such an occupation could be seasonal, and their settlement, with its wooden frames and established structures, had an air of semi-permanence. It was not then, that they moved inland and used this place as a base for fresh supplies. Fraser’s limited French scarcely lent itself to in-depth questioning and the vast amount of
conversation that took place between the members of the two parties had quickly been reduced to a series of implicit grunts, exaggerated facial expressions and often exasperated gesture.
His repeated efforts with ‘Pourquoi tant de poissons?’ were met with an eyebrow barely raised and a dismissive shrug. But one night, two, maybe three weeks after our arrival, Fraser, who had been working with the tribe at the nets to gather up their haul, joined the rest of us at our paltry fire with eyes of kindling hope.
‘They keep talking about an enlèvement. All day. I keep hearing it. Enlèvement. I think it means collection. Des poissons. I think they fish for someone else.’
‘Did you ask ‘em? What they meant?’ Billy looked up at him sharply.
‘Tried,’ Fraser shook his head and crouched down to take up one of the sticks we’d laid aside to spike and cook our fish on. ‘They speak so quickly. I thought he said something about the French. I couldn’t make it out.’
‘It would explain why they store most of their catch,’ I said, eager to give the information credence. ‘Did it sound like they thought it would be soon?’
‘I dunno,’ Fraser sighed. ‘Couldn’t tell. But if they’re talking about it now, they must be expecting something.’
We watched with a heightened sense of awareness the following day, and the day after that, for the slightest shift in the tribe’s general routine, for some hint that they might be expecting change. But nothing seemed unusual and Fraser was just beginning to dismiss the reliability of his understanding when, on the third evening, we were astonished and then exultant to hear, more loudly and more clearly by the minute, the sound of a motor engine chugging close, then closer still until, as we rushed from our various positions, shouting and calling down onto the beach, a large motor launch hove into view, its prow aimed purposefully at our particular stretch of the shore.
Making Shore Page 20
