“All I know is that a sheets a rope, not a sail. Isn’t it? I sailed a dinghy a few times as a girl. But someone warned me never to mention dinghy sailing to yachtsmen.”
“No drama, Liv. We’d rather have a filmmaker than a yacht bum. Yachties are two a penny round here. It’s much harder to find someone you can stand listening to for weeks on end in a stuffy cabin. Reckon we can stand you. Question is, can you stand us? If you think you can, you’re in.”
“Then I’m in! Thank you.”
Papeete waterfront, two days later. I got there early and breakfasted on pain au chocolat with strong coffee at a stall by the cruise docks. Traffic was squealing along the corniche. Reggae throbbed from a bar. A barefoot man was swabbing the floor, washing small tides of black water, cigarette butts, and dead beetles into the gutter.
“Ça va, Liv?”
“Atrocious accent. Coffee?”
Traffic lights changed, releasing a pack of motorbikes. “Knock yours back,” Simon shouted, “and we’ll head down to the marina. Lars is meeting us there. The old gaffer can’t resist a lovely boat. Or a lovely woman. Reckon you turned his head.”
Even from a distance the broad navy-blue hull stood out. She looked authentic, a working boat, while those lined up each side of her were plastic toys with jangly aluminium masts. She was creaking gently on the tide.
“The Tui Marama.” Lindqvist’s measured voice. “Vatu here should translate for you.” A large amiable man stepped into the circle of the ship’s admirers. I’d half noticed him, taken him for a bystander. Now I saw one of the most perfectly formed human beings I’ve ever met. In a white man his physique would have been narcissistic, the result of long hours with exercise machines. But it was clearly natural to him, as natural as the smile—warm but reserved, no beach-boy grin.
“Miss Olivia Wyvern. Mr. Tevita Nadarivatu.” We shook hands.
“I’m Liv. What do I call you?”
“Vatu. Everyone calls me Vatu. Since my army days. It means Stone.” The nickname, he explained in a resonant voice I wanted on film, referred to his reluctance to get up early after drinking “grog.” He’d been with Fiji’s UN troops in Lebanon. I noticed his T-shirt, a sort of traffic sign—a red circle with a diagonal slash enclosing a mushroom cloud; below it was the question, When Will I Be Blown Up? attributed to William Faulkner, 1950, accepting his Nobel Prize.
“Now we’ve got a little Lebanon of our own,” Vatu added sheepishly, making it clear he didn’t approve of the coup in Fiji.
“You couldn’t be in better hands,” Lars said. “This man speaks English, French, Fijian of course, and Tahitian.”
Vatu laughed off the compliment. “Everyone in this part of the world has languages. Otherwise it’s awkward when you leave home.”
“Which is?”
“Suva, same as the Tui Marama. In Fijian her name means something like Lady Chief, like Queen. In Tahiti Marama means moon. All this—” he waved at the open sea outside the reef, where Moorea rose green behind a waiting tanker “—is Moana Marama, the Moon Sea. Tahitian legend. The Societies are fallen moons.”
He was anthracite dark, with a high furrowed forehead and a helmet of springy hair resembling well-trimmed topiary. I’d seen engravings of men like Vatu in old books, ferocious figures with punky warpaint, stretched earlobes, and towering bouffants dyed orange and red. But he was calm and soft-spoken, with such easy manners they seemed a state of grace.
“How did you learn Tahitian?”
“The best way. My wife’s Tahitian.”
“Is she coming to see you off?” I glanced around for her. Tourists were admiring the boat. And I believe—this may only be hindsight—that I have an echo of a hardbitten man in slacks and aviator sunglasses, a professional of some kind, taking photographs.
“Tara’s in Paris, at the Sorbonne. I’ve been staying with her mum and dad. They’ll be down soon. We’ll sail after lunch. Less traffic on the water.”
Lars handed me a letter. “This came for you. I forgot it the other night.” English Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z1. I turned aside, reeling with homesickness.
“Farewell, all. Bon voyage!” The Confucian figure glided away on his lime-green flip flops.
Smell. Not a filmmaker’s long suit. A boat is a thing of smells, carrying her years about in bilges, lockers, beneath her ribs, in the hidden footings of her masts. Diesel, new paint, varnish, these were superficial. A few seasons of leisure hadn’t banished thirty years of working life. Below, in strata of time, lay exhalations of pineapple and banana, drifts of cocoa, spilt rum, crushed sardines, tarred rope, tobacco coils, lye and quicklime, bully beef and withered bêche-de-mer—all that had sweltered under the Tui Marama’s decks. And through everything the rancid tang of copra.
Copra, bringer of cargo—knives, guns, watches, radios and calico—a life rendered into soaps and oils, like the whale. The only thing a lonely atoll has to sell. Except itself: a place to practise blowing up the world.
I’m not sure when I began to notice things were wrong. For the first few days it was calm in the evenings, the auxiliary chugging, the old ship nodding and ambling beneath us like a mule. We’d gather on the forward hatch around Vatu’s tanoa—his kava bowl—a beautiful, bellied thing hollowed from a giant tree, the Fijian sitting regally behind it like a muscled Buddha. This was his “grog,” not alcoholic but a mild opiate. He taught me the etiquette: crossed legs and upright back, the respectful handclap before accepting the coconut-shell cup, the importance of draining it in one and clapping again quietly.
I got to like the earthy taste with its numbing hint of drug. Three or four rounds before supper, one formal, showing respect for the holy plant, then a stretching of legs and stories. The South Seas! There was nowhere on earth, during those first, good days, I’d rather have been.
Natalie and Simon seemed affectionate by the bowl, knees touching, fingers interlaced on the pandanus mat that Vatu always unrolled on the hatch, Simon interested in her lecture on the pharmacology of kava (given for my benefit), she boasting of her husband, his degrees in zoology and botany, his collections, his cartoon strip for a greenie magazine.
“Show us the latest, Si,” she said. He was good: the line strong, the captions making the point. Frame One: A lovely blue-white Earth orbited by an alien spacecraft, a laughable Buck Rogers thing, two squid-like creatures reclining inside and sipping cocktails with little umbrellas. “What did I tell you?” one says to the other, “the perfect honeymoon spot.” Frame Two: second alien frowning, its large eye goggling through a telescope. “I thought you said this place was unspoiled. It’s overrun by tool-makers! See for yourself.” Frame three: close-up on factory chimneys, a traffic jam, airliners circling a congested airport. Frame four: “Don’t worry, darling. That’ll all be gone by the time we land. Those infestations are self-limiting.”
Simon showed his work sheepishly, like a small boy ashamed of a stamp collection he’s outgrowing. I saw that Natalie was being strenuously nice to him.
At breakfast next morning he was moody, giving short answers, avoiding my eye. It was a Sunday, Vatu on watch, Natalie with a week-old Sydney Morning Herald, bought at great price in Papeete, spread out on the doghouse table.
Simon: “Go on. Read the paper, then.”
Natalie: “Sorry, you want some? Sports or Books?”
Simon: “You know perfectly well what I want. I want to talk. I like talking at breakfast. Together five years and you don’t even know that. Jesus!”
“Simon, that’s not fair. You know we haven’t had news from home since Suva. And you know there’s nothing I like better on a Sunday morning than to curl up with a coffee and spread out the paper for a quiet half hour.”
“A quiet two hours, more like. Liv, you tell her. How long have we been sitting here? How long’s she had her nose in that?”
“Sorry. This one’s for you two to sort. I’m taking coffee up to Vatu.”
“Oh, yes. Vatu. Oh ye
s. Fine specimen, isn’t he? You should see how your tongue hangs out. It’s revolting.”
“Simon! Say what you like to me. But don’t you ever speak to Liv like that again.”
“Or what?”
“Why do you always have to be so bloody pugnacious?”
“I’m not pugnacious. I just defend my turf against habitual trespassers.”
“What sort of life is it, Simon, when you see your whole existence as bits of turf to be defended?”
I didn’t know Simon and Natalie well enough to judge how serious their bickering was, but it alarmed me. Only Vatu stayed the same, radiating his polite goodwill. He must have noticed things weren’t right, but was too well-bred to let it show. I kept to my duties and myself, avoiding the Australians because I wanted to, avoiding Vatu because I didn’t. I don’t hold the agony-aunt view that the “other woman” is always a villain or fool. That’s not how I see it. As Bob’s other woman I was keeping that marriage alive, supplying something it lacked, for him anyway. (And for her, too, if she couldn’t stand sleeping with the guy, but I didn’t ask.) That said, I was hardly a social worker. I was there for my own rewards. I’d rather share an interesting man than have a dull one all to myself. But one affair like that’s enough. So I treated Vatu with a formality that seemed to suit his own code of behaviour. I stayed out of his cabin; he stayed out of mine.
That night there was a storm, our first, the dark sea blossoming white under a backlit overcast. The old ship leapt and skittered until dawn, as if shrunk to a bathtoy, tiny on the waves. I felt overwhelmed, inadequate. And plain scared. I’d never seen weather like that from a boat.
We thought it a turtle or a dolphin. They’re often caught in drift-nets, Natalie said, where if they can’t surface to breathe they drown in about half an hour. If breathing is possible, they die more slowly trying to thrash free, the nylon slicing into necks and flippers.
She’d just relieved me on lookout at the masthead. Vatu thought there might be uncharted reefs. “Charts can’t be trusted, Liv,” he’d said. “Coral is a stone that grows.” We took turns aloft, fighting nausea and hypnosis, watching for a change from green to turquoise, for a tell-tale stitch of waves. Natalie sang out again. She’d seen colour.
“Nothing. Only human. Filthy bastards.”
She meant flotsam, rubbish from a ship. She’d said more than she knew.
The woman was floating face down, her yellow hair fanned and pulsing in the swell like fronds of seaweed. Her shadow lanced away through green infinity, a shaft of darkness with the outline of a bird. She wore a red shirt and white shorts. Her feet were bare, the soles very pale as she slipped by. It seemed impossible that she could be here, so far from land. We’d seen no ships or islands, not even any gulls for days.
A breath of nightmare touched my scalp and set me shivering in all that heat. Vatu started the engine and reversed, spilling the wind. Natalie was pulling on a pair of fins. “I’m going in for her. Simon, get ready to lift her over the stern. Liv, go back aloft, would you, and look for a sail. The boat she came from might still be around. Keep a sharp eye out for wreckage.”
I did as I was told, swarming up the ratlines (the rope ladders between the Tui’s shrouds), scanning through binoculars. The sea was gentle again, acting innocent. I was at the centre of a still and empty world, a bare disc drawn from the compass-tip at which I stood. The body had materialized from nothing, a sleeping beauty on the ocean fields.
The only variations were the fall of sunlight, cloud shadows, an occasional flash when a heavy swell collapsed in a grin of foam. No sail, no funnel, no smoke. Nothing but isolated clouds overhead, and larger ones growing up from the horizon on slender stalks, spreading out in caps like toadstools. We might have been the last people on Earth. On water. I think I was in shock.
A shout summoned me on deck. I helped Simon and Vatu grasp the woman by her arms and heave her up the transom. In the water she’d looked merely unconscious; out of it she was clearly dead, her buoyant repose transformed into a sodden lifelessness. Eyes staring like a doll’s, sky blue, till Natalie brushed down the lids.
We laid her out beside the companionway. She looked young. Sixteen, twenty-two? The dead don’t show their age like the living. Natalie knelt astride the girl, kneading her, dislodging a gush of bloody water from the lungs. I noticed Natalie’s hair, how the sun had burnt a pink line along her parting. The hair shook. She inhaled sharply, a moment of horror before regaining her professional detachment.
“My God, look here. She’s been hit! On the head.”
She rolled the body onto its front to show us the wound, then pulled up the shirt, exposing a purple welt over most of the back. The backs of the thighs were the same. Vatu turned away, respectful of woman, of the dead. Simon began to cough, his voice narrow. “Sunburn?”
“Sunburn doesn’t crack ribs. If I open her up, I’m sure I’ll find internal injuries. She fell from a height. The water hit her like concrete. Or something did.”
We threw hasty questions. Where could she have fallen from so hard? A mast? A cruise ship? Vatu didn’t think last night’s storm had been bad enough to sink anything seaworthy “More likely a propane leak in the galley. Gas sinks more boats than weather.”
“I don’t think she fell from a ship at all.” Simon was glaring upwards, fury in his eyes. “I say she fell from the sky. The Argies do that. When they ‘disappear’ people, verb transitive. Heave-ho from a chopper out at sea. She was probably a guerrilla or something. A teacher who got uppity and joined a union.”
“We’re a long way from Argentina, Simon,” Natalie said.
“Not as far as you think. Only a couple of hours by air from Easter Island. That belongs to the Argies.”
“Chile. It belongs to Chile.”
“Same difference.”
“Were jumping to conclusions.” Vatu’s resonant voice, calming. “We know very little.”
The body was fresh—only hours dead—but wouldn’t stay fresh much longer. It couldn’t last to the nearest village, let alone a port with a police station. The Tui’s fridge was smaller than a TV set, enough for milk, butter and a few beers. We couldn’t keep her.
“I’d like privacy for an hour or so, below,” Natalie said. “I’m going to take photos, then do a post-mortem. It won’t be pretty. When I’ve got her sewn up we’ll bury her at sea. We’ll keep her clothes and try to get some fingerprints. Can we find some ink, Simon? Maybe squeeze it out of a biro or something?”
The three of us sat at the bow, as far as possible from Natalie’s operating slab—the doghouse table. I went aft briefly, to help with the fingerprinting. She was coolly efficient with the corpse. I wasn’t; this girl was the first I’d ever seen. (Except for Mother, “at rest” in an undertaker’s chapel, her make-up done all wrong.)
There’d been a flurry of words and speculations. Now no one spoke. Vatu and I studied the water for wreckage, a wallet, anything. For a time the Tui was adrift, head to the faint wind, sheets slack, sails jowly A sorry bit of seamanship, had there been other eyes to see it. A ship is lovely only when she’s taut. A flapping sail is a sign of tragedy, like a horse on its side.
Simon went to the wheel, let the ship fall off and gather way for steadiness while Natalie worked.
It was four o’clock when she emerged, arms bloody to the elbows, face drawn. She was wearing a yellow plastic apron that said Captain Cook.
“You better take a dip, sheila. Then you’ll need a drink.” Simons old voice was back, amiable, confident, the voice he’d had in Tahiti. “Luff—and tots of grog all round. Real grog, Navy style. Then we’ll do the honours. Anyone got a prayerbook?”
No one had, not even Vatu.
“What a mob of heathens! Still, she might be a heathen herself. Might have been.…” He went below and came back with a salt-rimed Bible, an Australian ensign, some glasses and a bottle of rum. “To those in peril on the sea. Bottoms up.” Simon jerked his thumb at Vatu. “You and me, mate. We’ll fet
ch her. Ladies stay on deck.”
While they were below, Natalie bathed in the sea, then came forward, wringing her hair inside a towel. “You’re good with words, Liv. Would you, you know … read something?” She put the old book in my hands. There was a purple ribbon marking Psalm 104:
O Lord my God …
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters:
Who maketh the clouds his chariot:
Who walketh upon the wings of the wind.…
Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.
Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment.…
There go the ships: there is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. These wait all upon thee.…
Let the wicked be no more.
Praise ye the Lord.
The small corpse shrank quickly, weighted by a spare anchor, a paleness in the green, smaller and smaller, until it was only a writhing opalescence, a white otter diving to the bottom of the world.
Ten
ENGLAND
Riverhill. October, 1899
I DID NOT WITNESS IT MYSELF, but doubt anyway that I could have adduced a rational explanation for what was seen as we sailed back to Melbourne from Tasmania. I am not mystically inclined, nor was I then. Table-rapping, ball-gazing, spirit-calling, planchette—all that seems to me sheer trickery and nonsense, unworthy of civilized beings. The Holy Ghost’s as far as I go. Yet a very queer thing happened out there on the Bass Strait, and no-one, not even Reverend Dalton or the Admiral, was able to account for it.
There was little wind that night, the ships all but becalmed, and the waters of the strait, which have a well-earned name for treachery, were on their best behaviour, glittering like beaten pewter in the path of the moon. At about four a.m., a lookout shouted that “the Flying Dutchman” was across our bows.
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