The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Now begins the octopus’s attempt to pull its prey bodily into its lair. Its grip no longer feels localised at your arm. Vaguely you know it must have put out another tentacle to grip your body, but it surely cannot pull you in like that: the cleft is too narrow to accommodate you and the tentacle; as long as it goes on trying that way you are going to remain stuffed into the entrance but not drawn in past it. And then that pressure, too, increases unimaginably and you realise that your reasoning did not include the inevitable collapse of your own ribcage. There must be some movement into the hole because your head twists round even further, making crackling sounds. It is now so far round it catches a glimpse of Badoy’s torch pointing aimlessly upwards; you wonder why it should be until you sense it is your own, held behind your back in your left hand, now no longer a part of you. So where is Badoy, God damn him? Fiddling about somewhere below in the darkness….

  Until his light, like a lark descending, strikes from above and there he is again. This time he tears the air-line from your mouth and pants great cavities into the water about you. His spear-gun is gone; in his hand he holds a knife. With this he retreats behind you after first pushing his air-hose back into your mouth. There are sensations of rending from your midriff; light flashes intermittently. Suddenly the appalling grip around your waist eases, your lower half is free to move a little away from the mouth of the hole and swivel to the right to relieve minutely your cracking neck. You are once again held only by the arm, which feels double its length. Badoy appears briefly, sucks air and disappears. This time there are no flashes of light: he is beneath you, wedging himself and his torch into the hole. There are confused feelings of tearing and pain from your arm, and without warning the rock floats away from the side of your head like feathers and a gentle cushion of water takes its place. Simultaneously there is a great roaring in one ear: Badoy is offering you your now-released air-line and takes back his own. For a moment you both drift, each sucking on your tube as somewhere in the night above the compressor chugs and chugs, blessed engine.

  Badoy shines his light back towards the cleft, now ten feet away. A great cloud of ink floats about its mouth and a host of small nocturnal shrimp-like krill, attracted by the light, are prickling at hands and faces like flies on a summer’s day. Then he propels you away and upwards in a slow journey that seems to take for ever while pain begins gathering in your right hand and arm, the left side of your head, your neck and nearly everywhere else. The pressure of the air-jet increases as you rise, and you still go on breathing it even after your head breaks the surface, not quite sure that you have left one medium for another. Then you spit it out and it flails and gushes.

  ‘Oy, Badoy! Badoy!’ you shout in the darkness into the suddenly cold air. An answering cry comes from close at hand and now you can hear his own hose, discarded and bubbling. ‘Where the hell did you get the knife?’

  ‘Ayy!’ He gives a long exultant whoop. The compressor is close by; it chugs in the invisible boat, rising and falling. There are voices. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The knife. Where did you get it?’

  ‘I went up for it.’

  ‘Jesus!’ The implications. ‘But I had your air-hose.’

  ‘It wasn’t so far. We were only down about seventy feet.’

  ‘But we’d been there a long time. Decompression….’

  ‘No problem. I went up straight and down straight again. You can do that if you’re quick.’

  ‘Why didn’t we take bloody knives with us?’ you heard your petulant rhetorical question go out into the night air. ‘So stupid….’

  But what was this world to which you had returned? You still felt yourself travelling up and up into the sky as usual, but this time it was different. Something had changed; for the aftermath of fear is not relief and still less is it reassurance. The exact note had been struck, your whole life was ringing with that undeniable resonance, that messy echo of childhood fear of fear, and hero-worship, and fear of cowardice, and longing for something or other to be over.

  You got yourself into the boat, the compressor fell silent, the screw churned. There was not much talk and no banter even from those who had spent the night safely aboard. You slumped, the deck slippery with your blood and the mucus which had come from the octopus and coated everything. In the dark you discovered your arm was burst and a thick muscle now lay exposed; you turned your torch on it in loathing but merely found a foot or so of severed tentacle still stuck there.

  ‘Ah,’ said Badoy, ‘that was good, bringing a bit of the octopus. Better than none at all. We’ll cook it by and by.’

  You smiled in the dark at this. ‘What was your own catch like before all that?’

  ‘OK. Not bad, not good. Not a very good night for fish. About like you.’

  ‘Damn. Of course, my own catch is still down there.’

  ‘No, it’s here. I cut off the nylon before we came up.’ He flashed his light on to a jumble of fish bodies in the bilges. He had also brought up your mask.

  ‘You’re quite unbelievable.’

  You returned to the island where you examined your wounds. Nothing desperate. The round sucker-weals stood out in scarlet over right arm and waist, each pinpricked with livid blood-spots. The side of your face and head was gouged and scratched but it was all superficial. There was a single deep cut on the inside of your forearm where Badoy’s knife had sliced through the tentacle. ‘Sorry,’ said Badoy.

  Dawn was coming. The air turned grey. You all packed up and crossed back to Tagud. The story was told and retold, but only because there was nothing else to do with it. There is no way outside the gruff fiction of derring-do to thank someone for saving your life; it is far too complex a matter to merit simple thanks. Must you not have wanted to die, just a little bit? Must there not have been that desire tucked down in your unconscious to entomb your conscious as well in those dark gulfs, even as your betrayed body tried to escape them? How else could you have ignored so many danger signals, have been so cavalier? And Badoy, too, had he ever had any real option? What were the psychic rewards for being a hero? Or for failing? How, knowing all this and suspecting still more, could you possibly say anything as banally inappropriate as ‘thank you’?

  For the rest of that day and, it seemed, for weeks afterwards the stench of the compressor came back up from inside.

  On the way back to Anilao, Badoy said once again, and not at all apropos of the incident (which you really believed he had half-forgotten): ‘I don’t want to be a fisherman all my life. Are there jobs in television in your country? I would like that, I think.’

  For a short time you resumed your leisurely life in Anilao, although it took time to muster the courage to go spear-fishing again, particularly at night. As if to urge you through this bad patch Badoy made you an even better spear-gun to replace the other, with a redesigned trigger of whose mechanism he was extremely proud. Then one night he said: ‘To be a fisherman you need to be brave.’ It was the first time he had ever alluded to questions of fear and courage. You were surprised.

  ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘of course you are scared down there. Plenty of people there at Tagud will not go down at night like you, like us. They do not want to use the compressor. We’re all scared; it’s a bit dangerous sometimes.’

  You knew then that right from the beginning it had been a plot. For reasons of his own Badoy had wanted you to feel fear, had needed to set up that howling echo just as much as your submerged self; had led you inexorably to the compressor so you could suck in great draughts of it. The reasons – oh, they were lost in the workings of his psyche maybe; or perhaps they were his direct way of counteracting an impression of impotence he hated giving. For might not a foreigner like yourself so richly endowed with nonchalant mobility, such passports and visas and letters of credit, who moved so fluently in the clear waters above a sullen Third World labour pool – might not such a foreigner be badly in need of a lesson in respect? To make light of two great obsessions of the affluent West,
technology and physical security, even as he dreamed of clawing his way into that world – might that not have been Badoy’s real elegance, his deadliest accuracy? And if you had not been ruffled by this suggestion of war would you not have allowed a burst of affection for the way it had been declared?

  ‘There’s one thing,’ you said magnanimously. ‘If that night we’d been wearing pukka scuba gear, I’d most likely be dead. You couldn’t just have given me your air-hose while you went up to fetch the knife.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘You see? Simple things are best.’

  On the other hand, of course, you would almost certainly have been wearing a knife….

  You did fish again but it was not the same. Your dreams were full of aggression aimed at Badoy, the lucklessly innocent repository of your fantasies. Nobody is as put out as a jilted fantasist, and the fantasist who thinks to perceive an actuality in what he is doing is the most put out of all. You became tired of his voice, his ‘ay!’, his wife moving dolefully about their dark house while radiating some tough resolve. You hoped he would soon get a job abroad. One day word reached you that the dendro-thermal project was shelved and with it your feasibility study, but that if you went back to the capital and bullied the right civil servant you could get your accrued salary.

  Your leavetaking from Badoy was friendly, offhand, as if in six months or so you might well fetch up back in Anilao and find him still mooching and dreaming of emigration. Then he would dig out your old spear-gun and you would both slip back into the water as if no time had passed. But on the battered once-a-day bus which took you away up the coast you sat on the landward side, ignoring the blue waters creaming over the reefs on your left, staring fixedly into the palm-groves and the forest above them pouring skyward through ravines and gullies to the peaks of the central massif. And what were you thinking? That even if you never did return to that particular place wouldn’t the sea always be in waiting? And wouldn’t there be other Badoys and other involuntary opportunities to hear that lone whistler with his private note set ringing a bare inner room? For you cannot help yourself.

  As even now the distant thud, the compressor’s stench rise from inside.

  Cheating

  The honeymoon was nearly over. That morning the Mooltan had emerged unscathed from the Bay of Biscay, and already the gathering overcast and heaping grey-green seas were beginning to throw into brighter and ever more unreal relief the memories of long Mediterranean days, of vivid and pungent ports.

  It had been fun, thought Christine, simultaneously catching herself out on the note of wistfulness and mentally giving herself a cross little shake. It had been fun, of course; and Paul had been sweet in the way their short (but not indecently brief) engagement had promised: attentive and … and, well, thoughtful. That was the word, wasn’t it, which everyone always used about Paul? There was no escaping it. It was hard not to make comparisons with the other young men with whom she had had somewhat reserved dealings; young men in plus-fours and open cars, young men in Oxford bags, young men in white tennis longs. Some, she admitted, had been attractive to a greater or lesser extent (usually the notorious cads, if she were honest) and all had had that crashing, puppyish nonchalance which – if it were ever capable of being reflective – would have blushingly supposed itself lovable. So if ‘thoughtful’ described someone who considered consequences rather than perfunctorily observed etiquette, then Paul was undoubtedly thoughtful. The only trouble was the direction that thoughtfulness took.

  Christine had of course imagined the honeymoon in considerable detail well before it ever happened and by now, practically within sight of Southampton, she ought according to her predictions to have been feeling a changed person. True, she was no longer a virgin; and nothing in her imaginings had prepared her for the oddity of the experience through which this had come about. It was not that their lovemaking wasn’t marvellous – she definitely presumed it was. But the act which above all was supposed to unite two people in each other’s sight (unlike the wedding, which had united them in the sight of God) had seemed to make Paul, if not more distant, exactly, then strangely jocular. He called it ‘Bonzo’ and laughed knowingly before he turned the cabin lights off, at which point she felt her upbringing called upon her to make a proper girlish response such as ‘Oh, really, Paul, you are a wicked boy!’ but she could only remain silent while listening to her new husband groping his way across the room, barking his shins on unfamiliar nautical obstructions. She must have had other preconceptions, too, since without knowing why she had expected it to last longer. But, although ‘Bonzo’ was brief, it was quite frequent, so she supposed that was how it was. And then – as at all other times – Paul was solicitous. Was he all right? Was he hurting, pleasing, loving enough for her? Was he all right?

  Yet after all that, when maybe the earth had moved for her or there again maybe it was just the swell beneath the Mooltan’s forefoot, here at the end of her honey-month she could not in all honesty consider herself changed in any significant way whatever. Well, why should she be? she thought impatiently; her own fantasies had obviously been based on childish suppositions. Paul was untroubled by such foolishness. He was manifestly unchanged.

  They had finished their penultimate breakfast aboard; the last night was to be spent berthed in Southampton since the ship would dock too late for convenient train connections to London. They left the dining room and somehow Christine found herself being escorted courteously but firmly via their stateroom to the secluded reading room on the upper deck.

  ‘You can tell we’re getting nearer home with your eyes closed can’t you, Kitten?’ He closed his eyes in illustration before ushering her through the door of the reading room, which smelt of the beeswax and turpentine polish which stewards applied liberally to every wooden surface they could find. ‘There’s a real edge to that wind. That’s why I want you to wrap up well and stay inside today. We don’t want chills after all that wonderful sun. Can’t risk our baby.’

  Now, what did that mean? Christine wondered as she allowed herself to be tucked into a leather armchair like some elderly patient on a health cruise. He sometimes called her ‘baby’ in joshing recognition of the American films they had watched together (on those occasions when he had said as if impulsively, ‘I know, we’ll go to the flicks,’ but on arriving at the cinema she would discover he had already bought the tickets. Thoughtfulness again). But now might ‘baby’ mean something more literal?

  ‘You’ve got your book, haven’t you?’ he asked. ‘You’ll be able to get through that comfortably before we have to return it to the ship’s library. We might do that at tea-time.’

  ‘I could practically do it now. I’m afraid I’ve cheated and read the last page already.’

  ‘You bad girl.’

  ‘What are you going to be doing, Paul?’

  ‘Nothing, Kitten; just pottering. Thought I might go and say good-bye to the engine-room. That sort of thing. It’s like leaving a familiar old house, isn’t it?’

  The engine-room had exercised a fascination for Paul right from the start of the voyage. He had asked the Captain on their first night out, who had been happy to introduce him to the Chief Engineer. Rather to Christine’s surprise Paul had insisted on taking her as well when the next morning a boy in a white mess-jacket had appeared to conduct him below. The thought crossed her mind that maybe she was expected to find the engine-room so noisy or smelly or otherwise boring that it would give him carte blanche in future to spend hours there without her. He had, it was true, passed much of the voyage in visits to the various mechanical innards of the ship, afterwards explaining what it was that he had seen. In point of fact, none of it had struck her as particularly dull in itself or, come to that, particularly un-dull: it was merely machinery doing precisely what she supposed it would. But she was pleased on his behalf because it had obviously given him immense satisfaction, as well as something to do. She had rather liked the engine-room. It was indeed hot, and the noise was so intense it
seemed to blot out even itself. She had stood amid a kind of deafened silence on a perforated catwalk gripping the handrail tightly and watching two immense cranks below her, one on each side, alternately rising and falling. Each time they rose their bright steel knuckles brushed against a cloth wick dangling from a brass pot bolted just above their reach. She presumed it was some primitive but effective device to keep the bearings oiled. Once outside, in a different kind of silence, she heard Paul’s voice coming as if through layers of felt: ‘Did you see the automatic oilers?’

  ‘Those brass pot things with wicks?’

  And she had caught something in his eye, a flash of annoyance perhaps, a demand that she let things be his way.

  Now she watched him leave the reading room and, through the thick pane of glass next to her, could see him crossing the deck and going down a companionway, tall, boyish, but contriving for all that to look dignified in an elderly way. Perhaps it was his lack of bottom; the back of his trousers seemed empty in a very English manner. She found herself wondering how they would both look in fifty years and was surprised at how easily she should have skimmed over their whole lifetime as if to glimpse the outcome. Not only was that a kind of cheating, it was perfectly ludicrous. What on earth did it matter what they were going to look like, die like? They had an entire life ahead of them. Live it to the full, she told herself, but could not quite banish the poignancy of this piece of sententious self-heartening.