by Jase Kovacs
I pull out some ships biscuit, hard tack we bake on the island, and offer it to him. "Here, kid. You look hungry."
Doesn't raise his eyes, doesn't stop the water works but a hand comes up and he takes it. He nibbles it and, what do you know, suddenly he feels all better again.
"They're gone eh? You here by yourself?"
Nods.
"What have you been eating?"
"Tins."
Katie perks up. That's good news. "You have many tins?"
"Plenty tins."
"No one else on this ship."
"No one."
"What's your name?"
"Blong Blong."
"Okay. My name is Matai. My friends call me Matty. Do you want to call me Matty?"
He wrinkles his nose. Like he just stepped in something. "Matai? What sort of name is this?"
What sort of name is Blong Blong, retorts Katie.
"It means south wind. It comes from an island named Tahiti. I'm a sailor. I use the wind to go places. You know what I mean?"
He nods, like, no lady I have no idea what you're talking about but you're giving me biscuit so I'll keep you happy.
"Did you come on this ship?"
"Yes."
I want to ask him what happened here, where are the others, why is there only you, but figure we could do without the tears for a while so I let him eat his biscuit and get comfortable. He finishes it off, licking the crumbs from his fingers and then cocks his head to the side as if listening. Cries of sea birds and a tortured grinding filling the bowels of the ship as the tide spills through warped steel plates and stirs cargo and the flotsam and jetsam no doubt swirling in the deeper reaches of the hold.
"I sleep in crew deck. Captain said no, not allowed up here Blong Blong but he gone okay I sleep there now. Dark down in big places. Plenty things but no light. Big holes, Blong Blong falls and no go back. We go, yes? You got flashlight, you take Blong Blong, get more things and good foods we eat lots yes?"
"Whoa, slow down there kid." I guess I'm smiling as his face has lit up like a sunrise. He's bursting with nervous energy, jiggling his legs and about two seconds from jumping up and leading me by the hand as if we're on a merry jaunt to the fairground. "Back up there. It's just you, right? Captain's gone? Crew gone?"
He nods, excited now. "Just me. We can go now, yes? Take good food. All the cans here dirty. Makes Blong Blong sick." He mimes vomiting and then grins like he has just told the world's best joke, his white teeth impossibly straight and clean, almost glistening. "Is okay, only Blong Blong here, no worry, we go you help Blong Blong yes?"
"Okay. Show me."
What the hell are you doing?
There's no marys here, I tell Katie, using my Mum's old name for the infected. This kid would be chum otherwise.
You don't know that. Tie him back up and do it properly. Have your school excursion later. A kid alone on a shipwreck like this? You don't find that the least bit suspicious?
How long do you want to stay on this hulk? Let's get the kid to show us what there is. Hey, maybe having a guide who knows the ship is a good idea - like I won't fall through a rusted deck and you won't have to find someone else to annoy.
Blong Blong moves to the doorway while I have this exchange with Katie. Waiting by the door as I look off. As if I was gazing into the distance rather than having a pointless argument with a manifestation of my subconscious.
Nuh-uh. Kid still alive after all this time? This ship's been here for years. There's something funny going on here. He's probably bait.
Did you notice the lifeboat on the way up here, Katie?
No.
Exactly. The gantry is empty. The lifeboat is gone.
Could mean anything.
You're right. Let's find out.
"Blong Blong." I crouch down so I can look him in the eyes, taking him by the shoulders. He can't meet my gaze of course so I wait until he plucks up the courage to look up to me. He's a little annoyed, which I'm pleased to see, like, what is it lady, let's go get some tins. "You have to tell me. What happened to everyone else? What happened to the crew."
He flicks his head, as if clearing an errant strand of hair from his eyes. "Gone. Runaway. Leave Blong Blong."
"How did they run away?"
"Big storm. Ship going. Everyone jump in orange boat. Runaway. Forget Blong Blong."
"When was this?"
He shrugs. "Long time."
"Blong Blong little?"
Nods.
"Ship crash?"
"Ship crash! Ka-bew!" He smacks his fist into his palm and then lets it slide up his forearm, hinting at the ship working its way onto the reef. "No more go. Blong Blong all alone. Sad Blong Blong. Eating tins. No good. Come on, let's go, let's go." He takes my hand from his shoulder and pulls me to the door.
I look back at Katie who is still perched in one of the busted windows.
I don't like it she says.
He shows me where he lives. The crew deck, the bottom level of the superstructure. The deck covered in discarded tins and wads of paper and random detritus. His home a cabin with four steel bunks, one of them covered in filthy blankets, he points to it and says "My bed. Itchy."
I'm not surprised. He's just been leaving the cans and tins wherever they fall and the air is thick with flies and I don't look too hard at the ground as maggots turn my stomach. I can only imagine the lice that crawl through his matted dreadlocked hair and the parasites burrowing in his skin, as he scratches himself and picks at the sores on his forearms.
We'll have to give him a full delousing before taking him aboard.
Ha ha what? You can't be serious. You want this little rat on Voodoo? He's got fleas for god's sake.
I don't even bother replying to Katie, who is hanging outside as if she is worried about picking up a skin infection herself. She knows as well as I do that we can't leave him here. He has to come back with us. Plus, hey the kid's kind of funny. Like, when we come in, he points to some yellowed faded pornography that is pinned up to the wall of the crew deck and wrinkles his nose, letting me know that yuck who wants to see that? And I see a ratty old stuffed rabbit in the corner of his bunk and, when he notices me looking, he pushes a pillow over it, embarrassed like oh this is just some other kid's toy animal, I'm a big guy now.
"So where are these cans, Blong?" I drop the diminutive repetition of his name; it's a Filipino thing, kids get their name doubled. Calling him Blong, I let him know I think he's a grown up and I can see he notices, his shoulders squaring and his frame swelling, the pride nourishing him the way a rusted tin of peaches never could.
"Down below. You got good torch, yes? You light it up?"
I can't resist showing off. I drop to my knee and swing my rifle up in one smooth motion. Thumb the Surefire as it comes level so it pins a circle of white radiance in the far wall, a noticeboard covered in faded safety posters: Do you have your HIVIZ? Working for ZERO accidents.
If it looks like I've practiced this manoeuvre, it's because I have. Weapons drills done every day. Mag changes, cross draws, weapon fires weapon stops, immediate action, clearance drills, realign the weapon and continue firing. Keep me smooth and honed. Thanks Dad.
Blong laughs, the noise warming, claps his hands. Still a child despite this isolation this slum this deprivation. "Oh boy, you serious lady. Seal Team Six awesome. Okay, let's go, let's get some good tins, I show you the way."
Katie however doesn't look pleased when we come out. Blong skips ahead, disappearing down another stairwell but she points over to the side, to the base of the superstructure, where the radar and the antennae lie stacked, piled and then discarded, the plastic crumpled from UV, the fittings rattling loose.
Who leaves salvage behind? she asks.
"Come on lady!" Blong waves at the doorway, cross treaded stairs disappearing into the ship's guts. "Lots of good stuff down here."
Matty...
I see it. The electrics that were removed carefully from the top of the s
hip have been abandoned. The radar bar and the antenna and a couple of screens and two crates, neatly stacked. Ready to be unloaded.
Then I look to the kid, his face alight, delighted to finally have someone to talk to, someone to share his iron fortress with, his sanctuary, his prison, his Elba and I shrug to Katie. We're here now, aren't we? We've rolled the dice. Let's find out what's going on.
Why are there no birds living here, Matty?
Kid probably eats them, right?
Blong's voice rolls up from the stairwell. "Come on, Matty! Bring flashlight!"
I step forward and go down the stairs. Katie watching me go, like, I don't want to be part of this.
Over the threshold and down the stairs into the cool dark belly of the ship, Blong waiting at the bottom, waving his hands, excited I'm coming. He disappears inside and I follow.
Chapter 6
Sometimes I dive off Voodoo and let myself sink. When I'm becalmed in the middle of the ocean. No wind, no land nicking the horizon, an oily swell rolling the boat, sails whip-cracking at the end of every roll like the ticks of a metronome.
I step off the rail and plunge into the limitless blue. I can hold my breath for five minutes. Around that. My friend Calypso taught me. The French girl; she was a freediver. Big Blue. I float under Voodoo and look up at her. A dark shape, a streamlined ellipse surrounded by shards of sunlight dappling speckled waves. Below me a blue so deep that it passes beyond my perception into the infinite. My home an infinitesimal speck in a eternal watery void.
Calypso could dive down to fifty two metres. Maybe she still can; we haven't heard from her since year one, a single call on the HF, Zis is Zophie... we are going to Zingapore... crackles and whistles and pops of sunlight crackling in the ionosphere as my friend sailed into memory.
I'm not that good. Maybe make thirty five metres before the feeling of all that water above me overwhelms me and forces me to run back to the surface. It's not the depth, it's not the time that drives me to return, it's the weight, the psychological weight of all that water above, there are X metres between you and the air, do you dare to go on?
But depth notwithstanding, I can hold my breath. That's useful when living on a boat. When I'm not sure about my anchor, the holding, will it hang on during a big storm? I dive down the chain and swim its length, making sure it is straight and true, that the anchor has hooked and isn't just skating along fine slick mud or coral rubble like a tumbling paperweight. Good also when the chain catches on something, when the change of tides spins the boat around and wraps the chain around coral bommies. Go down there and sort it out.
One morning. I don't remember where. Borneo? No. Solomons. I had dropped the hook off a rocky point. No bottom either side, the reef a crest of land running out twelve meters deep before falling off to who knows how far down. Stupid, I was fourteen, still finding my way alone. After Dad. Before Madau. All alone.
The crest was all big boulders. I could hear them all night, grating on the chain as Voodoo rose and fell in the swell. Knowing that the odds were even that the chain would get caught up on something.
Sure enough, next morning I'm ratcheting away on the windlass and it just stops. No movement. So tight that Voodoo's bow stays down when the swell washes by, the chain locking her in, tying her to the ground, to whatever was down there, as if Voodoo was a big balloon or something. I slacked off the chain and grabbed a mask and down I went. Down fifteen meters. The water so clear I could see the problem as soon as I went in. The anchor wedged between two rocks, the chain twisted around a boulder just so every ratchet on the windlass only locked it in tighter.
I pulled myself hand over hand down the chain. The trick to relax, to zen out, let your body mellow so oxygen consumption goes down. To be chill about the idea that you had four minutes thirty seconds before you would black out. Ignore the body's instinctive, evolutionary need to breathe, the way your diaphragm wants to spasm, to force your mouth open and suck air. To counter every instinct that the human race had evolved to leave the oceans, to crawl upon land. Wasn't that a great idea? No plague among dolphins. No marys when it comes to whales.
So I'm down there, fifteen metres deep, waiting for the swell to dip the bow of the boat enough that I can unloop the 12mm chain (it's my big anchor, the bruce) from below the boulder when it happens. The morning sun spearing the blue with long shafts of gold. Out of the corner of my eye. A dark shadow comes. A growing shade. Impossibly huge, greater than any whale. First a hint of bulk and then a sense of eyes and a perception of fins and they come. Long sleek grey bodies. Hooked tails. Black button eyes and long snouts and half-gaping jaws curling with hooks of teeth.
Sharks.
Coming from out of the deep blue, a vast lance a caravan a progression a school an army. An armada of sharks. So close they look like they swim fin in fin. Hundreds of them, moving together, slowly but with purpose and direction. They come in and I hold onto the chain, my mouth opening in surprise and shock and maybe a little fear and a single bubble works its way loose and tumbles up to the surface.
There's all types - black tip reef sharks and white tips too, usually found lying lazily under rocky overhangs or gulping water sitting on the bottom. Grey nurses and tawny spotted leopard sharks. Sharks don't school together. Hell, they don't school, swim together maybe off pinnacles but never schooling, not like this. They look like a vast school of sardines, if sardines were six or eight or even ten feet long. Thresher sharks, their long tails like scythes sweeping lazy fields of wheat. Makos and tigers, the sight of which make me involuntarily instinctively huddle, my shoulders tighten, I pull myself against the chain as if I could become one with the rock. Sharks don't swim like this. They don't school, they don't march in great interspecies phalanxes like a procession of pilgrims, a parade, a crusade.
But these do.
They don't notice me. Or if they do, they don't care. There are hammerheads, their widely spaced eyes sweeping back and forth as their bodies twist in a serpentine motion that reminds me of pythons crossing rivers. And then, in the heart of the school, a great white shark, so large it looks like a bus surrounded by motorbikes. Its intelligence alien and ancient. Its mind from another plane. He sees me, I am sure. I look into its black eyes and I feel a peculiar horrible spark of acknowledgement. As if he says I know of your people and the havoc you have wrought. But beyond that, nothing. Cruising sedately with a regal elegance that would have taken my breath away, if I wasn't holding it so dearly.
The parade of sharks goes on for what seems like forever, an eternity amplified by the growing tightness in my lungs, the gradual darkening in the corners of my eyes, the flashes of red as every heart beat reminds me I am living on dwindling reserves. But I don't care, I could watch them until I died. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? And what drives them to swim together?
This would never be seen in the Time Before.
Until the school tapers and thins and with a suddenness that leaves an ache like the pain of an old wound, they are gone. A final fading tail driving the straggler onwards, a black ink stain evaporating until nothing is left but unblemished azure. The majesty is over, whatever miracle I was witness to done.
My work is down here is finished. Hanging onto the chain, bobbing on it like a fender, allowed it to work itself free and I let go, letting myself reluctantly float up to the surface, to separate myself from the water that is my home, my womb, the seawater that flows through my veins, the salt that is my life.
The great blue empty once more.
Chapter 7
Blong scampers down steel corridors, calling back, his voice echoing, his bare feet slapping on the deck. Yanking open doors and hatches with abandon, swinging them wide with clangs that reverberate through the hull.
I move behind him, keeping my rifle up, keeping the torch on the main corridor. It stretches for fifteen metres ahead of me before ending in a bulkhead, the hatch, which is painted with a big number 4, is secured by a wheel a foot in diameter. I'v
e given Blong a penlight and he dances excitedly back into the main corridor to show me whatever he has found. Delighted that the dark off-limits is finally open to him.
"Check this out, lady!"
"Throw it into the corridor." I may have discounted Katie's paranoia but I'm not stupid. Not going to let him lure me into an ambush.
"No, come in here." He's in the last room, just before the bulkhead. The corridor is scattered with items he has found noteworthy. Cans and a bunch of hard drives and a laptop, open, its keyboard heavy with dust. A bag of flares and a bunch of technical manuals, their pages fused together with mildew. "Oh boy, jackpot!" he calls.
I more down the corridor, pausing only to shoulder the bag of flares. My knees low, moving in a shuffle to keep stable, my weapon sweeping each cabin as I pass. These seem like engineering store rooms, locked cabinets filled with cardboard boxes bearing names that hold the mystical reverence that words like Eldorado and Babylon and King Solomon held for the ancients, words that portended great treasure and reward. But for me the riches that quicken my heart are known by names like Mitsubishi and Perkins and Jabsco Pumps and Johnson Original Impellers.
Spares. Room after room of spares. My heart thuds with an excitement greater than any child ever felt on Christmas morning. These are not toys. These are not treasures. These spares will keep people alive.
Blong comes back in the corridor, struggling with a box as big as his torso. NIPPON KEIDENKI WORKS LTD. He opens it and lifts out a metal cube wrapped in plastic. "What's this?"
"It's a voltage regulator."
He looks at it curiously, disappointed by the banal technicality of the name. "Can we use it?"
I laugh for pure joy, laugh at our sudden fortune. "Oh shit yes, we can use it!"
"Okay lady! Let's go. Open the door. Big room behind. Too big for Blong."
"You never came down here before?"
He puts the regulator gently back in the box, replacing the polystyrene insulation carefully, folding the cardboard lid back into place with the reverence usually reserved for holy artefacts. "Nope. Door too hard. No light. Too scary."
