by Gavin Young
I am prepared for what I see next, which is why I grip the sides of the boat. What I see looks like an immense island of wet slate slowly rising from the water; it stretches almost a hundred and eighty degrees before my eyes. But it is not an island. It is a whale – the biggest whale anyone has ever imagined.
Soon the whale is fully surfaced, and the roaring grows even louder – another prelude. I know that the whale is not going to lie there. It is going to do its trick, and its trick is to imitate a salmon; it is going to leap.
It leaps. Can you imagine a leviathan as big as the Queen Elizabeth leaping several hundred feet in the air? I sit alone in that sea, clinging to the sides of the rowing boat. What else can I do but hold on desperately, knowing what will follow when the whale falls back into the water? A tidal wave from horizon to horizon….
But I always wake up before the tidal wave.
When the Starling Cook had finished swilling out his pots and pans with seawater, the waves started to grow larger, and a big and mounting swell from the starboard began to push the launch over to an angle of thirty degrees. The sky was quite bright, not at all like the sky in my nightmare, and a full moon was rising behind us, coming up over Sri Lanka, which by now was well out of sight. The moonlight turned the agitated water into heaving sheets of wet mackintosh. I thought of the immense depths below us. ‘No bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms.’
The Starling Cook was watching me; he was obviously fascinated by the presence of this European passenger on board. When he caught my eye he grinned and danced a few steps on his piece of deck, pointing excitedly at the moon. He made a hoop with his long arms, miming a full moon, and then jabbed a finger at the waves. The moon’s to blame for all this, he was saying. His expressive eyes looked anxious.
I paid a hazardous visit to the captain in the stern, who gave me all his white teeth in an ugly grin and said, ‘Storm. Moon make big sea. Big sea storm.’ I staggered back to the bows and lay down tensely on my towel in the hard little bunk. The Australian was already in his, and finding it difficult to stay there. A discarded volume of Kurt Vonnegut lay on the deck, and a forty-degree list threw me violently after it. Scrambling back bruised into the bunk, I tried to wedge myself by pushing one foot against the ceiling and the other against the bulkhead, grasping with one hand the window frame over my head. The strain on my legs and arms soon became too great. Hauling myself out on deck, I saw that clouds now covered the stars and that the moon was only an area of bright haze in the sky. The wind took one’s breath away.
My notes become sea-stained here:
We are nearly on our beam ends once every minute and a half. The planks shuffle back and forth on the deck as the waves strike us, and the grinding and creaking parts of the old launch drown the noise of the engine, pistons, prop shaft, wind and sea. The chimney seems to be red-hot, and acts like a stove in the already overheated, confined space of the cabin. Boxes slide and fall; metal trunks shift. A heavy case – it must weigh a lot because it was the last thing to be loaded, and the whole crew had to struggle to manhandle it aboard – has begun to crash into and buckle the only lifeboat, which in any case is a poor light metal thing buried under a small mountain of pineapples, bamboo furniture and ceramic lavatory bowls.
One of the fresh-water tanks is leaking. The crew ladles the water from it to the other tank, which requires much rushing up and slithering down sodden decks in semi-darkness, with sarongs hitched up, slipping down or falling open. (Sarongs, it seems, are fair-weather garments.)
The sight of Hassan Ali in the wheelhouse window alarms me. He is clutching for dear life two vertical beams on either side of the compass. His face is fixed in an expression of agony or terror, teeth gritted, eyes staring. He looks terrified to dementia: a man facing a watery death? But I remember what I cannot see. His lower half is straining to control that heavy rudder handle, which must be vibrating and jerking about like a bucking bronco, battering his thighs. Hassan is grimacing with effort, not fear.
The seas are very big; they are breaking over us. The moon has gone behind two banks of cloud: one grim, thick and unmoving, the other low and scudding. From my ‘porthole’ I can see the black and grey strips of cloud streaming past back and forth according to the roll and dip of the launch. The corkscrew motion is exhausting. Two of the Maldivian passengers have already been very sick; they huddle together, green and horrified. I have offered them my ledge and seasickness pills, but they have refused both.
Now the Starling Cook joins the drama. Facing me, he is smiling and gibbering unintelligibly. Suddenly his eyes switch from my face to something over my shoulder – something, to judge by the horror on his face, too appalling to imagine. His eyes stretch open to an amazing size, and he opens his wide mouth and screams, ‘Eeeeeeeeeee———aaaaaa———aaayyyyyyyyyy.’
The sound was shattering, rising like the mixed sound of a whistling kettle and an air-raid siren above the racket of creaks and thuds of shifting cargo, wind, and crashing of the sea against the old wooden hull. Even if the whale of my dreams had surfaced behind us, I would have had to follow his pointing finger, turn and look. There was no whale; instead, I saw a low black cliff, visible because it was darker than the grey-black of the clouds. Higher than our stubby mast, it was about eighty yards away and advancing.
Thanks to the Starling Cook’s scream, I had time to wedge myself into the cabin doorway, bracing myself with feet and elbows. The Starling Cook himself leaped with astounding agility for the mast and clung to it, wrapping his arms and wishbone legs around it like a koala bear on a eucalyptus trunk. The impact of the wave was awesome. The launch heeled over – ninety degrees? God knows. Solid slabs of black water toppled over the gunwales, and everything on deck or in the cabin seemed to go adrift. Water filled my clothes, eyes and ears. Water cascaded from the legs of the Starling Cook’s shorts. He squawked like a wet hen and gestured at me, pointing once more at the moon with one hand and at the waves with the other.
The Australian, I saw, was out of his bunk again, and as the launch righted herself – she surprised me by managing to do so – he crawled his way past me in the doorway, shouting, ‘Someone’s got to tell that captain to steer a different course. He’ll have the bloody thing capsizing.’
‘Leave him alone!’ I yelled into his ear. ‘Must know this route by now. Must know the weather. It’s his beat.’ I knew enough about seagoing to be well aware that passengers should never try to advise a captain on how to sail his ship, whoever he is, whatever the size of the vessel, or however frightening the storm. I can imagine some captains taking such backseat driving very ill indeed – even, perhaps in an emergency, taking a pistol from a pocket: ‘I must ask you to leave the bridge at once.’ Like Captain Ahab, or Captain Bligh.
I didn’t catch more of the Australian’s reply than ‘… do something …’ as he scrabbled his way astern. Later I looked back to see if he’d been thrown overboard, but he was only crouched near the ramshackle wheelhouse, where by now another unfortunate was straining and grimacing astride the rudder bar in Hassan’s place. Next day the Australian told me he had politely suggested that the captain might alter course by a degree or two in order to take the seas nearer to head-on. The captain had smiled toothily – had he even understood? – and had altered nothing.
Again and again, the clifflike waves came at us and every few minutes the eyes of the Starling Cook forewarned me of impending disaster. Sometimes he tugged at my shirt before releasing his awful cry – ‘Eeeeeeeeeee———aaaaaa———aaaaayyyyyy’ – and again we would cling: I in my doorway, he like a monkey to the mast. There was nothing else to do but hope – although once or twice I did ask myself what I was doing there at all.
During the night I saw the lights of three or four big ships going north or south. They were small comfort; we could have capsized quite near them and they would have been none the wiser, for we had neither radio nor rockets.
*
In the early morning I fell uneasily aslee
p. The first thing I saw when I woke up was a big Maldivian sailor perched on the rail brushing his teeth under a triangular sail. The crew had hoisted canvas during the early hours when the sea’s fury abated. The wind was now north-east, and the sail filled satisfactorily.
The Starling Cook was up and about, too, shaping lumps of dough into white cricket balls, and then rolling them out flat on a hot plate on the stove. His woolly-headed assistant had already mixed jam and butter to make a very sweet custard, and we dipped the bread into it and drank dark, sweet tea.
The horror was over. The seascape had changed into a gentle blueness. The wind was benevolent, and in its way our mild roll was soothing. Soon it became very hot. The crew raised a tarpaulin over the roof of the cabin and I went and lay there.
Later the crew wanted their pictures taken in Polaroid. I discovered their names while I took them: Ali Qasim, Hassan Ali, Musa, Ibrahim, Captain Azia Ali – all Muslim names. I wrote them down in Arabic script to amuse them; peering over my shoulder, they murmured ‘Muslim’ to me, but when I said, ‘No Muslim. Christian,’ they showed no disappointment. They were pleased enough by the Arabic writing and murmured approvingly, ‘Arab, Arab.’ Their reaction to the Polaroid was immediately to throw off undershirts and shirts and to pose, stripped to their bathing trunks or sarongs, flexing their biceps and holding in their bellies like Asian Charles Atlases. In fact they were only fairly muscular, verging on the plump.
As the Baluchis had done on Al Raza, the crew made a great play with combs and mirrors. Hassan Ali caressed his long hair with a metal-bristled brush, looking with great attention at his reflection and going back over a certain swoop of hair, turning his head this way and that like a vain girl at her dressing table. After meals they relaxed in tumbles of tangled limbs on the cabin roof, always shifting arms around shoulders, legs over legs, lighting cigarettes, laughing, jumping up to dip a mug into the fresh-water tank or to spit over the rail.
Like an ageing film star bored with all that, the Starling Cook was uninterested in the Polaroid, and quietly continued to grind a stick of cinnamon to powder with a stone rolling-pin. His assistant made tea and carried it to the Maldivian passengers, who by now had recovered from their sickness. He even played a trick on them – I don’t know what – which is how he became known as the Black Devil. His face was very black and knobbly, and usually he was grinning. His trick made the passengers shout and laugh, and because of it I said, ‘Shaitan!’ (‘devil’ in Arabic), which I suppose is the same in Maldivian because from that moment they began to call him Shaitan, one of them adding ‘Black’. ‘Black Devil!’ they shouted, and he shouted back in glee, ‘Blaack Divil.’
The Black Devil was really anything but devilish. He had a good nature. I found him up in the bows blowing his nose in his fingers and watching the result slowly unstring itself to fall into the sea. He was turning back to knead the dough when I called to him and motioned to him to wash his hands, and at once he trotted away and washed them meticulously. Then he smiled warmly and nodded at me. A bond seemed to have been established; from then on, he gave me the first mug of tea. I was the first to feel his invariable invitation to take the mug, the finger tapping my forearm three times, like a gentle tapping at a door.
An odd incident occurred on our last day at sea. Hassan Ali, the crewman I had seen first at the helm, came to me weeping and distraught. The passengers gathered around, and with signs and bits of Arabic I learned that the captain had confiscated from Hassan Ali all the Polaroid pictures I had taken of him. ‘Master take, master take,’ was all he could splutter out. I didn’t want to tangle with the captain and I would never know his reasons, so I snapped Hassan Ali again out of the captain’s sight. He whipped the picture into the top of his trunks and smiled once more.
On the last day it also turned out that one of the crew, Musa, spoke quite good English. He came up to me, my notes remind me, and said, ‘Please, I have a pain in my penis. Have you a medicine?’ What was the trouble? I asked. Inflammation? Discharge? When had he last had a woman? In Colombo? I imagined that almost any disease of the penis was freely procurable in a seamen’s bordello in Colombo.
One month ago, Musa answered. He’d need an injection from a doctor there, I said. Would the injection be enough? he asked. I told him it would be.
‘Have you hashish?’
‘No, Musa.’
‘Have you hero-een?’
‘No, Musa. Why? You want?’
‘No, no. Five weeks in island jail. But you drink beer?’
‘Yes, I drink beer. Muslims also drink beer.’
‘Sometimes. Khomeini no drink, you know why?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling that our conversation was sidling up to the delicate subject of fundamentalist Islam and had gone far enough. I didn’t want to discuss militant Islam.
*
If the captain’s grin was awful, his navigation was excellent. On the third evening the outlines of Malé lay dead ahead of us.
The Starling Cook was beside himself with relief and the thought of home. First he cooked a magnificent curry full of chilli and pungent exotic leaves – a dish I would like to try again. I gestured at him, ‘Good, very good,’ and he wriggled about the deck in a happy dance step, arms raised, stamping his black feet, swaying sinuously on bowlegs, laughing. Everyone laughed back, even the Australian.
Dolphins leaped alongside the launch, a reassuring sight. The ocean was flat, the horizon clean and so well defined that it seemed we might drop over the edge if we could only reach it. The clouds were milk-white; had I really seen those ragged strips of grey scudding past my ‘porthole’ at the height of the storm?
The Starling Cook began to sing in a high undulating whine, ‘Feni, feni, sarna … feni, feni, sarna …’ a chant he repeated over and over. The crew joined him, and the Maldivian passengers jumped down from the cabin roof onto the foredeck and began to clap in time with the Starling Cook’s singing, arms in the air like Scottish reelers, and stamping around in a circle. ‘Feni, feni, sarna … feni, feni, sarna….’
‘What’s that mean?’ I asked Ibrahim.
‘It mean, “Good heavens, look, look, it’s love. Look, it’s love!”’
How could I have asked myself with such anguish in the storm, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was delighted to be exactly where I was at this moment.
Nineteen
After the storm, the calm in which we glided into Malé harbour made our arrival seem unreal. We might have been moving over a rink of black ice.
In a fever of excitement, the Starling Cook seemed to be brewing more and more tea; the Black Devil tapped my arm with a fresh mug of it every few minutes. Presently we anchored within the reefs and the captain welcomed aboard the Malé customs and immigration men, who, on inspecting my luggage, ignored my cameras but snatched my two Penguin books out of the hands of Musa. Earlier, Musa had fallen in love with the John Singer Sargent portraits on the covers of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Henry James’s The Awkward Age, and had spent an hour or two gazing awestruck at them by the light of the mainmast light, softly tracing their outlines with his forefinger.
My books were returned, but the Australian was less fortunate. He had been rash; the customs men soon removed from his knapsack several small bottles of pills. Worse, he had elected to travel with some highly suspicious objects – sticky Indian sweets in silver paper, for example, and what looked like sesame seeds in a matchbox. They were harmless, the Australian protested, but the customs men weren’t at all convinced, and threatened to saw into small pieces the tubular struts of his collapsible tent. It was a long time before they allowed him to join me in a boat heading shore wards with some of the crew, looking back without affection at the old launch with its wobbly exhaust pipe. With the truculent presence of Sea Eagle and the delays and the downpour, the trip had started in gloom. The storm had been a bonus in its alarming way, but now it was almost impossible to identify it with this inert and ugly little craft. Al
so, though I had been glad to sail with Maldivians, somehow the crew lacked the spirit of other seamen I had met. Was it shyness, wariness or xenophobia? Shyness, I think. The Maldives have always been isolated, and the islanders have little knowledge of outsiders. Today fifteen or sixteen islands of the archipelago have been turned into tourist resorts. But everything has to be imported, from the first nail to the next meal, so the resorts are horrifically expensive and have little to do with the people of the Maldives, except for those who work there. Everything has to be paid for in American dollars or pounds sterling; Maldivian money is not accepted. I tried to imagine large fenced-off beauty spots in the United States or Great Britain within which, say, only Saudi Arabian riyals could buy a meal or a bed for the night.
I stayed one night in Malé, a diminutive, attractive town entirely surrounded by the turquoise water indicating shallow sea and coral reefs. Going to buy my air ticket back to Colombo the next day, I felt a plucking at my arm and, looking down, saw the Starling Cook grinning and wagging his head at me. I took his hand and shook it and pressed ten dollars into his palm. He stuffed the note into the pocket of his old blue shorts, and danced a little bowlegged jig in the middle of the road, singing as he did so, ‘Feni, feni, sarna … feni, feni, sarna.’
In Colombo again, I hurried to the office of Mr Missier.
‘You must take biscuits or something like that,’ Mr Missier said. ‘You may not like the food at all.’
‘Is it rice?’
‘Rice and curry, yes.’
