Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Lazy,’ she said confidingly. ‘They can’t be bothered to come up the track and fetch me down to bury me.’

  She made it sound a long way off to her land. It was obvious that had she lived in a world where one did not have to consider social rituals and pious custom she would have chosen to be buried there among the coconuts by the bend in the stream rather than in the cemetery at Bulangan where the salt sea breezes rotted the cement sepulchres and within ten years made them look sordid rather than venerable. She was cut off from the land of her death and quite possibly now at the mercy of an alien crew of territorial spirits. Each time I saw her she seemed more silent, more worn down with the sheer proximity of people.

  ‘Take her home,’ I urged Dando. ‘Go on, even if it’s only for a visit while you feed the pigs.’

  And apparently he did, probably raising his eyebrows to passing villagers’ unspoken enquiries with a mime of filial helplessness as his ancient mother walked back to her country. She was not allowed to do anything when she got there but sat once more in the doorway of her hut with her feet on the polished bamboo rung of the top step as she always had, looking out at the sift of sunlight into her glade and the lurch of butterflies in and out of the dapples. Dando and her grandsons bustled around grating coconut for the pigs, shinning up a tree to collect the bamboo flask of tuba. Now and again they glanced to where Lolang Mating slept the sleep of an old person after a long walk, leaning against the doorway with her head against the jamb. And when it was mid-morning and time to set off home for lunch they found she was not to be woken.

  So they did cart her off down the track away from the fireflies and the frogs and in due time shovelled her into Bulangan. And there the salt sea-wind blows over her cement lid and the lizards run over the lettering carved with a trowel tip in wet mortar. And for many weeks afterwards I still approached the stream with caution out of sheer habit before going to lay the jerrycan on its side by the stones where we had sat. I would get back from the market in mid-morning and pass her hut and miss her intelligent gaze, for in the doorway now lolled the uncommunicative horny soles of a grandson as he snoozed.

  Then I went away for some months and when I returned found Lolang Mating’s hut canting and derelict. Her family had abandoned the site for it was more convenient to move the pigs and find another tree for palm wine closer to home. The roof had largely blown off in a storm and the slatted bamboo floor which had once been buffed by her bare feet was now black and spongy with wet, for the rains had come. In the mud nearby I found the ladle she had made for pigswill and took that up to my own hut where I still use it for boiling water. But it was not until I first passed her place in the dark that I found a strange thing. For there on a moonless night among the black pillars of this crypt Lolang Mating’s hovel glowed softly. Presumably her habit of bringing luminous fungi into the house had seeded the whole structure with spores which, with the sudden coming of the wet season, had sprouted. Alive with yeasts her hut pulsed with cold energy while by day one remarked only a sad trapezoid of spars and slats.

  It was not long before other people passing by at night noticed this and the predictable rumours circulated that the old woman had been a witch and that her familiar spirits or even her own spirit still haunted the spot where she had lived and died. The place was shunned, the hut fell down completely, and I was thought madder than ever to go on living at the end of a path which led through spookish wilds.

  I went to Dando’s on the anniversary of his mother’s death even though I think he half believed I had helped cause it by overwhelming his better judgement. I went for the eating and conviviality rather than the prayers for her soul, which I had no doubt could take care of itself. Her grandsons had thickened with muscle and drinking; one of them had gone off to the town some miles away to work as a Petron boy, turning the handle of a petrol pump. Even the pigs had grown fat, roaming the foreshore at dawn to unearth the leavings of the villagers who decently waited until nightfall before defecating in shallow scoops in the sand, like turtles laying their eggs.

  *

  Only after she had died did I realise that throughout our acquaintance Lolang Mating had never once asked me what I was doing in Kansulay: a person of phenomenal discretion. Certainly when I first arrived I could not have told her had she asked. It dawned on me only gradually that she might have understood if I had said ‘My father’, since she was also living alone in the bundok because of her family and because of the person she was.

  To explain it to myself, though, I would have to go back several decades and seven thousand miles to confront a few of those signal incidents which mark the trail leading here. I am old enough now to disdain the slow chronology of childhood and adolescence, most of it as boring to recount as it was to live through, and fix on a handful of events. I judge their importance to me in the way everyone does, by the manner in which they seem to echo down a life and go on appearing weirdly relevant and even influential in what one is and does. Drawing Tiwarik at the age of twelve was one obvious example of such an event. Another comes from a family summer holiday, that set-piece scene for so much collective friction in English family life.

  This memory is of a particular skirmish in the protracted feud with my father which in retrospect seems to have begun the day he was demobbed and which lasted until his death in the week before my university Prelims. examination. We were somewhere in the West Country, having a picnic lunch on a beach. The day was warm, the Atlantic glacial. My younger sister Jane with her child’s imperviousness to cold had earlier insisted on bathing, forcing at least one adult in with her to rescue her if need be from the green and pounding waves. I was sitting slightly behind my father, anxious not to be within his range of vision. He was slowly eating a tomato sandwich, gazing seawards as if at the fleets of ships he had always wanted to design in preference to a worthier career in medicine which presumably left the inner eye littered with nothing so much as corpses. Suddenly I saw the wasp which had settled on his sandwich and was busy in one of the doughy indentations of his last bite. I said nothing. I watched as without looking he took another mouthful and began his measured, irritatingly thorough chewing.

  It was impressive. He spat out on the sand a bolus of goo flecked with red and yellow-and-black, itself shocking enough since my father was a stickler for table manners as well as having a horror of public scenes of any kind. My mother looked at him in amazement wondering what she had done wrong.

  ‘Dammit I’ve been stung. Ow.’

  ‘Let me have a look, darling.’ My mother was an anaesthetist and had taught my father anaesthetics when he was a student at UCH just before the war.

  ‘There won’t be anything to see,’ my father told the sand with his head between his knees. ‘It’s just damned painful.’

  ‘Soft palate or throat?’

  ‘God, woman, I don’t … Sort of round about the uvula, it feels like. Oh,’ he said, suddenly understanding. My mother had been thinking ahead. ‘I don’t think I’ll obstruct. But it’s swelling all right. I can feel a lump.’

  We were a long way from the car which in turn was miles from the nearest cottage hospital. My mother persuaded him to submit to an examination.

  ‘Ow,’ she said in sympathy. ‘Yes, I can see where it is.’

  My father eyed her. Whatever the correct procedure should have been – such as running for the car – it was evidently too late now. He would simply have to weather it out. His voice was already hoarse and his breathing noisier.

  ‘In the last resort you’ll have to do a tracheo,’ he told her. ‘At least I suppose I couldn’t be in better hands.’

  ‘But …’ my mother looked about her helplessly at the picnic things, at the jam-smeared spoons, the bakelite mugs, the thermos of orange juice. She picked up the breadknife, a decent affair with a round wooden handle and a proper serrated edge.

  ‘Come on you two,’ she said to my sister and me. ‘Daddy’s going to be all right. You just go on down to the sea and play for
a bit but you’re not to go into the water yet, it’s too soon after lunch.’

  We left them willingly. Down by the foam which licked raggedly at the blotting sand Jane said:

  ‘Is Daddy going to die?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told her with an elder brother’s superior knowledge. She began to cry since she believed she was quite fond of him in the way children do. I was myself frightened by what I had done, quite rightly not bothering to distinguish between allowing something to have happened and actually causing it to have happened. We were both absolutely intrigued by the idea of the drama thirty yards away which we couldn’t bring ourselves to turn round and watch: Mummy sawing away at Daddy’s neck with a Harrods’ bread-knife. After a tense five minutes, though, we could see her beckoning arm. The swelling was beginning to subside; beach surgery was not going to be necessary. I felt light with relief, so perhaps I hadn’t really wanted him to die either. (It was another ten years before he really did obstruct, this time lower down the alimentary tract, not from a wasp sting but from the pincers of the dreaded crab. Nor bread-knife nor all the glittering cutlery of St George’s Hospital could save him. He was forty-seven, a scant two years older than I am now.)

  Later that afternoon when the wasp business was all over my parents were lying like most other people on the beach in a kind of post-lunch torpor, soaking up the weak sun with that English fixity of purpose which recognises there won’t be much more of it this year, next year, ever. I was sitting some way off making a corniche road with banked sand up the face of an outcrop of rock. Suddenly looking up at all those supine bodies it struck me they were already halfway sunk in sand. Supposing the sand were actually absorbing them as they lay dozing, that shortly there would come from all over the beach a series of soft noises, flut! thoop! glup! and I would look up to find it deserted of humans, of dogs, of parents, with only the faintest of outlines on the smooth surface to suggest what had lain there, like spoons allowed to settle beneath thick soup. I alone would survive … I do not know much about Freud’s theory of wishing one’s father dead; I think my fantasy coming so soon after the wasp incident was very much to do with doctors. It is doctors who, above all, see themselves as survivors since it is their duty to minister to the ailing and moribund, and doctoring was in my blood.

  Both my parents were consultants who were passionate founder-supporters of the National Health Service. Neither of them practised at home so there were no discreetly ringing doorbells and low voices or sudden gasps coming from behind the study door. Nevertheless the evidence for its being a medical household was plentiful. The magazines, advertising and – in those days – free samples of drugs which rained steadily on to the doormat six days a week were a part of it. Also a part were the anaesthetic machine and various accoutrements my mother kept in the cupboard under the stairs. The homes of schoolfriends I visited also had cupboards under the stairs but they were generally full of boring things like Hoovers and sewing machines and slide projectors. Nothing like as interesting as our cupboard with its gleaming equipment, all knobs and dials, the little cylinder of dreadedly-explosive cyclopropane, the bottles of waste ether and trilene which every anaesthetist of that era brought home for stain removals and putting down hamsters with tumours. There were blood-pressure machines and orange rubber bags and stethoscopes and catheters and old-fashioned glass syringes with rings to put the fingers through. By comparison my father’s doctoring tools were feeble, consisting mainly of a rubber-rimmed knee hammer and about a hundredweight of file cards (he was doing research on Parkinson’s Disease).

  But it was not just the props: the medical ethic was plentifully there and, on my father’s side of the family at least, fairly interwoven with the Christian ethic of the Good Doctor as well. My father had been born of medical missionaries in China, like Mervyn Peake, and was sent back to England at a tender age to be educated at Eltham College where Peake also was, some four years ahead of him. My grandfather went on to be interned by the Japanese in China and tottered heroically through the war looking after his fellow-inmates of the camp. On his release he was a survivor, but only just. I remember him as an ill old man, very quiet and gentlemanly. His nervous system was being eroded by something irreversible; he died when I was about twelve. His nephew, my father’s cousin, was a doctor; his son is a doctor. My father’s younger brother, my uncle, is a doctor, so is his eldest son. My aunt was a pharmacist.

  My mother was a black sheep, opting to be a doctor at a time when it was not ladylike for a girl who had been presented at Court to do anything as sordid as medicine. The medical ethic was strong in her too, the Christian ethic vanishingly weak. She was something of a socialist in a devoutly Tory family (my grandfather was Conrad ImThurn, heavily involved in the Zinoviev letter affair of the 1920s). I grew up with her accounts of doing her midder in the Thirties in the St Pancras area of London, chiefly remembering her shock at discovering how the poor lived and her anger at herself and her class for electing not to have known. I especially recall her saying how common it then was to go into tenements north of the Euston Road and find the top floor inaccessible because the occupants had burnt the staircase for fuel. In such houses she would deliver the baby on sheets of newspaper (fresh newsprint being, apparently, remarkably germ-free) and tuck it up in one of the pulled-out drawers of a chest, there being nowhere else for it to go.

  Actually my mother did have a great-aunt who was a pediatrician so she was not a complete loner in the profession on her side of the family. Nonetheless I honour the independence of her spirit. When I was growing up everybody except my parents took it for granted I would simply follow the family trade. But it was out of the question. I was already fighting my father: I could not have been a doctor had it been the last profession open to me. I made quite sure of this by failing abjectly in every science subject except Biology, which seemed interesting and neutral and which finally came to my rescue by allowing me to take up a place at university since I had ploughed ‘O’ level elementary mathematics seven times, then a school record for any member of the Upper Sixth and one which I would be proud to think remains unbroken to this day. It was not until my father’s premature death partially released me from the obligation to be mindlessly contrary that I was able to exorcise the lingering medical ghost by working in St Stephen’s Hospital, Fulham Road, where in all I must have spent nearly a year.

  *

  Kansulay has a water problem, relying for all fresh water on the stream which winds its way from the interior down past the place where Lolang Mating used to wash and where I still fetch my daily ration when I am living there. Further downstream it comes to where the coconut groves are more densely inhabited and finally flows through the village itself, under a shaky timber bridge and into the sea where it has created its own gap in the fringing reef offshore. This stream is Kansulay’s lifeline. Over the centuries it has eroded a bed for itself which is quite four yards wide and often more, but unless there is a sudden downpour in the distant mountains the water seldom fills it. Instead it meanders in a sub-riverbed within the larger bed, winding from rock to rock, pool to pool. Often there are wallows under the muddy banks in which buffaloes lie, their cool grey tonnage tucked into the curved recesses they have worn, muzzles resting on the surface, birds perched on their heads.

  Upstream of Lolang Mating’s old place few people actually live in the forest, as opposed to the groups who occasionally pass a night or two there while making copra from the furthermost coconuts. The water as I collect it is clean, kept so by leeches and by the little crabs, prawns and whelks which make nocturnal hunting trips (wading upstream with a pressure-lamp) a source of food. Sometimes one comes across a dead chicken or a loaf of buffalo turd but nothing to make one seriously doubt the water ’s fitness for drinking. Downstream from Lolang Mating’s, however, it is another matter as more and more people use the stream for washing themselves, their clothes and their animals. By the time it has reached the village it must be carrying quite a lot of domestic waste; t
here is a steady incidence of gastroenteritis and worms, especially among the younger children whose habit of defecating in or near the water cannot much help.

  The barangay Captain there told me that all community development funds had been frozen by the new government: no projects were to be undertaken until either the national debt had been paid off or all local officers from the Marcos period had been investigated to find out what they had done with the money for similar projects in the past. Supplying Kansulay with drinkable water seemed rather more important than assisting international usury or national witch-hunting so I suggested to the Captain that if he could supply labour and technical knowledge I could probably squeeze the necessary finance out of friends and relatives in Europe.

  Which was how I found myself one day walking in the woods not far from Lolang Mating’s with a young Filipino graduate who had worked on the provincial government’s water schemes in the days when there had been any. We were not expecting to stumble on an abundant source which could take the place of the stream, but it seemed to us that if we could find a steady spring we might pipe this down to the village to a series of stand-pipes where people could at least get their drinking water. They might still have to do their washing in the stream; and if they were unable to break their children’s habit of crapping in it and drinking from it then natural selection would simply have to run its unemotional course and weed out the incurably brainless (there being nothing like low-budget good works for reducing one to a heartless pragmatism).

  We encountered forest dryads, nymphs and sprites variously disguised as old men and women feeding pigs in a clearing, cutting a chicken’s throat and digging up edible roots with a rusty crowbar. It was several hours before we came upon a hollow beneath a jungled hill which dripped and ran in a way which at once cheered my companion. After some loping about like a retriever quartering the ground for scent he announced we would have to dig a test hole to see if the flow of water justified building a proper concrete ‘spring box’.