Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  And now it is at night that the old Earth lives on, threadily, at night and in the tropic seas. To take a torch down among the reefs at night is to experience still other things which suggest an ancient broodingness, a fragmented hegemony from whose visible signs you cannot construct a whole. Even if that were not so you would be chilled by the sound filling your ears. It is that of a million creatures fiercely being alive. At times it seems like the noise of limitless frying, the preparing of a million dinners. At others there is an insistent, manic quality to its gravelly roar like hearing a huge crowd in a far stadium, its voice surging in waves so the imagination half supplies unseeable events, half thinks to make out individual words. Just so on a Roman evening must the villagers of that city’s outskirts have heard the barbarities of the Colosseum several miles away borne to them on the soft summer wind.

  The volume of this steady underwater black noise is evidence of activity and violence far beyond what you can see with a torch. Above it are individually-separable squeaks, grunts and flutings. Something drums abruptly its thoracic sac. Something else makes a nearly human yawn. A shrill groan has you turning in shock, torch thrust out defensively to see whatever carnage is about to embroil you and there is nothing. Nothing but doused incandescent points, the nocturnal species you already know, a crab scurrying.

  You soon recognise that, just as on land, at night other creatures emerge and prowl the sea lanes. The hunter of fish down among the reefs with a torch and spear gun gets to know them, a different set of threats and prey. He is on the whole not after them; he is more intent on looking into holes and nooks to find the big fish he can seldom catch by day when they are alert and on the move. There is experience involved in knowing how to get them out since the holes through which they can be glimpsed may be too small, the real entrance hard to find. Useless to fire a spear into a fish that cannot be retrieved. There is experience, too, in knowing the sort of rock formations it is worth going down to inspect at close range.

  But the real skill is learning to see things and knowing what it is you are looking at. When I was a novice with a spear gun I would go out on patrols with a skilled mentor. I would pass over bare rocks and featureless seabed and seconds later he would pass over the same patch which for him became a rich fishing-ground. His spear would streak before my eyes and quiver fifteen feet below into a patch of sand which would suddenly heave and flap and flash the undersides of white wing. In those days I would not have known how to deal with a ray even had I been able to spot it and would have risked the thrilling (and sometimes fatal) poisons of its lashing sting. But not being able to see it until it writhed around a steel rod was a clear sign of how far I was from being self-sufficient as a fisherman. And now, I think, if I went out with a neophyte he might in turn wonder that I saw things he knew were not there.

  Of course I am still not seeing much of what there is; and allowing that far more experienced fishermen than I miss things I am made thoughtful by the rustlings in the marine undergrowth at night, at the constant roar of sound, at the evidence my eyes cannot see and my ears cannot hear of an unknown universe. I am always surprised at people’s surprise when they discover that the sunless depths of the great undersea trenches are not after all barren wastelands. It is evidence on their part not only of a lack of imagination but of a profound sensory chauvinism, a certainty that what would be a blind and crushing void for humans must also be for other creatures. At different wavelengths of vision and sound, with other gamuts of olfactory response, an ancient world lives on in invisible splendour. We are too dogged by Genesis, by our own myth of the absolute polarity of dark and light, of the one meaning death and the other life, absence and Presence. Being prisoners of an extensive set of such dualisms has led us to deny what they cannot encompass. The cure for this is to slip into black tropical waters at night and head on down. Through eye and ear pour exclamations; but as evidence of the world down there they are only as the faint scratches in a radio astronomer’s headphones are to an invisible galaxy of suns. It is a magnificently alien world which cannot be apprehended by terrestrial instincts alone. It is difficult to recognise a universe from inside another.

  *

  Even in broad light of day the island itself, despite its smallness, offers unexpected asides. It hints at more than surfaces. It took a while to discover that there is an enchanted place on Tiwarik, one which will remain for ever unfound by any ordinary stroller or scrambler since it is inaccessible except from the sea.

  On the side of the island away from the mainland where the ocean lies empty the cliffs fall sheer into a tumble of boulders awash with suckings and surges. At one particular point the angle increases beyond the vertical and there is an overhang beneath which a spit of flat rock no more than a yard or two across juts into the sea and so low it is covered at high tide. Here, invisible from above, I can lie on my stomach with my nose practically in the water and gaze straight down eighty-one feet to where the island’s roots disappear into sand. With the sun at the correct angle and with no wind to ruffle its surface the water becomes a block of glass and through it I can follow a map of the land of Drune.

  Drune is essentially a desert country between two mountain ranges. It is a plateau from which the inhabitants raise their eyes in every direction towards the great peaks which glitter in the rarefied sun, surrounding and defining the place of their birth. From these heights tumble boulder-strewn gorges, screes of eroded rock. Harsh though its outlines are in large-scale terms this is no sterile lunar landscape. A closer view shows the mountains to be densely wooded in places with thickets of emerald gymnosperms, stands of amber fern-trees, forests of wand. At the mountains’ foot along the edge of the desert are little white jumbled villages whose people live industrious but not grinding lives, tending their flocks and cultivating their terraces. They are respectful of but not terrorised by the vast birds which live in deep and mysterious caves in the mountains. These sleek-winged creatures traverse their skies at immense speed, occasionally pausing to nuzzle a village with their beaks, overturning houses by the hundred in clouds of dust, or browsing on the forests high in the hills. Drune.

  Why Drune? I wonder as soon as the name suggests itself. And then I remember back and back to long, shapeless, mesmeric hours on a swing beneath whose oak seat was an area cobbled from pieces of broken flagstones. Above this I would slump, arms hooked around the ropes, head hanging nearly between my knees, swinging gently backwards and forwards until I became hypnotised by the coming and going of the ground beneath. I was a child of secret lands and arcane languages and from the cockpit of my aircraft I soon identified the patterned landscape of Drune. I knew each hedgerow of moss bulging up between the triangles and polygons of its fields; I knew each crack which was a highway leading between its towns and every hairline fracture which was a wandering path down which the villagers went their ways.

  Sometimes I lay on my stomach across the seat and wound myself higher and higher off the ground until the ropes above me bunched and creaked. At maximum altitude I would begin my spiralling descent. High above Drune my little plane spun and spun while the countryfolk beneath stood in the fields with their heads thrown back and their mouths open. The spectacle! The control! Would he ever pull up in time! He always did, even though his head was plump with blood from the G-forces of his spin and he had broken through some barrier beyond instruments and clocks and had entered Drune itself, a different world where his whole body resonated with weird and piercing sense-impressions. It was Drune he loved to visit, and it was Drune because he loved playing with letters and in its own spelling Drune was Under.

  That the demon pilot of Drune was also an inveterate sketcher of imaginary islands now seems perfectly consistent. Already he had begun his search for a land but it was not the traditional land of escape. It was not at all to be a place of comforting evasion but of harsh and abrupt edges, of ravishing and awful gulfs under skies of tropic blue but blown through always by that sad dark wind – in short, a land
he might at last recognise as his own.

  *

  There was a curious legend at my first school, that country house among the South Downs. The house was one of those built without proper cellars but with a semi-basement lit by barred, ground-level windows with downwardly sloping embrasures inside. As far as I can remember this basement was largely given over to kitchens and laundry rooms and suchlike; if we went down there towards bedtime wearing a dressing-gown and a suitably pathetic expression there was usually a large woman with rolled sleeves to say ‘Poor child’ and give us a mug of unsweetened cocoa (sugar was still on ration) and a piece of bread and dripping. But anyone who then watched the poor child sipping his cocoa would have seen him wander about, his eyes on the floor, chewing abstractedly. He would roam through cavernous rooms forbidden him by daylight staring at the flagstones, peeping behind stacks of wicker laundry baskets held together by parchment thongs, straying if he were brave enough into the furthest unlit recesses brooded over by immense spiders and mouldering ping-pong tables stacked against the wall. He would be slightly emboldened by being a conspirator, for he was on a special mission which had been previously arranged in the dormitories up under the roof. The mission was to find the Lost Cellars.

  The myth of the Lost Cellars was one of the first things a boy heard as a newcomer to the school. In effect it said that somewhere beneath the school was a whole level which at some time in the past had been deliberately walled up and forgotten about in an act of collective amnesia. What was down there was the subject of endless speculation in the dormitories after lights-out, ranging from boys murdered by a long-dead headmaster to an idiot daughter of the present Latin master who was chained there with an iron mug and a tame rat which had worn its teeth down to stubs trying to gnaw through her shackles. Unfortunately we never found any evidence for there being access to these nether regions: no new cement in the joints between stones, no iron rings, no fresh plaster. This did not stop the speculation, naturally, nor the handing-on of the myth. But we soon became busy with our cordite collections and with the Army surplus equipment which was then so cheap and plentiful: signal lamps and walkie-talkies were the most popular with their great batteries wrapped in brown paper beneath layers of varnish and what looked like laminations of fat.

  The Latin master’s idiot daughter is there to this day no doubt, fulfilling her unenviable destiny of representing unfinished psychic business. Her father must long since have died for even then he had been nearing retirement. But his daughter is not one day older. Very beautiful, very wild, she talks all day to her toothless rat, staring into the darkness with atrophied eyes and relaying to him with great clarity the events of the bright visions wherein she lives. For even as she hangs in her chains her freedom is complete, as witness the power she has to escape the Lost Cellars, cross nearly forty years and seven thousand miles to present herself on Tiwarik one night where she steps straight into my mind.

  The odd thing was that when I moved to my second school, to the island amid suburbia, nearly the first myth I encountered was that of the Second Cellars. In this building the first cellars were proper underground ones without any windows and access to them was not limited since they held the changing-rooms and the hobbies room, the boot-room and the boiler-room in addition to a good many poky unlit annexes full of burst suitcases and mildewed copies of Ovid with ‘P. Binsted, Summer 1938’ on the flyleaf.

  These cellars were reached conventionally from inside by a flight of stairs which was merely a continuation (on a far less grand scale) of the main staircase. Outside, a tradesmen’s stone flight led up again into daylight. It was at the bottom of this flight that the evidence for the Second Cellars was strongest. There was a large flagstone which rocked hollowly under the combined weight of three boys (two, if one of them were ‘Slug’ Summerbee). Nobody had ever seen this flag lifted but it was known for a fact that an unnamed head boy had once been sent down to the cellars on some errand during morning classes and had seen a firm line of wet footprints leading from the stone’s edge and along the passage to the boiler-room. This added greatly to the awe and horror in which we held old Bisley, whose duties in addition to acting as school groundsman were to tend the school boilers and clean the school’s shoes. To help him with all this – for he was truly an old man all brown skin and sinews – was a mysterious younger man believed to be his illegitimate son. This was a sort of Heathcliff figure with long blueblack Brylcreemed hair and tattooes on his forearms. He looked like a gypsy and when he smiled he showed brilliant white teeth. He rode an AJS motorcycle with sinister skill and was rumoured to be able to make any girl pregnant simply by passing her in a corridor and smiling. Nobody knew where he and his unofficial father lived. Maybe they didn’t live in the Second Cellars but they definitely knew something about them.

  Wright was brave, no doubt about that. One day he simply went up to Bisley’s son and asked him point-blank to show him the Second Cellars. A strange veiled look crossed the gypsy eyes.

  ‘How old are you, son?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘H’m. Wait till you’re thirteen.’

  ‘But I’m nearly thirteen now.’

  ‘Wait till you’re thirteen and just about to leave. Then I’ll show you. And one or two of your friends, too, if they’re lucky.’

  But something must have happened in the intervening months because Wright never did see the Second Cellars; probably in the flurry of Common Entrance examinations and cricket Elevens he forgot all about them. Still, we would often be changing down there for some sport or other and look up with surprise to see Heathcliff lounging silently in the doorway, smiling secretly, surveying with his black eyes the little waxy English bodies.

  However, certain boys were quite immune to any sense of threat this man implied. Ackroyd in particular was used to a very straightforward relationship with the sort of people who cleaned shoes and stoked boilers. We were down in the boot-room after lunch, a room lined with wooden pigeonholes in which nested the school’s shoes. The atmosphere was peaceful like a library, scented with leather and dubbin and Cherry Blossom polish. Old Bisley and Heathcliff were sitting in one corner, cleaning shoes. Bisley was putting on the polish while Heathcliff was buffing it off; the back of Bisley’s left hand had a black tide-mark of polish across it. Ackroyd went to his pigeonhole, retrieved his shoes and examined them critically, moving beneath the ceiling bulb in its metal cage.

  ‘I must say I don’t think much of these,’ he said.

  The two men went on polishing.

  ‘I say,’ said Ackroyd. ‘These really aren’t up to much, you know.’

  Heathcliff put down his wad of rags.

  ‘I’m sorry young sir is not satisfied.’ His voice was not very loud; I trembled and prayed for Ackroyd to shut up. ‘You see, we’ve only got eighty-four pairs to clean.’ But he should have known that this sort of mode is lost on the Ackroyds of the world.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the boy. ‘Give me the cloth.’ He took Heathcliff’s rags and scrubbed at the toecaps of the shoes he was holding. ‘There. Not very difficult, was it? It’s called elbow-grease,’ he explained.

  The look Heathcliff gave him would have kept me – did keep me - sleepless for nights but Ackroyd was unconcerned. He simply put the shoes neatly back in his pigeonhole and walked out.

  If old Bisley and the threatening Heathcliff added to the psychic resonance of the Second Cellars myth, then plausibility was given by the nearness of the famous Chislehurst Caves. Very occasionally when the school was deemed to have been especially good and deserving (plenty of scholarships and matches won) we were marched in crocodile along the scrunchy drive between the rhododendrons, past the gate-keeper’s lodge and out into gracious suburbia. Downhill we went past fine examples of Gynaecologist Gothick set on an eminence amid their spacious gardens, down under the railway bridge by the little bosky station where poor drudges called commuters apparently had to go every day, down to where a densely wooded hill rose steeply on the ot
her side. And there, under this hill, was the entrance to the Chislehurst Caves.

  These were a natural cave system stretching – some said – for twenty-two miles. Or it may have been forty-two. An essential part of their reputation was that their full extent was not yet known, so terrifyingly labyrinthine was the network. Part of them had been used during the war (then only seven or so years before) as air-raid shelters and were equipped with barbers’ shops, chapels, clinics and stores. At the entrance, a simple wooden gate which did not even reach to the top of the cave mouth, we were handed oil lamps and allotted cocky Dickensian guides, likely lads with the accents of Wapping and the Isle of Dogs who had learned their spiels by rote, including impromptu jokes and warnings.

  ‘Several blokes ’ave come down ’ere nights and climbed over the gates ’oping to do it all fer free. Nuffing but a bicycle lamp wiv ’em. Poor sods.’

  ‘What happened?’ we ask, trotting down the passageway in a cloud of lamp soot, our figures thrown onto the walls by the flickering orangy flames we carry. The sense of drawing ever further away from warm sunlight is weighing on each of us.

  ‘Ah, we always finds ’em in the end,’ comes the voice from the darkness. ‘Takes a bit of time, though. Last bloke it was what, Pete, five days?’

  ‘Wha’?’ shouts back Pete from somewhere ahead.

  ‘That last geezer what climbed in, ’ow long was it before we finds ’im?’

  ‘Six days, wannit?’

  ‘Yus, that’s right, six.’

  ‘But wasn’t he hungry?’ asks ‘Slug’ Summerbee.

  ‘’Ungry? ’E was dead, wannee? They always is. Dead.’