Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  By now my co-celebrants, my fellow-orgiasts, my friends all have about them the aura of miracle as we drown ourselves in violent sound. We stumble into each other in the dark: glasses of tuba slop and clash, the necks of rum bottles saw unsteadily against beaker rims. Indiscriminately we embrace, are embraced in turn by, children, men, women, chins glinting with chicken fat, while all around the petrol, the oxygen, the carbide, the paraffin blaze and blow away our words, reducing us to gesture.

  ‘Ay, last year …’

  ‘A bad year, that …’

  ‘Shitty.’

  We all know who died, who lost a boat, whose children never went to school. We all know the slow attrition caused by endless petty economies: the wounds left unplastered, the jeep fares saved by two hours’ hike to town, the nights made interminable by keeping lamp oil for an emergency. We all know pretty much what everyone has in their largely cupboardless bamboo houses whose walls are stuffed with hoarded pieces of paper, plastic bags, half-used biros, perished scraps of spear gun elastic. We have seen behind the curtain made of rice sacks and have admired the wedding-dress being carefully kept for the eldest daughter just as we have admired the yellowing laminated plaques on the walls, plaques awarded by anonymous or defunct institutions and colleges certifying in copperplate a long-ago graduation, a course attendance, an honourable membership.

  A shitty year. So what better than to stand it on its head here in Tiwarik and welcome in the new with a prodigal overturning of normality? The precious petrol blossoms skywards and its thunders run up and down the dark coast, chased by those of misered paraffin. The release is boundless. Not only the children weep, nor only with pleasure. The great barrage keeps up, the arcadian silence is abolished. Out on the dark sea tonight there would be no way of telling if the sounds were those of battle or celebration and even on the island, as the flames briefly photograph faces streaked with tears and mouths thrown open, it is not really clear. I am suddenly sure it can after all be heard from my hill-top in Kansulay, the concussions crossing the intervening miles of sea as once across the English Channel the summer winds wafted the sounds of slaughter in Picardy and Flanders to the ears of ladies in long gloves and netted hats bending over their beehives in Sussex. Sometimes it seems this century has re-drawn all human boundaries so that now we shall always be within earshot of war, of that battlefield on which we so increasingly live.

  Time passes until the dawn is only an hour or two away. The hut is crammed with sleepers. Boys sleep on their sides among the rocks, hands between their drawn-up knees. The women and girls who have done most of the cooking are rolled together beneath a tattered yellow tarpaulin. Drunken artillerymen are slumped over their cold pieces, for the last grain of carbide has gone, the last drop of paraffin, the last trickle of petrol. Nobody knows how much oxygen is left in the cylinder. It is one of the marvels that it appears to be inexhaustible in a world of things which perpetually run out. A ringing silence has descended on Tiwarik which suddenly swims out from under a smokelike cloud of overcast and sails beneath a clear stellate sky. I lie on my back and watch the meteorites end their billion-year dark voyages in evanescent streaks.

  And bit by bit across the strait the cocks awake and crow in the deserted village which is Sabay.

  11

  The catharsis of fireworks springs us forward into the new year as if under a common obligation to forget what we know of all previous new years and their outcome. The Sabayans and I reminisce for days, recalling mental pictures taken by the light of fires and the muzzle-flashes of kanyon while avoiding all mention of the mortal passion which had gripped us. The recognition of an unspoken, unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars and welling up from the ocean is, I think, the basis of our affection for each other, as why might it not be for anybody anywhere.

  Going back to spear fishing after a lapse I find my neck muscles aching. It is like ‘weaver ’s neck’ from which Second World War fighter pilots suffered in their constant searching for enemy aircraft. In their case it resulted in chafing (it was to prevent this, rather than out of gratuitous dandyism, they wore silk scarves) but muscular cramps afflicted them as well. My own neck muscles bunch and knot as I go hunting fish through alien skies. The combat is unequal, my victories comparatively few, besides which there is the arduousness of working always against the inner oxygen clock. This can produce beautiful effects of heightened detail, of the special kind of noticing one associates with limited time. Whether scared or simply fighting the body’s craving to be spared this discomfort I carry back up with me vivid details which have about them the aura of being acquired against the odds, of having been wrested from somewhere obscure. Fright, which occurs quite often, is especially good for freezing indelible images: the grey shark hanging there ten feet away and watching, the moray one did not notice, the banded sea-snake investigating a pair of legs rendered motionless by an act of sheer will.

  Much later and many thousands of miles away I will come upon Oliver Lyttelton’s From Peace to War which has this paragraph about his experiences in the trenches in the First World War:

  Fear and its milder brothers, dread and anticipation, first soften the tablets of memory, so that the impressions which they bring are clearly and deeply cut, and when time cools them off the impressions are fixed like the grooves of a gramophone record, and remain with you as long as your faculties. I have been surprised how accurate my memory has proved about times and places where I was frightened …

  Turning to Paul Fussell’s book again I will find not only this very paragraph quoted but nearby a sentence from Max Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme: ‘What a strange emotion all objects stir when we look upon them wondering whether we do so for the last time in this life.’ At first sight it might seem merely pretentious to draw a parallel between being caught up in a famous holocaust and doing a bit of fishing, but the mind cares nothing for such scruples when it makes its associations. Fear for one’s life echoes straight down a dank well into the soul. The circumstances do not much matter, it is enough to know one may very shortly be dead and that the translation will be violent and painful. Besides, the exactness of Lyttelton’s image is too great to be ignored. I have carried with me out of the sea a nearly eidetic memory of a hundred different expeditions, of my comrades and of our victims and of our wounds. I can remember things such as I never can on dry land. Yet while the details can be recalled with clarity the gaze has often passed through them. Undersea terrains are not to be mapped by their details: the land they compose is viewed under strain and at once becomes somewhere else. I scan it with an accurate haste beside which my view on land has a leisurely vagueness.

  For the chronological as well as the oxygen clock ticks on. One day infirmity or age will keep me from the sea for ever and it is not fanciful on any sortie to wonder whether I have shared an element with a cuttlefish or squid for the last time. This is Max Plowman’s ‘strange emotion’ which in large part consists of tenderness. I devour the sight of these creatures with a kind of gentle greed, marvelling once again at the language of their skin, at the ‘passing cloud’ effect as their chromatophores blink and meld to send colours chasing over their bodies, at the violet lightnings of their skirts. I can hardly believe there will come a day when I shall no longer be able to watch them.

  My beating heart drives me downwards. Wordsworth showed how hardly possible it is for us to disentangle our landscapes from our childhoods but I wish I knew for certain where it came from, this extravagant desire of mine for something so distant from all the landscapes of my youth and which now makes my middle age look foolish. The feud with my father may well have closed off certain possibilities, but I would like to know why it should be in this subaqueous world – of all the marches of earth – that I should have looked for and found a magnificent and lonely poetry.

  *

  When I first returned to Tiwarik (it now feels almost a lifetime since I clapped eyes on it amid careering wave-casts) I remember thinking it could
not assume a proper identity until it had acquired a position in the mind. But already I must have been imagining living there because when for lack of a better site my hut was built a little above the strand it caused me to feel disorientated for some time. Instead of its facing Sabay across the strait I must always have imagined it on top of the island somewhere and facing out the other way across the expressive blank ocean. Consequently I experienced a strange twisting sensation as if the island were being rotated against its will from right to left – that is, anticlockwise as seen from above. This persisted for some weeks and was mildly bothersome because it hinted at strain in a pattern I was trying to impose on the island (or it on me).

  Less mildly, this phenomenon involved me in a good deal of unnecessary swimming since at night I often lost my way. If one is spear fishing on a moonless night with only a torch, and especially if one is too far away from shore to hear its breakers above the wash of surrounding waters, it is easy to become lost. Then, buoyed up on a swell I would glimpse the yellow lights of Sabay, faint oil lamps nearly drowned, and think I was on the wrong side of Tiwarik because for me my house was really perched above an imaginary beach on the seaward side. Half exhausted by three hours’ hunting and towing a catch-line with several kilos of fish, I once arrived beneath the sheer igneous headland standing deep in lurching tons of surf. I was expecting to step out and stroll up a coral beach to my hut where I could smother my catch beneath a layer of salt and sleep until dawn. Instead of which I found I still faced a long swim against a strengthening current.

  I am intrigued by this whole process of orientation and Tiwarik is the perfect place for throwing it all into doubt. One day I spend a lazy morning after a night’s fishing, marinading and then laying out the catch on the drier. Something far away in my mind is nagging, meanwhile. It is that even to this remotest of remote places I have brought a chore with me for which there is a deadline. It is a literary chore, itself bizarre in the circumstances: to re-read a children’s novel I wrote long ago as a preliminary to writing an outline treatment of it for a film script. I have frequently come across this book over the months, down at the bottom of my bag jumbled up with spare torch batteries, lengths of elastic, a copy of James’s Princess Casamassima (why?) and a treasured cake of Roger & Gallet’s ‘Vétiver’ soap. Now I go and dig it out reluctantly climb up to the edge of The Field of Guavas and sit in the shade of an antipolo tree.

  On reading it again I remember little of the story yet at the same time it remains utterly familiar. Suddenly I come upon the sentence: ‘To his left he could just make out the huge bulk of the Seneschal’s House …’ and am brought up short. Not by the redundancy of the adjective but by that left. Surely I meant right? The sea is on the right together with the house being pounded to pieces by the waves. It must mean that sixteen years ago I had ‘approached’ the fictitious town of Carisburgh by the wrong direction.

  This is very odd. The one consistent thing about one’s own writing is the position of the eye. I do not know what governs the way in which one always sees an imagined view – a house, a road, a room – from a particular angle. Maybe there was a time in childhood when the bearings of such things became fixed so that after a holiday, for example, certain kinds of imagined coastline are for ever approached from the same direction, thus, the sea always on the right. There is a plausibility about this. It took me a long time to perceive how my fantasies and day-dreams set indoors (‘set’, of course, being the word in this theatre of audience participation) took place in rooms which, no matter how disguised initially, tended to slide back into archetypes of rooms in the first two houses I can remember and usually into my own bedroom. Not in terms of colour or upholstery but of disposition: the window here in relation to the bed; the bed lengthways against the wall rather than with the head against it; the door (representing threat of intrusion) in that corner and opening in this direction. And thus the writer as the dreamer of narratives calls instinctively upon the same internal compass to orientate imaginary acts.

  How then could I have written ‘left’ when I had to have meant ‘right’? The book slips off my lap and I discover I have been gazing out to sea for an unguessable time without registering either it or the distant boat crawling across it. (How swamping the inward view which rises up and drowns the visible world!) I drag myself back to the text and forcing myself to read with more attention now discover what I had missed. The character Martin – and hence the narrating eye – is approaching the house from a different and not wrong direction. It was deliberate. I am relieved, having for a moment been disorientated by not being able to visualise my own story and feeling that peculiar twisting sensation as if something were trying to turn itself round the right way. In the human brain there is no magnetic north and yet all imaginary actions, all dialogues, all ideas feel as though they take up an inner physical direction peculiar to them alone and assigned them as they form. It is the route they take to reach the mind’s eye; each route is unique and imparts its own flavour. Later it is easier to recall the flavour of ideas and memories than the originals themselves. I can often not remember an argument but usually the scent left by its trail in my mind, the olfactory echoes lasting vividly long after the words in which the thought was expressed have vanished without trace.

  Again the book has slipped off my lap and again I find I am staring at the ocean which now contains no boat at all, not even a faint wake across its directionless expanse. Inner twistings and flavours: maybe this is how it feels to migratory birds and animals, one of whose forbears once went on a summer holiday or winter journey thereby orientating itself so thoroughly that it passed on a new set of directions for ever. Modern science glosses this inaccurately by referring to gravitational fields, stellar patterns, magnetic poles, the position of the sun and so forth, but that is only because modern science as yet knows no way of quantifying the influence of summer holidays on impressionable organisms.

  Meanwhile I remember Marisil, Sising and Bini’s eldest daughter who once went to stay with relatives on the other side of a town not much more than nine miles from Kansulay. She was unbearably homesick and returned three days later even though she was supposed to have gone to be formally employed as a maid. I asked her how it had struck her, being away from home for the first time in her fifteen years.

  ‘I was always so sad,’ she said. ‘It’s not like here in Kansulay, they haven’t got any hills there.’ She spoke as if she had been to a foreign country. ‘And the sun was in the wrong place.’

  What did this mean? I found out her relatives’ house was differently aligned. When she sat outside the front and expected the sun to rise as it did at home over the coconuts on the left and set behind the bamboos up on the hill near the place they called Babag it did no such thing. Instead it slouched across the sky in an unexpected direction. In addition to feeling immeasurably touched because she looks so like her mother I felt complete sympathy with her, knowing of the inner wrenching, the sense of bending which she could only describe as homesickness and which really told of an offence against the map in her mind. I imagine I am now at ease with the map of Tiwarik I carry in my own mind. This, however, turns out to be self-delusion, at least when it comes to my own orientation.

  *

  My disabuse begins one evening when they come for me as the light is beginning to go: Arman, Intoy and Danding in one boat, Silo, Jhoby and Bokbok in the other. They sit around drinking small nips of anisado to warm them for the long night ahead while I change into night-fishing gear: black cotton jogging suit with long sleeves and a pair of dark nylon socks. This is partly a protection against stinging plants and sea-urchins but it also lessens the attraction of my pale flesh to passing sharks. I strap a knife on the outside of my right leg. Ever since a near-disaster some months ago I seldom hunt at night without one. Arman, who played a heroic rôle in that particular drama, also wears a knife, as does Jhoby. Once none of us would have dreamed of taking knives but now we are well past feeling self-conscious and m
aking jokes about looking like Lito Lapid, a Filipino film star of immense popularity whose endless hand-to-hand combat parts have made him a sort of ageing Bruce Lee.

  By the hurricane lamp’s benign glow we check our equipment: spear guns, elastic bindings, plywood flippers, masks and goggles, torches. At the last moment Arman decides to change the batteries in his torch which takes a minute or two because of the home-made waterproofing. We are all using the same design, ordinary three-battery Chinese flashlights encased in motorcycle inner tube warty with patched repairs. The tyre is cut off with about six inches to spare, doubled back and rolled up on itself like the end of a toothpaste tube before being bound around with elastic. The result is a fat rubber torch, bulbous with air and waterproof to a great depth. A disadvantage is that it takes time to change the batteries and even longer to replace a bulb. Another minor disadvantage I have discovered occurs only at depth. Beyond a hundred and thirty feet or so the water pressure squeezes the rubber flat over the switch making it impossible to turn the torch off. This makes one-handed signalling very difficult. Tonight we will be at such depths, using both the boats’ compressors.