Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I draw a careful bead between its eyes and fire. The creature explodes in billows of silt which at once obscure it. The nylon line between my fingers snaps tight, goes suddenly limp. I fear the ray has shaken loose the barb and escaped with a headache but the line tautens as I gain a few feet of altitude and there, arising from the spreading cloud below, is the great grey diamond of my prey, showing flashes of white underside as its wingtips curl like the rim of a galvanised bowler hat. Soon the spastic curling changes to regular waves rippling fore-to-aft as if the messages of its dying brain had been reduced to a basic sine-wave pattern. Much relieved I swim off a few metres to a patch of undisturbed sand and settle the ray on the bottom. I lean my weight on the spear and drive its tip right through the fish. This produces no further effect so keeping one hand on the end of the spear I flatten myself to one side, knife in the other hand, and with a strong slash at arm’s length cut through its tail just in front of the sting and slice backwards, carving off the gleaming white thorn which even in this lost wilderness I push point downwards into the sand out of sheer habit.

  The only problem with this prize is its weight and resistance in the water but it can’t be helped. It is not worth going up yet. I have lost all sense of time. Now and again I think to see torch-flashes like migraine warnings from somewhere ahead, off to one side, even above me. I picture the four of us each hanging at unequal heights in this dense void at the end of a plastic umbilicus while far overhead the two boats keep pace in silence. By now they will have rounded the island and be heading out towards the mainland. Down here at the bottom the sea’s arcades extend on all sides, infinite in their possibility. A cuttlefish floats in the water beside me in that hunched posture they adopt in readiness for flight; the head up and the body angled slightly down almost as a horse’s head sits on its neck. The large intelligent eyes with their crumpled pupils watch me thoughtfully and it sets up its ‘passing cloud’ defence, hoping to disconcert me with the shimmers of colour crawling over its skin. I nod to it down there, grateful my companions can’t see me failing to shoot a good-sized bagulan. All at once I know too well that sound of the spear going through its crisp bony plate like a nail through styrofoam, the sight of the explosion of ink.

  I feel as though I can go on for ever down here letting my light play over this prodigious landscape. I am sure that with a bit of practice I would even be able to survive without breathing like those fabled yogis who bury themselves for months. What a difference between lying in a premature grave staring up at a wooden lid and moving in these blissful ranges. The only thing is I am gradually becoming aware of a change in the sea: it is beginning to smell rather, and it takes me a moment or two to identify the smell as being not unlike hot flux. Maybe somebody is soldering down here. Also, somewhere a long way off, my head has begun to ache. It is no problem, though. It is all a matter (I tell myself) of keeping one’s head. If … Now that takes me back to my second school where Rudyard Kipling’s poem was framed and hung above the dining hall door. If you can keep your head … What makes me think of that down here? The weirdest thing. I find myself reflecting further on the whole ethic of that particular school, with its treatment of literature as either morally uplifting or punishment (Sweet Auburn …) and its dotty militarism. Why, one had only to look at the names of the dormitories. What were they, taken in order from the end of the corridor? Haig, Kitchener, Beatty, rather than Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg … Rosenberg? Isaac Rosenberg? You must be joking. What about that first school in Sussex, though, what were its dormitories called? Wellington, Marlborough … More dead warriors, the whole playing-fields-of-Eton ethos.

  Somewhere my body shoots a two-kilo grouper, by itself worth forty pesos in the market at Malubog tomorrow, while my brain struggles to be fair. No, Wellington and Marlborough were followed by Oundle so they must have been referring to public schools. Collectively they represented a much more realistic aspiration for the baby scholars sleeping in them. Who on earth would want to be Haig? ‘If you can keep your head,’ though. What a deeply foolish poem by an often good writer and how typical that our headmaster – like many others of his ilk, no doubt – should have thought it worth hanging up to inspire his little grey-shorted troops. My mind jumps to the South Vietnam-Cambodian border in 1971, to the so-called Parrot’s Beak and the province of Svay Rieng whose territory Congress had repeatedly been assured no American soldier had ever violated. I am reading the flak-jacket of a black US Marine. Carefully written in large magic-marker lettering it says: If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs they probably know something you don’t, fuckhead. How I wish I had known that in 1953.

  Is that a shark or a submarine my light picks up? It is neither. I swim through the space where it wasn’t. The concussions of my heart reach me through the water. As if from afar on a warm summer night the crowd cheers in the Roman Colosseum, a constant roar, a million mandibles applauding. Thumbs down: throw him to the sharks. Good old shark, the raptor of the deep.

  Raptor of the deep? My brain is trying to tell my mind something but my body gets in the way, shooting a sea-snake in the head. Always shooting things, my body. Why? It’s silly; you can’t eat sea-snakes, any fool knows that. I make a mental note to punish my body for that later but it seems a bit preoccupied at present with the smell of soldering and an ache in its head. ‘If you can keep your head’, indeed. That’s exactly what not to do. One should make every effort to lose one’s head for good and all and give oneself up to the rapture. Only look at it … I shine my torch around. What I see brings the run of tears to my eyes. They trickle down inside my mask and make the sides of my nose itch as I contemplate the sublime otherness of this place: the solemn architecture of Drune softened by the bunches of coloured weeds disposed with consummate artistry at exactly the right points to gladden the spirits. From a million windows wink a million eyes. Motes and beams dance luminously in the streets, hang their fragile violet banners in the air, float diaphanous buntings which glow in the dark and disappear at the flash of a torch like insubstantial green phlegms. I am in it at last, in it and of it, the underlying real. Another quotation floats out from behind a rock in letters of fire, this one by William Burroughs, a writer whose greatness brings further tears to my eyes. ‘A psychotic is a guy who has just found out what’s going on.’ Right. Right. Exactly. Only the truly mad understand the underlying real. Perfect wisdom for flak-jackets.

  Now the entire picture is becoming brighter. The colours are coming out of their shells, stretching and glowing. De Chirico himself sits on a tussock of concrete moss and designs it all. He is a little bald Italian with half-moon spectacles and something inside wonders whether he really looked like that but it hardly matters because there he is, pulling from his mouth a string of words which glow nacreously like the pearls I can see they are: ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art.’ There is a pause. Then he brings out a final triumphant sentence which glitters and stings the eye: ‘The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter.’ The truth of this overwhelms me. It cannot be denied. Is not the proof all around me? Soulless and untroubled beauty is here in abundance. Gratefully I offer de Chirico the mouthpiece of my hookah for a puff but it turns out I am myself inside the hookah because the smoke comes out of the end as bubbles, which is wrong. The smoke must be outside. Sadly I replace the tube and de Chirico vanishes.

  Far off a light beckons.

  I swim towards it and the arcades ascend obligingly, taking me with them. I am sure I am no longer swimming though. It is far more like the progress in a dream, an effortless gliding through the black press of fathoms. I realise why this is. In reality water is not solid at all but layered like flaky pastry. Providing one finds one of the horizontal seams between its strata one can shoot through as if expressed between sheets of oiled rubber. More than ever I am sure I could manage
down here without breathing but I am doing so well with my effortless gliding I decide to wait for next time before acquiring another new skill. One thing at a time, this is of the essence. Meanwhile my practised hunter’s body is spearing and spearing, killing and killing until the catch-line is more like a sheet anchor I am towing, a dead weight which retards even my sliding progress.

  A light closes on me. I flash my own at it. A terrifying insect face with huge beetle eyes stares back, mouth parts extruding a bubbling proboscis. Its name is Arman and it reaches out a pale claw to touch my shoulder before making a downward jabbing gesture. I grin at it and water rushes into my mouth. I had forgotten there was water out there. I swallow it and follow Arman the beetle. An eternity scuds by in which my body begins to pass back messages. Out of the incoherent weight of there being something I disentangle one or two definites: I am cold, I am immensely tired, my jaw aches, my head aches, the forearm holding the spear gun aches. We are heading down, steadily down and down. As we do so my body is strangely lightening while an oppressive melancholy grows. I am losing something, there is a loss, something recedes. Almost vertically downwards now, deeper and deeper until my head bursts with a roar against the bottom. I wonder what we are doing here but rest for a while in pain. Then a light blazes nearby and, flashing my own in reply, I see Arman the beetle approach with a headache. He reaches out a limb and gently plucks out my own proboscis. This time water does not gush into my mouth but rinses in and out. His voice reaches me. I can hear him perfectly but cannot understand the words.

  ‘Enough,’ he is saying. ‘Ay, very cold. Also my head aches.’

  As if reminded, his headache leaps across and settles on top of the one already in my own skull. His light splits into many parts, his voice into others. In a sickish lurch the universe rights itself and drains away leaving me in my proper mind but with a raging head lolling in the black water next to a boat. The engine’s throb is silent. Intoy is standing up in the prow coiling in Arman’s air-hose, Danding in the stern does the same for mine. A tug at my waist reminds me and I unloop it, weakly, put out a hand and clutch at the bamboo outrigger.

  ‘My head aches too,’ I say, but with difficulty because my mouth is misshapen, the teeth on one side no longer meeting as they used to and the tongue blundering in so unfamiliar a cavity.

  ‘Maybe the wind carried some exhaust into the compressor. Monoksyde. Ay, very bad.’ He laughs. ‘I think maybe I get a little crazy down there.’

  ‘Me too.’ I thought it was nitrogen rather than monoxide which made that happen. ‘Christ, my head.’ I vomit into the sea, voiding what feels like half a gallon of hot saline over my upper arms and chest as I cling to the rocking wood.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Arman is asking. ‘Four hours we are down there. Very long.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Guess where. No? Sabay.’

  ‘Sabay?’

  ‘Right. We’ve crossed right over. Look there.’

  A mile away across the strait, so faint and lost in the night as to be all but out of sight, glows the hurricane lamp I left burning back on Tiwarik.

  Somehow I heave myself on board. I am still not able to rid myself of a memory which goes on insisting I was heading downwards when I surfaced, that this upper air, this night is in the wrong place, that the entire universe has been stood on its head. Tiwarik. We inspect the haul by the light of our now dim torches. My own catch-line says it all. First the three mangled fish, then a dozen weighing about a pound each, the ray, a splendid grouper. Thereafter my catch becomes more and more bizarre.

  ‘You’re going to eat this?’ Danding indicates the sea-snake.

  ‘Well …’ The evidence is that my head had indeed been lost down there. The snake is followed by a small sea-cucumber, a selection of insignificant aquarium fish and finally some carefully threaded bunches of weed. The last item is a lump of abraded red coral which has a hole in it large enough to admit the fluke of my spear. Arman and Danding laugh. They have seen such things before.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Arman says. ‘We should have come up earlier. Never mind, you’ve got some huli. That’s a good forty-peso fish you’ve got there.’ He pokes the grouper with a toe. ‘Maybe fifty if there’s not much else in the market.’

  Suddenly I realise what I am crouching over. Lying along the bottom of the boat, intermittently visible between thwarts and decking, is a great grey corpse. A shark.

  ‘Arman?’ I cry. ‘You didn’t …?’

  But he had. He explains he noticed this five-footer which was obviously interested in his catch and momentarily being presented with the creature’s soft gill-slits a mere metre away had fired his spear from behind and slightly downwards into the gill, the only possible point of entry into that tough hide. Immediately the shark had rolled in the water instead of darting away and tearing itself free had spun and wrapped the spear around itself like a wire collar. Evidently its own struggles had driven the point into some vital organ for thereafter it had rapidly become feebler enabling Arman to tow it up. He had continued the dive with my spare spear. It was a truly astonishing feat of strength and nerve; the insides of both forearms were raw as if sandpapered by that thrashing hide. I give my own account of the shark which mutilated my catch and show the evidence. It is almost certainly the same animal.

  ‘We’ll soon know,’ says Danding. ‘When we cut it open we will find the missing halves of your fish.’

  The other boat with our three companions is long gone. Danding ferries me back to Tiwarik on my insistence: I need to be by myself. On the way Intoy praises me extravagantly for my ray, putting his finger into its mean little slit of a mouth. I think he feels I need consoling in the face of Arman’s amazing triumph and for that I am grateful. I bequeath him and Danding my entire catch except for a couple of fish for my own breakfast. I am full of residues: of disorientation, of headache, of being so outrageously bested by Arman. Of course it was competitive, how could it not have been? Left alone I stare sleeplessly up at the thatch and reflect on the underwater journey we have made, on the barricades of reason I crossed. I have no real idea where I am. Endless black water is still flowing around and through me.

  *

  In the morning my headache has more or less gone but I am sluggish and subdued as if not merely my body had been flattened beneath the incalculable tonnage separating the place where I sit from the distant village of Sabay. For an entire morning the world seems oddly two-dimensional while somewhere inside there persists that conviction of the world’s being inverted. I am sure I was heading downwards when I came up. It takes many hours for this certainty to fade during which time the landscape fattens out again and things gradually take on depth. I am reoriented.

  In the afternoon I walk to the top of the bluff overlooking the beach and sit in the sun like an invalid or the survivor of a bad accident made thoughtful. The island feels warm and reassuring beneath my back but then it turns scornful of my stupidity. Your element is the air, it says, blowing its grasses across my face. Your element is the sun which falls in brilliant crimson on your closed eyelids. You may carry them safely with you beneath the sea as long as you don’t surrender them to the compressor. You relied so much on mechanical assistance you lost touch with your proper element and equally lost touch with the sea. Instead of heightened awareness you experienced mere hallucination. You may extend the limits of your landscape to take you beneath the sea but only if you go down unassisted. Lungfuls of air, a hut on an island. That is all. That is enough.

  Why bother? I ask the island in return. Why the undergoing of extremes to see a few things a little differently? What need of such harshness?

  No answer. The grasses continue to brush my face, the sun to fall on my shut eyes. Far off below the sea crumbles and crumbles away at the shingle.

  12

  To live alone on a coral-fringed island in the South China Sea might stand for some Europeans as a consummate antithesis to their own lives, almost as a romantic
ideal. In fact the notion of a ‘paradise island’ has long since stopped being an aesthetic judgement and has become instead a tourist industry description, a travel brochure category like ‘handicrafts capital’ or ‘cultural Mecca’ or ‘popular resort’: if that is what enough people call it, then that is what it is. Obligatory, then, for a paradise island in these parts are white sand, coconut palms, ice for the drinks, a beach shop selling sun lotion, barbecues and disco music at nightfall.

  Tiwarik is not a paradise island. It has only discomfort to offer. Its single white beach is a shifting bank of sharp coral rubble. The drinking water arrives sun-hot from the mainland, tasting of plastic jerrycan and brackish from the well there. The flies are often bad. The shingle bank is used as a restaurant and lavatory by passing fishermen and the remains of their improvised meals provide the island’s insect life as well as the hermit crabs with cheer and sustenance. The cogon fields are home to two species of snake. Large ragged centipedes are common. Often they can be seen through the slats of the floor making their way across the earth beneath the hut. Sometimes they climb up at night. Once I was woken by one lying across my forehead; it bit me savagely when I brushed it off. I cut that one vengefully in half and in the morning the two halves still preserved a semblance of life. Intoy tells me you have to bury them separately otherwise they will crawl together and join back up again. I tell him this is a simple matter to test but all subsequent observations do nothing to discourage his belief.

  It would therefore be a rare person who could incorporate Tiwarik’s painful reality into his dream of alternative living. The ruse which might be employed in Manila of choosing not to see what one looks at would hardly be open to him here, that trick performed by the tourist busloads as they pass. On Tiwarik this person would also be immune to the terminal lassitude of tropical provinces which afflicts so many Westerners, turning them to drink and despondency and indefinitely postponing the writing of soulful letters home. He would on the contrary be filled with a sense of urgency, aware always that he is seeing and doing things just in time.