It is a strange moment when, whistling in a bare room, you chance to hit the precise note at which it resonates. For the duration of that note the room becomes live, it rings in sympathy; the very plaster declares its heart. A quarter-tone’s deviation up or down and it at once falls silent, you become again a whistler in an empty room. Similarly there can come a moment, maybe only when you are past being quite young, when something happens which makes your lived past vibrate with a kind of accuracy likely to make you say, ‘Yes, that’s me; that is how I have always been,’ but which also might make you much prefer to fall inwardly silent with that shame which is not guilt but years and years of wishing you were not so. Such a moment came, such a note was struck and such a recurrent fault was set trembling into inward audibility when you visited Tagud.
Thanks to Badoy, whose home village it was, Tagud had become a legendary place, a minor Mecca which, once you had heard its name, you were fatally destined to visit. For at Anilao you shared an exile: he from his birthplace, you from yours. And what brought you together in that dull coastal strip with its half-hearted fishing and its weary copra-making? What else but the sea, which, although it scarcely runs in your blood, does run beneath your character like an undertow, tugging and churning and – whenever you are close to it – unsettling the contours of your restless bed.
You did not become conscious of Badoy until several weeks of enforced exile had passed in Anilao. The government project – a feasibility study of the prospects of a dendro-thermal installation to generate electricity for the province with quick-growing timber – had stalled in the way in which such things do in that part of the world. Insinuations had come that the funds set aside for your salary had already bought the cement needed to build a house for the newly wed daughter of the manager of the electricity co-operative. Pending reassurances you stopped work. Many days passed, and in Anilao the days pass slowly. The mornings are blue and tropical; the afternoons are black and tropical, and the rains tramp in from the sea; the sunsets are resplendent until promptly the nights descend like swags of stifling black cloth shot with vast discharges of electricity. Not long, therefore, before your feet took you into the sea as others’ take them into the room where the television is. And there you met Badoy.
You are hardly alone in your admiration for people with an elegant physical skill. It is pointless to deny there is always an erotic component, however well disguised, in such admiration since it is impossible to watch any body so closely without seeing your own. One day you were down among the corals in a mask, at least knowing enough so that the corals you sometimes held on to were not those which sting and leave the hands blazed with brown weals. In point of fact you were watching – for as long as each lungful of air lasted – the local species of bird wrasse with its long snout whose exact purpose seems not precisely known. It is a reasonable assumption that it picks its food out of deep crevices which other fish cannot reach; but this, as they say in scientific circles, remains unconfirmed. You had some idea that, as a casual amateur with time on his hands, it would be nice to confirm it one way or the other. They are not easy fish to observe, because unlike other species of small coralline fish they seem to be continually on the move, weaving rapidly from place to place rather than forever circling the same patch (for many species of fish recognise a territorial imperative).
On that particular occasion you had just gone down a fathom or two with freshly held breath when from behind a rock and not more than ten feet away there swam a fat parrot-fish, green and blue and scrunching away at the coral with its powerful beak-teeth. There was a sudden rushing sound, a pok! and the fish began flailing wildly. A shadow passed overhead and the parrot-fish rose, still struggling, hauled upwards with a long steel rod spitting it. You rose with it to the sunlight and there was Badoy sparkling and grinning in tiny home-made wooden goggles set with little olives of glass. He passed the struggling fish down along the spear and on to the length of green nylon cord which trailed in the water behind him.
‘Did I surprise? But I thought, that’s a delicious fish and you are down there without a spear-gun so why waste it?’ He refitted the spear into the gun he was holding, a simple wooden stock shaped like a child’s toy rifle with powerful heavy-gauge elastic tied to its short bamboo barrel: essentially an underwater catapult. You bobbed your head back beneath the surface. In front of you hung Badoy’s legs, one foot wearing a flipper cut from marine plywood and held on by a piece of inner tubing tacked across it, and trailing downwards in the blue water like a thin tail from his spear-gun was the length of nylon which ended with perhaps two kilos of threaded fish, joined now by the still-flapping parrot-fish.
‘How long did that take you?’
‘Two hours, maybe more. It’s not a good day. The water’s too clear. Very easy for us to see the fish but very easy for the fish to see you. Also it is daytime. And anyway this is Anilao. Not like Tagud.’
‘Tagud?’
‘Where I come from. Maybe forty kilometres down the coast.’ And Badoy pointed with the tip of his spear (which you now noticed was barbed with a nail bent and hinged ingeniously through a hole) to where the green of the palms disappeared in a succession of hazy headlands into the distance. ‘They are real fishermen there. Not like here in Anilao.’ He looked sardonically at the beach a few hundred yards away on which a handful of boats was drawn up but which was bare of activity except for the rootings of domestic animals.
‘Is that thing very difficult to use?’
‘No, not difficult to use. Difficult to catch things, yes. Ha, perhaps that is why not many people in Anilao go spear-fishing. They just use nets sometimes or look for small octopus in the rocks at low tide. They are very lazy here. Just drinking.’
Of course you wondered why he was here if he seemed so contemptuous of Anilao and its inhabitants, and of course you were drawn to the only other person in the sea for what seemed like miles in any direction. Above all, you were filled with a great urge to imitate, to try spear-fishing perhaps for food (as you would have explained it sensibly to yourself) but more to become accomplished in a new skill, to have some of that nonchalant marine confidence and enter a new world with new companions and rise just as dazzlingly to the surface, teeth glittering with pleasure. But more still – although you did not at the time recognise it – because it promised fear and fresh confrontations with an old bugbear; for your submerged self sniffs out fear like truffles which your daily self shrinks from as poison.
Badoy’s elegance underwater was complemented by his ingenious craftsmanship on land. He set about making a second spear-gun using the few tools he could lay hand on, hacking the stock out of a plank of coconut wood with a large knife. The spear was a metre of quarter-inch steel rod in which he gouged holes and slots and raised a jagged tooth at one end to catch wire loops attached to the stretched rubber thongs. And all the time you wondered why he was so eager. Was it because he had nothing to do? Or maybe because he wanted a companion in the water, even a tyro? Or because he was a natural didact anxious to pass on what he knew? A week or two had passed, the speargun long since finished and in daily use before you discovered that the much older woman who brooded discreetly in his house was Badoy’s wife, evidently formidable enough in some undisclosed manner to insist on their living in her home village rather than in his. Her uncle, recently dead, had left enough money by local standards so that Badoy was not compelled to take regular paid work. What would he do but mooch and fish and, according to gossip, occasionally disappear for annihilating binges in the distant provincial capital?
Frightening as it all was eventually to become, you do remember those early days when you were learning the craft as ones of extreme happiness. Taking the spear-gun and spending three hours in the sea, often twice as long, sometimes with Badoy but more often alone, shooting and missing, stalking and missing, learning the habits of the different species. Exhausting at first: the continual swimming down to fifteen, twenty-five, forty feet in pursuit or merely on reconnaissance, then clawing back up for air, the process repeated for hours until a strange disorientation set in and you became in some sense unsure at any given moment which medium you were in. Learning to manage the long nylon line attached to the rear end of the spear was a slow essay in exasperation. The currents tangled it; the corals snarled it; your legs attracted it and snared themselves in it. One day you said ‘Enough’ and cut the line off. It happened to be the day you got your first shot at a really decent-sized fish. The spear struck home satisfyingly and the fish made off with it at speed to vanish, heading downwards into the ocean deep.
Badoy merely grinned and unhesitatingly set about making a new one; but it took hours and he cut himself in the process and you felt contrite and sullied by incompetence. Thereafter you learned to use the line, holding the stop-knot on the end lodged between two knuckles until there was enough catch to weight it out of the way in the water.
Soon you began to return trailing small coral fish like paper cutouts on the tail of a kite. Most were familiar aquarium fish: angels, butterflies, Moorish Idols and the like, enough of which fried or toasted constituted a meal. Some days there were none; later there were a few but larger. And all the while Badoy hung around his dark house among the trees, whittling this and filing that or maybe sitting on the step morosely watching the eddies of hens around the pump where the maid did the washing and the sun never pierced the canopies of leaves. Behind him his wife moved sombrely about the house. Your arrival – probably anybody’s – would awaken both from their melancholy so that she smiled and Badoy sparkled. But when you left you could feel whatever strange and mutual reproach settle once more and no doubt remain until you next saw them: something which emasculated or unfeminised them into the gloomiest creatures.
Away from his house, though, Badoy was full of energy. Even when alone in the water you felt his presence over your shoulder explaining a diver’s worst enemies or making you work the corals harder or pointing out that he always did most of his own impromptu repairs right there in the sea since he had nobody on shore to whom he could bring unravelled rubber bindings or broken wire loops. You were being urged along; steadily, certainly, you were being groomed but you still did not know exactly for what.
‘You must come to my village,’ Badoy said one day. ‘Perhaps at the end of this month or next month we will visit Tagud. You would like to come? The spear-fishing there is very good. But first we must practise night diving.’
‘Night diving?’
‘It’s much better. The fish are asleep there in the corals. You go down and shine your flashlight and there they are. They don’t move much. You can put the end of your spear this close’ – he held his hands six inches apart – ‘and pum! Big fish, too; you’ll see.’
‘Isn’t it very – well – dark?’
‘We will bring my cousin in a boat and borrow a pressure-lamp. It’s not necessary, the lamp, but it makes it more easy for you the first time. Also we will have our flashlights. You have flashlight?’
‘Just a cheap Chinese thing. It isn’t waterproof, though.’
‘Of course. But we will make it.’
Waterproofing torches by means of adding another, slightly larger diameter, lens and encasing it all in a length of motorcycle inner tube was merely one more of Badoy’s skills. Two nights later you lowered yourself from a tiny boat into the black waters above what in daytime was a familiar reef. And there it was, pressing in all around you amid the fitful sparks of plankton gingered into momentary luminescence by tiny eddies and swirls. There it was, swimming upwards at you from those pitch depths. Certainly it had been preparing itself in instalments: the first time you saw a moray eel fix you with its blank and white-rimmed eye and bare its ragged teeth at you and at nothing else; the first time a sea-snake came swimming rapidly up in clear water to investigate you alone; the first time you speared but did not kill a stonefish whose poisoned spines could inflict agonising wounds and you were left on a tossing ocean trying to manoeuvre the twisting creature down the spear and back along the nylon line away from your naked feet. Pangs they were when in warm tropic seas a quick cold current ran over your body. But this black gulf which concealed all such things and no doubt many worse made for a fear which did not easily pass.
Then Badoy’s torch flashed on and the pressure-lamp outlined his downward-swimming, purposeful body in sad green light like something which could not be followed but which you pursued anyway for your own safety, imagining always, imagining the very worst that could happen: the accident which sent your spear thudding into his body, the bent-nail fluke making it impossible to pull out and which would mean finding transport in the middle of the night (hardly likely in Anilao where the only vehicle was a battered motorcycle) to take a mortally stricken Badoy eighteen miles over atrocious tracks to the only hospital where, if rumour were to be believed, they often performed major surgery by candlelight with the aid only of dozens of ampoules of local anaesthetic since somebody had sold the nitrous oxide on the black market.
But here is Badoy’s torch and then Badoy himself, alive and well, flashing his light briefly on the end of your line to see what you have caught and, doing likewise, you discover his own line already weighty with the big reef fish you dream of getting by day. And again you follow him down, but this time the excitement takes over when you flash your own torch unbelievingly into a hole and there not more than two feet away is a good solid half-kilo goatfish, one of the mullet family, its chin barbels twitching in the sudden light. Then your spear pocks through him and you have air enough left in your lungs to sweep him back along spear and line with a now practised gesture, trap your torch between your legs as you reload so as to see where to catch the stretched elastic, regain a lost few feet of depth and move on to the next hole, which contains nothing but a dark red slate-pencil urchin you have never seen by day. And so back up to the surface where the night now seems darker than the sea beneath you except for the single star of the pressure-lamp some way off and the air is almost cold in comparison with the water. You have suddenly shifted elements.
And the excitement never failed even though the fear lurched up before submerging again beneath sheer physical pleasure and interest. You always came back exhausted after three, four and once five hours of working the reefs in darkness but never without some fresh knowledge of the sea and its creatures. Often you returned with handsome fish, many times with cuts and stabs and hydroid burns, various parts of your body embedded with the snapped-off tips of brittle black sea-urchin spines. (‘Piss on them, that’s the best,’ said Badoy the first time. ‘It dissolves them.’ ‘How can I possibly? They’re here.’ ‘Forget them. They dissolve anyway in a couple of days.’)
The moments of fear were almost always those when you allowed your imagination to intrude. The sudden confrontations with marine hazards were moments of extreme busyness, of co-ordinating spear and breathing; the fright only came later. You have never been phobic about the dark or of being alone, but there were times when both lightless boat and Badoy himself disappeared for upwards of an hour and you were quite alone in a black sea beneath a black sky sometimes not even knowing where the shore was since you were too far out for the breakers to be audible above the local slop of water. Then you felt – not fear, exactly, but a desolation, an abandonment such as prefigured a way of dying which might well turn out to be your very own, unlocatably small between a black space and a black deep. How, then, to explain that this doleful panic could turn, now and again, into the greatest exhilaration and send you plunging recklessly downwards with your torch switched off so that the twinkling of plankton beyond your mask were the stars in a downward firmament traversed by the brilliant comet of your spear-tip? And then, perhaps, far away at an unguessable distance off to one side a brief flash like the dimmest green lightning as Badoy’s torch-beam outlined a range of coral like a bank of cloud.
All this time you knew how happy you were by the way the question ‘how long can it last?’ re-posed itself in a variety of ways. Privately your hope was that the manager of the electricity co-operative had indeed embezzled your salary, maybe in so doing prolonging your stay indefinitely (for it costs next to nothing to live simply in a place like Anilao). But what of Badoy? He frequently referred to his plans for working abroad – in Saudi Arabia, in America, in Australia – anywhere overseas, really, where visa requirements and work-permit laws could be got round, fluffed over or just plain flouted. Did you think his chances of getting a honeymoon visa and then overstaying and going to ground as an illegal immigrant were better in Australia or the US? was one of his ways of starting these conversations.
‘But what about your wife, Badoy?’
‘She stays here, of course.’
‘But surely you’ll miss each other badly?’ (Was this inquisitiveness or mischief?) ‘You may be gone a year. More’, you added, thinking of gaol, ‘or less’, thinking of deportation.
‘Three maybe, perhaps five. Of course. But the money…. What else can we do? Without work there is no future for me here in Anilao. She will be happy because of the money.’
‘But what kind of work could you do in a place like Saudi Arabia?’
‘Oh, anything. Construction, labouring, working in the restaurants for other foreigners like me. It doesn’t matter.’
‘But it may be hundreds of miles from the sea. No more spear-fishing.’
And finally in a gloomy outburst: ‘I don’t want to live as a fisherman all my life. I want something better than this place. I want to see the world.’
How uneasy were such conversations, which would recur practically verbatim and with your own lines beginning ‘But …’. Even more uneasy were they when his wife was present, the looks of hopelessness she shot at him, at you. The atmosphere became heavy with the sense that there was a great inaccuracy somewhere, that you did not understand who was being reproached for what, if anyone were: he for longingly talking of desertion, he for battening inertly off his wife in Anilao, or you for treason in possibly aiding his going. Your own selfishness appalled you, the degree to which you wished to hold another person’s life static to make a background against which you could do your plentiful discovering, your peregrinations. Struck then by the image of Badoy’s marvellous talents and skills which he ironically so undervalued lying unused or even deteriorating in the blazing heat of an Arabian construction site, you were made sadder still. It became but a small step from raising practical objections concerning the difficulty of legally working abroad to finding yourself entertaining fantasies masquerading as plans to build a large fishing-boat of which Badoy could be the skipper while you – what? – held ropes and jumped over the side, dog-like, to retrieve lost paddles? It was absurd. Yet it was never quite enough to laugh at such plans, because self-mockery, too, has that quality of ringing as if round an empty room. The real self has opportunely just left, closing the door, and can be heard outside in the passage obtusely heading back towards the television room and fantasy.
And so in due time your probation ended and you finally reached Tagud. It turned out to be smaller even than Anilao, its greater dependence on the sea reflected by the purposeful way in which the bleached huts had their piles driven into the sand above the high-tide mark and hugged the shore in a straggling line, scorning to spread inland among the sheltering palms. Behind the village rose a mountain whose steep sides were partly forested. A mile offshore was a tiny uninhabited island whose general shape and jungled cap were an aping in miniature of the mountain opposite. In between ran seas whose purples indicated their depth.
‘Bad currents,’ said Badoy succinctly. ‘We will take a lot of rice and water and live on the island. You will like it there; very good corals.’
The first two days there were a continuation of your Anilao spear-fishing but now in paradisal guise. The corals were richer, steeper, the water clearer, the fish grander. Who has never hung above such reefs in the early light of morning, steeped in the bliss of altitude, has missed a vital fraction of the world’s beauty. On one side the floor of the sea rises to become the rocks of shore; on the other it falls now shallowly through hillocks of coral – twenty-foot crags like model mountain ranges – now steeply in gorges and vertical cliffs slashed by crevasses into ever-purpler depths of invisibility. On the way down this magnificent descent are ledges of blond sand and creamy patches of coral fragments making irregularly spaced steps on a grand stairway down. Such now is your physical familiarity with what you lovingly see that you appraise each of these steps. ‘I could reach that…. I might just get down to that one…. I’d never make the bluish one, not at my age. Fifteen, sixteen fathoms and then straight back up, all right; but twenty-five fathoms, never.’ Yet, even if you will now never be able to get down much beyond a hundred feet without mechanical assistance, how beautiful it is as the light becomes stronger and higher; how bushy and furred those cliffs with multiform varieties of plant, how mysterious the brilliant fish moving isolate or in small flocks at all levels in this fluid mass like birds, how splendid the little sharks eighty feet beneath your soles and flexing like rubber daggers moving haft-foremost. This astounding medium sustains it all; it bears you up, in it you float, entranced by a paradigm of inwardness and depth.
But the fear was not long in returning. You could feel it coming each time you crossed back from the island to Tagud and met Badoy’s family and the other fishermen of the community. They radiated a competence so great it immediately annulled your own pride at having acquired a small skill of your own. It soon became clear that this arose not from a disparity in your respective expertness with a spear-gun, superior though theirs was, but from their use of something which was evidently what Badoy had been leading you towards right from the beginning.
The compressor.
‘When I come back home here to Tagud,’ Badoy said one morning, ‘I must seriously catch fish so I can sell them and bring the money to my wife in Anilao. I must work.’
So playtime was declared over; there were livings to be earned. Either you went on dabbling on your own or else you followed Badoy on to the last stage.
‘It’s exciting,’ he urged. ‘It’s the best. Far better than what we’ve been doing.’
You felt a pang at this easy devaluation of weeks of pleasure.
‘Far better?’
‘Not far better; that’s still very good,’ Badoy said encouragingly. ‘But you can get bigger catches of bigger fish because you can go so deep and stay down there for hours maybe.’
‘How deep?’
‘Maybe two hundred and fifty, three hundred and fifty feet sometimes.’
Good God. ‘Is it very difficult?’
‘Not so. With practice a week or less. We will try later today when the boat comes back.’
Later that day you examined the compressor. The system was simplicity itself. The boat’s propeller shaft could be disengaged and a fan-belt slipped over a pulley so that the engine now drove a small air-compressor from which led two thin polythene hoses each hundreds of feet long.
‘That’s all it is,’ said Badoy. ‘You control the air-flow by biting with your teeth, and when your mouth aches you squeeze a loop of the tube between your fingers like this. It needs a bit of practice to learn how to regulate it automatically.’
‘No valves or anything?’
‘No.’
‘What about depth-gauges?’
‘Do you have one?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Neither do we. We learn to judge how deep we are from the pressure on the body and the colour of the water. We must also judge how long we have been down. Do you have a diver’s watch? No? Did you know if you come up quickly from deep it hurts your joints like rheumatism? There is a man here in Tagud who was very drunk all night and he went down the next morning without sleep and still drunk and I think he comes up too quickly maybe. But he is now, what, paralysed from here…. Did you know about this danger?’
Did you know? Good God, had you not heard about the bends when you were at school and since read the elaborate safety-codes for scuba diving? The carefully worked-out pauses for decompression at each depth, to be minutely timed on obligatory chunky watches? The depth-gauges and knives and nose-clips and wet-suits and cylinders and weighted belts and flippers and reduction valves and compasses and underwater flares and so on and so on: the expensive accoutrements of those who quite reasonably wished to take their pleasures safely.
‘We will try now,’ said Badoy.
‘Oh…. What happens if the engine fails? It’s always running out of fuel.’
‘There’s a reserve air-tank here.’ He pointed to a pitted and rust-corroded cylinder lashed to the side of the boat with nylon line.
‘How long will that last?’
‘Three minutes maybe?’
‘So if you’re at two hundred feet you’ve got three minutes to surface?’
‘We won’t go that deep. This is your first time. Easy practice only.’
‘What happens if that fan-belt breaks? It looks pretty frayed to me.’
‘Same thing. You will know. For a moment the air stops completely and then it comes again but less, so you will know it is reserve. Now, put the tube around your body twice and loop it over two times only to hold it and bite the end in your teeth.’
With the engine running the compressor sent a huge draught of stink into your mouth, less air than the flavour under pressure of diesel oil and polythene tubing whose walls were infiltrated with colonies of yeasts. You retched.
‘Don’t worry. Up here the pressure is very great. Later when you have practice you will go down to sixty, seventy feet and the air comes just right. But when you go down to three hundred you must suck it in, the pressure is so few. Very tired, your lungs. Now, ready?’
And because you weren’t ready you floundered about in the topmost yard of water like a beginner learning to swim. It was hard to remember to do so much at once: clench your teeth to breathe normally, equalise the pressure in your ears, ignore the stink and head down beneath the throbbing wooden hull of the boat. A moment’s inattention and the air would burst into your stomach, your mouth open and sea flood into nose and mask; you would flail to the surface, choking and pouring and belching great gouts of diesel stench while the loose end of the tube whipped about in the water hissing and bubbling. And Badoy’s colleagues, teenagers mostly, would peer down laughing.
That first session barely lasted ten minutes, but in that time you did get down about thirty feet and stay there for longer than you ever had when you relied on lungs alone, Badoy cavorting round you with his plastic umbilicus in his mouth, trailing bubbles and teasing little fish. Later that night, in the small hours, you went off with them in the boat for spear-fishing; but it wasn’t the same for now you were left behind with your lungfuls of air while Badoy and colleague took the compressor’s hoses between their teeth and you watched their flashlights going straight down and down and down, becoming green dots of luminescence before winking out behind coral outcrops as the polythene uncoiled on the deck above them. You could not yet join them at such depths, so disconsolately swam towards the black bulk of island to bring you to shallower inshore waters. And so that night you fished alone, spearing a bigger and better catch than ever before but surfacing companionlessly to listen for the faint diesel chug of the compressor out in the dark. Sometimes it moved when the boys on board paddled to keep pace with the long-vanished divers; at other times it disappeared altogether as the noise of the invisible surf nearby drowned out its sound.
Hours later and shivering with exhaustion you found the boat again, bringing with you about four kilos of fish on your line. You should have been overjoyed but you were tetchy, jilted, cold and getting colder still as you sat on deck in the night air while the compressor chugged on and still Badoy didn’t return. Then at last the green patches of light growing under the sea and flashing intermittently like electrical storms in tropical clouds seen from high-flying aircraft: the gladiators returning. And here they were, whooping on the surface in the dark, chattering excitedly, swapping stories while their abandoned air-hoses spurted and threshed in the water, then coming in over the side and needing help to pull in their nylon catch-lines with twenty kilos of fish threaded on each: rays, small sharks, groupers, cuttlefish, vast parrot-fish, surgeon fish, a middling octopus, the meat from a giant clam.
So it came to colour your days on the island. Enclosing the mere practice of swimming down and staying at sixty feet without a spear-gun but with your lungs overinflated with oily air, the jaws of that vice: not to be left out on the one hand and on the other the compressor. And always from somewhere afar off in the mind that ringing of an empty room, that fear which had reverberated for as long as you could bear to remember, reminding you that you were full of the wrong stuff. Sleep, snatched mostly during the days’ intense heat, now became obsessionally haunted, shot through with descriptions and apprehensions:
It is just completely terrifying.
Two hundred and fifty feet overhead is brilliant sunshine. The sea is flat calm. Stray half-beaks and flying fish will be breaking the surface almost from sheer light-heartedness, flirting with that nebulous barricade between the two abysses.
But down here the pressure is like dark blue cement, transparent, unset, squeezing in from all sides against mask, hands, ears, genitals. You are in its grasp.
‘Of the two kinds of eel the white one – you know, with the black spots? – that’s the worst. The black one is bad but it does not attack so often. You must look for the separate lump of coral on the bottom, small like this room and maybe no more than two or three metres high, like an island? They like those for their nests. Sometimes there is the head of the eel sticking out and watching you. If he is about as thick as your leg here, he will be about two metres long and very strong. If his head is up like this – like a snake going to bite? – ay, he is dangerous. He will keep maybe his last half inside his house; with the rest he will attack. His teeth, they will take everything from your arm-bone, so you must remain to four feet of him and put your spear in the mouth here. That is his weakest, but you must be ready for a big fight. He is almost impossible to kill with one shot because the brain is very small and behind the eyes. Sometimes the tip of your spear goes up through the roof of his mouth and destroys the brain – ay, very lucky – but his body is stupid and doesn’t know he is dead already. If you hit him in the head, he will always pull back into his house and he will take your spear with him. He’s very hard to pull out then, and your spear will bend like plastic. But sometimes when we are swimming around we look for a coral like that and we look for a tail sticking out. When we see it we are happy because he is so easy then and we shoot to the tail, pum! because when the eel feels it he only wants to get away. He will not attack like that even if he is thick like my stomach here. He thinks only of the spear in the tail and leave his house to swim away from the pain. Always he swim away from the pain.’
Away from the pain is straight up, away from this pressing liquid cell: up, up like a frail pink rocket trailing silver platters of diesel air which come wobbling up for half a minute after you first lie on the surface, feeling the sun on your face again, even now hardly believing in the world you have just escaped. But impossible: that exit route is blocked off by knowledge like a concrete lid over your head, knowledge of what happens to your body if you surface like that from an hour at forty fathoms. The images haunt: the agonising fizzing in the joints, perhaps the haemorrhaging in the skull, the crippling, the vegetable future. It is yet another vice (down unbearable, up impossible) each of whose jaws is dreadful. There is no room for panic down here. Better to discharge it all while you are asleep so it later lets you concentrate on the only thing that counts: that thin polythene tube wrapped twice around your body, the sighing end clamped between your aching jaws. The compressor.
Down there on the right where the sea-bed shelves steeply towards the violet drop which is the brink of a five-hundred-fathom deep, towards the edge of that monstrous chasm the stink comes sluggishly through the tube. You’re now at over three hundred feet, and the compressor can’t cope. You drag the air into your lungs as through a miraculous chink in those dark blue walls. Afterwards, when you are on your way back up the shelf keeping a wary eye open for eels hidden in the myriad holes you peer into and slowly decompressing, the air-flow gradually increases. Until the first glimpse far above and some way off: that black lozenge with the twinkling outline which is the keel of the boat, home of the compressor, fount of all nourishment the taking of which makes your jaws ache around its stenching nipple. Right now, though, that mechanical breast is far away, and only from the thinly flowing taste do you know that it is still alive.
And how infinitely further that sunlit western world of safety and back-up systems and fail-safe. The scuba rules, the diving codes, the union regulations. Here they are not worth the drift of plankton and diatoms past the face-plate. Here there is nothing but a polythene tube in the mouth and a home-made catapult, nothing but the actuality of the moment pressing in with stray threads of scald from invisible stinging tendrils which drift through all tropical oceans as if from some single titanic and long-dismantled jellyfish, some toxic Kraken whose fibres still circulate the globe. Much later, if you are lucky (and because day has now magically elided into night) the banter round the driftwood fire, roasting your catch under a starry sky which still seems to draw you upwards hours after you have left the water:
‘Ay, Badoy, I thought you couldn’t manage him so I shot him in the gills here but it only made him madder.’ Blurts of laughter.
‘And that hammerhead? I guess he was just shy. Big, though, wasn’t he?’
The sharks. Some are not at all shy. You are there at a hundred and fifty feet investigating a cavern beneath an overhanging mountain of coral, trying to spot something edible with all the time the knowledge that you yourself may be the most obviously edible thing for fathoms. There is something in there, too: a big grouper perhaps, like that monster a week or two ago. It was just such a cave, and you were similarly trying to screw up enough courage to go inside, when a bulk of shadow detached itself and suddenly a gigantic flat eye moved like a dinner plate slowly across the cave mouth followed by a wall of dark red scales with one or two parasites attached. If a pin could snare a wild boar, then maybe a metre of elastic-driven rod filched from the core of an electric power cable might have some effect on a creature that huge, but you were not about to try to see.
And amid such reflections the sense of shadow behind and, turning, you see the shark watching from about twenty feet away. Everything looks bigger underwater and this is a twelve-foot Tiger the size of a submarine. And instantly the word ‘requiem’ flashes in the brain since the Tiger is one of the requiem family which in turn is one of the worst. The very word makes the liquid blue cement on all sides congeal and press coldly in, squeezing the upper arms involuntarily to your chest, squeezing the mind.
‘They don’t attack so often, sharks. Usually there is plenty of food for them down there, so they are not always hungry. But he is curious. He wants to know if you are worth attacking. He is attracted to light things, so we wear dark shirts and jogging pants when we dive, but sometimes he sees the soles of the feet in the distance. When he stays like that about twenty feet away, just watching, you must keep like him flat in the water, not upright. Because his mouth is underneath he needs to come at an angle when he attacks, so you must make it difficult for him by lying in the water with your head towards him. Always face him. Always watch his eyes: they look dead but they see everything. You keep your spear-gun pointed at him and you never take your eyes off him. If he moves round, you follow him round too, with the tip of your spear. He doesn’t know what it is. He sees your goggles or mask and he sees your spear and he can’t make his mind up if they will be dangerous to him if he attacks. Usually sharks just go away when they see you are so ready for them. But if he comes closer still maybe you will soon have to fire your spear. The only place is here, in the gills, because the rest of him is too hard and your spear will bounce off. If you hit him in the gills, he will go away; he doesn’t like that. Also the end of his nose is sensitive, and he doesn’t like to be hit there. If you get him in the gills slightly from behind, it’ll go in. You’ll lose you spear and your catch, but it is worth it. If you miss the gills? Ay, ha, I think you must not make a mistake. You are very alone down there.’
Maybe you fire and maybe the shark does go away, but there you still are, a hundred and fifty feet down without a spear and holding a useless length of wood like a child’s toy with two impotently dangling strips of rubber, hyperventilating with a plastic hose stuck in your mouth and more or less at the mercy of whatever else turns up. You may have remembered to give three sharp tugs on the hose, and if by some extraordinary fluke someone in the boat was actually holding it at that moment and there was a spare air-line it might just have brought a colleague plunging down to your assistance. But what would he find? A pale figure in a wet cement cell holding a piece of wood. Then the slow, humiliating escorted swim back up the sloping coral shelf, pausing to decompress, waiting down there while your brain is still full of shark and everything inside is screaming at you to go, go, get up, get out of it, until at long last your head breaks the surface into the blinding lights and a ring of anxious faces. ‘What was it? What was the problem? You have lost your spear.’
‘Shark. A massive goddamned shark.’ Your voice is squeaky with air under pressure, your jaw aches so much from clenching the tube that you can’t enunciate properly and your teeth no longer meet each other in the way they did, feeling lumpy and displaced to one side as after dentistry.
‘Shark? Oh, what kind?’
And you know whatever species you say these boy gladiators in torn cotton will be immensely good-natured and agree it was high time to stop anyway because the compressor’s getting low in fuel and we should maybe land and cook some fish. And always you wondered what it would have taken to make them just a little bit worried. Until that day you found out.
Well, night it was, to be accurate; for the choking practice-sessions and the worst of the haunted dreams were past and you had graduated to night-diving with the compressor. Much of the fear now could be held down by exhilaration: self-pleasure at doing things automatically so your body could take care of itself leaving your mind freer to speculate, enjoy, and attend to getting a good night’s catch. For the fish down there were indeed bigger, though in that speckled darkness as docile as the little painted ones of the shallows when night came.
In point of fact the darker it was the better for spear-fishing, so sometimes you fished in the early part of the evening before the moon rose, coming back to the island at about midnight, the tarpaulin shelter stretched over sticks glinting in the starlight as one person set about making a fire and another began sorting and threading the catch for sale early next morning. At other times, though, the moon would rise as the sun set and you would all have to wait until it disappeared from the sky. On such occasions everybody slept when night fell at seven-thirty; everybody but you, of course, who would achieve an unreal doze at midnight, needing to be shaken awake at one-forty. And at that moment, as reality began to edge in to take the place of whatever dream, the very last thing you wanted was to get up, scramble through black surf into a boat, go out across a black sea beneath a black sky and go down and down with a torch and a spear-gun and a polythene tube in your mouth, the compressor overhead thudding the stink into you so that even next day you could taste it while belching after lunch.
Yet once out there in the dark off Badoy’s village, balancing in the narrow boat while by flashes of torchlight masks and goggles are checked, spear-guns sorted, the coils of air-line kicked into more or less neat piles and the engine stopped so the boatman can disconnect the propeller shaft and slip the frayed fan-belt over the compressor’s pulley, something changes. Amid those full black waters which so directly oppose the low ebb of your vitality and will the image crosses your mind of what people are doing at that moment in your own birthplace. It is nearly lunchtime there, and those dull shopping malls will be crowded, utterly safe with familiar names and products, utterly reassuring if you could ever suspend spleen and ennui. And the thought comes: what you are really doing is living against all that. The world is full of nest-builders and settlers-down but you will never be one of them. For you, only these present wrenches of pain and pure fear and glimpses of magnificent wildness will one day remind you that any of it was real; that it was not all fantasy and television, it was not all insulation; that the reefs beneath are there always. Do you crave a violent end? the mind runs on insistently in the darkness. But the compressor has started and Badoy is already in the water, his line hissing. Maybe; but not now, oh, not now this night….
You should remember every detail of that dive, but you don’t. There were just the two of you working an unfamiliar stretch around the seaward side of the island. As you submerged there was a flash of distant lightning which lit the mountain on the mainland, partially obscured by the black bulk of the island in the foreground, then you headed down with Badoy, two abreast, into the dark. The sea-bed here revealed by your glancing torches was different: the same coral varieties but more mountainous and fissured in their formation. There were fewer slopes and inclines, more cliff-faces and crevasses. Badoy worked one side of a ridge, you the other. Often you caught sight of his torchlight although not the beam itself, fitful green lightnings on the far side of crags. The catch increased steadily. It was more difficult terrain but more rewarding. The steep gorges were silvery with hydroids, stinging ferns which waved in the currents; to get into them you had to swim on edge, and the back of the elbow holding the spear-gun was repeatedly wealed. Making your way about became more and more difficult as the drag on your catch-line increased. Adding a three-kilo grouper made it still harder.
And always the nerves alert, the quick flicker of glance for the least movement, for the white-rimmed eye moving in the eel’s lair as a dot among all those undulating forests. The click of unseen crabs, the grunt of a creature disturbed, the directionless drumming on some thoracic air-sac. No longer can you hear the compressor’s distant thump, and it seems like half an hour since you last saw Badoy’s light or heard the far metallic ring of his spear-point on rock. You are investigating a black diagonal cleft little more than a foot wide. A yard inside and it turns to the right. There is nothing in this pocket other than small white pebbles on its floor, and it is precisely those white pebbles which should be telling you about the thick olive snake embedded among them which you mistake for – what? – the tail of a ray, perhaps. So automatic has become the sighting, the firing, the hauling-in of fresh trophies that you fire without thinking; then the thought, too late, catches up.
The spear is snatched from you so fast that its cocking lug and the first foot of nylon line take skin off your fingers. It lodges at the back of the cleft, quivering as whatever it is tries to drag it round the corner. Then amid the clouds of silt you glimpse what it has struck into and another, darker cloud comes billowing around the corner to engulf you. Octopus. The one creature of which Badoy has spoken with real fear.
‘I don’t like the feeling on your hand,’ he once said after winkling a tiny octopus from its hole with a steel prod at low tide. ‘They stick to you.’ He lifted up his hand with its dark parasite wrapped around it like a clot of leeches. ‘This one is too small; but even a little bit bigger – say, the head the size of half my fist? – and they will bite pieces out of you. That mouth, that beak you remove when you eat them, it’s very strong and sharp. The big ones will always try to pull you towards the beak to tear you.’
But even so you are already trying to get hold of the end of the spear, reaching right-handedly into the cleft to rescue that precious weapon, still perhaps not sure of the power and size of the creature you have engaged with and which still lies hidden around the corner. Only when you feel a second tentacle close over your forearm, wrapping it together with the spear and tugging you irresistibly forward, do you realise how truly awful is the mistake you have made and how likely it is to prove fatal. For there is a degree of strength which you know cannot be resisted for long. You know from so many encounters over the months with even insignificant-looking sea-creatures how powerful the small muscle of a clam is, how resistant to dying a little eel. And now you feel your arm being compressed, the skin being dragged forward towards the hand as if it were a long glove being pulled off and simultaneously your right shoulder catching half into the mouth of the cleft, your head desperately averted over it and wedging at an angle against the rock outside so that slowly the mask is being crushed sideways across your face and immediately the water spurts in to fill the face-plate and your nose.
Now, with your head bent back over right shoulder, left cheek ground flat against the coral, everything is dark. By some miracle your left hand still holds the torch, but it is pointing uselessly into the sepia-filled cave. The pulling stops for a moment but does not ease while both creatures take stock of the damage and plan tactics for the immediate future. But you have no tactics and very little future. A grain of reason makes you bring your left hand as far away from the hole as possible and, reaching back behind you, you fire a regular three dots of light in random directions. Your heart-rate is way up and your respiration crazy, panting the rank air out into your skewed mask in the hope that the pressure will empty it of water again but it can only half-empty it: the seal between face and rubber is too weak on one side to stop the in-flood of that liquid black cement.
An age passes; you are locked and entombed, your neck cannot be far from breaking. Then something touches your hand holding the torch. You flail it wildly, trying to shake loose this new tentacle. Badoy’s light breaks across your head and he comes round to peer in at your face-plate and, by God, he’s grinning as if to say: ‘Ay, now you’re learning the trade.’ And somewhere inside his lair the octopus senses reinforcements have arrived and his pull increases again. Then suddenly your air stops. The tube is pinched between you and the mouth of the hole, perhaps at the rim of your mask, perhaps lower down your body. You wave desperately with the torch, making confused gestures towards your head like someone with an arm amputated at the wrist. Badoy, incredible Badoy, notices straight away amid all else that your bubbles have stopped. He reaches over and pulls your mask right off and the cement crashes into your eyes, nose, mouth, then you feel a stabbing at your lips: another tube gushing diesel stink. You grip it in your teeth and suck and choke and suck and open your eyes. There in front of you is Badoy’s face, slightly blurred now that your mask has gone. He hangs there in his little olive-lensed goggles, grinning and grinning until he reaches over and gently pulls the air-hose from your mouth and puts it back in his own for a few breaths. Then he makes a gesture you cannot understand because he, too, is holding his torch in the hand that makes it and it stabs wildly. He thrusts the air-line back in your mouth and disappears behind you. His light vanishes.
Now begins the octopus’s attempt to pull its prey bodily into its lair. Its grip no longer feels localised at your arm. Vaguely you know it must have put out another tentacle to grip your body, but it surely cannot pull you in like that: the cleft is too narrow to accommodate you and the tentacle; as long as it goes on trying that way you are going to remain stuffed into the entrance but not drawn in past it. And then that pressure, too, increases unimaginably and you realise that your reasoning did not include the inevitable collapse of your own ribcage. There must be some movement into the hole because your head twists round even further, making crackling sounds. It is now so far round it catches a glimpse of Badoy’s torch pointing aimlessly upwards; you wonder why it should be until you sense it is your own, held behind your back in your left hand, now no longer a part of you. So where is Badoy, God damn him? Fiddling about somewhere below in the darkness….
Until his light, like a lark descending, strikes from above and there he is again. This time he tears the air-line from your mouth and pants great cavities into the water about you. His spear-gun is gone; in his hand he holds a knife. With this he retreats behind you after first pushing his air-hose back into your mouth. There are sensations of rending from your midriff; light flashes intermittently. Suddenly the appalling grip around your waist eases, your lower half is free to move a little away from the mouth of the hole and swivel to the right to relieve minutely your cracking neck. You are once again held only by the arm, which feels double its length. Badoy appears briefly, sucks air and disappears. This time there are no flashes of light: he is beneath you, wedging himself and his torch into the hole. There are confused feelings of tearing and pain from your arm, and without warning the rock floats away from the side of your head like feathers and a gentle cushion of water takes its place. Simultaneously there is a great roaring in one ear: Badoy is offering you your now-released air-line and takes back his own. For a moment you both drift, each sucking on your tube as somewhere in the night above the compressor chugs and chugs, blessed engine.
Badoy shines his light back towards the cleft, now ten feet away. A great cloud of ink floats about its mouth and a host of small nocturnal shrimp-like krill, attracted by the light, are prickling at hands and faces like flies on a summer’s day. Then he propels you away and upwards in a slow journey that seems to take for ever while pain begins gathering in your right hand and arm, the left side of your head, your neck and nearly everywhere else. The pressure of the air-jet increases as you rise, and you still go on breathing it even after your head breaks the surface, not quite sure that you have left one medium for another. Then you spit it out and it flails and gushes.
‘Oy, Badoy! Badoy!’ you shout in the darkness into the suddenly cold air. An answering cry comes from close at hand and now you can hear his own hose, discarded and bubbling. ‘Where the hell did you get the knife?’
‘Ayy!’ He gives a long exultant whoop. The compressor is close by; it chugs in the invisible boat, rising and falling. There are voices. ‘What did you say?’
‘The knife. Where did you get it?’
‘I went up for it.’
‘Jesus!’ The implications. ‘But I had your air-hose.’
‘It wasn’t so far. We were only down about seventy feet.’
‘But we’d been there a long time. Decompression….’
‘No problem. I went up straight and down straight again. You can do that if you’re quick.’
‘Why didn’t we take bloody knives with us?’ you heard your petulant rhetorical question go out into the night air. ‘So stupid….’
But what was this world to which you had returned? You still felt yourself travelling up and up into the sky as usual, but this time it was different. Something had changed; for the aftermath of fear is not relief and still less is it reassurance. The exact note had been struck, your whole life was ringing with that undeniable resonance, that messy echo of childhood fear of fear, and hero-worship, and fear of cowardice, and longing for something or other to be over.
You got yourself into the boat, the compressor fell silent, the screw churned. There was not much talk and no banter even from those who had spent the night safely aboard. You slumped, the deck slippery with your blood and the mucus which had come from the octopus and coated everything. In the dark you discovered your arm was burst and a thick muscle now lay exposed; you turned your torch on it in loathing but merely found a foot or so of severed tentacle still stuck there.
‘Ah,’ said Badoy, ‘that was good, bringing a bit of the octopus. Better than none at all. We’ll cook it by and by.’
You smiled in the dark at this. ‘What was your own catch like before all that?’
‘OK. Not bad, not good. Not a very good night for fish. About like you.’
‘Damn. Of course, my own catch is still down there.’
‘No, it’s here. I cut off the nylon before we came up.’ He flashed his light on to a jumble of fish bodies in the bilges. He had also brought up your mask.
‘You’re quite unbelievable.’
You returned to the island where you examined your wounds. Nothing desperate. The round sucker-weals stood out in scarlet over right arm and waist, each pinpricked with livid blood-spots. The side of your face and head was gouged and scratched but it was all superficial. There was a single deep cut on the inside of your forearm where Badoy’s knife had sliced through the tentacle. ‘Sorry,’ said Badoy.
Dawn was coming. The air turned grey. You all packed up and crossed back to Tagud. The story was told and retold, but only because there was nothing else to do with it. There is no way outside the gruff fiction of derring-do to thank someone for saving your life; it is far too complex a matter to merit simple thanks. Must you not have wanted to die, just a little bit? Must there not have been that desire tucked down in your unconscious to entomb your conscious as well in those dark gulfs, even as your betrayed body tried to escape them? How else could you have ignored so many danger signals, have been so cavalier? And Badoy, too, had he ever had any real option? What were the psychic rewards for being a hero? Or for failing? How, knowing all this and suspecting still more, could you possibly say anything as banally inappropriate as ‘thank you’?
For the rest of that day and, it seemed, for weeks afterwards the stench of the compressor came back up from inside.
On the way back to Anilao, Badoy said once again, and not at all apropos of the incident (which you really believed he had half-forgotten): ‘I don’t want to be a fisherman all my life. Are there jobs in television in your country? I would like that, I think.’
For a short time you resumed your leisurely life in Anilao, although it took time to muster the courage to go spear-fishing again, particularly at night. As if to urge you through this bad patch Badoy made you an even better spear-gun to replace the other, with a redesigned trigger of whose mechanism he was extremely proud. Then one night he said: ‘To be a fisherman you need to be brave.’ It was the first time he had ever alluded to questions of fear and courage. You were surprised.
‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘of course you are scared down there. Plenty of people there at Tagud will not go down at night like you, like us. They do not want to use the compressor. We’re all scared; it’s a bit dangerous sometimes.’
You knew then that right from the beginning it had been a plot. For reasons of his own Badoy had wanted you to feel fear, had needed to set up that howling echo just as much as your submerged self; had led you inexorably to the compressor so you could suck in great draughts of it. The reasons – oh, they were lost in the workings of his psyche maybe; or perhaps they were his direct way of counteracting an impression of impotence he hated giving. For might not a foreigner like yourself so richly endowed with nonchalant mobility, such passports and visas and letters of credit, who moved so fluently in the clear waters above a sullen Third World labour pool – might not such a foreigner be badly in need of a lesson in respect? To make light of two great obsessions of the affluent West, technology and physical security, even as he dreamed of clawing his way into that world – might that not have been Badoy’s real elegance, his deadliest accuracy? And if you had not been ruffled by this suggestion of war would you not have allowed a burst of affection for the way it had been declared?
‘There’s one thing,’ you said magnanimously. ‘If that night we’d been wearing pukka scuba gear, I’d most likely be dead. You couldn’t just have given me your air-hose while you went up to fetch the knife.’
‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘You see? Simple things are best.’
On the other hand, of course, you would almost certainly have been wearing a knife….
You did fish again but it was not the same. Your dreams were full of aggression aimed at Badoy, the lucklessly innocent repository of your fantasies. Nobody is as put out as a jilted fantasist, and the fantasist who thinks to perceive an actuality in what he is doing is the most put out of all. You became tired of his voice, his ‘ay!’, his wife moving dolefully about their dark house while radiating some tough resolve. You hoped he would soon get a job abroad. One day word reached you that the dendro-thermal project was shelved and with it your feasibility study, but that if you went back to the capital and bullied the right civil servant you could get your accrued salary.
Your leavetaking from Badoy was friendly, offhand, as if in six months or so you might well fetch up back in Anilao and find him still mooching and dreaming of emigration. Then he would dig out your old spear-gun and you would both slip back into the water as if no time had passed. But on the battered once-a-day bus which took you away up the coast you sat on the landward side, ignoring the blue waters creaming over the reefs on your left, staring fixedly into the palm-groves and the forest above them pouring skyward through ravines and gullies to the peaks of the central massif. And what were you thinking? That even if you never did return to that particular place wouldn’t the sea always be in waiting? And wouldn’t there be other Badoys and other involuntary opportunities to hear that lone whistler with his private note set ringing a bare inner room? For you cannot help yourself.
As even now the distant thud, the compressor’s stench rise from inside.