1
The Old Man and the Sea
The Soaring Eagle Spur, Cape Town International Airport
10 a.m.
Two years earlier.
“Are you sure you’re not having a midlife crisis?” said my partner.
I paused with a chip halfway to my mouth.
“Why would you say that?” I said in a strangled voice.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. “Lots of people have a midlife crisis. At a certain age.”
“I’m too young to have a midlife crisis!” I yelled, or I think I yelled. My partner isn’t someone to be yelled at in an airport restaurant and she was still there, so maybe I only said it and the yelling part was in my head.
I call her “my partner” because some time ago she asked me why I called her my girlfriend.
“Aren’t you my girlfriend?” I asked.
“Are we fourteen?” she replied.
Personally, I think calling her my partner makes us sound like we’re about to go on a crime spree or open a coffee shop together, but okay.
“Daphne’s having a midlife crisis,” my partner said, “and she’s the same age as you.”
Daphne’s a lawyer who recently flew to Bali to live in a hut near the sea and write a fantasy novel. Her husband and kids and her friends see this behaviour as a midlife crisis, but I’ve met her husband and kids. Apart from the fantasy novel, I think she’s being quite sensible.
(I should probably mention that Daphne is not her real name. I don’t think Daphne is anyone’s real name, other than one of the kids in Scooby-Doo. It’s not easy, coming up with names. If you use a name that belongs to someone you know, everyone thinks you’re talking about them, but the older you get, the more people you know with names. These are some of the problems you don’t anticipate when you sit down to write a book.)
“Forget Daphne,” I said. “I’m still young. I’ve got years to go before I’m middle-aged.”
She looked at me.
“Right?” I said.
This was not the airport conversation I wanted to be having. I’ve had high expectations of airport conversations, ever since the teenaged me got all gussied up one Saturday night to watch Casablanca on TV with his mom. That sentence should tell you all you need to know about my youthful romantic career, but let me add that afterwards I started imitating Humphrey Bogart in the hope of becoming more attractive to girls. It isn’t entirely surprising that this strategy did not find traction with the women of Durban; I’m only grateful I wasn’t punched more often by random strangers. You’d have to be the Dalai Lama not to wish physical harm on a chain-smoking sixteen-year-old in a fedora and trench coat, talking as though his molars were glued together, calling people “shweetheart”.
But I never quite shook the conviction that the main reason for airports, and at least one of the reasons for having a girlfriend, was so you could stand there with one of you leaving, bodies taut with feeling, talking in low voices about things that matter.
I’ve had plenty of airport conversations since then, but they never really worked out that way. Maybe it’s because Humphrey Bogart had a misty wartime airstrip to work with, and I had the Soaring Eagle Spur. Also, Bogie was sending Ingrid Bergman to go win the war against the Nazis, and I was mainly saying, “Call me when you get there” and “Will you miss me?” and “But you’ll miss me, right?”
I did once break up with someone at the airport, or rather she broke up with me. I stood there stoic as Bogart and watched her walk away, and I made sure I shed no tear. Then I went into Cosmic Candy and bought a big bag of sour worms.
But this should have been a good airport conversation, because for once I really was flying off to do something adventurous. I didn’t want to debate how old I’m getting; I wanted to squint bravely into the distance and say that if anything should happen to me, we’d always have Sea Point.
“I’m not saying you’re middle-aged …” she said.
“That’s an ugly word to come from such a beautiful mouth, shweetheart.”
“But maybe you’re having some sort of crisis—”
“Tcha!”
“—of the kind that sometimes affects people in their middle years.”
I forgot I was being Bogie. “Stop saying that! Maybe you’re having a midlife crisis!”
“You’re going off to do what?” she said. “Swim with sharks?”
“To dive with man-eating sharks,” I corrected her proudly. “In the open ocean.”
“And you’re going with your equally almost-middle-aged friend?”
“Seriously, I wish you would stop using that word.”
“And this is on a list of things you want to do before you die?”
“Number seven.”
“But you’re only doing it now. Out of all the years you’ve been alive …”
“It’s not that long.”
“… you’re choosing to do it the month before you turn forty.”
“I see where you’re going with this but you’re wrong. We’re not doing this for my birthday; we’re doing this because Clarence is getting married.”
Clarence isn’t his real name. I don’t know anyone called Clarence, except Clarence Clemons, former saxophonist for the E Street Band.
She looked at me for a long time.
“All right,” she said.
“All right?”
“Fine. You’re not having a midlife crisis.”
“Thank you!”
“You’ve been behaving perfectly normally.”
“Good.”
“I’ll mind my own business.”
“All right,” I said. “Now listen, if something should happen to me out there, I just want you to remember, we’ll always have …”
“Oh look,” she said, “they’re calling your flight.”
*
The south coast of KwaZulu-Natal
8 a.m.
Everything would have been all right if only we’d never met Captain Spike, the one-eyed shark whisperer.
I flew to Durban and met Clarence at the airport and we rented a car and drove south through the cane fields, listening to East Coast Radio.
I don’t know what powerful grip the late eighties have on the good people who work there, but if you feel too much time has passed since last you heard a song by Patrick Swayze, East Coast Radio is the station for you. It’s like voodoo slavery. Who knows what peace Madonna might have found by now if a piece of her immortal soul wasn’t chained to East Coast Radio, singing “La Isla Bonita”? Someone needs to burn down the ECR studios just to set free the spirits of Terence Trent D’Arby and the Cutting Crew.
But still, it wasn’t all bad, driving with the windows down and the smell of sugarcane and salt, just two young dudes blasting Phil Collins’ “Groovy Kind of Love”, lookin’ for adventure. Midlife crisis? Midlife crisis? Look at us now!
The place we rented was high on a ridge, a little outside town, overlooking a brown river with an arched railway bridge. The woman who owned it had an Italian name and wore gold jewellery and so much mascara it looked like she’d been using prank binoculars.
“Are you Italian?” I asked her.
She told us there was a time the whole town was Italian. There were Italian bakeries and delis and churches consecrated to Italian saints. The streets were named after Italian families, and of all the families, hers was the most Italian. She took us to the edge of the bluff and pointed out the extent of their land. Across the river was a puff of white smoke.
“That’s our steam train,” she said.
“You own a steam train?”
She shrugged.
“So is your family in the sugarcane business?”
“Pah!”
She looked cagey. I knew what she must be thinking: Who is this handsome stranger, new to town and asking questions about the family?
“We’re in the closure business,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “The closure business.”
Later Clarence and I drove into town.
“What’s the closure business?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Clarence. “You should have asked her.”
“The closure business,” I said. “Tell me that doesn’t sound sinister. The closure business.”
“So what?”
“They’re Italians. Closure business. Closure business. Jeez, I hope that just means they’re undertakers.”
“Mmm,” said Clarence. He was being unusually quiet. Even on the drive out from the airport he’d been holding back, as though waiting for me to say something. He hadn’t even joined in with Wang Chung on the radio, and Clarence likes to have fun tonight as much as anybody.
“What’s the matter with you? You don’t want to know if we’re renting from the mob? There could be bodies under the lawn.”
“I’m just thinking about the wedding,” he said.
“Maybe that’s the closure business,” I said cheerfully. “Maybe they’re wedding planners.”
Clarence looked at me without speaking. Lately people were doing a lot of looking at me without speaking.
“What?” I said.
“Are we ever going to talk about this?” he said.
“Can we get some food first?”
“You know that’s why we’re here, right?” he said. “Because I’m getting married.”
“Is that why we’re here? I thought we’re here to dive with sharks.”
He looked at me some more.
*
I’ve been friends with Clarence for a long time. We once hitchhiked to Grahamstown together to see girls who didn’t really want to see us. He taught me the internet and when I was learning to drive he let me practise on his car. For a while we had a standing dare to meet for a swim on 15 July every year, the cruel midwinter, but after a while we let it lapse with neither of us mentioning it again. He once decided that when he turned ninety he would jump into the core of a nuclear power station, and even though I don’t know if that’s possible and I have no beef with nuclear power, I promised to help him. For a very long time our friendship was elastic and break-proof, until I fell for the oldest trick of all. He broke it off with a girlfriend who had been making him unhappy, and then asked me what I thought about her.
I’m no fool, I kept schtum, but time passed and time always drops your guard. Speaking ill of a best friend’s ex-girlfriend is a magic incantation that makes all your worst fears real. Soon he was back together with her. Soon after that they were engaged to be married.
My partner recommended I say nothing except congratulations.
“But she’s bad for him,” I said. “I have to let him know what I think, don’t I? I’m his best buddy.”
Is it possible, she wondered, that I was only this worked up because he’s my last unmarried male friend? And also that I’m making this unnecessarily about me?
But she was wrong. I had a moral obligation. It was absolutely the right thing to do, plus I’d thought of a good metaphor, and I have an unreasonable faith in the power of a good metaphor.
This is a lesson I never stop forgetting: I’m never so likely to be wrong as when I’m utterly convinced I’m right.
“What you are,” I said to Clarence one day, “is one of those climbers going up Everest, who get to the Death Zone where there’s not enough oxygen. Every minute they stay there they become more confused and disoriented and closer to death. They can’t make good choices any more. Their only chance is to turn around and go back to where there’s air, but they can’t see that and just keep going to the top. If their friends don’t turn them around, they’ll surely die. That’s me. I’m that friend. You’re in the Death Zone, buddy. You’re walking the wrong way.”
He had looked at me a long time then too, in very much the same way he was looking at me now.
*
We found a place in town called The Bamboo Deck. There was a string of coloured bulbs with every fourth bulb missing and a big blackboard with a chalk drawing of an eel in a top hat talking to a couple of streetwise flying fish. One fish was offering the other a suspiciously hand-rolled cigarette. It bothered me. I don’t object to fish using recreational drugs; it’s the practical considerations.
How do they keep the joint burning underwater? How do they even light it? These are the creative problems to which an artist should apply himself if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life on the south coast drawing sea creatures on chalkboards.
I had asked Carla our Italian landlady to recommend an operation that would take us out with the sharks, and she’d insisted on an outfit named Sea Safaris.
“Shall I call Sea Safaris?” said Clarence now.
“Dunno.”
“Carla likes them.”
“Maybe she likes them too much. What if they’re her cousins in the closure business?”
“They run shark trips. Why would they also be in the closure business?”
“You think the closure business couldn’t use a boat that goes out to feed the sharks? If I was in the closure business, a shark boat’s the first thing I’d get.”
“I think we need to find out what the closure business is.”
“I think we do.”
That was when we met Captain Spike the one-eyed shark whisperer. He was sitting at the next table cradling a glass of beer like an old doubloon.
“You guys want to see sharks?” said Captain Spike the one-eyed shark whisperer.
It’s a slightly misleading name. He didn’t have one eye – or rather, he did, but he had the other one as well. I call him “Captain Spike the one-eyed shark whisperer” because “Captain Spike the shark whisperer with a missing tooth” lacks a certain something. But the “whisperer” part came from him.
“A shark whisperer has to know his fish,” said Captain Spike, eyeing our beers like a man slowly circling the block for a parking space. “It’s not just currents and chum, you know.”
No, sure, that made sense, we nodded. Why would it be only currents and chum? Only a greenhorn would think it’s just currents and chum.
Captain Spike said we’d be wasting our time with Sea Safaris, because there’s only one shark whisperer and he doesn’t work for Sea Safaris. He finished his beer and looked at the glass with some sorrow, as though it was an old friend who hadn’t come to his wedding.
“Can we buy you a beer, Captain Spike?” I asked.
He agreed we could.
Captain Spike told us he’d take us out, and he’d do it for half the price of Sea Safaris because he does it for the love of the ocean, not the tourist buck.
“The love of the ocean!” I cried. “Yes! You’re a man who follows his passion, Captain Spike.”
“Argh,” said Captain Spike modestly.
“You’re the man for us, Captain Spike,” I said, buying him another beer.
When Captain Spike was in the bathroom, Clarence questioned whether it’s such a good idea to go to sea with the first guy we meet with a boat and a missing tooth.
“He looks like Robert Shaw in Jaws,” I said.
“Robert Shaw gets eaten in Jaws,” said Clarence. “And the boat sinks.” We had watched Jaws the previous week, to prepare.
“But Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider survived!” I pointed out. “We’re Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider!”
“I’m not Richard Dreyfuss or Roy Scheider,” said Clarence.
“Look,” I said, “never mind Captain Spike, we’re going on an adventure.”
“The adventure part is diving with the sharks. The adventure’s not putting our lives in the hands of an old drunk in a beach bar.”
“He’s not that drunk.”
“We should call the proper outfit.”
“You’re talking like a middle-aged man,” I said.
“I am a middle-aged man,” said Clarence.
“Not yet.”
“And you are too.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You know,” said Clarence, “we’re getting older. It’s not the end of the world. Things change. I’m getting married.”
“You don’t need to, though,” I said. “There’s lots of time left.” He looked at me steadily. “I’m getting married because I want to,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry if it bothers you—”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“I’m sorry if it frightens you.”
“It doesn’t—” I stopped and ground my teeth and looked away. It’s a hard thing to say when you’re a grown-up, without sounding like a child: Why do things need to change? Things are always changing. Can’t they just stay the same for a bit, before they have to change again?
“I think we should go with Captain Spike,” I said.
“I’m not going to change my mind about getting married, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” said Clarence. “This wedding’s happening, buddy.”
“Captain Spike’s the guy for us.”
“Jeez,” said Clarence. “Are you sure you’re not having a midlife crisis?”
*
The Indian Ocean
7 a.m.
We met Captain Spike at the river-mouth lagoon. He was sitting up in the back of the boat, scratching his head like a man who has just woken up in his boat.
The light was the colour of magnesium filings, and then cigar smoke. The sun came up through the salt haze like an egg sliding up a windowpane on the other side of a net curtain.
I wasn’t feeling very poetic. I’d had a few drinks the night before, more than I strictly needed, because I figured that’s what Ernest Hemingway would do if he was swimming with sharks in the morning. He never deliberately swam with sharks so I was about to get one up on Ernest Hemingway, but that didn’t make me feel any better. My belly was full of battery acid, soap powder and poisoned eggs. Someone had removed my eyes and replaced them with pineapples.
We helped push out the boat.
Captain Spike wore plastic sunglasses and a cap with “STP oil” on the front, and he was still wearing the clothes from last night. As we climbed in he offered us a sip of his beer.
“Maybe once the sharks come,” we said.
“Sharks come when they come! Who can summon the sharks?”
“I thought you can,” said Clarence.
“We must answer the call of the far horizon!”
I liked Captain Spike, but I was starting to wonder about all the empty cans in the bottom of the boat.
We went out under the bridge into the small choppy waves where the river meets the sea. The grey light made the water violet, but the sun came up further and in the shadow close to the boat the water was deep blue and when you looked straight down it was almost clear.
It was fun at first, with the fresh air on our faces and the flat sea, but as we went further out the sea stopped being so flat. I began to feel warm in the temples.
“Can you, uh, can you go a bit slower?”
Captain Spike looked back from the wheel.
“Slower?”
“Maybe to avoid some of the bumps. The, uh, the ups and the, you know, the downs.”
“You want me to go slower?”
“No!” yelled Clarence, grinning like a Labrador out a car window. “This is good!”
This was a nasty side of him I hadn’t seen before. Herman Melville was right: you learn a lot about men when first you go to sea with them.
Then I noticed something.
“Captain Spike,” I called. “Where’s the dive gear?”
“What dive gear?”
“The stuff we dive with. Tanks and that.”
“I’m not a dive-master,” he said. “I’m a shark whisperer.”
“So what do we do when we get the sharks?”
“You swim,” he said.
Clarence and I looked at each other.
Captain Spike cut the engine and we bobbed on the swell. “Is there a problem?” he said.
There was a problem.
“I’m not such a good swimmer,” I said.
Captain Spike looked at me the way no man ever looked at Ernest Hemingway.
“You dive, don’t you?”
I do dive, but the whole point of diving is it’s not swimming. You just kind of hang there with your own air and you don’t even have to keep yourself up. It’s the least active sport in the world, including darts. It’s like darts would be if you could lie down and watch someone else throw for you. Diving is really just recreational breathing. It’s one step above taking a bath.
Swimming’s something else. I’m afraid of swimming and having to keep myself up over deep water. If I don’t have my own air supply, I need to keep within tippy-toes of something solid.
I might have explained that but the bobbing was making me feel hot and also cold and then hot again. Everything on the inside of me sloshed from left to right, then sloshed slowly back again.
“It’s okay,” I muttered. “Let’s just go.”
“Actually,” said Captain Spike, taking another pull of his beer, “right here’s fine. You guys brought your goggles and fins and stuff, didn’t you?”
As a matter of fact, we hadn’t. Only Clarence had. Mine were still on the backseat of the car.
“You’ll have to share,” said Captain Spike, dropping anchor.
“No, it’s okay, you just use them,” I said generously to Clarence.
“Nope,” said Clarence. “We’re only here because you thought we should dive with sharks before we turn forty …”
“No,” I tried weakly, “it’s for your wedding …”
“… so if I’m going in there, you are too.”
*
I didn’t think I would feel like this when I turned forty. I wasn’t sure how it would feel. James Bond is just about forty in the books, but I’m not insane; I knew I wouldn’t feel like James Bond. But I also knew I wouldn’t feel like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, with the fences of suburbia closing around me and my own low, keening moan of despair in my ears. I thought there might be some middle place, some satisfactory sense of being grown up. I think I thought I might feel like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.
I don’t know if you’ve seen To Kill a Mockingbird, but it has one of the two scenes in movies that always make me cry. (The other is in Casablanca when the French guys in Rick’s Café sing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis. Singing is the one thing the French can do heroically.) Gregory Peck was forty-three when he played Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer in a white Deep South linen suit who in defiance of his community has been defending Tom Robinson, a black man accused on trumped-up charges of raping a white girl in 1930s Alabama. Spoiler alert, but he loses the case, Tom is sentenced to death, and Atticus sits stunned as the courtroom drains of its crowing white spectators.
Outwardly impassive, a world going on inside, Atticus packs away his papers. The courtroom is empty except for the upper galleries, the section segregated for the black townsfolk. There, no one has moved. They sit in silence as Atticus snaps shut his satchel, squares his shoulders and walks up the aisle to the exit. Then silently, as one, the gallery stands. Atticus’s young daughter Jean Louise, nicknamed Scout, is sitting in the gallery too and she sits in incomprehension, until the Reverend Sykes puts his hand on her shoulder and murmurs, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passing.”
If you can watch that scene without making an ugly Claire Danes cry-face then you’re a stronger man than me, or maybe it’s just that you haven’t yet lost your dad. I always thought I’d feel something like Atticus Finch when I was forty: a kind of ideal father, whether I had kids or not. I wouldn’t necessarily be a hero but I’d be courageous and upright and tough, battered by life yet unbowed by defeat. I’d have substance and responsibility and moral courage and basic competence. I would know where the edges of me end and the world begins. I also thought I’d have a nice white linen suit.
I don’t feel that way. I feel much as I always felt. I’m like a small boy who has been transplanted Freaky Fridayishly into the body of an almost-forty man. Gregory Peck is a sturdy boat on the water and I feel more like its shadow. If ever I were accused of a crime I didn’t commit in a small town in a lynching state, I don’t think I’m the one I would choose to fight for my life.
My friend Janet recently had a child and doesn’t feel qualified for adulthood either, so she drew up a list of all the things she knows for sure, that she’ll pass on to her daughter one day. She said she found it quite encouraging, that it showed her she’s gathered more wisdom than she’d realised. It has good material on it, like, “The first half of any task is always the hardest” and “No matter how horrible the flight is, that’s never the thing you remember about the holiday.”
I tried to think of the things I know for sure:
What a pitiful list.
It’s not fair: when you’re young you get to have heroes and role models. Men and women turning forty: who is there to tell us how it’s meant to feel? Gywneth Paltrow? Should I be like Gwyneth Paltrow? For better or for worse, I’m not Gwyneth Paltrow.
*
Captain Spike prepared to bait. It took some time because between the various steps he would sway a little from side to side with a preoccupied expression, as though he was considering something very interesting in the field of particle physics.
First he took out a bottle of something called Shot-for-Shot Anchovy Oil. I can think of no human purpose for Shot-for-Shot Anchovy Oil besides spraying over Syrian cities to pacify the rebels. It is the concentrated essence of every nasty thing anyone has ever said on the internet, dissolved in a black fishy catarrh of wickedness. If you squeezed the tar from Satan’s lungs into a sack made of teenage boys, French crotches and decomposing seals, that might resemble the liquid in a bottle of Shot-for-Shot Anchovy Oil.
I felt the paleness like clingfilm on my face.
“I think I’ll just … I’ll just rest my head a little over here,” I said, sliding down onto the floor. My face was resting in a combination of sea water and diesel and some other liquid that made me suspect Captain Spike hadn’t bothered leaving the boat in the night to take his yardarm to the mainsail, but I didn’t care any more. I didn’t care about anything.
Captain Spike shook frozen sardines from the sack into the perforated drum from inside a washing machine.
“Get a whiff of that,” he said jovially, trying to put the sack over my head.
Seasickness works in stages, like grief. First you feel sick. Then you feel worse. Then you find some shred of a reason – I chose vengeance against Captain Spike – to carry on living. Then the swell picks up and even that’s taken away and you renounce all human plans and beg like a wordless animal for the mercy of the marlinspike.
Captain Spike ladled some kind of rotting mush of mullet into a perforated plastic bucket. He smacked his lips.
“Mmmm! Two weeks old. Fruity!”
“Oh, Jesus,” I groaned, and it wasn’t blasphemy, it was more like surrendering to the eternal mystery.
“Mmm!” said Clarence nudging me with his toe. “Hey? Mmm!”
They watched with satisfaction while I threw up over the side. Vomiting was the highlight of my day so far.
“Hey?” said Clarence cruelly. “How’s it going, Ernest Hemingway?”
Draped over the pontoon like one of Satan’s squeezed-out lungs, I weakly watched as Captain Spike dropped the bucket and a buoy and the drum over the side, all tied together and tethered to the boat. The drum sank till it was just a pale dull disc, like a Disprin at the bottom of a glass.
Then it started to rain.
Actually, the rain wasn’t so bad, because it flattened out the sea and turned it silver and pocked it like a dented car bonnet. I might have a chance if the boat would just stop moving, just, even for a minute, if it would just for half a damn second stop moving …
“How long do we have to wait?”
“The shark,” said Captain Spike, settling back and pulling his cap over his eyes, “is like a woman.”
How is a shark like a woman? Toothy? Rough if you stroke them one way, smooth the other way? Lacking a swim bladder? I never found out exactly, because Captain Spike went to sleep in the rain with his cap over his eyes and a beer in his hand.
“Oh god,” I said. “Oh god.”
“Oh god,” said Clarence too.
Normally I’d be happy that Clarence was also suffering now, but I was long past the land of simple human pleasures.
Thoughts occur to you when you’re a grown man on an inflatable boat on the Indian Ocean, vomiting with another grown man in the rain. Thoughts like: Remember when I was young and Mom would bring me strawberry Nesquik in bed and a toasted cheese sandwich and an Archie comic? That was nice. I’d like that again. I want to go home.
“You know,” gasped Clarence, “we could go back. We could wake him up and say we’ve had enough. We could just go back.”
I didn’t answer. I was retching, but I was also thinking about it.
“We’re too old for this,” gasped Clarence. “We don’t belong out here. We belong in restaurants.”
“We’re having an adventure,” I said between dry heaves. The heaves were the only things in my life that were dry.
“I don’t want to do this any more. It’s my wedding.”
“Shut up about your wedding! Are you a Kardashian?”
Clarence puked on himself with cold dignity. I should have felt bad – no man should call another man a Kardashian, even if the other man is in fact a Kardashian, which wasn’t even the case here – but I was too busy feeling bad to feel bad.
“I’m going for a swim,” said Clarence. “You don’t get sick when you’re swimming.”
I wasn’t convinced of that. The way I was feeling, long after death my ashes would still be groaning on the mantelpiece, but I didn’t care what he did. I didn’t care about anything.
I watched him pull on his mask and snorkel and jump over the side. Then I watched him levitate like a cartoon coyote and backstroke through the air back to the boat.
“They’re here,” he said.
I couldn’t see anything on the surface, but following the line down from the buoy I saw the drum jerk and dance in the surge, and shadows pass across it like bats across a moon.
We tried to wake Captain Spike to tell him the sharks had come.
“Good,” mumbled Captain Spike, and went back to sleep.
We sat there stumped, the mask and snorkel sloshing in the water between us.
“Look,” said Clarence, “there’s no first-aid kit. There isn’t even any drinking water. If anything happens, Popeye won’t get us to a hospital in time. I doubt he’ll even recognise us when he wakes up. Let’s be smart.”
Yes, we should have been smart. I knew that. I’ve made smart decisions before. I even knew the smart decision here. But next month I was turning forty.
I lowered myself over the side. I’d never been in the open sea without fins before. Feet aren’t made for swimming, they’re made for resting on a stool. In the sea they’re small and soft and don’t displace much water when you kick. They’re like sardines tied to a whale. Hands are like sardines too, now that I came to look at them all white and wrinkled through Clarence’s mask. I was going swimming around a drum baited with sardines, with sardines on the ends of my arms and legs.
I’ll say this about swimming with sharks in the open ocean: it gives you something to look at. I like a game drive as much as anyone, but at a certain point one piece of bush looks much like another, and there are those in-between-animals stages when even the most avid fans of nature might choose to rest their eyes and contemplate the infinite. This is not true of swimming with sharks. I was in no danger of falling asleep.
There were a lot of them, although they were hard to count because they moved so fast. A shark on one side of you could be on the other side before you could finish turning your head. I turned my head a lot. It swivelled like a young girl watching a tennis match while being possessed by the devil. There were sharks on the left and sharks on the right and sharks underneath and more sharks arriving all the time. They were big too, as big as me, and in the distance there were more and they looked bigger there because you couldn’t see exactly where shadow ended and shark began.
The rain fell cold on my back. I lay face-down with the sea in my ears, breathing heavily through my mouth like a dirty old man. Some of them came towards me to see what I would do, straight and fast like unfriendly teenagers on a train. I couldn’t get away so I stared them down; my incompetence looked like confidence. They swerved aside and I thought, I’m having an adventure. I can’t be middle-aged yet, because look – I’m having an adventure.
The sharks made a kind of electron swarm around the atom of the drum and I stayed on the outskirts, keeping an eye on one in particular, a big brute with a notched fin who circled and darted through and returned, side-eyeing me with a worryingly casual air, as though I was a wallet lying on a sidewalk. I watched him so carefully that at first I didn’t notice that the ball of sharks was moving further away. The drum was in the distance, glinting in short shafts of light, the water around it growing dusky and indistinct. It took me a moment to realise that if the drum was far away, and the drum was tied to the boat, then …
I lifted my head.
The boat had drifted away.
But that can’t be true. The boat has an anchor, so it can’t drift away. That’s a relief. But no, that’s not a relief, because if it’s not the boat that’s drifted away then …
On the back on the boat, quite far away, Clarence was shading his eyes with his hand, watching me. Wait – is he watching me, or is he trying to find me?
I tried to wave, but that meant turning upright and pedalling the water with white, sardiney feet and that wasn’t very comfortable, so I switched in mid-pedal to get horizontal again and swallowed a mouthful of water.
The boat was rising and dropping. When it was in a trough I couldn’t see it any more. I tried to kick towards it but the drift was stronger than my kicking. I tried to swim, but swimming is exhausting and suddenly all that water opened up beneath me.
I started to thrash.
There’s a small industry in helpful books about how not to be bitten by a shark. Not all experts agree. Some recommend you swim towards the shark, others that you cautiously back away. Some say you should strike its nose as a deterrent, others prefer screaming loudly. There are certain areas of unanimity, however, namely:
1. Do not, when you see sharks in the water, jump off the boat.
If, however, you have jumped off the boat:
2. Avoid irregular movements or jerky motions, or you will resemble some kind of ailing sea-mammal. Ailing sea-mammals are the cheeseburgers of the ocean.
Thrashing falls into the category of irregular movements and jerky splashing motions. I was like several ailing sea-mammals tied up in a sack.
I thrashed and I thrashed and when I interrupted my thrashing to raise my head and swallow some more water, the boat wasn’t further away but it wasn’t any closer either. The sharks didn’t scare me; it was the fact that I was about to drown. My strength was gone and I was going under, and it was all my fault because I jumped into the sea without fins when I can’t swim very well and I floated away and my body will sink and maybe that swine with the notch will take the first bite and then the others will join in. Would anyone find my head? Do heads float? I hoped they’d find my head.
*
But no doubt you will already have guessed that I didn’t drown. When someone drowns they have better things to do than write about it afterwards. If I’d drowned, you can bet I wouldn’t be at my desk right now, checking my word count and avoiding mails from my publishers. I’d finally be watching the last season of Breaking Bad.
What happened was Clarence dived in and swam over and helped me stay afloat till Captain Spike finished waking up and hauled anchor and brought the boat round. The sharks didn’t eat us, but I had to put up with Clarence’s smug face for the rest of the weekend, so it was a mixed blessing.
“I suppose you could say I’m some kind of a hero,” he mused as I lay staring at the sky.
The rain had passed and the sky was pale blue and ribbed with high clouds like the roof of a mouth. Captain Spike dropped the last of his sardines over the side and the sharks rolled up against the boat like fat koi in a pond.
Nearly drowning brings moments of clarity. I’d been acting like a fool, and probably had been for some time. Something was affecting me and it had something to do with my age, and unless I recognised it I’d go on being a fool until I did something really stupid or everyone around me finally lost patience. I needed to go home and tell my partner she was right, and ask her for help.
But if moments of clarity lasted they wouldn’t be called moments.
When I landed back home she was there to meet me. It had been two days since I’d nearly drowned. Time’s a funny thing. Ten years can pass like a drunken afternoon but two days can change everything, or change everything back.
“How was it?” she asked.
“It was great,” I replied.
“Really?” she said. “Because I thought, on the phone, you sounded a bit …”
“No. It was excellent.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m like a shark whisperer now. That’s what they called me there: the shark whisperer.”
“Wow. So you were like Ernest Hemingway?”
“Yeah.” I said. “Oh yeah. Totally. I was just like Ernest Hemingway.”