The last pair of divers brought their baskets of lobsters to the surface at around 3.30 in the morning. Both the gullies south and north of the Madonna had been worked out, but there were many crevasses yet to be explored. A couple of empty ice chests were left over when the others had been filled.
‘That’s enough,’ the captain said.
‘There’s another good hour’s darkness left,’ somebody objected.
An electrical storm far out to sea gave silent glimpses of cloud banks low on one horizon, snapshots of a bruised pearl-and-ginger colour. Otherwise, the night was lit only by constellations. Little Turtle’s river of tears, known elsewhere as the Milky Way, flowed across the sky as though grief were the universe’s most prominent feature. It outshone the other playlets, yet the starlight faded as it fell to earth. The ocean mopped up its dazzle as with thick cloth. In the darkness surrounding the Medevina, little ambient detail was visible. Whenever stray voltages flickered on the landward quarter, the cape off to port stepped forward and back again indecisively. The coastguard’s patrol boats were evidently in another patch of territorial water tonight.
‘We shouldn’t push our luck.’
The boat’s name was a composite of those of Captain Nicomedes and his wife Divina, though the craft was jointly owned by four people who worked it as a cooperative. Medes’ decision to call a halt might have been challenged by any of his three companions who thought it wasteful not to profit by an extra hour and fill the last boxes. Yet nobody objected. It was as though everyone aboard was mindful of the dead fisherman we had left afloat so many hours ago, of the vengeance his spirit might wreak if given the provocation. (You will not have forgotten that when the trip was nearly over and a familiar coastline once more off the bow, one of the divers confessed he wouldn’t have felt easy that night working any new beds further away from the Madonna, whose calcareous lump had given its blessing to our poaching activities.) Spell and counter-spell.
So the air hoses were coiled and stowed; the engine was stopped and reconnected to the propeller shaft; weak, sweet coffee was passed around in the ringing silence. Cigarette ends glowed in relief. An offshore breeze brought distant beach smells of wrack and drying caves. It was laden also with tropic moulds and that perfume of decay which mixes vegetable with flesh, so the image came of an inflated piglet being rolled at the tideline, trotters stiff among weed. The tension that had preceded the diving had gone, the omens were forgotten. Quiet laughter rose from murmured talk. We were not going to be arrested this trip.
The engine was started and we took up a homeward course. The starlight fell yet more faintly. An overcast was creeping from the east, extinguishing the Octopus’s suckers one by one, then the Brazier, and finally blotting Little Turtle’s tears. The night grew deeper. Though there was scarcely any wind, the sea became suddenly choppier and from this we knew we had left the shelter of the invisible headland and would soon be out of enemy waters. An hour later, we had a tiny running light aloft, dawn seemed no nearer and the chop was sending smacks of spray from the bows to rattle aft against a hunching of plastic raincoats. This was no threatening change in the weather, though; just the patchy moodiness of the sea as it was strained through the archipelago, bounced between land masses, alternately heated and cooled, convected and churned between abyssal currents and shallow races. Soon the coffee’s warmth was long gone and everyone had retreated into himself, wrapped in wet plastic, staring at the same patch of planking or tackle, waiting for the return of daylight and calm water and the implied heat of a rising sun.
The cold end of a working night, the hypnotic blare of the engine: it must have been these which explained the lack of attention. With a crash the boat suddenly reared and flung everyone sprawling in the bilges. Cries went up and the captain cut the engine. The first thought was of having run aground at full throttle, the constant fear in coral seas where hidden reefs can rise to within inches of the surface. But the bottom was still in the boat and we were not yet floundering in the dark ocean. The captain and the mate hurried forward with torches. According to their curses we had rammed a drifting log, a common hazard in these parts.
‘If ever a trip was jinxed …’
Lights were flashed astern to see what we had overrun. Sure enough, something was rolling in our dispersing wake. The captain was on his knees in the bows, examining the damage. We were holed on the waterline: not a crippling wound, but several square inches of marine ply were stove in. A strong smell of petrol was stealing over the boat. More shouts. A cigarette end was flung judiciously overboard. A spare polythene container of fuel stowed in the bows had been holed by the impact and several gallons had run aft into the bilges before the two men extricated the crushed container and tilted it so that the hole was uppermost.
You will not have forgotten how everyone set to bailing with every available mug and bowl. The boat’s rocking dead in the water was accompanied by crunchings and creakings from the darkness where the port outrigger lay. Light-beams focused on it. Tangled up in our paired bamboo floats were the tilted spars of a small boat.
‘We hit a boat!’
‘It wasn’t a log!’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! This whole damned ocean’s full of abandoned boats tonight.’
‘It was a log! Look, you can see it behind us.’
But beneath the vaporous smell of petrol another, familiar stench was filling the air. A single voice cried out, ‘Oh my God, it’s him!’, and a select chill went through us all. The more trembling beams converged on the torpid object in the sea astern, the more clearly they revealed it as the body we had abandoned some eight hours earlier.
If, as claimed, there is in the human mind a gambling instinct, a constant assessment of odds, moments of shock reveal it as being definitely more reliant on superstition than on statistics. There was nobody aboard, yourself included, who was not tugged into the rhetorical device of demanding what were the chances of hitting the same boat …? and coming up with the predetermined answer: ‘Astronomical!’ Afterwards, though, on dry land and with a couple of nights’ sleep separating the event from its memory, anyone might soberly have reassessed those chances. The fisherman had been drifting with the current; our captain always went with the current as far as possible. It was the act of a seaman who knows how to lean on nature and save fuel whenever he can. Our collision was unlikely enough, surely, but not so incredible as to make it seem – as it did in the dark with water and petrol bubbling around our bare feet – fated, ordained, even Justice catching up with us. Nobody who lives off the sea remains a rationalist for long. Those of the crew who earlier had consoled their consciences with defiant cries of ‘No time!’ now began planning the truce they would enact with the dead man before his unappeased spirit might ruin us entirely.
The boat was paddled backwards until his body drifted under the counter. The curious crowded back to view it, thereby making the captain’s repairs easier by lifting the hole in the bows clear of the water. The stink of fuel and decay rolled over us. Nobody dared light a cigarette to make breathing easier. Torn-up rags were tied over faces so we became the masked crew of a plague barge. A rope was belayed around one of the fisherman’s swollen calves. The noose’s friction soon began to slough the skin off, and it seemed likely that his little boat had itself been leaking so that his lower body had steeped in seawater for several hours.
The hatless corpse had swollen greatly since the moment we had last glimpsed him like a lone King Arthur faring forth to Avalon. His back was now as wide and flat as a slab. The T-shirt stretched across it, advertising a brand of paint, was already going in ovals at the seams. His shorts were likewise cracking as though the buttocks beneath were plumped with silicone. Pathos no longer attached itself to this body, wallowing inert as a bolster. His statuesque silence and exaltation had vanished. Only his hair, the liveliest part, floated and streamed in puffs of current as it once had on windy days.
‘This time he must be buried.’
‘For certain. I don’t care if he committed suicide. We’re risking our lives until he’s given a Christian burial.’
‘Oh don’t start that again, Mots. We don’t know his religion.’
‘It’s all one God,’ the dogged voice said. ‘We’ll give him a Christian burial because it’s the only one we know.’
‘You know it, do you? The proper service like Father Deme knows?’
‘Even Father Demetrio doesn’t necessarily know it. He reads it.’
The talk went on. It revealed nothing but a universal refusal to touch the decaying body, to turn it face up, to have anything further to do with it other than piously to wish it gone.
The two boys crawled out on the struts and freed the remains of the fisherman’s boat. Without support the little hulk filled and sank until nothing but the outline of its own bamboo outrigger was visible. Since it was too small for an engine, it had never been registered, and there was no identifying number painted on its bow. Nor was there any way of taking it in tow. The captain ordered it cast adrift and it soon vanished.
All this time, dawn was slowly breaking above the cloud cover, sending down a stealing greyness as through a suspended sheet of ground glass. Our world took on shape. A loud swirl of water became visible from just beyond an outrigger.
‘Oy pating, pating!’, someone shouted, and the additional fear of sharks found a perch next to the other dread spirits already crowding our boat’s superstructure. There was no question now of doing anything with the body except sinking it as hastily as possible. The longer it stayed tied to us, the longer we ourselves would remain bait.
Meanwhile, the captain and the mate had jury-rigged a repair. The patch was not quite watertight but, with luck, would hold at reduced speed, provided we kept our weight in the stern. They now decided what they might sacrifice to send the dead man to the bottom. The spare anchor could go, and so could the rusty acetylene cylinder used as a reserve air tank when a third diver was deployed. A discussion broke out as to how much weight was needed to take the corpse down, inflated with gas as it was. The men decided to err on the side of excess. Nobody wanted to see this man ever again although he was probably destined to bob up in many a dream. Now, respectfully, and with the sacrifice of many dollars’ worth of equipment, he was being asked to leave us alone.
The assorted weights were firmly tied to the end of the rope attached to his leg. At a suggestion, some people took amulets and crosses from their own necks and wound them around the iron. The captain said: ‘I don’t know this service. Let’s say the Ama Namin for the poor fellow, and God give him and us rest.’ Out on the dawning ocean the Lord’s Prayer rose raggedly towards the ground-glass ceiling. The sea was calmer now, and the boat merely wallowed slightly in the swell. Had the sun been up we would no doubt have been revealed once more as surrounded by an iridescent membrane of fuel clawed here and there into holes by catspaws of wind. Swaying on a few planks above unknown fathoms of water, the crew muttered while the grey bowl of air around us began to fill with the sensation of lifting, as though the remaining darkness were rising like helium to dissolve in the sky. Barely waiting for the various murmurs of ‘Amen’ and ‘Siya nawa’, the captain began unhitching the cord that secured his precious boat to its albatross. With a series of loud splashes the weights followed each other into the sea.
The length of line gave the iron a second or two in which to sink and take up the slack between it and the dead man’s ankle. Then – and how quickly it happened! – the corpse gave a start, a half twist and a sweep of one arm like that of an engrossed snorkeller jerking up for air. For a shutter’s click his face turned towards us, a swollen and eroded Buddha, before he vanished. A collective sigh was heaved; nobody spoke. We continued, mesmerised, to watch the water as though expecting him to reappear.
In The Last Act, William Tegg quotes a nineteenth-century ship’s surgeon, Dr Clarke, who described leaning out of his cabin window one day idly watching an officer fishing when ‘the corpse of a man, newly sewed in a hammock, started half out of the water, and continued its course, with the current, towards the shore. Nothing could be more horrible: its head and shoulders were visible, turning first to one side and then to the other, with a solemn and awful movement, as if impressed with some dreadful secret of the deep, which, from its watery grave, it came upwards to reveal.’ In explanation, Dr Clarke went on to cite one of his medical contemporaries who wrote that ‘in a certain stage of putrefaction, the bodies of persons which have been immersed in water, rise to the surface, and in deep water are supported in an erect posture, to the terror of uninstructed spectators. Menacing looks and gestures, and even words, are supplied by the affrighted imagination, with infinite facility, and referred to the horrible apparition.’
So we stood in the lightening dawn and stared at the sea. Hardly any of us doubted the unknown fisherman’s power to haunt. If meeting him once had seemed fated, his finding us again had been uncanny. Nobody would have been much surprised, though petrified, had he miraculously started up out of the waves, pointed a dripping finger and anathematised us all. But a long minute passed and nothing more menacing occurred than a couple of abrupt disturbances in the water some way off to suggest the restless prowling of predators. Then the entire boat was enveloped in a reek of corruption that made everyone clap his hands across his cloth-wound mouth. It was so intense it suggested a physical presence, as though the deceased had secretly joined us again, his identity concealed by a mask. On an inspiration a bottle of rum was passed around, the liquor liberally splashed on the cloth protecting mouth and nose. Pulling himself from this collective trance of disgust, the captain tried to start the engine. On the third attempt it caught; and in the welcome blare of machinery we moved slowly from under the primitive cloud and set a course for home.
As soon as the masks were ripped off and lungs were filling with morning air, a discussion broke out between those who believed the appalling stench was the manifestation of an evil spirit and others who thought that when the corpse had reached a sufficient depth, pressure would have ruptured its decomposing tissues and released the pent-up gases in one stinking bubble. Either that, or a shark had attacked it, which would have produced the same result. This debate was still going on when there were fresh cries from the stern and once again the engine was cut.
It seemed that even now the dead man was not finished with us. Someone had noticed that the pile of polystyrene cool boxes containing the lobsters had become shrunken and lopsided beneath its protective shroud of tarpaulin. On investigation it was found that the leaked petrol had melted the bottoms of the two lowest boxes and that all the lobsters in them were dead or contaminated by fumes. One by one the mate began throwing them over the side. Each small splash represented wasted time, wasted danger, wasted effort and diminishing pay for everyone aboard. Finally, the last of the spilt fuel was mopped up and the surviving boxes restacked on a base of boards scrounged from elsewhere in the boat. The two bottomless and soggy boxes were balefully thrown overboard where, light as they were, they drifted cantedly astern as we resumed our course. They remained visible a long while, brilliantly white in the rising sun like children’s coffins floating in our wake.