Dead Water (32 page)

David sleeps through the night-time tremors, only to be woken by a loud bang. He thinks of bombs. A terrorist atrocity. The Dhofari rebellion. He opens his eyes wide, his body stiff and straining under the sheet.

It is absolutely quiet. There is no birdsong. He gets to his feet and opens the blinds. His room lies at the back of the hotel, overlooking the pool. He snatches a robe from the foot of the bed and opens the verandah doors. There is something wrong with the pool. The water level is too high. The water slops over his feet, sending bottles of shampoo clattering over the decking and – what are those grey things?

Fish. He is surrounded by little flapping fish. The water is black. A sewer main must have burst. He hobbles back to his room and shuts the door.

There’s shouting in the corridor. He goes to open the door. As he turns the handle something ice-cold slaps his ankles. Water is squirting into the room through the bottom of the doorframe.

The door bangs open. Black water engulfs him. He sprawls. He gasps for air and swallows something sharp. He flails, pulling at the furniture, toppling it into the water. It floats.

He sneezes. It feels like he’s swallowed a razor. He spits out a mouthful of greenish foam and gets to his feet. He leans against the door jamb. The water is roiling around his knees, unable to choose a direction. Sneezing and coughing, he wades into the corridor. The lights are out. In the dimness, he can’t see the water for debris: napkins, passports, bedsheets, nappies, shattered wood, Formica. He has a dim notion that he has to gather things. Penknife. Passport. Sunscreen. He turns back into the room. The first car rolls into the pool. Then the second. The wave does not compute. The wave cannot be coming towards him because his room is at the rear of the hotel. Mist fills the air, obscuring his view of the pool. Shadows loom in the mist. They take on form and dimension. A motor scooter smashes through his windows on a tide of broken glass and corrugated iron.

The swell carries Ester across the road. She glimpses her hotel, then the water folds over her. When she comes up again, she is being hurled towards a building she does not recognize. It is built over a sunken parking area. Water curves, dips, rushes under the building. The current drags her along a concrete awning towards the sink-hole. She grabs hold of an exposed rebar. She levers herself on to her elbows and leans over the concrete shelf with the water rushing around her legs. The water is trying to pull her off and carry her under the building.

When the surge eases, she pulls herself on to the shelf. She is bleeding everywhere. Where she grabbed the rebar, her palm is gashed open, There are two dribbling slashes across her breasts where the water dragged her along the awning. Her legs look as though someone has gone at them with a lawn strimmer. The water is full of glass.

By now the water is receding, taking with it the contents of the hotel lobby: computers, TVs, filing cabinets, children, tables, panelling. From up the road the water streams back, bearing off whole bungalows. Cars. People. Sheets of corrugated iron go past at twenty, thirty miles per hour, skimming and slicing the surface of the water.

A dark line appears on the horizon. Another wave.

David heaves himself into the corridor and there’s an old man rooted there, frozen; they practically touch noses. ‘Christ!’ The man’s all bloodied up, his face a streaked thing, bacon, barely human. ‘Sarah.’ Blood streams through his hair and down his face. He says: ‘This isn’t my hotel.’ He’s wearing a yachting blazer. It’s John, the Englishman.

David says, through a throat that burns, ‘You need to sit down.’ ‘I was on the beach with Sarah.’

David reaches out for him. Is there any part of him that’s safe to touch?

‘Where’s Sarah?’

‘What?’

‘Come with me and sit down.’

‘This isn’t my hotel.’ John turns away from David and stumbles down the hall. The back of his skull is off. There are wet things in his head. At the foot of the stairs he kneels down. David doesn’t know how to help him. John heaves drily into the water and rolls around and sits on the stair and says, ‘We’ve got to find the can.’

‘It’s gone, John. Where do you think it’s ended up, after all this?’ ‘Well,’ John grumbles. ‘You would say that. Wouldn’t you?’ He makes like a cat, bringing up a fur ball, and his face just, well,
sticks
. It jams there, so that he can no longer speak. He only hoots.

‘I’m coming back,’ David tells him. ‘I’ll find somebody. I’m coming back for you.’ He climbs the stairs to the roof. A couple of dozen people have gathered here, blocking his view of the sea. Taller than the rest, Peter the South African leans on the parapet, an SLR camera pressed to his face. Someone screams and people pull away from the edge and he sees past Peter to a towering wave that has no water in it at all: only gas heaters, air conditioners, people, motorcycles and cars.

The building shakes. The wave forces its way down an alley. People fall into him, screaming. Peter is still at the balustrade, the camera pressed to his face. David, light-headed, sways forward and joins him.

Peter is using the camera’s telephoto lens to scour the beach. ‘They went down there this morning,’ he says. ‘Suzie and the kids. She took them for a swim.’

Along the coast waves criss-cross each other, mounting and bursting. The beach bungalows are falling apart. Corrugated-iron sheets spill into the water. Beds, TVs, plastic ducting, washing machines. Wreckage grinds together, creaking and banging. Horns and alarms fill the air. A tuk-tuk has been hurled into the crown of a palm tree.

Peter says: ‘Where’s your daughter?’

‘I don’t know. I saw John.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He wanted us to go and find the can.’

‘Fuck the can.’

‘That’s what I told him.’

‘The can is gone.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean. Look.’

‘Yes.’

Peter stands with his face pressed to the back of his camera. His family is lost as surely as the can is lost: there’s no point in his standing here. ‘Peter. Come on.’

‘I’m fine. Go find your daughter. Go, take care.’

David stares at Peter. They have never liked each other. David leaves the roof and heads downstairs. John has vanished. In his place are two French girls. The waves have torn all their clothes off. There are deep punctures all over them, as though someone has attacked them with a fork. David helps the girls up the stairs. The stairs are thick with mud. The girls whisper their thanks. Everyone keeps calling him ‘doctor’.

He goes back down, counting the number of landings, and stops where black water, thick with turds and tampons and shampoo bottles, slops over his feet. Ester’s room is under water.

Ester climbs on to the apex of the roof. She gets her bearings. She is about half a block away from their hotel. Above her, on the balcony of a neighbouring apartment block, a woman wrapped in a sari encourages her boy to jump. Hand in hand, they make the leap. They fall straight through. Ester, sitting athwart the ridge tiles, feels the whole roof flex as they hit it, and disappear.

Ester works her way along the roof. At the edge of the building she looks for a way across the alley. The water has receded, leaving behind a tangle of refrigerators and mattresses. The waves have driven a Toyota Hilux tail-up into the wall below her. She lowers herself into the flatbed. The cab’s rear glass is missing. She climbs through. The cab is full of blood. She crawls over the plastic fascia to the driver’s side door and scrambles out through the window.

From here she’s able to reach a balcony on the first floor, but the room beyond is jammed with shattered furniture. She climbs back over the balcony and gingerly works her way down the rubble, through a webwork of fallen power and telephone lines, and into the water. It is black, opaque, it comes up to her knees. Straining for sounds of a third wave, she wades round to the back of the hotel, stubbing and cutting her feet on rebar and lawn chairs.

An explosion has taken away the back wall of the kitchen. The inside is a maze of tangled metal, vents and dangling wires. The swing doors to the dining room are blocked, but something has punched a neat hole through the plasterboard wall. She crawls through. The dining room is under about a foot of slurry. The flood has stacked the entire contents of the room against the left-hand wall. Twenty tables, a hundred chairs. The tower leans, wobbles and falls. Spray scuds the ceiling. It falls as rain as Ester pulls her way towards the lobby.

People are fleeing the hotel. If you time it right, you can run out of the main lobby and get far enough up the road to be beyond the reach of the waves. The sea is still ugly. Surges just a couple of feet high are more than strong enough to wield sheets of corrugated iron like scythes. People are shouting instructions and warnings. Their voices keep getting lost in the din of the helicopter as it buzzes the beach, back and forth, filming the destruction.

Ester leaves the hotel. By now she feels as though she’s hobbling on stumps. She’s kept her dressing gown. Some people out here are naked. Others are fully clothed and sit surrounded by luggage, as though at any moment a plane might arrive and pluck them off the hillside. People squat by the roadside with their backs to the sea, staring sullenly at nothing. A truck passes, full of women and children. Word has gone round there’s another big wave on the way. Someone jumps up and points out to sea, triggering Mexican waves and screams and pointless, circular running. Most people here have no fight left.

Ambulances pass her on their way up the hill. She picks up her pace. If they find David first and he is injured and they carry him away, it might be days before she finds him. She picks a dirt path and goes exploring. There’s a chance David wasn’t in the hotel when the waves struck. There’s a chance he went for a walk, a chance that he didn’t choose to explore the beach.

A local man passes her, carrying a heavy pan. It has scrapings of rice in it. He’s been bringing food to the survivors. He glances back at her, looks her up and down, and says something in Thai.

‘I don’t –’

He shuffles his feet, nods at her, and walks away. She watches him go. There, on the path: he has left her his shoes.

It finally dawns on Ester that perhaps David is in Rawai. It would be just like him to have gone there at the crack of dawn, bossing the scuba guides around, checking, double-checking, triple-checking their gear. She knows her hope is crazy. Still, she turns around and hobbles down the hill, back to town.

The sea is calm and glittering grey: a sheet of foil. The waves have swept cars and tuk-tuks off the streets and stripped the leaves from the trees. There is a surface cleanliness about everything, but each building is either a gaping concrete shell or a rubbish heap, and already there is a smell over everything: not rotten, but wrong. The smell of deep ocean.

There are vehicles running along the coastline now, all heading in the opposite direction. Beyond the town, the traffic dribbles away to nothing. Still, she presses ahead. Her legs aren’t working properly. They are bleeding again, everywhere, all over.

Sand covers the road, and she is just about to sit down in it, she is putting her hand out to steady herself, when two things happen. She sees that the sand is gritted with tiny fragments of glass, like shattered Christmas baubles; and just ahead of her, she sees a Toyota. Bungee-roped to the back of it there’s a mountain bike. A Marin. Ester laughs, and stamps a tattoo of thanks to the cargo gods. She wrestles the bike to the ground.

The coast is not as she remembers it. Here and there, in puddles, things flap and shiver. The skies are empty: these stranded fish will die long before the birds return to finish them off. Shoals of shrimps have left vivid streaks in the earth: great strings of pink. There is much bare earth where the vegetation has been torn away. There are no dogs.

She expects the ground to be a quagmire but the water has run clean off the land, stripping it so that the going is easy. The earth and the sand have formed a mottled map over the road, a two-tone, dun-coloured thing, ancient and weathered and smooth as velum. It is obvious, after only an hour of this, that she is lost. This is, literally, a new country. There are no trees.

She crosses a riverbed. There is no bridge, no sign of a bridge, and the riverbed is inexplicably dry. Ester climbs off her bike. This has to be Rawai. Only there are no buildings. Stiff and sore and thirsty, she drops her bike in the dirt and casts around for the line of the road. There is nothing at all.

A flat dribble of earth and sand spreads in a brown-paper fan before the sea. Where the earth and the sea meet, a shipping container sits beached half out of the water. One of its doors has come open. It swings to and fro in the wind, squealing.

She is very thirsty. Her forehead throbs. The skin there feels as tight as a steel plate. Raw from the sun, she shakes out her dressing gown and wraps it around herself. The wind whips the gown around her legs. For a while she hesitates. There is only one possible refuge David could have found here, and there it is, half in, half out of the surf, its doors swinging in the wind. Once she looks inside the container and does not find him, then that is the end. Her father will be irretrievably lost.

The container is old and rusted and lacks any obvious markings. It is so dilapidated she wonders if it might not have sunk long before and been lifted from the seabed by the great waves. She catches hold of the door as it swings in the wind. It’s heavier than she expects. She staggers, taking its weight, and opens it wide.

She steps inside the can. Impossible to imagine there is a rear wall to this thing. Its darkness goes on forever. Her bare feet slap the plywood floor: a fragile sound. She moves forward. Seawater swills around her feet. The container groans. It yawns. She stares into the darkness and she sees, just a few feet away from her, a shadow. A man, or the form of a man.

It is not David. It is somebody else.

Missing men. Spilled containers. Ships run aground. The Indian Ocean tsunami has thrown Moyse Line into chaos. At Muscat airport Tanya Dix, PA to the company president Havard Moyse, waits for Ester by the gate. No easy, ex-cabin crew courtesy from her. Ester feels instantly put in her place as Tanya, clicking her way towards the VIP lounge, rattles off a series of questions Ester cannot possibly answer. What is she here for? Who does she need to see? What does she need? When by? She thinks Ester’s a businesswoman. Ester follows her through the airport’s semirestricted spaces, past glass-walled rooms stuck over with lining paper. Through the gaps Ester glimpses grey-faced US soldiers, crates of Tanuf mineral water, rucksacks as big as body bags. ‘Do you know where you’re staying?’