Dead Water (47 page)

‘
Yes, we see you
.’

A huge blue gantry towers over him. No cabin. From this point on, everything’s machine.

Looped umbilicals gather and stretch as its arms reach out over the cargo ship’s forward hold. For the next three weeks, this will be Rishi’s home. Genoa. Hamburg. Then the long Atlantic crossing. The batteries in the can his people have prepared for him have juice enough to sustain him for a voyage three times as long as the one he’s contemplating now. He’ll have lights. A bed. A TV and a laptop. A toilet. A satellite phone. Security passes for ports in Egypt, Canada and Thailand. Three passports.

There is no one about. The noise of the gantry makes it hard for him to hear the phone. ‘What was that?’

‘
Three stacks to your right. Left. To your left. Sorry
.’

Start walking.

‘
Other way. Other way!
’

The blue gantry rolls past him on wheels higher than he is. He’s afraid. We can smell his fear, and the smell is good. Rishi’s powerless here.

‘
To your right
.’

So stop.

A forty-foot white Moyse Line container sits on its own in a space marked out by yellow paint.

‘
Go up to the door. Now. Open it
.’

Rishi slips the phone into his pocket while he fights with the bolts. They come free. He digs the phone out of his pocket again.

‘
Listen. When you enter the container you’re going to lose the signal. There’s a cord just inside the door for the light
.’

Oh no there isn’t.

He steps over the lintel, into a fug of damp and solvent and epoxy resin. Behind him, the heavy steel door swings in the wind, dimming and brightening the interior walls, the plywood floor, the ribbed ceiling. He cannot make out the back wall at all, it is so dark. But he can smell it. He can smell it all right. What he did to Mummy. What he did to Daddy. The stinking shreds of burning tyres.

The doors swing open again and he catches his breath to see us, we are so beautiful. We snake towards him: rivers of glass dust. Shreds of yellow light! Clouds caught by the setting sun! Fields of colour, soft and wet as the insides of a peach! We are so beautiful, so uncanny, we might be a dream that’s slipped into the waking world somehow. A dream that’s spilled from heads other than his own.

He feels for the cord. There is no cord. He squeals like a girl to feel Us. The ripple of Our cold dry skin. He sees Us curling above him: Our colours and Our fangs. He smells Us: a breath of burning electrical insulation and dripping upholstery foam, fats and charred nylon, burning hair and paint fumes. We are so close now, Our twofold nature finds itself reflected in each of Rishi’s eyes. To Kaneer, he excuses Daddy’s death: ‘It was an accident!’ To Abhik, he sighs: ‘Samjhoria – it wasn’t my idea!’

Not good enough. We have a story to tell. A tale to comfort us in our long and limitless death. And this was always on the cards. This was always going to happen. What other kind of story would we ever choose?

He steps away from Us again, again, again. His footfalls make hardly a sound as he retreats further and further into Our Dark...

Now change the number on the can. One byte will be enough to keep him orbiting in here forever. It doesn’t matter how much he screams. It doesn’t matter how much he flails. No purchase here. No friction. No leverage. The propeller spins but the hull’s not going anywhere.

Dead Water.

Nothing exists. Nothing has to exist, or everything becomes coincident with everything else, and the universe is reduced to a homogeneous dot. Picture a propeller, caught between layers of different densities: how it churns and churns, whipping up the foam on which the real world, the world we see and smell, depends.

In darkness and paralysis, Egaz Nageen dreams of a place with nothing in it. No matter. No heat. No energy. Not even light. Nothing except, just possibly, the potential for form. Waking, he clings to his dream, and from out of the big and deepening blue he gathers up the things he needs to sustain him.

He builds: Suniti’s tears against his cheek.

He builds: Sen’s raft has stayed afloat.

Sabir’s small hands thump rhythmically against his chest. The whole raft lollops like a hotel bed as Sabir lands his weight, again and again, on his father’s chest. Salt water fountains from his broken mouth. He gasps and gags in one seamless, wringing heave.

Through the open door of the life raft, he can see the
Ka-Bham
lying on its side, half-submerged. Its deck cargo is mostly gone, tipped into the sea. Only a few containers remain, tangled in wire lashing, near the surface of the water. With every swell they knock against the upturned deck. Swells break and cream along the iron house.

Nageen flits in and out of consciousness and still he builds. Workmanlike. Determined. Now Suniti is sitting on the slope of the
Ka-Bham
’s bow, cradling the life raft’s nylon line. She’s studying the waves that lap the hull a few metres below her. The
Ka-Bham
will take time to sink. When it does, she imagines it falling away in a broiling whirlpool of spume and spray. As if. ‘Sit,’ says Nageen, through a throat that can no longer sound: ‘Calm down. Just hold on to the fucking rope.’

If the engine-room bulkhead has held this long, it’s not going to burst now, so they have half an hour, maybe longer, before the ship goes gently down. Their best hope is to stay by the
Ka-Bham
for as long as possible. A cargo ship – even a small, half-sunken cargo ship – is easier to spot from the air than a life raft.

Item, some nylon line. Item, a supply of fresh water. Item, a sponge. A safety knife with a buoyant handle. Two bailers. A fishing kit and a mirror. No EPIRB. No radio. Not far away – behind him, thank God, where he doesn’t have to look at him – Chief Engineer Sen lies face-down in a spreading pool of red.

Their captors’ final mistake: they meant to leave no one alive. They ran out of time. If they’d had time, they could have made sure of it. Brought the
Ka-Bham
’s crew on deck. Pulled pillowcases over their heads. Beaten their heads in with twistlocks and cheater pipes. Or not even that: just zipped them to the anchor chain and let it go. God, imagine the shame of that: shackled to an anchor chain with
cable ties
.

Suniti pulls off her kameez and drapes it over her head to protect herself from the sun. Sabir totters the length of the
Ka-Bham
’s hull, his shirt held tented to hide his melted face. His lovely boy. His child. I love you. Oh, my treasure, how I love you!

The air is clear, but as the minutes pass, strange clouds come to spot the sky. Balls. Plates. Cigars. Nageen stares at them. High cloud. Ice cloud. There is a storm coming. Not for hours, but soon. The wind will blow the clouds apart. Then it will come for them.

Sabir, listen. When I was a young man, a fisherman, we would go out, me and my friends, in the dying of the day, with carbines hardened in old wars. Tarutao boys. We hunted trawlers: thieving South Koreans. We shook Australasian pensioners to the core with our threats, sacked yachts and pleasure craft, and came away with watches, passports, handfuls of paper money. To be perfectly frank with you, son, it made pleasant a change from catching fish.

Listen, Sabir. Starving men do not have a choice. But we did. We were not starving, my friends and I. And you know, Sabir? In the end, we did choose. Every one of us. One way or another, every one of us grew up.

Listen, Sabir. Sometimes, it takes a whole life to right yourself. So become the thing you ape, Sabir. Ape wisely and well. Become good.

A black dot burns the sky away: a tiny hole that shivers and expands. An eye. A mouth with fangs. A ring of bright blue light. A spinning snake. A machine with moving parts, wet and golden as the insides of a peach. Sabir raises his hands to the sky. He waves his shirt. His hard feet slap the burning hull. ‘Americans!’

In an ocean bigger than thirty Indias: Americans.

Well then, thinks Nageen, not quite believing: bless America.

Fangs curl upon themselves, ploughshared to landing gear. Lemonyellow feathers spring from under metal scales and churn the sky. The air shivers in the creature’s down-draught and the life raft swirls and spins, takes on water, bobs and drowns and bobs again.

Nageen snorts, tastes salt and spittle.
True
. He bites his lip, tastes blood.
All true
.

A US Navy helicopter sweeps in close, turns the sea to foam, and drops a line.

Centuries ago, when sailors from Europe first encountered North African dhows, they marvelled that, for all their curving elegance, these exotic machines couldn’t tack. Trade winds have driven dhows back and forth across the Indian Ocean for centuries and the pulse of their to-and-fro is so regular, so reliable, no one ever bothered to learn how to steer against the wind.

Powered by twelve-cylinder Suzukis a dhow these days can push twenty-five knots in an hour, but if the crossing from India takes longer than about five days, it will still put into Ras al Hadd to resupply.

Concealed inlets. Goat paths. Mudflats deep enough to drown a fourby-four. David Brooks steers his RIB to shore and bumps against the jetty. He climbs out and makes the boat fast against a pole so smooth it feels as though it is coated in glass. The planks of the jetty wobble and spring under his feet. Whatever fastened them has long since rusted away. The whole structure is held together by nothing more than habit.

A thin gravel path edges over steep, stony inclines, out of sight, round hills, to the island’s hidden heart. Round the bend is a bend and around that bend is another bend. Madness and despair. Lights in the sky. He follows the path round the island. Waves have undercut the rock all around and in the overhang a greenish coral grows. It is not a living green at all. David pauses a moment and nudges a spur of the stuff with his toe. It is as soft as cream.

He comes to a level platform, inches thick in fish bones, oyster shells and pieces of calcified coral, and stands gazing over the shell of an old accommodation block. Its low brick walls are all that remain. He walks in among them. The wood from the roofs, long since collapsed, lies in a grey, spongy carpet at his feet. Around the next bend he comes upon a brick shed, far sturdier than the homes of the people who once served here. It is intact: a tall, windowless stone building, its corrugated-iron roof slathered with cement. Above the only door, chiselled into the lintel: 1933. The year of its construction. Seaplanes once stopped here to refuel on their way to India.

The iron door of the refuelling station is open. David goes inside. The whole of the interior is taken up by a gigantic fuel tank mounted on trestles. The floor is thick with the shed skins of gigantic snakes. There is a faint multicoloured sheen to them: dead rainbows. But with a mortal’s talent for self-deception, David convinces himself that they are, in fact, the feathery remains of a fuel hose. In the midst of the skins, like an egg in a dragon’s nest, sits an old orange buoy, the size of a man’s head.

David scuffs ankle-deep through the rotten rubber, stirring it with his stick as though he were chivvying the ash of a dead fire. He jabs his stick into the mess, getting purchase on the concrete floor, then bends down and lifts the buoy.

He pulls a red leather notebook from his jacket and drops it into the nest. It will be safe here, until the next time.

‘Towards a Unified Theory of Ocean Circulation.’ Diagrams and spirals. Dead water.

He sits the buoy on top of it.

After years of this shit you get cynical. You figure, you may as well go work for yourself. ‘The can I took off the
Ka-Bham
is stocked with canisters of a trichothecene mycotoxin produced by the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona and consigned to Dead Water around the time the Knesset was refusing to sign the Biological Weapons Convention. 10 April 1972, to save you looking it up. Years ago. The stuff will be safely dead by now. Don’t tell my buyers.’

Ester’s answerphone says: ‘To re-record your message, press One.’

He presses One, and then the red button, killing the call.

The Pajero is waiting for him behind the next hill.

He drives for half a day through a landscape that looks recklessly young.

Up-tilted rocks, like giant launching ramps, erupt from a sea of gravel. Around lunchtime, to complete his disorientation, he finds himself abruptly fed on to freshly set Tarmac. The new coastal highway is radically unexpressive: a flat, monomaniacal idea, and when it ends, narrowing at last to a single lane, warning signs appear and the hillside is smothered in pink plastic sacks. David drives slowly over the hill, unsure of what he’s seeing. Workmen crouch in the shadows behind big boulders, stripping the red plastic sleeving off rolls of copper wire. At the top of the hill two policemen in a patrol car ignore him as he passes. So that’s it: they are getting ready to blow up the hill.

The road descends and weaves slightly inland to where Chinese derricks are pumping the water out from between the roots of dying date palms. He turns off the road at a coastal village and drives the Pajero at speed along firm tracks in the dunes to a view of the sea. The moon comes up over the Gulf of Oman. At this latitude the horns of a half-moon point up, parallel to the horizon, so that it looks like a cup. Inversion effects ripple and ridge its silhouette and lend it a fluted stem. The whole sea pulses green. Out to sea he catches isolated flashes: the movements of fish. Where wave overlaps wave, green lightning explores the join. Each incoming wave, curling on itself, wrings out some light. Phosphorescence lights up the foam scurrying over the sand towards his feet.