Pescador's Wake (16 page)

His words are ringing in Julia's ears: ‘
He
's still all right.' Is the baby a boy, she speculates, or had the doctor just used the generic
he
that everyone seems to apply to unborn children? Julia's parents have been calling the baby ‘he', too. Perhaps they are hoping that if they say it enough times, their wish might come true.

Until now, Julia hadn't wanted to know the sex of this child. After the miscarriages, she'd needed to be sure the pregnancy would end happily before making plans. It was simply too painful to build castles in the sky for her baby's future only to have them demolished and burned. Turned into ash like her tiny, lost babies. She supposes she was trying to keep a small distance between herself and the little life within. But seeing her baby's face on the monitor has evaporated any chance of self-preservation. She must love him now, not later. Whatever happens.

In minutes, Julia is hurried to theatre and the anaesthetist is asking her to sit up and bend forward so he can insert a needle deep into the space between the bones of her spine. The contractions make it difficult to keep still. She feels the coolness of an alcohol wipe and the prick of a local anaesthetic. There's a deep, nauseating feeling of fullness in her back. She is laid down and observes the flurry of action, blurred through tears, in her peripheral vision. She weeps quietly.

The doctor, now fully gowned, is scrubbing at a sink, his back to her. Her baby's life is in his hands. He turns to face the surgical bed but avoids meeting her eyes.

The paediatrician introduces himself before attending to a small Perspex trolley fitted with tiny tubes, drip bags and a heat lamp. The baby's soon-to-be new home is no substitute for her loving belly, she thinks.

The surgeon begins. Julia feels a tugging sensation, but can't see beyond the screen that has been erected on her chest. A bloodied glove reaches for an instrument and Julia focuses instead on the ceiling. Nausea overcomes her and she vomits. A nurse deftly catches the tea-stained bile in a bowl. Some of it sticks in Julia's hair. She feels a cloth wipe her face.

There is a small mewl and Julia realises it's her baby crying. The doctor lifts the tiny, red-skinned form from her and passes it to the paediatrician who places it quickly into the Perspex humidicrib.

‘He's very small,' the doctor says.

‘
He
,' Julia whispers. So it
is
a boy. A son.

She sees the intensive-care nurses and the paediatrician huddling around the humidicrib. There's a sucking sound as they work to clear her baby's lungs.

It's odd, Julia thinks, that her baby can survive so many months surrounded by water, and then be in danger of drowning only when he is brought up and into the air. It strikes her as the opposite of what happens when an adult
drowns. Eduardo once admitted to her that it was his greatest fear—to fall deep into the earth's watery womb.

Julia lifts her head but a nurse warns her to stay still. ‘The doctor hasn't finished stitching you up,' she is told.

But, with the anaesthetic, Julia couldn't reach her son even if she tried. It's as though she has been assaulted and robbed – left paralysed, body and soul. The paediatric team swiftly moves the baby out of the theatre and into a lift that will take him to the neonatal nursery. It's so strange, Julia thinks, to be so instantly separate. To feel the distance forcibly stretched between her and her baby. To realise that she is now a mother of two, for however long this baby survives.

Julia looks back at the obstetrician's face and sees that he is starting to appear more at ease. He tells the nurses a joke and Julia is struck by how quickly his part in this ordeal is over. Her nightmare, she suspects, is just beginning.

To drown at sea. We all fear it. All of us fishermen. From the time our grandfathers struggled through surf in small boats that they launched off the beach, to now, on factory ships, a million miles from our homes on shore. We call the sea our second home, but none of us want to go to Davy Jones's locker. I have read that ‘Davy Jones' probably derives from ‘Duffy Jonah', a west Indian term. Duffy means a ghost. Jonah was the prophet who was thrown into the sea.

Carlos dreams of Eduardo sinking. He becomes Eduardo. His orange sea jacket fades to a muted blue before turning inkblack, in the way the deepening ocean bleeds all life of its colour. A final cry departs his gaping mouth as a rising, expanding bubble. Empty lungs collapse under the water's weight. Strange life forms inspect him at close range. Hagfish nibble on fronds of waving hair. A parasitic lamprey attaches to a sunken cheek. Above him lies the swollen belly of an iceberg. Finally, his large body gives way to the seafloor.

He opens one eye. Then both.

His legs merge into a tail fin.

He communes with fish, removing hooks from black, rubbery lips. He plunges a hand down torn throats and into soft stomachs to remove the remains of poorly digested chicken bones, food tins and plastic bags, all discarded by fishermen. Antifouling paint, containing toxic tributyltin from the hulls of icebreakers, coats the seabed with its sickening film, causing some life forms to die and others to mysteriously change sex. The reach of humans is everywhere.

A procession of toothfish approaches him. There are perhaps five hundred. Each gaunt specimen hooked via a
short nylon rope to a longer, sturdier line. It's the longline he had cut only two and a half weeks before—the line he had let fall, fully laden, back to depth.

The fish queue patiently for him to release them, one by one. They are thin from being enslaved, unable to feed.

He hears the familiar engine noise of a boat above. Naked hooks, the size of fists, appear. He takes the end of one in his mouth and lets it pierce his cheek. He warns the other fish away. Hours pass as he waits, suspended. He is patient.

Finally he is brought to the surface. Once handsome, he is now reduced to a ghoulish mess of matted hair and gouging fish hooks tearing his broken face. His sea jacket hangs like shreds of sunburnt kelp. He gloats as he spins on the line, dancing a series of macabre pirouettes from an avant garde ballet. Slowly he stops spiralling and faces the fishermen on deck. His audience.

‘Soon there will be no fish left. Go home or you shall die.' His curse is clear. Emphatic.

The fishermen hurriedly cut the line and he falls heavily back into the ocean. His turgid tail splashes water at the shaken men, who are left in doubt of their minds. He is gone, this soothsayer who can divine the number of fish left in the sea.

He has learnt to breathe the air dissolved in seawater, but it will not always be so easy. The deep sea, so rich in oxygen, is finally releasing the life-giving gas. As the earth warms, and
ocean circulation patterns change, less oxygen is being transported down to deep-ocean currents. He wonders how long it will be before the strange world around him suffocates.

He rides the Antarctic circumpolar current full circle, allowing himself to be caught at every opportunity—at the islands of South Georgia, Prince Edward, Crozet Kerguélen and Heard. He moves further south to Ob and Lena Banks, where illegal fishers are already exhausting new grounds.

Sometimes deep-sea nets are used instead of longlines. But they are no barrier to this keeper of the deep. He climbs into their open mouths and cuts holes in their fouled rope to let the fish escape. Occasionally he is spilled onto deck and takes a blow from a gaff or a bullet to the head, body or tail. He bleeds thick blood, stocked high with anti-freeze borrowed from his Antarctic toothfish cousins. But he can't be killed, for he lives in every fisherman. He is their collective fear of the ocean, of drowning, of becoming monstrous. He propels himself back into the sea.

Tales of this denizen of the deep spread. They converge in the bars of Port Louis, Durban, Walvis Bay and his home port of Montevideo. In these places, the illegal fishers gather to drink their fill of spirit, and to warm aching bones and souls weary from chasing fish across lonely seas. Each time his ghost visits a boat, the vessel inevitably suffers misfortune: sometimes the loss of life, sometimes an injury, always poor catches. It's hardly worth going to sea.

His curse is realised. The boats scared away, he begins the long task of nursing the stocks back to health.

Carlos wakes in a lather of salt water, his mind and body thick with the effects of hypothermia. He struggles to shake off his nightmare of the ghoulish Eduardo and for a moment wonders if his friend's death may also have been a dream. He glimpses relief. But it is a mirage. It vanishes like the flashes of Southern Lights that grace the Antarctic sky, teasing fishermen with the luminous greens—the colours of grass and trees—of home. He can't lie, not even to himself. The details of the dream recur with sickening, spiralling clarity. Not as a fluid film of events, but rather a succession of short takes of the drama that unfolded. The order is jumbled, as he tries to make sense of what has happened.

An unstoppable barrage of memories place him once again on the frozen deck, reaching out for a disappearing hand. It's as though by retelling the story, he hopes to discover a detail that will reverse events and bring Eduardo back.

His thoughts drift now to Eduardo's wife and daughters. He'll have to make a satellite call to break the news, a call that will reveal the
Pescador
's position to the world—not that it's a secret any more. And if the call is intercepted and used somehow to incriminate him, then that is the price he must
pay. The fate of the boat and the catch now seems less important. He covers his face with his hands, blocking out the world. Perhaps he should give Virginia and the girls one more day in which to believe that Eduardo is still alive, a brief peace before their hollow grief undoes them forever. Carlos knows that from the moment they learn of Eduardo's death, their lives will be divided neatly into before and after. Everything will change.

The boat is travelling perilously in the following seas, and Carlos thinks of Dmitri at the helm, steering the boat northeast, at right angles to the waves behind them. How could he have failed to see the Russian's vile potential? He pounds his fists hard against the inside wall of the hull. He recalls the accusations Dmitri made against Eduardo and wonders if any were true. Perhaps none of it matters now. He feels sick with grief and panic and the knowledge that he has failed his crew. Carlos lowers himself out of his bunk and feels his body ache under its own weight. There's a sharp pain each time he draws air into his lungs, and he realises he must have bruised or cracked a rib when he was reaching over the deck yesterday, reaching down towards oblivion for Eduardo. He closes his eyes against the pain and the truth.

Someone knocks on his cabin door and he hears the hinges creak as the door opens and closes. ‘We're going to pretend that it's a divided camp.' It's Manuel's voice coming towards him. ‘That the Spaniards aren't yet convinced of his
plan, and that the Peruvians are for it. If we all pretend to be behind Dmitri, it'll look too suspicious.'

‘What he said about us planning to sell some of the catch behind your backs was true.'

‘Most of us would have done the same.'

Carlos opens his eyes to study Manuel, trying to comprehend the loyalty of his crew. ‘I didn't know about the guns.'

‘I know. Neither did Eduardo. I overheard him talking to Dmitri. Not the whole conversation—most of it was in Russian—but he let slip in Spanish a few times, to swear mostly.' Manuel makes a poor attempt at a laugh before his grave expression returns. ‘Eduardo was furious that Dmitri had brought guns on board.'

‘So he
was
telling the truth.' Carlos rubs his forehead and studies Manuel.

‘
Si.
But we have to focus on Dmitri now. He has been at the helm for nearly twenty-four hours. He'll be getting tired and dropping his guard. You go up there, and tell him the Spaniards won't talk to you. He'll take it as encouragement and call us up to the wheelhouse—I'd bet on it. But we'll play hard to get so that when the Peruvians offer their support, he'll lap it up. When he hands out the guns, that'll be our chance to overthrow him.'

‘You've given this some thought then?' Carlos manages a weary smile, but inside a part of him has died. Being at sea
doesn't feel the same without his best friend. But even Eduardo had struggled to make light of the grim situation they'd become embroiled in. Carlos suspects this would be one of the few occasions that he would have admitted he'd bitten off more than he could chew.

He thinks back to being a boy at La Paloma, larking about with Eduardo—the trips too far from the coast in Eduardo's father's dinghy, and the nocturnal dives (Eduardo always went first) off the pier to commune with the ocean's night-dwellers. It's true that Eduardo took bigger risks than he himself was ever prepared to take, but it's also the case that Eduardo was prepared to wear the consequences. Whatever secret arrangements his friend made for this trip, Carlos consoles himself, were to protect him.

Carlos pays a short visit to the crew's cabins below deck, acknowledging each man with a short dip of his head. He sees their silent grief at losing Eduardo. He opens his mouth to speak, but shuts it again. Words are inadequate. In silence, he makes his way along the corridors and back up the three flights of stairs to the wheelhouse.

‘What the hell happened yesterday?' Carlos fires the question at Dmitri as if it were him, and not the Russian, holding the gun. He knows that the treacherous conditions on
deck would have hampered visibility from the wheelhouse, but the Russian must have seen two men become only one. ‘Why didn't you turn the boat around? We could have saved him.'

‘Not in those seas.'

‘You didn't even try. You killed him.'

The Russian sneers. ‘Do you think I need either of you?'

Carlos glances briefly through the rear windows and sees that their lead on the Australian boat has narrowed while he has been asleep. To hell with them. He reaches for the satellite phone. ‘I'm calling Eduardo's family.'

‘I don't think so.' Dmitri holds up a small piece of wire, no doubt taken from the guts of the Inmarsat communication system, from his jacket pocket. He takes a final mouthful of vodka and feeds the wire into the empty bottle. ‘We cannot transmit using VHF radio, either. We can, however, listen to incoming calls on both, just to keep ourselves entertained.' He laughs.

Carlos takes a step towards Dmitri, but José threatens him with the gun. Carlos holds up his hand in surrender and steps back. To be shot now would serve no one, bar Dmitri. And with the shortage of helmsmen on the boat, not even him.

Carlos leans his back heavily against the wall nearest him and slides down to the ground. He rests there on the wet carpet, his knees drawn up, hands hanging over them. His body is still exhausted from the day before, and he squeezes shut his eyes as he tries to block out the piercing pain in his ribs.

‘So, what's the feeling among the crew?' Dmitri asks. ‘I thought El Animal might have been back here with an answer by now. What's taking him so long?'

‘I don't know. The crew aren't talking to me.'

Dmitri guffaws. And Carlos watches him reach for the intercom. ‘Manuel, bring the Spaniards up to the wheelhouse. I want them to hear from me what is on offer.'

Within minutes, the ten Spanish crew arrive edgily at the door. Their eyes go straight to the guns slung across Dmitri and José, and then dart around the room as they try to conceal their fear. Most of them, Carlos realises, are seeing the wheelhouse for the first time. They take in the bird's-eye view that the windows afford of the fore and aft decks, and Carlos imagines that each of them is reliving the last three weeks from his perspective. He questions whether they would have made different choices.

José is watching their eyes too, and twitching with adrenaline. He points his gun anxiously at the men.

‘Take the helm, Manuel,' Dmitri orders, before turning to speak to the assembled men, his own gun hanging by his side.

The Spaniards jeer collectively at Dmitri and swear at José, who is waiting on the Russian for direction. One of the
younger crew spits at Dmitri's feet. It's not the reception the mutineer had expected.

‘Do not mock us, my friends,' Dmitri warns. ‘And do not think for a moment that my colleague here does not know how to use that gun.' His expression hardens. ‘Show them, José. There must be someone here who has angered you over the last few weeks. Perhaps they have taken more than their fair share of food, or made you look a fool.'

José appears confused about what Dmitri is asking him to do.

‘Go on. Show them you can do it. Or are these men right? Are you afraid to use the gun?'

Carlos notices Manuel tensing visibly at the helm. This was not part of the plan. ‘There's no need for that,' Manuel speaks quickly. ‘Listen, men, to what Dmitri is offering you.'

‘Shut up. I want them to see I am serious.' Dmitri repeats his instruction to José. ‘Go on!'

José raises the weapon and looks down its length to the men in front of him. He surveys the group, one by one. Carlos has paid little attention to José until now. He strikes him as a loner, and wonders if the young Peruvian can claim to know any of the men in front of him—if anyone inspires hatred or admiration. Or are they just a blur of fishermen, desperate souls crewing the same boat on the same stretch of ocean?

‘I said go on!' Dmitri bellows.

The gun is trained on the oldest fisherman, Roberto Cruz. Carlos has never seen José even speak to him.

‘Do it!' Dmitri roars.

‘No!' Manuel shouts from the helm.

José panics and Carlos hears the gun explode.

‘
¡Jódete!
' Carlos swears. He hadn't expected the fool to do it. Not in the chest. Perhaps over his head, or into the floor. He goes to the old man. Roberto's son—a young man of perhaps twenty—is on the opposite side, holding his hand to his father's bleeding chest. His other hand smooths the wounded man's time-worn forehead, and strokes his thick, silvery waves of hair.