Dead Water (48 page)

He dips his hand into the surf. It comes out flecked with stars. A wave comes and crashes and recedes. He watches as it runs back to the sea, leaving green lights in the sand, some brilliant, some dim, but thousands of them, strewn, curled, massed, riven by dark little rivers no wider than a fingernail. He thinks of the satellite photographs you see sometimes in airline magazines: the seaboards of great cities at night. A wave washes the city away. A few seconds later another appears. For a minute or more he stares at his feet as though the sand around were a gazetteer. Hong Kong... Singapore... Rotterdam... Yokohama... He thinks about great waves. About the births and deaths of civilizations. He is very tired. Bone-tired. He aches.

The next day he arrives in Sur and, glad to be free of the cabin for a while, wanders the streets, from the offices of National Biscuit Industries past tailors and launderers to the Turkish Sheep Restaurant on the far side of town. He sits on the promenade watching the fleet coming in: open boats draw up along the beach. There are about fifty of them, loaded to the gunwales with tuna. The surf is pink with blood and yet the men and boys wrestling the fish off the boats are in dishdashas so white, so pressed, so neat, it’s as though the world has let its continuity lapse.

The fish are auctioned off by a Sur native wielding a silver-handled cane. The affair, apparently ill-tempered, keeps collapsing into laughter, only to resume at the same cut-throat pitch. Toyota Hiluxes line the promenade, their windscreens covered in blankets. Drivers stir inside the darkened cabs, snatching sleep before the all-night run to Dubai.

In the evening he forks up a plateful of sweet fish makboos on a terrace overlooking the offices of the Golden Cage Wedding Company. He says: ‘If it’s pirates you’re after you should be here with me. Every other creek and lagoon they say Osama hid out there in the bilge of a dhow when he fled Afghanistan. Osama is the Bonny Prince Charlie of our age. Where are you?’

He does not delete the message this time. He leaves it on her phone. He wants her to know where he is. Absurd as this is. Absurd as he knows it to be: he wants her to come after him.

The next day, heading east, the hills grow sharper, darker, more pyramidal, and the sand of the desert disappears under a wine-coloured gravel, dotted here and there with prosopis trees, their canopies pruned by passing camels into natural umbrellas. A small range of crumbly red hills marks the point at which the earth surrenders to its own gravity. Beyond, the landscape acquires an absolute and mathematical flatness, before dribbling away into dunes and gravel beds, shallow lagoons and salt marshes. On the northern side of this spit is the Gulf of Oman. Southwards – a five-minute drive over weedy rubble and ferny succulents – lies the Indian Ocean. So he comes to it at last: Al Suwiah. The end.

The currents here sort the ocean’s trash and hurl it on to the beach to make strange, apocalyptic waymarkers: here a line of shattered televisions; there a pink pool of dead shrimps, over there a shoal of plastic sandals. He picks his way through the sea’s leavings – fragments of coral, plastic bottles, leathery rays. When the wind dies the air fills with flies and the stench of dead fish.

He walks for hours, courting a tiredness that will not come, past deserted fishing huts made of date-frond wattle and old fishing net. With the onrush of night, structures hidden in the day by dust and haze become visible. At the end of an old landing strip there’s a navigation tower with a revolving blue-white light. Inland, jazzy red fairy lights blink in complex, shifting syncopations: air hazard lights for the transmitters of the BBC World Service.

In boxer shorts and barefoot he zig-zags east along the beach in the last of the light, following the tracks of turtles as they scoop their way up to the dunes to lay their eggs. The ground is covered in circular depressions where the young have dug up through the sand and away.

Back at the waterline the sea crushes its colours into the sand.

David thinks of Eric Moyse in his container, crossing from ocean to ocean and in and out of deep-water facilities from Rotterdam to Kaohsiung. Unrooted from everything, sensitive cargoes move, silent and unseen, over the earth. Or they do not move: a mystery that tantalized the crews of the
Dobbs
and the
Fram
. Dead water. It has not escaped his notice that, after all these years, and having committed so many trivial and not so trivial betrayals, and having sacrificed so very much of both himself and others, he has ended up, today, barely twelve hours’ drive from where his journey started more than forty years ago. Bitumen and metal dust.
Italia
.

He goes back to the car and checks his phone. There are no messages.

He gathers driftwood for a fire. He comes upon a smooth grey piece from an old dhow. A decoration, a repeated spiral pattern, has been chiselled into the wood. He traces the figures with his finger. This way. That. This way. That. His finger races round the wood, chopping waves into froth: no headway here.

He lays the fragment down in the light of the fire, takes a picture of it with his phone, then tosses it into the flames.

Whatever else her father has done, he has been a good teacher. The first thing Ester does, she throws away her mobile phone. Next, she has to ditch the Land Rover.

She makes it out of Muscat easily enough and passes over the hills of Sohar in the last of evening, the copper-green of the earth turned mossy by the dying light. To either side of her rise hedgerows of plastic bunting. The road is up. The road is closed. She joins a tailback of Shinas-bound traffic composed almost exclusively of Toyota Hiluxes. Where the plastic hedges meet in a tangle of rusted cementation rods and gray drainage pipes a dented tin sign sends them trailing cluelessly, nose to tail, into the desert.

For twenty minutes Ester follows the cars in front into the wilderness. But a glance at the cabin compass finally convinces her that they are doubling back on themselves. They are curving back towards Sinbad’s emerald mountains. They are lost. For a while, mesmerized by their collective folly, she follows the car in front and the traffic snakes out ahead of her, and it weaves obediently behind, and the whole convoy wriggles across the desert like a line of ants.

The spell breaks. Ester wrestles the wheel around and heads off on her own, southwards, into the dark. The cars behind follow her, obedient as chicks. She accelerates. The vehicle behind her catches her up, flashing its headlights, entreating her to slow down. It is not good to be followed like this.

She turns the wheel an eighth-turn to the right and holds it there. A minute passes. Another. She’s driving one-handed, peering into the dark, ready at a moment’s notice to grab the wheel and wrench it round to avoid an acacia tree, a big stone, a fault in the rock. The ground refuses to surprise and another minute passes. Now, to her right, she makes out a string of headlamps sweeping by her side window into the dark. She holds her hand steady on the wheel, exerting the gentlest pressure, and in another minute she has the traffic stream dead ahead of her.

Another minute and the traffic flow is on her left and she is merging gently in. The car that has been tailgating her nuzzles in three cars behind and the traffic behind it merges where it can – and then she loses sight of where the flows are blending.

For a while she orbits, an obedient mote, in the circus she has made. Then she cuts her lights, drops into manual, and floors the accelerator. This time she is too quick, too impetuous for anyone to follow. In the rearview mirror she sees that the gap she left in the circle is already healed.

She does not want to reveal her position, so rather than flash her brake lights she lets the Land Rover coast to a stop. She climbs out. The ground is flat and rippled and hot through her trainers. The Land Rover’s bodywork tings and crackles as it cools.

In the distance the great wheel she has made in the desert endures, vehicles following each other bumper to bumper. She wonders how long it will last. This eddy. This gyre. How turbulence maintains itself. Why the oceans do not cease to turn.

She waits for it to disappear – a bright snake, all glass and glitter, eating its own tail. She waits for morning. She waits to be alone. Once she is alone, she’ll torch the car. Once she’s torched the car, she’ll walk away.

Many thanks go to men and families I cannot name (they know who they are), and to two I can: Anna Davis and Nic Cheetham towed this story into clear water.

S. I.
London, 2011

‘The truth is, everything in this universe has its regular waves and tides. Electricity, sound, the wind, and I believe every part of organic nature will be brought some day within this law. But my philosophy teaches me, and I firmly believe it, that the laws which govern animated beings will be ultimately found to be at bottom the same with those which rule inanimate nature, and, as I entertain a profound conviction of the littleness of our kind, and of the curious enormity of creation, I am quite ready to receive with pleasure any basis for a systematic conception of it all.’