Dead Water (8 page)

The twofold djinn spins together a scenario of unspeakable, sickening horror, then jackknifes away from the ruined hut, repulsed by its own powerful imagination.

Marking the southern boundary of the compound, half-hidden behind piled pallets and rolls of rusty, half-unravelled chain-link, there’s an old forty-foot shipping container, ‘MOYSE’ still just about readable on its flank. It’s the only secure structure on the site, the only corner of that busy desolation where they are guaranteed some peace. They need space to breathe. To come to terms. They need to understand what they are. The boys unravel and fan in under the lip of the padlocked door.

Among old buckets, tools, drums of fuel oil and kerosene, bottles of paint-stripper, turpentine and white spirit, the boys curl around themselves, each the other’s nest, and whisper stories in the dark. And for a while, they are comforted. These tales, at least, are familiar. ‘The Qazi of Jaunpur’. ‘Wangu and the Lion’. Folklore from a land since pocked with breeze blocks and landfill. But it’s a limited repertoire and very soon exhausted.

They try spinning new tales out of old, but story-time’s a luxury almost unheard of in their little lives; they’re only young and bricks are all they really know.

It goes like this
: Wangu is the oldest man in the village and he cannot bear to see anyone happy.

No, like this
: Wangu finds good, loamy clay soil from the side of a hill.

How about this?
Wangu just wants more money, more land, more sheep. He knows to avoid old stream beds and flood plains and digs a hole in the ground four feet long by three feet wide by three feet deep. When day dawns he has wandered far, far away from the valley of the stone lion and he fills the hole with water.

No, no
.

Like this, then
: When day dawns he swings his legs over the rail and plucks the brick from his mother’s grasp. It is an ordinary yellow house brick, poorly made, porous as a sponge. He folds it in his arms and falls into the water.

Something has happened. Something important. But the transition from the old, familiar shipping container to some other, quite alien, storyspace is so abrupt and so seamless it takes the boys a moment to realize the enormity of it. For a little while they read their old surroundings on to the new: Pink jellyfish: paper dishcloths. Darting crabs: rats. Rocks wrapped in gold weed: sacks of cement. Then, looking up, they see that the roof of the container is turned to sea and the silver undersides of waves plash their glassy sides with bluing light.

The boys rise cased in ice, infused with wonder. What is this place?

This landscape’s so strange it might have leaked from someone else’s dream. Land made of ice. Ahead of them a dark fang punctures the grey horizon. Foyn. They walk and walk. They stumble into puddles, shield their eyes, suck buttons torn from their coats to keep their thirst at bay. They wear felt boots. They carry axes, pistols. Now here’s a story worth the telling, a boy’s adventure tale, if only they can.

The blow is so fast the boys don’t even see it coming. Howling, swiped out of story-time, they flex into the air, fleeing white bears, smashed ice, and the red ruins of strange men.

Buoyant, briefly becalmed, the boys take stock. Somehow, they’ve fallen through the skein of things. How it happened is a question that can wait. Now all that matters is, how on earth are they going to get home?

They spin and spin, but there’s no traction here, no headway, they are adrift. Is this it, then? Is this the end? They’re only children. Little. They’re aghast. How can stories end in such a way? Where’s the moral? Where’s the justice? Brought up on old tales, and precious few of them, they’re unprepared for this. The way lives churn and churn, going nowhere, just frothing time into what might have been.

At the eleventh hour, a rescue. A wrecked and flapping bladder happens by, a plaything of the air. A complex fabric bag, sheened with aluminium paint. Now, this is new. Pure Jules Verne. Shit-kickers they may be, but they’re boys, and know of Nemo. Once, stumbling on some distant village fair, they snuck in under the tent wall to watch. James Mason in white polo-neck, Kirk Douglas in red stripy T. Ever afterwards, for as long as they were flesh, they carried the marks of their transgression. A scar above Kaneer’s right eye. Abhik’s cauliflower ear. A movie’s not for
bhangi
kids.

Well, look at them now! Squealing with joy, the boys wriggle round the stricken airship’s balloonettes and grid themselves along its flexible metal skeleton. There are men here, survivors of the first crash, but marooned now. Lost men. Dead men. One, despairing, leaps, embracing chilly dark and death.

Furiously, the boys work to keep the airship afloat. Snatches of the film return to their powerful and twofold mind and they use it to plug the airship’s holes. Kirk Douglas crouches by a gap in the wall, looking out into the Arctic night, hunting in vain for some last-minute, third-act solution. James Mason lies across a mat of muscle-red tarpaulin, greeting the tragic failure of his ship with dignity and cigarette. Mutters: ‘Should have stuck to submarines.’ Mason’s a reassuring name for these kids: kids whose clay- and mica-blotched skins once glittered greenly in the dusk like week-old fish. Mason’s swarthy, flattened looks make him every inch a Nemo, too. Prince Dakkar, son of the Rajah of Bundelkund, who plundered sunken galleons for gold and preyed on British ships to fuck the hated Empire up...

The boys will spin this story out for as long as they can, they’re learning fast, they’re getting good at this, but narrative logic demands that what goes up must come down. The shattered airship will crash again – and finally, this time. The ship must crash...

But the winds do not stop in their courses and the oceans do not cease to turn, and the bag, a ruined, wheezing lung, flies higher, higher, hits a slipstream, bends, deforms, stretches and shreds, its luggage spilled, its Nemo hurled without complaint to earth, roll-up sparking in his claywhite fist. World-wrapping winds whip shreds of fabric bag round and round the earth and drop them, years later, on a barren hill.

The boys slither over dry, smashed rock, dizzy with adventure. They have no idea where they are, or when, but they are beginning to grasp that geography matters less to them than it matters to the living. They make their own journeys with the stories they tell. They fashion – somehow, they don’t yet know how – their own escapes. They survived a barren and virtually unpeopled Arctic: they’ll make a story of this place too. Stories are their breath. Their food. Their blood. And they’re getting stronger.

On the hill opposite, perched in a shadowy defile, a wounded officer of the Sultan’s Desert Regiment blinks, sun-dazzled, as letters spill and blur across the shattered wastes, into the defile and up, unseen, towards his heart and brain.

The boys bed in, tense, waiting for the crash, the screaming plummet, the blow from the monstrous white bear. (For all they know, it’s their presence brought such ill-luck on their former host.) But nothing bad happens: just a stumbling descent on one good leg to the town and the shore and the motorboat. David Brooks rides in the prow, watching a pod of dolphins. He wonders why he feels so nauseous, who never had a day’s seasickness in his life. The boys, winding boisterously around his guts, fight for the view afforded by his eyes.

The aeroplane ride to the southern city of Salalah is exhilarating, though the Skyvan’s interior is cramped and smelly and not nearly as comfortable as the airship. Riding in the Land Rover with David Brooks and Edward Turnhill brings them back to territory with which they are almost familiar: dust, rock, broken concrete, jerry-rigged phone and power lines. It’s when they get to the palace that things begin to fall apart. This David man’s no hero, it turns out. He’s come to steal a kingdom. No hero hides behind a gun, a uniform. No. The boys will none of him. They’d sooner tease the old man’s parrots.

When they look up from their play, David has gone. Turnhill and the Sultan have gone. The palace is deserted.

The palace doors are open. One by one the Sultan’s birds flump their way towards the great outdoors. Funnelled to an unlikely height by the strange, reverse vertigo of once-captive birds, the parrots spiral over their palatial home, up and up, until they hit a cold layer, whipping counter to the sea fog’s flow. Airs of different temperatures and densities do not mix. They rub against each other and waves form along the join. An inverse wave, like a great tongue, scoops the birds up into the cold layer and the wind flings them, bright as rockets fired from Nemo’s ship, out over the ocean.

Around noon the next day a lump of something, a rough parallelepiped, yellow as a cheap housebrick, drops out of the Indian Ocean’s blue empyrean and lands on the roof of a forty-foot-long shipping container. The container is one of eight lashed to the hatch covers of a small Chinese-built cargo ship called
Malacca Queen
. Bricked in ice, deepfrozen, Sultan Said’s second-favourite parrot (a rare Senegal) shatters against the roof of the container and the container, ‘MOYSE’ stencilled on its side, rings like a bell. It’s empty – or may as well be, for what its contents are worth:

Wastepaper / US$100 TEU / 01 TEU.

Crouched in the dark between this container and the next –

MSKU7176658: Vehicles, cars, buses, trucks, lorries, motorcycles, bicycles, used.

– fifteen-year-old Egaz Nageen ducks.
Gunfire
? RIB pilot, machete boy and look-out, Nageen is so far out of his comfort zone here he’s imagining all kinds of shit. His idea of piracy is sneaking aboard some Sydney tourist’s yacht while they’re busy getting pissed portside. He’s never clambered aboard so big a ship, never mind in mid-ocean.

Something colourful and frilled convulses at his feet and Nageen falls back, fumbling with his knock-off AK. At last he has the thing pointed in the snake’s approximate direction – but now that he looks closer, what he took for the hood of a monstrous serpent turns out to be nothing of the sort. He nudges it with a horny toe. What the fuck? Just a few bloody feathers stuck together with a skin of grey glue. Must have been a bird flew into the ship’s exhausts. He nudges the dead fragment under the container with his foot, shuddering. Where are they? What’s taking them so long? What was that sound? He imagines all kinds of grief. A crew wielding knives from the galley. Fire hoses. Flare pistols. He lays down his AK a second and wipes his eyes with the edge of his T. He’s had enough of this shit. If he gets out of this alive he’s catching a bus, well away from Tarutao and the boys and all the stunted hand-to-mouth with which his youth’s been filled so far. He’s not stupid, and he’s not broke. There has to be something better he could be doing with his life.

Meanwhile the boys slither under the container, round to the doors, and in. Wrapped around each other for warmth, for safety, and for the sharing of strange tales, they explore the container. Their awakening senses tell them that they will not come this way again or see this box again. Still, they are excited. They are overjoyed, for every such container affords a feast for story-eating creatures.

Boxes and boxes and boxes. Millions of boxes.
Tens
of millions of boxes – and every one a dedicated explorer of the earth! Follow the boxes and you follow the stories of every grain and fruit and paste and spice. Every nail and screw and handle. Every ointment, adhesive, moisturizer, syrup. Every rebar. Every book. The drug-run done, the ship’s released, rebadged, re-crewed. MSKU 7176658 is unloaded in Istanbul and transferred to a Suezmax behemoth bound for Nagasaki. From there, stuffed with electronic components, it heads back north to Tilbury and on to a ship bound for Newfoundland. Fifty further voyages are enough to bring Abhik and Kaneer to Mumbai. From here it’s an easy business to ride a box back home.

Stretches of the GTR are as busy as the Strait of Malacca, just as dangerous and just as pirate-infested. At 2.00 a.m. the truck they’re riding in splits its tyres, jackknifes, and rocks to a halt in a cloud of dust. Youths rush out of the shadows and up to the cab, wielding iron reinforcing rods. But the boys are long gone, bellied by the warm air rising from the Sher Shah Suri Marg. They know what they are now. They have the measure of their power. Howling, they hurl their way home, their colours startling drivers bound for shifts in the emergency wards of Agra, Mathura and Bharatpur.