Then a sound rose from the deep and flayed the skin from the backs of my hands. It was coming from a woman in the bow, and I saw that it was Martha, slumped over a bright, shrouded shape. Her cries broke into the sunlight one by one, ragged and raw, like creatures torn out of her on a hook.
All along the beach, people splashed out of the water, knees up, as if a fin had been spotted in the shallows. I saw Harry the barman running down to the boat.
The passengers came ashore. Some of them went away at once, others clung together on the beach, talking among themselves and then to the people getting up from their deckchairs and towels. Martha still sat in the bow with the captain beside her, weeping quietly now, while the sun clanged on every surface.
I should go and speak to her, I thought, comfort her. We’ve made a connection. But I couldn’t face it.
When Harry came up to the hotel, I followed him to the Sandbar and found him pouring rum into a dozen glasses on a plastic tray. He told me the story. The Parakeet had anchored off Coral Point as usual. While the crew prepared lunch, the snorkellers did as they always do, floating out into the water at the end of the beach and letting themselves be carried back on the current. I remembered it myself: you hardly needed to swim, you just lay on the tide, drifting, suspended between two worlds, with the sun on your back and your face pressed through the surface of the water into another dimension. No one knew whether a sudden current had turned Eckie in under the boat or whether he’d decided to swim beneath it. He’d been caught in a tangle of lines between the hulls and drowned. By the time his absence was noticed, it was too late. The captain dived in and cut him loose, and they hauled him onto the beach and pumped his chest for an hour. Even after they’d gone on board and turned the boat towards home, they went on trying to make him breathe.
But what about Martha? I asked. Didn’t she see that he was in trouble?
She was sleeping, Harry said. She had sat down in the shade against the dunes, watching Eckie in the water. I imagined him floating on the current, rolling over now and then to find her on the shore. ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ She stretched out with her head in the shade for a moment, she said, just for a moment, and she must have dozed off. When she awoke, the captain was already in the water with the knife in his hand and the boy’s body dragging. She thought her son had been murdered.
The boy’s body. I could not picture it. It was easier to imagine that this was a prank, that he would cast off the shroud of beach towels and jump up, squealing with laughter.
An ambulance came. Two men in floral shirts waited on the grass, while another in a white suit went down to the water’s edge, stepping carefully so that sand did not get in his shoes. The captain and his mate brought Eckie’s body ashore on a board and the other men put it in the ambulance. The captain carried Martha ashore in his arms like a child. Her silence was more appalling than her weeping. Everything fell into it.
I did not go to Blue Bay or anywhere else. I finished my work and in the evenings I sat on the verandah with a book on my knees. The Parakeet was anchored nearby. The newly arrived holidaymakers, unaware of its freight, and some of the old ones, eager to make the most of the time left to them, swam out to the boat and splashed around it. Behind the counter at the Sandbar, Harry went on cracking ice and slicing limes.
The overnight flight to Frankfurt was packed and I wished I was flying business class. The penny-pinching would have to stop. Watching the backpackers stuff their bags into the overhead bins, I wondered what Martha had made of Eckie’s rucksack. Could she figure out where everything went? Perhaps the travel agent had sent someone to help her, a guide or counsellor. They must have trained professionals for a situation like this. Or a sister might have come to support her. Did she fly home with the body? What do they do with the coffin? It must go in the hold with the luggage.
The safety film unnerved me. ‘In the unlikely event of a loss of pressure in the cabin, oxygen masks will drop down automatically from the panel above you.’ I imagined what it would be like to face death here, the suffocating terror of it. The cartoon figures on the screen, mincing stiff-legged towards the emergency exits or reaching calmly for the dangling oxygen masks — ‘Make sure your own mask is properly secured before you help children and others in need of assistance’ — were meant to reassure. These beige dummies should be less alarming than actors, who were real people after all, but they had the opposite effect on me. They looked like zombies. Flight of the living dead.
I ate the little helping of Moroccan chicken with the little knife and fork. I drank two little bottles of chardonnay.
There was an empty seat a few rows back, and after the trays had been cleared away, I thought of moving for the elbow room, the chance to put my head down for an hour or two. I remembered those stories about passengers on doomed flights who swapped seats with a stranger and were miraculously saved when the plane went down. But what about the others who were saved by staying where they were? There was no story in that. And there was no lesson in it either. You lived or died. Luck could not save you, and neither could love.
As soon as the lights were dimmed, I covered myself with the baby blanket and tried to sleep, but I was too near the galley. People looking for water or whisky kept pushing through the curtain, bumping against my shoulder.
In the small hours, when I had begun to despair of sleeping at all, a voice reached me. It was a young mother in the row in front of me. She had an infant in a bassinet secured to the bulkhead. I’d noticed her earlier because she kept getting up to look into the crib, to adjust a blanket or run a hand over the child’s head. Now she was singing a lullaby. I did not recognise the language, but I understood it well enough.
The cabin was quiet. Under the lit signs that said ‘Do not smoke’ and ‘Keep your seatbelt fastened’ nearly everyone was asleep. The baby was sleeping, but its mother went on singing. Just as she needed to reach out and stroke the edge of the crib with her fingers, she needed to reach out with words into the soft shell of his ear. For a moment, I saw an aeroplane full of little children asleep in their adult bodies, under youthful muscle and middle-aged fat, behind beards and breasts. Babies. The long, grey nursery droned into the dark. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and the consoling babble washed through me.
Industrial Theatre
I
I don’t know much about industrial theatre. To tell the truth, I didn’t even know it existed until my friend Natalie invited me to the launch of the new Ford Kafka. In her younger days, Natalie was a cabaret artist, but lately she has made a name for herself on the industrial stage. She thought this particular performance would appeal to me, because I am interested in both reading and motoring.
As a special guest of Natalie, entering through the stage door so to speak, I would not be receiving an official invitation. But she showed me the one she had saved for her portfolio: a key ring with an ignition key and an immobiliser jack dangling from it. It was very much like the real thing, except that the immobiliser was embossed with a K. The details of the launch — venue, time, dress code (‘black tie or traditional’) — were printed on the plastic tag. I learnt afterwards that messengers dressed as racing drivers had delivered the invitations by hand to each of the invited guests. The trend in these things, says Natalie, is towards the extreme. Even the habitués of industrial theatre grow weary of cheese and wine and complimentary gifts, and something out of the ordinary must be proffered to reawaken their appetites. Then the hope is always that these custom-made playthings will lie about on desks and coffee tables long after the event and become talking points.