He rolled up his sleeping bag and headed for the cabin door. Grant was seated at the console, examining a chart of the Banda Sea stretching all the way down to Timor. Prabir explained what he was doing. ‘Is that OK with you?’
‘Yeah, of course. Go ahead.’ She turned back to the chart. Prabir wondered belatedly if he was eroding her privacy; the cabin windows had no blinds, so the two of them would no longer be as manifestly out of each other’s sight as when he’d been tucked away behind the lockers. But she hadn’t raised any objection, and once she switched off the console she’d be all but invisible anyway.
As he unrolled his sleeping bag on the deck, he tried to decide whether or not he owed it to Grant to tell her he was gay. On one level it seemed like an insult to both of them to suggest that it mattered; unless he’d misread her completely, she was the kind of person who’d start from the assumption that he wouldn’t try to exploit their situation, and she’d certainly shown no sign of wanting to exploit it herself. But he knew that his judgements were sometimes skewed; he was so accustomed to ruling out by fiat the whole idea of sex that he forgot that other people weren’t necessarily viewing him through the same filter. A few years after he’d started at the bank, he’d been assigned two graduate trainees to supervise while they were on a month’s rotation in his department: a man and a woman, both about his own age. He’d done his best to put them at ease, remembering how nervous he’d been in his own first weeks on the job, and as far as he could tell he’d been equally hospitable to both of them. But after they’d moved on, the news had got back to him that the woman had found his behaviour positively oppressive. He’d been too nice. He must have wanted something.
There was a gentle breeze moving across the water; for a minute or two Prabir was almost chilly, until his skin reached a kind of clammy equilibrium. The boat was pitching slightly as it crossed the waves, but that bothered him even less than it had in the confined space of the cabin.
He’d brought his notepad with him, but he was too tired to continue with the language lessons. He stared up at the equatorial sky, the sky he’d seen from the kampung at night: obsidian black, with stars between the stars. He could fix his eyes on one spot and try to map it, but his mind stopped taking in information long before he hit the limits of vision.
A few hours before he’d almost welcomed being back on the Banda Sea, but the connection seemed a thousand times more immediate now, the details of his memory sharper by starlight. He could feel the years melting away in the face of the accumulating evidence: the musical sound of the half-familiar language ringing in his ears, the struggle to sleep on a humid night. That was how memory worked, after alclass="underline" placing like moments side by side. There was no linear tape inside his head, no date stamp on every mental image. It didn’t matter what had happened since. Nothing could stop the days and nights of eighteen years before becoming like yesterday.
He picked up his notepad and scrolled to the address book. Felix would be at work, but they could still talk for a few minutes. Though he’d never admit to it, he’d probably been offended that Prabir had only left a message when he’d called from the hotel. He’d probably welcome a civilised conversation to make up for the slight.
Prabir put down the notepad. He was sure it would work, he was sure it would help: watching the face of his lover in Toronto painted before him in a fine grid of light. That would banish the night terrors. But it still felt like the kind of crutch he didn’t want to lean on.
Prabir woke at dawn to the sight of Gunung Api, a black volcanic mountain rising out of verdant hills to tower over the Banda Islands. White mist—he hoped it was just mist—swirled around the peak. Gunung Api was still active, and though it hadn’t done serious harm for fifteen years, a recent report had said that clouds of hot gas and ash were being vented every month or so.
Api, Bandanaira and Lontar, the three main islands of the group, were about as close to each other as they could be without merging like Ambon’s Siamese twins. Lontar, to the south, was the largest, and Prabir could just make out the tips of it protruding on either side of the smaller northern pair.
He glanced towards the cabin. Grant didn’t seem to be up, so he urinated overboard to save disturbing her. He wondered if the boat would stop for him if he dived in for a swim to clear his head; the autopilot would certainly detect the event, but exactly how it responded would depend on the settings Grant had chosen. He decided not to risk it.
He sat on the deck and watched the volcano. Birdsong carried across the water, a faint, distorted version of the chorus that had woken him as a child. He laughed wearily. He’d sailed this sea before, he’d seen these stars before, he’d heard these birds before… but so what?Most people lived on in the very same town where their parents had died, some in the very same house. It was only because he’d left the whole country behind that it had come to seem so charged with significance. This was just a place like any other; it couldn’t drag him back into the past.
Grant emerged from the cabin and stood beside him, yawning and groggy, but smiling at the spectacle in front of them.
She said, ‘I don’t know about you, but quite frankly I stink. I’m going swimming.’
They sailed into the gently curved channel between Lontar and the other islands, past a moss-encrusted Dutch fort, towards the main town of Bandanaira. A vast coral garden lay beneath them, visible clearly through the water. Grant almost swooned with delight, crying out excitedly every now and then when she recognised yet another species of fish or sponge or anemone. Prabir stood beside her trying to be blasé; even if he couldn’t put a name to every one of these creatures, he hadseen this all before, when the ferry had passed through on the way to Ambon. The Bandas had been a major tourist destination then, the harbour full of thirty-something Beijing honeymooners snorkelling and—rather more bafflingly, and a great deal less benignly—jet-skiing. But between the war, the 2016 eruption, and a number of subsequent minor earthquakes, the tourist industry seemed to have gone the way of the spice trade.
They found a mooring and set out into town. Apart from one abandoned modern hotel the buildings were in good repair, and Prabir felt no sense of poverty or decay; Bandanaira seemed to have shrunk back into obscurity gracefully. People moved unhurriedly on foot or on bicycles. The volcano loomed over the main street, barely three kilometres away; it was impossible to tell from here that it was on another island altogether.
After a while a swarm of children surrounded them: not beggars, just curious, exuberant kids, born long after the last tourists had departed. When they asked where the visitors were from, and Prabir said, ‘Canada and Wales,’ they dissolved into fits of laughter; maybe they were too young to have heard of either place and thought these were unlikely-sounding made-up names. When Prabir managed to get a question of his own in, the answer was disappointing but no great surprise: the biologists’ expedition hadn’t stopped here.
One of the older boys told him earnestly, ‘Your wife is very beautiful. Tell her she is very beautiful.’ Prabir translated the compliment but left out the presumption of matrimony. It had occurred to him back in Ambon that it might simplify things if they agreed to let people assume this as a matter of course, but he hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with Grant, and he didn’t want to argue the point in public.
Grant consulted her notepad and they turned down a side road. The children fell away. Prabir said, ‘Do you want to tell me where we’re going?’
‘Up into the nutmeg plantations.’