The View from Mount Dog (13 page)

And always the nerves alert, the quick flicker of glance for the least movement, for the white-rimmed eye moving in the eel’s lair as a dot among all those undulating forests. The click of unseen crabs, the grunt of a creature disturbed, the directionless drumming on some thoracic air-sac. No longer can you hear the compressor’s distant thump, and it seems like half an hour since you last saw Badoy’s light or heard the far metallic ring of his spear-point on rock. You are investigating a black diagonal cleft little more than a foot wide. A yard inside and it turns to the right. There is nothing in this pocket other than small white pebbles on its floor, and it is precisely those white pebbles which should be telling you about the thick olive snake embedded among them which you mistake for – what? – the tail of a ray, perhaps. So automatic has become the sighting, the firing, the hauling-in of fresh trophies that you fire without thinking; then the thought, too late, catches up.

The spear is snatched from you so fast that its cocking lug and the first foot of nylon line take skin off your fingers. It lodges at the back of the cleft, quivering as whatever it is tries to drag it round the corner. Then amid the clouds of silt you glimpse what it has struck into and another, darker cloud comes billowing around the corner to engulf you. Octopus. The one creature of which Badoy has spoken with real fear.

‘I don’t like the feeling on your hand,’ he once said after winkling a tiny octopus from its hole with a steel prod at low tide. ‘They stick to you.’ He lifted up his hand with its dark parasite wrapped around it like a clot of leeches. ‘This one is too small; but even a little bit bigger – say, the head the size of half my fist? – and they will bite pieces out of you. That mouth, that beak you remove when you eat them, it’s very strong and sharp. The big ones will always try to pull you towards the beak to tear you.’

But even so you are already trying to get hold of the end of the spear, reaching right-handedly into the cleft to rescue that precious weapon, still perhaps not sure of the power and size of the creature you have engaged with and which still lies hidden around the corner. Only when you feel a second tentacle close over your forearm, wrapping it together with the spear and tugging you irresistibly forward, do you realise how truly awful is the mistake you have made and how likely it is to prove fatal. For there is a degree of strength which you know cannot be
resisted for long. You know from so many encounters over the months with even insignificant-looking sea-creatures how powerful the small muscle of a clam is, how resistant to dying a little eel. And now you feel your arm being compressed, the skin being dragged forward towards the hand as if it were a long glove being pulled off and simultaneously your right shoulder catching half into the mouth of the cleft, your head desperately averted over it and wedging at an angle against the rock outside so that slowly the mask is being crushed sideways across your face and immediately the water spurts in to fill the face-plate and your nose.

Now, with your head bent back over right shoulder, left cheek ground flat against the coral, everything is dark. By some miracle your left hand still holds the torch, but it is pointing uselessly into the sepia-filled cave. The pulling stops for a moment but does not ease while both creatures take stock of the damage and plan tactics for the immediate future. But you have no tactics and very little future. A grain of reason makes you bring your left hand as far away from the hole as possible and, reaching back behind you, you fire a regular three dots of light in random directions. Your heart-rate is way up and your respiration crazy, panting the rank air out into your skewed mask in the hope that the pressure will empty it of water again but it can only half-empty it: the seal between face and rubber is too weak on one side to stop the in-flood of that liquid black cement.

An age passes; you are locked and entombed, your neck cannot be far from breaking. Then something touches your hand holding the torch. You flail it wildly, trying to shake loose this new tentacle. Badoy’s light breaks across your head and he comes round to peer in at your face-plate and, by God, he’s
grinning
as if to say:
‘Ay,
now you’re learning the trade.’ And somewhere inside his lair the octopus senses reinforcements have arrived and his pull increases again. Then suddenly your air stops. The tube is pinched between you and the mouth of the hole, perhaps at the rim of your mask, perhaps lower down your body. You wave desperately with the torch, making confused gestures towards your head like someone with an arm amputated at the wrist. Badoy, incredible Badoy, notices straight away amid all else that your bubbles have stopped. He reaches over and pulls your mask right off and the cement crashes into your eyes, nose, mouth, then you feel a stabbing at
your lips: another tube gushing diesel stink. You grip it in your teeth and suck and choke and suck and open your eyes. There in front of you is Badoy’s face, slightly blurred now that your mask has gone. He hangs there in his little olive-lensed goggles, grinning and grinning until he reaches over and gently pulls the air-hose from your mouth and puts it back in his own for a few breaths. Then he makes a gesture you cannot understand because he, too, is holding his torch in the hand that makes it and it stabs wildly. He thrusts the air-line back in your mouth and disappears behind you. His light vanishes.

Now begins the octopus’s attempt to pull its prey bodily into its lair. Its grip no longer feels localised at your arm. Vaguely you know it must have put out another tentacle to grip your body, but it surely cannot pull you in like that: the cleft is too narrow to accommodate you and the tentacle; as long as it goes on trying that way you are going to remain stuffed into the entrance but not drawn in past it. And then that pressure, too, increases unimaginably and you realise that your reasoning did not include the inevitable collapse of your own ribcage. There must be some movement into the hole because your head twists round even further, making crackling sounds. It is now so far round it catches a glimpse of Badoy’s torch pointing aimlessly upwards; you wonder why it should be until you sense it is your own, held behind your back in your left hand, now no longer a part of you. So where
is
Badoy, God damn him? Fiddling about somewhere below in the darkness….

Until his light, like a lark descending, strikes from above and there he is again. This time he tears the air-line from your mouth and pants great cavities into the water about you. His spear-gun is gone; in his hand he holds a knife. With this he retreats behind you after first pushing his air-hose back into your mouth. There are sensations of rending from your midriff; light flashes intermittently. Suddenly the appalling grip around your waist eases, your lower half is free to move a little away from the mouth of the hole and swivel to the right to relieve minutely your cracking neck. You are once again held only by the arm, which feels double its length. Badoy appears briefly, sucks air and disappears. This time there are no flashes of light: he is beneath you, wedging himself and his torch into the hole. There are confused feelings of tearing and pain from your arm, and without warning the rock floats away from the side of your head like feathers and a gentle cushion of water takes its place.
Simultaneously there is a great roaring in one ear: Badoy is offering you your now-released air-line and takes back his own. For a moment you both drift, each sucking on your tube as somewhere in the night above the compressor chugs and chugs, blessed engine.

Badoy shines his light back towards the cleft, now ten feet away. A great cloud of ink floats about its mouth and a host of small nocturnal shrimp-like krill, attracted by the light, are prickling at hands and faces like flies on a summer’s day. Then he propels you away and upwards in a slow journey that seems to take for ever while pain begins gathering in your right hand and arm, the left side of your head, your neck and nearly everywhere else. The pressure of the air-jet increases as you rise, and you still go on breathing it even after your head breaks the surface, not quite sure that you have left one medium for another. Then you spit it out and it flails and gushes.

‘Oy, Badoy! Badoy!’ you shout in the darkness into the suddenly cold air. An answering cry comes from close at hand and now you can hear his own hose, discarded and bubbling. ‘Where the hell did you get the knife?’

‘Ayy!’
He gives a long exultant whoop. The compressor is close by; it chugs in the invisible boat, rising and falling. There are voices. ‘What did you say?’

‘The knife. Where did you get it?’

‘I went up for it.’

‘Jesus!’ The implications. ‘But I had your air-hose.’

‘It wasn’t so far. We were only down about seventy feet.’

‘But we’d been there a long time. Decompression….’

‘No problem. I went up straight and down straight again. You can do that if you’re quick.’

‘Why didn’t we take bloody knives
with
us?’ you heard your petulant rhetorical question go out into the night air. ‘So
stupid
….’

But what was this world to which you had returned? You still felt yourself travelling up and up into the sky as usual, but this time it was different. Something had changed; for the aftermath of fear is not relief and still less is it reassurance. The exact note had been struck, your whole life was ringing with that undeniable resonance, that messy echo of childhood fear of fear, and hero-worship, and fear of cowardice, and longing for something or other to be over.

You got yourself into the boat, the compressor fell silent, the
screw churned. There was not much talk and no banter even from those who had spent the night safely aboard. You slumped, the deck slippery with your blood and the mucus which had come from the octopus and coated everything. In the dark you discovered your arm was burst and a thick muscle now lay exposed; you turned your torch on it in loathing but merely found a foot or so of severed tentacle still stuck there.

‘Ah,’ said Badoy, ‘that was good, bringing a bit of the octopus. Better than none at all. We’ll cook it by and by.’

You smiled in the dark at this. ‘What was your own catch like before all that?’

‘OK. Not bad, not good. Not a very good night for fish. About like you.’

‘Damn. Of course, my own catch is still down there.’

‘No, it’s here. I cut off the nylon before we came up.’ He flashed his light on to a jumble of fish bodies in the bilges. He had also brought up your mask.

‘You’re quite unbelievable.’

You returned to the island where you examined your wounds. Nothing desperate. The round sucker-weals stood out in scarlet over right arm and waist, each pinpricked with livid blood-spots. The side of your face and head was gouged and scratched but it was all superficial. There was a single deep cut on the inside of your forearm where Badoy’s knife had sliced through the tentacle. ‘Sorry,’ said Badoy.

Dawn was coming. The air turned grey. You all packed up and crossed back to Tagud. The story was told and retold, but only because there was nothing else to do with it. There is no way outside the gruff fiction of derring-do to thank someone for saving your life; it is far too complex a matter to merit simple thanks. Must you not have
wanted
to die, just a little bit? Must there not have been that desire tucked down in your unconscious to entomb your conscious as well in those dark gulfs, even as your betrayed body tried to escape them? How else could you have ignored so many danger signals, have been so cavalier? And Badoy, too, had he ever had any real option? What were the psychic rewards for being a hero? Or for failing? How, knowing all this and suspecting still more, could you possibly say anything as banally inappropriate as ‘thank you’?

For the rest of that day and, it seemed, for weeks afterwards the stench of the compressor came back up from inside.

On the way back to Anilao, Badoy said once again, and not at
all apropos of the incident (which you really believed he had half-forgotten): ‘I don’t want to be a fisherman all my life. Are there jobs in television in your country? I would like that, I think.’

For a short time you resumed your leisurely life in Anilao, although it took time to muster the courage to go spear-fishing again, particularly at night. As if to urge you through this bad patch Badoy made you an even better spear-gun to replace the other, with a redesigned trigger of whose mechanism he was extremely proud. Then one night he said: ‘To be a fisherman you need to be brave.’ It was the first time he had ever alluded to questions of fear and courage. You were surprised.

‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘of course you are scared down there. Plenty of people there at Tagud will not go down at night like you, like us. They do not want to use the compressor. We’re all scared; it’s a bit dangerous sometimes.’

You knew then that right from the beginning it had been a plot. For reasons of his own Badoy had wanted you to feel fear, had needed to set up that howling echo just as much as your submerged self; had led you inexorably to the compressor so you could suck in great draughts of it. The reasons – oh, they were lost in the workings of his psyche maybe; or perhaps they were his direct way of counteracting an impression of impotence he hated giving. For might not a foreigner like yourself so richly endowed with nonchalant mobility, such passports and visas and letters of credit, who moved so fluently in the clear waters above a sullen Third World labour pool – might not such a foreigner be badly in need of a lesson in respect? To make light of two great obsessions of the affluent West, technology and physical security, even as he dreamed of clawing his way into that world – might that not have been Badoy’s real elegance, his deadliest accuracy? And if you had not been ruffled by this suggestion of war would you not have allowed a burst of affection for the way it had been declared?

‘There’s one thing,’ you said magnanimously. ‘If that night we’d been wearing pukka scuba gear, I’d most likely be dead. You couldn’t just have given me your air-hose while you went up to fetch the knife.’

‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘You see? Simple things are best.’