Alexander Smith - Unbearable Lightness of Scones

When Matthew felt the first tug of the water – the one that led to his overbalancing – he thought nothing of it. His mind at the time was on something quite different: on the meal he had enjoyed in the restaurant overlooking the beach, and on the name of the West Australian wine they had so enjoyed. Cape something or other. Menthol? No, that was not it. Menotti? No, he was a composer. And hadn’t he lived out near Gifford somewhere? Yesterday House? No, that was not it. Yester… Yes, that was it. And he wrote that opera that…

So might our thoughts drift from one thing to another, by the loosest of associations, at precisely the time that imminent disaster threatens to engulf us. Before he fell into the water, the last thing in Matthew’s mind was the word “Amahl,” and then “Night Visitors.” Then the sudden, overwhelming embrace of the warm water, swiftly rising to his chest, lifted him off his feet, covering him entirely so that he spluttered and struggled for breath.

Now he felt the real tug, as the rip tide seized him and moved him swiftly from the shore. Within a few seconds the distance between him and Elspeth, whom he could still make out in the darkness, on the beach, had increased to twenty yards. Then again the tug and the sense of travelling really quite quickly, away from the beach, out into the deeper water. There were waves, of course, which gave him an up-and-down movement, a bobbing, but which seemed to take him nowhere nearer the beach. As the initial shock subsided, he thought, I can swim with the waves, into the beach, but the movement of his arms seemed to make no difference at all to the direction in which he was travelling. His clothes seemed to be dragging him down; his feet were heavy. He kicked hard and remembered his shoes, abandoned on the sand, which made him think: How will I walk home now? Curiously, for one in such a plight, he wondered about the spare shoes in his suitcase. Or had he forgotten to pack them? And then he thought: I should not be thinking of these things at the moment.

Putting reflections on spare shoes out of his mind, he tried to remember what he had heard about rip tides. They took you out to sea, of course – he knew that; but there was something else, some bit of ancient knowledge that now he tried to bring to mind. Swim diagonally – across the tide – not against it. That was it. Then, when the power of the current was reduced, one could go in again. But now, far away from the beach, he found that the waves were confusing him. Where was the beach? In the direction of the lights, of course, but the lights seemed to come round again on both right and left. Perhaps the beach curved.

It was while he was puzzling over this that Matthew suddenly remembered the sharks. Coming from Scotland, where nature was, on the whole, benevolent, and where the most dangerous of creatures was the reclusive adder, or perhaps an aggressive Highland cow protecting her calf, he did not think of what might reasonably be expected to have an interest in stinging, biting or even eating him. And yet Australia was full of such creatures. The western taipan was the most dangerous of land-based snakes – and Australia had it. Then there were all those spiders, and the box jellyfish up in Queensland. Even the duck-billed platypus, so ostensibly lovable, had a poisonous spike concealed on its back legs and could cause a lot of damage. And then there were the Great White sharks, and this very beach was one on which attacks had occurred.

Matthew now remembered that one should never swim at night. Even the locals, braver than most, would never enter the water at night. And here he was, in the sharks’ element, utterly at their mercy – although mercy was not a concept one associated with sharks. I am simply prey, he thought; a floating meal. Involuntarily, he drew his legs up to his chest in an attempt to make himself less of a target, but this served only to make him less buoyant and he had to kick downwards again to stay afloat. And with each kick, he thought, I’m sending a signal down through the water into the depths: here I am; this way.

Terror was now replaced – even if only for a short time – by relative calm. Matthew realised that he was going to die, and the thought, curiously, made him worry less about what he imagined to be in the water below him. He wondered now how quickly the end would come; would it be, as he imagined, like being hit by an express train, pushed through the water; or would it be painless, almost analgesic, as the system shut down after the first large bite? Perhaps it would not be analgesic so much as analeptic: perhaps consciousness of what was happening would be heightened. Time, they said, slowed down when one fell a great distance. Perhaps that happened too in the course of a shark attack.

He stopped struggling against the current and began to allow it to move him where it would. He was feeling a little bit colder now, although the water was still comfortably warm. At least I didn’t fall into the North Sea, he thought. Had that happened, I would have had very little time before succumbing to the cold – about four minutes, was it not?

He looked up at the sky. Against the deep velvet blue, half way to the horizon, was the Southern Cross, as if suspended in the sky like a decoration; a symbol of this country that he had hardly yet got to know, which had welcomed him so warmly and was now dispatching him. At least I’ve seen the Southern Cross before I die, thought Matthew. At least there’s that.

And then he felt something brush against him, against his shoulder. He let out a groan, a sound of anguish that was quickly swallowed by the waves and the empty air. Phosphorescence glistened on the surface, and then disappeared. A black shape. A fin.

Provided that they survive the experience – which unfortunately many do not – those attacked by sharks provide us with a rather surprising account of what it is to face imminent annihilation in the jaws of a predator. Some describe feeling anger at the creature attacking them – understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances; others describe a feeling of calm verging on acceptance; yet others speak of an overwhelming determination to survive at all costs. This last reaction is perhaps the best response, as it can spur people on to heroic efforts to repel the shark with blows and kicks. And if these are directed at the sensitive part of the shark – the nose, which contains the shark’s navigation and sensory organs – then such blows can be successful in persuading the shark to desist. After all, it is thought that we do not taste all that agreeable to sharks, and while they might go to more effort with a succulent seal, a surfer in a wet suit may be a less attractive proposition.

Not that Matthew was wearing a wet suit. He was clad only in the clothes in which he had gone for dinner at the restaurant on Cottesloe Beach, minus one shoe, of course, which he had kicked off in his struggle to get back to the shore. When he felt the shark brush against him, though, he felt the sleeve of his shirt rip, exposing more flesh to the sea. He was calm enough to know that this was not a good development: an exposed arm was a more tempting target than one that was clothed.

He thought that at least. Beyond that, his reaction was neither to fight off his attacker nor to spend his remaining seconds on this earth in the contemplation of the life that he had led; in thoughts of his new bride, his gallery, his family, Edinburgh, his flat in India Street, and so on. He thought of none of these, because he lost consciousness. The human mind, faced with its end, can simply blot out the unacceptable; refuse to believe what seems to be the inevitable. Matthew’s mind did that. But just before that happened, he opened his eyes wide to the sight of the creature approaching him in the water; to its fin, which was rather floppy, he noticed, and to its curious beak-like nose. Beak. Dolphins have beaks.