Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

The weather becomes dull, then clears to a hot sun again. One late afternoon on a bright day, Api says he is going for a swim in Oriental Bay; he wants to collect shellfish and catch fresh fish. The water is flat calm, iridescent blue. Wearing blue swimming trunks and equipped with goggles, snorkel, flippers and a spear gun obtained from a sports goods shop, he wades out from the beach and sinks beneath the surface. I sit on some rocks, the Sten gun nearby, watching him wallowing around. I doubt if there are any sharks. And he says he’s a good swimmer. But I feel uneasy. He dives several times, the black flippers up-ending, sliding under the surface tension. The glass-like top of the water becomes liquid in ripples, then calms. I’ve forgotten my sunglasses; I can’t see beneath the brightness of the water, it’s all polished and sky. He seems to be under for a long time. I stand up. There are bubbles, a faint swirl. The nightmare closes in quickly. It’s no use shouting. I clamber across the rocks. Nothing. The light hurts, I can hardly see. The water here must be about a metre deep. I step in, onto sand, and wade forward. He is there, by the next rock, breaking through the surface, blowing water from the snorkel, his hair matted. He wrenches off the mouthpiece, exhales and laughs, eyes crinkling behind the glass visor. The water seems to slide off his skin, over its smoothness, as it would from the skin of a child; he lies back, drifting towards me, the bright line of water making its way up his chest and throat, the ripples shaking his image until it dissolves, childlike, a convulsive movement beneath the pressure of my hand on his head forcing him below the surface with hardly any pressure at first but then a firm hold of my spread hand pressing down to meet the sudden resistance from below, the eyes wide under the water and collecting all the light; child, I know, the struggle, the movements are only instinctive and I can help you hold firm against them because I know from what you let me see in your eyes that you have no control over those movements and this is what you want, this is why you looked to me, still, now, in unbelievable bright liquid staring, the eyes will stay open even after the limbs have all gone slack and the hand has slipped back from the side of the bath. Why don’t the eyes close?

A sudden wrench on my arm pulls me forward and I almost lose my balance. The head jerks away. A kick thuds onto my kneecap. In the same instant the water explodes upward, splattering my face in a shock.

The Maori is standing, the spear gun held straight at my chest, less than a metre away. He gasps for breath. The saltwater runs down my face. I blink it aside. We stare, fixed; his eyes wide behind the beads of sea on the glass panel. He spits, savagely.

‘What the hell you think you’re doing?’

The different images from this and the other day unravel themselves like straightening reflections pulled different ways from a distorting mirror.

How did he trick me? He fooled me into thinking he was drowning. For a moment he’s about to fire the spear gun, to kill me. He sees that fear in my face, my amazement at his impulse, his overreaction. He lowers the gun, eyes still fixed on me; chest heaving, mouth open. With his other hand he pulls off the goggles and flings them onto the rocks.

‘Don’t—’ The words stick in my throat.

‘What?’ he says.

‘You tricked me.’

‘Jesus!’

There is a tight, clenched silence. We are both trying to work out what has happened. We both want explanations. Excuses, at least. There aren’t any. Are there? My mind writhes around. All I can say is, ‘You shouldn’t have.’

‘Me?’ he asks, screwing his face into exaggerated bewilderment. ‘ Me ?’

‘I thought you were in trouble. You tricked me.’

‘I bloody well was !’ he interrupts. ‘ You weren’t fooling, were you? Eh?’ He leans forward, very much a stranger, mad, holding his fist towards me, index finger pointing. ‘Don’t ever try that again. Ever. Right?’

‘You were making a joke of it,’ I manage to say.

‘What?’

‘Drowning. You know my son drowned. You shouldn’t have done that.’

The anger melts away from his expression; all his facial muscles relax, and his whole body seems to sag. He obviously hadn’t thought about it at all. The realisation deflates him. His eyes waver and move away.

‘Oh, Christ,’ he mutters. In a sudden movement he turns and hurls the spear gun out into deep water. Then, head down, hands on hips, he shakes his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, the words directed not really to him but to the other images from the past sliding away deaf beneath liquid, under cold earth, into the folds in my mind. I never said it before. It would not have been understood. But I never said it. I’m sorry.

‘So am I,’ the Maori says. He wrenches the flippers off, climbs out of the water onto a rock and extends a hand down towards me. ‘Come on.’

I look up. It makes some kind of sense to him. Not to me. I can’t comprehend it. The words cover something which will not be looked at, which is too elusive. All I know is that I have a conscious mind which has adapted itself to a very strange existence. Inside the control that holds my expressions and gestures I suddenly feel helpless, like a thing evolved in liquid under different pressure and weaker gravity, bones gone soft inside a hard shell, carried up by a wave against my will and thrown onto land under a light far too strong.

I raise my hand and he helps me up; solemn, subdued.

That evening I move my eyes from the book I am trying to read, and find he is gazing at me over a glass of wine, thinking intently. Our eyes collide and he slowly looks away. When I try to say that I was afraid of something else, that it wasn’t him I was pushing down, it was the memory, it was being reminded of what for me was a nightmare coming up from the past; he drinks carefully and then says, Well, it felt like me, to me.

It is a reply which might sound like one of his self-mocking jokes playing on the responses of an imaginary Maori, a stereotype less intelligent than himself yet part of an identity which is inside him somewhere, useful for saying awkward things. The permission to be frivolous has gone now, so the remark sounds hard. I realise that he dived beneath the water today to play a casual joke of the kind he might have tried out on one of his mates. The extent of his miscalculation went beyond what either of us had imagined; and now he has to estimate how far I am from being one of his mates, and cope with knowing it could be an immense distance. His intuition may have failed him; I may be immune to it in ways he hasn’t thought about.

He has been betrayed again. Perhaps he looks back over memories which may be clearer than mine and casts this into the balance.

The evening goes on. Separated from the machinery which used to slice it up and deal it out, time has already become psychological, and although we’ve kept our watches going to our own guess of hours and minutes, the figures ticked off by the hands no longer have very much meaning. The days appear to have distorted and stretched in places as much as the nights. Within a few hours even a slight lessening of the tension makes the day’s events seem to fall back a long way into the past. We want this to happen. So it happens.

Beneath what seems to be vulnerability he is resilient; there are concealed resources for absorbing surprises and making adjustments. My admission that I was not consciously in control of my actions has diminished me, and his manner changes in small, scarcely noticeable details; the emphasis of his gestures, an inflection in the tone of his voice, suggests that he has assumed some of the control I have lost. There is an air of reluctance about this, of someone forced to take on extra duties but he becomes more intent and watchful as well as more decisive. I wonder if I imagine most of this from my helpless feeling. I know for certain only that the expression which occupies him later and increases in the intervals between the attention given to trivialities is a more bitter sadness than before, adding years to his features. It occurs to me that he is older than he ever told me.