Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘He wouldn’t,’ Suzanne said.

Wilson laughed. ‘He might.’

Namu called from the stern and pointed towards the coast. The land had flattened out; they could see a few thatch huts, some palm trees, a strip of volcanic sand.

‘San Bruno,’ Wilson told Suzanne. ‘People say that a tribe of Amazon women lived there once, but there’s no real proof, only stories that were handed down.’ He stared towards the shore, its charcoal sand, the curved prows of canoes. ‘It’s just a fishing village now.’

Suzanne listened carefully as Wilson described the place that they were heading for. It lay just to the south of a sandbank that was almost a mile long. Each morning shoals of small fish swam through a channel at the southern tip, which made it a popular feeding-ground for bigger fish. If they anchored above the channel, Wilson explained, they would stand a good chance of catching bonita or cabrilla or yellowtail.

She interrupted him. ‘But it’s all sea. How do we know when we’ve arrived?’

Wilson asked Namu, and then translated the fisherman’s reply for her. There were three different marks on the land, Namu said. When all three lined up in a formation that he recognised, then he knew he was there. He lifted his shoulders, grinned.

She watched Namu as he watched the land, and thought she saw the moment when the landmarks fell into place because his wide eyes sharpened at the corners. Soon afterwards he stood up and began to furl the sail. Next he had to fix their position on the surface with his anchor, a solid lump of rusting metal. It looked more like part of an engine than an anchor, and she said as much to Wilson.

‘It is part of an engine,’ he said.

There were rocks on the ocean bed below, he told her. If they used a traditional anchor, the kind with a straight piece and a smiling piece, it would more than likely just get stuck.

He had to help Namu heave the anchor on to the bow and roll it overboard. The two men could barely manage it between them. But over it went, and the rope uncoiled slickly, fizzled over the side as if it were being devoured by the sea. Uncoiled, uncoiled; it seemed the sea’s appetite was boundless.

‘It must be deep,’ she said.

Wilson nodded. ‘Fifteen fathoms.’

Namu took a wooden reel and unwound the twine. On the end of the twine was a lead weight, the shape of a teardrop, and a hook. He reached into a bucket at his feet and took out a mackerel.

She watched as Namu threaded the hook in through the fish’s mouth, out through its gills, in through its body, out through its tail. It reminded her of sewing. He straightened the fish on the hook, then threw it overboard and put the reel and the line in her hand.

‘Let the line pay out,’ Wilson told her. ‘It’ll run through your fingers. When it stops running, that means you’ve reached the bottom. Then you reel it back in a few feet, so it’s hanging above the floor. That’s where the big fish are.’

She followed his instructions. The line slid across her palm and vanished into the water, just kept vanishing. A magic trick: there did not seem to be any reason why it should be moving. She tried to imagine what the line was passing through, what it would be seeing if it had eyes, and could not. Such a vastness lay beneath them; it was like an image of infinity.

At last the line stopped paying out, as Wilson had said it would, and she reeled it back and held it, as he was holding his, between her thumb and forefinger, almost as if she were testing its weight. She sat for several minutes with the line between her fingers. Nothing happened.

When Wilson reeled his line in, the bait had gone.

She decided to check her own line. The hook came up empty. Yet she had felt nothing.

‘It’s practice,’ Wilson told her. ‘It takes years.’

He fixed her hook for her, and she began again. Time slowed down, and then it did not seem to pass at all. Light glanced off the water. The boat seemed cushioned, in suspension; nothing changed or moved. Soon even her sense of place dissolved. It was not here that children walked in her shadow and moonlight ran down swords. Not here; somewhere else. She tried to summon Paris into her mind, and found that she could hardly remember it. Or rather, she could remember it, but it just did not seem real. The grey streets that she saw did not convince her. What had she loved? The city after rain. Dancing until she was almost asleep on her feet. The nightingales on the Rue de la Sorbonne. But their singing now seemed artificial, shrill, to her, a tune played on a music box. Rain was something she no longer understood. And dancing? She preferred not to think of that at all. The sound of a knife on wood broke into her thoughts, and she glanced round.

Namu was hacking two mackerel into pieces on the bench beside him, chopping the fish as fine as if they were parsley. When he had reduced them to a bloody pulp he moved down the boat, examining the pale stones that were wedged between its ribs. She had thought these stones might be decorations, or represent some kind of superstition, but she now saw that they had a specific, practical purpose. Namu selected a stone with a good flat surface and laid the crushed fish across it, then he took his hook, already threaded with a whole mackerel, and wound it round and round the stone. He threw the whole grisly parcel into the water and paid his line out fast. He looked up, saw that she had been watching. He grinned, and uttered a few quick words.

‘What did he say?’ she asked Wilson.

‘Wounded fish. They smell the wounded fish.’

And sure enough, before too long, Namu was up on his feet, the line taut in his fist, the muscles standing out on his stringy arms.

‘He’s got something,’ Wilson told her.

Namu would haul on the line and then pause, his head tipped sideways, as if he were listening to the fish below. Then he would haul on the line again. One final tug, a shudder of silver in the air, and the fish landed on the boards at Namu’s feet. The length of an arm, and heavy too, if the blows it gave the bottom of the boat were anything to go by. She could feel the power of its convulsions in the soles of her feet. As Namu chopped another pair of mackerel, he began to talk to the dying fish. Wilson translated for her. ‘He’s telling it to quieten down. He’s saying that everything’s going to be all right.’

Namu spoke to the fish as you might speak to a child with a fever, his voice calm and comforting, soothing as a cool hand on your brow. It struck her that he cared for the creature he had killed. There was respect in the look he gave it, a kind of compassion too, perhaps even a little affectionate teasing at the continuing strength of its protestations, even though the battle was lost. She touched it after it had ceased to move; it felt as hard as muscle. There were many colours in its skin, pink and blue and yellow, the colours of dawn, but only when the light caught the scales at a certain angle. She thought of the doctor’s waistcoats and mentioned the similarity to Wilson, who looked up from yet another empty hook and smiled.

At the end of an hour Namu had two more fish, almost identical to the first. It was close to midday by then, and time to set sail for the land.

‘I don’t think I’m very good at fishing,’ she said, as she handed her reel back to Wilson.

‘I didn’t catch anything either,’ he reminded her.

Namu spoke to Wilson. He pointed at the sky, then at the fish, and shrugged.

‘He says we arrived too late,’ Wilson told her. ‘He says the small fish mostly pass this way just after sunrise. If we’d been here earlier, we would have caught forty or fifty.’

‘Three, though,’ she said. ‘It’s enough for lunch, surely?’