Authors: Emily Barr
‘I’m going to go back and hand these in,’ she says. ‘Do you want to give me yours, Esther? I’ll just say we’re all off for a walk together. I can’t bear the idea that they might fall into the sea.’
I laugh.
‘I would never have thought of that.’ I hand my key to her, and she runs off.
Samad is on the sand, eyeing up the boat.
‘Esther,’ he says, smiling at me. He is jumpy: I see his eyes flick anxiously after Katy.
‘Yes, sorry. I stopped to look at the lizard.’ I will not tell him, I decide, about his colleague shouting after me, because I do not want to make him worry about being in trouble. If Rahim says anything to Katy, she will be able to field his questions with more aplomb than I would.
‘Edward – here,’ Samad says, and Ed climbs aboard and sits in the appointed place. ‘Katy will go there. Esther, we squeeze you in the middle. You are thin!’
‘Cheers!’ I will take my compliments where I can find them.
‘Hop on in!’ Mark instructs me. I have never seen the Americans up close before, though I have seen far more of their anatomy from a distance than they have ever seen of mine. Mark has glossy black hair and a rich, kempt look, while Cherry is perfectly toned and somehow, in spite of the lack of facilities here, manages to wear just enough make-up to make her look like a Hollywood actress playing the role of a woman on a paradise island. I wonder, in my jaded way, how long their marriage will last, and whether two years from now they will still be all over each other, ostentatiously being in love. I also want to know why they have come here for their honeymoon, rather than somewhere showier, but for the moment I let Samad give me a hand into the boat, and manage to park myself on the cross-bench perpendicular to Jean, who is skinny, with a bird-like face, and next to the space allocated to Katy.
‘Ready to swim with the turtles and friendly sharks?’ Mark says, fixing me with a dazzling smile. Up close, he even smells glamorous: he must be wearing cologne or something. It is jarring in these surroundings. ‘And coral, and all the usual paradise paraphernalia? And we’re stopping on one of those islands for lunch. Just us. Desert island. That’s the thing that’s swung it for Cherry and me.’
‘Right.’ I look forward to watching them having sex in a new location, then. From the corner of my eye I catch Jean having the same thought, and smirking.
Katy runs back smiling, and climbs in.
Samad starts the engine.
‘You
have
got lunch,’ Gene says to him, leaning forward. The Australian’s ample stomach bulges over the waistband of his shorts, and wiry grey hairs grow out of the top of his T-shirt. ‘We’re not going to go hungry, are we?’
‘Yeah,’ Jean adds, rolling her eyes. ‘You wouldn’t like him when he’s hungry. He’s even worse than bloody usual.’
‘Oh, will you listen to her?’ Gene asks us. ‘Don’t marry, young Edward. You’re not married, are ya?’
‘I’m not,’ Edward admits, and his reluctance at being drawn into the fight is almost tangible. I like him for that.
‘Good job,’ says Gene.
‘Indeed,’ Jean retorts.
I look at Katy, and then at Edward. I can see that all three of us are beginning to regret this.
The wind blows my hair back from my face. The engine whines and does not sound entirely healthy, but we move so I suppose it is all right. I turn back and watch the beach disappearing behind us. Soon we are round a corner of the headland, and it is gone.
I stare around without talking as we motor far out to sea, in waters that look almost deserted. Luckily for everyone, Jean and Gene lapse into silence too. Mark and Cherry are entwined and I try not to look at them, as it feels uncomfortable and voyeuristic to be so close. Sometimes there are other boats in the distance, but Samad explains that all the snorkelling trips visit the same spots, and that we are trying something different.
‘They go to lighthouse, fishermen’s village, romantic beach,’ he says dismissively. ‘They are lazy. Always “lunch in fishing village” because people say “oh lunch in fishing village is the real Malaysia”. It is not! Just for tourists!’
‘That’s what I love about this,’ Katy murmurs. ‘The fact that we’re not going along with the herd. Look at us – we’re heading out into the ocean, to places that no one ever visits.’
‘It is amazing,’ I agree. ‘Out on the water like this.’ And it is. I could sit here and look around at the sea all day.
I am happy not to be on the circuit, meeting other boatloads of people at every spot we visit. When Pulau Perhentian Kecil is a barely perceptible line on the horizon, we stop, Samad throws down the anchor, and hands out snorkelling gear.
‘You swim all around,’ he says, sitting back and putting his feet up. ‘You see everything. Then you come back.’ He takes out a cigarette, hunts through his pockets for a lighter, fails to find one and puts it back in the packet.
‘I haven’t done this for years,’ I say to Jean, who has whipped off the kaftan she was wearing, revealing a sturdy purple one-piece.
‘Agh,’ she scoffs. ‘It’s not exactly much of a skill, is it, darling? Just put the stick in your mouth and breathe. Like smoking!’
She pulls her mask down and grins at me. Then she turns to look at Gene, who is rocking the boat as he nearly trips, taking off his shorts.
‘Oh for God’s sake, you idiot!’ she yells. ‘You’re going to tip up the bloody boat, you moron! Do you want to capsize us all? Is that it? Cretin.’
Gene turns and makes an ugly face at her. She juts her chin back at him and they glare at one another. I wonder if this is what the dying days of my marriage looked like to outsiders.
Instantly, I know for certain that the answer to that question is a resounding ‘no’. Chris and I never had anything approaching the passion that these two share. I would have relished making scenes like Jean and Gene’s. It was only the death throes of our relationship that took us anywhere near here, and no one witnessed that, apart from the sole person who would have been, and was, damaged by it.
I take a deep breath and jump over the side of the boat, into the warm, clear water.
It envelops me. I float on my back and stare up into the blue sky. There are a couple of wispy clouds, and nothing else at all. I feel the sun hot on my face, and am glad I am coated in high-factor sunscreen.
It is glorious out here. I adore being so far away from land, from everything. There is a twinge of fear that goes with it, but I can see the boat and so I push the fear away.
Edward swims up next to me, doing a businesslike front crawl. He stops and treads water. When he slicks his hair away from his face, water trickles down the back of his neck. Katy swims up next to him, smiling broadly.
‘Out in the elements,’ she says happily. ‘That’s something, isn’t it? Just us and the sea and the sky.’
I am trying not to be afraid of all the water underneath us.
‘The sharks they get here,’ I say. ‘They are OK, aren’t they?’
Edward chuckles.
‘You know what?’ he says. ‘When you said that, my very first reaction was to dive down and grab your leg. But I didn’t do it! How cool is that?’
I frown at him. ‘What, I’m supposed to congratulate you? For not acting like an eleven-year-old boy?’
‘Yep!’
‘Congratulations, then.’ We both laugh.
‘Thanks.’ He swims away, then turns to call, ‘By the way, the sharks are fine!’ before diving down under the water.
‘There’s nothing dangerous,’ Katy says. ‘Really, there isn’t. Come on, do you want to have a look around together?’
I nod. ‘Thanks. I don’t normally get freaked out by things, but this is kind of odd. The huge amount of water under us, the fact that it’s all full of creatures down there and we don’t belong. And knowing that we’re so far from anywhere where we could . . . I don’t know, walk and stuff.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘but that’s the joy of it.’ And she turns and starts to swim.
I am not one of life’s swimmers: I did not even learn to swim until I was nearly twenty, and that was only when I realised everyone else could do it. I learned because I wanted to start driving lessons, and decided that you should not learn to drive without first being able to swim. The life skills do not come in that order. Swimming was more elemental, and also cheaper.
I was an au pair at the time, on the outskirts of London.
‘We’ll pay for you to do a course or something,’ Mrs Tao offered, breezily, soon after I started the job. ‘That’s what our girls normally do, though ordinarily it’s an English course, which naturally you, Esther, don’t need! So what do you think? French or something?’
I smiled at her. I liked living in their house. It was spacious and airy, and I had the entire top floor to myself.
‘Swimming,’ I said. ‘I can’t swim.’
‘Done,’ she replied at once. ‘And how on earth did you manage to grow up without learning to swim?’
She never waited for the answer, so that was all right.
I hated my lessons at first, hated standing in the shallow end with an odd cross section of the non-swimming population (an old man; a teenage boy from a land-locked African country; a nervous woman a decade my senior, and others), all of us watching the patronising instructor who started her first lesson with the words: ‘Now, as you’ll all be aware, this –’ and she splashed the surface with her hand, ‘– is
water
.’ Yet when I first made it across the pool, I felt as though I had won an Olympic gold medal. I drive without thinking about it now, but when it comes to swimming, I am still a little wobbly.
The sun is hot on the top of my head. I have been daydreaming, and Katy is swimming around slowly, her face in the water and her snorkel stick poking out.
When I swim over and join her, peering through the screen of my snorkel mask, I immediately realise what all the fuss has been about.
There is a cloud, a shoal, whatever you are supposed to call it, of tropical fish, directly below me. The clown fish are tiny, much smaller than I would have supposed them to be, back in the days when I used to watch
Finding Nemo
with Daisy. And there are millions of others: blue fish, gold fish, shimmering silver fish. There are huge ones and minuscule ones. Fish that are shaped like proper fish, and odd ones with lumps and bumps all over them. There is coral, utterly unlike the dead white coral that is all over the beaches: it is alive, bright, moving.
I swim away from Katy, away from everyone, my face still in the water. I get used to breathing through the snorkel. It stops feeling scary and starts being normal. Occasionally water will splash into the top of it, and the first time I panic when I inhale it unexpectedly, but when I discover how easy it is to bring my face to the surface and sort it out, I stop worrying. This is a glorious way to spend a day. I become entranced by the comings and goings in the deep. I want to see turtles, and even sharks, because nothing in this glorious place could possibly hurt me.
I follow one knobbly fish, swimming above it as it makes its way somewhere, purely because I like its spectacularly ugly face and its funny lumpiness. Its body sometimes looks brown, sometimes gleaming gold. It moves lazily from side to side as it swims, over coral, through the middle of smaller fishes. I lose myself completely in shadowing its journey, wondering whether it is aware of my presence. I must be cutting out some of its light when I am directly above it. Perhaps I am no more than a cloud in the sky would be to me. I focus on its world, the colours, the dangers and the predators. I wonder whether it eats smaller fish.
When it abruptly speeds up and darts away from me, I resurface.
I am alone in the middle of the ocean. At first I smile: this is proper holiday bliss. Then, treading water, I spin around, looking for the boat. When I don’t see it, I spin again, scanning the horizon. There is an island in the far distance, though I have no idea if it is Perhentian Kecil or a barren rock, and a strip of land that may be the mainland, far away against the sky.
There is nothing else.
I feel the depths of the ocean below me. A hundred thousand fish are here, and me. The notion of sharks no longer seems charming. My breathing comes faster. I can feel the sun burning where my parting is, on the top of my head. I lie on my back and try to calm myself by looking at the sky.
I cannot have swum as far as all that, because I never swim far. I must be near the boat. I ought to be able to see it; but there is no sign of it. I remember the story of the divers in Australia who were left behind because someone counted the wrong number of shoes in the boat.
I know that something has gone horribly wrong. As I swing myself back to an upright position, I realise I have to try to swim to safety. The island in the distance is my only option.
I am trying to do a front crawl, because I am pretty sure that that is the only way to get somewhere fast, but the island is no closer and I am exhausted.
When I hear the distant whine, I hardly dare hope, and keep my face set in the direction in which I am travelling, keep chugging away at my woeful crawl, until it is too close to ignore. Then I turn.
‘Esther!’ Jean is yelling. ‘For Christ’s sake!’
‘Going somewhere?’ calls Mark, leaning over the side of the boat, his teeth glinting in the sunlight. Samad grins at me and manoeuvres the boat alongside me.
‘You said you weren’t a good swimmer,’ says Katy gently, as the boat pulls up next to me and Samad reaches out to help pull me in. It is neither easy nor elegant, but I am heaved over the side in the end like a massive tuna, and we don’t quite capsize.
‘But you’ve travelled an incredible distance,’ Ed says as I get up and sit on the plank. I am trembling all over, and I feel ridiculous.
‘Sorry,’ I tell them all, looking down at my feet. ‘I had no idea. I lost touch with everything. It was like being in a dream.’
‘You raced away so fast – you looked like a woman on a mission,’ says Katy, laughing at me. ‘What were you up to? What happened in your dream?’
They all look expectant. There is nothing to do but tell the truth.
‘I was following a fish,’ I admit.
There is a brief silence. Gene chuckles.