The Queen of Patpong (24 page)

She wants to get to the stern. She pictures the stretch of black water between her and it, and suddenly she has a strategy. She pulls her hand back into the sleeve of her jacket so no skin is exposed, extends her right arm along the side of the boat, and then sweeps it stiffly away, elbow straight, toward the bright pinpoint of the squid boats. She’s careful to stop when her arm is straight in front of her, terrified of sweeping a cluster of jellyfish into her face. Only when she’s finished the maneuver does she ease herself right, almost as far as her arm had reached, and repeat the action.

The fourth time her arm encounters resistance, as though the water has suddenly thickened, and then she feels the dead, soft weight against her inner arm, just below the elbow. Her gasp is reflexive and, to her, deafening. She clamps her teeth together and keeps the arm moving, sweeping the cold, heavy, yielding mass aside. Then she pulls her arm down and holds her breath, shuddering violently and listening. It isn’t until she hears Howard still lumbering around on the prow, not rushing toward the sound she’d made, that she moves into the space she’s just cleared with her arm.

She’s dizzy with fear, but there’s a hard little bit of knowledge gleaming inside her: The sea wasps can’t sting her through her clothes.

With three more swipes of her arm—finding nothing more floating in the water—she’s at the corner, with her back still to the boat. The rain, which had lightened, begins to come down harder again, making the sea around her hiss as the drops strike. For several minutes, Howard remains relatively still, except for a couple of changes in weight, shifting from foot to foot, moving a few feet to one side or the other.

He grunts.

Grunting? Why? Lifting something? Lifting what? What’s so heavy? And then she hears a sharp
snap,
and she knows what it is. It’s the cuff of the rubber wet suit.
It’s not for the cold,
he’d said.
It’s for something else.
A second later there’s a loud splash as he strikes the sea’s surface on the other side of the boat.

The only direction that makes sense is the one she’s most afraid to take: outward, away from the boat, away from the rocks, toward the fiery glow of the squid boats, maybe three or four kilometers away. She’s sure he’ll circle the boat first and then maybe swim toward the rocks to see whether she’s clinging to the far side of one of them.

She can’t endure the thought of swimming facedown, eyes and mouth open to the jellyfish coming out of the darkness, and she can’t stay underwater for more than a few yards at a time. So she rolls onto her back and pulls herself away from the boat, looking up at the sky, the rain pelting her face, hoping once again that her thick, heavy hair and the jacket with its turned-up collar will protect her head and neck if she swims into anything. The rain is colder than the seawater, and she opens her mouth, letting it land sweet and cool on her tongue, closing her eyes against it and feeling it tap gently against her eyelids. She counts her heartbeats, since she has no other way to measure time.

When her heart has beaten two hundred times, she stops swimming and lets her feet dangle down into the cooler water below. Then she pulls some of her hair forward, to cover her face, which she knows will look pale above the water. She clears just enough hair from her eyes to see.

About a meter and a half from her are two or more sea wasps. She starts to move away from them but stops, reversing her arms underwater. Howard has come around the boat, swimming quietly from the bow toward the stern. She can see the light-colored bathing cap he’s wearing—one of hers, taken from the suitcase—to protect his head. Halfway along the bow, he stops, apparently treading water, and then the flashlight comes on, and she realizes it’s the rubber-coated one that had been upright in a bracket beside the wheel. Howard angles the light along the boat, pointing at the stern, and then slowly turns it in a half circle, and Rose pulls herself down.

Thirty heartbeats later, when she surfaces to look, Howard is gone.

She treads water, feeling the rain on her hair. He’ll finish his circuit of the ship. She decides he won’t swim to the rocks, as she thought at first, because it would take him too far from the boat. If she got aboard, it would be easy for her to keep him in the water—there are long poles with hooks on them, and she could swing one of those at him whenever he gets near. No, she thinks, he’ll get back on board.

Through the rain she sees his head, still in the pale cap, on the deck of the boat. She hears the metallic, teeth-grating sound of the chain being wound in as he retrieves the anchor, and then the motor catches and purrs and then purrs more urgently, and the boat starts to move. Within seconds the spotlight comes on, and Rose’s hopes die.

There’s no way she can hide from the spotlight. Even if she were a foot underwater, he could probably pick out the bright pink of her jacket. If the spotlight hits her, he’ll have her.

But the spotlight can’t point
behind
the boat. She needs to swim behind the boat, following the man who’s hunting her. At the moment he’s heading to her right, parallel to the rocks, and she sees what he’s going to do. He’s going to make a circuit of the rocks, make sure she’s not on them or behind them, and then he’ll search the surrounding waters, probably in a spiral, until he catches her in the spotlight or until she’s stung by a sea wasp and he finds her floating facedown.

She orients herself toward the biggest rock, closes her eyes, and starts to swim, expecting the fiery lash across her forehead and cheeks with every stroke. She’s surprised at how clearly she can hear the motor when one ear is in the water. She’s paying a lot of attention to it as a way of knowing how far from the boat she is, when the volume suddenly drops. She stops and orients herself again, feet downward, dark hair pulled over her face, and looks.

She’s about halfway to the big rock. Howard has taken the boat behind the one to the right, which has intercepted the underwater sound of the outboard. There were three rocks, he’d said, the third hidden behind the other two. She closes her eyes and tries to visualize it. If she can get between them without swimming into a jellyfish, she might be able to stay out of sight. Even Howard can’t see through rocks.

She follows the boat’s route, knowing that Howard is glued to the wheel, eyes on the spotlight, carefully steering around the massive stones. He’s going slowly, obviously dividing his attention between navigation and scanning the water in front of him. She realizes, as she lifts her head for a breath and looks ahead, that following the boat gives her an unexpected advantage: The wake directly behind the boat is free of sea wasps, pushed to the sides by the boat’s prow.

She swims past the big rock, daring to lift her arms out of the water in an overhead crawl, knowing that she’ll be seen in a minute if Howard goes to the stern and looks back. But she risks swimming a little faster anyway; the closer she is to the back of the boat, the less likely she is to swim into a sea wasp.

She pulls herself along until she’s gotten around the bigger rock. She’s swinging out to her right to get behind the smaller one when the engine stops.

In an instant she’s floating vertically, hair pulled forward to mask her face. The boat rises above the low, flat surface of the rock, and in the stern she sees Howard, flashlight in hand, the beam transcribing arcs across the water. So it’s occurred to him to look behind him after all.

Rose edges closer to the smaller rock just in case, but she stops at the sight of a cluster of sea wasps in between her and it. In fact, now that she’s near enough to the rocks to see them more clearly, she sees that sea wasps have been carried to them from all directions by the water’s motion. There’s a ring of jellyfish, like a border of solid water, maybe two-thirds of a meter wide, wherever the rocks meet the sea.

There’s no way she can get through it. She’d be stung a hundred times.

A hard core of certainty begins to form inside her. She will die here.

And something bumps against her from below.

The terror is instantaneous and all-consuming. She swims wildly, smacking the surface with her arms, not thinking about the noise she’s making, swimming after the boat as though it were her refuge, putting the smaller rock to her left now and then accelerating beyond to turn around it, following in Howard’s wake.

Once she’s circled the second rock, she sees the boat, sliding around the far end of the third rock now, only the bottom couple of feet obscured by the stone’s low-rising surface. As she watches, Howard cups his hands to his face and lights a cigarette.

All these months,
she thinks,
and I never knew he smoked.

The thought strikes her as absurd, and she lowers her face into the water and releases a bubble of laughter. He was like a fancy envelope, she thinks, with a toad folded inside it. She laughs again and loses some of the rest of her air. With both of her ears underwater, she’s almost deafened by the grinding sound of the boat’s hull scraping over rock, and she brings her head back up in time to hear Howard screaming a sustained, unvarying stream of obscenities and to see him running the length of the cabin and repeatedly slamming the side of the boat with one of the long poles, as though he’s punishing it. Then he leans forward, facing her directly from the far side of the rock, shoves the end of the pole into the water, and grunts with effort. He throws his weight behind the pole again, and this time he lets loose with a scream that seems to come all the way from his belly, and as it dies away, the boat moves and he pitches forward, off balance, and has to catch himself with both hands, the pole slipping away from him and splashing on the ocean’s surface as the boat floats free of the rocks. Howard runs to the wheel, cranking it hard right, accelerating to increase his distance from the underlying shelf of stone.

Rose floats there, watching him go. She thinks that he may just have opened a path for her, even if the path leads to a place she doesn’t want to go. She reclines on her side and does a gliding stroke that carries her slowly down the full length of the third rock and then around it, her eyes on the receding boat most of the time, shifting only to check the surface in front of her and make certain she’s not getting too close to the solid ribbon of sea wasps that surrounds the stones. As she swims, she visualizes the other side of the big rock, and slowly, methodically, like someone drawing a map from spoken directions, she assembles something that might be a plan. The idea, thin as it is, seems to buoy her up as she swims toward the place she least wants to go, the place she’ll be most conspicuous, the first and last place he’ll look for her. Toward the rocks.

AND THERE IT IS.
Floating in front of her, maybe ten meters from the first and largest of the rocks, is the long pole with the rusted hook at one end that Howard used to push the boat free. She grabs it with both hands, a surge of exultation passing through her, and scans the surface near her for a sea wasp. Sees one, about three meters away, between her and the rock. She kicks herself toward it and then puts the end of the pole under her arm, resting it against her rib cage, wraps both hands around a segment of the pole she can reach with her elbows slightly bent, and slices it sideways through the water, just beneath the surface. The resistance pushes her in the opposite direction, but she scissors her legs to stay in place, and the pole continues to ripple through the water until it hits the weight of the sea wasps. It takes almost all her strength, but Rose is able to keep the pole moving, shoving the sea wasps aside.

Four or five minutes later, gasping with exertion, she has cleared a path through the band of jellyfish surrounding the rock, and she is on her knees in the shallows, only her head and her very pink shoulders above water. The boat is a few hundred meters away, making a wide turn that might bring it back. She stumbles forward, all the way out of the water, until she is facedown on the biggest rock. She stays there for as long as she dares, watching the light, gasping for breath and luxuriating in the sensation of a solid surface beneath her. Then, without much faith in what she’s about to do, she goes to work.

Fortunately, what she wants is right at the edges. Lying down, so she’s out of sight below the crown of the rock, she rolls onto her back and pops open the pink jacket, then works her arms out of the sleeves and rolls off it. Lifting her arms as little as possible, she peels off the T-shirt, and then she unfastens the jeans. She tugs them down to midthigh and then rolls onto her side and brings her knees up so she can inch the jeans all the way down. They’re heavy and wet, and she’s sweating, despite the cool drizzle, by the time she scissors her ankles free. Then she folds her T-shirt once for protection, tucks her hands into it, and begins to gather seaweed. She’s worried there might be sea wasps, or at least sea-wasp tentacles, tangled in the weed, although she sees none.

Working as fast as she can with her hands trapped in the shirt, she stuffs seaweed into the arms of her jacket and builds a mound of it in the center. She does up the snaps, looks at it for a moment, and then jams handfuls of seaweed into the jacket through the bottom. When it looks about right, she crawls another couple of meters, dragging the bulky jacket and the jeans behind her, until she hits another mass of seaweed. With one hand in the T-shirt and the other holding the jeans open, she begins to stuff the jeans, starting with the cuffs and shoving the seaweed as far as the knees, and then turning the pants around and working in stuffing from the top until the legs are full. She zips and snaps them, then pushes the remaining weed into the rear and hips, all the way up to the waistline.

It takes her five or six minutes, with frequent peeks above the rock’s surface to track the movement of the boat, but at last she has the jeans convincingly stuffed, and she picks up the jacket and places it above the sodden pants. It lies there, arms splayed outward, separated from the jeans by a few centimeters, looking like someone who’s been cut in half at the waist. She wants to put the T-shirt back on, but it’s lighter-colored than her skin, so she leaves it at the rock’s edge as she pulls herself, flat on her belly and scraping every inch of skin on the front of her body, up the gentle slope. She drags the jacket and the jeans behind her.