Читать книгу Life Underwater - Ken Barris - Страница 6

Simon

The light is too hard in Port Elizabeth on certain days. It has a single-minded ferocity, reflecting off the sea and glaring through the clouds. On the beach, lion-coloured sand throws it back so harshly that Simon’s eyes ache. He doesn’t like the beach that much. It is too hot most of the time. He knows most other boys like the beach. They have self-assurance, or pretend to have self-assurance – it shines out of their bodies so clearly, whichever it is. They claim the sea as their own, as he never can: he loves the ocean, but often fears it.

Once he saw a sand shark cruising on the bottom directly below him, swinging its head from left to right as it undulated forward. He had it in the sights of his spear gun. He could get it right between the eyes. But he didn’t squeeze the trigger. The fish could attack him, or tow him out to sea. He knew it was really harmless, all five feet of it, but his heart leaped into his mouth and he angled off as fast as he could, fearing that he was a coward even more than he feared the shark, his big spear gun dragging foolishly sideways.

There are oysters on the rocks, sea urchins, hermit crabs. Slender brick-red worms tunnel through the foundations of the oyster shells, the part that anchors them to the rocks. They emerge when he cleans oysters for his father, scraping them together to get brown moss off the top. They stink – perhaps it is the shell itself or the moss that stinks – of ammonia or urine. By the time the oysters are served on a tray, nestled in ice and crescents of lemon, the muck has been cleaned off.

Now he is maybe six feet down, not needing to breathe, not yet, flying underwater like a seal or otter. The trick is to recognise the crack between the upper and lower shell, about a millimetre wide. It is difficult because of the mossy overgrowth. He finds one and taps it. If the oyster is healthy it snaps shut, the first part of the movement rapid, the closure more deliberate. If it doesn’t respond, it is dead or bad. This one is fine. He raises the crowbar and slams it in, which is difficult hanging head down, body anchored to nothing but the movement of the swells. He has to slam in the crowbar several times, the sound brittle but clear in the density of water. He eventually wrenches the oyster free. It drifts and tumbles in a cloud of shell fragments and disturbed slime.

His need to breathe is pressing. He lunges down and grabs the mucky creature, then tunnels hard upwards to the surface. Looking up, it is a flexing, shifting silver shield. The light is too hard. Even seen from below, it hurts his eyes.

There is the metallic ring of a propeller in the background. Mechanical sound travels for miles underwater. There is the slow hiss of his breathing through the snorkel as he drifts on the surface, which he always finds so peaceful. There is the slap and release of the surface chop. The water isn’t deep here, a fathom at most. Beside him floats the inner tube that is his dock for the molluscs. It has a galvanised steel ring tied to its underside, from which dangles a gunny sack. The ring is tied to a small anchor, and so cannot drift off.

This morning he nearly drowns. He dives, fins gently above the bottom in search of a promising bed. Puzzlement overcomes him. So many colours! Shades of olive and silver, suggestions of blood embedded in the moss. There are lichens purple and orange, and chalk-green seaweed. He glides over a brick-red starfish, its skin leathery, one of its pentagrammic arms bent at the tip, as if it has an arthritic digit. It reminds him of his grandfather’s index finger, which bends sideways. My rival, he thinks of the starfish, which also hunts oysters. There are little black spots floating inside his field of vision, as if they have always been there. A school of tiny silver fish feeds around him, nibbling at the sea grasses. They make crackling noises which sound like the minute explosions of ice dropped into warm brandy.

He should be needing to breathe. Why, he ponders, is there no urgency? He turns upwards as the sea grows darker and cold fingers touch the back of his neck. Like my own private eclipse, he thinks idly, and then in panic, waking at last to the fact that he is in danger of blacking out. He breaches, kicking frantically, blasts the water out of his snorkel and spits out the mouthpiece. The tube is in reach and he tries to launch himself over it, half successfully. It is still empty enough to take his weight. His heart beats with slow, heavy force. Sun enters the world again.