Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine (5 page)

And what, he might wonder as he held the chattering sheet of onion-skin between his fingers, what was all this about? I invariably neglected to say. I preferred not to proclaim at once my innermost desires. I felt they should be subtly drawn out of me, gently teased from the very core of my being. Children of course; five to be exact, an ample brood. I still did long every now and then to see land before I died, just a scrap, any old desert island, but a full-fledged continental mass if at all possible. The thought being to lead him into conversations, then from one thing to another, and to those things finally. But his reaction, equally invariable, to my carefully typed-out remarks was to award me a day off, and foolishly every time I leaped at the opportunity, swallowed the bait and resolved to wait another year before resuming negotiations. So I would go downstairs and wash up the dishes and return to deck to find Unguentine drawing in the heavy rope by which the swimming platform was towed, a thing of fat timbers strapped on to old oil drums. I remember the day. I looked over the rail; the platform was directly below the stern. We embraced. The thickness, the solidity, the sheer weight of the incarnation of our bodies together surprised me into an audible gasp. So he was there, after all. Where were my things, he indicated somberly. I produced a bag. Inside, a plastic raincoat, towel, a few home-made chocolate bars, a jar of fresh water, a flashlight; a hook, line, sinker and bait. Then I squatted on top of the railing an instant before dropping my lithe body the seven feet below to the swimming platform, which pitched under the weight of my fall. Above, Unguentine untied the orange rope and let it snake into the water with an elongated splash. I blew him a kiss, he waved, I saw children’s faces pressed against the glass where there was no sun-glare, but illusions, flowers only. I heard Unguentine pull closed the stern doors. Soon we were drifting apart. The sea was still calm and the horizon slightly misted as I slipped away and beyond to the fading sounds of roosters crowing, ducks quacking, the cooing of doves, the morning noises of the barnyard with which I could feel no more connection if I so chose, a whole morning, most of a day, to lose myself and everything in the blankness of sea and sky. Soon it would all dwindle to a glaring presence on the horizon, impossible even to look at on account of the blinding reflections of the sun on the silvered panes of the dome, and I would spread out my towel on the hoary planks and lie down on my stomach, my cheek against cool wood, eyes half closed and lost in the worn depths of those planks on which the action of waves had raised a nap of soft orange fur and in whose grain there flowed currents and rivers from pool to pool, threaded with tapered sandbanks. Those planks, those logs, my vacation home with its wide cracks and through them the sound of water lapping and secret little drafts, glints of sunlight from the water licking at the barrels underneath. Hours might pass before I would finally turn my head to let the warming sun play upon my face and take a squinting look away, would wonder what could compare to the edge, the line formed by the planks against the opalescence of the morning sea, as seen naked with all body, body drinking, as body stretched farflung to contact more the warm, damp logs, my nails dug in to pick at splinters, toes caressing the sun hot upon my back. So to doze, sink deeper in; or lose it. Thus quickly a day. Once a year. My day off.

So soon sunset and out of the west, aquatic pines sighing in the wind, the flaming barge would swoop down like a proud and hissing gander to pick me up and carry me off—or the faceted eye of an insect come too close. Unguentine would be there standing on the bow with a coil of rope in hand, poised to fling it across. Often he would be balancing himself on tiptoes on the railing. I tried to discourage the habit. ‘Get down off that railing, you’ll fall,’ my first words shouted to him after a day away. Fall he did, more than once. He was like that, he would put on his tennis shoes and find some precarious point to stand on with one foot, balance there until the inevitable, humming, making little squeaks, blowing sharp, obscene noises into the wind, until he would fall. Once as he stood up on that rail, hopping methodically up and down on one foot, the other dangling over the sea, arms flexing up and down at the elbows and rope whipping back and forth, I shouted up at him somewhat harshly to throw down the line; it was getting dark, there were things to be done, dinner, the bed to be made. He attempted to give the rope a toss while still bouncing up and down. But in that delicate manoeuvre, the railing being perhaps slippery with an evening dew or an invisible application of grease or oil, he came down not on his muscular toes but on his instep, painfully, in such a way that he lost his balance slightly, his heel sliding from the rail, legs akimbo and arms thrashing, coil of rope spinning way off mark and splashing into the water, his crotch rushing inexorably downwards towards the rail, the dull thud, the awful blow by which any ordinary man would have thoroughly castrated himself. I remember the way he doubled over in pain, rolling off the rail in a compact ball. Hastily I attempted to look the other way. Seconds later there came the splash. What if it all ended like that, I thought, with a stupid accident out in the middle of nowhere? But that could never be, I knew. I fished him out, as usual. Nothing to worry about beyond the bother of it all, swirling hair and wet arms, sopping clothes. I suspected him of being somewhat immortal at times. Indestructible, surely, for he never hurt himself however much he might have tried. Often, returning to the barge, I sighed. For whatever happened, it would never end. We were out of time. On and on. Forever. That man. These seas.

After
years and years of marriage, and
forever on the seas, lonely, I finally demanded a child. I remember the day. The sky clear and hard with a hot, dry wind foaming the crests of high waves, the barge rolling and pitching, branches of trees snapping back and forth. Here and there leaves and twigs, whip-lashed free, dribbled to the ground. Unguentine had previously removed the figurehead from the prow for a new paint job; she was a thick-lipped and heavily rouged creature with a fixed stare, and all bundled up in drapery to conceal a problem of bulk; and made out of wood. Her name, unknown. She hadn’t come with the barge. Unguentine had pulled her up out of some shallows one day despite my caustic remarks. So there she was. He had her inside the dome and laid out on a tarpaulin on the lawn, had sanded her down, was repainting her. The lower lids of her big black eyes drooped, giving her an expression of dumb terror such as might be assumed at the prospect of imminent collision; no doubt she deserved those shallows, her long water life. I compliment her arms, however, hanging limply by her sides, for at least there was something feminine about them. I shuffled around the lawn smoking while Unguentine knelt and painted. The jealousy I was attempting to feign was mainly to clear the air. Having spent all morning searching the garden for a note from him. Having taken up smoking for the occasion, that he might know where I was by means of the smoke and my frequent fits of coughing. Rhythmically he brushed away at her red robe. ‘Won’t help,’ I muttered. ‘She’s too far gone.’ Such things. Every now and then, the paint stinking, he would clear his nose with a sharp and hissing inhalation, or draw his left wrist across the nostrils, wiping the residue on his left hip pocket. ‘Blow your nose,’ I told him more than once, not that he could easily do so with paint all over his hands. I was waiting for him to get it on his trousers. Then I might really have words with him. But he refused to do either. Raised slowly but inexorably by a huge swell, the barge crested and rumbled down the other side, the glass of the dome chattering in its frames and the decks shuddering as we hit bottom with a lurch. The branches of the nearest tree, the Fir Irene, sprang up and down. Beyond the trees, a splash, the angry quacking of ducks. It seemed I was getting nowhere with him. I turned my back and strode away without saying a word, down the little path laid with driftwood through the sycamores, the lilacs, the roses, the gladioli, past a tub of cactus, and opened the door on to the bow and stepped outside. A brisk gale had sprung up. The glass of the dome was all hazed over by countless applications of salt-spray; yet it was hot out, over ninety, with the sky now dimmed by the golden dusts of some far desert, a land in the air. I marvelled briefly. The most I had seen in years. With tears streaming from my eyes and the wind whipping them away, I slung my brown thighs over the rail and dropped my feet to a ledge and groped along to the anchor as the bow pumped up and down over the high waves and into the valleys between, my body utterly naked to the hot wind and cooling spray. At last I was gripping the rusty studs which had held at the figurehead and by which, in an instant of calm, I swung myself down to her pedestal where I soon stood facing out to sea, my arms stretched wide to welcome the ceaseless waters, scraps of seaweed, fish, anything. ‘Please!’ I shouted, perhaps more than once. My eyes became sealed, closed by the howling brine wind; after each wave I gargled and retched. Yet there was some odd security amid all the tumult, poised as I was on the edge of a precipice, gripping numbly, the roughness scraping against my buttocks, and I felt I could have released my hands or even kicked my legs so perfect was the balance of my position, pressed between wind, waves and barge. Or that I might be lying on a prickly earth, on my back, staring into a fierce sun. Possibly it went on for hours. My body vanished away into a sort of numbness for whoever or whatever was left inside me, watching, listening, a small creature who came to life spasmodically whenever the wind chanced to pry open my lips and whirl down my throat, striking my vocal chords and generating words, half-words, groans, odd scraps of verbiage that seemed like fuzzy caterpillars or thistles glowing many colours. But how could they have warmed me so much? Words not even mine but only the flogging sea’s, jammed into my throat, uttered? Then vanish? Thistles? Thistles?

I came to hours later to find myself stretched out on some blankets on the bedroom floor, with Unguentine crouching opposite me, leaning against the bulkhead with his knees drawn up to his chin. A pot of steaming tea separated us, biscuits. Outside the storm still raged. Moments like this I imagined, for comfort, that through those walls all the good and smiling people I had ever known were throwing buckets of water against the side of the barge. Unguentine now prepared to speak. I knew the gesture intimately. The manner in which he quickly wet his lips with his tongue, swallowed, opened his mouth a crack. ‘What exactly is it you want, my dear?’

I rewarded him with a winning smile despite my condition. My whole face glowed. ‘A child,’ I said. At last I had done it, said it. Unflinchingly he poured tea and handed me a cup, also a biscuit. Brightly I awaited a response. But none came, only the sound of tea being sipped, the crunch of biscuits. Through the bulkhead came the creaks and groans of unused machinery, wardrobes and trunks shifting about. After a while he got up and left me. The storm was to last five days, at the end of which time I was recovered sufficiently to resume hanging around him, get in his way, sigh. At last a response came, or at least an acknowledgment of my request. He was searching the roses for aphids at the time. I remember his large black eyes staring at me through leaves. Shimmering leaves. He was kneeling in the dirt. He said he would see. I thought, while he spoke those words, I heard a tinkling of very fine bells or the chatter of a tambourine—but such was often the case those rare times he spoke, what with that fleshly tongue of his, that oddly musical pronunciation.

But see what? I was to puzzle at length over these words and wonder whether by saying he would see he meant that by waiting long enough my desire might lapse, be displaced by others, such as school-teaching, baby-sitting, affection for dogs and cats; or whether he meant to deny me now in order to reward me greater some time later. Next day I ransacked his gestures for a hint of exegesis, but they were the same as always, breakfast taken standing on the stern deck at sunrise to those peculiar mutterings he made only at that hour, little squeals and groans deep in his throat, an inner sort of laughter that scarcely passed his lips, the click of tongue, the yawn, a rubbing noise he produced by kneading his bare toes on the deck, this last being a signal for those five or six gulls he had befriended and which stayed with our barge through thick and thin for the regular breakfast he now scattered into the water: some toast, a pailful of garden pests, a few slices of fresh fruit. Days passed. Idly I wandered around the barge and wondered what to do. Then for the first time in years I took to wearing clothes again, plain things, drab things, tattered, unironed. One morning, written in miniscule letters on a white speck stuck to the bathroom mirror, the message: ‘Where has your body gone?’ So he had noticed. I sniffed success. The night, Unguentine asleep, I flung open trunks and footlockers and dragged bundles of clothes upstairs and spread them out on bushes to air in the garden, drawing them back in before dawn like coloured mists. A day of secret ironing and mending. Next morning, I arrived late and haughty to the breakfast table, wrapped in the dazzling lavenders of a full-length evening gown as if I had spent the whole night dancing with dark and hairy men. Unguentine tried to pretend nothing was the matter. But I saw his whiskers billow in and out with the heavy breathing of irritation, I saw him twice spill his coffee. On I went. Seemingly from nowhere, I would make my apparition in the garden and glide slowly between trees, my oiled body lathered in veils. Decked out in flowers and a too-short pinafore, I swung back and forth in our garden swing, lisping infantile lullabies. In buckskin loincloth and feathered bra I climbed trees and criticized his lawn-mowing in shrewish pidgin English, pelted him with ripe fruit. Or he would be down in the hold sealing a leak in the hull when, quietly, from out of the darkness, a soft and grease-smeared form clad in overalls would roll past him to vanish into another darkness. Once I dabbed myself with ketchup and old scraps of material and draped myself over the winch, as if with leg caught in the gears. One whole afternoon I spent making up my eyelids to resemble my eyes, in such a way that when closed they appeared to be wide open; I confronted him with this phenomenon at dinner, the seemingly blinkless stare; he bolted his dinner and ran.