Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam

out up to the stars and over across the jagged city.
     
    ‘Not a bad fit,’ said Logan, some feet from Alec who was surprised the first voice he heard was that of a man, so deep was he in a maze of preoccupation with the women who had indirectly led him to this beach.
    Gabriel, turned black and shaped like a rubber doll, looked down at him.
    ‘We’re diving, d’you want to snorkel?’ The impression was of playtime, with different games. Alec enjoyed the cheap exclusivity of feeling left out.
    After Logan and Gabriel had taken the Zodiac out to the blue, he watched them fall back off its edge into the water and briefly envied them their belief in other elements than thought and feeling.
    Once snorkelling, he was again a child, and happy. The gaiety of the bright world so close below was unstopping, a continual dazzling display as though flowers could gossip. Drifts of pompous-faced black fish with eyes like pugdogs pouted at each other, followed by haughty blue fish long as an arm with inbred noses and blots on their shield-shaped gills. Some shoals moved like the light on waves in a painting and were gone, others were electric bars the size of a textbook underlining. The silent bustle and fierce colour held him happy as he forgot everything and listened with his eyes.
    Inland, but aware of the time, Nick carefully drew the pursed mouths of the three, various, gastropods he had tracked down.
    In the deeper water, Logan stroked the blue lips of a velvety black clam the size of a chair and moved away each time they closed their helpless distended frill. Close to his face, stretched open into an expression of ecstasy by the mask over her eyes and nose, was Gabriel’s. Her eyes obeyed his own as she watched him pull away from the passive, clenching, clam.

Chapter 3
    The graffiti on the huts and cafés off the road that made a circuit between the mountains of Moorea were in the rounded, looped writing that is taught in French schools. Occasionally romantic, the words were more often resentful of the distant administration that had formed the very way they were set down. ‘ À bas la France! ’ was written on one maroon stuccoed wall that yellow and pink plumes of hibiscus brushed in the evening wind; the letters were as assuredly French as the script in the first Babar books.
    Nick hired a bicycle from a man with strong hair like a wig and a frangipane blossom behind his ear with a Biro. When he was a mile or so away from the beach where he had left the others, he smelt garlic and pork and the gluey richness of haricots . The café door was held and fixed open by a springy growth of vetch that had grown around it so that it could not move. Hens came and went through the plastic ribbons that covered the doorway. Black coffee had burnt near by that day.
    ‘Can I get some water?’ he asked, his thirst woken by the sound of falling water splashing down the mountainside behind.
    A woman brought him bottled water. He paid the comparatively large bill in the way you had to in these islands, without translation into any other currency. Nick as a rule bought little and appreciated much that came free, so he understood a certain fairness as he took in the shining moss wet as a bath sponge, the ticking undergrowth that tipped towards flat black rocks, the fungi white like cheese stacked at the side of the cafe’s window at which quivered gingham curtains.
    Leaving the bike with the woman, Nick pushed in his green metal chair. It twanged as it hit the table. The island was full of reverberations. The inanimate seemed to react as though it lived.
    If he found any snails he would be pleased but what he sought most of all was the heart of the island.
    He held on to fibrous palm trunks as he made his way up to the water he heard. Soon his sweat was mixing with the mist of water that a deep waterfall dispels as it falls down. From up here the cove where he had left the others was not dark but the green of water over white sand, the