Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam Page B

something that appeared to have had pincers. Even within, the flesh of the big shell was skewbald.
    ‘Soak it in bleach or cleaning soda, I should, Nick. The shell, that is, after you’ve pulled out the beast. We shan’t eat it. Use the flesh for bait when you lay the lines tonight.’ Logan was at the charts with his dividers, plotting their course at the chart table. ‘What can we expect to eat, Gabriel?’
    ‘Dorado ceviche and noodles.’ Gabriel was enjoying the galley still, and, since this afternoon, working for Logan had become something full of promise to her. She turned the flesh of the fish in its souse of lime juice and chilli. Having stripped the skin off half a dozen tomatoes she had frisked through boiling water, she chopped them and laid them around the shrinking, whitening dorado slivers. The smallness of the galley and the adaptations of technique and habit it demanded of her conventional repertoire exerted a challenge over her that she felt, now while the ship was at rest, to be laid out clear as a trajectory set in stars. She dared the sea to show her up. Yet she was also relieved that the galley was a place where Logan did not often come. The element of fear that went with her being drawn to him needed some cessation. It is wearying to serve at all times, even when it is sweet most of the time to do so.
    Charts have the unimprovable truth of discovery in their words. They admit that little is yet known though much said, and most of it fearful. Not much advance has been made, when you look at the charts, since the time when plumb lines were all the sonar there was. No satellite steering but a sextant, Logan thought, as his mind and body had been cleared to do, of the sea and its conquest by men.
    ‘The only real advance is in the killing of pain,’ Logan would say, when he spoke to men who did not go to sea. ‘Where you might have had to knock a man out with your fist if he got hurt, now you can carry morphine and just shoot him up.’
    The morphine was kept with the guns, in a safe hidden behind the tantalus. It was the boat builder’s joke, though it did not bear repetition. Logan and Elspeth knew about it; no one else.
    ‘Huahine tomorrow?’ asked Sandro. These islands were like suburbs to him, different from one another in small ways but not so different from home, and full of people who did not mix with one another except in the most intimate ways, for love or work.
    ‘Six o’clock start. We’ll shoot clear of the reef like a bullet from a gun. Say hello to your mother from us all, Gabriel, if you’re going to do the words for home now.’ She had actually been coming into the saloon, but she apprehended that he did not at present want her visible, and she found a way of making the thought a romantic one. Perhaps he was thinking of how best to tell his wife.
    Gabriel’s suntan deepened pinkly. That was all a blush could now do to her. Not even Sandro had mentioned her talking into the tape recorder. She smiled at Logan from along her eyes, as though to put him down. Elspeth watched him for irritation but he just grinned and went back to making pencilled lists of figures.
    ‘Anyone mind if I put the generator on for a while?’ asked Nick.
    ‘Fire ahead,’ replied Logan. Nick looked around, but permission had been given and no one questioned it.
    He checked the generator, made a solution of soda crystals in a polythene bucket and wedged the bucket in the lazarette. When he had, he hoped, pierced the big sea snail mortally, he felt for its anchorage of muscle and severed it. The snail that fell overboard was dappled like a new fawn and as long, two feet of stretched dead muscle gone slowly slack in pain. He put the shell in the crystal solution. It was a hot night now.
    To drown out the sound of the generator that gave them the benefits of artificial heat, light and cold, Logan put a tape into the machine. The solemn glorious pomp of Purcell’s ‘Dead March for Queen Mary’ rolled