JETSAM

KERRY GREENWOOD

Kerry Greenwood has written a number of plays and has worked as a folk-singer, factory hand, director, producer, translator, costume-maker, cook, and also qualified as a solicitor. She works part time for Victoria Legal Aid as an advocate in Magistrates’ Courts and in her spare time is currently working on several projects which include the tenth book in the Phryne Fisher series; Death Before Wicket, Out of the Black Land, a novel about Ancient Egypt; and Scathe, the next novel in a young adult series.

The poignant and resonant story that follows is about a special gift from the sea, and the awakening of an eternal myth in the near future...

* * * *

The water carried him effortlessly up out of the shipping channel and deposited him at my feet, like a hunting dog laying down a slain animal; neatly, gently, and smugly pleased with itself; retreating in lapping ripples, leaving the prey enlaced with sunset coloured foam, iridescent with salty bubbles.

A man. A naked young man, bruised by rocks, his skin pale and his hair as lank as seaweed and brown as kelp. He was not breathing.

One hand lay curled across his breast as if cradling his heart. The other lay upturned on the sand, relaxed and empty.

I dropped my Notebook and my knapsack and knelt beside him, rolled him over, and began artificial respiration. His muscles were cold and flabby under my fingers, chilling my hands. I expect that he did not notice, but I could feel the scrape and slice of sand in his grazes, and I winced for him as I pounded air into the sodden lungs. Water trickled from his mouth, then gushed. There was still no sign of life. I turned him over, cleared his mouth and breathed into it, laying the palm of my hand on his chest. I could not detect a heartbeat. He seemed colder than any stone. I heard my heart pound wildly. My own breath scraped in my ears.

The sun had gone down. It was darkening by the minute. It was deadly quiet, except for the thud of the sea. No people or even dogs had passed me. I could not remember having heard a boat or a plane. Not even the Securicor helicopter was flying in this weather.

I bent to breathe again, forcing my warm air into his cold mouth. His lips were cold, like the tritons’ I had kissed as a child. He was the supporter in a fountain, poor merman. The water had worn his face away. I had kissed a triton then, and I was kissing a triton now.

My hand felt for his heart, my own lungs were bursting, a red mist was clothing the beach as in a cloud. Another breath, pause, another. I felt the chest rise and fall mechanically, then he coughed, twitched, and took a breath of his own. His heart began to beat. I shoved him over on to his side and he choked on seawater, blinked, and lifted one hand clumsily to wipe his face.

His hands began to bleed.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him away from the sea, in case he was a suicide and might ruin all my hard work. The wind began to howl. Sand scrubbed speech from my mouth.

“Come!” I yelled, pulling at his arm, hauling my pack by the straps. The gale began to tear the clouds apart. I could not carry him and the knapsack and cloak, so I released him gently and gathered my gear. I could find the castaway in the dark, but not my own gear.

“Wait!” I screamed over the wind and ran to the cliff, where I had found a cave on previous expeditions. Rain began to fall in stinging icy drops. He was crawling when I got back to him, having left my baggage in the cave. I dragged his arm over my shoulder and we staggered forward in the dark, bent double. We stumbled through the soft sand, falling often, until we fetched up against hard stone. I took hold of his hands and placed them on the rough stairs.

“Three steps, then a flat bit, then seven steps.” He leaned against the step, panting and coughing. I shook his shoulder, pointing upward. “You’ll have to crawl!” I shrieked above the storm, and a gull shrilled back at me. I saw him nod, and he began to crawl. It was a cruel journey. I heard him sob as his mistreated hands impacted against the rock. Slowly, painfully, we manoeuvred ourselves up the stairs and into the cave, where my castaway rolled to the floor and lay still.

Rain was pouring down, drumming like a hundred armies. I crawled, swearing, and fell over him. Listened at his mouth; he was still breathing. I felt for the pack, tore it open, and scrabbled for a match. I lit one. It burned blue and yellow, casting leaping shadows.

I set fire to my heap of driftwood which I kept ready laid here, and it spat salt as it burned high and welcome. Light flared, grotesque and uncertain. The cave was perhaps thirty metres long — it might have gone right back into the hill, seamed like a rabbit warren — and there was a fresh water soak, where the rain seeped down into a natural catchment in the rock. I had found various signs that other people knew of it — the occasional lost thong, used condoms, beer can rip-tops, syringes and melted fishing line — but I had never met anyone there. The hearth had been in use for years and was thick with old charcoal, so that once well lit it would burn all night. I watched it until my hands thawed enough to be useful and then disembowelled my knapsack for aids to gracious living.

I had not expected to be spending the night out. I had expected to find a nice place to read. I had a Notebook with Simmond’s Ethical Choices in Law, nastily entitled by one of my colleagues Are UneM human? which I was supposed to have read, and the recently-recovered poems of Ovidius Publius Naso in Gaetic, which had been translated by three different people; I wanted to compare them to the known rhythms of Metamorphoses, my favourite work. Flexing my fingers, I caught myself thinking that Ovid would have recognized this situation. Either a god had come to a mortal and I was about to be overwhelmed by a swan or a shower of gold, or a princess had rescued Odysseus from the ocean. Perhaps my young man, also, was trying to get home.

Everyone has an Ithaca.

I had provided myself with my thick cloak and a blanket. Since the ice-caps had calved and the sea had risen, places which were land were now water, and the climate was chancy. Melbourne had been struck, of late, with weather which could range from typhoon to heatwave in the course of a day. On the Net — the only uncensored words in the world — people were saying that the planet was trying to obliterate us: the Gaia hypothesis. It might be true. The goddess might be ridding herself of inconvenient, destructive humans in the way which large organic systems work: slowly, but very thoroughly.

Black poppies bloomed now on the ice-sheet. I had seen digitalized images of the sable blooms on snow.

I had also packed a picnic. I had some rather battered apples — real apples, grown on a real tree, not the force-ripened perfection of organic engineering, all wax and polystyrene — coffee bags and a billy, cup, plate and spoon, a lightstick, some matches, a Notebook PC and a cake of chocolate. Coffee and chocolate would have made me a target in most places. Since Brazil had been struck by Arzulie Fever no beans had been exported as far as Australia, because no-one knew how the fever was transmitted. The crops in Africa supplied the High Ones, who lived in their towers in New York and Berlin and felt no lack. Net said that they even had tobacco and heroin. But there was a lot of gossip on Net and the best cigars had gone down with Cuba, under the sea with Fidel. It was probably insane for me to have taken such treasures out of my secure housing. But I had felt the walls closing in, needed to get out into something which wasn’t at a remove; real waves, not electronic ones. Real salt, not packet. Real danger, not imagined.

I wondered if my captive had also come out to surf the wild edge.

If so, he had been dumped.

I caught some water from the soak and balanced a pot on the coals, steeping my coffee bags. I went to my triton and found him asleep with his head pillowed on a rock. I hoped that he hadn’t died of cold and hauled him onto the soft white sand in front of the fire, laying him on his side and wrapping him in blanket and cloak. He murmured something, then subsided again.

Outside the solid cliff, the wind howled and scrabbled, tearing at the rock, and the waves lashed. It was so dark that I felt my way back to the fire like a blind woman. No hunting packs of bandits tonight; not even they were cruising for prey in such weather.

I settled myself in the sand and took off my waterproof coat, unlaced my boots and wrung out my long hair. It was not warm enough yet to remove more clothes. I dried my face on the driest part of my shirt. I cupped both hands around the coffee and savoured it; bitter with aromatic oils, delightful, unfamiliar.

The merman’s body steamed as it dried. Salt caked and formed swirling patterns on his skin. I used a little of the warming water to wash his face, dabbing it dry with the shirt. The radiant heat of the fire was sucking the sea out of him; he lay lapped in blue flame. His hands, as I took them in my own, felt less limp and sodden. He was becoming alive again. Cheered by this, I cut up the apples to stew in fresh water as they were too battered to eat whole. The cave began to smell less of salt and seaweed and more of cooking and humanity.

As his hair dried, it fluffed into curls as brown as a chestnut horse. He moved a little, and I turned his back to the fire to warm his other side. His body was marked and blotched, but in line as pure as marble. His back was long and straight, the shoulder-blades prominent, the buttocks square, the legs long and lightly muscled. I wondered what had brought him into the clutch of the sea, so young and delightful a man.

I felt over the warming body for broken bones, wanting an excuse to touch him. The feet were cut and bruised, but not fractured, and all the long bones, the pelvis and rib cage and spine were in their correct places. The skull was intact except for a slightly soggy patch over the temple where a big bruise was spreading. A blow from a sharpish implement, perhaps a ball pein hammer or a boathook. I plastered my wet handkerchief over it — handkerchiefs were one of my affectations, like real silk underwear. Then I saw, when I examined his hands, a purple bruise over both knuckles. The skin had broken. Either he had struck out with both hands, or he had been struck with a heavy object in order to loosen his grip on something — the side of a boat, perhaps?

He had fallen no distance, then. There were no impact injuries. He must have fallen onto something soft, or into the sea. Flotsam: that which is found floating after a wreck. Jetsam: that which is thrown deliberately from a boat. He was jetsam.

He had no gang insignia on his wrist, where they are always marked. There were no calluses on his hands, no marks of trade at all. He had not spoken, so I could not judge accent or caste. He might merely be an UneM, drifting, picking up a little work here, a little theft there; not on anyone’s database, the children of those who never worked, grandchildren of those who worked in factories, dug coal, drove trucks, all things done now by matter transfer and machine. His youth seemed to support that. However he had not the hands of one who had used a shovel or stood at a machine. His arms bore no tracks of needle use. His face bore no traces of masking paint which the Wanderers used, those priests of their strange religion. He had not been castrated like the Gate people or lobotomized like the Fools. Both his head and his genitalia were intact. He had no electronic temple tag for the Game headset, which plugged the user straight into the Mind of the Machine. He had no piercings such as prostitutes, Joy Boys, Pretty Ones always affected. Even his ears were untouched.

He was a puzzle. A naked, beautiful enigma. He snuggled deeper into the coverings and began to shiver. This was odd. His skin was hot under my fingers. I found the Notebook and accessed medical information. “Hypothermia,” it replied. “A condition which produces violent shuddering as the patient begins to get warm. The shuddering is an attempt by the body to generate heat. Subject should be wrapped in blankets or preferably lowered into a bath. The water temperature ...” I shut it off. He was already wrapped in all the blankets I had and the fire was evidently not a sufficient source of heat.

That left me. My body was warm. His shuddering shook him head to foot. Having gone this far, I would have to go further. No-one had touched me — I had touched no-one — for a long time. Who was it said, “If you save someone’s life you are then responsible for him?” A Chinese source, I was sure.

I was afraid, but I insinuated myself into the cloak, took his head on my breast and wrapped my arms around him. His hands were icy on my flesh. Then I shivered too; he was still as cold as stone, but soon our heats began to equalise. He relaxed all of a piece like a puppy and opened his eyes.

Brown eyes like pebbles, reddened by the sea. They flicked over my face, registered that I was a stranger, widened, then examined the cave, the fire, and my breast on which he was reclining. The eyelids drooped and a voice croaked, “Who are you?”

“I am a student,” I lied. I did not want to disclose my professional status to him. I am worth kidnapping, and I have many enemies. I am one of the State’s Enforcers, a Judge of the High Court. People don’t like me. I may not be able to order them killed, but I can order them frozen for years. Down in the underworld, they call me the Stealer of Time. “My name is Eleanor.”

“Eleanor,” said the voice, and trailed off. I reached out of our cocoon and poured him some coffee. He drank it greedily, carefully, and his throat cleared. I asked quietly, “Who are you?”

He jerked as if he had been connected to the Tesla grid and dropped the empty mug. His eyes stared beseechingly into mine and I stroked and soothed the body back into my embrace. He shuddered violently.

“Never mind,” I said as gently as I could. “It doesn’t matter. I shall call you my merman, because you came out of the sea.”

“I can’t remember!” he wailed. “I can’t remember anything!”

His voice was almost unaccented, educated, and not what I was expecting.

“Never mind,” I soothed. “It will come back to you. You have had a blow on the head. Have some stewed apples.”

He ate as bidden but was still wary. I left him and went to the mouth of the cave to listen to the storm. It had blown into a real gale. I could not see properly through the curtains of rain and windblown sand, but there seemed to be lights and movement on the shore. Who could be there? Much better not to know. Smugglers, perhaps. A siren was wailing out to sea.

Altogether as desolate a night as I had ever seen, and colder than the grave.

The wall of the cliff concealed the entrance. No-one could find us if they did not know that the cave was there. The fire gave little smoke and that would never be noticed in this storm. I sighed with relief, which was odd, because my triton could easily be a criminal, and those out in the wind my own officers seeking him for good reason. I tried to remember what operations I had authorized for tonight. I had stripped myself of all my devices before leaving my apartment because I did not want to be called in; just for a few hours I wanted to give myself the illusion of freedom. No mobile, no aural plug. No laptop. I had even left my Quatch at home, my computer-watch which advised me of the law and the statutes: if I made a misstatement, it beeped and referred me to the correct wording. This morning I had felt that one more beep and I would crush it under my heel, watch the microcircuitry melt and fracture, bleeding information stored on atoms as I watched, vengefully pleased. I racked my memory. What was there? Nothing out this way. Tonight was the raid on the shooting gallery on King Street, where someone was selling super-speed, called “Racy”, which had driven five UneM and a city councillor’s son irretrievably insane over the past week. The councillor’s son mattered, and his father could afford to buy law. No helicopters and no boats. Therefore they were probably not my enforcers, and I did not want to attract any attention from anyone else. The last kidnapping attempt had only been foiled when one of the silent men who slunk into my office had tripped an alarm and the gas-delivery system had put all of us to sleep. I had a three day headache out of that, although I was grateful. I did not want to think about what they intended to do to me before they allowed me to die. For I was very good at my job. I was their enemy. This beautiful boy might be the bait in a trap. Research would have shown that I was mainly heterosexual, liked young men, and had no current partner since Richard had discovered a deep desire for a home and a family and had gone off to seek for the right womb in which to plant his seed.

He had apparently found her, too, in a rural community where they still believed in childbirth. The thought of him hurt suddenly and I flinched. Though Richard would never have been discovered in an equivocal situation like this. He never moved without his mobile and he was permanently tagged with a Situchip, which could locate anyone, anywhere.

I had watched, one night, electronically, as he moved across the city and into someone else’s bed. I had been so affected by his desertion that I had only just avoided Compulsory Counselling, which the State decreed for any operative who seemed to be less than happy and well adjusted. I had taken a huge risk by leaving all my electronic devices at home and going out electronically naked and undetectable into the night.

I probably should leave the boy here with the blanket, after all, he was safe and warm, and walk to the nearest Securicor officer. She would arrange transport home. But if I left him here I would never find out who he was.

And I did not want to give him away. He was mine. He had come to my feet out of the sea, and I had given him back his life.

I returned to the fire. He was sitting up, examining his bruises.

“Move over,” I said, sitting down beside him with my cold feet to the fire. “I’m frozen.”

“So am I,” his voice was quiet. “The heat is gone from me.”

I leaned into the tangle of wrappings and began to thaw my hands. He laid one palm over mine and laced our fingers together. There was blood on his hands and I had been trained from childhood to avoid the contamination of someone else’s blood. But I could not account for my lack of fear. I suddenly smelt wine, heard someone laughing.

“Someone hit you,” I observed, shaken. No-one had touched me in kindness for a long time. “Was there a fight?”

“I ... I was clinging to the prow of a boat ... and someone ... yes, he hit me with a boathook to make me let go ... and I fell... I fell into the sea ...”

“Why were you there?”

“I don’t remember ...”

The lining of the cloak was silky against my skin as I removed my wet clothes and joined my triton. He wreathed himself around me, thrust his head against my breast and lay there, holding tight, sobbing with release or frustration. I felt his tears hot and wet on my shoulder.

This was unexpected. I clutched him close to prevent him from sliding into my lap. I began to kiss him as one would a child, gently, wiping away tears, when suddenly he turned his head and his mouth opened surprisingly under mine, warm and wet and salty with tears and sea water, and we kissed passionately as though we had known and desired each other for years. His hands searched my chest, seeking the nipples, and squeezed hard enough to make me gasp, though not with pain. I lay under him in the silky wrappings, my thighs pillowing his against the sandy floor, while the wise hands caressed me and I stroked him and the unreadable eyes dropped tears onto my face. I heard the voices which humans create from the patternless wind and ocean. “Evoe! Evoe!” they cried, dancing Greek maenads from before history.

With a swift, curiously final movement he was inside me; I did not feel the usual resistance of my flesh. His skin was fiery now, his breath came fast; I felt all my internal muscles gather and clutch and the delicious glow suffuse me, so lovely that I thought I might die; to burn and bloom and burn again.

He was strong in his pain, vigorous, young. He was deep inside me, but I felt no pain. I thrust my hips up, wanting him deeper, deeper. When I felt his climax I locked him tight against me lest any of his love be lost. He stretched out along me, legs aligned, his head on my shoulder, sighing, relaxing, at peace. I had never had such loving. I was bruised and fingermarked and astonished to the depths of my soul.

A hard piece of rock was making itself felt under my left hip. I moved a little, and he withdrew from me, and lay beside me, kissing my shoulder absentmindedly and tenderly.

“I have remembered my name,” he said softly, as we lay together to wait out the storm. I was so drowsy that I could not keep my eyes open.

“What is your name?” I asked, fitting my head into the curve of his shoulder as though I had been lying with him all of my life.

“Dion...” was all I heard as I was gathered into the deepest and most satisfying sleep of my life.

When I awoke in the morning the storm was gone. So, of course, was he.

* * * *

AFTERWORD

I was considering the advent of the gods to humans, as expressed in ancient Greek legend. The more rational the world becomes — and I am envisaging a very rational, very ordered and strict world where all humans are monitored most of the time by machines — the more likely it is that some upwelling of the irrational will happen. The essence of the unreasoning forces of nature and the unconscious is Dionysus, the god of wine and madness. He came to Ariadne when she was deserted by Theseus on Naxos, and the vases all show a woman collapsed on the sand with a man bending over her — in fact any depiction of this scene almost has to be Ariadne on Naxos. I thought it would be interesting to reverse the roles, something I frequently do with my Greek works in order to examine the legend afresh. So the woman finds Dionysus in the sand. And it all developed from there.

— Kerry Greenwood