Romano shoves his shoulder against the door.
The moonlight leaks beneath the metal edifice into a heaving, hungry pit among the shins of the rig. Romano shines his infrared ray into it. Fifeen metres below us, a black wave rolls back, growls a warning, then smashes against the metal stanchions holding us up. It is relentless, this sea, confident that it is only a matter of centuries before the steel gives. The sea air is foetid with salt and some other, organic matter. Romano crosses the platform outside the door, takes off along a narrow ledge above the stormy pit. He turns, beckons to me. My bulging eyes in his torchlight must express my feelings. You must be crazy.
Romano shoots the infrared ray at my feet. ‘Come.’
I lift up my feet, one by clumsy one, as if learning to walk. My blood swells inside my ears, slaps against my tympanic membranes. I cling tightly to a slim metal railing I pray was welded to last forever, walk the plank above the barbarous sea.
Ahead of me, Romano is digging his fingers into a rectangular seam in the skirt of the rig. ‘Help me.’
I see no possibility of it opening, but I stick my smooth fingertips into the seam. The metal sheet shudders and scrapes along its salt-encrusted tracks in the wall of the rig. The moon sweeps into the opening, caresses an intricate-looking engine. On either side is a lateral brace, not meant for men to rest their bums but to hold the huge engine in its storage place.
‘Sit,’ Romano commands me.
I climb onto the right ledge, he takes the space on the other side.
‘Sewage pump,’ he says.
I sniff. I smell no odour of excrement. This moon has a definite fondness for machines. She sidles lower in the sky, hesitates on the horizon as if hypnotised by the object of her love. She seems not to be particular about the purpose of the pump. She strokes it with golden light for what might be hours.
* * *
After a long, long soiree, the moon turns silver, makes a strange artwork of Romano and the gigantic sewage system. She paints me silver too, irons out my tired creases, then slowly the light turns a soft charcoal pink. It must be close to sunrise. I bend down, peer towards the horizon. The moon turns transparent, exits discreetly, on her way to commit infidelity in another hemisphere.
* * *
Now the sky slowly becomes more frivolous. It turns the sea pink, paints the metal pinions with a hue of watermelon. Below us, triangular pink fins appear as if cued by stage lights.
Sharks. I slam my back against the wall. The triangles thrust higher, show a glistening, glutinous coating on their shark-leather skins. The beasts are two metres, three metres long, some of them. Some of them are babies. I see the colossal dorsal fin of an old warrior, pitted and torn in grey and pink. He rolls below us, his jaw crammed with stalagmites thrusting up in razor-sharp disarray. His tiny eyes hook us in our hiding place. I pull my feet up, bang the back of my head on the steel behind me. Romano laughs softly. The rogue shark dives down deep, leaves the seething pit to the juveniles. Just then, the sound of voices falls into the shark pit, bounces back out.
To the left, past the narrow ledge, the door to the rig is open. Two men stand on the platform, dressed in black as if they hoped to cloak themselves in the darkness of the night. They did not expect pink. One is a black man of about fifty, if his grey sideburns are not lying. His face wears an expression of habitual scepticism. Could this be Tamba’s father? Yes. He has the same straight shoulders, the same anarchic eyebrows as his rebel son. The other man is plump, as soft as the hake he would become if he fell in. But he says something to Tamba’s father, points at the sharks like this is an aquarium. The men disappear through the doorway.
They re-emerge carrying a stretcher. On it is a skeleton, painted pink. Its hipbones are like soup plates, the valley between them grotesquely steep. They must have torn off her shirt after her last breath, dishonoured her by stripping off her father’s boxer shorts. The girl was skin and bone beneath her ragged clothing. Her pubic hair is blonde and sparse. Her pale nipples look lifelessly to the side – no flesh to point them heavenward. It is only her eyes that stare towards us. From here I catch a sheen of their arc-eye brilliance.
Oh, Frances.
The plump man loosens the strap around her ankles. Tamba’s father loosens the strap around her sunken solar plexus. Below us, the sharks spin and thrash in grey and black, roll over to get a better view of the skinny offering. Frances’ white hair falls back, less frayed in this party light. Tamba’s father tips the front end of the stretcher up. The sun arrives above the horizon, turns her sunburnt eyes a turquoise blue.
Is she alive?
But Frances is as stiff as a board as she shoots off the stretcher and slips feet first into the sea. The huge, scarred monster blasts up from the deep. It opens its jaws, engulfs Frances up to her abdomen. Her arms do not flail or fly, she is a rigor-mortis mannequin as the beast lifts her so high she gazes up at us.
Daddy, I hear her say.
The shark plunges into the sea, drags Frances down into its black-and-blue violence. Romano’s feet are on the ledge beneath his bum, his head crushed between his knees. A funny sound issues from him, a high-pitched whining. I shove my hand behind a
