Teranesia

A few hours before he’d almost welcomed being back on the Banda Sea, but the connection seemed a thousand times more immediate now, the details of his memory sharper by starlight. He could feel the years melting away in the face of the accumulating evidence: the musical sound of the half-familiar language ringing in his ears, the struggle to sleep on a humid night. That was how memory worked, after all: placing like moments side by side. There was no linear tape inside his head, no date stamp on every mental image. It didn’t matter what had happened since. Nothing could stop the days and nights of eighteen years before becoming like yesterday.

He picked up his notepad and scrolled to the address book. Felix would be at work, but they could still talk for a few minutes. Though he’d never admit to it, he’d probably been offended that Prabir had only left a message when he’d called from the hotel. He’d probably welcome a civilised conversation to make up for the slight.

Prabir put down the notepad. He was sure it would work, he was sure it would help: watching the face of his lover in Toronto painted before him in a fine grid of light. That would banish the night terrors. But it still felt like the kind of crutch he didn’t want to lean on.

Prabir woke at dawn to the sight of Gunung Api, a black volcanic mountain rising out of verdant hills to tower over the Banda Islands. White mist – he hoped it was just mist – swirled around the peak. Gunung Api was still active, and though it hadn’t done serious harm for fifteen years, a recent report had said that clouds of hot gas and ash were being vented every month or so.

Api, Bandanaira and Lontar, the three main islands of the group, were about as close to each other as they could be without merging like Ambon’s Siamese twins. Lontar, to the south, was the largest, and Prabir could just make out the tips of it protruding on either side of the smaller northern pair.

He glanced towards the cabin. Grant didn’t seem to be up, so he urinated overboard to save disturbing her. He wondered if the boat would stop for him if he dived in for a swim to clear his head; the autopilot would certainly detect the event, but exactly how it responded would depend on the settings Grant had chosen. He decided not to risk it.

He sat on the deck and watched the volcano. Birdsong carried across the water, a faint, distorted version of the chorus that had woken him as a child. He laughed wearily. He’d sailed this sea before, he’d seen these stars before, he’d heard these birds before … but so what? Most people lived on in the very same town where their parents had died, some in the very same house. It was only because he’d left the whole country behind that it had come to seem so charged with significance. This was just a place like any other; it couldn’t drag him back into the past.

Grant emerged from the cabin and stood beside him, yawning and groggy, but smiling at the spectacle in front of them.

She said, ‘I don’t know about you, but quite frankly I stink. I’m going swimming.’

They sailed into the gently curved channel between Lontar and the other islands, past a moss-encrusted Dutch fort, towards the main town of Bandanaira. A vast coral garden lay beneath them, visible clearly through the water. Grant almost swooned with delight, crying out excitedly every now and then when she recognised yet another species of fish or sponge or anemone. Prabir stood beside her trying to be blasé; even if he couldn’t put a name to every one of these creatures, he had seen this all before, when the ferry had passed through on the way to Ambon. The Bandas had been a major tourist destination then, the harbour full of thirty-something Beijing honeymooners snorkelling and – rather more bafflingly, and a great deal less benignly – jet-skiing. But between the war, the 2016 eruption, and a number of subsequent minor earthquakes, the tourist industry seemed to have gone the way of the spice trade.

They found a mooring and set out into town. Apart from one abandoned modern hotel the buildings were in good repair, and Prabir felt no sense of poverty or decay; Bandanaira seemed to have shrunk back into obscurity gracefully. People moved unhurriedly on foot or on bicycles. The volcano loomed over the main street, barely three kilometres away; it was impossible to tell from here that it was on another island altogether.