The Woman in the Boat

I.

It had been a pigeon. Previously. Now it was hard to tell, although there were tiny, plucked feathers scattered all over one side of the bobbing boat.  The feather strewn side was also the bloody side if one observed closely, with trickles and splotches of red having soaked deep into the old wood of the boat. To think she had managed it all with her pocket knife, which was visibly rusty after two weeks of exposure to the naked sun and salty air. At least, it felt like two weeks to me. I can no longer tell time with any certainty.

She’d severed the bird’s head and only the badly de-feathered carcass remained, whatever resistance its life had offered, long ended in the relentless sun.  She’d washed off the blood from the carcass as best she could with seawater, using her thumbs and palms. Finally, having laid it aside, she turned her back to me and got busy trying to start a fire using a few strands of coconut-husk-like fibre from the boat’s insides. She trained the sun’s rays through a single piece of scratched, spectacle glass on to the fibres. It was a hopeful effort but not without promise, since the trick had worked the previous day, only she’d had nothing to cook with on the fire. Today, when the stricken pigeon, circling overhead, desperately hunting for a place to land, dropped exhausted onto the boat, she had pounced upon it, giving the bird no chance.

Having succeeded in starting a fire, she rested her back against the boat’s side, a smile of satisfaction growing on her weather-beaten face like a mad woman’s grin, as white smoke wafted up. She clasped the pigeon’s carcass, forced a make-shift skewer through it and held it over the sputtering fire that was growing stronger, salivating at the imagined taste of the meal to come.

The endless motion of the sea was something that, when she stopped moving around restlessly and when her mind wasn’t pursuing a worry, she found hypnotic. The boat bobbed, as it had done continuously during our time at sea. The rhythm of the boat caused a creaking sound which together with the waves lapping the sides, deepened the effect of drowsiness. The sea lulled her again and again, like a gentle mother, and she did not resist it.

Her hand held the skewered pigeon steadily over the fire while her eyes glazed over. I wondered if she was remembering something. Had she remembered me, for instance? At times like this, her eyes were of no help at all. They looked vacant, as if her soul had departed for someplace else, leaving behind a vessel that was a stranger. Just like me. Well actually, I should say, unlike me. The opposite of me in fact. I only had my soul now and my physical self, my carcass if you will, was somewhere at the bottom of this very same sea, ripped away and tossed off. I recognized a glimmer of her familiar self in her eyes only when she attacked the pigeon and cut its neck off.

II.

I think she stopped seeing individual objects around her, and only saw a moving palette of colours. Not just the different degrees of blue below, around and above her. There were also the sickly shades of green sea that came in slithery, swerving motions towards the boat and circled it, heaving and breathing relentlessly, like living things.

I wanted to warn her to watch the fire but she’d snapped out of her thoughts and moved the bird away before it got burnt. Gingerly she tore a small piece of the skin off, blew on it repeatedly and placed it into her mouth, between her badly cracked lips.  Her eyes rolled backwards as she chewed and swallowed the meat. She breathed hard, a kind of primal exhalation.

There were times it seemed as if this was all a dream, when those other vessels came alongside the boat and people in uniforms stood up to peer inside. Always, this occurred when she was crumpled up, rolled into a human ball, in the boat. The visitors would watch her, speak among themselves and leave. Sometimes they’d see what she was cradling and with looks of frustration, reach in and remove it, placing it on its hook by the side of the boat. Blissfully, she’d continue her sleep, thinking it was a departing dream, but I knew better.

Perhaps she was missing me after what she’d done to me only a few days earlier. Was it only a few days? Perhaps it was a little longer. I lost track of time pretty much as soon as I was separated from my body.

She didn’t care for the transparent pigeon now as it floated above the boat, tethered to its hook. She stopped trying to pull it down and cradle it as she fell asleep. I think that was when she decided to enter the water. She’d been watching the way the waves moved. The patterns that the water made had hooked her.  Anybody could give the scientific reasons – the wind, the moon, the earth’s gravitational pull, or the momentum of waves traveling over long distances, whatever – for the geometry, the sort of 3D motion, that endlessly formed and unformed and reformed into beautiful patterns.  She was mesmerized. In the swaying ocean, her gaze was fixed for ages on the performance that seemed to take place around the boat. She decided she’d enter the water, to know how the patterns would feel against her body.

III.

They looked like mosaics, on a permanently-in-motion floor that happened to be made of water. Shifting, giving way, coming together and growing apart. Collapsible Moroccan building walls. Some sort of Arabic mosaic at the foot of the boat. She’d roll with the boat and come around, not letting her eyes disconnect from the traveling show-waves circling the boat. She put one leg over, wetting the bottom of her much-crumpled gown and the heaving boat threw her backwards onto the flooring that still had a couple of stray pigeon feathers, trapped underneath the boards. She was going to go over one of these days, I knew it. One of those instances when there was absolutely no one within sight, no land and no vessels. No one to suspect it of her, the secret desire to throw herself into the embrace of the sea, because she was always bundled up and asleep when anyone came. I was the only one there, permanently watching her. And for how much longer? Will my story end when hers does? I thought mine had already ended, when she dispatched me. Did I need to be around until she meets her fate, as well? Where would I go then? I am tethered to this boat as well, this boat with its sole occupant with the dead pigeon hanging from its hook.

I no longer feel any personal danger. Fear left with my sinking body so it’s probably true that the one comes with the other.  Fear comes with the body. I remember how I felt when she throttled me. That was fear. It’s gone completely. Now, I am just bored and waiting. Wishing I could communicate with her, but she doesn’t hear me. I don’t think she hears anyone, anymore. I’ve seen her lying still as a corpse while the people in uniforms reach over and touch her, trying to rouse her. Was it the chemicals they were feeding her? To me, she’d already been lost prior to the time she gripped my throat and stared at me like a stranger. It was not she who had killed me. Physically, of course it was her. But mentally, it had been a stranger that had done the deed, of that I can say without any grudge.

I could see the puzzlement on the faces of the uniforms each time they came and watched her motionless. Everyone began by gazing at the hook and bag that hung from it, remembering the number of times she’d attacked it and pulled it down. She had really frightened them because she had seemed lucid despite their best efforts. They’d made sure they upped the dosage each time before they left. For protection.

She’d lost interest in the bag and the visitors as well after those initial incidents. Maybe it was the dosage. Maybe she just knew it was not worth it. I think she pretended to be asleep whenever she heard voices approaching, to avoid interacting with anyone. When everything grew dark and quiet again, I’ve seen her sit up and wait for her vision to adjust so she could continue watching the waves. The woman I had known, was afraid of water and all her life, had kept her distance from it. She used to keep her family away as well and made sure no one approached sea or swimming pool while she was in the vicinity. She never learnt to swim. It was, as far as I know, something that originated from her childhood, the aversion she had to water. Now, she looks at the performance of the waves around the boat as if hungering after a teasing lover. The watching and admiring. I’ve seen it. The kind of lustful look that only leads to terrible things.

I’d have warned someone, anyone, but how would I have done that? She was beyond my reach, even more so now in our respective conditions. I had only my soul and she, only her body. We were lost to each other. I couldn’t stop her harbouring those thoughts or pursuing her desires. Into the water, her eyes said. The next time the vessels came with the people in uniforms standing upright and looking over, they found her on the floor of the hospital room, dead still.