relaxing in the dusk, the smoke of cooking fires came from the landward. Wavelets broke on the beach. A breeze rustled in the thatch eaves and set the palm trees soughing. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said to the old man in Malay.
‘Jayari cannot speak Malay,’ said Padili, his youngest son, ‘but he can speak English.’ I repeated myself and Jayari followed my gesture at the horizon with his eyes, still uncomprehending. He saw only what he had seen every day of his life, the sea that supported him and his family, the sea that kept them poor. And not a hundred yards away was the Sipadan Water Village, a faux primitif mimicry of the stilt village where he sat, mocking his poverty with its milled boards and varnish, charging per person per night more than his family’s income for a month. The white man thought this view beautiful? I felt ashamed, and added by way of explanation, ‘We do not have this in my country.’
‘Therefore,’ said Jayari, ‘from what country are you coming?’ I was as much surprised by his tone as by a conjunction straight off the bat. He spoke loudly and was so emphatic in his use of English as to be almost threatening. ‘Therefore’ turned out to be his favourite word and he was pinning me down with questions. He held an interrogative grimace after each, and the slight tremble that moved his old body made him look as though he would explode with rage. His mild ‘Ah, yes,’ once I had given an answer, and the occasional grin that betrayed no hint of a tooth, showed his true character. I told him I wanted to stay with Sarani, and he asked: ‘Therefore, what is your purpose in this roaming around on the sea?’
He assumed I would spend the night at the resort, and even started telling Padili to help me with my bags. He was surprised when I stopped him. ‘But you are rich, and there are many people from your country there.’ I told him I had not come so far to meet people from my own country. ‘Therefore, where will you sleep this night? In which village? Please, do not go to the other side. There are many Suluk people there. Therefore, you will sleep here.’ Padili was sent out for Coca-Cola and an oil lamp was lit. Jayari told me that they, and most of the other people on this side of the island, had left the Philippines three years previously to escape Suluk violence. ‘We want to keep our lives, therefore we came here. They attack us with guns. Please do not trust Suluk people. We cannot do these things. We are good Muslims. If we commit bad things, therefore bad things happen to us. How can they commit such things to human beings? Please do not trust Suluk people.’ His head shook as he stared at me, the corners of his eyes clogged with rheum. The households on his side of the island were mostly Bajau. The village on the other side had been there ten years and was a mixture of Suluk and Bajau, with the balance of power tilted towards the Suluk. Robert Lo’s resort took up the whole of the eastern third. Almost everyone on the island, resort-workers included, was an illegal immigrant.
Food was brought, rice and fried fish, and a jug of well-water. I had been wondering what I would do about drinking water and here was the answer. Jayari said he had learnt English from an American teacher at the Notre Dame school in Bongao during the pre-war days of the Philippine Commonwealth. He remembered Mister Henry with fondness, and his home island that he would not see again. ‘Of course we want to go back, but we want to live, therefore we stay here. Please do not trust Suluk people.’
The sleeping mats were being spread for the night. Beside me, with a mat to itself, was a shallow tray, wooden and filled with what looked like ash. Jayari explained they were the ‘remains’ of his grandfathers, carried with him out of Bongao. Every Bajau house had such a place; the seat of Mbo’. I was intrigued by the duality of their belief, Islam and ancestor worship running side by side, but having declared himself a good Muslim Jayari did not want to talk about it.
He was much more interested in the possibility that I was in possession of cough medicine. His cough kept him awake at night. It made his legs weak and he could not go very far before he became breathless and dizzy. He could only smoke one packet of cigarettes a day, and that was upsetting him. ‘Therefore you will give me medicine.’ He had smoked at least five cigarettes while we were talking, flicking the ash through the gaps between the floorboards. I had tried one. They were menthol, but the mint did little to conceal just how strong and rough the tobacco was. The brand was called ‘Fate’, the packet green with a white rectangle front and back on which was written FATE in black letters below a single black feather. I asked how many he usually smoked. ‘Two packets,’ he said, at which his wife laughed and said, ‘Three.’ She had settled on a pillow by Jayari’s leg, but had given no previous sign of understanding our English conversation. ‘They are very strong,’ I said. ‘Can you smoke another brand?’ The younger men smoked Champion menthols, milder, made in Hong Kong and smuggled from the Philippines. ‘I cannot smoke another one, another one makes me cough. I cannot be happy. Therefore, if you pity me, you will give me medicine.’ I only had the remains of the strip of Disprin I had bought for a hangover in Singapore. He looked at them suspiciously, but squirrelled them away in the wooden box where he kept his smokes.
I had not moved from the spot where I first sat down. I needed to stretch my legs. Jayari sent Padili with me to the shore. Night had fallen. The moon had yet to rise. It was probably not the best moment to negotiate the walkway to the beach for the first time. The crossing involved a nice balancing act on rough planks that merely rested on wonky pilings and bent considerably under my weight. What looked deceptively like handrails in the darkness were in fact wobbly racks for hanging nets and clothes and fish. And now that I was halfway, someone was coming in the other direction. We shimmied past each other somehow. It was with relief that I reached the land, although I scuffed my foot against a lump in the sand, and nearly stumbled.
After a day of being scrutinised and interrogated I wanted to be on my own, and walked off down the beach beyond the last stilt hut. I found a log on which to sit and listen to the palms, stargazing and wondering, therefore, what was my purpose in this roaming around on the sea? Sarani would be here in the morning. He would take me fishing as my father had done when I was a boy, and I had a sudden access to memories of summer holidays in the west of Ireland, a time before the disappointments of growing up, the smells of hay and camomile and burning turf, fishing for mackerel with handlines.
Fishing had been an important part of my father’s Devon childhood, and he had passed his father’s love of it on to me. I caught my first fish aged three. Some of my most worry-free hours have been spent on the river bank. Fishing is a stoic teacher and maybe that was why I had sought out a people who fish as a way of life, to learn what it had taught them.
It was still dark when Sarani called. I came awake instantly. ‘Come,’ he said. I started scrabbling around with my luggage. ‘No, come, look.’
Two boats were moored outside the seaward door, Sarani’s and another, from which a crowd of faces watched me as I climbed down onto its bow. The ceremony began.
A young woman stepped forward, a bright print sarong tied off under her armpits, her shoulders bare. She had the listless air of one who has just woken. She squatted on top of a wooden rice mortar, and an old man wearing a strip of blue cloth around his head and thick spectacles held on with string poured water over her from a coconut shell. He mumbled words that were not meant to be heard. An old woman smoothed down the girl’s long black hair with her hands, the strokes progressing none too gently down to her shoulders, sweeping down each arm, muttering all the while. A young man came forward and was treated to a more perfunctory bath. They each put on dry sarongs and settled down to eat with the others from a large bowl containing a mound of cassava decorated with plantains. Their engine chugged into life, they pushed off from Sarani’s boat, and they were gone, the eastern sky lit as though by orange footlights.
‘They are going to pull up their nets,’ said Sarani in answer to my question, but he was more elusive about what the ceremony meant. For him it did not have a meaning; for him, everything about the ceremony, its form, its purpose, was self-evident. ‘It is Mbo’.’
The sun was already fierce as Sarani poled the boat out to the edge of Mabul’s reef. The tide had started to go out, and we had to get to Kapalai while there was still enough water for us to cross over its fringing reef.