right way up. Then you roll it down like this, but you have to be careful the bit you have unrolled does not go under the bit you are unrolling or else it won’t unroll any more. You see?’
‘What?’ said Sarani.
‘Never mind. So you roll it all the way to the bottom, as far as it will go, and then you are ready for playing love.’
‘And after?’
‘And after the mani has come out, and before your botok goes small again, you take it out of the woman.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘Minehanga’. ‘It is best to hold the bottom when you are doing this.’
‘And then I can wash it?’
I told him he must throw it away; at least the condom, if not the wrapper, was biodegradable. I told him that if the wrapper was broken, or punctured, then the medicine would not work and he must throw it away without using it. I threw my demonstration model in the bin to underline the point. He nodded and stowed the packets in the belt-bag under his shirt. It seemed a little late in the day to be giving contraception lessons to a father of eleven, but perhaps my absence from the boat that night would give him the opportunity to practise. We went to look for hurricane lamp parts. Maybe he was planning a night of fishing instead.
In the late afternoon when the tide had again covered the stinking flats, I waved goodbye to Sarani and his family and hangers-on, as he cast off from the kampung air, Pilar’s boat laden with supplies, and Sumping Lasa said her first words to me. As they backed away from the dock, she came running out onto the bow deck in her best frock still wearing her flip-flops, and she waved to me. ‘Bye-bye,’ she said. ‘Bye-bye.’
The greatest luxury ashore was access to a bathroom, though I had quickly accustomed myself to arrangements on the boat. You pee over the side, you crap through the gap in the stern boards, left for that purpose. Sarani would say, ‘Mesti buang tahi, must throw out shit,’ as though ditching ballast, and move aft to the dark stern with the baler for company. Minehanga always had the cover of her sarong. The children were sat over the edge of the gunwale while they off-loaded, their bottoms washed with sea water, the planks washed down with sea water when they did not quite reach the gunwale in time. Sarani could pee over the side from a squatting position by the gunwale, lifting up one leg of his loose fisherman’s trousers. I did not have the balance to be able to do this on a rocking boat. I was forced to stand. My appearance on the bow deck at any time would draw curious stares from the other boats. To stand up there with your old boy out, trying to keep your balance and ignore the watching eyes, the comments ‘Look, he pees standing up!’ – cannot pee, more like – was not an easy matter.
Washing was done at the stern, sluicing with sea water and rubbing with the free hand, a rinse with fresh water if stocks allowed. Sarani’s skin felt dubbinned to the touch, oiled against the sun and the sea. The bundles of clothes gave off the smell of clean unperfumed bodies; the boards were smoothed by the rubbing of skin, and held the odour of people; the pillows had the comforting scent of hair. In the Semporna Hotel, the foam bedding smelt of night-sweat.
I met Ujan and Mus at the Marine Police post, and the three of us adjourned to the bar. The conversation turned to fish-bombing.
‘You know what they use? These,’ said Ujan, indicating the beer bottles. ‘Maybe you will see these ones again at Kapalai in a couple of days. They fill them with a mixture of fertiliser and petrol. Then they plug a detonator into the top, light it, wait a moment, throw it into the water, and boom.’ He laughed as he tapped the top of the lager bottle with the bottom of the other and froth raced up the neck and out, Mus hurrying to tip it into his glass. ‘You have seen the men who waited too long? In the market maybe? No right arm and a lovebite on the side of their face?’ Ujan poured half-and-halves, Carlsberg and Guinness.
‘It is very difficult to catch these people,’ Mustafa confided. ‘On the sea, they can see us coming a long way off. They just throw the bombs overboard, pick up their fishing lines, and move onto the shallow reef where we cannot follow them. The materials are so cheap and easy to find. You can make one at home. You have to get the proportions right, or else it is very unstable, but they know how to mix it. The detonators come from the Philippines, but they are home-made too, made from a bundle of matches around a small charge of explosive. You can buy them here for one ringgit each. We try to catch the people who bring the detonators across, but they are very small,’ he held up his little finger. ‘You could fit ten into this cigarette box. Oh yes, we catch plenty, but there are always enough that get through. What can we do? It is a big ocean. Sarani doesn’t bomb fish, does he?’
‘No, he says it is the Suluk people.’
‘Bajau also, Indonesian also, mainly it is the illegal immigrants.’ The immigration problem extends Malaysia-wide. Illegal immigrants were blamed for most anti-social crimes, I noticed from the newspapers: prostitution, mugging, smuggling, drug-dealing, car theft, burglary. Those who broke no further law after their illegal entry still faced deportation, in theory at least. Occasionally there were sweeps, ‘checkings’, followed by mass deportations, but the immigration laws are flouted at every level, from the ruling party handing out Malaysian documents to Muslim Filipino and Indonesian migrants at election time, to illegal Bangladeshi construction workers on prestige projects like the new Kuala Lumpur airport and the twin Petronas Towers, to loggers and plantation labourers in Sabah.
‘Sabah would close down if there were no illegals,’ said Ujan.
Unfortunately, the threat of deportation promotes the use of fish-bombs. If you were a poor fisherman who had left the Philippines with your family to make a living in Sabah, and you knew there was always a chance you could be caught tomorrow and sent back with only the clothes you had on, would you invest capital in nets and lines? Or waste what might be only a short time in these waters trying to catch fish by those laborious and uncertain methods, when for an investment of three ringgit, bomb and detonator, you can blow up twenty ringgit-worth of fish in an instant? And why should you care, while your luck holds, whether there will be any reef or fish left in a year’s time? It is not hard to understand the reasons people use fish-bombs, but it is very difficult to sympathise with them.
The speck on the horizon that I had glimpsed between the islands of the channel I took to be a large boat that had anchored off Mabul, maybe a naval patrol, or a freighter from Tawau. As we rounded Manampilik, and passed by the southern edge of the Creach Reef, I could make out five masts towering above the shape. Except they were not masts. Closer, it became apparent that they were legs; in the short time I had been absent from Mabul, someone had moored an oil rig 500 yards offshore.
I was returning on Sabung Lani’s boat, Sarani’s other son. He had no idea why it was there, but then he had no idea what it was either. I explained where diesel came from, and he brightened. He needed fuel. He always needed fuel. His boat was packed with people and their luggage; he was collecting passengers for the run across the border to Bongao. His own family was large, and his boat was no bigger than Pilar’s. He had come forward over the roof to sit with me, scattering girls singing their heads off amongst the nets. I shared their joy, to be on the sea again, in the warm light of the afternoon, knowing this time what lay ahead of me, and relishing the prospect. Sabung Lani sat close.
‘So you are sleeping on my father’s boat?’ He spoke gentle Malay. He always referred to Sarani as bapak saya punya, ‘father I have’, an elegant colloquialism to which he gave a humble and reverential intonation. I felt an immediate sympathy with Sabung Lani; he too suffered from acne. He looked like an older version of Pilar, heavier, and while they both had Sarani’s gentle eyes, Sabung Lani’s did not have his
