Omai lives on the edge of town, at 352 Broken Head Road. A one-storey clapboard house.
You can see the sea from here. Of course you can. Omai would have lived in the sea if he could have done.
I wait a couple of minutes after knocking. My head is a dull ache. I hear soft noises from inside the house. The door opens a little. An old woman with short white hair peers out from behind the latch chain. Late eighties, I would have said. Face as lined as a map. Standing asymmetrically from arthritis and osteoporosis. Worried, cataract-infested eyes. Luminous yellow cardigan. She is holding an electric tin opener.
‘Yes?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I think I might have the wrong address. Sorry for bothering you so late.’
‘Don’t worry. I never sleep these days.’
She is closing the door. Hastily I say it: ‘I’m looking for Sol. Sol Davis. Is this the right address? I’m an old friend. I was having a meal with him tonight and I’m worried I’ve upset him.’
She hesitates a moment.
‘Tom. My name is Tom.’
She nods. She has heard of me. ‘He’s gone surfing.’
‘In the dark?’
‘It’s his favourite time to do it. The ocean never goes home. That’s what he always says.’
‘Where does he surf?’
She thinks. Looks down at the cement path in front of her door, as if there is some kind of clue there. ‘Damn my old brain . . . Tallow Beach.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’
I sit on the sand and watch him, lit by the full moon. A small shadow rising up a wave. And then I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket.
Hendrich.
To not answer it would only make him suspicious.
‘Is he with you?’
‘No.’
‘I can hear the sea.’
‘He’s surfing.’
‘So you can talk?’
‘I won’t have long. I’m meeting him later.’
‘Is he sold?’
‘He will be.’
‘Have you explained everything?’
‘In the process. Not everything.’
‘The film of him on YouTube now has four hundred thousand views. He needs to disappear.’
Omai vanishes under a wave. The head rises up again. It seems the perfect way to live. Riding a wave, falling off, getting back on. So much of life seems to be based around the idea of rising, of building something up – income or status or power – of living a kind of upward life, as vertical as a skyscraper. But Omai’s existence seems as natural as the ocean itself, as wide and open as the horizon. He is on his board again, on his front, paddling with his arms over the swell of the water.
‘He will, I’m sure.’
‘Oh, I know he will. For all our sakes. It’s not just Berlin. There’s a biotech research firm in Beijing and they’re—’
I have heard this stuff for over a century. I know I should be concerned, especially with Marion out there somewhere, but it is just another noise in the world. Like water against sand.
‘Yes. Listen, Hendrich, I’d better go. I think he’s coming out of the water.’
‘Plan A. That’s all you are, Tom. Remember, there’s always a Plan B.’
‘I hear you.’
‘You’d better.’
After the call I just sit there, on the sand. From here the waves sound like breath. Inhale. Exhale.
Twenty minutes later Omai is out of the water.
He sees me and keeps walking, carrying his board.
‘Hey!’ I follow him up the beach. ‘Listen, I’m your friend. I’m trying to protect you.’
‘I don’t need your protection.’
‘Who is the woman, Omai? The woman in your house?’
‘That’s none of your business. And stay away from my house.’
‘Omai. Jesus, Omai. Fuck. This is important.’
He stops on the rough grass at the fringe of the beach. ‘I have a good life. I don’t want to hide any more. I just want to be myself. I want to live a life of integrity.’
‘You can move anywhere in the world. Hawaii. Indonesia. Anywhere you want. They have good surf in a lot of places. The thing with the ocean is it all joins up. It’s all the same mass of water.’ I try to think. I try to find something in our shared past that will break through the stubborn walls of his mind. ‘Can you remember what Dr Johnson told us, that first week after the voyage? At that meal they did for you, at the Royal Society. About integrity?’
Omai shrugs. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Come on, don’t you remember? We ate partridge. He told us that you always had to be ready for new knowledge. While knowledge without integrity is dangerous, integrity without knowledge is weak and useless. I’m trying to give you knowledge and all you are giving me back is integrity. Integrity that is going to get you killed and risk everything.’
‘And do you want some knowledge, Tom?’
I gesture a ‘go ahead’.
He closes his eyes, as if taking a shard of glass from his foot. ‘All right, I will give you some information. I have been like you. I moved around. All over the Pacific. Anywhere questions wouldn’t be asked. Samoa. The Solomon Islands. Lautoka in Fiji. Sugar City. New Zealand. Even went back to Tahiti. Hopping around. Where necessary I formed the right connections. Found little ways into the underground. Got fake documents. Always starting afresh. Wiping the slate twice a decade. Then things started to change.’
‘How?’
A man walks by, a late middle-aged man in a faded Quiksilver T-shirt and frayed cut-off jeans and flip-flops. He is on the beach path, heading onto the sand with a joint and can of Coke. He is mumble-singing a sad but indiscernible tune. He is a peaceful, oblivious stoned drunk who wants nothing to do with us. He sits heavily on the sand, to smoke and watch the waves, well out of earshot.
Omai sits down too, placing his wet board on the sandy grass and sitting cross-legged on it. I join him.
He stares out at the sea with sad fondness, as if it is a memory. Moments pass, unregistered. ‘I fell in love.’
Obviously this raises questions but I keep them silent for now.
‘You used to tell me about love, didn’t you? You used to tell me about that girl you fell in love with. The one you married. The mother of Marion. What was she called?’
‘Rose.’ To say her name, on a beach in Australia in the twenty-first century, makes me feel a strange and dizzy sensation. The distance of time and place fuses with the closeness of emotion. I place my hands on the grass and the sand, as if needing to feel something solid, as if there are elemental traces of her there.
‘Well, I found my Rose. She was beautiful. Her name was Hoku. I get headaches, nowadays, when I think of her.’
I nod. ‘Memory headaches. I’ve been getting a lot of them too, recently.’
I wonder, for a moment, if Hoku is the old woman with the tin opener that I had seen in the house, though this idea is quickly put to rest.
‘We were only together seven years. She died in the war . . .’
I wonder which one. And where. Second World War, I assume, and I’m right.
‘That was when I moved to New Zealand and got some fake papers and signed up to fight. There was never an easier time to fake your identity. They accepted anyone then. They didn’t pry too deeply. Not that I did much fighting. Was sent to Syria and sat and baked there for a bit. Then Tunisia, for more baking with a bit of actual action thrown in. Saw some things. It was intense. What about you? Did you fight in that one?’
I sigh. ‘I wasn’t allowed. Hendrich thought the combination of science and ideology was the most dangerous thing for us. And he was right, but there were the Nazis, with all their deluded obsessions about creating the perfect race. Their pseudo-science eugenics people were onto us. They’d taken over the Institute for Experimental Research in Berlin and discovered their research into us, into albas, and they were after as many of us as possible . . . Anyway, Hendrich was going through a paranoid phase. He didn’t want any of us involved in the war. And, yes, while you were saving civilisation I was being a short-sighted asthmatic librarian in Boston. I still hate myself for that. I suppose I have tried to avoid love the way Hendrich has wanted us to avoid war. To try to stay alive without any more pain.’