The Waves Burn Bright Read online

  The Waves

  Burn Bright

  Iain Maloney

  First published 2016

  Freight Books

  49-53 Virginia Street

  Glasgow, G1 1TS

  www.freightbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Iain Maloney 2016

  The moral right of Iain Maloney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library.

  ‘Fit means thon word survivor?’ from “At the Piper Alpha Memorial, Queen Mother Rose Garden” by Sheena Blackhall, collected in Hairst O Thorns: Poems in Scots and English (Lochlands, 2004). Used with permission.

  ISBN 978-1-910449-82-0

  eISBN 978-1-910449-83-7

  Typeset by Freight

  Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow

  Contents

  Incheon Airport, Republic of Korea, June 2013

  Kagoshima / Sakurajima, Japan, September 1980

  Somewhere Over Russia, June 2013

  Aberdeen, July 6th 1988

  Aberdeen, June 2013

  Piper Alpha, July 6th 1988

  Aberdeen, June 2013

  Aberdeen, October 1988

  Aberdeen, Summer 1990

  Aberdeen, December 25th 1990

  Scottish Highlands, December 25th 1990

  Aberdeen, June 2013

  Durham, January 1999

  Aberdeen, January 1999

  University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, December 2000

  Findhorn, May 2003

  Dunedin, New Zealand, April 2003

  Aberdeen, June 2013

  Aberdeen, June 2013

  Skye, December 2003

  Loch Morlich, June 2013

  Coylumbridge Hotel, June 2013

  Loch Morlich, June 2013

  Acknowledgements

  Iain Maloney was born in Aberdeen and now lives in Japan where he teaches English and writes about travel, literature and music. He studied English at the University of Aberdeen, has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and, as a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, has been published in journals and anthologies around the world. In 2013 he was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize. Following the success of his first novel First Time Solo, which was shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize, his second novel Silma Hill was published in 2015.

  For the one hundred and sixty-seven

  For the survivors

  For the families

  For Aberdeen

  Fit means thon word survivor?

  From ‘At the Piper Alpha Memorial, Queen Mother Rose Garden’ by Sheena Blackhall

  Incheon Airport, Republic of Korea, June 2013

  I need to run.

  The ground beneath my feet, granite hardness, taut muscles stretching out, flexing and tiring before the next flight, eleven hours of stasis, the world circling below, night and day passing. Already the fatigue like mercury in my veins. My hand against the shower wall, I grabbed an ankle and pulled, feeling the strain in my thigh. Maybe I could run through the terminal, run against the travelators, run from gate to gate tracing the outline of the airport. The urge like electricity. Run.

  Maybe not. With terrorism and whatever’s going on with the North, someone running could be a threat. The firepower on display. How did people ever get used to being around guns? I asked Ash, she’s American, she should know.

  ‘You rationalise it, Carrie. You push it aside, try not to think about it. Humans can get used to almost anything given enough time. Given enough pressure.’

  Pressure turns carbon into diamonds; given enough time anything can happen.

  She was dozing in the lounge. She could sleep anywhere and in Seoul they make you comfortable. Each time I came through Incheon I thought about moving to South Korea. I loved Seoul, loved the food, Seoul food. I could live on samgyetang chicken every day for the rest of my life but I could never leave our home in Hawaii, the house I shared with Ash, the view of the sea from the front, the mountains at the back. For the first time in years I had a home, a fixed centre even when I was in Japan, in the Philippines, in Chile doing my research, when Ash was in New York. There was always a conference, an invitation, a seismic event. Jetsetters, both of us. But Hawaii was our heart. Where we met. Where we fell in love.

  Take this time. She’d been in Hawaii, I’d been on Aogashima, a volcanic island south of Japan. So we met in Tokyo, her direct, me by taxi, boat, aeroplane, my suitcase snaking behind me on a broken wheel, then onto Incheon, Amsterdam then Aberdeen. Scotland. Home.

  From Hawaii to Scotland, every way is the long way round.

  I wrapped up in a fluffy white towel, fabric-conditioned into cloudlike softness, and towelled my short red hair, pulled on cargo pants and a strappy top, gave my hair a quick muss with mousse, spiking it loosely, dumped the wet towels in the basket and swung my new backpack into place. It didn’t sit right, too high up my back, the strap too narrow.

  It was a birthday present from Ash and I didn’t like it. I hadn’t been ready to call time on the last one, a khaki canvas bag I’d had since I was a PhD student in Durham sixteen or so years before, a present from a girlfriend, Anna. It was stained and smelled of rot and damp, the stitching frayed, but it had circumnavigated the Pacific Ring of Fire, scaled active peaks, been buried in ash and was once stolen by a boy on the back of a motorbike in Vietnam before being dumped minus valuables in a puddle. We’d been through a lot together and when Ash presented me with this new backpack… over the years I’ve become good at suppressing emotions.

  She gave me a sleepy smile, ‘Hi.’ Her long auburn-tinted hair was all scuffed around by the chair. I loved it when she was relaxed and scruffy, when sleep brought her to my level of grooming. She was my first partner of either sex whose fashion sense wasn’t some variation of ‘grunge’ or ‘nerd’. She was a lawyer, expensive suits and salon hair. Me the scientist, practical hair, tomboy clothes. Somehow we worked.

  ‘Feel better?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘I swore I’d never go back.’

  ‘You swear too much.’ She sat up and lifted an eyelash off my cheek. I blew it and wished. Kissed her, the scent of her, coconut.

  ‘Let’s find our gate.’

  Ash would be asleep before we crossed Chinese airspace. She viewed sleep like an accountant views money: profit and loss. Long-haul was her way of making up the deficit. Some parts of life are worth sleeping through, she’d say.

  I can’t sleep on planes so I had prepared ahead, my backpack full of work-related good intentions. Papers to read, marking, draft correspondence, funding applications. One thing they never tell you when you start out in academia: for every rung on the ladder you climb, the level of correspondence doubles. I spent more time writing unfortunately at this time… than I did talking to my PhD students. I padded down the aisle, slipped my laptop and folders into the seat pocket, wrote a post-it to-do list and thought how much more organised my life would be by the time we landed.

  They closed the shutters and
turned the lights off, like it was nap time. In the window seat, Ash took a valium with her wine and closed her eyes. The aisle seat was taken by a middle-aged Japanese man who plugged in his iPhone headset and also fell asleep, little trills of maybe Schubert counterpointing the thrum of the engines.

  The carbonara sauce sitting badly in my stomach, not mixing well with the coffee, I opened two files on my laptop. The first was my paper for the conference at the University of Aberdeen. The paper was fine and if it were to be delivered anywhere else I wouldn’t even look at it again. Aberdeen was where I’d been an undergraduate, where the oil industry was everything and the oil industry reps, many of whom would be in the audience, would be asking questions, hostile, loaded questions, about my conclusions.

  This wasn’t an average conference.

  This wasn’t an average paper.

  Aberdeen was where I grew up. Where my father was.

  Dad wouldn’t know I was there, didn’t follow research anymore, wasn’t in the academic loop. He wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t. But maybe Harry Boyle had told him? Dad was old friends with the Head of Department. Maybe they still drank together.

  I watched Ash sleep. She smiled, her lips tight together, dimples and laughter lines. She hated the lines, showing despite her care regime. I loved them. Contours and gradients were my field, I knew how to read them. Perhaps that was why love became simpler as I aged.

  The second file was a report a colleague at Aogashima had given me about research at Mount Ontake. I’d already run it through Google Translate and now had to turn the gibberish into grammatical and scientific sense. I felt breath on my arm, stale and smoky. The Japanese man had woken up and was reading over my shoulder. ‘Can you read?’ he said, pointing at the original report.

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It’s too difficult.’

  ‘Yes, even for Japanese people I think.’

  ‘It’s a scientific paper. About volcanoes.’

  ‘You study volcanoes?’

  ‘And teach others.’

  ‘That’s good. A good job. In Japan we have a saying – there are only four things that scare us.’ He counted them off on his fingers. ‘Volcano. Earthquake. Tsunami. Father.’ He laughed at his joke, and I smiled. He was probably a father himself. Did his children make the same joke? ‘This is Ontake-san.’ He pointed at a couple of symbols. ‘Have you been?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s very beautiful. Sunrise from the top is wonderful. I grew up nearby. Very good skiing.’

  ‘I’ll try and go. I like skiing.’

  ‘You must have been to Sakurajima though?’

  I nodded. Volcanoes and Fathers. Sakurajima.

  Kagoshima / Sakurajima, Japan, September 1980

  Mummy didn’t like it there. She wanted to leave.

  She hated being sticky and sat puffing and fanning herself with the map. Daddy had been there before so maybe he was used to it, or maybe he didn’t mind sweat so much. His beard must have made his face really hot but he never complained like Mummy. I didn’t like it at first but then I got used to it a bit. It was cooler when we were in the north, on the island called Hokkaido. Kagoshima was south. South is hotter but only if you’re in the north. If you’re in the south, like Australia or Chile, south is cool and north is hot. Daddy went to Chile. He went to a lot of countries when he was younger. When a country he had been to came on TV he said ‘I’ve been there’ and Mummy rolled her eyes. Now he only went to America. He went to places like Houston, Texas for business. In America you have to say the name and the state because Americans aren’t so good at geography and you need to help them, like London, England and Tokyo, Japan. I looked up Houston, Texas in the atlas. It’s in the south of the north so it must be hot too. Maybe that was why Mummy never went with him.

  Mummy was in the next room and Daddy was out on business with Taka. He told me on the plane that Taka was an old friend from university and Mummy laughed her mean laugh and said she thought all his old university friends were women. After university in England Taka came back to Japan to study earthquakes. If I knew no one was going to die I’d like to feel an earthquake. It must be so weird to feel the earth moving like a bouncy castle. Taka tried to guess when earthquakes would come. He told me in the car from the airport that he’d never been right yet. I said he should study more and he laughed. When he laughed you could see he had lots of fillings in his teeth so maybe he ate too many sweets when he was little. Mummy told me not to be rude.

  Everything about this room was different from home. My bed wasn’t a bed, it was a mattress on the floor, called a futon. There was no carpet. Instead the floor was covered in straw mats called tatami. They were nice and cool under my feet when I walked back from the bath hot and already sweaty again. It was summer but it wasn’t like summer at home. At home we sat in the garden and had a barbecue, swatting wasps and watching the sky for signs of rain. The clouds came in quickly over the hospital where Mummy worked and dropped their water on our washing. Here there were no clouds all day, just hot blue sky.

  We’d been in Japan for a week and we’d seen temples and castles and mountains and lakes. We flew into Tokyo and then flew straight out again. I only saw it from the air. When I told my friends I was going to Japan they all said ‘Tokyo?’ because it was the only place they knew. I was going to take a map home and show them where I’d been.

  Next to my bed was a lamp. It was made of a dark wood Daddy said was cedar. I could switch it on and off without getting out of bed. At home I didn’t have a lamp next to my bed and Mummy switched the light off for me, which was nice when I was tired, but if I wanted to read, I couldn’t. Here, if I wanted to read, I could.

  Daddy bought me two books for the holiday: A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth by Jules Verne and How Volcanoes Work by Kenneth Murphy. He gave them to me as a surprise. Mummy bought a book for me in the airport. It was called Goddesses by Jane MacMillan. It was about all the different cultures around the world and the goddesses they prayed to. I liked this book because the pictures were funny and interesting. You could look at them for hours and keep finding new things. Jules Verne had no pictures because it was a book for grown-ups and grown-ups don’t like pictures. Kenneth Murphy put pictures in his book because it was for children like me but because it was science and not fantasy the pictures were not so exciting. The pictures were of volcanoes erupting and volcanoes that had been cut in half so you could see the inside and underground, and learn what happens to make a volcano erupt. The photos of real volcanoes erupting were amazing but most of the pictures weren’t real.

  I was going to see a real volcano. When we arrived at the airport it was dark and I couldn’t see Sakurajima. Most people could only drive around Sakurajima and look at it from far away but Taka had made it okay for us to go close because he was friends with Daddy.

  I flicked the switch on the lamp and the room went dark. I lay back and listened to the fan whirring and clicking. It turned its head like a person watching a very slow game of tennis and when it reached the end, it clicked three times, like it was trying to turn further but couldn’t. Then it turned back. Maybe it wanted to be an owl and turn its head all the way round. Without the fan I couldn’t sleep, it was so hot and sticky. I didn’t need any sheets. I closed my eyes and imagined walking on a volcano. Would I feel it boiling under my feet like a pan lid when Mummy was boiling potatoes? Taka said that smoke always comes out of the crater like someone was burning their barbecue up there. Would we be able to breathe? Would I see lava?

  Mummy and Daddy were in the room next to me and there was a door between the rooms so you didn’t have to go out into the corridor and knock. The door was closed but it was very thin. Doors and walls were all thin in Japan. At the hotel in Hokkaido some were made of paper. I lost my balance putting my shoes back on and put my thumb through a wall. The walls here weren’t made of paper but they were still thin, not like the granite walls in our house in Aberdeen, Scotland. (You have to say Scotland because of the oth
er Aberdeens – there’s one in America and one in Hong Kong and another in South Africa.) At home we couldn’t hear our neighbours, Mr and Mrs Galloway. But I think they sometimes could hear Mummy and Daddy.

  Daddy came back from his meeting with Taka and he was very noisy. It sounded like he kept dropping his key in the corridor and then there was a bang and he said a bad word. I woke up thinking it was morning and time to see the volcano but it was still dark and maybe I’d only been asleep for ten minutes or maybe two hours. It was so hard to tell time in the dark.

  I put my head under the pillow but I could still hear them.

  ‘You stink of whisky.’

  ‘Not polite to say “no” in Japan.’

  ‘And the state of you. Your shirt untucked and… God, your fly is open.’

  ‘Ah, he wants to come out and play.’

  ‘If he sticks his head out he’s getting whacked with my hairbrush.’

  There was one thud, a pause, then another. His shoes.

  ‘Be quiet. Caroline’s asleep next door and there are other guests, you know.’

  ‘They won’t complain. Too polite.’

  ‘No, go and have a shower. You’re not getting into bed reeking of alcohol and smoke. Where the hell did you get to? You said it was just a couple to catch up.’

  ‘Lots of catching up to do.’

  ‘Well I hope you weren’t causing havoc in the hotel.’

  ‘No. Went out. Hit the town.’

  ‘It looks like the town hit you. Where did you go? I can’t imagine there are too many bars open at this hour.’

  ‘Taka knows a place.’

  ‘Taka always knows a place. I’m serious: shower. And don’t wake Caroline. We have to get up in a few hours to see this damned volcano.’

  ‘She wants to go.’

  ‘Like she has a choice. I’m sure if you asked her she’d much rather go to the beach or a theme park than all these museums and geologically fascinating places.’

  ‘Fine. Let’s ask her.’