The coral bones, p.1
The Coral Bones, page 1
“A rich and brilliant novel about the connectedness of humanity in itself and with its world: beautifully written and compellingly drawn, layering history, present day and the future with brilliancy and power. It’s a novel about the climate crisis, but it’s a naturalist’s novel too, with some wonderfully, vividly observed writing about sealife from coral to sharks and seahorses. Just marvellous.” Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself
“A beautifully crafted love letter to our endangered coral reefs. E.J. Swift confirms her reputation for writing elegant, heartfelt and compelling eco-fiction.” Anne Charnock, Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author of Dreams Before The Start of Time and Bridge 108
“Beautifully realised, vivid versions of past, present and future combine in The Coral Bones to powerful effect. It gave me much to think about. I won't forget it.” Aliya Whiteley, author of Skyward Inn and The Loosening Skin
“E. J. Swift pulls no punches in this beautiful and terrifying yet boldly hopeful novel. The wonder of the Great Barrier Reef is laid out for us via a vivid multi-dimensional tour through the lenses of past, present and future. The three narrators’ deep emotional bonds with the ocean are skilfully drawn out and interwoven, revealing the inescapable truth, simultaneously comforting and alarming, that we are more profoundly connected to our increasingly fragile environment than we ever suspected.” Vicki Jarrett, author of Always North
Also available from Unsung Stories
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley
Dark Star by Oliver Langmead
Winter by Dan Grace
The Bearer of Grievances by Joseph McKinley
The Dancer by Rab Ferguson
The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley
Metronome by Oliver Langmead
Pseudotooth by Verity Holloway
You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin
2084 edited by George Sandison
This Dreaming Isle edited by Dan Coxon
The Willow By Your Side by Peter Haynes
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
Always North by Vicki Jarrett
Dark River by Rym Kechacha
Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus
Greensmith by Aliya Whiteley
Out of the Darkness edited by Dan Coxon
Gigantic by Ashley Stokes
Unexpected Places to Fall From by Malcolm Devlin
Whirlwind Romance by Sam Thompson
To Catch a Moon by Rym Kechacha
Published by Unsung Stories
3 Rosslyn Road
London E17 9EU, United Kingdom
www.unsungstories.co.uk
First edition published in 2022
First impression
© 2022 E. J. Swift
E.J. Swift has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of their Work.
This book is a work of fiction.
All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictional and any similarities to persons, alive or deceased, is coincidental.
Paperback ISBN: 9781912658220
ePub ISBN: 9781912658237
Edited by Dan Coxon
Proofreading by Jonathan Oliver
Cover design by Vince Haig
Text design by Cox Design Limited
Typesetting by Vince Haig
Printed in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
for James
Table of Contents
1 Epipelagic
2 Mesopelagic
3 Bathypelagic
4 Abyssopelagic
5 Hadalpelagic
Acknowledgements
1
Epipelagic
0–200m
Hana
MAY
We found the body in an orange inflatable off the south coast of Lizard Island. Face, limbs and torso had been painted entirely white, and in black letters on the surrounding lip of plastic were the words: This is what it looks like when coral dies. In the days that followed Coral Man’s appearance, I read numerous theories about his demise, and more about his desecration. He was a prophecy, a wake-up call, also an affront. Some claimed he was the work of activists, eco-warriors and the like who had been on the warpath since the beginning of the bleaching crisis. A few right-wing outliers blamed the scientific community, never to be trusted when it came to climate. One tabloid posited a radical form of protest through self-immolation, and then of course there was that singular article, which argued the words were a twisted tribute to the musician and international icon Prince, days after the anniversary of his death at his home in Minnesota.
The man was a stranger to me, but death brings unforeseen intimacy. To look at him was vertigo. Reading that message, I felt as though all the events of the days and months preceding were smashing together: the words I had said to you and withheld, the promises made and the too many I had broken. Something other would be forged in the collision. Molecular structures would split and reconfigure, just as all around us the ecosystems we had depended upon for millennia were melting, mutating, metastasising into unpredictable forms. Reading that message, it was clearer than ever to me that we had reached the brink, were poised on the very edge of the abyss, uncertain if we would fly or fall.
Did you see the story, Tess? All the major news outlets ran it, so you must have caught the headlines at least. Probably you thought of me, and probably you wished you hadn’t. I’m sorry for that – I’m sorry for a lot of things. There’s no reason you should have placed me at the scene, but I did in fact play a role in Coral Man’s discovery. As for the media hyperbole, you’re too astute to have paid much attention to that. The truth, as we both know, lies in the interstitial. To reach it, you must be prepared to go under.
Are you ready?
Then take a deep breath.
›•‹
Aaron and I were out in one of the research station dinghies, assessing the damage to the surrounding reefs after the latest bleaching event. I was already in the water, about to submerge, when we saw the inflatable. It was a hundred metres away, being slowly guided to shore by two divers, masks pushed up from their faces. Inside, we could make out something long and white and inert. Aaron gave the divers a wave and we manoeuvred our dinghy carefully around the bommie to give them a hand with their mysterious cargo. As we drew closer, it became clear that the white object was indisputably human and indisputably dead. I looked to Aaron and saw my alarm mirrored, his eyes widening with incredulity. My gut twisted. The dread that I’d been carrying all morning contracted into something hard and stony.
The first diver, a man, hailed us.
Hey, guys! Do you work here? We found this – this dude—
Just floating! Out past the reef—
The second diver was a woman. They were American – tourists, I assumed, from the island resort. Aaron assured them that we did indeed work here. That was good enough for the Americans. Aaron brought the dinghy close to the beach so I could jump out and I helped the tourists push the inflatable up on the sand. They were both white, heavily tanned, and of my parents’ generation – I guessed them to be in their sixties.
As we wrestled with the inflatable in the surf, the body inside slid to an angle, making all of us swear. The soles of the feet were now pointed towards me. Beneath the paint I could see the hard skin of the heels and the softer curve of the instep, wrinkled by exposure to water. My stomach buckled again. The sand underfoot shifted with the backwash and a surge of dizziness caused me to stumble. The American man grunted, adjusting to the redistribution in mass. I’d always imagined the dead to be light, but the load was greater than you would believe one person could weigh. Sweating in the heat, hampered by the suction of our wetsuits, all three of us were breathless and panting by the time we’d got the inflatable clear of the water.
We stood there on the pristine beach, a narrow strip of sand between turquoise sea and acacia woodlands, flanking the orange inflatable with the corpse inside and the loaded message on its rim. I had to force myself to look beyond the words, to give the dead man the courtesy of acknowledgement. He was broad-shouldered and still muscular, although a degree of thickness around the waist suggested he was losing the battle against middle age. He wore board shorts, the material stiffened with streaks and gullies of white paint, and flecks of it surrounded him in a spattered halo. His eyelids were glued closed. There was no evidence that I could see of physical assault – that is, nothing to indicate murder – but I couldn’t suppress that vestigial sense of foreboding. I leaned in, swallowing back my nausea. Studied the face. Thick eyebrows, neatly trimmed beard and a largish nose, a tinge of sunburn glowing through the paint. Its physiognomy, from above, not unlike the contours of a reef. There was no bloating.
Hana! called Aaron, who was still in the dinghy. It’s not anyone we know?
I looked up, startled. It hadn’t occurred to me that the dead man could be from our community, an acquaintance or colleague from the research station.
I don’t recognise him, I called back.
We should get help, the American woman said nervously.
Of course, there is no mobile phone coverage on Lizard Island.
We were roughly halfway between the resort and the research station. In the end, Aaron had to take the dinghy around the island, and the Americans and I waited with our dead ward, moving a good few metres down the beach before seating ourselves, trying not to dwell upon the question of who he might be and how he had come to be here. Instinctively I checked t he skies, but the beautiful day was holding. Our vista eastwards could have been an exact replica of the advertisement that must have brought these tourists halfway across the world: a view that completely belied the destruction Aaron had recorded only this morning. If this was irony on an existential scale, I wanted no part in it.
By now it was approaching midday, and the three of us retreated into the slim shade offered by the acacias. I heard the call of a pheasant coucal, caught a brief glimpse of the bird itself before it took flight inland, unimpressed by this incursion on its territory. The heat bore down. The wetsuit seemed to squeeze my chest ever tighter. I succumbed, peeling off the top half, then the bottom, aware of a crashing relief as the air entered my lungs with greater ease. I sat in my bikini, conscious of being nearly naked in the company of strangers; and of the corpse, which was worse somehow, as though its proximity were contagious. But anything was better than being in that skin at noon in the tropics.
The Americans watched me, then hesitantly they too rolled down the top halves of their wetsuits.
What was your name again? the woman asked.
Hana, I said.
I’m Erica. This is Bruce. We’re staying at the resort.
I nodded.
We’re from California, said Erica.
Brisbane.
I watched her push down the urge to ask where I was from originally. It was hardly the occasion for casual chat, but we needed to distract ourselves from the inflatable. I asked if this was their first trip to Australia. Erica said they’d visited once before, the west coast and Ningaloo.
Most people do it the other way round, I commented.
Bruce wanted to see whale sharks, said Erica. But it’s true the east coast is prettier. Don’t you think, Bruce?
It’s pretty, sure.
How long are you staying on the island? I asked.
Seven nights. We did Cook’s Look yesterday, but really we’re here for the diving. We’ve been all over the world, the Maldives, the Red Sea… so we had to come here. It’s terrible what’s happening to the oceans. You know, when we started out, the reefs were pristine. There were so many corals and thousands of fish, literally thousands.
You don’t see groupers and sharks now, said Bruce. Not in numbers. Not like you used to. Tell you what, there’s a ton more jellies out there too.
Gives me the creeps, said Erica.
Cascades, I murmured, more to myself than to the Americans. That was the thing: bleaching was just the start of it. Maybe the Americans knew that, maybe they didn’t. A quarter of all marine species depended on this habitat. When corals died, it wasn’t a death in isolation. The benthos was next – all the lesser loved creatures, the millions of worms and snails and crustaceans that made their home on the reef – then the fish went, and the turtles, then the cartilaginous predators, the sharks and rays. An entire ecosystem collapsed.
But surely your government’s gotta do something? said Bruce. This is gonna hit the tourism industry hard, if nothing else.
Don’t get me started, I said.
There was a pause. Erica said, Anyway, I guess we’re telling you things you already know. If you’re a scientist here?
I don’t work on the island all the time, but yeah. I’m a marine biologist.
This time the pause was longer, and I knew we were all thinking about the message on the orange inflatable. This is what it looks like when coral dies. The palette of a common clownfish, I thought. Orange plastic, white paint, black letters. The reef’s most flaunted icon, for anyone familiar with its inhabitants. Given that it was the Americans who had found Coral Man – as I was already thinking of him, as the media would inevitably dub him – they would surely be suspects for his deceased state. They’d said it themselves, they cared about the oceans. And now that I had revealed my profession, doubtless the same possibility had crossed their minds about me.
I sized up the odds. Me, mid-thirties, average height, in reasonable shape from regular diving and cycling, though I’d let the latter slip more recently. I supposed it was just about conceivable to others that I might take on a hefty fifty-year-old man. The Americans were older, and saggier around the edges, but there were two of them and they were experienced in the water.
I reminded myself that Aaron was a witness, Aaron was fetching help. But now all I could think about was the man, and how he might have died. Drowning, if that were the cause, was a horrific way to go. In a rush, I remembered all the dives where something had almost gone wrong, when I’d lingered a few minutes longer than advisable at depth, or seen the shadow of something large, not yet identified, emerging from the gloom. I imagined my body pulled from the water, laid out on a slab to be named. What had this man been aware of in his final moments?
Don’t think of it. I scanned the shoreline. It would be too easy to see menace in the isolation, the oppressive heat, to give in to the premonitory feeling of the day. A goanna eyed us up from further down the beach and began heading our way, its gait slow but determined. The Americans looked unsettled.
They don’t bite, do they? asked Erica.
I told her the goannas weren’t dangerous. The lizard stopped about fifty metres away from us, observing. Its tongue flickered in and out. Then it turned and lumbered away into the forest. After that, Erica kept checking behind her, as though the lizard might suddenly leap out from the bush.
I wished Aaron would return. My dive watch said he had been gone for twenty minutes. It felt much longer than that. I began worrying about the body in the heat. Should we have dragged it into the shade? Would it start to bloat?
Erica occupied herself with pointing out seabirds to her husband.
Is that a tern? she asked. I think it’s a kind of tern. If we had the app we could check what they are.
We don’t have the app, honey. We don’t have our phones.
I know we don’t have the app. I’m just saying, if we did—
Her gaze veered in my direction, inviting me to be her interpreter. I had no intention of taking on the role, or of telling her she was looking at two species of terns, bridled and lesser crested. The birds were fighting over a catch, their wings stretched into taut arches, talons outstretched.
I switched on the camera, which I’d had on my person when I was about to dive, and flicked through Aaron’s photos. At first I was careful to keep myself oriented towards the Americans, but I quickly became immersed in the photographs. They were like everything else I had seen, from the scientific community and those media with enough of a conscience to report on the environmental crisis: image after image of bleached or dying corals. This reef had already flipped to a macroalgal state. Repeated bleaching had weakened the corals, and there weren’t enough fish to keep the rapid growth of slime in check. The camera was a death memoir. I put it aside, gazed at the glittering ocean before me, the waves washing up and receding from the sand. I thought about the tourists at the extortionate resort, and wondered if they had any awareness of the massacre underwater, because that was how I thought of it: a massacre. A slow and insidious one by carbon dioxide, but a massacre nonetheless.
I was up at Lizard as a favour to Aaron. His research partner had taken ill with appendicitis and been rushed to the mainland for treatment; she wouldn’t be back in the field for a few weeks. Aaron was also the sole friend I had confided in about my breakup with Tess, and doubtless he considered me in need of distractions. He was probably right, but I hadn’t been looking forward to the trip. What I had seen in photographs was devastating enough. While it remained in pixels, I could cling on to delusion, maintain a barrier between the known and the potential for fallacy. I wasn’t sure I had the resilience to see the damage at Lizard in person. But Aaron was focussing on signs of reef recovery, looking at the big boulder corals like porites, and that was how he sold it to me – a grain of hope in a seemingly hopeless catastrophe.
I’d flown up from Townsville the previous afternoon. I managed to pick up a last-minute connection to Cairns, and from there Aaron had booked me on the afternoon charter to Lizard, another fifty-five minutes in the air. I was the only scientist on the flight. The other passengers were visitors to the resort, where the cheapest accommodation cost around two thousand dollars a night, and private lodgings such as The Villa rose to six. Some of the resorters were Australian; the majority were from abroad, and all of them exuded the casual confidence of the rich.
