The Riau Island Mystery

Thinking back on things, it was probably Mark's last gig in Singapore and he deserves to know what happened even if he might find the truth hard to handle.

Mark, the Scuba diving instructor was also an Englishmen; one of those free-spirit nomads that ended up in Southeast Asia and bummed around on boats from one place to the next. The boat was an ugly tub, one-time luxury yacht turned live-aboard, stripped of its fineries. We were anchored in a small cove off Pulao Linga, an isolated Malaysian island in the Riau archipelago four hours motor-sailing from our base in Singapore. The captain and two crew members were quick and efficient with wordless aid.

There were seven diving enthusiasts aboard. I remember the Japanese husband and wife, for no other reason than they were the ultimate victims in the tragedy. Indeed Mrs. Watanabe has stayed with me in my dreams though I never shared anything more than a terrifying death scene with her. The other two couples were typical American corporate expats, bored experience- hunters, and with more money than sense. They were all kitted out with the very brand-new dive-gear, top of the range. Newbies. I could not hide from the superiority of my heavily used scuba equipment.

The Riau islands are on the equator. It was hot, muggy and heavily overcast; gray-blue clouds threatened a deluge. The sea was leaden and still, the jungle crowded in on the cove, the water in which we were moored was opaque, silty, muddy, and smelled fetid, like it was overcrowded with algae or plankton. The tides are muted at the equator, so the ocean slops around like bathwater. The small cove was a good place to learn advanced underwater diving protocols in adverse conditions: night diving techniques, zero-visibility navigation, and wreck diving methods.

Mark briefed us ahead of our first dive, and I quickly realized that my neophyte companions had barely enough experience to claim even basic competence, so it took an hour to go through the rudimentary stuff like buddy systems, dive plans, and decompression safety stop protocols. I paid good money to be aboard the boat, so I did not appreciate this amateur-hour delay.

“I’ve heard there are a lot of sharks in these waters,” I said, thinking to have a bit of fun at the newbies’ expense.

“Sharks?” said a freckled American man on behalf of his worried blond-haired wife. They were fussing endlessly with their face masks and fin-straps.

“And crocodiles. The crocs forage around the shore of these smaller islands.”

I thought Mark might play along with the joke, being a fellow Brit, and a man of action like me, but he was one of these self-important types, unable to share the limelight, as people in service roles often are.

“Kenneth, that’s very funny, I’m sure, but there are no crocs around here,” said Mark irritably.

“What about sharks?” said the other American man, balding, bespectacled, and holding his wife’s hand.

Mark looked at me with distaste, as if I’d created a problem for him, when all I was doing was lightening the mood, and introducing a bit of excitement.

“No sharks, no crocodiles or alligators, no barracudas, no deadly jellyfish… Sorry, folks but Kenneth is just stirring up trouble.” I looked for a wry smile on Mark’s face, but instead he was playing this straight and serious, and I took a dislike to him. The newbies looked at me like I was a naughty child, so my universe of dislike expanded at once to include the two American couples. The Japanese husband and wife seemed a bit lost, so I gave them a bit of slack.

“The most you might see are some Spanish Mackerel,” said Mark. He turned to the whiteboard and drew a picture of a fish wearing a beret and a speech bubble, “Ole!”

Everyone thought this was very funny, except me.

“Kenneth, since you are more experienced than the others…”

This was more like it! A recognition that I was not like the others; that I was a natural leader. Cream rises to the top, etc.

“Perhaps you can buddy up with Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe? They might benefit from your vast experience.”

It sounded just a bit sarcastic, but I took Mark’s instructions at face-value, because after all I was a bigger person than he, able to roll with the punches, and – fact of the matter – the Watanabes would benefit from my supervision and advice.

I’ve scuba-dived in some of the best diving-sites in the world. I’ve seen Manta Rays visit the “car wash” rock in the Maldives, I’ve observed gigantic Napoleon groupers nibbling at the coral reef in Sulawesi, I’ve watched sharks, pelegiacs and turtles flying across along a valley in the Great Barrier Reef, like herds of African mammal migrating the rift valley. The water in the Riau islands is like pea-soup. You might swim into the jaws of death and not know until the very last moment, which, I suppose, was true for Mr. Watanabe, whereas Mrs. Watanabe kind of knew what was happening, I think… though I will never be sure. My point is that the Riau Islands are not a great place to go diving. Take my word for it.

“Thirty minutes, maximum, thirty-feet, maximum just a quick warm-up dive,” said Mark, from the transom of the yacht once we were all in the water. “We’ll do the navigational instruction after lunch, but I want you all to get comfortable with the environment. Remember, three minutes at the decompression stop. Do you understand?”

I was the only one that knew the “OK” sign. The American couples were gone in an instant. Mr. and Mrs. Watanabe were unsure what to do, so I gave them a thumbs down, they nodded vigorously, and we descended into the gloom. Thirty-feet down, and we were kicking up clouds of fine-texture sand and mud from the bottom of the cove. The Watanabes swam parallel to me, visible as slender black wraiths, the boat, suspended overhead, was a dark trapezoidal presence, both comforting and weighty. Beneath the ocean, these everyday objects took on a mystique and power, which was not proportionate with their appearance and utility. Beneath the water, everything is strange. I jumped with fright at the boat chain and anchor when they suddenly manifested from the pixelated soup, inches in front of my nose.

There were shadowy moving figures beneath the water in the middle distance. A cloud must have crossed the sun because a larger shadow flashed past at great speed.

The Watanabes were lithe, athletic people, all muscle and sinew, surprisingly strong swimmers, and it took a bit of effort to catch up with them. When I did, the water had cleared of silt, and large round rocks sat in the sand like half-buried boulders in a neatly curated Zen Garden. For a weird out-of-body moment, I felt like a blimp floating across desert terrain in Arizona or New Mexico, drifting serenely along valleys and ravines.

Mrs. Watanabe to my right was a beautiful silhouette and imagined with a vague erotic delight, being entwined in her slip stream.

How, I wondered, could a cloud cast a shadow in the water when the day was overcast? A speeding shadow. I felt cold water seep down the back of my wetsuit, percolate along my spine.

In an instant, I’d lost the Watanabes.

I was inching through a narrow gap between the rocks, the sand was coarse, and the water was clear, and I could see twenty feet ahead to the end of the gulley. I pressed my hands against the rippled and ridged sand and felt like an amphibious explorer. Who’d have thought that I, Kenneth Walters, the hairdresser’s son from Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, would end up scuba-diving with Japanese people in the South China sea! I was overcome with a sense of awe and wonder. I would have a wealth of remarkable stories to tell my children, one day.

Up ahead, the gulley opened and revealed fronds of black seaweed waving gently in the water. A silver snout, a saw-toothed jaw, yellow and black striped scales, a fish with an eye the size of a dinner plate slid across the vista. The fear instinct was simple and instantaneous. I froze then flew, arms churning, flippered feet flailing, air bubbles jetting from my mask, I somehow contorted my body and propelled myself backward and away from the leviathan. Even amid near-mindless panic, I estimated the fish to be six feet deep, pelvic to dorsal fin, and therefore thirty or forty feet long, head to tail, a monster of the deep. I have never been so scared, and I have never swum so fast.

I bumped hard into something yielding behind me. It was Mrs. Watanabe.

“Up, up!” I screamed, but – of course – it was a guttural roar, and the enormity of my fear was expressed in large bubbles that escaped from my mouth and mask. I imagined disembodied screams enlarging and bursting out at the surface of the ocean seconds later. Too late to save Mr. Watanabe.

Mrs. Watanabe and I were spectators suspended in the aqueous quick. The great monster moved effortlessly along the sandy bottom, like a yellow and black striped loony toon fish, disinterested and wall-eyed, its jaws gaping stupidly. It was as if a four-year-old’s nightmarish vision of a fish - a mackerel - had come to life. A Spanish mackerel! What the hell was a Spanish Mackerel? What did Mark, the instructor, know that we didn’t know?

Mr. Watanabe had no idea what happened to him, because he was swimming toward us, and unaware of the giant creature that pursued him unhurriedly. It didn’t bite him or chomp him, or show any urgency of motion, but one moment Mr. Watanabe was swimming towards us, the next he was swallowed whole in the fish’s cavernous blubber-lipped mouth, and then Mr. Watanabe was gone.

I have the benefit of hindsight, but not so Mrs. Watanabe, whose horror, and incomprehension were written in her wide and lovely eyes. I have rationalized what happened and I can live with it as a true fact, and a pivotal moment in my life, while I imagine Mrs. Watanabe died a horrible death that she was unable to understand.

I wonder if an earthly existence interrupted in this manner gets special treatment in the afterlife. Does St. Peter offer counselling to those whose last moment on earth was so uncannily weird that it defied comprehension, and therefore defied the ordinary closure that is availed to the rest of us. Is the ocean haunted by ghosts, and, if so, are they confined to the spot in which they lost their mortal coil?

Mrs. Watanabe was sucked into the gaping maw of the terrible fish, and what eroticism there was in her slipstream I can only know by unwitting reconstruction in my dreams and nightmares, in which she figures, without a given name and faceless, often. She was gone in a flash, and so was I, though still embodied and alive. With the benefit of reflection, I have since taken some comfort in knowing that she was united in death with the man she loved, towed undersea into a Shinto eternity.

I burst above the ocean surface and swam to the waiting dive-boat, creating a turbid frothy wake owing to speed at which I fled to safety, expecting any moment for the loony-tune fish to erupt from the ocean, giant jaws agape, the Watanabe’s crying for help and clawing for egress. I don’t remember how I got aboard the boat, how I removed my dive gear, nor how I ended up sitting in the debrief room, shaking with fear that I explained away as cold.

“Where are the Watanabes?” said Mark once we’d re-assembled on deck.

There was no sense of alarm or even concern. They’d obviously swam ashore. We were anchored no more than fifty yards from the mangroves that clawed at the ocean.

“They were good swimmers,” I said, remembering the mermaid that was Mrs. Watanabe.

Past tense! What a fool I can be.

“Kenneth, you buddied up with them. Do you think they went ashore?”

“I’ve no idea Mark. The visibility was extremely poor, and they were very headstrong. They didn’t wait for me.”

The American couples were breathless but elated. They confirmed that visibility was limited. They hadn’t seen much beneath the waves, but they were excited to get back in the water later in the afternoon and learn underwater navigation skills.

“It would be very easy to lose your bearings down there,” said the freckle-faced man.

Thinking back on the whole sequence, I suppose I could have just come right out and told the truth.

“The Watanabes were swallowed by a giant Spanish Mackerel!”

I think I made the right decision.

We were about two hours into the search and rescue. Mark was a madman, calling on air-sea rescue, jumping in and out of the water, doing his own search, grilling us all for information. He was quite unpleasant, but I guess that he was facing a nasty reckoning back in Singapore. Helicopters from Singapore and Brunei and Jakarta were circling overhead, and coast guard ship arrived at high-speed, and the divers spilled into the cove. The clouds broke open the deluge came and it became impossible to conduct the search. I prayed that the Watanabe’s wouldn’t suddenly be disgorged by the fish, pop to the surface, and shake me from my white lie of omission.

The picture of the Spanish mackerel was still visible on the whiteboard. The beret was a silly accessory, of course, but the fish depicted by Mark’s quick scribble was a very accurate representation of the looney tune fish. Is it possible that Mark manifested the nightmare? Can you imagine having that on your conscience? I don’t think he’d have reacted well to that notion, and it would only have complicated things with the authorities, for him, for me, for everybody. Furthermore, the truth just sounded ridiculous, then and now as I tell it in public for the first time.