I was glad for the racket the engine made; it precluded conversation. I did not want to talk, only to observe, as I was being observed. I could feel the eyes of everyone under the tarpaulin were on me, the mother and her three young children, the older woman who was rolling herself a cigarette, Sarani’s white-haired companion from the day before. He touched my arm to gain my attention and mimed smoking one of my cigarettes, before settling down to the reality. I let them get on with scrutinising me and tried not to appear alarming – smiling at the children seemed only to make them cry.
Out in the channel, the sun was fierce. We passed the stilted suburbs of Semporna, single plank walkways their pavements, the open water between buildings their streets. Pump-boats putt-putted in and out of the maze, small two-stroke in-board engines making them sound like mopeds, their riders sitting at the stern with one arm hooked over the plywood side working the paddle that acted as the boat’s rudder. Their flat plywood bottoms bounced across the wake of a trawler coming into port, nets furled around the davits. Less than a mile away was the coast of Bum Bum, with villages dotted amongst the coconut plantations, clusters of rusting roofs surmounted by the shining tin dome of a mosque. The channel turned and broadened, habitation becoming more sparse, and ahead was open sea. Flying fish fled our bow wash.
As we cleared Bum Bum’s southern point, the stilt village that had appeared to be attached to land turned out to be freestanding, planted on pilings over a shallow reef, the houses connected to each other, but to nowhere else. Behind was another island, Omadal, inhabited, and a Bajau Laut anchorage. I scanned the horizon off the port bow where I thought Mabul should be, and I made out a low regular shape looking like the cap of a mushroom, the sides curving down and in on themselves, the top flat – the characteristic shape of a coconut plantation. Sarani moved over to where I sat.
‘That’s Pulau Mabul,’ he shouted, pointing to the shape. We were still travelling south-south-west along the coast, and Mabul was due south, which left me wondering about our course.
‘We are not going that way?’ I pointed straight out towards it.
‘Cannot. There’s coral, you see?’ I had not been looking properly, but now I could see a line of grey rocks that broke the water, the palisade of the Creach Reef running uninterrupted from Bum Bum to the group of three islands we were approaching. ‘Only at the top of the tide can we go that way.’ He looked round at an estuary that bit into the mainland. The river brought brown water and forest leaves out into the channel. The mudflats were uncovered between the mangroves and the water line, and as we passed, a view into the inlet opened up, its banks covered in nipa palm; behind, were hills rising to one thousand feet and the westering sun. Sarani pointed to the flats where egrets stalked. ‘The tide is still coming in. We must go around these islands to reach the deep water.’ He pulled a dirty Tupperware box from under the gunwale, his betel-chewing kit. He peeled off the husk, mottled orange and black, divided the nut and wrapped a portion with some powdered lime in a leaf. He stuffed the package into a metal cylinder which fitted over a wooden baton and mashed the nut and leaf and lime into a paste with what looked like an old chisel bit. He pushed the cylinder down and the baton, acting as a plunger, presented a plug of pan to Sarani’s reddened lips. He packed away the paraphernalia, and went back to scanning the sea, spitting pensively over the side. It is a complicated business, using a masticatory when you haven’t got any teeth.
Manampilik, the last of the three islands, was little more than a steep ridge with a rocky shore. Coconut palms clung to the lower slopes, the higher left to scrub. The sea was glassy in its shelter. There was a swirl at the surface. ‘Turtle,’ said Sarani, and as I looked for it to show again, a fish as thin as an eel, a long-tom, broke from the water ahead of the bow and skipped like a stone once, twice, three, four times, each leap carrying it ten feet. The run ended only after another ten feet of tail-walking. I had never seen anything like it. Sarani laughed at my surprise and said, ‘They taste good.’
We rounded the southern edge of the Creach Reef and passed in deep water between Manampilik and a fourth island, confusingly called Pulau Tiga, ‘Third Island’, a tiny islet, no more than a sand bar, yet covered with stilt houses. It seemed the most unlikely place to site a village, on a strip of sand that looked as though it would wash away in a big sea, with nowhere to grow anything, no fresh water. Was there even any land left at high tide?
‘Oh yes, there is still land,’ said Sarani, ‘you see, they have trees.’ And there were two forlorn papaya plants, whose sparse crown of leaves on a long stem poked up between the roofs, growing in the middle of the village. There was a volleyball net strung between them. It was a surreal touch on a surreal island, a sand bank in the middle of nowhere that quadrupled in size twice a day. Sarani had family connections here. One of his sons had married a girl from the Bajau Laut group whose boats I could see anchored on the southern side of the island. It was my first glimpse of a Bajau Laut community, and it thrilled me.
We turned east-south-east, away from the mainland, and the horizon became immense. The water was indigo, marbled with wind lanes, and moved with a slow rhythm from the south, from the vastness of the Celebes Sea. I could see the tops of the trees on Sipadan to the south-east, the ragged outline of its tiny patch of rain forest, and due east, the peak of Si Amil. Danawan, separated from Si Amil by a narrow strait, and Ligitan, the last island in the group, remained hidden below the horizon. Sailing east from Ligitan there is nothing but water for the next five hundred miles.
We slowed as we approached Mabul’s fringing reef and picked our way through the coral heads, Sarani sitting in the bow on the look-out for snags. The evening sun threw a warm light over the stilt village on the southern shore and long shadows in the grove of palms behind. The shouts of children playing came out across the water. Pump-boats and brightly painted jongkong were returning with the day’s catch, being dragged up the beach between the houses. We made for a long barrack-like building – the school – and nearby a fence ran back into the palms, marking the end of the village, and the beginning of the Sipadan-Mabul Resort. The stilt houses connected to the beach by duck boards were replaced by sun-chairs and thatched umbrellas. The resort’s liveried jongkong and speedboats, all bearing the ‘SMART’ logo of a turtle kitted out in scuba gear, were pulled up on the raked sand. Set back amongst the palms were bungalows with verandas and air-conditioning units. It was a different country.
Sarani expected me to get off here and stay in the resort. He had not completely understood what I wanted to do, and now that I was on the boat I certainly did not want to get off it. ‘You cannot stay on the boat tonight,’ he was adamant, ‘but we will come back for you in the morning. Maybe you can stay in the village.’ We motored around to the other side of the island where the houses were poorer, more ramshackle, and dwarfed by an orderly group of wooden buildings at the end of a long jetty – another resort, the Sipadan Water Village. We nosed back in over the reef, and towards a house whose seaward wall had a doorway where sat an old man with a grizzled crew cut, shirtless, watching our progress. Sarani hailed him, as we cut our engine and glided in, the bow poking into the woven palm-leaf wall. It was agreed. My bags were passed into the house, and Sarani signalled for me to follow them. I clambered in.
‘Until tomorrow?’ I said.
‘Until tomorrow, early.’ I watched him pole the boat around and out towards the deeper water, the sun setting behind the hills on the mainland. I was not completely sure if I would see him again. Meanwhile, for the second time that day, I found myself landed in a strange world where I was the strangest thing in it, feared by the children and stared at by the adults, talked about in a language I did not understand. I sat with my luggage on the other side of the seaward door from the old man. His family hemmed us in, their curious faces catching the last of the light from the western sky. Shadows grew from the back of the hut’s single room. Fishing lines, nets, clothes hung from the palm-thatch walls, baskets from the rafters. Woven pandanus mats and pillows lined one side. I looked around while they looked at me. I looked out at the strands of painted clouds