Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam

snail ate everything, not just what it was supposed to. The second wave of foreign snails was even worse, and carnivorous. Species of plant and insect grew scarce as they were eaten up. Now the first, indigenous, island snail is endangered and people come from America and all over to try to track it down and beef it up and train it to fight back in the name of biodiversity. People are wishing they had the old wee nuisance back.’
    ‘What a lot you do know,’ said Logan. He did not like the way she, having perfectly good information, made it implausible in the way she set it out. He did not look women in the face unless he was explaining things to them or setting out to seduce them. Otherwise, in a beautiful voice, he gave orders. He did not need to pitch them high. He was a man for whom people did things, for their own reasons.
    ‘The ecology of islands is fragile that way,’ Nick said, but it was not annoying. They even hoped he would continue. He did not have the polymath’s trick of talking in brightly formed sentence-long paragraphs. He went on eating Weetabix, feeding himself from the front of the spoon. It was a large spoon, no different from a small spoon to him in the matter of eating; had it been an engine part he could have gauged dimension precisely. ‘In small enclosed places with highly organised finite interdependencies you can’t afford to unbalance a single thing.’
    Elspeth and Gabriel were coming by now, the fourth full day in Moorea, to seek one another out. The forgettable conversations that distinguish the domestic female day could not take place at sea, where there were no shopkeepers, no bus drivers, no familiar strangers. Gabriel, being younger than Elspeth, did not need and had not established so many of these links, but Elspeth realised each time she went to sea how she missed such small advances into disinterested warmth.
    The escape provided by these secessions from life on dry land was more partial for the women. The sense of being away and free can shade with a change of wind into the sense of being caught and trapped, painted in to a picture one did not choose to be part of.
    The chopped time of watchkeeping, twenty-four hours divided into six stretches of four, quickly establishes itself. The body adapts by cutting off the dawdling sleep that is rich in enquiry and reconciliation with the day just gone. Even in the deepest sleep, too, the body is attuned to the boat. All through the sleep on a boat, by day or by night, you listen for some clue from the air as to what it intends to do. On a sailing boat this speculation is the medium of all preoccupation. The wind breathes into everything. If it is not there, its absence is felt like a distant but fresh bereavement.
    The company on board were between the land and the sea in their sleeping habits as well as their anchorage; they had not yet begun to work fully on the watch system, although Nick and Sandro tended to split the night between them to listen for dragging on the anchor chain. Nick hoped to see the fish that stripped the hooks each night. All they had caught was a shark pup that was more interesting to gut than to eat. It had fed with such uninvolved gusto that its belly spilled out fifty-seven unmarked silver wrasse, shiny like foil birdscarers. Ardent Spirit was anchored a few hundred yards out from the island; as the day began, the sound of mobilette engines could be heard from the land, and sometimes a papery chopping, palms being cut by machete blades. The flat sea took the noise straight over itself from the high island. There was no modifying shore. Beyond the boat, over the reef, the water crisped and broke, caught from beneath continually, combed to shreds and flung again.
    Gabriel, wound up in a pareo of flowered cotton, seemed nonetheless unexotic, her bare shoulders fine, not private or suggestive. The cloth wound round her was not introspective and alluring like a sari, but to the point, as an Englishwoman will have