Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  For a moment there was silence and Carroll seemed to writhe under Ash’s glance. He lifted his eyes to look at the elderly captain in the other chair, then he gestured again towards the shore.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he persisted weakly. ‘They are there. Perhaps there’s no artillery after all. But the troops are there. Why do you think my men are so nervy? This is Captain García who was in command of the battery. He’ll confirm my remarks.’

  The captain looked up at Carroll as he heard his name, and nodded quickly.

  ‘They didn’t say anything about opposition troops this morning,’ Ash said, slamming a great hand down on the table so that the crockery chinked together. ‘They said nothing about enemy positions. They merely told us the ship was mistaken in the darkness for a vessel coming down from the north.’

  ‘I can’t agree.’

  ‘We had a pilot on board,’ Ash snapped, losing his temper. ‘He was killed. I brought his body ashore this morning myself. One of your own people. What would he be doing allowing us to interfere in the affairs of his own country?’

  Carroll frowned. ‘Clearly he’d been bribed,’ he said feebly.

  Ash was silent for a moment, conscious of the eyes of the others watching him, then he turned slowly and explained to them what Carroll had said. Dodgin regarded him as though he were in league with Carroll. Probably there was no one and nothing that Dodgin believed in. His whole life had clearly been a pathway of distrust which now seemed to have crystallized into a searing hatred to Latin Americans. His yellow face was lined with bitterness and fury, and he leapt forward abruptly, peering over the table.

  ‘You’re trying to blame us to save your own bloody necks,’ he shouted at Carroll in an explosion of fury. ‘That’s what you’re doing!’

  Ash turned to Carroll who gestured impatiently. Neither he nor Dodgin had understood a word the other had said but the hatred between them had become a very real thing.

  ‘We must hold the ship up for a while until investigations are made,’ Carroll said, and his voice was sharper, as though Dodgin’s dislike had stirred up his temper at last.

  ‘You can’t hold the ship up,’ Ash said.

  Carroll gestured angrily, his eyes flashing. ‘You are in national waters, at the moment governed by the military authorities,’ he retorted. He had risen to his feet, facing them, with his head up and one hand on his belt, in a suggestion of the dramatic. The anxious man who had climbed aboard had suddenly reached way back into the strict code of his army training and become what he was meant to be, stiff-necked, proud and arrogant.

  His eyes moved along the others for a moment, as though he were trying to assess their reactions.

  ‘Naturally,’ he went on, ‘if an admission of guilt were forthcoming at once, there need be no delay. There would be no need in the case of such a deposition being laid before me to hold you until an inquiry could take place. Such a statement, properly witnessed, would be admissible before any court, and you could leave at once. The ship’s papers would be returned and a pilot could be permitted to come on board immediately.’

  Ash sneered, and for a moment Carroll loathed him for his size and his strength and the anger that glowed in his eyes.

  ‘Just a few names on a scrap of paper,’ he said, staring down that long bony nose of his at Carroll. ‘Just a few names, and then you’re happy, and the Embassy can sort out the tangle.’

  He looked at Carroll contemptuously for a second, then he turned and explained to the others, and Dodgin’s fury burst out of him immediately in a shout. He surged round the table, knocking a fork to the deck so that it clattered noisily in the silence.

  ‘You know what,’ he said in a shout to Ash. ‘You can tell him to make a little brown paper parcel of his bloody idea.’

  He gestured under Carroll’s nose with a shaking finger and his eyes blazed icily as he stared up at Ash, consumed with his rage. ‘You can tell him to tie it up with string,’ he yelled, ‘and shove it where the monkey shoves its nuts. That’s what you can tell him, mate. He’s getting nowt from me.’

  Six

  There appeared to be nothing more to be said. Dodgin seemed to have made the decision for all of them.

  Carroll jerked his tunic straight. He seemed annoyed, as though he hadn’t expected the crew of a sad old tramp like the Ballaculish to show any signs of spirit. He hitched up his belt, then as he looked at them again his expression changed once more, as though he felt that a crew as wretched and devoid of discipline as this one seemed to be couldn’t possibly withstand him for long after all. They were a grubby and pathetic lot, it was very clear, and obviously the fag-end of the Merchant Service who could find no better ship than the lopsided old Ballaculish.

  The odour of moping dockside streets and all their years in cranky, meanly-found ships, beggarly with poor food, obsolete as the gallows and crewed by the smallest possible number of men, was on all of them. All the unsavoury places they had known in the world from Tiger Bay to Capetown’s District Six and back again stood on their faces with the disappointment of lifetime of dreary forecastles and glory holes, and there wasn’t one of them who looked as though he had the moral strength to defy anybody.

  As he turned away, however, Dainty raised his head. There was nothing courageous about his twisted little figure, ravaged by the booze he’d put away over the years, but as he peered through his bent spectacles with his dim and watering eyes there was something about him for a moment that showed a glimmering of pride.

  Dodgin stood alongside him, his weasel features by no means the countenance of a stoic, an angry, hostile face whose expression suggested that he had long ago been cheated of everything that was decent and human, and bitterly resented it. For a moment, though, they were at one in their indignation at Carroll’s infamous suggestion. By whatever muddled reasoning they had reached their separate conclusions, it was clear that in their own peculiar way they had not after all wholly lost their pride. They still possessed not only more courage than appeared on the surface, but a modicum of honour too.

  Only Grundy’s sickly face, flushed still from drink as it swung from one to the other of them reflected uncertainty.

  Carroll watched them for a moment, as though he sensed that something had gone wrong somewhere, then he fished in his pocked and produced a folded sheet of paper which he tossed among the cups and saucers on the table.

  ‘I’ll leave this,’ he said. ‘Perhaps later, when the anxiety of the moment’s passed and we’re all a little more calm, you might like to read it. It only requires signing. It covers everything.’

  ‘What’s he leaving?’ Dodgin demanded.

  When Ash explained, he snatched the paper up so viciously he knocked a cup flying to the deck. It smashed neatly into two halves which rolled round in half-circles and stopped, rocking gently on their curved surfaces.

  ‘That’s what I think of your lousy paper,’ he shouted at Carroll, slamming the sheet to the floor after the broken cup. ‘Look!’

  He gave the paper a kick with his scuffed-up shoe that sent it skating along the deck. It rose as the air got under it and finished propped against the bulkhead.

  ‘Christ,’ he yelled. ‘You dirty bastard! You even had it ready, all wrote out for us to put our bloody monickers on!’

  Dainty put a hand on his arm, a twisted grimy hand, square and torn with work, its nails broken and black with grease. He pushed Dodgin back and stood on his own in front of Carroll.

  ‘I don’t know who sent ’em,’ he said to Ash with a sad stale dignity that was touching. ‘Or whether they came on their own. But there’s nothing doing, mister. You’d better tell ’im that’s not how we do business where we come from.’

  As soon as they emerged on deck, Grace knew something had gone wrong. She had heard the shouting in the saloon and Dodgin’s shrill abuse, and Ash’s angry face as he appeared through the door confirmed her fears and left her shivering with anxiety for Teresa.

  ‘You rotten lot of sods,’ Dodgin
burst out as he exploded into the sunshine, hurtling on to the deck as though he had been shot violently out of a gun. He seemed to be hopping with fury and Grace drew Teresa nearer to her where she stood among the Lascar sailors and firemen, aware of the musty smell of their bodies and the stale stink of their sweat.

  ‘I ought to chuck you all in the water,’ Dodgin went on, his puny body contorted with rage and, though none of them understood what he was saying, the soldiers by the ladder unslung their rifles and stood with them across their chests.

  ‘Shut up, Dodge,’ Dainty said uneasily. ‘They might start something. And we don’t want nothing more to cope with until we’ve sorted this lot out.’

  ‘Shut up?’ Dodgin’s eyes were wild. ‘That’s the bastard killed our mates, isn’t it?’ He jabbed a skinny finger in the direction of Captain García. ‘And ’im’ – he pointed at Carroll with an accusing, unwavering hand – ‘’e’s the bastard who’s trying to wriggle out of it and put the blame on us.’

  Ash caught his arm as he raised a bony fist and, swinging him round by it, slammed him hard against the bulkhead.

  ‘Let me go,’ Dodgin shouted, struggling to free himself. ‘Let me go, you bastard! You’re as bad as he is! He wants sticking! That’s what he wants!’

  Carroll watched the scene uneasily, nibbling at his nails.

  ‘I bitterly regret this has had to happen,’ he said quickly, as he moved towards the ladder. ‘But unhappily, people are often killed in other people’s disputes. I remember the Amethyst and the American ship, Panay. It’s the fortune of war.’

  ‘Fortune of War, be damned,’ Ash snorted.

  There was silence as Carroll surveyed the group, then Dodgin’s fury burst out again in a stream of abuse.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, put a sock in it!’ Ash suddenly lost patience with his shrill rage and, putting the palm of one great hand on the steward’s chest, held him easily against the steel of the bulkhead. ‘Poking him one in the eye’ll get you nothing,’ he snapped. ‘Only a bonk on the conk with a rifle butt.’

  Dodgin became silent at once and Grace saw Ash suddenly as someone bigger and more commanding than the dubious mountebank with the racy slang she had got to know.

  Carroll, too, seemed a little over-awed by his manner.

  ‘We might require names,’ he said nervously, as though he felt that some face-saving show of force were needed to salvage a rather sordid incident from ignominy. ‘We might require everyone’s names for our report. This man, for instance’ – he gestured at Dodgin squirming behind Ash’s hand – ‘What’s his name?’

  Carroll’s gesture was too much for the steward. ‘What’s he want?’ he yelled over Ash’s shoulder. What’s the bastard after now?’

  ‘He wants you name.’

  ‘Moby Dick,’ Dodgin shouted immediately, glaring at Carroll. ‘That’s it. Moby Dick. Moby H Dick. And I hope it does him a bloody lot of good.’

  Carroll turned away and his eyes fell on Teresa whom he had not noticed until that moment. He gestured vaguely towards her, almost as though he were giving her a blessing. ‘It’s a bad thing to force women and children to endure hardships,’ he said to Ash. ‘These matters could be put right so simply. Whose is the child?’

  Grace’s eyes had flown to Ash’s. She could only guess what Carroll was saying but there was agony in her face.

  ‘She’s mine,’ Ash said quickly.

  ‘I have no wish to make war in children,’ Carroll said unhappily. He reached out again, as though he would have liked to have laid his hand on Teresa’s head. ‘I’d like to be able to offer a free passage to the lady and the child.’

  ‘But you daren’t in case someone finds out what’s happened,’ Ash finished for him with a cool insolence. He leaned on Dodgin and looked at Grace whose eyes were afraid, as though she couldn’t trust her own courage, as though she had tested it too far already.

  ‘They’ll stay here,’ he said to Carroll. ‘They feel safer. I’m afraid you can’t use ’em to force us to sign your silly little document.’

  Carroll shrugged. ‘Such an ordeal for your wife, señor,’ he persisted.

  Carroll shrugged again, and they crowded the rails and watched him descend the ladder and settle himself among the soldiers in the boat. As Ash released Dodgin, the steward almost fell into the river trying to spit into the launch.

  Then the engine was started up and the launch was pushed off at once with a tinny racket from the screw and a boiling of water from the stern. As it headed away from them, it seemed as though the old Ballaculish was left in an island of loneliness, besieged and beyond relief.

  Seven

  The meeting that followed in the saloon degenerated into complete confusion, with everyone shouting at once and gesturing angrily at each other over the littered table, while the Lascar sailors stood in the alleyway outside jabbering at each other in their high-pitched voices.

  Huddled in a corner of the saloon, her face white as she held Teresa to her, Grace was able gradually to grasp what had happened from the fragments of conversation that emerged from the incoherence of their indignation, and the doubt that had started on the deck multiplied until she seemed to be in a nightmare of ill-defined, misdirected anger and fear that didn’t seem to fit into her life at all.

  This, she thought, was never meant to be part of the humdrum course of events she had enjoyed so much until she had started off from London on that chase after Teresa which everyone had condemned at once as crazy.

  It had seemed when she had stepped ashore into the middle of the June uprising that they had all been more than right; and righter still when she had found herself caught up in yet another more virulent and violent upheaval, and heading south on an old-fashioned train that had disgorged her at some God-forsaken halt whose name she’d never discovered, where she’d been obliged to find the rickety bus that had taken them on to Flores, forced to rely on Teresa’s shy and hesitant Spanish to get them all they wanted. Even through all her acquaintance with Ash, it had still seemed crazy though just a little less frightening, but now, since she had first seen this dejected old ship, the whole insane structure of events appeared to have collapsed on her into a still crazier jigsaw where strange alien emotions had started in her, warring all the time with her fear for the child and her alarm at the behaviour of these passionate indignant shabby men. It was now, with Dodgin brandishing a knife and threatening everyone within reach in his blind violence, and Grundy and Dainty shouting with rage at each other, nothing more than a convulsion of fear, and of relief that never came to anything, merely descending into fear again almost before she had got used to the lessening of tension.

  This was never how her life was intended to be, she kept telling herself, repeating it over and over again in her mind through all the shouting and anger that seemed to be centred on Ash, as though he, because he had dealt with Carroll, were the cause of all their misfortunes. Even during the war and the blitzes, there had always been the reassurance of well-known faces about her and familiar surroundings. Her life had been one of happiness, because she had the gift of extracting the utmost from it, because she enjoyed the sunshine on grey London streets, and the red buses, and the rigid inhuman guardsmen at the Palace; the ducks on the Serpentine and the impassioned orators at Marble Arch who always made her laugh or want to cry with pity, even the muted colours she loved so well when winter wrapped her around with the mists of the river.

  Here on this dark ugly little ship far from home there was nothing that belonged to her background – nothing save perhaps Ash, standing up to the others now, bigger than any of them and undisturbed by their accusations, his face the only one in cabin not touched by the hysteria of anger or panic.

  ‘He can’t hold us up,’ Dodgin was saying furiously. ‘This is a British ship.’

  ‘And it’s three hundred-odd miles upriver,’ Ash pointed out calmly, ‘with the nearest town, other than Santa Rosa, a good forty miles away. It looks to me as though he’s holding us up
most effectively, old chum.’

  ‘Jesus, though’ – Dodgin’s face seemed to writhe into a knot of fury – ‘somebody’s bound to wonder where we are.’

  Dainty shrugged. ‘A scruffy, cock-eyed tramp like this?’ he asked. ‘You know what the Williamson-South America Line consists of? Two old ships like this, both of ’em falling apart at the seams. You think they’re going to pull any weight anywhere? You think Lloyds or the Admiralty are going to worry? What do you think we are? The Queen Mary?’

  ‘I don’t care what we are. We’re a British ship.’

  Dainty hunched his thin shoulders, still encased in the plank-like blue serge he’d donned to attend the funeral. ‘Nobody worries about ships like this,’ he said. ‘Nobody cares if they’re a week overdue. They often get lost here and there. We’ve been up this river weeks at a time on other runs. It used to depend on how much old Phiz was enjoying hisself and how cheap the booze was.’ It seemed already as though his pride and courage had dispersed and he was prepared to accept the situation after all, listless, defeated, unable to think of anything that wasn’t hopeless.

  ‘We’re a British ship,’ Dodgin repeated persistently.

  ‘Yes,’ Dainty said. ‘With a rotten engine and an oil leak and a vibration like a cake-walk. She’s not worth rescuing. They’d probably say let ’em have her. Let her give them grey hairs instead of us. The only people who’re going to worry about this are the owners and they ain’t got no money to start chucking about. I was aboard her the time she was held up in Hong Kong and nobody give a damn whether we ever go out then. Make no mistake, we’re on our own.’

  Dodgin gestured vaguely, helplessly, as though his mental processes, used as they were to thoughts of violence and viciousness, couldn’t cope with this inability to do anything. ‘We could signal somebody, couldn’t we? – a ship going downriver maybe – get her to pass a message.’