by John Harris
The storm continued through a whole day of rain-filtered light and moist boredom unrelieved by any further visit from the shore or by any indication at all that anyone was interested in them. They could see the little grey-painted launch with the lantern-jawed corporal crouching under the canvas dodger, moored near a wooden jetty just downstream. Once a bumboat loaded with fruit approached the ship and their spirits soared as they saw a means of getting ashore, but then they heard the motor of the grey launch start up and the fruit boat was headed off by the corporal waving his pistol at the man at the tiller.
‘Not taking no chances,’ Dodgin said heavily, standing in the rain and staring over the rail. ‘Yah, leave him be,’ he yelled suddenly in his high voice, like the shrill yelp of an angry terrier. ‘Let ’im come, if he wants to!’
‘Shut up, Dodge,’ Grundy said uneasily. ‘There’s no need to aggravate ’em.’
Dodgin stared at him. There was no concession in his thin bitter face, no willingness to come to terms. Dodgin’s life had been lived mostly in a state of discomfort, but none of it had in any way humbled him. They had been hurt and insulted and there was no part of Dodgin’s make-up that permitted him to be friendly with the people who had caused their humiliation.
‘Aw, you’re yeller,’ he said contemptuously. ‘You nipped off when the shooting started. You’re as bad as the darkies. I just wish I’d got proof where you was. That’s all.’
Because Grundy didn’t reply, the argument didn’t develop for once and they all trooped back into the saloon and took their places again round the table, bored with the silence and with each other. Their listless conversation was mostly nostalgic, of home, ships and reminiscences of boozing – the rest they left out in deference to Grace – frightful tales of hangovers, lost anchors and demented shipmates that grew wearisome to them all but the spellbound Teresa.
Ash was standing silently by the porthole, staring at the rain, his face sombre, his eyes distant and thoughtful, as he listened to them talk. For a long time he said nothing, then he turned abruptly and faced Dainty.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Why can’t we make a run for it?’
The old man looked startled and scared but Dodgin’s eyes became suddenly bright.
‘There’s no reason, when you think of it,’ Ash went on, ‘why we should sit here and play tag with Carroll. This world wasn’t meant to be peopled by pygmies, doormats and dwarfs. Let’s have a crack at it.’
Dodgin jumped up eagerly. ‘I’m game, Mister,’ he said immediately.
‘Don’t talk so bloody silly,’ Grundy said heavily, addressing the steward without looking up. ‘We can’t.’
Ash turned his head. ‘Why can’t we?’
Grundy lifted his eyes, very conscious of the fact that Ash knew of his behaviour during the shelling and had very noticeably made no mention of it.
‘We’ve got to have a pilot,’ he muttered.
‘Pilot?’ Dodgin swung round on him. ‘Who wants pilots? They only get in the way with their shouting and bawling.’ He seemed prepared to dispense with all formalities and aids to navigation, even with commonsense in his eagerness to defy Carroll. ‘We’ve got a full crew except for officers,’ he said. ‘Any of us can get the anchor up. If we can’t, we can let the bloody thing slip. It’s not hard. We’ve got another on the other side. We’ve got a deck officer. All we’ve got to do is go. The Amethyst didn’t just sit on her arse and hope for the best. She did something about it. Why can’t we?’
‘Because the blasted river’s full of islands.’
‘The river’s buoyed,’ Ash pointed out. ‘We’ve got charts.’
Dainty shook his head. ‘There’s a battery of guns on the point,’ he said, his voice low and weary. ‘We can’t risk the ship. I’m in charge and I could lose me ticket. I can’t afford to do that.’ He looked at Ash, appealing to him to understand. ‘See what I mean?’ he asked. ‘Not with them guns.’
Ash shrugged angrily, his eyes bleak and suddenly disinterested. ‘It’s your ship,’ he said brusquely.
Dodgin sat down again and they became silent once more, oppressed by the dead stillness and the silence of the ship, conscious of having no work that they could usefully do, of having no direction, no leadership. Old Dainty had sunk into a coma of apathy, making no attempt to find jobs for the crew, no effort to keep anyone occupied.
Because of the silence, they were beginning to notice the little noises that were normally drowned by the humming of motors or the clatter of men at work, the little noises like the sound of wind and water, the rustling the cockroaches made behind the lockers, and the squealing and the scrape of tiny claws that told them the rats were still there.
‘They’ve been at the bread,’ Dodgin said during the afternoon, as though the rats, like everything and everyone else, were his personal enemies and he theirs. ‘But I’ll fix the bastards. For once I’ve got the time.’
And he went about the ship, swathed in a frowzy peeling oilskin, armed with traps and poison and even snares for the known routes of the rodents, followed everywhere by Teresa who had suddenly found something interesting and exciting. Even the cockroaches provided some sort of diversion and she followed Dodgin happily as he searched them out in all the nooks and crannies of the pantry with DDT sprays and even lighted tapers, shrieking with terrified delight as he collected them in dead hundreds.
Later, there was a fight between two of the Lascars on the foredeck and later a shoving match between Dodgin and Grundy over the food, which was really only the longstanding dislike that existed between them breaking into the open. But, by evening, they had made their peace again sufficiently to play cards in the saloon in an atmosphere foul with cigarette smoke, while Teresa lolled with the ship’s cat on the settee, which squeaked fatly every time she moved on its leatherette surface. She was occupied for the moment with a tattered supply of American comics they had found in the captain’s cabin, and Flash Goron, Jiggs and other less pleasant personalities held her momentarily enthralled.
In the end, they faced another stuffy night with not much hope of anything different for the following day, and as they stood up, throwing the cards on to the table, Dodgin listlessly switched on the radio again.
At once they heard the voice of a radio announcer speaking in Spanish.
‘Here we go again,’ Dodgin said. ‘Let’s have some jive.’
‘Leave it alone,’ Ash said quickly, reaching out to lay a big hand over Dodgin’s on the control knob. ‘And put a sock in it, for God’s sake. I want to listen. It sounds exciting.’
‘What’s he say?’ Dodgin demanded eagerly. ‘Is it something about us?’
Ash signed him to silence and put his head nearer to the radio.
‘He sounds in a proper tizzy,’ Dodgin commented. ‘What’s he on about?’
‘For God’s sake, shut your rattle,’ Ash commanded in that high-handed manner of his, and Dodgin grinned, accepting the insult cheerfully.
Ash listened for a moment longer, then they saw his expression lifting.
‘They say they’re going to bombard the capital,’ he said, translating quickly for them, ‘unless the government surrenders unconditionally. They sat it’s cut off from the outside world – no road, rail or telephone links.’
They all started slapping each other on the back. ‘Soon be over now,’ Dodgin beamed. ‘Then we’ll be away. He can’t hold us once it’s all finished.’
‘There’s a twenty-one ship flotilla steaming up the river from the sea,’ Ash went on, his head cocked, his eyes bright again. ‘Cruisers, battleships, the lot. The capital’s blacked out and they’ve been firing ack-ack guns.’
There was a pause and it seemed hard to believe in that silent dark backwater, surrounded by reeds and willows, with only the ducks and waterfowl to provide movement, that not far away men were at each other’s throats, that people were stopping their ears to the racket of guns and the howl of aeroplanes, that great ships were manoeuvring in the delta and the governmen
t was tottering. In the stillness, even with the scarred bridge above them and the knowledge that the lives of Phizackea and two other men had been blasted out of existence within a few yards of where they were sitting, it was hard to imagine the smoke and dust of battle, and the crumbled buildings in the glass-littered streets.
Then the announcer’s voice came again and they all sat up at once.
‘He’s offered to negotiate,’ Ash said quickly, translating sentence by sentence. ‘And they’ve refused.’
They all started talking at once, caught by disappointment, then Ash signalled them to be silent again.
‘Shut up, for God’s sake,’ he said, and they all held their breath once more. ‘I think we’ve only caught the end of the message. There’s something else about him resigning – no, hold on’ – he was silent and the cabin was filled with the harsh triumphant sound of the speaker’s voice and the repetition of the dictator’s name which came like weakening hammer strokes that seemed symbolic of his decline.
Then Ash straightened up and gave Dodgin a slap across the back with his great hand that almost riveted him to the deck.
‘I’m barmy,’ he shouted, ‘I’m nuts. I’m off my chump. I only caught half of it the first time. He’s resigned already. They announced it first half an hour ago while we were still arsing about playing cards. He’s vanished and they’ve accepted the terms of surrender. We only got the tail end of the story. It’s over. It’s finished. Finito. Kaputt. Or otherwise Napoo. Carroll can’t hold us any more. It’s all over bar the shouting.’
He scooped Grace up from the settee into his arms with ease and began to waltz her round, knocking chairs and cards flying. Suddenly all the strain had vanished and Grundy was beating Dainty on the back and shouting.
The rain had stopped when Grace went out on deck. The sky was jammed with stars and there was a sharp damp smell after the downpour that seemed to drive away the acrid smell of hides and the stink of tar and oil that clung about the old ship.
Ash was smoking in this shadow of the bridge, staring over the bow towards the shore which lay like a black ragged line in the distance. Grace came up behind him and stood alongside him. He said nothing and offered her a cigarette.
‘Tess asleep?’ he asked.
‘Fast asleep. I think all the excitement we’re having wears her out.’
‘Never mind,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll be on your way home in a day or so.’
Grace nodded. In her thankfulness at the reprieve the radio message seemed to bring, she felt the indignation at the outrage dying inside her.
She wanted desperately to tell Ash of her happiness, but he seemed not to notice the nervous gaiety in her manner.
‘I’m not the only one who’ll be on the way home,’ she pointed out. ‘So will you.’
He shrugged and she stared unbelievingly. ‘Don’t you want to go home?’ she asked. She knew he’d been away from England for a time which, to her, with her great affection for London’s streets and parks, seemed a void in a lifetime. And apart from the language, he’d not picked up even a gesture to show that he’d ever lived abroad. With that fine arrogance of his, the stout yeoman arrogance of the insular race he represented right down to his backbone, he had never thought there was anything he could add to himself that was better than what he already possessed.
‘Don’t you want to go home?’ she repeated.
He shrugged again. ‘I’m not fussy,’ he said. ‘I can live anywhere so long as I can have an occasional jug-up. What’ll you do when you get back? Back to the old routine?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘I sometimes wonder if I could. I’ve spent all my life in that damned hotel, ever since I was a kid, bobbing and scraping and yes-please and no-thank-you-ing to every Tom, Dick and Harry who came in. I’m not so sure I want to do it again. It seems a bit narrow suddenly and I sometimes feel there’s a bit more to life than that.’
She looked up at him, wondering if he could realize how the humdrumness of daily work suddenly appalled her and left her with a feeling that all her life she’d been missing something.
He smiled at her and there was a surprising tenderness in his face.
‘Don’t kid yourself,’ he said. ‘The other kind of life isn’t much to write home about either. The lights are never as bright as you thought they were, and the women aren’t so beautiful or the men so tough. When you stop to think about it, it’s all a bit of a mug’s game really. You ought to go home and marry Fred.’
She stared at him, indignantly, “Fred,” she wanted to say. “Fred’d be a poor sort of catch! Can’t you see he’d be a poor sort of catch? He hasn’t a dog’s chance now.”
‘Fred’s a friend,’ she pointed out, surprised that she had so much control over her voice. ‘That’s all. A good friend. Known him for years. That’s why he can lend me money and I can borrow it.’
‘If he’s as good as all that, why don’t you marry him? He sounds as though you ought to. Honest. Decent.’
Dull, too, she thought to herself. Dull as they come, bless him, with his fumbling attempts to please her. Dull and exciting as ditch water for all his kindness.
‘Plenty of money,’ Ash went on. ‘Security. Security was what you wanted, wasn’t it? Security and certainty of the future.’
She looked up at him, hesitating before she spoke.
‘Fred’s not the one I’m looking for,’ she said slowly.
He blew smoke down his nostrils, his eyes quiet.
‘You’re nuts,’ he said. ‘You ought to be married, a woman like you.’
There was an undisguised admiration in his voice that almost led Grace to make a fool of herself. She was blushing in the darkness, with hot angry words actually on her tongue that would have given the game away, when a door opened, flinging a pathway of light across the water.
Dainty appeared on deck with a bottle of whisky in his hand. He grabbed Ash by the arm and pulled him towards the alleyway.
‘Come on,’ he said loudly. ‘We’ve got to celebrate. Dodgin’s putting on a feast. If we’re not careful, he’ll be opening a tin of peaches.’
Ash looked at Grace and she laughed, thankful that the moment had passed and they were natural with each other again. She looked up at him, her eyes bright under the Assyrian black hair.
‘Come on,’ the engineer said. ‘There’s cocktails first with Jim Dainty.’ He held up the bottle in his hand. ‘Local distilled. He brought it back.’ He grinned at Ash. ‘Seventy per cent paraffin. Tastes like nothing on earth. If you don’t hurry inside the bastards’ll swig the lot.’
Grace laughed again, feeling they had at last been accepted aboard the ship and, impulsively grabbing Ash’s hand, she dragged him after her through the door to the saloon, following the old man’s capering figure that looked curiously like some twisted, shambling goblin.
Nine
They were all waiting on deck the following morning for the arrival of the grey launch, standing by the rails to greet it in spite of the rain, all light-heartedly prepared to jeer at Carroll’s discomfort as it approached, all dressed in an assortment of rainwear that varied from Dodgin’s frowsy oilskin to a simple sack over the head worn by Dainty.
They all looked a little the worse for wear. The radio announcement the previous night had lifted them from their despair to a hilarious mood of gaiety and Dainty had unearthed a second bottle of whisky and Dodgin had broken out the rum. Pooling their resources they had managed to get noisily maudlin and even Grace had gone to bed a little mellow, singing softly, enjoying the exhilaration of feeling free again.
Dainty was still licking his dry lips, but his old eyes were bright with anticipation as he stared across the rain-flattened water, watching for the approaching launch.
‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘Won’t we ’ave something to tell the papers when we get ’ome?’
Teresa climbed on to the rail alongside Ash, grabbing his arm to help her, completely reconciled and unquestioning in her devotion again
!
‘Will we be going home soon?’ she asked.
‘Should be,’ Ash said confidently. ‘They can’t hold us up much longer. They’re bound to let us go now it’s all over.’
Dodgin stared at the blank river banks and the absence of any moving vessel. ‘I hope you’re right, mate,’ he observed with a sudden gloom. ‘But, by the look of things, you wouldn’t exactly say they was hurrying.’
The shower became a downpour, stopped and started again in a steady drizzle, and they had been standing there for some time when they began to realize that the launch was showing no sign of moving and that they were all getting very wet. One after another they drifted below again, and sat around in the saloon, hopefully waiting for the cough of the launch’s engine.
It was Grace who prepared them something to eat, for Dodgin seemed to be caught between the moroseness brought on by his hangover and a new fear that they had celebrated too soon.
‘The bastards aren’t coming,’ he snarled, the disappointment showing bleakly in his face. ‘He’s just leaving us here to think it over. He’s leaving us to bloody well rot.’
‘Maybe they can’t start the engine,’ Dainty said hopefully. ‘You know what they’re like. That bastard of mine’s enough to make a saint swear. Maybe it’s that.’
‘Maybe,’ Dodgin agreed reluctantly, as though he were loth to abandon something which gave him cause for anger. ‘And maybe not. I wouldn’t put it past that fat little bastard to do the dirty on us.’
Nobody really sided with Dodgin though, all of them feeling that his suspicions were much too highly developed for him to be a good judge of events, and it was not until darkness came round that they finally abandoned hope.
