The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  The last of these were, of course, Tim and Babette, who reacted with all the pleased astonishment I had been rehearsing for them in my mind. We sat that evening under a dusky sky, chatting of this and that – their own forthcoming wedding; my plans for the coming year, poring over the map I had bought that morning and tracing out possible routes to the Black Sea. Across the Thames, the great glass tower of Canary Wharf raised its gleaming pyramid high into steamy clouds of its own making and flashed its brilliant white light to flicker on the dim night sky.

  It was Hallowe’en. The sprites and boggles of the English countryside would be out in force tonight – the Peg Powlers and the Urisks and the Water Kelpies, the sea-sirens and the marsh-folk, the willow-men and alder-witches, and Ellesmere’s own Jenny Greenteeth whom I’d left so very far away – all would be abroad. But Jack de Crow had eluded them each and every one and was safe at last in the soulless heart of the great city.

  But even here there was perhaps a little magic. For with the talk of Hallowe’en, I had remembered something. Hopping down into Jack where she lay snugly moored against Ilanga Umfula’s side, I rummaged deep into her front locker. Ah yes, here it was: that curious brown bottle of Hobgoblin Ale given to me in Bristol by my old student Alex. I had been keeping it for this moment.

  Three glasses and a bottle-opener were fetched out onto the stern decking of the narrowboat where we sat watching the night sky. Then, as Tim lifted his glass for a toast, a burst of pink fireworks flowered in the southern sky over the water. Again and again they came with a volley of distant thunder, giant chrysanthemums of rosy light blooming the city skyscape and dissolving into showers of fire – a display, Tim explained, put on by a nearby Tesco store. But the prosaic nature of the event could not spoil the beauty, the aptness, the sheerly perfect timing of the spectacle, and perhaps I may be forgiven for mentally claiming them as my reward. I almost … almost … expected them to spell out Well done, Sandy! in letters of pink fire against the broad sky. I said as much to Tim.

  ‘Yes, Sandy,’ he replied, but knowing me fairly well, was kind enough to add, ‘clearly just a technical hitch. They’ll have ironed out the problems by the time you reach the Black Sea, you just wait and see. Cheers! To adventure!’

  Jack shifted comfortably beside us in the darkness, dreaming of foreign parts. She seemed happy enough with the idea and so, I realised, was I. ‘To adventure!’ I replied, and drank up. ‘To adventure!’

  End of Part One

  Part Two

  My Purpose Holds

  Dooms and Delays

  Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the Western stars …

  —TENNYSON, Ulysses

  Let me tell you briefly about Fermat’s last theorem, a clairvoyant and my bottom.

  Many years ago my mother took my sister and myself off to see a clairvoyant. We didn’t tell my father that, of course, because he would have worried that we were getting enmeshed in a New Age cult. No, we told him that we were going off to buy some herbs and shrubs for the new border and that was all. Which was true enough, because this particular clairvoyant owned a nursery and played the Delphic Oracle only as a sideline.

  He was a giant of a man, sporting a jutting beard, frizzy eyebrows and a huge pair of boots, and his name was equally impressive: Mr A.J. Mackenzie-Clay. He had – or so he claimed – been struck by lightning no less than three times, and it was after the third strike that he had woken up to find that he now had clairvoyant powers. These manifested themselves through the medium of numerology, he explained. By adding up the numbers corresponding to your birthday, your age and the letters in your name, he could predict your future, diagnose likely health problems and reveal the inner secrets of your soul. All this was accomplished while striding around his vast nursery and loading you up with another three pots of tradescantia, a tub of lemon verbena and a sack of organic compost to take home.

  To my sister Margaret, his predictions were detailed, fascinating and unlikely – and mostly set so far in the future that by the time they came true – or failed to eventuate – he would be long underground and taking a more active role in the production of organic compost than ever before. Only one prediction was worth storing away: namely, that after the next four years of considerable hardship my sister would find that the beginning of the fifth year would bring a long-deserved reversal of fortunes. The long night would be over, and she would emerge victorious.

  Meanwhile, what about my future? While Maggie and my mother went off to inspect some Iceland poppies, I awaited my turn, half cynical, half curious. Mr A.J. Mackenzie-Clay jotted down my name, birth date and other details on the back of an old seed packet.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he intoned. ‘Interesting, very …’

  I looked at the scribbled grid of numbers he was rapidly producing. He added up a column of numbers here, dashed down a total there, and drew a swift arrow to an earlier grid. Then he jotted down a hasty question mark, grabbed another seed packet and started again.

  ‘Yes, odd, one doesn’t often get such a … Ah, but wait a minute Here’s a double eight. Yes, that is interesting. With a preponderance of fives too. How very … sad.’ He finished on a sigh and shook his head.

  My mother returned. ‘Well,’ she inquired, ‘and what about this one?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the prophet, gazing into the middle distance over the glass cloches to the eucalypt-blue hills beyond. Then he announced my doom: ‘He will always have trouble with his bottom.’ And with that he strode away between the salvia beds and not another word would he utter.

  In the long history of prophetic utterances, among the whole smoking, writhing, pale-mouthed league of Pythonesses, Cassan-dras, Weird Sisters, Sybils and Norns, has there ever been a forecast so undignified, so banal, so downright embarrassing as that particular piece of oracular lore? We drove home, me sitting in an outraged silence among the verbena, Maggie smiling quietly to herself and my mother pondering aloud the meaning of that last cryptic remark, saying, ‘Well, yes, you have always had a problem in that area, haven’t you? Don’t you remember that time …?’ until I was forced to silence her musings with a fierce and heartfelt denial of any problem in that area whatsoever since the age of two. I did not give Mr A.J. Mackenzie-Clay’s numerological prognosis another thought until five years later when I was preparing to set sail in Jack de Crow down the Thames to the open sea.

  That is the tale of the clairvoyant. Now let me tell you a little about Fermat’s Last Theorem. Fermat was a renowned mathematician of the eighteenth century who is famous for his last theorem; he proposed that no matter how far you looked, you could never find two cubes that would add up to make a third cube. What is more, he scribbled an airy comment in the margin of his notebook to the eff ect that he had found an elegant little proof of this fact which he would jot down here but there wasn’t quite enough space, so another time perhaps.

  Then he went and died.

  For the last three hundred years that breezy assertion has been driving the world of mathematics to the brink of despair. It seemed such a trivially easy thing to prove, especially as Fermat was so off-hand about it, but it has proved anything but simple, and has taxed the greatest brains of the last three centuries to no avail. Few students of mathematics since then, professional or amateur, have not idly tried to be the first to recapture whatever flash of insight led Fermat to make his claim.

  For therein lies its fascination for the amateur: the idea that the proof, if it exists, does not rely on any complex supermaths but in a simple quirk in the way of seeing the problem, accessible to any curious puzzler. There are certain conundrums involving the cutting up of chess-boards, or the movement of a knight around the board to visit all the squares once and once only, that are almost impossible to solve by traditi
onal mathematical means. However, take a child’s set of crayons, colour in the squares in a certain pattern and the solution comes leaping out at you. The nature of the problem has not been altered by the colouring-in, but the filters through which we see the problem have rendered the answer obvious. It is just such a twist of perception that most likely lies at the root of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and it is tempting to seek to be the first in three hundred years to see just what it was that Fermat saw.

  Or so, at least, thought I. Thus it was that as I whiled away my days preparing Jack de Crow for the rigours of the journey ahead, my evenings were spent covering sheets of paper with formulae, diagrams of cubes, Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci’s series and a whole set of things that I dubbed ‘Incompatible Numbers.’ (Don’t ask.) And the fact is that I was onto something. I really was. I was working along lines that had just the right sort of quirkiness and amateur knowledge that was called for, and I had seen all sorts of odd and beautiful things about cubes that I had never heard anyone else mention. Yes, there were some really very promising insights emerging. By the time I had fully developed my theory I was writing in a mathematical shorthand of my own invention, mysterious hieroglyphs as meaningless to the casual observer as Mr A.J. Mackenzie-Clay’s jottings all those years ago.

  All terribly exciting, as you can imagine.

  Or possibly not, if you have been looking forward to the continuation of the roving adventures of Jack de Crow upon the high seas and are now a little bewildered by the absence of waves, dinghies and seagulls, and justifiably puzzled at the intrusion of clairvoyants, mathematical formulae and the author’s bottom. There is a point to all this, I assure you, but before we get to it, let me turn swiftly to the details of Jack and the one or two preparations that had to be made before I set off on the second leg of my odyssey.

  There was much to be done. The first thing on the list was to ring Wilf, the River Police Sergeant who last October had offered to accompany me across the Channel in his trawler on my return from my Christmas break in Australia. As this was the only conceivable condition under which I could attempt the crossing to France, I had to phone to find out if the jovial Wilf had been quite well when he had made that extraordinary offer, or if, with the leisure to reflect, he had since decided to declare temporary insanity and retract the offer.

  When I got through to him, he was as blithe and cheery as ever, and said that if I could get myself round to Dover, then all I had to do was to give him a ring in mid-March and he would take a few days off to escort me across to Calais.

  The next thing to do was to make sure that Jack de Crow was fit to make the journey. Her adventures had left her in a sorry state Most of the bright buttercup-yellow paint had been scraped off her keel, her topsides were a leprous rash of peeling varnish, her prow and gunwales were battered by the walls of a hundred-and-thirty-two locks, and she still had a slow but irritating leak in her hull that allowed a couple of inches of water to slosh about in her bilges.

  I managed to sand off the worst patches of flaking paint from her hull and sides before heading off to a purveyor of marine paints and varnishes in Lincoln’s Inn, there to discover that an edict had recently been passed by an environmental board banning the sale and use of buttercup-yellow paint. It apparently has a toxin in it, not present in paints of duller hue, that poisons all the aquatic wildlife with which it comes in contact. I thought back to how much of the stuff I had left in smears and scrapes along the docksides and lock-sides of England’s waterways and was surprised that so much as a tadpole still survived between London and the Irish Sea.

  In lieu of yellow paint I bought several large tins of bright blue and a smaller can of gloss black and spent a merry morning slathering it on, covering with blue all that part of Jack’s hull that would be below the waterline, and then, because I had already scraped away large patches around her prow, re-painting those bare parts with blue as well, trying my best to make the patches look deliberate and well designed. I repainted the name, Jack de Crow, in gloss black, and as a flourish painted a set of coiling black spirals on her pram-nose that trailed backward along each flank to turn into black-feathered wings. When I had finished, she looked as cheerfully eccentric a vessel as ever sailed. Her colour scheme was perfect and the jackdaw wings along either side lent her a brave air, rather like a jaunty Viking. She also, miraculously, stopped leaking. She was ready to fly once more.

  Which is where Fermat’s Last Theorem and my bottom come back into the story. As the grey March days progressed, two things started to develop rapidly. One was my work on the Theorem, and the other was a degree of discomfort in what the gentry of the eighteenth century so charmingly called ‘the fundament.’ I thought at first that I had merely bruised my coccyx when sitting down too rapidly on a London bus-stop seat, but as the days went by, instead of the tenderness subsiding, it grew worse and worse and was accompanied by a feeling of nausea and lassitude.

  The crisis came on the last and worst day of a blustery March, a foul day of heavy rain and strong winds, ushering a thunderstorm up the Thames and releasing it upon the city like a sullen buffalo. I dashed around the streets of Southwark dodging the rain showers and trying to accomplish a dozen last-minute errands: maps, charts of the Thames Estuary and the Channel, waterproof bags, a pot of varnish, and not least, a telephone call to my sister Maggie in Edinburgh to find out how she was coping with the latest in a long line of battles at her university laboratory. As the day progressed and errand after errand failed (the chart shop closed, the waterproof bags too flimsy, the varnish tin leaking all through my bag), the pain in my tail increased to an angry throbbing.

  Eventually, on the off-chance, I wandered into a doctor’s clinic and dropped my trousers for a quick inspection of the trouble spot. An hour later I was being admitted to the Kingston Hospital for emergency surgery. It transpired that I had a serious pilonidal abscess on my lower back … well, the very base of my spine really … well, alright, let’s be honest, on my bottom. This had been merrily pumping poison into my bloodstream for a fortnight and needed to be operated on without delay. It was the last straw in a particularly frustrating day, not least because while I had been busy getting soaked for no good reason, I had suddenly seen a way of getting those Incompatible Numbers to work for me, a neat little twist that could very possibly be what I had been looking for. All my notes and equations were back in the docks covered in varnish, however, and in all the rush I had had no time to try out my new idea. Now here I was lying in a hospital bed waiting to go under the general anaesthetic, and my chance to solve the greatest mathematical mystery of all time would have to wait until after the operation. That is, if I still remembered my new idea after the drowsy limbo of anaesthesia. Didn’t funny things happen sometimes? Memory loss? A wiping clean of the mental slate? The situation struck me as grimly humorous: the fact that the last person to make this breakthrough, namely Fermat himself, had died before he could share it with the world, and now the only other person in three hundred years to do so was likely to lose his memory on the very brink of triumph.

  Or die, even, I jested to myself bleakly.

  Outside the hospital window a blink of white lightning flared out in the late afternoon darkness and all the lights dimmed for an instant as the bolt struck home somewhere nearby. A second later the thunderclap shook the air, but a minute later it came as a re-echo from further off. Of course. The storm was moving swiftly westwards. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, I mused.

  Suddenly I sat upright.

  Mr A.J. Mackenzie-Clay, thrice-stricken …

  His bearded face swam before me, his sad eyes on the distant hills. What was that ridiculous thing he had said all those years ago? My bottom? That my fate would come to me through my bottom?! Was this then the dread unravelling of Fate, the ignominious end?

  No, I told myself firmly. This was nonsense. This was as nonsensical as I had thought it all those years ago, and nothing had changed since then. I would stop feeling
morbid, stop worrying about Fermat until after the operation and start thinking of something or somebody else – such as Maggie, whom I had still not managed to telephone. The time for the operation was not until after midnight, so I had plenty of time to ring and hear about the latest act of petty sabotage perpetrated by her senior colleague, the man who had been systematically destroying her confidence at work over the last three years.

  So I did. A phone was brought to my bedside by a nurse, and I listened as Maggie told me the latest news. Good news, it seemed: the tide had turned. He had gone, the persecutor, last Monday, and gone for good, his dark schemes brought into the light. From now on, things would be better … had already improved beyond measure in that last week, in fact, with an exciting breakthrough in one area of Maggie’s malarial research and a new grant slotting into place. It was all just peachy, just marvellous … and just, I slowly realised as I hung up, precisely as Mr A.J. Mackenzie-Clay had predicted it five years ago. The fortunes of my sister had indeed suddenly turned. So what did that say about my fatal bottom and the sad look in the prophet’s eye? I’ll tell you what it said. I clearly had mere hours to live, and what’s more, Fermat’s Theorem still to solve. I gave the phone back to the nurse, requested pen and paper and set to work to make sure that mathematical posterity was not cheated a second time.

  Well, I did it. At three minutes past midnight, just into the new month, I scribbled on a hospital notepad the equation that proved beyond doubt that two perfect cubes could not be added to make a third perfect cube. It was simple, really, and depended on a certain insight into the fact that all cubes are actually composed of Incompatible Numbers in factors of six, and that these – well, never mind, there isn’t quite the room here, but I’ll get back to it later if you like.