And more insidiously unsettling still was the fact that in extremis even the level-headed Fraser could no longer be relied upon to retain his self-control.
Besides, no one else seemed quite able to catch the drift of Joe’s joke. After all, I was not even sure that any of the others knew my real name.
CHAPTER 8
PORTENT
Morning after morning, there was the sea, there was the sky and that was all. Unbroken. Except for where they met at the horizon. A thin, blue misty line in a perfect circle whose boundaries bobbed and shifted with us so that we were always at its heart. With all the properties of a mirage, it shimmered in the hazy heat, beckoning, promising, flirting with our straining eyes – yielding nothing.
There was no comfort. The sun, with all the spiteful fury of hell’s fires, consumed us, reducing us to little more than bones of men. Pinioned, like insects to a piece of wood, scarcely still alive, we writhed beneath her unforgiving glare. And in stripping us of flesh, she robbed us of the appetite for life. We had food but could no longer eat; our bodies, waterless, baulked at it and then buckled for its want. We had company, but neither energy nor the will to talk and we had the blood still running within our veins but for what purpose, beneath the sun, we no longer cared.
By sundown, we were limp, weak with relief at temporary respite from the rack. And then we had to row. It had been shared. In teams of six, one man per oar, we’d taken turns working through the blackness of the night but whether we made progress, and at what rate, was difficult to discern. As time went on, our wasted muscles wrestled vainly with the labour, skinny buttocks and stringy thighs rubbed and blistered on the uncompromising seats and it was cold. We lacked the strength to build up heat with work and so, exhausted and lean-limbed, we shivered through the small hours, praying for and dreading the first warming rays of dawn.
One night, Big Sam, who rowed up in the prow along from the skipper, suddenly pulled up, staying his oar to watch the faltering rhythm of those in front. He stood up slowly and put his hands upon his hips.
‘You boys ain’t pullin’. You ain’t pullin’ your weight!’ He looked down upon the skipper, whose crooked form jerked and jumped with effort, and said with irritation, ‘And you ain’t neither. You white bastards are leaving it all to me and Moses. We’re the only ones doing any work!’
‘Jesus Christ, would you shut your bleedin’ trap? I am pullin’ my bloody weight and more,’ cried Mick, panting from a middle oar. ‘It’s you what’s been bloody slacking. Jesus! Been pullin’ this side on my own half the bleedin’ shift! Thought you’d bloody gone to sleep.’ Muttering furiously, he kept on rowing as if to try and prove his vigour, but the skipper did ease up and sat back to watch. Jack and Slim, who with Moses made up the rowing six, were clearly galled by Big Sam’s slander, and though swearing, tried to compensate, pulling deep. Their scrawny backs warped under the weight of two or three great thrusts but, unable to sustain it, they fell back quickly, despite themselves, to faint, erratic strokes. Silently, one by one, they stopped. Mick and Slim hunched forward while Jack laid his head down against the boat’s side.
‘We none of us bloody are, for Christsakes!’ Mick burst out, ‘None of us are bloody up to it. Pull your weight? Jesus! What weight is that? Next to bloody nothing.’
‘We have to bloody row. The sail ain’t gonna fucking well get us there.’ Billy’s voice came from low down somewhere in the middle of the boat. Most of the crew, it seemed, were still awake.
‘Don’t you think I bloody know that,’ Mick shouted, ‘All I’m saying is we bloody can’t. None of us have the bleedin’ strength!’
‘All right, all right. Keep your shirt on Mick!’ Fraser spoke up calmly from behind Big Sam. ‘We’ll have to row in pairs, that’s all. Two men per oar. Sir?’
The captain sighed, ‘We won’t be able to row as long. Twelve men rowing, then resting all at once. Bound to take us longer.’
‘Not at the rate we’re going now it won’t. We’re not getting anywhere like this,’ Fraser replied, decision taken.
‘Well, I ain’t rowing with any bastard who doesn’t fucking pull. You got that Mick?’ Billy, sitting up, lit the touch paper. He disliked Mick, more so since Mick had yanked his knife off him when he’d taken it to Fred’s face, and he directed his words specifically to aggravate. Incandescent with rage, Mick was off his seat in seconds, ‘You callin’ me a slacking bastard?’
Billy shrugged his shoulders carelessly, implying yes.
‘Well, are you?’ Mick made a move towards him, fists already up.
‘Well, Big Sam said it. We all heard.’ Billy, as clever as he was snide, fell back on Big Sam’s reproach for cover. He got to his feet and snarled at Mick, ‘You ain’t been pulling as hard as you fucking might be.’ This kind of slur to Mick was tantamount to a stinging slap. His impetuous nature sometimes caused his judgement to be faulty but it made him otherwise wholehearted in every sense. He could not do things by half and took pride in it.
He bellowed as he flung himself at Billy, and those around them, knocked and jostled by their falling bodies, were soon embroiled within the scrapping fray. Cries of anger and of pain filled the darkness, as, swearing and scrabbling, the scrum of men surged over and beneath the seats, from one side to the other, unsteadying the boat with their shifting and uneven weight.
‘Stop! Stop. Shut up! Shut up and listen!’ Joe, beside me, scrambled to his feet and stood stock-still, arms out straight, palms down. Craning. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he roared. ‘Shut up and listen!’
The dishevelled knot of men in the middle of the boat abruptly stopped the fighting, mid-swing, and faces turned, slightly startled, towards Joe. ‘Listen!’ he almost whispered. ‘Can you hear it?’
There. There above the silky slapping of the waves and the gentle creaking of the boat, we could just about make out the distant but familiar hum of an aircraft engine. Mick got up, roughly yanking out his limbs from under other men’s, and the rest of them, remorseless but suddenly distracted, disentangled. In twos and threes, everyone got on their feet to listen.
‘Bloody hell. Quick. Get the sail up!’ the captain shouted. ‘Mick, the storm lamp!’ The fight forgotten in common purpose, there was a sudden frenzied rush to action. We leapt towards the sail and hitched it up as far as it could go. Mick lit the storm lamp and jerked it up to rest by the craggy stump at the top of the mast. Its light beamed down and in against the whiteness of the sail, which, reflecting, gave it further cast.
The droning of the aircraft engine was louder now. We could not see it but its increasing volume told us it was nearing. It must have seen us. We stood, all eyes blaring at the blackness of the sky, searching. The hum grew louder, louder still, and our hearts, as one, beat faster. This could be it. We had been found. Surely, we had been found. The thrumming of the engine was still way off but we stared unblinking at the stars, straining in all directions to catch the instant of swift, dark shadow passing over them. The low rumbling reached a mild peak and then, then it began to die away.
‘Ah, fuck!’ Mac cried. ‘It’s going. Bastard’s missed us.’
‘Shut up!’ hissed Joe, ‘Listen.’ We stood, barely breathing, ears screwed up to the slightest suspicion of a waver in the sound but the aeroplane was moving off and the comfort its throbbing engine had fleetingly provided dwindled with its noise.
‘Mayn’t have been one of ours,’ Big Sam sniffed, wiping his arm across his face.
‘Must’ve seen us. In all this blackness. Couldn’t have missed the lamp against the sail, surely?’ Jack appealed to Joe.
‘They’ll have seen us,’ Joe looked at him, peeling his eyes unwillingly away from the faded promise in the sky. ‘They’ll report it. We’ll be picked up tomorrow, I betcha.’
‘They didn’t see us,’ Mac shook his head. ‘They’d’ve circled. Jesus, how could they’ve bloody missed us?’
‘For Christsakes, Mac. We don’t know that they did! We’re the only light in all this god
forsaken ocean…’ A startled shriek from Slim cut Joe off mid-sentence. As he’d started speaking, there was a sudden, sharp slap against the middle of the sail and a heavy thud as something fell back from it into the boat. Those nearest to it leapt away.
‘What the fuck was that?’ Slim cried.
‘It hit me. It bleeding hit me. Landed on my legs,’ Jack knelt down and after a short scuffle, brought up in both hands to show us, a twisting, squirming fish. It was quite a big one, fourteen inches, maybe more. Still thrashing, it jerked its way out of his grasp and landed, flopping again, in the bottom of the boat.
‘Must’ve been attracted by the light,’ Clarie said, watching it in wonder.
‘Shame the frigging plane wasn’t,’ muttered Mac, crouching down to look at it. ‘It’s a big ’un though.’
‘Kill it, Jack. Here!’ Billy pushed Jack aside eagerly and leant down, grabbing at it with one hand, pinning it to the floor and then he delivered a swift, decisive blow to the top of its head with the handle of his knife. He held it up, chuckling. ‘’S a flyin’ fish. Supper tonight then, lads.’
We ate it raw. The captain cut it up into as equal shares as he could manage and we fell upon it. ‘Don’t leave me the fucking tail end,’ Bob Cunningham cried as people jostled down over one another to grab their piece. ‘Ain’t got so much meat on it!’ Hands darted in from under the dark edges of our huddled group, grasping at the bits of fish that lay, entrails exposed, within a small, circular pool of light. The captain, Joe and I were just about the last to get to it. There was a morsel each and it was salty but it was succulent. I sucked and sucked at it, draining up its moisture, and then savoured its soft and juicy flesh for as long as I could keep it in my mouth. It was sublime.
We lit the storm lamp for as much time as we dared in the nights that followed, in the hope that we might catch another, but it turned out that our fish had been a singular stroke of bizarre good fortune and luck spurned the chance of being so kind to us again.
The morning after, encouraged by the thought that we’d probably been sighted, Billy helped himself to a couple of splashes more than his allotted quota of clean water from the barrel and Pat Murack saw him. Since we’d made our seven gallons, we had stuck rigidly to our regime of rationing, fearing to make the same mistake we’d made on our first day. We could make no more water as the boat already weaved and twisted in protest at the heavier waves and, not knowing when, if at all, we might make land, we could afford no slackening.
Pat lurched at Billy drunkenly, weaving oddly up towards him before trying and failing twice to grab his shoulder and spin him round. Eventually, he grasped at Billy’s arm and jerked him backwards, causing him to tip his tin and splash the ill-gotten water around and over its sides.
‘Wha’ the fuck…?’ Billy, startled, pulled away but Murack stuck his face up close, raging eyes and snarling mouth working with an incoherent fury, ‘Water, fucking water. Seen you.’ He could barely get his words out through his gritted teeth and he brought two shaking fingers up, jabbing them at Billy’s eyes. ‘’Sh’our water! ‘Sh’our water!’ he cried, breathing heavily and grunting with the effort to take in air. He rubbed the heel of his palm into one eye confusedly as if to try and regain focus. Then he swayed and, placing his other hand on Billy’s chest to steady himself, he leaned his face closer still, almost into Billy’s neck. Still too surprised to act, Billy wrenched his face away, disgusted at the other man’s hot blast of breath. ‘Fucking thief!’ Murack shouted rawly, with all the poisonous anger he had left in him. Billy threw him off sharply then, shoving him at both shoulders and Murack, arms up and flailing, fell backwards, landing heavily on the seat behind. He hunched down, one arm across his stomach and his head nodding just above his knees. He toppled then, slowly, on to his side and lay there mumbling, ‘Thief. You fucking thief,’ over and over to himself.
Billy put his hands up in the air in an attitude of innocent surrender and said defensively to all of us quietly looking on, ‘I didn’t do a fucking thing. I swear it. You all saw ’im. He fucking well attacked me!’
Clarie, who’d been standing next to Billy, bent down low to peer into Murack’s seething face. ‘He’s sick,’ he said, drawing up. ‘Look at him. He’s really sick.’ Murack’s body twitched and shuddered along the seat and he muttered on, seemingly oblivious, in a voice that rose and fell according to the virulence of his rambling, the most of which only he could possibly have understood.
‘Hey!’ A sudden cry from Big Sam cut across the general contemplation of Murack’s state and we turned to see the big man teetering on the ledge of seating, leaning out but keeping himself on board with one hand on a mast-line. He was pointing skywards with the other. ‘Look! There’s birds!’ he cried excitedly. He was right. Looking up, I could make out one, no, there were two, small, dark coloured forms, wheeling and swirling in the air, a little more than a hundred yards away from us. ‘Must mean there’s land about here somewhere!’ Big Sam yelled impatiently, not waiting for comprehension to dawn upon his frustratingly slow-witted audience. ‘They’ve gotta live some place, haven’t they?’
‘Bloody hell. He’s bloody right. We must be close!’ Mick leapt up behind Sam and leaned a hand upon Sam’s shoulder to steady himself. The rest of us moved closer, lining the port side of the boat, screwing up our eyes to watch with envy, the glorious freedom of their flight, swooping and dipping, from the cloudless to the shimmering blue and back again. Our spirits soared in hope at their every rising. Surely these birds nested somewhere, returned to land to rest and breed. It could not be so very far. Excitement spread among us and we began to squint at the horizon expectantly.
The captain did not spare us long though and shattered our barely savoured joy with wizened sagacity. Shielding his eyes with a trembling hand, he began to shake his head. ‘No, lads. Those are Mother Carey’s chickens. They don’t mean a thing.’ He turned away in disappointment, letting his hand fall limply to his side.
‘What the hell does that mean?’ Mac asked sharply, stepping into his path to stop him moving off. The captain looked tiny, what was left of him, a flimsy, bearded whisper of humanity. Mac glared down at him accusingly, frustrated at the inconvenience of his knowledge. ‘And what the fuck’s a Mother Carey’s chicken?’
‘They’re storm petrels. Old seamen call them Mother Carey’s chickens.’ The captain looked up wearily into Mac’s furrowed face. ‘They live on the wing.’ He paused a moment, waiting for this information to grant passage past Mac’s obstructive body, but Mac continued to glower at him, demanding further explanation. ‘They survive by feeding off the water. They live miles and miles out from the shore.’ He had to spell it out. ‘They don’t need the land.’
‘Ahh, for fuck’s sake,’ Mick, suddenly punctured, slumped down to sit upon the ledge.
‘Why Mother Carey’s chickens then? Who the flaming hell is Mother Carey?’ cried Big Sam angrily, irked more particularly at having been robbed of the kudos of discovery. He grasped the rope with both hands now and, leaning inwards, brought his face to rest against it.
The captain hesitated, looking down the line of now attentive faces and then he sighed. ‘It’s a legend. She’s an old crone. She’s responsible for bad weather out at sea.’ He stopped, unwilling to say more.
‘And they’re her birds.’ Clarie finished for him, casting a glance back up towards the skimming birds behind us. ‘They mean bad weather, don’t they?’
‘No kidding, Sherlock. Storm petrels. Kinda obvious, ain’t it?’ Mac snarled.
The captain shook his head but Fraser stepped in for him, ‘Superstitious nonsense. They don’t mean anything.’
But it was too late. A disquieting sense of deep unease had wreathed its way around us, its mists settling about the margins of our fragile minds. Men began to shamble away, eager to throw off the unwelcome omen. Mac moved aside begrudgingly to let the skipper pass and Clarie went back to look at Murack. Big Sam slunk down, muttering to himself, and wandered off.
But I could barely move. I stood transfixed, staring at the graceful arcing of the birds. A spasm of panic swept across me, seizing my insides and twisting. It must have registered in my face, for Joe, suddenly conscious of my immobility, looked startled and then rearranged his face to try for calm assurance.
‘For Christsakes, Joe, I made them hack the bleeding boat up. If there’s a storm…’ I babbled until I had to stop to swallow painfully.
‘There isn’t gonna be a storm. It’s rubbish, Cub! You can’t believe that old sailor’s yarn. Hell, just look at the bloody sky! Not a frigging cloud… Cub!’ He tapped me lightly on the furthest cheek, pulling my face around and forcing me to peel my eyes away from the flitting spectres and look up at him. ‘You didn’t make anyone hack up the frigging boat. We needed water. Half of them’d be dead by now if it weren’t for you. And one day, they’ll be grateful for it.’ His tone lightened suddenly. ‘Except for Mac. Oh, and maybe Billy. But then those two are prob’ly Mother Carey’s bleeding brothers!’ I laughed despite myself, despite the pain it caused my throat and lips, and turned my back upon the birds.
‘Think Murack’ll make it?’ Joe asked Clarie in the evening. As the day had gone on, Murack gradually had quietened down. The constant stream of his invective against Billy had ceased abruptly but his incessant mumbling took longer, fading with the light. His body slowly stilled. He lay where we had left him since that morning, across the middle bench, and despite his stark exposure to the sunlight he had barely moved. We were getting ready to take up the oars for nightly rowing and so we were going to have to shift him, though all of us were reluctant to disturb what looked like more peaceful rest. Clarie shrugged. ‘Depends what’s up with him.’
‘He’s been drinking sea water,’ I said. It seemed obvious to me.
‘So’ve others. Big Sam’s all right. So is Bob. Slim. They got better.’ Clarie sighed. ‘Mayn’t be the sea water. I dunno. Could be anything. Could be the heat. Maybe some of us just aren’t as strong as others. Some blokes’ bodies don’t cope so well without water. Without food. Who knows?’ He looked around, from side to side and then beckoned us in conspiratorially. Joe and I leaned towards him and he whispered quietly, ‘Between you and me lads, I’ve been having a go at drinking my own water.’ He tried to grin at me, the corners of his mouth slitting with the movement as he fixed me with his rheumy eyes. ‘Tastes like bloody piss!’ he said, rasping with amusement at his own joke. He wandered off, still choking dryly and shaking his head. Alarmed, I looked across at Joe but found only my own fears for the reliability now of even Clarie’s mind reflected in his face.
Making Shore Page 14
