Making Shore
Page 21
As our cries of encouragement turned to hoots of joy, it chuntered on steadily towards us, ploughing resolutely through the breakers and scything up the beach to run to ground finally on the sludgy foreshore. We crowded round her, jubilant and excited, and were joined almost immediately by a slender, dark-haired man of about thirty-five, who leapt down lightly from her deck to stand before us. With his hands upon his hips and wearing an expression of exaggerated puzzlement, his quick, bright eyes darted from one man to the next, growing larger and more incredulous by the second, as he wrestled with the swift gamut of emotions that played out almost comically across his bewildered face. His thick, black eyebrows shot so far and so enthusiastically up towards the top of his head that for a moment, it looked as though they might leave it altogether.
Astonishment at our presence there at all, enquiry as to how and why, horror at our bodies’ evident degeneration, and shock at the ragged desperation in our appearance, were quickly overtaken by a frown of resolution, which was soon replaced again, finally, by sheer delight as he realised that he was so obviously the cause of our wild and rapturous celebration. One distinct sentiment after another swept across his boyish features as he struggled to find the words to begin.
‘Guillaume. Je m’appelle Guillaume. Au nom de Dieu, qui êtes-vous?’ Then, with the instinctive understanding that we quickly came to recognise as one of his many qualities, he saw, in a split second, our dismayed incomprehension. ‘English? I am Guillaume. What, for God’s sake, are you doing here?’
‘Where exactly, is here?’ Clarie, typically fastidious, wanted to know, but his question was drowned out by the clamour of other voices, rising to be heard.
‘Can you get us out?’
‘Have you any water with you? Any food?’
‘On a lifeboat. We were torpedoed. Three weeks in a fucking lifeboat, two or more on this godforsaken beach.’
‘Living on stagnant water and salted fish. Next to nothing before that. Fucking starving.’
‘You’ve got to take us with you. Surely you can get us in.’
‘We’re the ones who made it,’ I said.
Guillaume’s attention shot from man to man as he strove to keep up, to glean a basic understanding from the avalanche of foreign words his question had precipitated.
Some particular phrases he caught hold of readily and he repeated them with wide-eyed wonder, shaking his head and throwing up his hands at various intervals. ‘Trois semaines? Merde, alors. C’est impossible!… Food? Mais oui. Of course. I have plenty. You must eat, bien sûr, you must all eat!… Return with me? Of course, we must try…’ As I had been one of the first to reach his boat, I stood quite close to him and so he turned his head towards me at my voice, tilting it on one side and looking carefully into my face. Lowering his voice, he smiled at me very gently. ‘There are good friends then, who did not.’ He did not require an answer but for the first time since Moley Wells had been abandoned, water suddenly gathered at the corners of my eyes and my vision blurred. I could not speak. Guillaume put an arm around my scrawny shoulders and, directing me towards his boat, he said then, ‘You must help me get them down some food.’
Guillaume was not a man to skimp on anything and evidently he prided himself on travelling in style. I stood by the prow of his launch while he handed down to me an extraordinary array of provisions, some verging on the luxurious, but all, to our famished eyes, miraculous. He seemed to have an inordinately plentiful supply: tins of meat, of bread, crackers, biscuits, chocolate and coffee. He even produced a couple of tins of foie gras and then two bottles of red wine.
All the while he darted about the deck, opening and closing cupboards, slapping his forehead and exclaiming in enthusiastic affirmation at the plain necessity of the next discovery, before appearing again suddenly with another packet or tin held cheerfully aloft. Out of deference to his particular kindness, I wrestled with all my will against the frantic urge to abandon my post and join my ravenous companions, whose awaiting hands wrested each piece of manna from me eagerly as I passed one after another back, grappling to hold as much as they could manage before making off, a little further up the beach, to make an exuberant start.
Guillaume sat with us on the sand and talked at us while we ate. He worked for a French canning company in Villa Cisneros, a town in Rio de Oro, three days north of our present location, which turned out to be Cape Tamarisk on the coast of Mauritania. He made regular trips to settlements that were dotted at various intervals down the coast, collecting in the fish, paying the villagers for their labours and providing them with salt for the preservation of their catches until he next returned. He reckoned he could get us all on to the launch and take us back with him. If we could put up with the squeeze during the day, we could sleep ashore by night, and he felt sure that he had food and drink enough to provide for us quite adequately until we got there. Having fully appeased our stomachs now, and so gratefully, we assured him that we had suffered so much worse.
He listened then, appalled and astounded, to Mick and Clarie, who, aided by a series of bald interjections from Mac and toothless lispings from the skipper, recounted the bare facts of our horrific journey. The expressions on Guillaume’s face lurched between disbelief and astonishment, from consternation to naked admiration and back again, as his inability to contain the ferocity of his feelings became increasingly evident. His frequent but very genuine exclamations of amazement and alarm were interspersed liberally throughout the telling of the tale. Several times he leapt up onto his feet, staring around at our upturned faces as if hoping to hear, at any moment, one of us refute the truth of it.
They told him of the sinking of the ship, and the ensuing catalogue of disasters we had had to bear: the other lifeboat and the broken mast, the half-empty water tanks, the elusive Canaries. Of how we had managed to make seven gallons of water, at which point he leapt again onto his feet and rushed to shake the hand of a slightly startled Fraser and clap me heartily on the back with such a force that it made my ribcage rattle. He sat again to hear how we had burned the life jackets and half the boat. How we had been lucky with the constancy of good weather and the consequent relative calmness of the sea. They told him of painful, strenuous nightly rowing, of our thirst and of starvation and of our landing here and the unsympathetic nature of our welcome.
But they did not talk of feral, primal fighting, of the gradual disintegration of civilised awareness, of knives at throats and threatened murder. They did not tell of overriding self-concern. Not of hatred, prejudice or greed. Of solicitude resigned nor the abdication of humanity. They did not mention, by name at any rate, Moley Wells and Moses, Murack and Fred Watson. Joe. Their voices and their eyes were once again those belonging to reasonable men and there was little in what they presented to Guillaume to betray that it had ever not been so. Replete, and confident now in our salvation, they talked until our shadows grew long and pointed on the sand and the sun began to ravel in her dusky warmth.
In the morning, Guillaume, who had been outraged to discover that the tribesmen had refused, on our arrival, to give us water and then food unless we could offer something in return, marched into their settlement and in a voice of rousing and incredulous fury, yelled at their assembled group. Some of them slunk off into their tents reluctantly, to return in dribs and drabs, bearing the various sorry items they had taken from us. I picked up Joe’s compass, which was thrown on to the sand at Guillaume’s feet, along with a few paltry plastic combs, some belts, a couple of canvas bags and the few bits of jewellery we had been forced to part with. His anger was only heightened by their apparently casual impenitence, though the sight of Captain Edwards’ false teeth landing in the pile was so unexpected that he could not repress a burst of laughter. The atmosphere immediately lightened and though most of the jewellery was returned to its rightful owners and some of the belts snatched up for immediate service, we left them to the rest of it, if not in recompense for their inconvenience, then to serve as souvenirs.
That night, knowing that we would be leaving in the morning and without having made any conscious decision to do so, I went to where Joe lay. The rudimentary cross I’d made leant drunkenly on one side and so, tutting and rolling my eyes at him, I put it straight and sat down.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. From here, when I looked down along the beach, I could see the rest of the crew sitting around the fire with Guillaume. They were all listening to him in attitudes that I could see even from this distance denoted expectation, and I knew as well as they did that he was telling them some great yarn that would end in great guffaws of laughter. Joe would have thought him marvellous.
I rested my arms loosely around my knees and stopped to listen for a while to the sounds of the shore, which were now so embedded in my consciousness that I no longer noticed them. I listened. I listened to the steady, surging constancy of the waves’ approach and the recurrent, drawling answer of their infinite retreat. To the insistent scuffling of some small animal in the cavernous darkness of the dunes behind and to the enormity of silent stillness in the skies above, from where the stars watched all with pitiless impassivity. Soothed, for the first time, by such strange and simple beauty, my mind’s restraint gave way momentarily to deeper understanding and I caught a fleeting glimpse of what it meant to live. To have known and to have loved. I would remember.
The flaccid skin along my arms began to pucker in the chill of the night air. I took his compass from my pocket and looked at it in my hand, as I passed my fingers and thumb slowly across it.
Then, making a small well in the sand on the shrunken mound at the foot of the little cross, I put it carefully inside and covered it over, pressing it down with my palm. ‘I’ll do it when I get home,’ I said.
CHAPTER 12
INTENT ON TRUTH
‘Merde! Regardez-les! Ils sont à demi morts. Abaissez les armes!’ Guilaume stood squarely in the middle of the deck, squinting up the harbour wall at the line of Mauritanian soldiers, whose glinting rifles pointed down, moving slowly from one wide-eyed prospective captive to the next. Impatiently, throwing up his hands, Guillaume tutted his disgust. ‘Allons-y,’ he muttered, ‘Alors, let’s get this over with.’
One by one and shakily, we scrambled up the quayside until we stood pathetically, huddled and trembling in the glorious sunshine, before the guns. No one spoke. The eyes of the soldiers passed silently over our emaciated bodies, our tired and filthy faces, half concealed by wild and matted hair, and the tattered remnants of our clothes. None of us had shoes. And one by one, they let their weapons fall.
Guillaume, apologising vehemently, had had to radio ahead to alert the authorities in Villa Cisneros to the fact that we were with him. To a Frenchman working for the Vichy French, technically, we were the enemy, and whether he wanted to or not, he was duty bound to turn us in. He had hoped, however, that we would be well cared for, and as we were herded into the back of an awaiting truck, I could hear him still, busily firing questions and instructions at the soldiers at its side.
As two of them closed and bolted up the tailgate at the back of the truck, he appeared again beside them, grinning widely. ‘They are taking you up to the hospital. For examination and for treatment. You will be all right. I have told them, eh? You will be all right.’
One of the last ones in, I had taken one of the seats nearest to him and Captain Edwards, wincing, leaned across me to offer Guillaume an extended hand, which he took and shook warmly. ‘Thank you, Guillaume, for everything you have done.’
‘Euh! Je vous en prie! C’est rien, monsieur,’ he raised his shoulders so that his neck disappeared completely and, holding them there, he shook his head with typically natural deprecation. ‘It was the least I could have done.’
As the engine started up, engulfing us all in billows of filthy smoke, he turned to me and reaching into his trouser pocket, produced an unopened packet of cigarettes. Raising one eyebrow and holding them briefly aloft for me to get ready for the catch, he tossed them over the tailgate, aiming for my hands. ‘And you, mon ami affligé, you will be all right?’ he shouted.
I smiled at him and nodded. ‘Is there anything I can get to you, when I get back?’ I yelled over the revving of the engine, which, due either to the decrepitude of the truck or to the gross incompetence of the driver, was building to a deafening crescendo. He looked thoughtful for a moment and then, as the truck began to lurch away, his face lit up with joy.
‘Shakespeare!’ he cried. ‘One book. All the…’ He struggled vainly for the word and failing to find it, threw up his arms and laughed. ‘Pièces. I lost mine. You send me that!’ He put both hands high above his head then and waved. I watched his figure receding as we drew off, up the hill through the town and away from the harbour. And he kept on waving until we reached a bend and swung out of sight.
The hospital was, in fact, a small, low, mud hut on the other side of town. We were ushered from the truck by our guards to be greeted by a thin-faced, young French doctor, the only one to work there, whose spectacles, bending wonkily across his face, were held together at the rim by a dirty fold of medical tape. He was sent immediately into a frenzy of activity by our appearance, scurrying about and squawking instructions at a couple of desultory and unruffled native nurses. Edging us fussily towards the eight tightly spaced beds, he rushed around, gathering together a motley and ancient-looking selection of implements, so that he might properly commence his examinations. We sat in twos and threes along the bedsides and waited, as he gazed and prodded and manipulated, considering each one of us carefully and in turn, and accompanying all his deliberations with a series of little hums and hahs of gratified appraisal. Some of us were presumably in better shape than others for, having applied dressings to the most infected open sores and instructed the nurses to dispense quinine to us all, he dispatched one of them to take Clarie and Tomas, Big Sam and four of the others, ‘à la maison.’
‘Fraser?’ Clarie wavered before he would obey the airy hand that waved him after the retreating nurse.
‘House.’ Fraser shrugged and then nodding him on, added, ‘It’ll be OK.’
The doctor shook his head at me and mummed his disapproval, after looking in my mouth. My tongue, he said, in faltering English and holding up three fingers, had split into three parts. Too dry, he told me and though I had felt it strangely unresponsive for weeks, I had not appreciated quite the extent of the damage. ‘Cognac,’ he said. ‘You stay for cognac.’ I had no idea why a shot of cognac would be the answer to the problem with my tongue and it ripped across the rawness of my throat until my neck and ears burned red and my eyes stung, but as the doctor pushed me towards a bed in the corner with rusted steads and greying sheets blotted with stains of mottled brown, I sank on to it with heavy relief. A bed, any bed, was infinitely preferable to damp, unyielding wood that chafed and creaked with every movement or to the pervasive chill of dank, intrusive sand.
Mick apparently had the same diagnosis and he too, was instructed to remain, along with the skipper, whose shrunken frame and evident reluctance to move reflected the extreme fragility of his body. The salt water ulcers on his legs and feet had become infected. They were black and swollen and prevented him from walking any distance without obvious striking pain. The others who were allotted beds alongside us had similar complaints or had just appeared to the doctor to be suffering most in terms of physical disintegration.
And so for hours, our restless bodies bucked and twitched on filthy beds in sweltering heat, tormented by the noise and relentless persecution of the thick, black hordes of flies. They kept up a constant, buzzing vigil for any opportunity to intrude upon the sweat-soak
ed creases on our ravaged carcasses and invade every grimy orifice. The tight, mesh nets the nurses draped about our beds were no obstruction to them, for the dark, mutating swarms swept up and down the room and flies, in their legion, crawled at every crevice, crowded in to feed on every open wound at each redressing, and snatched greedily at the chance to gorge on the goat’s meat and rice we were given, even as we sought to get them up into our mouths.
I lay curled upon my side, seeking not to think, my hands pressed between my knees, and my eyes, undirected, followed the dark profusion. The throbbing mass seemed at times to form itself, to my prickling horror, into a series of terrifying shifting shapes, a parade of grotesque images from my recent memory: contorted features on anguished faces, black, cavernous mouths, screaming, screaming, and eyes pinned wide in naked fear. I closed my own, determined that my consciousness should not fragment, but I could no more block out the hypnotic thrumming of the flies than I could the disquiet of my mind.
And yet, despite the primitive and unsanitary conditions, slowly, surely, our bodies at least began to mend. The doctor attended to each one of us conscientiously and the basic medical care he gave us, coupled with better food and unlimited water, breathed life back into our withered husks. And so when our guards returned to herd us all back on to the truck four days later, we saw our own improvements reflected in the brighter-eyed, smooth-lipped exclamations of those who had been taken to the house. Theirs had apparently been a similar experience. They had been cared for by the nurses and, although they had not had the dubious comfort of an iron bed, they were not envious, for their accommodation had apparently been relatively free of flies.