Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

  Penny determined to take up her journal once more. Everything was all right after all – positively forging ahead. She chose the open-air route back to her cabin, breathing the good cheer of bright skies. The sea was a dusty blue. Robert Kettle had disappeared, and she could address the aberration of her last entry with spirit, with equanimity. She did not, after all, have to show the diary to Hugh. She did not have to be available, in every way, just because he was her husband. Perhaps she just needed privacy.

  She unlocked her cabin, walked firmly in, and, standing beside the lower bunk, took firm grasp of the bedding. Cheryl was outrageous. She lived in a made-up world. She ought to have been in one of those silent films that ran too fast. But you couldn’t help liking her. Poor thing. Marriage was something quite different now, since the war. It had to be. Surely Cheryl and Lucas were dilettantes, too hectic and frothy, like children still. She and Hugh were soul mates, of course. People always said as much. Or they could perhaps become so, in the new world. Now Mary Garnery, on the other hand, knew exactly …

  Just as she was about to brace her back into the weight of the mattress, however, she noticed the bump which raised the blanket at the unused bed’s centre. It was a small bump. She backed away for a moment. She regarded it with distrust. Her mind flicked the pages of an extreme tropical bestiary. Who knew what might have come on board?

  She caught up last night’s high-heeled shoe. Very gingerly she advanced to the bed again, and poked at the bump. Lightly. Cautiously. There was no movement. No. It was all right, perhaps. There was no horrible, smothered awakening. She tapped the place with more assertion. ‘Well?’ she said, out loud. The bump did not stir. ‘Perhaps just somebody’s sock, or a pair of knickers.’ It was about the size. Too large for a stocking; too small for any other garment. Yet I would have noticed, she said to herself. Is the steward getting slack, or odd, stuffing my things in here? In the very centre?

  She allowed her guard to relax a degree or two and waited, listening, watching. No. It showed no signs of life at all. So she stepped to the bed once more, seized the sheet’s turnover in both her hands and, ready on tiptoe to make emergency exit, flung the covers back.

  It was nothing. It was a brown paper bag, twisted and creased as if with much use. She picked up the shoe and hit it again with the heel. The paper tore. The colour of a bruise was inside. She picked up the other shoe and, leaning over boldly, employed both heels to rip at the hole.

  What she found made her feel sick. It was a vile rubbery shape with hands and feet, knobbled over with warts, spines. She continued to stare, uncomprehending, until she remembered everything, and the tears welled up and she was given over at last convulsively to sobbing.

  She had lost the baby and there had been no one to tell, and it was as if it had never happened. Only a couple of months or so old anyway – kept that a secret. A surprise for Hugh when she got out there. A surprise for herself. She had put it out of her mind. They had not wanted any more children. They had decided. She had hardly acknowledged she was pregnant – all that excitement, the packing up, leaving, the anxiety. So much to attend to. Parting from the boys. Dealing with Mother.

  And then that moment in the storm, when something shifted inside and it was lost. It was lost. And she just carried on. As if nothing had happened. As if it was all over and forgotten there and then and someone else had had the pain – all that awfulness in the toilet. Clearing up the spots on the floor afterwards, leaving no trace. Someone else.

  But it was her. She didn’t forget. She knew all along. It was hers.

  Someone knocked and came in, his hands full of cleaning implements. ‘I’m sorry, madam. I thought the cabin was empty.’ The steward’s eyes flicked from her distraught expression to the toad on the opened bed.

  Penny hid her face in her hands. Then she hurried past him through the door and fled along the corridor.

  So far we were the only people on board ship who knew someone had been killed. Finlay stood on one side of him and I on the other, holding my Winchester repeater popgun loosely on my finger by the trigger guard. It almost smoked.

  He was stripped to the waist. He lay collapsed across one of the special deck-chair loungers, flung right back, so that his head cricked over its end rail. His face was in stark shadow from the overhang of the deck above, but below his neck, across the skin of his throat, his arms and his stomach, under the wisps that grew there, shone out a bright, unbasted pink. One of his arms hung down touching the deck at the wrist’s bend. The other lay across his chest, as if clamping the huge book to it. But I could see no sign of a wound.

  ‘Is this him?’ Finlay said.

  I nodded. As soon as it happened I had run back to fetch her.

  ‘Well?’ she said, trying to sound unimpressed. But her looks gave her away.

  I scanned up and down the walkway. There was only the departing back of one of those old men in blue shorts and socks, staggering on round the deck. What Mr Chaunteyman referred to sneeringly as the last constitutionals, I did not know why. And beyond him, some people were scattered, sitting out, sunbathing with drinks, or reading, absorbed in themselves. In the other direction one of the Lascars was painting the metalwork white.

  ‘Do you think we should do something?’ I said, weakly. Only I knew the truth.

  ‘You’re sure he’s dead? Are you sure?’ Finlay held away, with gathering horror.

  I held away too. I looked down and all along the smouldering body. There was no sign of movement. It seemed quite defunct. Then the book and the hand that rested on it slipped down and hit the chair frame with a soft thump. A real dead man’s jolt. That and the sheer oddness of the vast stripe across his surface fused my guilt.

  ‘Yes.’ I stared at the deck, thin greyish planks with the tarry black between them.

  ‘We’ve got to tell someone, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose we have.’ Then I noticed the cherry stone I had fired. I had been stalking imaginary cowboys, seen some, blasted; reloaded, seen more and fired my popgun indiscriminately round a bulkhead frame. The cherry stone lay on the deck, not far from my sandalled foot.

  You could get the cherries out of empty glasses. I had a supply in my pocket. But I was not dimly credulous. Even to my child’s grasp it seemed extremely far-fetched that a person might be wiped out by something so puny. Yet here lay the slain proof. I struggled to make sense of it all. I had heard at school of the fragile pressure points in the bones of the skull. If you pressed on your temples you could kill yourself. Or that place just under the ear – true. Supposing, by the most hideous kind of accident, I had got one of his pressure points. It could happen. It would be the worst kind of luck but it could happen. I trod cautiously beside the stone, stooped to retrieve it, and then slipped it into my pocket.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she was saying. ‘We’ve got to tell someone. We’ve got to hurry, Pom. In films they always scream and go running and shrieking. Why do you keep wearing that dill hat?’

  I put my hand up to touch the fez.

  She seemed to be on the brink of tears. ‘Why don’t you do something? You’re so useless.’

  Once more I looked ahead and astern. The grown-ups in the distance were calm and preoccupied.

  ‘You do something. Why should I do everything?’

  ‘Why should I? Why should I? You found him.’ Her face changed. ‘What do you think he died of? Do you think it’s a murder?’ She inched closer. ‘Wait. Look. I know who it is. He came ashore with us at Port Said.’

  But now I had pocketed the stone and no one could pin anything on me. ‘What’s his name, then, if you know him so well?’

  ‘I don’t know his name. Why should I know his name? I bet he died of some disease. My mummy said. Port Said. That stinky place. I bet he died of the poo of Port Said.’

  ‘That’s a rhyme. Maybe his poo was poisoned.’ And I ventured on, looking for the giggle of her acceptance. ‘Maybe they stuffed poison up his …’

  But she stamped
her foot. ‘Don’t be disgusting. You’re just a dirty Pommy bastard and I’m telling.’ And she was about to rage more and hold my preoccupations over me, when I saw behind her a shape that looked familiar coming along the deck in our direction.

  ‘There’s Penny.’

  Finlay turned and ran to her, and was almost instantly at her side, explaining everything, tugging her hand, pointing back at where I stood next to the dead man. ‘And that’s just how we found him,’ she said as they came up, pointing again. ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it? It’s that Port Said man. They put them overboard, don’t they? Wrapped in a flag.’

  Penny looked, and then drew in her breath as her body seemed to jump. She made a small noise. I could see her eyes looked different – swollen and strange, her face, even with the fierce sun behind it, puffy, darkened here and there with blotches.

  At that moment Robert awoke, blinked and groaned as he tried to sit up.

  28

  Penny burst out laughing, full of relief. He was ridiculous. She wanted to embrace him. But his surface screamed: No! The skin is so excellent an organ, so responsive, tough, and yet fragile; so beautiful. She wanted on the instant to tend to him with cold creams and healing unguents, soothe him with her touch.

  ‘Now, Penny, which is the most emotional of the animals?’ Michael Canning had teased her last night in the lounge. The others had joined in, suggesting various behaviours: screeches, grunts, tail-waggings, chest-beatings, crocodile tears. They had made quite a party of it – but the riddle was insoluble. ‘Everyone give up?’

  When, with his schoolboy grin of triumph, Michael Canning offered his bizarre answer, Penny had gone straight off to the library in disbelief, to look it up. She sifted through navigational memoirs and natural histories until she found it. It is the octopus; which, frustrated of a voice by water and heritage, wears its feelings on its eight sleeves and flushes the bulb of its head with chromatic waves. The octopus is the most candid of creatures.

  Now Robert, similarly naked, wore his feelings on his skin. Cut off at the neck by the shadow of the overhanging deck, his body flagged up his heart. There is no simple code-book. It was after all an enormous self-induced blush to be in her presence; yet it forbade her to respond. With his bluish-white stripe across the lobster pink he was all valentine. But Penny was reminded of the boy, Pom or whatever his name was, with his predilection for blood, making those gruesome enquiries of her about punishment. Did he ask his mother to dress him like that? Odd child, but boys will be boys. It struck her suddenly that Robert had been chastised. One might almost say his skin showed the first flogging of the voyage.

  At the frog racing, Penny could not stop thinking about Robert’s body. She lost eight shillings. How he lay there sprawled out. For a terrible moment she had thought he really was dead. Then the poor man moved and, in waking up, made that heartrending groan. She was mortified now by the laugh that escaped her. She realised as soon as it happened he was in a bad way after all. People had begun to cluster round. Someone got hold of the quartermaster from the dance space. He had come, clutching one of the frog ropes.

  Robert brushed the attention away. ‘No. It’s nothing. I’m quite all right. Just a touch of the sun. Nothing to make a fuss about. Please.’ He made to walk. Then collapsed.

  They took him to the sickbay. There was a stupid distraction, a shriek, when that wretched boy managed to hit Finlay Coote in the teeth with a cherry stone. Why must he act up now, the child. The kind who would try deliberately to lose at board-games.

  She went back to her cabin. In her mind she did soothe the burns, tracing the shape of his arms, smoothing his breast. It was as if the shape of him glowed inside her own, or that she was gone out of herself like one of the saints obsessed with wounds. Not that she worshipped him. Nothing abasing or ridiculous like that. More that she knew she was fascinated in a manner not experienced before. She longed to see him; simply to see again what had disclosed itself to her: his body, from the waist up, clear, strong yet very delicate and damaged. It was strangely marked.

  She wondered if she might be allowed to take him something – some fruit, perhaps. Or flowers. Or perhaps something less intimate – for she would not want to be giving the wrong signals. She should not need particularly to visit him at all. He was nothing to her. So what if his body had taken up residence in hers – well, that was a private thing of her own. What was the phrase? A sexual fantasy, no doubt. Apparently they were considered normal. Of course she would not go. How violently her emotions were playing tricks on her. Why, only this morning she was weeping over the miscarriage. It was intolerable. Quite intolerable. Vulgar, even. Like Brighton beach, even. And she knew, as everyone did, exactly what Brighton stood for.

  Yet she had a certain proprietary right to visit him – as the person who found him. Not counting the children who thought he was dead. And what a shock that had been: the thought, just for a moment, that he was … It would not leave her alone. Why should she not visit him? He would be covered up. It would be the decent thing to do. She did know him – after a fashion. He was ill. She had discovered him.

  What more natural thing in the world than that she should call in at the sickbay, one of the cabins on C deck – she had happened to find out exactly where – to visit a friend who had been silly enough to get himself roasted in the Red Sea. They might laugh about it. A lucky escape, maybe. From something worse – if she had not happened to be passing, and woken him. He might be grateful. He damned well ought to be. She ought to give him the chance to say so, ought she not?

  Cheryl had said … But Cheryl was Cheryl … Yet he had been avoiding her. She was sure of it. What was he expecting, then? An affaire? Surely not. The impudence. But he had made no overtures of that kind. There had only been the message of his eyes. About which in her heart of hearts she understood all too well? To be absolutely honest? And now the meaning of his beautiful, painful skin?

  Then she had better keep well away; or she would be getting her fingers burnt. And that would not do. Surely that would not do at all. So she made the best of the remainder of the day and turned in early.

  But in her bunk-bed in the dark she continued to feel him lying there almost next to her, and could find no balm. He burnt her on the edge of sleep, where images chased one another off the rim of the world. The toad no longer troubled her. She could not be frightened by it and did not care. The phrase ‘free woman’ swelled in her mind – from the lesson at the service yesterday. St Paul. She had not noticed it especially then, whereas now it filled her head. Her thoughts sailed ahead of her, into the tropic zones, beyond Sinbad, beyond the Spice Islands, through the Strait of Malacca and out into the Pacific. She saw the delicate charts of Cook, the log-books and sketches of Bligh. She had found them in the library. Now the whole blue binding of the book of the sea, wearing red as its signature, was quite indelible.

  There was a knock at her door. Cheryl came in. ‘Penny? You all right, darling? Thought there might be something the matter. Just wondered if there was anything I could do?’

  ‘Oh, God. Cheryl, it’s you. No. Quite all right, thank you. Yes. Just thought I’d turn in early for once. Catch up a bit on my beauty sleep.’

  Cheryl hesitated just inside the doorway. The light from the corridor outside made a faint sheen about her hair. ‘You sure? Can I get the steward to bring you a glass of chocolate or something?’

  Penny shook her head.

  ‘You didn’t look too good. I was watching you at dinner, you know. You really ought to be eating better, dear. Enjoy yourself, darling. That’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘I’m fine, Cheryl. Really I am. Tummy ache. Headache. You know.’

  ‘Of course, darling. See you tomorrow. Sorry to wake you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep. Really.’

  ‘I’ll let you alone, then. If you’re sure. Remember, if there’s anything on your mind … anything at all.’ The light was behind her but Penny thought she appeared to wink.

  �
��Thanks, Cheryl. I do appreciate it.’ Penny yawned. Cheryl closed the door behind her.

  Mr Chaunteyman had no such scruples, apparently, and called on the still slightly delirious Robert in his sickbay the next morning.

  29

  He blew in like the simoom, the bad wind.

  ‘A word in your ear, old chap.’

  Robert registered an American, speaking the phrases of an Englishman. He wondered whether he was properly awake, and looked around the room to check. Then he recognised the tall, dark-haired, slightly balding visitor as someone else who had once bought him a drink in the Verandah – an obvious alcoholic. He had made that judgement on the spot. Very likely an ex-serviceman, killing memories. Not an uncommon thing, if you knew how to look for it. Robert had lived with the problem all his life, and could tell the signs. It was a family secret. He hated it. The father was fine – could go on for years, provided nothing real was allowed to touch him. If it did the balloon would go up. But in general the drinking could be managed, kept dark. Robert’s was a close family; in which everyone did their bit.

  For it never actually showed up in the music-hall sense – these types did not slur their speech, nor fall down. Their noses were rarely pickled; they did not sing. They were ostensibly quite ordinary chaps. Gentlemen. It was just that certain conjuring tricks involving alcohol happened around them. And only if you looked very carefully would you catch the exact quantities being put away. That was the constant thing. He was quite sure he was right.

  ‘We met at lunch last week. Dave Chaunteyman. Remember? Heard you’d got a touch of the sun. Pretty bad luck, eh?’

  He extended his hand; a good-looking man, well built. His looks gave him a stylish, indeed, slightly English flavour. And, with that thin moustache, he could ‘old boy’ Robert, who was a decade his junior, as if he had picked it up through long association. Which Robert was sure he had not, for the rest of his speech was more or less thoroughly transatlantic – though he had ‘manner’. Chaunteyman was possibly, he thought, the son of some well-connected Yankee family.