Acts of Mutiny

by Derek Beaven

  The boys. What could she do? She could not undermine them. Once more her spirit sank. She gripped the wash-basin before the porthole, then, straightening up, yanked her curtains roughly apart. There was the beginning of dawn. She turned. Even now the items of her cabin were becoming visible. In a moment or two it would be day. With the boys she had a duty as a woman beyond anything laid on a man. She could never leave the boys. She was tied utterly by her love for them. And by that everyone had a hold over her.

  Except that having left them … She had left them in fact. It had given her this platform, this space in which to fall … this region of illumination. Having left them to think and gather herself as it were, why, what were they to be called to if not a new life, a new world, a new way of being. She seemed to see the whole position from high up, very detached and clear, a floodlit, now dawn-lit vision of her place in things.

  But she was building castles in the air. It was all in her mind. She knew nothing, not even that he felt anything for her in the way she was beginning to feel for him. Not for certain. Not quite. Through her cabin floor she felt the engines start into life. It would not do.

  ‘In this great ship, my dear little children,’ said Mr Tingay, ‘it would be all too easy for me to occupy you with the easiest things. The great Bible story of Noah, for example, is the story of a ship. That’s something we all learn at Nanny’s knee. Yet there are many folk who have never heard even this charming and instructive tale. In the lovely words of the hymn we have just sung:

  ‘The Bible they have never read

  They know not that the Saviour said

  Suffer little children to come unto me.

  ‘And indeed, in my mission to the original peoples of Australia, I shall, sadly, children, be starting “from scratch”. These are folk who have never seen the sea, who couldn’t imagine what the great flood might be like. Yet the signs of God’s work are there, even in the baking centre of Australia. Would you believe it, there are sea shells in the very floor of the desert. So it must have been some time after our great lesson in the dawning of time that these poor Aboriginal people chose to live in the waterless wastes of an unvisited continent. Yes, these odd, furthest-flung children of Ham actually preferred living in the hottest, harshest place on earth. God has painted them black for it, but they have so far missed out on his message. I shall have a hard job getting them to think about Noah’s Ark, shan’t I?’

  There were polite titters as on the previous Sunday. Sitting on my own at the back of the dance space, I tried to catch Finlay’s eye, but she would not look at me.

  ‘But you, young as you are, are already capable of so much more. You are privileged. You are intelligent. Think of your scripture classes at your prep schools, or wherever it is you went. How lucky you are to have met Jesus in the Bible, in your churches. Met him in person. You are children of the promise. We had that last week. Do you remember?’

  Heads nodded, some possibly with boredom.

  ‘There was another ark, children. Wasn’t there. Oh yes. We know there was another ark. Hands up who knows what the other ark was?’

  Several desultory hands went up. Unfortunately, I put up mine too. ‘The Ark Royal, sir. It’s an aircraft carrier.’ I had seen it at Chatham with my father.

  There was a burst of laughter as the gathering came to life. Finlay turned round and led the scorn, and the faces.

  ‘Don’t be facetious, that boy. Or I’ll report you,’ said Mr Tingay.

  ‘The Ark of the Covenant, sir.’ It was one of the anonymous little English girls.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Mr Tingay, and went on to detail the sacred container that caused the walls of Jericho to collapse. I listened, humiliated in front of the ship’s company of children.

  We all waited for Dragnet. I found myself wondering about the conversation I had overheard between Messrs Chaunteyman and Barnwell, under the clock tower back in Aden.

  ‘I can assure you, Mr Chaunteyman, nothing is being hidden from you; there are no secrets, there is no conspiracy’

  Mr Chaunteyman had started to get angry. He shook Mr Barnwell’s shoulder. ‘Hey, now. What do you guys think you’re playing at. You’ve got no damned authority over my comings and goings, mister. Dave Chaunteyman sails where he pleases.’

  ‘I can’t abide an officer who won’t hold his liquor, Mr Chaunteyman,’ Mr Barnwell had said coldly. ‘No doubt you’ll soon be finding Reds under all our beds, but they’ll be entirely of your own troubled fantasy, sir. Now please get a grip on yourself, before you embarrass your … good lady here.’ He indicated my mother, and Chaunteyman seemed to subside, abashed. That was the moment when the illusion I had of him first began to crumble. I could not believe what I had heard.

  Through a long lens I see myself again in that moment. I have had my week of Dragnet and the Red Sea; now something has changed. Two more items from my suitcase have been dropped into the world. Maybe if I empty any more I shall go critical, targeted to destroy the wrong parents. I am turning myself into a man of war again. The hatred in my body is like a hot iron. I am gradually making room for it – like a heavy-duty soldering iron left switched on against a lead box. The silver melt runs off in a little pool, dripping and hardening on the deck below. How hatred itches to get at the intricacies of things. It works them loose. It finds out the weak points.

  34

  The Arabian Sea lay under an intense blue-white dome, its taste was warm, its own colour the blue of jewel stones.

  If I was unsure of Finlay, what matter. Rejection I had dealt with before. Dragnet ran its course and I stayed apart, uninvited.

  At last there were flying fish. They were revealed by Rosalind Finch-Clark – and her mother. Dilys Finch-Clark I had imagined to be a very private and retiring woman. So far she had proved elusive, seen only in glimpses, usually through the doorways of small interior spaces. Perhaps she liked creating an aura around herself. She was unsuccessful. I never heard anyone express romantic curiosity concerning her at all. Even her husband Paul seemed to show no interest in her.

  Now she was made flesh I could see she was completely ordinary – of ordinary size, colouring, features and dress. And she happened to be occupying the place on the foredeck rail nearest the bow – a place I liked to regard as mine. Barnwell’s aircrew had commandeered the other side, and were throwing things into the sea. Rosalind leaned out next to her mother with her feet on the first wire. ‘Look. There’s one.’ She pointed.

  Her mother studied the bow wave. I stood up next to Rosalind and followed the line of her finger. A small streak of silver leaped and skidded in the wave’s glitter, keeping pace with the white cut of the ship’s stem. Then another. Then a rush of five or six at once. They were easy to see once you believed in them. All exuberance, they appeared to love racing us. We watched for ten minutes or so. Dilys wondered whether it could be the same twenty or so fish who kept swimming so fast as to escape the surface; or whether they were replaced by new relays.

  ‘Look! You can see their wings,’ Rosalind said.

  I studied them. I could just detect the exotic wings, frilled out beside them, on which they would glide. There they leaped again, skimming like chromium-plated cigars, like surface-skimming missiles. The timelessness of the sea and the flying fish held me then, as it does now. Sometimes a fish skims ahead, and I am pulled along. It is a happiness. And yet the story must be told.

  Rosalind was aware of my presence without taking her eyes off the skimmers. When she had looked enough, she told her mother she would go down to the hold to see their cat. Dilys suggested she invite me. Dutifully, Rosalind enquired did I want to go with her?

  We collected Finlay and a boy called Peter from where the ping-pong was set up. Finlay looked at me but made no objection. So I tagged along. Then Rosalind took us on a route through ante-rooms and passages I had never seen, down to the storage realm – before the hold proper – of miscellaneous pets and odd accoutrements. It was through a strong door which gave on to
a short flight of metal stairs. In my imagination I cannot find it again with any precision, though I know it was somewhere in the very rearmost part of our first class region. I cannot be sure quite by what password or key we penetrated that lowered environment of the pets.

  ‘Only people with an animal are allowed down here.’ Rosalind, of course, would come down frequently to look at her huge cat.

  To begin with, the region beyond the door was utterly different in character to the finished and panelled appearance of the passenger accommodation. There was a strong smell, as you would expect. A dog began barking as soon as we entered. Then another took up die sound, and then two more. Rosalind threw the handle of a large metal switch. Pools of low-wattage electric light illuminated the between-deck space. Its headroom was reduced. There was barking all around and it stank. Its floor was of untreated planking, upon which our feet sounded with a booming echo amid the din of the dogs.

  ‘Shut up, Pokey. Doc! Stop it this minute!’ Rosalind located the excited ones and settled them down.

  Electric bulbs were fixed here and there to girders or stanchions. Where their lightwash reached, boxes and crates of all sizes could be seen. Rosalind pointed out where in this village of packing so-and-so’s tortoise lay labelled, or whose guinea pig or pedigree rabbit was usually to be found asleep around which corner.

  ‘A steward comes in to look after them. That’s his job,’ she explained. ‘They moldy sleep.’

  We felt clearly the ship’s recovered movement beneath our feet; I imagined the pets had learned to be both bored and soothed by it. And to have given up because of the dark. Perhaps they were drugged. But now there came sounds of scuffling and stirring from all quarters. They hoped we would feed them, or reassure them. Rosalind appeared to know all their names. She took Finlay in tow. We boys followed on. Interspersed among the cages and sealed crates were other inexplicable pieces of hardware: a vintage motor bike, a squat palm tree, a small fleet of prams and parked pushchairs. Some of the crates were standing open as if their contents were presently in use.

  In the unusual light the ship’s skin was also visible, showing its flanges and bolts; while above our heads a great number of pipes ran off into the darkness; some as thin as the conduit for wire, others as fat as drainpipes.

  The dogs took up barking again. Rosalind shouted at them. We followed her, impressed, as she led the winding way along a particular ‘lane’ to the Finch-Clark pet crate. Someone in the crew had attached a notice to it: ‘Danger. Man-eating Cat’. We gathered round in the dim light and peered inside. ‘Titus’ was indeed prodigious. He was the size of a respectable dog.

  ‘It’s a hormonal abnormality,’ Rosalind pronounced. ‘It started when he was fixed.’

  ‘Fixed?’ Finlay enquired. A dog barked again. Another. The community of the semi-darkness all became excited at once.

  ‘Now then, Sukey! Just you stop it! She’s the ringleader. I’ll come in a minute.’ They seemed grudgingly to respond to her, settling down. ‘You know. Fixed. So they can’t have kittens.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘So they can’t … you know. Do it.’

  ‘So he won’t want to.’

  ‘Having his balls cut off,’ said Peter. We nudged each other as boys.

  ‘Having his bits all off. He won’t try anything then,’ Finlay said firmly.

  ‘What. Willy and all?’ Peter sniggered.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting, Peter,’ Rosalind intoned loftily, before shouting at the dogs again.

  And Finlay sided with her. ‘Yes, Pom,’ she said, looking scornfully at me. ‘Don’t be disgusting, Pom.’

  We all poked at the extraordinary creature, which seemed docile enough, then explored further the resigned and morose animal world that lay about us. Rosalind was in her element. Perhaps she spent much of her time here. Perhaps, I pondered morosely to myself, they had kept her mother here until today.

  ‘This one died.’ She indicated an empty cage, and assumed a tragic tone. ‘He was so lovely, Ben.’

  ‘What was he?’ Finlay asked.

  ‘The loveliest golden retriever. He was so silky. But he was so old, too. He died in the storm.’

  ‘There’s a free cage, then?’ Finlay said.

  ‘Yes.’ Rosalind affected a kind of sob.

  ‘Pom could go in it. There’s a cage here for you, Pom.’ Finlay turned to me.

  The others all laughed.

  ‘He’s so disgusting. He needs to be in a cage. Don’t you, Pom? Disgusting!’

  I was shocked. The other three children seemed united in their laughter. It seemed they knew exactly what Finlay was laughing at. They had grouped themselves together, subtlPerhaps it way, insidiously – leaving me quite out, quite stranded.

  I tried to make light of it. ‘Yes. I’ll go in the cage. It’s a cage for a wild Pom.’ I made a step forward.

  But they laughed with genuine derision, taking their cue from Finlay’s piping Australian accent. ‘Yeah. Wild Pom! Wild Pom! Wild Pom!’

  ‘Shut up!’ I heard myself call out. ‘Bloody shut up!’

  ‘Oh, it swears does it? Bloody Pom! Shut up, Bloody Pom!’

  They all laughed again.

  ‘He’d just fit in nicely.’

  ‘Then he’d be fattened up and eaten.’

  ‘In his red shorts!’

  ‘And his stupid shirt!’

  ‘And his disgusting fez!’

  ‘He’s a Commie!’

  It was no more than that. As if in complete accord, they moved away together, back towards the door, making the message complete, and leaving me alone in the middle of that maze. I had fooled myself for a brief interlude that they were my friends again.

  Rosalind paused by one cage that stood upon another.

  ‘This is Rocky, the McAlisters’ mynah bird.’ She flicked its wire mesh.

  ‘Doo wah wah. Doo wah wah,’ the bird sang. ‘Last tra-a-ain to San Fernando.’

  They all laughed. I tried to laugh too from where I stood, but they ignored me.

  ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.’

  ‘Dirty Commie. Dirty Commie,’ Finlay crooned to it. The others were delighted.

  ‘Don’t step on. Don’t step on … my blue suede shoes,’ the bird replied.

  And then they departed, leaving me for the moment paralysed, watching them climb the metal stair – ‘the ladder’ as my father would call it. So the habitual naval word comes to mind now watching them again in my mind’s eye, seeing the slot of light from the open door.

  ‘Turn the light out after you, will you?’ Rosalind’s face appeared in the slot. ‘When you decide to come out. And make sure the big door’s shut.’ The slot disappeared.

  35

  They did not lock me in. Fighting my tears, I made towards the stair. I heard the mynah bird, Rocky, flutter cramped wings inside his cage, and whistle the beginning of a hymn. ‘Lead us heavenly father, lead us. This is the BBC Light Programme.’ He subsided, and then shook up his feathers one last time to get off a parting scold, ‘Washed in the blood of the Lamb!’ like some Baptist great-aunt.

  I thought of the sea, through the moving floor. We were just under the water-line now, perhaps. Beyond the metal skin, there would be flying fish lagging back, making ready to accelerate the length of the hull and fling themselves off the bow wave. There would be sharks also keeping pace, maybe, hoping for kitchen waste. There would be barracudas, sea snakes. And, I let myself imagine, further off, sea horses, starfish, Portuguese men-of-war, nautilus conches.

  The dogs barked again. I would not give Finlay the satisfaction of meeting me soon about the ship, knowing I had crawled after her out of my humiliation. I stopped and began to cry. Then looked about me. Nor would I pay her the homage of tears.

  I should become hard at last, after my father’s wishes, become a man as brazen as my tradition demanded. The barefoot sailors on the gun deck, tested, grogged, unmoved by heat, cold or the lash, stoo
d to the cannons ready to do their duty. They could lose life or limb. They were willing slaves, duty-at-noon. Proud of it. Iron hard on the inside. Steel-proof on the outside. Proud of the way they could bear it.

  It is the facility of children to sneak into places they are not supposed to go, to solve puzzles, to open those seals and stoppers designed to flummox adults. The fiercer the child, I believe, the more against the odds, the more slippery and impossible its achievement. But at first I employed my energies merely destructively. There was, for no good reason that I could see, a radiogram, standing beyond the cages, wedged in between cabin trunks. I opened it, took out the twenty or so heavy discs from their slot inside and stamped somebody’s precious old gramophone collection into the decking. ‘Oh, it was the storm, the storm,’ I said to myself, by way of explanation. ‘Oh, dear. Oh, what a pity.’

  I sat on the vintage motor bike for some minutes and, unable longer to stifle the tears, wept again.

  The next remembrance I have, however, is in a different space altogether. I have come down another ladder; we are surely well underwater now. There is the vibration noise of the ship, much louder. We must be near the drive-shaft housing for one of the screws. Yes, near to me somewhere I fancy I can hear the blades taking endless hold of the water, forcing it away from us, driving us on. Here, it is much darker, and more cramped. In my imagination I have to stoop, but this cannot be right – for I am a child. Yet there is a sensation that I have gone far deeper still into the nautical past. Though this is a colour I put on it. And maybe from just such associations I insert the obstinate hang of tar to the stink of paint, sea-rot, old oil. For stink it does. How hot it is, too, and heavy the air.

  There is a very faint light – perhaps through some door I have got undone, from the other place, but perhaps not – to which my eyes are becoming accustomed. It is an empty space, set aside in a low region of the hold; I sense by the floor’s motion I am nearer the stern of the ship.

  But I am not here on my own. I said it was empty. Not a human presence; no indeed. But there is something. Some very sentient life is here, a hidden creature which I loathe and detest; and yet I feel at home with it. I have been drawn here. I have come to pet it; to feed it.