Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Across the table the Chengtu’s second engineer, a young, dark, birdlike Sri Lankan called Rohan, winced and his Adam’s apple yo-yo’d rapidly up and down. He glanced at the scarlet pool of ketchup on Darby’s plate, gulped ‘Excuse me,’ pushed back his chair and left.

  *

  My cabin contained a table, settee, two chairs, a bunk and, most important of all, a good reading light. The ship’s library was small but varied: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, Patrick Moore’s The Story of Astronomy, a Larousse Encyclopaedia of Modern History, a handbook on witchcraft. I took down The Oxford Book of Short Stories; it seemed ideal for the ten or twelve days to Papua.

  As I lay down on my bunk to read it, a notice pinned to the cabin wall near the telephone caught my eye. It was printed in Japanese and English, and I read:

  The Sufscriber lifts the handset and diall-ng ‘2’ then replaces the handset and wait when the subscriber and called hears ringing tone if called answers. Both ringing tones stop and speech starts.

  The Chengtu had been built in 1977 in a Japanese shipyard, for (I think) a Dutch company. Odd that Japanese efficiency could result in gibberish. On the other hand, Japanese efficiency had got the ship herself just right. The Chengtu moved smoothly and most economically at thirteen knots, and she could do no more. Just as important – for me – she was built to accommodate tall men. Japanese often design ships like dolls’ houses for half-pint Japanese seamen, but I was never threatened by the Chengtu’s deckheads, lintels and air-cooling outlets. I had no need to go about stooped like a miner at a coalface.

  Across an empty sea we passed without incident down the west coast of Luzon, the northernmost of the Philippine Islands; then, with the long splinter of Palawan Island to our right, we entered the shelter of the Sulu Sea. The Sulu Sea! What memories were summoned up by that innocent-looking stretch of tropical water. Two years earlier I had crossed this region of piracy, rebellion and death in a Filipino launch bearing contraband goods from North Borneo to Mindanao Island. A very different experience from the Chengtu: then, men with tattooed bodies had relieved me of money and binoculars. I had been lucky. Very recently, men had walked the plank hereabouts. Others had been thrown overboard, and their slit throats quickly attracted sharks.

  The sun shone now on a sea as immaculate as I remembered it had been then. I will never forget it. I carry like a snapshot in my head the beauty of the ancient domains of the old sultans of Sulu, where palm-lined bays have always sheltered the scudding outriggers of smiling, brown men who a hundred years ago, for the sake of plunder, killed with their curved krisses and brass cannon, and who now prefer machine guns. Better armed than ever before, the living descendants of the sea rovers of old Sulu have fired on, and even boarded, cargo vessels as big as the Chengtu. If you were the captain of any kind of vessel in these waters the important thing was not to stop. The mistake of anchoring for a night to shelter from a cyclone had led, in the recent case of the British master of a container ship, to his waking at midnight to feel the cold touch of a pistol on his neck, and to hear a whisper in his ear: ‘Money, money, where’s the money?’ He must have heard the snick of the hammer before the whisperer shot him dead.

  *

  Around midnight, I was reading R. L. Stevenson’s grisly short story, Thrawn Janet, with only the bunkhead light on.

  An’ then a’ at aince, the minister’s heart played dunt an’ stood stock-still; an’ a cauld wind blew among the hairs o’ his heid. For there was Janet hangin’ frae a nail beside the auld aik cabinet; her heid aye lay on her shouther, her een were steeked, the tongue projekit frae her mouth….

  Could this chill, northern tale really have been written on the sun-heated beaches of Samoa? Something made me look across the darkened cabin to the door – a slight movement, no sound. The door handle slowly drooped; silently, the door began to open … it opened halfway. What …? I waited for the ghastly, hanged head of Stevenson’s Janet to peer at me round it … coyly. But as I sat up, rigid with utterly senseless fear, the door closed again as slowly and silently as it had opened, and the metal handle moved back into place without a click. I leaped for the door and looked out. No one. At the stairhead, no sound. The captain’s and the second engineer’s doors were closed. I returned puzzled to my bunk and my reading, but now I substituted one of Saki’s lighter stories for the gruesome tale of how the ‘auld desecrated corp’ of the witch wife Thrawn Janet crawled back from the dead in the moorland manse under the Hanging Shawn, ‘wi’ the heid aye upon the shouther, an’ the girn still upon the face o’t’, and how the devil in her drove to madness the Reverend Murdoch Soulis.

  At breakfast I told the story of my opening door, and Julian Gomersall smiled. ‘Maybe it was our ghost. Our last third officer swore he saw a phantom figure on the left wing of the bridge. He even spoke to it – well, so he claimed – but it disappeared.’

  ‘The Chengtu was only built in 1977. Anyone die in her yet?’

  ‘Not aboard her, that’s true,’ Jim Bird said. ‘But all around her. Want to hear?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  And he began: ‘In 1981, we were en route to Hong Kong and detoured to avoid a typhoon. North-west of Luzon – actually, we’ve just passed the place – near dusk, we saw a boat. A big wave suddenly threw it up or we wouldn’t have been able to see it. It was really rough; Force 8, I should say. It was difficult to get alongside the boat, which was tiny – about 18 foot long, with just a sort of rabbit hutch on it where people were huddled.’ I knew what was coming.

  ‘Vietnamese.’

  ‘Yes, Boat People. They must have been drifting for a month or two. Their engine had packed up; no fuel.’ He shook his head, munching cornflakes. ‘Well, we threw over a line. But, trouble was, the poor bloody Vietnamese were too exhausted to help themselves much. Only two of ’em managed to grab a rope ladder and begin to haul themselves aboard.’ shook his head again, even more mournfully. ‘Yes, but a heavy sea swept one of them back into the water, and he disappeared. The other one just managed to get aboard. A girl … an emaciated girl. What else could we do? We tried throwing down a net right over the boat, hoping they could at least fall into it and we’d pull them up. Like fish, you see.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Yes. But the seas were appalling and the ship was rolling and pitching something terrible. And then – good God! – the little boat was swept under our stern – and that was dangerous. We threw down lifebuoys and lines, and yelled to them to grab hold – “We’ll haul you up,” we shouted. But they were too weak for that. And they couldn’t understand English – and we, of course, couldn’t speak bloody Vietnamese. Only two youngsters did what we told them – jumped into the water from the boat and held onto our lifebuoys. Just two. And even they…. Just then, a huge wave slammed the whole loaded boatful up under our counter. Bang. And that was it…. The boat filled at once and went down with them all –’

  ‘Except the two clinging to the lifebuoys.’

  ‘No. If they’d clung on … but they panicked … scrambled back into the doomed, fucking boat. Of course, it took them down, too.’ Jim Bird looked round. ‘What else could we do? Even then, I sent a volunteer over the side with a line round him. He fished out another girl … and then I called him up again or we’d have lost him, too, in that bloody awful sea. So we saved just the two girls – living skeletons by then.’

  I thought of close Vietnamese friends – as close as part of my own family – I had said goodbye to in Saigon before it fell; of Shanghai 1927 and Saigon 1975 – and after; of Asians dying in the furnace of a locomotive, or in a Force 8 gale off Luzon. Over the Chengtu’s breakfast toast and marmalade an image arose of Wei Kuen, Ah Po and their young wives in that doomed boat under the Chengtu’s counter. I thought of 1997 and Hong Kong. It could happen to anyone.

  *

  Tony Darby reminded me of a portrait of Arnold Bennett in middle age, a comforting image.

  ‘Foony thing happened once,’ he said a morning or two lat
er. ‘We’re at sea, y’see. And I’m in the engine room takin’ the night watch at one in the mornin’, havin’ a cup o’ tea and a sandwich down there, like. I’d sit there on a chair –’

  ‘On a chair? Get away!’ said Bird, winking at me.

  ‘– and have me sandwich and cup o’ tea. And for two or three nights, I’d look up and think I saw, above me, near the gangway’ – he stared at us in turn and added with great dramatic emphasis – ‘a figure.’

  ‘Go on with you,’ Bird said.

  Darby laid bacon on a slice of bread and poured HP sauce over it. ‘A figure,’ he continued, ‘which sort of flinched away – and disappeared into nowt. Well, next morning I took my tea right by the door, to watch and wait. And the figure appeared – a little black man! – and I grabbed ’im. “Gotcher!” I said. “But you’re not a bloody ghost.”’

  ‘A stowaway?’

  ‘Ay. Hidden in the bilges somewhere and creepin’ out at night to snitch food from the crew’s mess.’ He bit into the sandwich.

  ‘Who was it then?’

  ‘Some sort of refugee from Mombasa. Well, we took him halfway round the world. Had to. He’d no papers. Didn’t exist, officially.’

  ‘So he was a sort of ghost, then.’

  Darby laughed. ‘Ay, he were a ghost, an’ all.’

  A notice in the wheelhouse said:

  Recently two stowaways were discovered on board Asian Pearl soon after she had left Hong Kong. These men were carried around Australia and Far East ports and were eventually landed on her return to Hong Kong. At one stage they leapt into the sea while the vessel was at anchor and were rescued from imminent drowning by a fishing boat. We would ask, therefore, that you have a thorough search before the ship leaves port….

  There would be others. Asia is full of human beings ready to risk death rather than stay where they are.

  *

  The Chengtu moved south through strings of islands, strangely shaped, some like green-gloved fists, some like brown teeth, and in one case something like a small pyramid riding on the back of a whale. On some I could see smoke rising from houses on stilts, and outriggers drawn up on a beach. The Malays of Borneo call this region the Land Below the Wind, below 10° north, above which lies the typhoon belt between Luzon and Japan. We were approaching the Equator.

  The whaleback of Mindanao lay to starboard, and the long outline of Basilan Island; and then Zamboanga’s white buildings with, alongside its wharves, several passenger ships bound for Singapore, Cebu City or Manila, and a congregation of kumpits, as they called local launches like the 80-footer in which I had crossed these waters two years before. Little fishing outriggers skimmed about with small, brilliant sails – green with chocolate brown stripes, pale brown and black stripes, turquoise blue stripes on white or the palest yellow; tiny, vivid moths on the placid blue sea. ‘Zamboanga is a violent city,’ the captain of my kumpit had said. ‘Many grenades in markets and movie houses.’ Muslim guerrillas had been fighting the Christian troops and police of President Marcos in these islands for years. A grenade went off near the main plaza when I was there, and I’d seen gunmen terrorizing customers in a cafe. But Zamboanga is a beautiful little city, full of flowers.

  On the Chengtu we turned our backs to it: we had boat drill. The Filipinos, short, bronze-skinned, wearing hard hats and yellow lifejackets, paraded under the lifeboats and prepared them for launching. Long black Filipino hair and whiskers stuck out under the helmets. One had tied his hair into a pigtail. They were a cheery bunch. Europeans in the shipping business had told me that Filipino officers can be a problem. Filipinos, Koreans and Taiwanese have too often bought their certificates of competence – their ‘tickets’ – for a few hundred dollars in Manila, Seoul or Taipei. ‘That’s one reason why the sea is so bloody dangerous today,’ Julian Gomersall said. But a Filipino crew works well, giving no trouble.

  ‘Cheap labour,’ I said.

  ‘Good cheap labour,’ said Gomersall.

  Cheap labour. These giggling brown men in overalls would not have resented that description; they felt lucky to be any kind of labour at all. Cheap labour! An image arose in my mind of the shabby white hull of an old liner in a steamy Red Sea port. In 1979 the veteran Messageries Maritimes liner Pasteur had lain at anchor, a floating dosshouse, in Jeddah. Once she had plied between Marseilles and Saigon carrying French colonial officials and their wives, planters and legionnaires, dealers in gems and Buddha heads, spies and card sharpers. On her decks, in imperial times, white-suited Frenchmen in topees sipped pastis, and while chatting to their wives thought with inward lascivious smiles of their Tonkinese mistresses. When she became a dormitory ship, two or three thousand Filipino stevedores slept cooped up below those decks like battery hens and by day were ferried to the Jeddah docks, to perform the manual work that, in these booming days of desert oil and gold watches, the poorest Saudis disdain to do. One of the Chengtu’s Filipinos told me that the going wage in Jeddah for a Filipino labourer was $280 a month. The Middle East has spawned a new working class of Asian serfs who are glad to get this humble work. Koreans sweep the airports of Arabia; Pakistanis clear the rubbish from its streets; Filipinos work its docks.

  During inspection at sea European ships’ officers often find Filipino seamen, who like most seamen these days have cabins to themselves, huddled in each other’s arms three or four to a single bunk, like apprehensive puppies in a basket. The officers smile significantly when they talk about this, but in a tentative, uncondemnatory way. For what is it? Affection? Sex? A cringing need for comfort in an unsure world? Something of all these, no doubt – and especially the last. Luckily for them, Filipinos are born with a protective skin: their indomitable humour and an unmatchable sense of fantasy.

  *

  The Filipino with the pigtail turned out to have almost as many names as a European prince. People called him Sonny, but he told me his real name was Sebastiano José Generoso. ‘I am also known as Sonngen III,’ he confided, squatting half-naked in red tracksuit bottoms on his bunk and handing me a San Mig beer. ‘Sounds like a king,’ I said. His cabin walls were an eye-riveting photographic collage of topless girls. In one or two vividly coloured photographs he himself was prominent, his arms round a couple of nude shoulders. One girl sat astride a bicycle in tight leather pants and dark glasses. ‘Good for wanking,’ Sonny admitted, adding, ‘Maybe I marr-ee the one at left, maybe not.’ Maybe not is more likely, I thought. He had a pleasant, unserious grin and the typically white teeth of most Asians. His pigtail was released so that his long, black hair fell straight to his naked shoulders, and from the gold chain round his neck hung what looked like a small tusk. ‘This is a tooth of a wild peeg from Luzon,’ he said.

  He looked – many Filipinos do – like a good-natured pirate. But what was this photograph of mushrooms?

  ‘These mushrooms are very interesting, surr. They are like LSD.’

  ‘You like LSD, Sonny?’

  ‘Not any more. Before, I was injecting Nembutol, speed, coke, something like that. Now I like whiskee, beer, vodka. Not too much – I don’t like fighteeng and troubles.’ His expression, in repose, was oddly sad and drawn for a young Filipino. All those drugs seemed to have depleted him.

  Over his bunk were two paperbacks, Everything You Want to Know about Recreational Drugs (recreational?) and a paperback western by an author called Louis L’Amour. Bursts of hi-fi pop roared and pulsed down the alleyway outside.

  ‘That’s Roger,’ Sonny said. ‘He beats on my door at midnight to get me to come hear his music. But I read books. I say, go away. Last treep, some guy try to steeek a knife into Roger in the mess.’

  ‘A music lover, perhaps?’

  He laughed.

  Sonny would be paid off at the end of this voyage; the China Navigation Company had decided to replace Filipinos by Hong Kong Chinese – a matter of company policy: Hong Kong company, Hong Kong crew. Never mind, Sonny shrugged; some other ship would turn up. A tramp for preference; you get the odd
day or two in a port on a tramp; a container vessel never seemed to stop. Filipinos need fantasies: this one had put together a royal-sounding name, for instance. With his friends he would laugh, but he was a touching figure at other times. With me, his laughter would stop and his smile fade. Filipinos are amazingly ebullient, but their homeland – so beautiful – is cursed with a degree of poverty beside which the ailments of affluent Europe seem trivial. Sadly swinging his legs from his bunk, Sonny-Sebastiano-Sonngen III-Rahja sighed, ‘The Filipinos are despised by so many people,’ and his expression, suddenly close to tears, wrung my heart. Like gypsies, the indigent Filipinos are condemned to roam this cruel world, scrounging menial jobs to keep their families alive – and their self-respect.

  *

  I read in my notebook:

  Captain Julian Gomersall, 6 foot 5 inches, a Yorkshireman living in Sidmouth. Also a fitness freak. Although no teetotaller, he does look fit, one has to admit that. At dawn he appears on the bridge in swimming trunks, and starts pacing up and down silently, like a caged panther; deep breathing; back and forth. Thirty times a day he runs up and down the external ladders of the ship. Robert Lau (‘Sparklet’), the young Chinese radio officer, another health fanatic, passes him, impassively, in the opposite direction. Risking broken ankles for the sake of their waistlines, they dart about the ship panting grimly, ignoring each other and everyone else. ‘Daft,’ says Tony Darby, complacently patting his Tweedledum stomach.

  Lau is quiet, shy and teetotal, the son of a retired Hong Kong prison officer. Lau plays poker with Ken, the second officer with the missing fingertip. He eats alone in his own cabin, gobbling Chinese food from his own bowl, untempted by the Norwegian hash served to us by the Filipino cook in the dining room. Once he had wanted to be a priest. ‘But I am a sinner – I think.’ His girlfriend wants him to leave the sea and join the police. ‘Sins don’t much matter there,’ he said, with no sign that he’s joking.