They danced until the last guitar chord slashed the air, leaving them breathless and suddenly self-conscious in the silence.
Stevenson caught Sharimah’s elbow and turned her back to the table, but Taylor had gone to relieve himself, and another song, slow and smoochy, crooned lugubriously from the tape recorder somewhere behind the bar. Both the Norwegians, huge blond men, swivelled slowly, the tiny Chinese women engulfed in hugs.
Stevenson slipped his arms round Sharimah’s waist and drew her to him. The scent and touch of her overwhelmed his senses. He thought, distantly, of Cathy. Sharimah’s face was averted so he pressed closer as they began to sway to the slow beat. Her pelvis thrust forward to meet his, and she turned her face up to him. His tumescence intruded between their contiguous bellies.
‘You want me, tonight?’
He swung her round and found himself facing Taylor. Sharimah sensed some conflict within him and drew back her head. Not thinking he would spurn her, given his obvious urgency, she sought elsewhere for explanation.
‘You married man?’
Stevenson looked down at her, his agony clear on his face.
‘Yes,’ he lied, feeling her fall away and himself shrink feebly.
She sighed, and, as if to compound an image of star-crossed lovers, he embraced her tighter. Lust unaccountably gave way to a sudden, overwhelming feeling of tenderness.
They drew apart, holding hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Okay. Your friend he wants me tonight.’ Stevenson nodded. ‘I like you best but I am business girl. Your friend good business, okay?’ She squeezed his hand then let it go and walked towards Taylor who was watching them from the table.
‘Sure,’ murmured Stevenson following her, as her buttocks wiggled away from him.
Stevenson stumbled at the top of the gangway. He was not drunk, just a little unsteady, his coordination a touch awry. As he came level with the deck two figures could be seen in the pools of light from the bulkhead lamps. The Tamil security guard greeted him with a respectfully indulgent grin.
‘Good evening, sir.’
Stevenson paused on the gangway table, hauling himself upright before stepping on to the deck. The second man straightened from leaning on the rail and the deck lights high-lit the tight-lipped, malicious smile.
‘Well, well; if it isna our Second Mate, an’ pissed out o’ his skull an’ all!’
Stevenson paused for a moment, glaring at Macgregor, but possessed of sufficient sobriety to hold his tongue; then he plunged through the door into the athwartships alleyway and dragged himself unhappily up to the boat-deck accommodation.
A giggle came out of Rawlings’s cabin and the door curtain was suddenly rent aside. A naked girl, her face flushed and laughing, backed out, her arms extended as though restrained. She twisted free with a toss of straw-blonde hair, still giggling, and made to run. She found herself confronting the astonished Stevenson. Both of them stood stock-still, the lights playing across the girl’s breasts as they heaved with excitement and exertion. Then she turned and fled in the opposite direction, just as Rawlings, a towel draped discreetly round his paunch, looked out into the alleyway.
‘Dawn? Dawn? Are you all right? Good God, Alex . . . !’
‘She went that way.’ Stevenson nodded towards the Captain’s end of the alleyway.
‘Oh, shit.’
Rawlings padded barefoot in pursuit. For a moment Stevenson stood, wondering if he had really seen the naked girl, then the intense whispering from the turn in the alleyway and Rawlings’s reconnoitring head made him turn away. He let himself into his own cabin. As he shut the door he heard the flap of their feet and the suppressed giggles of the girl.
‘Was that one of your friends?’ she asked with the voice of a fallen angel.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cargo Work
During the lonely night watches of the outward passage, Taylor had seen no very good reason for Caroline’s fidelity. In his unhappiness her acceptance of his proposal in the first place and their subsequent splicing among the liturgical trappings of the Church of England seemed equally incomprehensible. Perhaps she had changed afterwards; perhaps, after all, she had made a mistake, in which case it was a common enough one.
Had she written even the dullest of letters to meet the ship’s arrival at Singapore he might have felt some amelioration of the self-doubt and low self-esteem he so competently buried in his cultivated air of superiority. But Caroline had failed him and his disappointment was so acute he came ashore intent on desperate and immediate solace.
Thus, he rode with his wounded pride silent in the taxi alongside Stevenson whose very words had precipitated the crisis, knowing what he contemplated had its own compensations the instant he caught sight of Sharimah alone at the bar. The girl’s beauty made her price unimportant and it pleased Taylor to excite his tormentor, then to cheat Stevenson of her.
He woke at dawn. Above him a large fan gyrated slowly against the cracked plaster of the ceiling. He rubbed his eyes and the movement disturbed a gecko high up on the far wall. The little house lizard was hunting dozing flies. Outside, beyond the open jalousies, the air was heavy with the land smells and the persistent stridulation of cicadas.
Alongside him Sharimah stirred. Even after his passion was spent and remorse crept upon him with the awareness of the events of the previous evening, he could lie and admire her beauty. The grey light made her seem insubstantial, ethereal. One breast was uncovered and she had caught a stray lock of her black hair in her right hand as she had turned in her sleep.
Memories of the yielding softness of her lips came to him, and he stared in fascination at the high cheekbones and the delicate darkening of the skin of her almond eyelids.
He was suddenly disgusted by the sweat-stained grossness of his own body, already stirring again with its automatic and primaeval reaction.
She opened her eyes, gauging his mood, suddenly cautious and insecure, he realised, as she must always be on waking next to a client. He watched her as she turned anxiously to the bedside table and the crinkled heap of dollars. He followed her gaze and then their eyes met again. It was all they had in common, he thought, with a sudden pain, knowing she liked him no more than any of the others, that pile of paper money, left incautiously for him to retake if he had the mind to. He had wanted and paid; she had wanted and sold.
He lay back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The gecko had gone.
Beside him Sharimah rose. In an oddly private gesture she turned away from him and drew on a wrap. It was the signal that he had had from her what he had paid for: his time was up. She walked to the window and sat down upon a rickety chair, indicating he should dress and leave. She lit a cigarette from a packet lying on the window sill. A faint cloud of smoke blew back into the room.
He got up and began dressing.
‘Can I see you again when I come back to Singapore?’ he asked. Was he coming back to Singapore? Did he want to buy this girl who did not like him again? Why not? The illusion of love was better than the wasted passion he had known with Caroline.
The rapidly growing light caught her face in haunting profile. The cigarette smoke trailed from her mouth like ectoplasm.
‘Maybe you not want to see me when you come back.’ Her face was expressionless. ‘Maybe you have ’nother girl in Hong Kong.’
‘Maybe.’ He made to leave, then paused with his hand on the door handle. ‘Sharimah?’
She only half-turned her head, so he could see the angle of her cheek but not her eyes.
‘Did . . . did you like me?’ It was a stupid, gauche question and she turned full face and stared at him, her eyes wide, disbelieving. He thought, for a moment, she was going to shrug indifferently and play the bored whore, but, miraculously, her expression softened and she looked as she had in the first, innocent, uncomprehending moment of waking. ‘You okay,’ she said, then swung to the window. Taylor did not see she was crying as he backed out
of the room.
Mackinnon woke parched and priapic, disturbed by vague feelings of remorse. The empty gin bottle and half-finished drink stood evidence of his indulgence as he collected his thoughts. Such lapses of rectitude were rare, but they brought the taste of guilt to his lips.
There had been a time . . . but it was best not to think of it, to close the cupboard door and lock it on the skeleton within. It was a long time ago and the man who never made a mistake, Mackinnon consoled himself, never made anything . . .
He slaked his burning thirst, relieved his abused bladder and, having showered, wound a towel round his waist and padded about the dayroom clearing away the bottle and glass, then walked out on deck. The first light of dawn flushed the eastern sky and the morning smell of the tropics, even on the edge of this teeming city, was refreshing. He thought, with a pang of nostalgic regret, that he would not smell it many more times, and he drew long draughts of the cool, scented air into his lungs. The faint suggestion of a headache lurked and he leaned on the rail and stared down on the empty wharf.
Ahead and astern lay the crescent of moored ships, the brilliant glare of their deck lights gradually fading, superseded by the rapidly growing daylight of the equatorial latitude. The wharf was dusted with detritus alongside each of the Matthew Flinders’s hatches. Stacks of pallets stood by the locked doors of the godowns while wisps of straw and chips of polystyrene packing bore witness to the cargo discharged the day before. Mackinnon looked at his watch. In an hour the scene would be transformed with the arrival of the ‘wharfies’, the tally clerks, the foremen and stevedores. The security man coming on duty would bring him a copy of the Straits Times and the agent’s runner would be aboard with the day’s paperwork. Mackinnon hoped that he would not have to deal out summary justice this morning and there were no drunks to log. If there were his reading of the newspaper would go hang.
He became aware that he felt an anticipatory sensation of resentment against anything that threatened to upset the tranquil passing of this voyage. It was a rather selfish indulgence, his conscience chid him; perhaps it was nature’s way of telling him it was time he retired.
He grunted his objection to the uncomfortable thought and put it down to a touch of alcoholic remorse. A second later he had remembered the cause of his private binge and the vague, premonitory feeling that had disturbed his equanimity the previous evening: the boat people.
He sighed and gazed out over the Lion City. How different it appeared, with its tower blocks rising in white columns above the old, colonial-period architecture, dwarfing the once massive structures of the tuans, visible evidence of the triumph of largely Chinese capitalism.
How different to its appearance when, in those first weeks of peace, the James Cook had berthed in the Empire Dock and the pomp and circumstance of British reoccupation had taken place. For Uncertificated Third Mate John Mackinnon, eighteen years of age, the bugle-blowing had a hollow ring. He remembered the pictures of General Perceval’s surrender when the unthinkable occurred and now he was here to witness its aftermath. The lorries arrived at noon, a convoy of them, and the crew of the James Cook watched as their pitiful cargo was unloaded. It was a cargo that was to occupy the vacant ’tween decks of the James Cook, fortuitously fitted out at the ship’s building by an opportunist Sir James Dent with a view to transporting Indonesian and Malay Muslins on their annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The ship had never been employed on this hadji run, but today the ’tween decks were filled with a human cargo of another kind.
After several months’ service with the Fleet Train based at Manaus, the crew of the James Cook had heard of the Burma Railway and of Changi jail. They had heard, too, rumours of Japanese atrocities matching the revelations of Belsen, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and the rest, but they had seen nothing. For them the war had been between their inadequately armed ships with their over-stretched escorts and the unseen U-boat. Then, in the Pacific, they had conveyed stores, fuel and ammunition to the British Pacific Fleet, raising to an art form the replenishment and subsequent efficiency of the great aircraft carriers with their screen of long, lean destroyers.
But they had seen little of the enemy apart from the desperate, doomed and incomprehensible heroics of the pilots of the Emperor Hirohito’s divine wind, the Kamikaze. Those old hands among the James Cook’s company who remembered Japan before the war talked not of politics, of the invasion of China or the rape of Nanking. Instead they remembered nights ashore in Shimonoseki or Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama, of the gentle giggles of the knocking-shop girls, whom they gallantly termed geisha but who were nothing of the kind. They complained, seeing in it perhaps a manifestation of that arrogance that was but a flatteringly sincere imitation of the white man, of the indignity of the ‘short-arm inspection’, when the port doctor publicly examined the penises of the crew for signs of primary syphilitic lesions. Even this formality had its admirers, who contrasted it with the head-in-the-sand hypocrisy of ‘homeside’.
In liberated Singapore, however, they saw something else as those trucks set down the released prisoners of war.
Mackinnon remembered it so well. The staring eyes, the shrunken limbs and cadaverous bodies, the uncertainty and fear in their faces.
‘They don’t realise they’re safe,’ he remembered one hard-bitten able seaman observe in a wondering tone. ‘Yer okay now, mates,’ he yelled, as if the gruff reassurance set all to rights. And as the bellowed and intended kindness fell upon uncomprehending ears, the seaman turned aside and let fly a muttered torrent of obscenities that expressed his disgust and impotence.
Had Mackinnon felt something of the same futile exasperation the previous evening? Had it been the same stunned disbelief, compounded by a bleak despair that nothing ever changed, that man’s inhumanity to man stalked his vaunted progress like a shadow?
As the daylight finally triumphed and along the wharf the deck lights were put out by tired nightwatchmen, he found himself swearing under his breath like that old AB. The recollection had been vivid and he could almost smell the foul stench those poor men gave off. It permeated the James Cook and lingered for weeks as they engaged in the melancholy duty of repatriation.
Mackinnon was distracted from these morbid recollections b? the arrival of a taxi at the foot of the gangway. He stared curiously down to see its occupant get out. It was Taylor.
So the Third Mate had spent the night with a prostitute. Mackinnon was disappointed. He did not expect his officers to be angels, even those who were married, though the folly of risking HIV infection appalled him. There had once been a lapse in Mackinnon’s own marital probity, though Akiko had not been a whore. The intimations reaching Mackinnon that Taylor’s private life was unhappy did not, in the Captain’s opinion, entitle him to vengeful immorality. The Captain would have more readily forgiven Taylor a brief descent into a bottle. To do otherwise would have been sheer hypocrisy . . .
‘Morning, sir.’
Startled, Mackinnon turned to find the Radio Officer behind him, already immaculate in his white shirt and shorts.
‘Morning, Sparks. You’re up early.’
‘I wish I could say I was an early bird catching worms, but I didn’t sleep too well.’ He peered over the rail as the taxi pulled away and Taylor’s feet clattered on the gangway. ‘Night on the tiles, I see.’
‘Yes. Pity. What kept you awake?’
‘Oh,’ Sparks shrugged, ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘Was it those boat people?’
Sparks met the Captain’s eyes. ‘Bothered you too, sir?’
‘Yes, and if I’m honest, more because I don’t want any similar complications on this of all voyages than from any great notions of compassion.’
Sparks nodded. ‘Know what you mean. Upsetting, just the same. If they’ve got this far south, the China Sea must be full of them.’
‘Yes, that’s what’s worrying me . . . Morning, Mr Taylor.’
Both men watched the Third Mate climb sheepishly to the boat-deck.
‘Morning,’ said Taylor, recovering himself. ‘No. I had an excellent sleep, thank you.’ He made for the accommodation.
‘Mr Taylor!’ Mackinnon called, and Taylor swung round expecting some interference with his private life.
‘Sir?’
‘What,’ asked Mackinnon, ‘was your reaction to those boat people?’
The question had sprung almost unbidden into Mackinnon’s mind, as though it had risen spontaneously from the depths of his subconscious. It was not what he had seen yesterday that had upset him so much as how it had made him react. He had experienced the feeling of impotent shame at being who and what he was all those years ago when, in the first flush of victory, he had walked the streets of Singapore – a youthful liberator.
He had read accusation in every pair of eyes he had encountered: the white man had failed, the mantle of imperial protection had proved an illusion. To an eighteen-year-old raised on Churchillian oratory and imperial mythology the effect had been profound. This morning he realised how permanent was the scar.
That failure had properly belonged to his father’s generation, he had thought, feeling the weight of history upon his young shoulders. Had his generation similarly failed? Yesterday he had read the answer in the countless pairs of eyes staring at the moored ships, and even, he fancied (for it was powerfully nostalgic), smelt again that smell . . .
Captain Mackinnon wanted to know how his youngsters had felt, and how would they react if, as seemed highly possible to the Captain’s haunted imagination, they too encountered a similar boatload of human wreckage.
‘What did I think?’ Taylor turned back and Mackinnon saw his eyes were opaque, inward-looking. ‘It was pitiful,’ said Taylor in an agonised tone of voice, raising his hands palms outwards then dropping them by his side in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Pitiful . . .’ He turned away.
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