by Craig Cliff
After twenty yards I felt the wind drop as I entered into the shelter of some rocky nook. I knew I was in the right place. The hut would be sheltered to the south but with a view to the north. I pushed forward, feeling the space with my hands, grasping at the black until I felt it. Wood. The delicate topography of its grain. The straight edges. The wee depressions around the nails.
I ran my hands across the weatherboard until I came to an upright. A door jamb. A galvanised hinge. The vertical boards of the door. I knocked but heard nothing in reply. My fingers found a metal knob. I wrapped my fingers around it and turned. A slow cloud of musty air enveloped me as I stepped across the threshold. I smelt the tang of tinned mutton and gunpowder, but my hands had found the frame of a bunk, the thick warmth of a woollen blanket. My stomach could wait. I dropped my sailcloth sack and lowered myself onto the thin mattress, tucked my knees up to my chest, pulled the blanket over my head and slept.
And that is the story of how I lost my voice. Not that I had much need for it at the time.
You are going to continue, aren’t you? You must bring the strands of your story together at least.
Must I?
Of course! Do not tease me, Gabriel. I have told you everything about my life.
Everything?
Quite everything. You, on the other hand, have much left to explain. How did you come to be tied to the mast? How did you ever get off the big island? How did you end up in the window that night you took me away?
Is a girl in your condition up to hearing more of an old man’s tale?
Please don’t call me a girl. And I am fine, now that I know the reason for the worm in my stomach.
The Second Leg
The Agathos made Port Phillip on the seventeenth of October. ‘Four nights you have,’ Captain Bock instructed me. These were the first words he’d directed my way in weeks.
‘Is there nae any work needed while she’s in port, Captain?’ I asked, well aware I was tempting fate.
‘We are here long enough to fill her hold with cargo, Carpenter, nothing more. Then it’s on to the Horn.’
Four nights was a short layover, considering we’d been at sea for seventy-five days and the journey back to Europe would take another hundred. But, as Porter had explained when we first met, the Agathos was being run hard in the hopes of making her crew rich—or freeing up some capital for the Rennie, Chambers & Bishop Shipping Company to invest in a steel and steam monstrosity.
I didn’t intend to return to the Agathos on the twenty-first. I wouldn’t receive my full pay until we made London, but I had been advanced £1 6s when I first joined the crew and a further £2 once we reached Melbourne. I left the ship in my oilskins—fortunately the sky was grey and promised rain—beneath which I wore as many of my clothes as I could manage, though I had to leave my tools and sea chest aboard. I felt no guilt in abandoning ship: I had fairly worked my passage to Australia. Besides, I was not so great a ship’s carpenter that I could not be easily replaced.
I found a room in an unnamed boarding house up a short lane that my fellow crew members had walked right past. The proprietor was a rail-thin woman with a plum-coloured bruise cupping the right side of her chin. I suspected her of colluding with the ships, so I lied and said I’d be returning to sea in four nights’ time.
‘Rooms are rented by the week,’ she said, ‘and just because you’re stayin’ only four days, don’t expect an extra rasher for breakfast.’
The boarding house was full of sailors intent on drinking their fill of undiluted rum, gambling with people they had every hope of never meeting again and sleeping with women whose kisses tasted of cigar ash.
I spent a lot of time that first day and night in bed, groggy, disoriented, one particular sea shanty the crew had sung in recent days running through my head.
And we’ll all go ashore
Heave away! Haul away!
Where we will drink with girls galore
And we’re bound for South Australia.
The afternoon of the next day I ventured outside, my head a wee bit clearer. I was no sailor. There was nothing for me back in Scotland, no real reason to risk my life rounding the Horn in a hard-run clipper with a crew of bullies. I walked along the waterfront, from Town Pier to St Kilda, dodging tear-shaped puddles and shaggy dogs dragging daydreaming men. When I looked out upon the harbour it was as if all the old sailing ships, the last of their kind to be built, were gathered in this one place at the bottom of the world. I wondered how many of Doig & Son’s figureheads graced these bows, but decided I was better off not seeing what had become of them. No one would pay me to repair another figurehead, not enough to live on. And yet I found myself scrutinising the sign of every warehouse and workshop I passed, hoping for a ship’s carver—so much for a fresh start—but it was all ironmongers, muntz traders and boiler works.
I caught a tram heading north to the centre of the city. The roads were lined with large stone buildings and terraced housing. When I alighted, I stood outside a long brick building covered in scaffolding. At the far end there was a square clock tower, while teams of tilers worked to cover three more conical towers spaced along the roof. This was a town of stone, I decided, not wood.
Trams jostled past every few minutes. The people walked so quickly that I expected them to stumble at any moment. I had never been to London, but I imagined it was like this: hectic, imposing, impersonal.
A man could disappear in Melbourne.
Having paid for a week’s stay, I returned to my boarding house and passed another queasy night.
I must have been a miserable sight at breakfast the next morning as an extra rasher appeared on my plate. I looked up but the proprietor did not turn around as she returned to the kitchen.
She had seen my kind before, no doubt.
I walked around Melbourne again that afternoon, waiting for lightning to strike as it did that day I saw Vengeance on the docks. I could become anything. I could go anywhere. But a man cannot make a choice when presented with infinite possibilities. I began to understand the appeal of spending one’s shore leave in a drunken stupor: a sailor’s life does not stand up well to interrogation.
When the she-oak’s gone to our head
Heave away! Haul away!
The girls can put us all to bed
And we’re bound for South Australia
My boarding house was crawling with such men. Three in particular were fixtures in the dining room, nursing their sore heads and forcing down greasy mouthfuls. From overheard snatches of conversation I gathered they were Americans. Two had signed on with a new ship; the third had decided to stay in port a while longer.
I tried to catch the proprietor’s eye as she entered the dining room with plates for the Americans, but she avoided my gaze.
‘Excuse me,’ I said when she returned with my own plate. She plonked it down, turned her back but paused, waiting for me to speak. ‘I was wondering if I could stay the rest of the week.’
‘I’m not in the business of hiding runaway sailors, Mr Doig,’ she said, addressing the doorway, and left for the kitchen.
One of the Americans lifted his head from his hands, narrowed his eyes and began growling. I looked down at my plate: just the one rasher of bacon. The American barked and I looked up to see him baring his impossibly white teeth.
I decided I should head inland to a town without sailors. One with no need for a figurehead carver. A place like the one Porter described, where the sun rises red and round over the earth. I would return to the land, become a crofter like my grandfather’s father, though the terrain was surely different to the Highlands. I would have to work my way into some land, shearing sheep and building homesteads. Perhaps I could marry well.
I spent a long time in front of a large map at Flinders Station and settled on Wadonga, two hundred miles to the north-east. The next train didn’t leave until ten the next morning so I purchased a ticket and returned to the boarding house for my final night.
The
world no longer swayed as I lay in bed. The shanty that had wormed its way inside my head had softened to a whisper. I slept and slept well. A glorious night, all things considered. I lay there long after the sun had risen, listening to the groans as the men made their way downstairs and the clinks of crockery on the breakfast tables. In time I rose, gathered my coat and hat and looked at my smoky reflection in the tottie window. I made my way down the stairs, thinking about the woman I would marry, the children I would have, the dry stretch of red earth I’d leave them when I died. I was so occupied by this fantasy that I didn’t see Swenson and Boag waiting outside the boarding house, one either side of the door. Before I could take in what had happened, they each had me by an elbow and were pulling me towards the docks.
‘What are you doing?’ I managed to say.
‘You signed on for a return voyage,’ Boag said.
‘Don’t think because we got a proper chippy now you can abandon ship,’ Swenson said. ‘You can earn your keep this time.’
‘There’s a new carpenter?’ I asked. I stumbled as I tried to look into Swenson’s face and my hat fell off. Boag stooped to pick it up in one swoop and plugged it back on my head.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘And a new mate.’
‘Keep your trap shut,’ Swenson said, craning his neck to talk over me. ‘I had a hard night and he’s stronger than he looks.’
I tried to resist but our progress towards the Agathos continued until her masts were visible, her hull, her figurehead—Vengeance looking away, unable to face another reunion—and soon we were up the gangway. The men on deck stopped rolling barrels and coiling rope to stand and cheer. For a moment I thought they might be happy to see me. That this was all some kind of hazing. That the torment of the first leg had been a test and now that I was back I would be treated as an equal.
Someone shouted, ‘Three cheers for the smallest press gang I ever saw!’ The men hoorayed and I understood my fate.
‘So you’re my new dogsbody?’
I turned and saw the American from the dining room, his white teeth shining. He raised his hands up near his chin, unfurled his large pink tongue and began to pant.
In time I learnt how Randik, the other American, had signed on as the new first mate and recommended his friend, Joe Sepsey, a ship’s carpenter with years of service, to Bock. The captain had leapt at the chance. I’m sure his heart didn’t even flutter at the thought of demoting me to an apprentice—in truth, my rightful station—but Randik and Sepsey understood straight away the virtue in casting me once more in the role of scapegoat and punching bag.
Sepsey was true to his word. I was his dogsbody. Hauling spars up from the storeroom onto the deck, then stowing them away once more when he figured out ‘another way to do it’. Climbing the masts to inspect yards and spreaders at dawn and dusk while the carpenter whittled his little wooden birds on the deck below.
There was something off about Sepsey. The left corner of his mouth would twitch, as if he were chewing a plug of tobacco. Even at his most serene he would curse unlike anything I had ever heard—‘Massive cocksnot!’ ‘Punch the clock fucking asslick!’
One day in the galley, waiting for my ladle of slumgullion, I overheard Jarrell and Burton talking about my new master. The two apprentices, inseparable since their experience while crossing the line, continued to shun me, but from their raised voices it was clear they knew I was behind them.
‘I heard he was a castaway on a desert island,’ Jarrell said.
‘Not a desert island,’ Burton said. ‘It was down Antarctica way.’
‘Desert island don’t mean sand, I don’t think. It just means deserted.’
‘I heard that’s the reason his teeth are so white.’
‘What?’
‘Being a castaway. They say it makes your teeth go white.’
‘What does?’
‘I don’t know. It weren’t no cocoa-nuts.’
‘How long was he shipwrecked?’
‘Long enough for that screw to come loose.’
‘Ah, but he’s a good sort,’ Jarrell said. ‘Knows what he’s doing all right.’
‘Best person to be wrecked, in a way. No wonder he survived.’
In less than a week the entire crew was under Sepsey’s spell. During the day he’d regale the men with tales of his shipwreck, his sixty-four days ‘against the elements’ on his uninhabited rock, all the while whittling his cardinals and jays while I installed new benches in the ship’s boats and sanded them down. At night, Sepsey led the revelry in the petty officers’ deckhouse. He never seemed to sleep, always seemed to have a jug of grog to his lips. The voyage, for him, merely extended the sea-oak bacchanal that took place in port.
Captain Bock, true to form, was never spotted unless in the company of the paying guests. These new passengers, bound for England, wore clothes as fine as those on the southbound leg but something always seemed to have gone awry in the dressing: the narrow section of a man’s neck tie protruding beneath the wider part, a button missed on a shirt, a brooch pinned upside down, the live flowers on a woman’s hat wilted and browning.
The weather grew wild as the Agathos dipped down once more into the Southern Ocean. The passengers replaced their parasols and ties with fur stoles and oilskins, if they dared venture above deck at all. Inside the deckhouse, Sepsey told his tales of coracle construction and seal hunting, leaving me to inspect the bulwarks and clear the scuppers.
On the first of November a family of icebergs was spotted off the starboard bow. They appeared benign—a small flock of sheep grazing on the surface of the water. The ship never passed close enough for this image of mine to be challenged.
That evening the rain began in earnest and fell for the next three nights. Sepsey’s revellers continued to pile into the deckhouse between sodden shifts on deck, the floor of our cabin perpetually slick with a film of water and ringing with the jeers and barks of my tormentors. Each night the party became more raucous, until on the third night Sepsey began barking, ‘A woman!’ in the same manner as his curses. ‘A man needs a woman. This man needs a woman.’
He tore off his shirt and ran outside, clutching his whittling knife.
The men cheered and charged their near-empty vessels and I pulled my blanket back over my head. The others soon grew quiet without Sepsey. Some returned to the fo’c’sle. Others crammed onto Jarrell and Burton’s bunks or slept on the sloshing boards.
The next morning the sun was out, bright and cool, and the men slowly roused themselves, untangling their limbs and wiping off the worst of the grime.
‘Where’s Sepsey?’ Kulke asked.
‘Did he not come back?’
The men filed out into the light, leaving me alone in the deckhouse, the door swinging with the swell. When I got up to shut the door I noticed the men in a circle on the fo’c’sle deck just before the bow. Curiosity got the better of me and I went to see what had become of Sepsey. Perhaps he had climbed the foremast and fallen. Perhaps he had simply passed out on deck.
‘Don’t wake him,’ I heard Swenson say. ‘Look at the smile on his face.’
‘Look at the smile on hers!’ Boag replied, and the men nudged each other with elbows and hips.
I drew closer, catching glimpses of the forms that lay on the deck.
‘A fine addition,’ said Kulke.
‘I think you mean subtraction,’ said Jarrell.
‘Ho!’ said Swenson, ‘make room, men. The apprentice is here to see the master’s handiwork.’
‘What’s a matter, Polly?’ Boag asked. ‘You look a little pecked.’
I forced my way between Jarrell and Burton. There, undisturbed by the commotion, lay Joe Sepsey, flat on his back, his pants around his ankles, his penis red and shrivelled. Next to him, Vengeance sat at an odd angle, her head tilted back to the sky, having been removed from beneath the bowsprit by Sepsey in a display of superhuman strength. Just above the base of the figurehead, where Vengeance’s waist merged with the ship’s stem,
Sepsey had carved out a vertical crevice.
‘I cannae believe you people,’ I shouted.
‘How deep does it go, you reckon?’ Boag asked the others.
‘I’m not about to stick my hand in there to find out,’ said Mantzaris.
‘It’s not made for fingers,’ Swenson said, ‘eh?’
‘Young Tim’s keen,’ said Boag.
‘He’s sanded it,’ said the boy.
‘Nothing worse than getting splintered, I guess.’
I grabbed Sepsey’s bare shoulder, which was so cold it made my fingers sting. ‘Wake up, Sepsey. Wake up.’ I slapped his face with the back of my hand.
‘Easy now, Slimy,’ said Boag.
‘Yeah, let the man sleep it off.’
I let Sepsey drop, his head banging against the deck with a satisfying thud. ‘And you, you degenerates. You cannae go on like this, surely? This man is an animal. You’re behaving like animals.’
One of the men produced a deep growl and soon the circle rang with the sound of rutting stags.
I put my arms around Vengeance’s shoulders and hoisted her up, understanding the dark pit from which Sepsey had drawn his own strength, but the men’s hands were upon me.
‘Where do you think you’re takin’ my wife?’ Swenson asked.
‘And my mistress?’ Boag added.
‘And my sweetheart?’
‘And my one true love?’
‘And my lass?’ This last voice belonged to Sepsey, who had rolled onto his side and was looking up at me, his white teeth flashing between blue lips, his cheeks a contorting mass.
‘You’ll nae touch her again,’ I said.
‘He’s cutting in line,’ said Jarrell.
‘Wait your turn, Slimy,’ said Burton.
