Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  While eating I indulge an innocent pastime. Fifty minutes’ work with pencil and paper yields four anagrams of ‘penis enlargement’. I’m pleased with ‘Men’s pie entangler’ and ‘Gentlemen, a sniper’. There’s concealed historical drama to be read into the headline ‘Temp enrages Lenin!’ and I’m definitely reassured by the implied promise of ‘permanent sin glee’. But yes, underneath it all I’m preoccupied. I can’t any longer conceal from myself that I fear Millie Cleat is not going to like the book I’ve written her, and the prospect of having to rewrite until she is satisfied is dismal verging on intolerable. At the extreme she might even prevent publication, when the remaining third of my fee happens to be payable. I am, of course, an old pro and understood from the first that this wasn’t a warts-and-all life but a ghosted autobiography. When we originally met, talked the project over and eventually signed the contract I did tell her that even the most devoted fans like their heroes and heroines to come with a smattering of warts because such private revelations make them seem more human, more like the readers themselves. Otherwise, if the account is too sanitized, it simply degenerates into hagiography and there’s little mass interest these days in saintly lives. ‘Sure, sure,’ she kept saying. ‘I don’t care what you write.’ Boy, had I heard that before. Those are precisely the people who bring an action three days before publication when thirty thousand copies of the book have to be hastily purged from bookshops and warehouses and pulped. And once an author has done that to a publisher he may as well hang up his word processor.

  Frankly, I should have thought the average reader’s overall reaction to the Millie Cleat who springs feistily from my pages would be one of ‘Eeughh!’ It’s impossible to disguise the central facts of her character, which are that she’s grotesquely ambitious, manipulative, without scruple and completely besotted by her own image. She makes Narcissus look self-effacing. However, perhaps I’m wrong to assume that everyone will automatically find her character distasteful. I’ve made this mistake before. In both my Luc Bailly book and Hot Seat! there were incidents that shed some pretty dubious light on the heroes, yet both Bailly and Snoilsson seemed happy to let them stand. Mind you, I never was convinced that Snoilsson could read, so he might have missed them. But the point is, I gather readers actually admire these tales of their heroes’ ruthlessness. They think them ‘sharp’ and ‘enterprising’.

  Is it me, or is it my readership that’s changing? For years I thought most people wanted their sporting heroes and heroines to triumph not just over their own mental and physical limitations (‘no pain, no gain!’) but also over the moral squalor of today’s professional sport. Call me a romantic, but I still warm to Britain’s admiration for gallant failure as opposed to the transatlantic worship of unscrupulous success. Wake up over there! It’s because history is written by the winners that it’s bunk. Trust him; old Henry Ford knew. I also thought I understood that the heroes of my books were supposed to be ordinary people with extraordinary talents who got to the top without having to resort to screwing their coaches when they were twelve, like gymnasts, or brutally fouling each other in full view, like footballers, or standing in the slips quietly telling the batsman that his wife’s a terrific lay, like Australian cricketers. These days I don’t think the readers care. People expect their sporting heroes to lie and cheat and foul and stuff themselves with performance-enhancing drugs because if they don’t it means they’ve stopped short of a total commitment to winning. ‘It’s the money these days,’ they say, as if that not only explained but excused everything. Actually, they’re all shits, the lot of them – sports personalities, fans and my readers alike, and it’s time Samper got out of this sordid business.

  3

  You think I’m exaggerating. You think when it comes to beloved Millie, the world’s nautical darling, I’m overstating my case. So I will indulge your verdict by not protesting. I am even willing to agree that simple job dissatisfaction leading to total burnout has distorted my view. But there is an unarticulated popular belief that a lone woman doesn’t brave the world’s oceans without mysteriously being rinsed free of the baser human motives. It is as though prolonged and intimate contact with nature automatically made people grander and purer instead of stupider and redder in tooth and claw. Being a one-armed grandmother only hallows Millie still further in her public’s eye: a gallant old sea-dog rather than a poisonous old sea-bitch. ‘It may be that the ghosts of Sir Francis Chichester and perhaps even of Drake himself were standing by her and gave her strength in her hours of lonely agony off Tierra del Fuego,’ intoned the Daily Mail (or was it the Express?), cunningly conflating Cape Horn with the Garden of Gethsemane. I don’t remember anybody writing in to point out that Jesus Christ had not been miked up, watched by webcams and pinpointed by satellite, and nor is there any record of his having taken frequent nips of Glenfiddich from a plastic bottle on a lanyard around his neck. It’s this aura of sanctity attributed to the woman that finally I can’t bear. Like any professional ghost who writes about popular heroes I’ve naturally done my best to suppress the truth; but in order not to do further damage to my blood pressure it has now become a matter of principle to present to her credulous public an alternative Millie Cleat.

  Principle? I hear you cry, and I’m duly grateful that you scoff. Under normal circumstances Gerald Samper is indeed the very last person to invoke principle. In fact, if I had a personal motto it would probably be ‘Expediency Always Trumps Principle’. I now think this might look rather well on the stonework above the sitting-room fireplace: Semper utilitas virtutem superat. Only the sentiment might make the pious monks of San Bernard shudder (if they still exist); the grammar is impeccable. If I had such a thing as a core this would probably qualify as a core belief, but mercifully I haven’t so it will remain a private rule-of-thumb. In any case I hope shortly to convince you that present circumstances are not normal and that I have a duty to blow Millie’s gaff.

  To that end, let me recount an incident that is for me unadulterated Cleat, and one which I have loyally and shrewdly omitted from my book. It is a story I succeeded in documenting in unusual detail, backed up by tape-recorded interviews with twenty-three oceanographers, many of them sober. So vivid were their accounts, but so far removed from most people’s lives their activities, I’m afraid I shall need to do a little background scene-setting once I have fetched a fresh bottle of prosecco from the fridge. Like millions before me, I find alcohol is inseparable from anything to do with the sea. Certainly there’s no possible way I could have written Millie! sober. As Churchill noted in relation to the navy, there abideth rum, buggery, the lash, these three; but the greatest of these is rum. Admittedly there have been a good few moments in my life, especially in Morocco, when I would have challenged his priorities, but just at present some prosecco will do nicely. The glass brims, the tiny bubbles ascend in wavering chains, so let me begin.

  A few years ago there was one of those awesomely tedious panic stories that nowadays hit the headlines with increasing frequency and tell of the different versions of imminent doom that are probably in store for us, as if we cared. Sometimes it’s rogue asteroids, often it’s dread epidemics, and eternally it’s global warming (or in my preferred version, a growling lamb or even a grim ball-gown). This particular story concerned a volcano called Cumbre Vieja or ‘Old Peak’ on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. The diverting scenario on offer was that Cumbre Vieja might be seized by a sudden fit of vulcanism such that its already fractured slopes would fall off into the sea, causing a tsunami of epic proportions. It would be goodbye to time-share cottages in Lanzarote as the wall of water sped off to lay waste the west coast of Africa before fanning out across the Atlantic to do the same to the eastern seaboard of the United States. Until the story hit the news, such vulcanological work as had been done on Cumbre Vieja was not imbued with much sense of alarm. Suddenly, however, having learned of the damage the wave might also cause low-lying coastal areas in Europe, the EU decided to fund an urgent
geological survey of the seabed around La Palma to see if it could yield advance warning of disaster, and to deploy some instruments that would enable permanent monitoring.

  This project, the European Atlantic Islands Geomorphological Instability Survey (or ‘EAGIS’ for pronounceability), duly rose through the usual bureaucratic strata in Brussels from the depths of feasibility into the sunlit realm of implementation. That it did so with unusual despatch was surely a measure of how worried Brussels functionaries were about their timeshare cottages, not merely in Lanzarote but in Funchal over in Madeira to the north. The declared aim of the survey was ‘to produce a three-dimensional model of the volcano’s submarine roots by using acoustic signals to penetrate several kilometres into the earth’s crust and reveal the faults leading down to the magma chambers of molten rock’. Can you seriously imagine this as a plausible ambition? Others could, it seems, for EAGIS recruited oceanographers from several countries and disciplines and finally put to sea late in the year in no fewer than four seismic-survey vessels. These were specialized craft of massive and hideous design known as ramform, being wedge-shaped with an extremely broad stern over which as many as twelve streamers of sensing instruments could be towed simultaneously. What with fuel tankers and other supply vessels, it was a fleet of a dozen ships, hired under very tight time restrictions and with overrun penalty clauses, that finally set sail out of Rotterdam. If they were lucky the scientists would have a bare sixteen days on site. A series of Atlantic squalls would be enough to abort the whole programme and write off some twelve million Euros. True, this was merely cash from the bottomless sack of that perennial Santa Claus, the European taxpayer, so it was literally of no account. Yet if the enterprise failed somebody somewhere might be forced to account for it, so everyone duly assumed a serious expression while it was planned.

  So also did the EAGIS scientists as they put to sea, daunted but eager. They were daunted because the area around La Palma to be surveyed was large, but as scientists they were licking their lips expectantly because it was an unheard-of luxury to have four survey vessels at their disposal. In the normally cash-strapped world of oceanography they were used to making do with a single converted Hull trawler towing a limited amount of often elderly equipment. This was a golden, never-to-be-repeated opportunity that the Good Fairies of Brussels had sent them, and they had gleefully designed experiments to take maximum advantage of it.

  Some people’s ideas of excitement seem designed expressly to astound the rest of us. My informants assured me that their most ambitious and enterprising scheme was to have all four ships abreast, working in pairs. One of each pair would tow a dozen streamers on the sea’s surface: thin polythene tubes up to four kilometres long with sensors embedded in them at regular intervals. The other ship would be towing a variety of air guns. These were heavy metal cylinders that produced detonations of compressed air at different depths and at various frequencies. The echoes of these sound waves from deep below the seabed would create a 3-D picture of the volcano’s roots. I was told that to appreciate how difficult it was I had to imagine four ships moving slowly abreast with a rigorously maintained distance between each, all towing four kilometres of streamers exactly parallel with one another so as to build up a seismological map with equal accuracy in all three dimensions. Apparently this is hard enough when going in a straight line but still harder when the ships reach the edge of the survey area and need to turn in order to come back and do a swathe in the reverse direction. They said it took these boats nearly thirty kilometres to turn safely and re-group at the end of each leg, which was why everyone in EAGIS was worried about time. Anything that added further delay to the difficulties of maintaining this balletic synchronization day and night might scupper the entire enterprise.

  For a fortnight luck was with them. According to those I interviewed no equipment malfunctioned, nobody goofed, the weather remained calm and blue. The Canaries are on much the same parallel as Kuwait and New Delhi, and even in the Atlantic in November it was hot on deck as the oddly shaped vessels steamed back and forth while the scientists watched the winches with their precious spools of streamers. Below decks they slept in shifts and stared at the banks of monitors in the labs as the streams of data came bouncing back from deep below the earth’s crust. Day after day the familiar bulk of Cumbre Vieja and the island of La Palma shifted from port to starboard as the ships turned and turned again, sailing their grid pattern with the precision of a military manoeuvre. And day after day the volcano’s even bigger undersea bulk slowly took shape on the laboratory plotters like a giant composite X-ray of a rotten tooth. Anyone other than a scientist would have been bored out of his skull.

  On the morning of the fifteenth day an alert Marine Mammal Observer aboard Scomar Seismic spotted a whale dead ahead. Regulations required that each ramform carry two of these MMOs who had the power to bring the survey to a halt in midleg if need be, and to order the immediate silencing of the air guns to avoid damaging the cetaceans’ hearing. Aboard survey vessels MMOs are generally about as popular with the scientists as the lollipop ladies who patrol street crossings outside schools are with commuters. Despite the beasts’ fearful halitosis most marine scientists feel a vague benevolence toward whales, just as many drivers do toward children. But the aura that surrounds MMOs and lollipop ladies, compounded of virtuousness and the smug certainty that any jury will find in their favour, can induce in those pushed for time a nearly irresistible urge to accelerate. This particular whale off La Palma brought the survey to a temporary halt. If the wretched animal could have received the blast of the combined ill-will of several hundred EAGIS scientists it would have shrivelled in an instant to the size of a herring. As it was, aborting the leg left incomplete a crucial portion of a huge unsuspected fault that was being revealed deep below the volcano. After hasty consultations over the ships’ radios it was unanimously agreed it was vital to re-survey this last leg. The whale, whether from malice or indolence, seemed disinclined to leave and was soon joined by another. Eventually they both swam away and disappeared off the sonar screens, but what with regrouping and getting the equipment synchronized again it wasn’t until ten o’clock at night that the four vessels could begin surveying once more.

  This was where my informants’ story began to degenerate into one of those Alistair MacLean-style narratives that manage to infuse mild drama with the spirit of pure wood. Unfortunately, in order to protect Samper Enterprises legally I dare not deviate far from the taped accounts they gave me. I am perfectly aware their conversation lacks sparkle. On the other hand the event these scientists witnessed is of importance and piquancy, as you will soon appreciate.

  At two o’clock in the morning the ships’ radars picked up the faint blip of a small craft approaching. On the bridge of the Scomar Explorer a British oceanographer, Valerie Geddes, was standing with a cup of tea beside the short-range scanner, keeping an eye on the four vessels’ relative positions. The detail of the cup of tea struck a note of homely realism, I suppose, which was why people remembered it. You can be sure that had she been picking her nose or reading Kierkegaard they would have edited it out as irrelevant. This is why adventure stories are often so boring to read. From her instruments Dr Geddes noticed that a brisk wind had got up, an offshore breeze that no doubt brought with it the parched smell of the Sahara Desert, although nobody mentioned it. This breeze obliged the ships’ navigation computers to compensate in order to keep them on course. The need to keep checking explained why nobody paid any attention to the insignificant blip on the radar until it was only a nautical mile off Explorer’s port quarter. Valerie immediately got on the radio to her counterpart in the neighbouring vessel to starboard.

  ‘What do you think it is, Patrice?’ she asked. (From his name I at once imagined a tall, clean-cut, aristocratic Frenchman with blond hair, practically an aftershave model. When eventually I met him he was a tubby Belgian with eczema in his beard.)

  ‘It’s making about twenty knots, very low pro
file. I guess it’s got to be a speedboat of sorts. Maybe a Zodiac?’

  ‘Well, we’re not getting any acoustic signature. We’ve got a zillion hydrophones out there so one of us ought to be picking up propeller noise, or at least some of the frequencies of engine noise. How about you?’

  ‘Nothing here, either. We’re going to lose it on radar any moment now. Your hull’s about to screen it from us.’

  By now others in the ships’ radio rooms were trying to raise the mysterious craft on a variety of channels but without success.

  ‘Ought we to send the chopper up?’ Each ramform carried a helicopter which could be launched fairly quickly in emergencies. But this was the middle of the night and at a moment when every waking person’s attention was focused on the survey. Did a tiny blip on the radar overhauling them at a rate of twenty knots constitute an emergency and justify putting a helicopter with two men into the air? It all had to be balanced against the requirements of COLREGS. Survey ships are as rigidly bound by the International Maritime Organization’s collision regulations as any other vessel, but ramform skippers have better reasons than most for being reluctant to abide by them. Apparently if a ramform stops suddenly its streamers begin sinking and may easily be lost.

  While they were dithering, others were outside on the port wing of the Explorer’s bridge with night-vision binoculars trying to see the interloper’s navigation lights, but without success. It was a moonless night, and the various lights on nearby La Palma and some inshore fishing vessels in the lee of the island further confused the issue. Suddenly from the bridge came Valerie’s cry, ‘For Christ’s sake, now we’ve lost him – he must be right on top of us. Use the searchlight.’ The light came on, swerved about the sea off the port bow, flashed over something billowy and lurched back to illuminate the immense green and gold sails of a trimaran yacht below them and shockingly close, a mere eighty metres away and heading straight across the ship’s bows. Collision seemed inevitable (this phrase is now out of copyright). On the bridge there was a burst of incredulous profanity as someone overrode the autopilot, spun the tiny helm hard to starboard and sent the engines to Full Astern. The Collision Imminent alarm whooped deafeningly until someone turned it off. The starboard searchlight came to life and caught the yacht barely scraping past the ship’s forefoot with centimetres to spare. The profanity became a chorus as other alarms went off and warning lights flashed, telling everybody what they already knew: that the ramform’s course had been irretrievably corrupted and the leg once again ruined. Valerie was still on the radio to the Scomar Navigator.