Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  One, with more bulges than it would seem biologically possible on one human body, rolled her ridiculously dark eyes enticingly and sucked heavily on her teeth. Another, who must have been forty-five and twelve stone, wore a gym slip, school blazer, and thick black stockings. There were two or three with thin, consumptive-looking features who, I thought at the time, would be lucky to see the spring. Others were ugly but obviously confident of other attributes, looking about with expressions which indicated that they had seen all this before, and worse, which made me wonder where the hell they had been.

  Some were not so bad, I suppose, provided there was nowhere else to go (and in Phillips Elbow there isn't, except the Hudson's Bay Mission Cinema) and you had drunk enough not to care. One was just beautiful.

  Her cheekbones were high, pushing up against her slant eyes; she had a small pursed mouth and black hair pulled away severely from her face. She was the only one of the girls with a dress to her throat. Around her neck she wore a modest crucifix on a gold chain.

  MacAndrews was at the table beside me, head in arms, still moaning: 'Liked bears. He really did.' I stood up and walked by the girl, smiling as I did. She smiled back encouragingly, diminishing any passing thought I had that she might have come in from the mission to save everybody. I went around the tables to where Mr Bodie was taking bids in his busy book. 'Excuse me,' I said. 'Can I have a word with you?'

  ‘Sure, sure,' he nodded backing away from the trappers at the table. 'You're the guy who's come up to take the Northern Swan out, ain't you?'

  'That's right.'

  'I know everything in this town,' he said. 'Even on a change-over day. You don't look too good, mister.'

  'I've got a bit of a pain,' I said holding my chest.

  'Don't have a pain here,' he warned. 'You'll die. The doctor's the sickest man in these parts. He can't do nothin' for himself, poor bastard. What's your name again?'

  'Captain McCann,' I said. 'Arthur McCann.'

  'Meet the lady wife,' he said civilly. 'Mirabelle, come over here.’ Mrs Bodie looked up from the bidders surrounding her and greeted me effusively.

  'Captain McCann,' said her husband as I bowed and she treated me to a quaint old curtsey. ‘Come to take the place of Harrington what's been ate by they bears.'

  'Mirabelle's English,' he said to me cosily.

  'From Droitwich Spa,' added Mrs Bodie. 'That was when it was a nice place. Before they put up all the wireless masts.' She sighed genteely: 'Poor Captain Harrington. Those bears are so beastly, Mr McCann.'

  I frowned conventionally. 'You think that's what happened, do you?' I said.

  'Listen,' Mr Bodie sniffed grimly. 'They grizzlies ain't keepin' him to bring up as one o' their own. That only happens in books.'

  'Poor Captain Harrington,' repeated Mrs Bodie. She immediately brightened, however, and said: 'Don't let's talk about that. We're all having such a happy time tonight. I always think this is a lovely occasion in Phillips Elbow, Captain.'

  'Highlight of the social year,' confirmed her husband. 'What do you think of our new playmates?'

  'The girls? Oh, very nice indeed.'

  Mrs Bodie beamed. 'I'm so glad, Captain, that you approve. We have to cast our net wide for girls like this, you know.'

  'I can imagine,' I said. 'Is that one an Eskimo?'

  ‘Good heavens, no!' exclaimed Mrs Bodie looking in the direction of my nod. 'She's very exclusive. From eastern parts, I believe, isn't she, Ewart?'

  'From Korea,' said her husband. 'She's a Korea girl.' He beamed. 'Hey, just get that! Korea girl! It's a funny!'

  I laughed loudly and felt the pain stretch in my inside. Mrs Bodie gave her husband an old-fashioned girlish push. 'Ewart! Really, you are a caution.'

  'Exclusive,' murmured Mr Bodie. 'Very exclusive, Captain.'

  ‘I can see that,' I agreed.

  'In fact,' he confided, 'I think maybe I made a mistake with that one. She's too exclusive and that ain't no good in a place like Phillips Elbow. See I've only got two bids for her, and the sort of money these two jerks want to spend they can't afford to hold one of her hands between them.'

  He glanced challengingly at me: 'Hundred bucks,' he said. 'Our Special Introductory Offer. And for that you get the Big Bear Suite, which is our best.'

  ‘Our very best,' echoed Mrs Bodie. 'And she seems such a nice girl. Well worth the money.'

  I only had seventy, so I went back to MacAndrews, who was lying insensible across our table, and took thirty from his wallet. It was only a loan, of course, but when everything happened afterwards it was overlooked and I never saw him again. He probably wondered who had robbed him.

  ‘Each of our suites is named after a figure in our history,' said Mr Bodie proudly as he took us upstairs together. The girl was holding my hand comfortingly. The pain had gone away for a while. 'Wolfe, Montcalm, Strathcona and so on. Big Bear and Poundmaker.' He paused and then said: ‘They last two was Indian Chiefs.'

  The Korean girl was looking at me with faint, assured amusement in her narrowed eyes. She moved without a sound.

  'What a good idea,' I said politely to Mr Bodie.

  'We like it,' he said. 'And you have our best suite. Have a good night, Captain, and God bless you both.'

  He went away as though to pray. I touched the girl's elbow so that she went in front of me. She seemed very young and shy, but she closed the door behind us with professional assurance.

  'Good and fine,' she said with chiming voice. 'What you called?'

  'Captain McCann,' I smiled. 'Arthur.'

  'Captain McCann Arthur,' she repeated carefully. 'I call you Captain, okay?'

  ‘Okay. What shall I call you?'

  'Anything,' she shrugged. She was carefully folding down the cover on the double bed, a charming touch of domesticity.

  'How 'bout Maggie. You like Maggie, Captain?'

  'Yes, I like you, Maggie,' I said seriously. She really was small, beautiful. Her features were broad but accentuated with those fine cheekbones and she had Oriental freckles on her nose.

  The room was comfortable, probably luxurious for those parts. There was a full-grown grizzly bear rug on the floor topped with grimacing head, and a rough drawing of an Indian, presumably Big Bear on the wall above the bed. There was also, for no sound reason I could imagine, a tourist poster of the Vatican. A blind at the window moved irritably with a finger of wind that was getting in from the night outside.

  'Do you think you're going to like it?' I asked. She was undoing my tie with accustomed charm. There was a strong musky smell coming from her neck.

  ‘ I like it if you like it,' she said bluntly.

  'I mean the place,' I said, embarrassed. 'Phillips Elbow.'

  'I don' think so,' she sighed. 'I was in San Francisco. That much better. But I guess I need vacation. I thought this place was ski resort.'

  'You made a bad mistake,' I said.

  'Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I find gold nugget.' She unbuttoned my shirt and rubbed her small hands against my chest. 'Now,' she added with a sign of finality.' You tell me where you from and then we quit the family stories and where you come from, this, and where you been, that. You din pay hundred bucks to talk, Captain. Okay?'

  She indicated that this had closed the subject except for the question of my homeland.

  ‘ I'm from England,' I said.

  'I hear of England,' she nodded slickly. 'You have nice Royal people. Okay. No more little talk now.'

  'Suits me,' I said. It did too. She undressed me almost

  pedantically, folding my clothes neatly, which pleased me because I'm of tidy habits. I remember now how Pamela brought that up. She looked closely at each bit of me which became revealed, even giving my knee caps a brief twist as though to see if anything would fall off me. Then, without fuss, she put both tiny hands between my legs and lifted my whole sexual assembly as if making a guess at the weight. She dropped to her knees and ran a surveyor's eye along the upper edge of my extended thing, pressed the front end
down and let it jump up under its own spring.

  ‘Is it all there ?' I inquired. She had taken nothing off yet.

  ‘Sure. Very nice,' she said. ' It work very good.'

  'It has up to now,' I answered.

  She ignored the remark and standing up said with nurselike formality. ‘Bath in there.' She pointed to a screen at one corner of the room. Reluctantly, wondering now if the night was going to be all I had hoped, I went behind the screen. On the floor half full of warm water was an enamel bath emblazoned with the words 'Canadian Pacific Railways'. Feeling foolish I stood in it, I felt as uncertain and exposed as I did the first day I paddled as a child in the sea at Barry Island. After a few moments she came around the screen, unfussily still businesslike, but now naked.

  At that moment I got a new fearful spasm of pain about my midriff. I bent forward, almost double, and it brought tears to my eyes. I half-straightened when she appeared, but I knew than I had something serious going wrong. If this had not gone so far, if we had not been there, facing each other naked, I would have gone back to the ship and gone to bed.

  ‘ Sorry,' I gasped when I saw her wondering. ‘Indigestion, that's all, Maggie.'

  She spontaneously sang a little jingle:

  'Alka-Seltzer.

  Happy Alka-Seltzer.'

  Then she took a bar of soap, grimaced at it as though it were of inferior standard, shrugged, and began to soap me carefully all over. My hands went down to the small cherry breasts and I rubbed them fondly as she rubbed me. She seemed to be pleased and began to hum a quiet, almost whispered, tune. Her hands busily worked the soap into me a square inch at a time. She brought hot water in an enamel jug, also marked ‘Canadian Pacific Railways', and washed me down with it. I had a feeling strange things were about to happen. They were.

  If you ever have the misfortune to get acute appendicitis, try to ensure that you are not in Bodie's brothel in the Arctic at the time. Facilities for dealing with it there are limited.

  Maggie had bathed me like a child, and dried me carefully six square inches at a time with a rough towel. The effect of this gentle operation was such that she was able to actually hang the towel on me, like a flag, while she went around the screen to what was apparently a set, hundred dollar, ritual.

  'Captain,' she called. 'You come in now.'

  I went around the screen and saw that she had prepared what in my not inconsiderable experience is the oddest oddity I have ever discovered. Even now I find it difficult to pick my words with enough care so as not to cause embarrassment to myself or to inconvenience others. It is difficult to know exactly why, because although what took place was exotic, it also had that certain domestic charm, which is something I have sought throughout all my life and travels. I have never chanced upon it since, even in the Orient, and when the memory now returns I am only sorry I was unable to stay, for the finish.

  She had lit a small primus stove and upon it had placed a saucepan of water. Over this, if you please, she required me to sit, with part of me going into the pot to simmer gently. She was going to cook me!

  At first I staggered away, blushing and laughing, at the very absurdity of the notion. I flustered and pushed my hands out, but she firmly led me to it and made me squat as she required.

  'Water not hot,' she said. She was right. She was very serious, but I began to laugh at the very idiocy of it.

  'No laugh,' she warned sternly. 'Very good for man to cook first. Make it very good for later.'

  'How will I know when they're done?' I asked.

  'You know,' she said. She obviously liked this bit herself and she wanted me to be serious. She came over and kissed me fully on the mouth, and then moved her small breast to my lips. The water was getting warm in the saucepan. My natural anxiety was overcome by curiosity. A delicious feeling began spreading upwards through my loins. I felt my blood running fast and my tension and desire becoming more with every moment. (Here I feel constrained to include a warning that this strange technique unknown to me before and since - embarrassment coupled with fear having prevented any lonely experiments - has possible dangers of which / know nothing and should only be attempted with extreme caution and with medical aid within reach.) Then the pain really got me. I don't know whether it had been waiting until I really was in the middle of everything, or whether this culinary sex had brought it on, but it went through me like a vengeful sword, streaking right up through my stomach and my breast. I howled and staggered, doubled up. I heard her cry out and over went the saucepan, but fortunately not the stove.

  Staying there was no good. I had to get out and get help. I pulled the towel half about myself and stumbled to the door, spiked with agony, bile filling my mouth, eyes unable to focus. Right opposite was a room marked 'Service' which I had noticed before. Crying with the pain I lumbered across the empty landing and in through the door seeking someone to help.

  As it was I burst in on my acquaintance, the small but truculent Neddy Shanks, riding naked on the biggest fattest girl of that day's import. She howled and he snorted with disbelief when he saw me. I had the impression of him sliding from her like a man slithering down a mountain. He was swinging his fists as he came towards me, but he didn't need to hit me. I collapsed and through the misty pain the shouts subsided. Then there were voices and steps all around me and I felt myself being borne away. I must have been muttering my excuse. ‘Service, it said Service' because through it all I could hear the annoyed tones of Mr Bodie saying: 'There's a man who don't know poetry. Who'd think it? Who'd think it?'

  Well, for God's sake, who would have thought of calling a room in a knock-house after Robert Service, Arctic poet though he was. Not much of a memorial for a man like that. They should have stuck to Big Bear and Poundmaker.

  Apparently they sobered the doctor up sufficiently for him to give me some morphine and the next day they flew me out on the same ski-plane which had brought me in. On the landing strip as they were about to load me Maggie arrived and treated me to a sweet kiss. I whispered, 'Goodbye, Mrs Beaton,' in her little ear, but she didn't understand.

  There was some commotion at the extreme edge of the airstrip and they told me that a man called Turk, who had a leg mauled by a bear and lived alone on Monro Mountain had been found dead among the trees.

  'Must have been trying to get into town to see the new women,' said the pilot.' Like they say, it's not just the women that kills you. It's the running after them.'

  Two

  The McCanns, having emigrated to Wales from Ireland via Scotland, a classic compounding of errors, were a strange family, riven by rumours, suspicions and jealousies far more than most. There were individual pockets of love and regard and some temporary alliances were formed when appropriate, but, in general, we were a family wired together by our hatreds.

  My father, Philip McCann, was a crewman on board a Bristol Channel pilot boat, but told everyone, even those

  who were in a position to know he was lying, that he was the actual pilot. It must have seemed strange to many people that such an exalted man as a marine pilot should live in a house like ours. To those who made this point, my father would reply that he was honourably paying off family debts accumulated over the years. He was a wide, gingery man, much given to uncontrolled laughter at his own jokes. From the moment when I was old enough to realize who he was I did not like him (for a start he built a sort of trick high chair for me when I was a baby, which collapsed when I sat in it; a poor basis for love).

  The family guessing game revolved around trying to compute which of my mother's six sisters had not been bedded by my father. There was known to be one who had not had her Phil, as it were, just as surely as there were known to be five who most assuredly had.

  Christmas was, predictably, never a happy time for us. There was a cloud of suspicion moving around the table; eyes getting smaller and imaginations getting larger and even when they were laughing they would all be looking sideways at each other. My father sailed through it all of course, the b
ig shining bastard, and my mother was the most unhappy of all. Even the children, my cousins, as they grew to understand about sexual relations would join in the elimination game to try and put a fix on the untouched aunt. They would squint around the festive table with the rest and in a way it was interesting, I suppose, because once they got too old to believe in Santa Claus there was something else to occupy them and that void which other children know was conveniently filled.

  Nobody ever did anything about my father. Not until Uncle Lewis managed it on his death bed; the best and foulest trick anybody has ever perpetrated with their last puff. But that was the trouble; we all left it too late.

  I used to crouch in chapel on Sunday, with my old man's praying and singing voice many decibels louder than anyone's, looking at the necks of the famous seven sisters of Newport, my father's harem, in the long pew in front. Once, when I was very young, I saw my Uncle Cess crying into his hymn book.

  Floss, Daisy, Clementine, Ramona, Peggy, Nardine, and Josie, my mother; those were their names. Sometimes, even at the distance of all these years and miles, I have mentally ticked through the list and tried, without success, to eliminate one from my father's conquest. They were the daughters of a pork butcher in Dock Street, Newport, and they were a handsome family in those days. I used to think that my mother was probably the least beautiful of them, but this could have been familiarity, seeing her about the washing and gardening or carrying the coal; or sitting, her face clogged with unhappiness and doubt, waiting for my father to come home.

  ‘ He's got a perilous job, your father has, Arthur,' she used to say when I asked what was troubling her. 'Perilous. .She loved the word, with its sniff of religion and the sea. She would quietly moan through the late hours. 'He could be at the bottom of the Bristol Channel at this moment. Right down deep among all that black mud. That's why I worry, Arthur. That's why.'