Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  She answered my knock. She was wearing an oriental dressing robe, a wide channel open down her naked front, the large flanks of her breasts pushing it wider at the top.

  She smiled and her eyes brimmed with pleasure.' Was he a good boy?' she asked.

  'He liked his little outing,' I said. 'Blian has gone home to have a nervous breakdown.'

  'Come in,' she whispered. 'Come and get those foggy clothes off your back.'

  Needless to say we both ended naked, posing on a dais for the Dock Settlement Art Circle. That marvellous moulded body was inches from the end of my cock, but every time I moved a millimetre some undiscovered Ukrainian Utrillo would howl a complaint. When it was finished, after two hours, I had a glass of Tizer and a rock cake and went home to my waiting wife. When I got there her grandfather was sitting at our table and his wooden suitcase was standing threateningly at the bedroom door.

  'He has decided to separate from gran and he's got nowhere to go. He wants a divorce,' explained Pamela practically.

  ' Divorce!' I cried. 'Jesus Christ, they're both over eighty!'

  'There's no age limit,' sniffed the old man. He had been weeping copiously over our tablecloth but that had not prevented him eating two-thirds of my supper. ' I should have done it ten years ago.'

  'Ten years ? You were seventy-three then, for God's sake.'

  'I've tried to make a go of it,' he moaned. ' But it's no good. We just don't laugh at the same things any more.'

  I stared at the dirty old figure, then looked up at Pamela who was soggy around the eyes. ' He's getting lines like that from television,' I said to her. 'They don't laugh at the same things any more! I knew there'd be trouble when your mother got that set. It gives people ideas.'

  'She's always too tired,' he went on ignoring my remarks, concerned only with his monologue. 'Excuses, excuses.

  She... she... she turns away from me in bed.'

  I sat down heavily and stared at him. 'She's eighty-one,' I said slowly. 'That's the best excuse I've ever heard.'

  'Eighty-two,' he corrected. 'What am / doing with a woman of that age anyway?'

  I glanced at Pamela who was nodding as though she understood perfectly. 'Can I have a cup of tea?' I asked. She went towards the stove, still looking sadly at her grandfather. I leaned closer to him:' Have you met anybody else?' I asked nastily. 'Somebody who's more you? Together you can reach for the stars.'

  'No,' he answered, but so shiftily that I didn't believe him. ' It's been fifty-eight years of hell,' he complained. 'I want to start my life again.'

  'It's a bit bleeding late, isn't it?' I retorted and Pamela reproved me from the kettle. 'Arthur, don't be so brutal. Poor old man. He's all cut up, can't you see.'

  I got up from the table and went across to her. ' If he had the strength to walk down the High Street we could take him to the marriage guidance council. I'm told it's very good. Get her to go too. Better still get a couple of bloody ambulances to take them. That would be something new for the do-gooders.'

  'Poor old chap,' she whimpered over the steaming kettle. 'Look at him crying.'

  'Look at him eating the rest of my supper,' I said more to the point. ' I suppose you think he's going to stay here.'

  'Where else can he stay? He can't wander around on a

  night like this. He'd catch his death.'

  'He'll catch his death at our bedroom keyhole,' I said.

  She caught her breath. 'You nasty bugger,' she said. 'How can you say such a thing about an old man?'

  'Easily.'

  Her face was sweating and red in the steam. She still had not taken the kettle off the boil. But then she relaxed and her voice became soft. 'Let him stay tonight,' she said. 'He can sleep on the couch. Tomorrow we'll take him back and try and get it straightened out between them.'

  'Let's take them down to the cemetery,' I answered. I found I was whispering.' Let them sit on a couple of graves and talk it over. Maybe they'll see sense then.'

  But the next morning I had a letter from the shipping company offering me a voyage on the S.S. Rotterdam Emperor to the Gulf ports, Valparaiso, and Rio. I tore up the application form I had cut from the previous evening's paper, offering me a new dazzling life in insurance, and cabled my acceptance. Pamela and I made it up before I went, but the old man stayed and I stuffed our keyhole with cotton wool that night.

  Fifteen

  That was in the autumn of 1947. I went back and sailed to Port Everglades, New Orleans, and down to the Latin places, even to Port Desire, where I saw the grave of my great-grandfather buried, as I've said before, in a ship's barrel, but with some honour by the indigenous Indians. On the memorial post he is described by a native name, three miles long, which translated turns out to mean White-Voyager - who - die - when - bitten - on - the - elbow - by -devil - dog. It was explained to me by a tribal archivist that the 'elbow* was a euphemism for arse, which was a forbidden word on memorial stones, and in fact did not often occur. That he was also screwing a local lovely at the time of the rabid dog's fatal bite is also deleted out of delicacy, but the facts are well established in the history of Port Desire. The name of the girl, which I also now forget, is mentioned with others on the stone in the sort of fashion of our own memorials:' Sadly missed by Debbie, Kath, Beryl, Doreen' or whatever they were called, 'And his children in Port Desire and Moonlight Bay.' Moonlight Bay was just up the road, towards Rio de Janiero.

  I felt an odd sense of affront at my ancestor who had travelled so far from home, after saying he was only going to Bristol for the day, and had spread his happiness and semen among alien people. After all, he had known a life before this even if he failed to acknowledge or remember it. There was his wife, lying mouldy and alone in Barry Municipal Cemetery, and he was out here in exciting foreign parts. It did not seem fair. My annoyance was such that for a few pesos I commissioned an obliging mason to chip an extra line in the old stone which said bluntly: 'And remembered vaguely by his wife Annie, his children and all his relatives in Wales.' That put the record right and I was glad.

  That going away from Pamela, after our happy six months, was, I suppose the hinge of my life. It turned me from baffled boyhood to fugitive manhood. In 1950 I got my third officer's ticket, in 1955 my second officer's, in 1962 I was the mate of a tanker, I passed my master's certificate four years later and my extra master's in 1969, which meant that I could be left to take a great ship across the deep waters by my own judgement. Because of the unfortunate wreck of Mr Cohen's Rolls-Royce I am now reduced to first officer again, but there is time. I think.

  My life, over this period, became more unfathomable than any ocean I traversed. I have tried everything, I suppose, on this odyssey of twenty years and more, even if I appear to have learned little. My solitariness has been of my own making for the sea has given me many acquaintances and no friends to speak of. I speak of it as solitariness because it has been spiced with pain and misgivings;

  solitude is serene and that I have never been.

  For that whole year after my marriage, a year bravely borne, I kept the faith, but one thick day in the middle of a Hamburg August I threw it away and went with a woman from St Pauli. We lay under the very roof tiles of a house, sizzling like chops in an oven, the German sun baking our every jerk and slippery movement. When I walked away all the people were going home from their work for the day, filling the tramcars and pavement cafes which were even then sprouting among the ruins of the war. They were like pigeons filling the city; they seemed free and I was still sweating under my clothes.

  I knew it would ever be thus, that I would walk, detached from the good, ordinary world, from some woman to some ship and from some ship to some woman and never find peace or really know my wife.

  From that time I simply let these things happen to me. There seemed nothing else I could do. Sometimes they were unspeakably sordid, at others hideously laughable, and there were others when I found something of the comfort and love a man needs when he is always voyaging. I became used
to waking in the middle of the night with strange arms about me.

  But if I am the world's prime fool, and I fear that after Angie there can be little doubt, then I've got there by my own efforts. Some men spend their existence in pursuit of conquests and never do battle with themselves. If only I could have stepped back and studied myself intently for a while, instead of going off like a randy rabbit at every whim of my sexual organ. But I didn't. I have gone alone into strange cities and countries to find company, sympathy and sex and sought out my own peculiar disgraces. Some men feared to go ashore alone, rushing off in gay gangs to find the sunken bars and hideouts where sailors always seem to go. There have been times when I've brought misfortune upon myself, almost lying back and enjoying it, and others when ill-natured chance was just waiting for a victim to walk by, and along I came.

  I am, after all, the very man who, promised an orgy of witchcraft and sex - for which I had, I might say, paid good money in advance - sat blindfold on a mountain track in Turkey waiting to be taken to the secret place. But they didn't come back for me, as they promised, and when it began to rain I took the blindfold away to see a ten-year-old goatherd regarding me with total interest.

  That was my own fault and doing. But in San Peso, in Central America, it was with the most decent motives that I took an eleven-year-old girl from her mother in the street. Those mothers sold their daughters to any man who had the money. I've heard men return to ships laughing at how they made those children squeal. But, when I had paid the mother, I took the girl down to the San Peso beach and paddled with her in the warm sea and built her a sandcastle. True she became very agitated at all this strange behaviour, and was crying when her foul mother turned up with the police. The British consul said to me after he had recovered me from gaol: 'You're a fool McCann. A bloody fool.'

  Even now I can remember some of my women only by remembering the ships. Memories of Lisa of Naples are prompted by a mental picture of the S.S. Aegean King, my first oil burner. Alice of Sydney, whom I called the Great Australian Bight, smiles at me through the smoke of the Southern Cape; I can still see Natalie, the American girl in Panama, running weeping alongside the canal, trying to keep up with the ship as we left Balboa; rushing blindly to a point where the concrete slid quickly into the canal. I wonder what happened to Natalie? Suzanne of Saint Nazaire conjures the S.S. Atlantic Castle (my first triple-screw) and, after years, I look with an outrageous optimism at the iron bridge by Singapore Harbour, thinking that I might see the lovely Eurasian face of Doris Da Souza enmeshed in its iron, weeping and waving at the departing Malacca Envoy.

  Sometimes when I am making chart calculations on the bridge the very corner of my eye touches, some cape or channel, some inlet with a small port at its head, and the

  lines and whorls on the official Admiralty chart become pieces of real land, touching the sea, the geometric blocks become buildings and streets that I can see clearly, perhaps from many years before. They become some place where something happened, sometime. Where someone was-walk-ing down a street and I happened to be walking towards them. Just a temporary bit of life that never comes again and maybe is forgotten. Maybe not.

  On that first voyage, after my marriage, I wrote to Pamela from every port, a page a day composed in my bunk, I thought of her and I conscientiously tried to dream of her, except I could not.

  When I returned after four months I found that Pamela's grandfather had sundered himself from his wife more irrevocably than even he had intended. He had died. Pamela found him in an untidy pile outside our bedroom door when she got up one morning. He died as he had lived, with his eye to the keyhole. My own father was not long behind him. He expired heartily, laughing at one of his own jokes in the Donkeyman's Arms. I flew home from Antwerp for the funeral and never have I seen such open satisfaction around an open grave. The grins were almost elbowing their way through the prayers.

  As a climax my Uncle Cedric, with a spontaneous fling, threw his false teeth into the grave and they sat grimacing on top of the coffin. No one made any movement or comment, even the vicar, who, burying people in that area as he did, had probably seen everything. Eventually when the men were about to shovel the earth on top of my dad, the vicar leaned quietly towards Uncle Cedric and clearly pointed out that if he wanted the teeth back he had better retrieve them right away or they were gone for ever. But my uncle shook his head. After the funeral, when we had gone back to the house, I found him in a corner and asked him why he had thrown the teeth. He began to cry and said: ' My boy, your father had everything else of mine that was movable, so I thought he might as well have the teeth as well. They say that in the Hereafter there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I want that bugger to do plenty of gnashing.'

  My mother, of course, saw but said nothing. After that she took to her knitting needles and chair by the fire, like someone watching over the eternal flame, and never moved from the house again. They found her dead there one morning a few months later, halfway through a jumper that would have only fitted my father. She had a drawer full of scarves and socks and sweaters all his size, all folded away. It was a shame and a waste, because he would never have needed them; not where he had gone.

  Pamela and I began to play our game which went on over the years, until the events of last autumn on the putting green, brought play to what I suppose is a definite end. I would return from a voyage and she would embrace me and ask me when I was going back. When once I challenged her about always asking me that same question she was hurt and said that she only wanted to know how long we would have together before I had to go away again. There was no hurry intended.

  She continued to live in the two rooms, although her uncle sold the greengrocery business and it became a baker's shop, which meant that our home was a good deal warmer and smelled both wholesome and wholemeal. She still lowered the basket from bed but a loaf and half a dozen pastries now came up instead of the tomatoes and mushrooms of the former days. The little place always looked exactly the same on the day of my return as on the day I left. She changed nothing, and she added nothing. We would spend a couple of weeks, or sometimes if I was back at the Technical College, a couple of months, in a void, a segment of what marriage is to many people everywhere. We did not row very much, but neither did we make each other laugh. We had a television now and it had taken her love from the cinema. I left her once watching 'Peyton Place', although she did rise and kissed me before I went through the door. I went to Australia, New Zealand, India, and Liverpool; I had seen two men die and another go mad;

  I had watched women weeping with the despair of hunger and children screaming because their mothers were crying and they were starving; I saw a policeman shoot a boy in the leg because he had stolen a driving mirror; I saw a flooded village and a town where the people shuddered as they prayed for rain. When I returned she was still hunched before 'Peyton Place' the ghostly tele-light on her quiet face, and what could have been the same Mars Bar half-eaten in her right fist.

  She would always say: ' Have a good trip ?'

  'So-so.'

  'Meet anybody nice?'

  'Not that I can think of. Did you?'

  'No. I don't meet anybody. I'm all right here.'

  And I really thought she was.

  The sailor knows very well the perverse comfort of loneliness. He hugs it to himself, wandering strange, alien cities where no one even turns their eyes to see him. Each step is a hope for some vaguely adventurous miracle, that he will meet some temporary love, some companionship, some pretended homeliness, some hastily made familiarity; an emergency thing with a simple bed and an embrace at its end. Loneliness is a sensation spiced with doggerel and self-pity, two things the sailor treasures. At sea he has the nursing ocean and the comfort of belonging to it, but in a foreign place he will wander, as I do, miserably because he feels shunned by everyday land people; jovial, busy men, children engrossed in play, shopping housewives, people laughing in cafes, priests and girls of eighteen with thirty-eight inch bus
ts.

  I gave this matter much thought over the years of my voyaging, and devoted considerable space to it in my accumulating novel 'All The Coloured Lights Of The World by Arthur McCann'. The girl in every port is a careless and untrue generalization composed by some fanciful man who had never ventured beyond his own backyard. For myself I felt short-changed by the temporary affiliation, come and gone with the morning or the impatient banging of the next customer on the door, even though I took it because it was available. I wanted a good, decent, settled domesticity. In as many places as possible. I wanted someone to whom I could go home. Wherever I was.

  The Split Legs Go-Go Bar on New York's East Side is, I confess, scarcely the sort of locality where a man searching, as I was, for comfort, love, honesty, friendship, and sex, -in a package - could seriously hope to fulfil his mission. But there, in Angie I found, and I say it again now, openly, ashamed as I am, the finest combination of those qualities I needed in my approaching middle age. Angie was so nearly right for me. So nearly.

  It was, as I say, hardly the venue for the meeting of two true people. I told her at the time that neither of us ought to have been there, with the mad lights, the three girl dancers twirling their breasts in a cage and the sore music. By rights we should have met in a park or by a river, introduced by a chance mutual friend, but since this could not be we had to make the best of the Split Legs Go-Go Bar. It was a place full of lost and aimless men and hard, predatory women. Somehow I felt that we were different, and, as it transpired, we were. As far as I was concerned our being there at all was a temporary membership of some sub-strata of society, and we would soon be able to escape and to walk happily in that park or by that river, where we so rightly and obviously belonged.

  Our conversation over the first drink was, I suppose, as banal as all such conversations are in those dim holes.

  'It must be very uncomfortable for those girls dancing in that cage,' I observed. 'They look like they're hanging up to cook.'