Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The eighteen-year-old from Eltham, the first-time traveller, worries that his trunk will disappear among the brown press of porters and stevedores elbowing and burrowing and shouting their way up through the disembarking passengers, or else that it might be left in the hold and carried on to Ceylon. But then he is seized with excitement, by the vibrant novelty of the heat and smells and vertical light, by the mysterious allure of that sand-coloured horizon. Pale-faced, he at last has a foothold in that world of spices he once evoked from tantalising scents in a warehouse. Cool, grey, faraway London. He feels a sudden affection for this ship as a link with home, his magic carpet, its very substance transfigured into salty paintwork too hot to touch, her crew now wearing tropical gear. When he disembarks he will be alone and adrift. His eyes fill with tears of excitement and the thrill of endless possibility makes his stomach tingle. A more fearful part of him urges that it is still not too late to remain safely aboard, see Colombo, catch a home-bound sister ship and within a matter of weeks watch the gloomy gantries of Tilbury once again harden out of estuarine mist.

  He is met by Richards, a close-barbered youngster with a small moustache, veteran airs and tanned extremities, as revealed when the linen sleeve rides up with his proffered hand to expose a forearm nearly as pale as Jayjay’s own. A perfunctory flash of white teeth somewhere beneath the shadow of his hat.

  ‘A & G sent me,’ he allows through the moustache, as though in a private rage that he of all people should have been detailed to meet a junior clerk off one of the company’s liners. He has a slight Birmingham accent. ‘Good trip, no doubt. She’s quite a comfortable old tub,’ and raises a seasoned traveller’s eyebrow at the black wall of the ship’s side.

  ‘Hardly old. Nineteen twenty-nine.’

  This is not deferentially said, and it is obvious from this moment that these two strangers are not about to embark on one of those deathless friendships.

  ‘You’re in the Caramanli,’ says Richards shortly. ‘If you don’t like it you can no doubt transfer to the Bachet or the Bel-Air. At your expense, of course. Hardly worth it since they’re all much of a muchness but some people like to give themselves airs. You’ll get your own accommodation in the Anglo-Egyptian Bank building after three months if you stay the course. Juniors come and go. They get homesick’ – a contemptuous flash – ‘or just plain sick, so we’ve found it’s pointless putting them into Company digs right away.’

  Richards has already commandeered a taxi to take them over to Suez. As its dented radiator noses through the dockside throngs a not very crestfallen Jayjay tries to make amends.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Three years this April.’

  ‘Heavens, I should think you must be about ready to move on,’ says Jayjay ingenuously, looking happily around him. ‘It surely can’t do much for a chap’s career to be stuck in a place like this for any length of time.’

  ‘Port Taufiq,’ says Richards in a heavy I’ll-have-you-know tone and leaning back cautiously in the appalling Chevrolet, ‘is an extremely important posting, as you will shortly discover. In fact, it’s pretty damned odd that you don’t already know, or mightn’t have guessed if you’d bothered to give it a bit of thought. Only practically every ship that passes through the Canal coals up here, that’s all.’ An immense pair of camel buttocks fills the glassless frame of the car’s windscreen. A stick thwacks heavily into them, producing no discernible effect other than a puff of dust.

  ‘But what about Aden? And anyway, I thought coal was a thing of the past. Surely it’s all oil-burners nowadays, like the Orontes?’ Another thwack.

  ‘Look, Jebb, I’ll tell you frankly and it’s for your own good. It would be a big mistake to make a poor start here. We’re a small community and I don’t mind telling you we set quite a store by first impressions.’ The camel at last moves aside, the taxi churns down a street pocked with khaki puddles of donkey stale and stops. ‘Quite a store’ (as he pays the driver with a careful disbursement of piastres and milliemes and signals imperiously to a listless boab to come and unstrap Jayjay’s trunk from the grid at the back). ‘You’ll find we’re pretty easy-going here but we’re not much for cockiness, if you get my drift.’

  The Caramanli is at rest on the border between lodging-house and hotel, neither rising nor sinking. Gentility is served by a man in a fez asleep behind a concierge’s desk, an ormolu clock without hands, two fake Directoire chairs and a copper vase containing a single dusty ostrich feather. Richards goes into full old-hand mode.

  ‘Misa’lchir, ya rais. Fih hagze ‘alasanu,’ indicating Jayjay.

  ‘Good afternoon to you too, good sir,’ replies the elderly Turk in English, stretching politely and blinking. ‘The gentleman’s name, if you please? Was the reservation made in person or by the telephone?’

  ‘I daresay you can manage to find your room without my help,’ says Richards to Jayjay when this farce has run its course and the boab again shoulders the trunk with a loud sigh and begins the Sisyphean trudge up a flight of marble stairs that promise to revert to plain cement as soon as they are out of sight past the first turn. ‘We start work at seven in the morning, which does not mean ten past. Everyone knows where the shipping offices are. Watch out for pickpockets. Try not to catch the clap before tomorrow.’

  He strides out and is instantly swallowed in the blare of light beyond the Caramanli’s chipped portals.

  ‘Ignore him, I should,’ an amused voice says at Jayjay’s elbow. ‘Richards is a complete twerp, I’m afraid. Nothing to be done about it, although I gather there was once a plan to black his bollocks and sell him to the Arabians as a slave. One deduces from the steamer trunk and the home counties tan that you’ve just arrived? Oh, sorry, my name’s Milo.’

  ‘Jerningham Jebb, but most people call me Jayjay.’ This Milo was a small, raffish-looking fellow in his late twenties with a frozen eye. ‘Are you with the Company, too?’

  ‘Which company would that be?’

  ‘Oh, well, Anderson & Green. The Orient Line, you know.’

  ‘Certainly not. What a dreadful thought. Don’t tell me you work for them?’

  ‘That’s what I came to Suez for. Why, what’s wrong with them?’

  ‘Nothing, I shouldn’t think. Not qua company. But the work’ll get you down. Within a month you’ll start to like Richards. Within a year you’ll have become Richards.’

  ‘No fear!’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s a dead cert. Still, there are plenty of other fates on offer here, though none as bad. Do you drink?’

  ‘Not that often,’ said Jayjay guardedly, thinking of a naughty glass of sweet sherry at Christmas and a couple of beers Michael had once bought him which he had much disliked.

  ‘I should keep it that way. It doesn’t agree with this climate, believe me. You’ll shortly be running into a cove named Hammond at your office. Take note of same. Are you a ladies’ man?’

  ‘Well, er …’

  ‘Put it this way: would you like to be a ladies’ man? Sorry, none of my business and all that. Over the mark. I was only going to suggest you stick to Europeans, not that that’s much guarantee these days. There isn’t a taste Suez doesn’t cater for, and what with boredom and no longer being under Aunt Edna’s eye one can go awfully wild for a week and then spend the next thirty years watching bits drop off the old bod. Blighted prospects and so forth. Forgive the sermon, just thought I’d mention it. And now the good wishes, the extended hand of friendship and the adieu. I’ve no doubt we shall bump into one another from time to time. One does in this place.’ And with that Milo also vanished into the glare of late afternoon.

  *

  As Milo had predicted the work turned out to be grim indeed. It soon dawned on Jayjay that an exotic location was inadequate disguise for a job he would not for a moment have contemplated doing in London, not even at the very edge of penury. It was only on reflection that he realised it was essentially the same sort of work his father had been doing unco
mplainingly for almost the last twenty years. He shared a large office with six Egyptian clerks and a fat boy named Simpkins from Tottenham whose stomach was in a state of constant rebellion even as his mind dwelt wistfully on plates of his mother’s toad-in-the-hole which, he asserted, would have had him right in a jiffy. Since to his dismay Jayjay found himself also sharing rooms with Simpkins in the Caramanli there seemed no refuge from his compatriot’s intestinal tract. In the clerks’ pool three fly-specked fans turned listlessly on stalks up in the high ceiling. Below them, none the cooler, Anderson & Green’s junior employees sat at desks tallying ledgers. In the maritime world ‘coaling’, as Jayjay had perfectly well known on first meeting Richards, was an old-fashioned term that had long since been extended to include fuel oil. These days it was interchangeable with ‘bunkering’. He now found he was assigned duties that related exclusively to oil. He was supposed to enter the incoming supplies from the Anglo-Iranian oilfields at Abadan and tally those figures with the reserve tonnages held in Port Taufiq’s storage tanks as recorded by the tankmaster down at the terminal. Or something of the kind. After a year of this, and in the absence of any cock-ups on his part, he might with luck be allowed to graduate upstairs to an office with a single fan to do some invoicing. He found it was of no comfort to reflect that Rimbaud had once worked as a bookkeeper for a coffee and leather-goods merchant in Djibouti, some hundreds of miles away down at the other end of the Red Sea.

  Within a week Jayjay had uncovered the great conspiracy of office work and found that it was usually possible to clear a day’s worth in well under an hour, given average intelligence and an urgent wish to get it out of the way. An employee’s skill therefore lay in dissembling in the most convincing manner so as always to appear hard at work when some shirtsleeved senior looked in. In this case the senior was the man Hammond whom Milo had mentioned. Having never encountered a hard-core alcoholic before, Jayjay took a while to match this amiable man’s appearance and behaviour with the gossip that surrounded him. According to office wisdom ‘Pusser’ Hammond was steadily and unregretfully drinking himself to death with bottles of whisky slipped him by the grateful pursers of passing liners in return for waiving certain paperwork and formalities. An ex-ship’s purser himself, Hammond was at ease with his life in the manner of men who have found a level that feels both acceptable and predestined, leaving them without the least ambition to better it in any way. He had been in Suez since the end of the Great War and in due course fully expected to wind up in a corner of the Christian cemetery. The prospect bothered him not one jot. Indeed, it amused him to think of the baking soil slowly leaching the last molecules of Johnny Walker from his marrow-bones. In the meantime he was content to live with a Greek lady and four hairy children in a flat above the greengrocer’s shop her family owned. At the grandparents’ insistence the children were brought up to be Orthodox. The girls were demure and stayed at home practically in purdah; the boys were dark and serious and could be seen trotting daily to the English school, satchelled and well combed. None of them in the least resembled Hammond physically. In due course Jayjay learned that Hammond never quarrelled, never raised his voice and seldom neglected his scant duties whether in the home or at work. He was relaxed and vaguely effectual in a land scarcely noted for brisk efficiency, and in this town his comparative honesty in financial matters made him positively outstanding.

  It was ‘Pusser’ Hammond who enabled Jayjay to slip away from the office on strictly unnecessary errands to the port or the terminal. ‘Figures in books one thing, bottoms on water quite another,’ he would observe. Jayjay would even volunteer to act as a messenger, by this menial expedient contriving to visit the yellow-painted Egyptian Health Office building in the little bay by the entrance to the Canal as well as assorted government and private offices in Rue Colmar, Suez’s main commercial street. Before long he had acquired a grasp of the town’s geography as well as a small degree of street wisdom. This amounted to a bare degree of familiarity with typical fares and prices, together with a smattering of pidgin Arabic; yet it was already more than his queasy roommate Simpkins had managed in almost a year.

  Was Jayjay homesick? Not perhaps in the usual sense of a constant awareness of being in the wrong place, of that interior hollowing which renders an entire landscape no more than a blank sheet on which are projected the fond pinings of the inner eye. But a feeling of missing familiar things would sometimes break through without warning while he was doing something that required no thought, such as cleaning his teeth in the Caramanli’s cavernous bathroom, a place of cracked tiles, ornate taps lacking handles and dark corners full of the sweetish breath of cockroaches. Suddenly this no longer felt like a rewarding adventure. He would long for the sound of trams on Well Hall Road, for the smell of Eltham in a winter’s dusk. How he yearned just for a moment to swap Suez’s hot reek of donkey urine and fuel oil for the cool incense of smoky fires being lit in suburban grates! To exchange the bedlam beyond the Caramanli’s windows for the musical tinkle of pine kindling being laid in a hearth; to trade the sky’s desert glare for the blossoming glow behind a sheet of newspaper held taut across a fireplace to make it draw! It was the vividness of the details that made them poignant: being able to summon the exact smell of hot newsprint as the fire behind it began to scorch the paper, knowing to an instant the right moment to take it away before it burst into flames between one’s hands, hearing the paper crackle with dryness as it was refolded. Thus could one sit on a seatless lavatory in Suez and meticulously perform an unrelated task two thousand miles away. It was painful and peculiar. Maybe this was not the massive ache Saki’s Unbearable Bassington had felt as he watched children romp at sunset on an African hillside, but for a moment Jayjay thought he knew how exile might feel. He wondered if it would have been the same if instead of being a day-boy at Eltham College he had been a boarder, accustomed to long separations from home. And he marvelled that this was what some of his overseas friends must have been feeling, cut off from their families for years at a time, even though, because they were Britons in England, one had never thought that they might be homesick. But he soon discovered that being truly homesick only lasts as long as there is nothing better to be. Being interested and diverted works wonders. There was too much too new about Suez for him to feel seriously bereft.

  *

  One morning Jayjay accompanies Hammond to the docks to meet the Otranto, which has just arrived from England on the Australia run. ‘Pusser’s’ good-natured equanimity (or drunken indifference) has maybe responded to his newest apprentice’s evident boredom with the office. They take a gharry, sitting up beneath a decrepit hood like a patched bellows. The horse’s hide is shiny black leather stretched over protruding croup bones. Only when they have crossed the harbour and are in Port Taufiq does the traffic – always anarchic – become immovable, with barrows and hand-carts filling the spaces between higgledy-piggledy vehicles. The driver’s whip cracks over his nag’s bones more out of ritual than to effect progress. It is the same gesture that makes the drivers of motor vehicles lean on their klaxons: something one does when one is stationary. It is directed at nobody, a brainless declaration of one’s immovable presence. Quite unbidden there comes into Jayjay’s mind a habit of his father’s which he has always disliked without knowing why, a habit shared by several of his schoolfriends’ fathers. This is to stand with his back to a fireplace with his hands in his trouser pockets, loudly jingling his small change and slightly rocking back and forth on his heels as he does so.

  ‘Figures in books one thing, bottoms on water quite another,’ Hammond is saying. He is clearly oblivious to the surrounding chaos as he is to the omnipresent flies that cluster on lips and around eyes. He digs in a pocket and hands Jayjay an Orient Line badge to wear on the lapel of his lightweight cotton jacket. ‘Your usual Port pass won’t let you aboard.’ A lorry so overloaded with some kind of fodder that it looks like a haystack has broken down. As they grind slowly past the knot of gesticulating men Jayja
y sees that a rear wheel has collapsed. The vehicle is so antique the wheel’s spokes are wood. Eventually they bounce over the sour mat of compacted vegetation that lies at the Port’s entrance.

  It is only a six-hour layover for the Otranto and few ongoing passengers without brief and urgent business in Suez have troubled to disembark. Jayjay assumes the stewards have already gone around as they had on the Orontes, telling all who would listen that Suez was a ‘hell-hole’ and recounting with relish stories of previous voyages when unwary passengers or greenhorn crewmen went ashore only to be robbed blind or found unconscious with their pockets cut out. ‘The British are here in Egypt to run the Canal for the Egyptians (like clockwork of course) but the Egyptians are supposed to run everything else and as you’d expect it’s a corrupt shambles. If you get robbed don’t blame me, and don’t go near a policeman is my advice. They’re the worst of the lot. I could tell you a few tales, make your hair curl …’ (A deck-hand on the Orontes had been obligingly graphic.) Now, seeing a British liner from the perspective of a denizen of the port everyone aboard has been warned against, Jayjay is aware of its defensive condition. The single canvas-sided gangway deployed is surrounded at both ends by junior officers in white duck uniforms keeping a wary eye on all comings and goings. Those who were disembarking have long since done so. Now the ship lies, taking on various provisions as well as fifteen hundred tons of fuel oil, moored to the dockside as though with wary reluctance. Jayjay notices that the immense hawsers fore and aft all wear large metal cones like megaphones to prevent rats, mice and all manner of other vermin from invading the ship.