by Morris West
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Police trouble, Interpol trouble, political backwash, everything in the book.’
‘In that case I’d better tell you something. It may have meaning, it may not. Just before I came aboard, I saw your Lachie McMutrie chatting with Duggie Donald in “The Crown and Anchor”.’
The change in him was startling. All the colour drained out of his face. Every muscle tightened. He was like an animal cornered and ready to attack. Then, very slowly, he relaxed, letting the air out of himself in a long exhalation, half whistle, half sigh. ‘You’d better tell it all, laddie.’
‘That’s all. I saw them. They were talking. They didn’t see me. I left.’
‘And it was in “The Crown and Anchor”. You’re sure of the place?’
‘Certain. I noticed the sign, which is one of the more colourful ones.’
‘And the time?’
‘I went in at a quarter to twelve. I came out about five to. They were still there.’
‘Then our Lachie had better have a very good explanation. If he hasn’t, I’ll take the hide off him and feed him to the sharks.’
‘Not while I’m on board, Ruarri.’
In an instant he was on his feet, savage and threatening. ‘You’ll mind your own business, seannachie! This is my ship. These are my men! If you stick your nose in, you’re apt to get it broken.’
‘Why don’t you sit down and cool off?’
He swung at me then, and I didn’t move fast enough, so that his fist caught me on the cheekbone and laid it open. The blow threw me back against the bulkhead. I pushed myself off it and came back to face him. His fists were down. He was gripping the edge of the table and shaking his head like a dog just out of a water hole. He wanted me to hit him; but, though I was blazing with anger, I could not throw the punch. I was full of bile and bitterness and I poured it out on him!
‘Some other time, eh, Ruarri? Just you and me and no holds barred. It’s your ship. Go run it, like a grown-up skipper! But if there are any accidents, you’ll have a hostile witness at the court of inquiry. The Mactire, for Christ’s sake! …The big bold wolf with —’
‘Shut up, seannachie!’ The words wrenched themselves out of him. ‘Please …shut up!’
He sat down heavily on the bunk and buried his face in his hands. I went in to the shower stall and sponged the blood off my face and found a strip of plaster to cover the slash. When I came back, Ruarri was calm again, and grinning, with an apology tripping off his tongue:
‘I’m sorry, brother. I lost my head. And I’ll give you the return match when you want it. Now you’d better hear what it’s all about.’
‘I don’t want to hear. I don’t give a damn.’
‘You’d better listen just the same. Because you’re in it now, like a noodle in the soup.’
‘I’m on the record, Ruarri. If I’m called, I’m a hostile witness.’
‘Amen. Now hear me out. I’m running guns, seannachie. Swedish army surplus, bought legally in Stockholm by Maeve O’Donnell and some other friends of mine, shipped overland to Norway, not quite so legally, and loaded by Bollison in a nice, quiet fjord where there’s no Customs cutter. I pull into Trondheim for fuel and water and a final check on the arrangements. Then we meet Bollison, trans-ship the crates and start for Ireland, which is where my market is at this moment because there’s trouble in Ulster and the IRA is paying cash on the crate for clean goods still packed in the maker’s grease. On the way home we fish, and the catch brings me back into Stornoway clean – provided our Lachie hasn’t turned Judas and sold us all to the British. So how does that strike you?’
‘It’s blood business. I think it stinks. I think you stink too.’
‘You’re entitled to your opinion. I have mine, and it wouldn’t make any sense to a fine, moral fellow like yourself. But you see what happens if someone’s blown the whistle on us?’
‘I do.’
‘So I have to know for certain, don’t I? And I have to get some signals out fast, don’t I?’
‘What you do is your own affair. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. If anything happens to Lachie McMutrie while I’m aboard, or if I hear of anything afterwards, I’m going to blow the whistle myself. The first port we hit, I’m going to leave you and fly back to Stornoway. On what I’ve heard now, you’re safe – and you know it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be telling me. It’s hearsay, therefore inadmissible, therefore useless in a case against you. But what I see, I’ll testify, if I’m called – and if the boy’s hurt, I’ll file a charge. I gave you the warning because I owed it to you – and to the Morrison, for that matter. I just hope you’re clear on what I’m saying now.’
‘Very clear. What I’d like to know is whether we’re friends or enemies.’
‘Work it out for yourself.’
‘A drink, then, to take the taste away.’
‘No thanks. I’ll get some fresh air.’
‘Seannachie?’
‘What?’
‘You owe me a smack in the teeth.’
‘Leave it on the tab.’
He was as bewildering as a diamond with lights flashing from every point, so that you couldn’t really believe there was a flaw in him. He was so limpidly honest at times, so swiftly penitent, and yet so darkly and suddenly dangerous that you were always taken unawares. I did not doubt him for a killer. I did not doubt him either for a lost lad with a great, dark hole in the middle of his life. I understood even his need of me. I saw clearly that, the moment I bent to his need, he would be standing behind me with his boot up my backside.
Then, when I came on deck and the wind hit me and the scurry of sharp rain, I understood something else. I wasn’t a free man any more. I was a prisoner on a bucking herring boat where the only writ that ran was the writ of Ruarri the Mactire.
Being a prisoner, I was impotent. I might as well relax and enjoy the experience. But there was small enjoyment to be found on a heaving deck, with the wind like a knife and the spray streaming down my damaged face. There was nothing to see any more but ragged cloud and squally wind patterns and the rearing white caps making a drunken dance. I was too proud to go below, but my pride was poor warmth with the cold creeping into my bones. I couldn’t go into the wheelhouse and face the poor gab-mouth, who didn’t know what they were brewing for him in the galley. For that matter, I didn’t either, but I knew that I wouldn’t like to face those five husky fellows without an open street at my back.
Then Daddy Burns came on deck and beckoned me over. ‘Compliments from the Matheson. He thought as you’d be standing helm watch, you might like to get the feel of it with me.’
‘Good idea.’ And, better still, I’d be out of the cold, with something constructive to do.
So we went into the wheelhouse, took the heading from Lachie and sent him below. I must have given them a rough ten minutes while I got the hang of it, because the movement of a heavy trawler is vastly different from that of a sailing yacht with canvas above and a long fin below to slice her through the chop. Then I began to understand the rhythm: the slow roll, the steady hurdling of the bows, the stern drag, and the yaw that had to be corrected neither too soon nor too late. After a while I was able to relax and listen to Daddy Burns spinning a yarn about a typhoon in the Sea of Japan, and a rusty freighter with one engine out and the other turning over just enough to hold her nose into the swell. It wasn’t until I checked my watch that I realized we had passed Cape Wrath and I was handling my first ship ever in the North Atlantic.
Then Ruarri came up and Daddy Burns left us, me still at the wheel and Ruarri, a message pad in front of him, fiddling with the transmitter.
He was grim, but he managed a flash of humour. ‘You can relax, seannachie. Friend Lachie is the original gutless wonder. There’s no blood. He’s less marked than you are. He’ll jump ship in Eire, which is just what we want him to do, and he’ll have enough inducement to keep him out of the Isles for a long, long time. Part of it’s money. The re
st is the certain knowledge that he’ll end up in a peat bog if he shows up in under two years. For the rest, hold your heading and your whist and let me get these codes off.’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
‘Up your kilts, Mr Christian!’
‘And the same to you, Mr Matheson!’
Suddenly and miraculously we were laughing as if the whole explosive mess were a schoolboy prank. Which it was, perhaps – except that men would be killed at the end of it.
Then Ruarri explained himself. ‘It’s a foul-up. But not quite as bad as I feared. Lachie’s a poor dumb traughan who couldn’t get his facts straight if you paid him – which Duggie Donald promised to do. So, with a little luck and good management, we’re in the clear. We’ll head for the Faeroes, where no one will dream of looking for us. Bollison can meet us there. He’ll be away clear from Trondheim before the British and Norwegians sort out the dog’s dinner they’ve got on their plates. A pity you’re not staying with us.’
‘Better I don’t.’
‘Will you say hullo to Maeve for me on the way back?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Just now, in Stockholm. Then she’ll be waiting in Copenhagen for the news. Since she’s put up the cash and guaranteed the delivery, she’ll be having some nervous moments.’
‘Where the hell does she fit in?’
‘That, seannachie, is a large question. She’s an Irish patriot, she says. And it could be true, because her family was in the Movement way, way back. My version is that she’s a wild girl who’s never found a man to tame her, so she’s now rearranged her priorities: money, horses, men and to hell with Ulster, in that order.’
‘I’d have thought you were made for each other.’
‘She still does.’
‘And you?’
‘Women I love. Money I love. Horses I can take or leave, like oysters. And for the Irish and their squabbles, I don’t give a hoot in hell. If they kill each other off tomorrow with the guns I’m bringing, I won’t lose a wink of sleep.’
‘And up yours, Mr Matheson.’
‘Yours, too, Mr Christian. Now will you let me get my work done? And I hope you’re making allowance for leeway, else we’ll be halfway to Nova Scotia by morning!’
‘I’m sailing the course you laid, for God’s sake!’
‘Do you want to finish the watch?’
‘Unless you want to pull me off it.’
‘No. Whistle down for a grog for both of us.’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
Say it, if you want, and I will not quarrel with you. We were brothers, two peas from one vine, rascals both, loving each other, hating each other, neither able to come to the final act of acceptance or rejection. And yet we had to come to it. I think each of us knew, each feared and both tried to postpone the moment as long as possible. It is the mystery of the brotherhood which eludes me still, the mystery which runs like an unbroken thread through the warp of history and of legend, too: Cain and Abel, the Doppelgänger, the man who lost his shadow, Absalom, hanging by the hair, run through by the spears of David’s captains. We were very close that evening, plugging blindly through the half-gale towards a distant and dubious landfall, sipping the warm, sweet whisky, while the red eye of the transmitter stared unwinkingly at us both.
When he had finished his transmissions, Ruarri took a radio fix on our position, gave me a new heading, wrote up his log and sat a while listening to a symphony programme from Reykjavik, the reception clear and untroubled over the noise of the wind and the sea. He asked me:
‘Have you ever been to Iceland, seannachie?’
‘Never.’
‘We should go there together one day. Strange, fierce country, with a fire in its belly and steam and hot mud bubbling out of the ground. The sea’s a monster there – shoals and mad currents, and rocks you’ve never dreamed of looming out of the mist, and the compass cock-eyed, so you don’t know whether you’re coming or going. They talk the old Viking tongue, write literature in it still. They’re a big and beautiful people, and you’ll dream about the women twenty years after. That’s where Parliament began, seannachie, with each man spouting his piece in the place of the Althing – and we’ve forgotten most of what they knew about democracy. Democracy …! Oh brother! We’re all slaves now, bound with paper chains and stapleclips! Are you free, seannachie? Do you feel free?…’
‘Not often enough.’
‘Even sometimes?’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’
‘Tell me when.’
‘Generally when I’m feeling most confined. As I am tonight. No offence, but that’s the fact of it. I can’t walk on the water. I can’t go anywhere except where you choose to take me. You could toss me overboard with no one any the wiser. Something happens when I know that I can always get away: into the past that someone else has created for me, or a present that I can conjure up from nothing, but keep, mind you, set down in words and keep and even pass on to you…The real liberty is that no one can invade that private kingdom, no one can rob me of a passport to it. The only way you can destroy it is by destroying me. Even then you’re not sure, because another man may have my manuscript or may have memorized the visions I recited. Dreams are dragon’s teeth. Sometimes they spring up flowers. Sometimes armed men… Does that make sense?’
‘Too damn much!’ His answer was abrupt and almost angry. ‘That’s what I envy in you, seannachie. That’s why I want to throttle you sometimes. You’ve got something I need like life itself and can never lay my hands on. There’s no private kingdom for me – never will be – because whichever way I turn there’s some damned official with a piece of paper or a rubber stamp or a writ, or a bloody regulation that says I can’t step farther until I’ve met his conditions. The only way I can get past him and his ilk is to shoot my way past. And how long can I go on shooting? …I dream, too, seannachie, wild and wonderful dreams. Why are my dreams a prison and yours liberty?’
‘Perhaps because you want to make them all come true.’
Truly I don’t know why I said it. I didn’t reason the answer. I wasn’t trying to be clever or turn a phrase. I don’t think Ruarri believed I was either. But he said it. He said it with a strange, haunted bitterness that was much more frightening than his rages:
‘You’re a clever son of a bitch, aren’t you, seannachie? Too damn clever for comfort.’
Then he left me and I was lonely in my tiny lighted box in the middle of the dark sea. I knew for certain then that the brotherhood could not endure. I wondered which of us would make the final rupture, and how and when it would come.
Chapter 11
BY the time my watch was ended I was cold, hungry and aching in every bone. I needed a large drink and a quiet supper and a long, long sleep. I got my drink and my supper: hot cocoa and a dish of cheese sandwiches. I also got a surprise. Ruarri and Lachie McMutrie and Daddy Burns and Athol Cameron and Calum the cook were playing a game of poker, noisy and as cheerful as though they had never had a cross word in their lives.
Now, if you have played poker, you will know it for gospel truth that you need only to watch a few hands before you know the name of the game and whether it is being played for fun, money or grudge stakes. I swear to you now – as I had once to swear it in affidavit – that this was a friendly game, for poor man’s money, with lots of banter and random jokes and no tension at all. I sat in on it. I played a dozen hands and came out winning ten pence – and wondering if I had gone quietly mad in the wheelhouse. Only the cut on my cheek told me I hadn’t.
Yet there was Lachie, the Judas of the band, who had put everyone in jeopardy, shouting and laughing and scooping in his winnings, with never a twinge of fear or a word of resentment from his shipmates. Each man had a drink beside him, so tongues were loose enough. They weren’t all actors. Ruarri, yes. But not the others – not Athol Cameron, or Daddy Burns, or Calum, who was a simple fellow, rowdy as a cock at sunrise. It made no sense at all, and after a while I was glad it didn’t. So long as th
ey landed me dry in the Faeroes, they could all go buccaneering for the rest of their lives – and whether they traded guns, women, shrimps, or salt herring, bless ’em all!
Just before ten-thirty, I tossed in my cards and went to bed. I tried to read for a while, but the effort to focus made me feel queasy; so I switched off the light and lay wakeful in the dark, listening to the buffet of the sea and the creak of the timbers and the muted gabble of voices from the galley. I thought of Kathleen McNeil, alone in her bed in Harris, and wished I were there with her; but there was small comfort in wishing and less in the fact that I would have to travel two thousand miles to get back to her.
Then I began to be obsessed by the bleak geography of the northern seas and all their legendary terrors of gales and fogs and drifting ice floes and black cliffs rearing out of mill-race waters. I remembered the toll of ships and men exacted every year by the black widow-maker to pay for the harvest of fish. I saw the longships putting out from Norway and the coasts of Jutland, square sails bellying, shield bosses gleaming in the thin sunlight, serried oar blades striking the water to the rhythm of the helmsman’s chant. I saw them scattered and labouring, rimed with ice from the driven spray, the sails shredded, the masts broken, the oarsmen furred like animals, blotched with frostbite, peering through the murk for a landfall in the dark. I saw them battling through the tide rips of the Faeroes, desperate for a beachhead where they could land their beasts and their women and begin to breed again to replace the lives taken by the sea. I saw Ruarri among them, always the survivor, the red wolf, run down to skin and bone, but snappish still and savage, howling defiance at the winds. Then, because I was deep in dreaming, I saw him changed: to the seal-boy with fur on his back, the love child of sailor and sea beast, who in the end must go back to the deeps….
I woke in darkness, blear-eyed and unrested. The rhythm of my world had changed. The wind had dropped. The engines were running dead slow and we were slopping in a long, greasy swell. Then I heard the long, hoarse bleat of the fog siren repeated every half-minute. I groped for the light switch, and when I had rubbed the gravel out of my eyes, I saw it was six-twenty in the morning. Ruarri’s bunk was empty and rumpled. I washed perfunctorily, climbed creakily into my sea clothes and went into the galley. There was no one there, but there was coffee still warm on the stove. I drank two cups and felt better. Then I climbed up on deck and stopped dead in my tracks.
