by CL Skelton
Sam closed his eyes and drew on his cigarette. It was a connection he saw all too clearly and did not wish to elaborate. But Mick showed no sign of moving and eventually Sam said, ‘Everything, all of it, was one step or another that led to where I am right now. If l hadn’t started any of it, I wouldn’t have ended up on that roadside with Terry.’ He shook his head suddenly, sharply, and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I’m sick of it all. I want out.’
Mick nodded. He just sat, smoking his pipe, considering, until he said, ‘Happen you’ve never thought, lad, but every step of all our lives only leads tot’ grave. It’s a one-way ticket we all get. There aren’t any day returns on this line.’
‘Some things hurry it all up a bit, don’t they?’ Sam demanded, suddenly bitter.
Mick was unriled. ‘You mean like parties and fast cars?’ He glanced across, gauging how far he could go. Sam was watching him again, his dark eyes intent and unreadable. ‘Nay, lad, you put too much weight on that. It were Terry’s time, that was all. It were Terry’s time to die.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Sam shouted, sitting up, ‘I made it his time. Don’t you see?’ Mick thought a moment, and then stood up, still chomping on his pipe-stem. He turned away, looking for something else to tidy up. He said, almost under his breath, ‘Heard ye were gettin’ a pretty big man around here. Hadn’t heard you were God, yet.’ Sam stared at him, anger giving his face more animation than it had shown since Mick arrived. But he said nothing, flopping down on the sofa again and willing Mick, with all his being, to go away. Mick didn’t. He plodded about, shifting things through to the kitchen. Sam heard the water running as he filled the sink and noisily washed up, one-handedly. He came back into the sitting-room and drew one of the curtains.
‘Leave the bloody thing,’ Sam shouted, and Mick, slightly cowed, left the rest. One bar of pure sunlight lit one corner of the room, celebrating the squalor mercilessly.
Mick picked up a half-empty bottle of Scotch lying on the floor half under a chair and said, with real disgust, ‘Oh you’re not drinking, for Christ’s sake.’
Sam shook his head, feeling sheepish. He had tried that actually, and failed miserably. Drink had always been a light, spontaneous pleasure in his life; as an antidote to pain it had proved useless. He couldn’t even get himself properly drunk.
Mick made another one of his passes of the room, like a minesweeper, gathering up crockery, old socks and litter. He picked up Sam’s ashtray and the packet of Senior Service and laid them on the desk.
‘Leave those.’
‘If you want them, you can get up and get them.’ Mick was standing in the middle of the room, the way Sam had seen him stand facing the sea that he hated, full of belligerence and perverse, unswerving courage. He looked like a small, tough tugboat that had just turned into the wind.
‘Mick, get out of my flat.’
‘In a moment. One more thing I came for.’
‘Oh, what now?’ Sam closed his eyes and put the backs of his hands across them, fighting to retain the unthinking grey mindlessness in which, in the dark, he could bear to live. Mick’s presence was as jarring as the bright beam of summer sun he’d allowed into the flat, and disruptive as the shouts of children on their way to the shore, outside. Everyone was rushing him so, even the natural world hurried him forward against his will.
‘One more bit of business,’ said Mick.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Sam exploded, ‘can’t anyone leave me alone? Give me some time, for God’s sake.’
‘You’ve had a month.’ A month. Four weeks in which to undo, unravel the ties of forty years.
‘It’s not enough.’
‘It has to be enough. The world’s not waitin’ for ever. And neither am I. I’m handing in my notice.’ There was silence. Sam sat up. He swung his feet down to the floor and turned, uncertainly, to face Mick.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. I’m givin’ notice.’
‘Mick? Now?’ He looked so uncomprehendingly hurt that Mick almost weakened; but there was no point in that.
‘Why not now? For all that’s been done lately, you certainly don’t need me. Anyhow, what do you care? You’re pullin’ out as well.’
Sam got slowly to his feet, looking confused and bewildered, and he said again, ‘Wait, Mick. Please. Give me time.’
‘You’ve had time. I’m done. Not stoppin’ here, any road. It’s like workin’ in t’ bluidy morgue.’
Sam hit him. Mick had pretty well gauged what was going to happen, and was already fading back out of the way, but the blow still sent him careening off balance, and crashing back into the desk. The time it took for him to awkwardly disentangle himself from the chair and the tangled wire of the telephone was enough for Sam to absorb what he had done. He stopped in his tracks and stood frozen there, unable to believe he had actually struck a one-armed old man, even if only with the flat of his hand.
‘Mick,’ he whispered.
Of course, as one-armed old men went, Mick Raddley was on the tough side. He bounced back genially enough, and seemed more amused than anything, rubbing his jaw. And he had a jaw like an unshaven rhinoceros. Sam’s whole hand stung.
Mick said, pleasantly, ‘You know, there was a time I’d uv wiped the floor with a skinny weed like you. An if’n you fancy holding one arm behind your back, I’ll do it just now. If that’s what you’re wantin’.’ Sam still stood unmoving and shocked.
‘I don’t want to fight with you, Mick,’ he whispered.
Mick shrugged. ‘Then what do you want?’ he said. Sam shook his head. He reached for the arm of the sofa behind him and sat down stiffly, like an old man. Mick, after a moment, lumbered across and sat beside him. He let the silence drag out, while Sam stared numbly into space. Then he said, ‘I’m not pretending I can properly understand. I never had a twin. Never had anyone I was as close with as you an’ Terry. But I had an older brother died at eighteen of TB. And a younger one, died uv the same thing, t’ year after.’ He paused as Sam turned to look at him, surprised.
‘I never knew about that,’ Sam said. As he said it he realized he knew almost nothing about Mick. He hardly even knew his wife; a shadowy figure behind a half-open early morning door, who more often than not he had regarded merely as an obstacle to the useful presence of Mick. He felt ashamed suddenly.
Mick was saying, ‘Funny, you don’t hear much about TB any more. Plenty uv it about, when I were a lad. Reckon it’s this new National Health or summat.’
‘Mick, forgive me.’
‘Still an’ all. That’s life. What we can’t change, we got to bear.’
‘I’m so lost I don’t know what I’m doing.’
Mick just nodded. He puffed at his pipe. ‘Fancy a sail, lad?’
Sam stood alone on the deck of the Mary Hardacre as she ploughed her way, in a stiffening breeze and below a patchwork sky of thickening cumulus, through the choppy waters of the Dogger Bank. They were en route to Stavanger in Norway from her home port of Hull, with the hulk of a salvaged freighter in tow. He glanced back over his shoulder. The dead ship rode low, but well. The patches were holding. He looked forward again, and then turned to let his gaze follow the whole complete circle of the horizon, but for the stretch blocked off by the clumsy superstructure of the tug and the low lines of her charge. He smiled spontaneously, feeling the wet salt wind on his face, and the surprising brief warmth of a patch of sun, through which they were passing. There was no peace, he reflected, like the peace of the sea beyond all sight of land. He had forgotten his own ever-recurrent amazement at the encircling blue emptiness. Perhaps, he thought, with a remembered streak of darkness, if you took all the land off the face of the earth, there’d be no sorrow left. He put the thought away; he was winning, he knew, and it was sabotage.
They’d left Hull in the late afternoon and thus were enabled to enjoy now the delight of waking to this landless horizon. It should be an easy job. The Mary Hardacre, like any tug, was built for towing, and indeed spent most of her time
doing precisely that. Towing was the bread and butter of salvage; she filled in the time between the drama of rescue and shipwreck with her steady series of contract tows. This one was more personal. The hulk behind them had been their own job. She was a small Norwegian freighter that had collided with a tanker off Spurn Head and capsized in shallow waters, in February. Sam had won the salvage contract and they had proceeded to right, then raise her. It had not been easy; the weather turned against them, and they’d had a difficult time getting her upright. Twice she had dragged along the bottom towards the salvage barge, slackening their winch lines uselessly over the A-frames fastened to her side. On the third attempt a cable had snapped, triggering off a rapid series of explosive partings as the strain shifted intolerably along the length of all thirteen frames. A young lad had been hurt badly by a recoiling two-inch hawser, and Sam had been shaken. No one he employed had yet been killed, but he knew it was a state of affairs, considering the nature of the work, that could not possibly last. He thought at the time of Ernest Cox, who had raised a goodly part of the scuttled German Fleet at Scapa Flow, working for seven years at it, and quitting with instant finality when he lost a man. Sam had wondered, while the lad in question was recovering in hospital, whether he mightn’t do the same. He pushed the thought aside now, fighting to keep his mood light, remembering Pete Haines saying gruffly, ‘Own bloody fault. Shoulda run faster.’
Pete was Master of the Mary Hardacre, and towing master as well; he had the experience from wartime, and the qualifications, which Mick Raddley lacked. Though Sam was personally certain that Mick could have taken the big tug anywhere and done anything with her. Still, she was no Keel boat. She was 125 feet long, and carried a crew of ten to tend to the needs of both tug and salvage gear. Her powerful diesels could haul several thousand tons of dead weight at eight knots through hearty seas, and do so willingly. Sam loved her, an affection Mick Raddley found comical. He turned now, seeing Mick approaching, his lumbering gait more appropriate now, on the rolling deck.
‘Aye, aye,’ Mick said. ‘It’s bluidy Wijsmuller.’ Sam grinned.
‘In time,’ he said, ‘in time.’
Wijsmuller of Holland were the acknowledged masters of long-distance towing, tramping the seas with a fleet of twelve tugs. Sam had no serious pretence of matching the established Dutch company, but it was something to aim at and tease Mick with. He had his eye already on another tug, or had done, before 8 May. He winced involuntarily, remembering, and the uncertainties of the last month descended like a flitting shadow of a gull, and passed over. He shrugged it off. Mick was watching him with his steady, wise old eyes.
‘I owe it to my Aunt Jane,’ Sam said suddenly, forcing another grin.
‘What? Name a bloody tug after her? I’d think she’d be insulted. Nay lad. You just like collectin’ things. Nowt but a jackdaw.’
Sam shook his head, ‘Jackdaws like shiny things.’ He kicked at the rust-stained deck of the Mary Hardacre with the toe of his tall sea boot, grinning.
‘Oh, yer wantin’ her shiny now?’ Mick grumbled. ‘Bluidy hell. I’ll get out my toothbrush, and scrub her up.’ Sam was looking back along the length of the tug, at the tow, riding easily behind. ‘She okay, Mick?’
‘Can’t you judge for yerself?’
Sam shrugged, ‘I think she’s okay. I’d like your opinion.’
Mick took out his pipe, filling it. ‘Reeght gradely lad. Nay bother.’
‘I was wondering if we oughtn’t to put a riding crew aboard to man the pumps,’ Sam said. ‘Just in case.’
‘Don’t trust your patches?’ Mick grinned. Sam shrugged. The freighter had been holed in the collision, but they’d patched her thoroughly with concrete poured into wooden coffer dams. She seemed dry enough, and rode well. He wondered briefly about the weather getting up, but he was glad in a way that Pete had chosen to leave her unmanned. If they lost her which, with the strains always present on tow-lines, was always possible, he’d far rather be hunting through a gale for an empty ship, even if it meant her springing leaks and foundering, than be searching for a stranded crew on a powerless vessel. Pete said he lacked nerve, and he knew it was true. But it was hard to have nerve with other people’s lives.
He looked out to sea. Responsibility, life and death, were as persistent as the gulls that followed their wake, mewing and crying like lost souls. The wind was rising slightly, and white horses splashed the incredibly blue sea. ‘God, it’s beautiful, Mick,’ he said, smiling.
Mick grunted. ‘You’re damned well always thinkin’ it’s lookin’ beautiful, just afore she’s gonna blow like all hell.’
‘Is it, Mick?’ Sam said, almost dreamily, leaning on the rail and drinking in the astonishing peace of it.
Mick grunted again. ‘Still in love wi’ t’old whore. Thought you’d be over that. A course she’s gonna blow. Look at t’ lie uv yon bank.’ He was pointing up ahead to a heavy scud of grey cloud settling nearer the water, with a white translucence beneath, between cloud and sea. Sam looked; acknowledged it looked like a storm and yet, despite the small fortune of scrap metal behind him, could not totally regret it. Sunlight broke out of the cloud, skidded across the wet deck of the tug, and was gone. He felt the wind begin to rise, and the first urgent scatterings of rain.
The sea got up at once, in response to the stiffening breeze, and the squall hit them quite suddenly. Sam went below for oilskins and came back on deck, thus protected against the weather. He went forward and stood again by the rail. The Mary Hardacre began to pitch and roll as a proper swell developed, and was crossed by fervent wind-driven chop. The rain came in heavily, and horizontally, and when he turned towards the towed ship she was barely visible through a thick grey sheet of water. Hail, mixed with rain, bounced off the surface of his oilskins and rattled on the deck. He drew his hat down closer and remained where he was, enjoying the feel of the tug bucking and rolling over the waves with powerful sureness. Sam had never been seasick in his life; an unexpected and unearned blessing for which he was singularly thankful.
At noon, the Shipping Forecast broadcast over the BBC promised them a gale. Mick grunted they already had one. They were watching the tow carefully now, when they could see her, that was. Sheets of rain lashed in between, and at times visibility was down to a matter of feet, and the only sign they had of their charge was the tow-line extending steadily out into grey nothingness. The rain cleared momentarily, and the freighter slipped into view, bunkered down low and steady, rising up and over each swell in their wake. She was in ballast for the tow and presented very little obstruction to the weather, being virtually a bare hull. Her superstructure had been so damaged by the pounding she took during the two months it took to raise her that there had been nothing for it but to cut all her top-hamper off, above the main deck. Still, ninety per cent of her value was in the hull itself, and that was what they had contracted to bring to the breaker’s yard in Stavanger.
A huge swell rolled under the tug, just as Mick Raddley staggered out of the wheelhouse to join Sam, who had gone aft and stood now at the leeward rail, watching the tow-line. The swell rolled beneath their stem and rose mountainous between them, and the tow and the steel cable tightened visibly over the arch of its watery back.
‘Aye, aye,’ said. Mick, around his pipe-stem. They held their breath. The line held, the swell receding behind them. The Mary Hardacre pitched up, riding the next. ‘Do wi’out any more uv those,’ muttered Mick. The tow-line was fastened hard to bitts on the bow of the freighter, but on the tug was held by a constant-tension winch, which was capable of taking up slack and easing the strain, but even that had its limits. The freighter was seaworthy enough, under tow, but cut loose she would be a dead hulk in the water broaching sideways to the heavy swells and in danger of capsizing, even assuming her ballast didn’t shift and her concrete patches, under siege then by the full force of the seas, did not fail.
The Mary Hardacre ploughed into another swell, so large that her bows momentarily buried, and a
rush of seawater poured down her decks, swirling about their boots before pouring back over the sides. Spray cast up in sheets cleared her stack. The swell moved beneath, throwing up their stern, and passed between the two ships, and again the tow-line tightened. Sam heard, over the roar of wind and water, a distinct, low hum of straining steel. Two men were on the winch now, ready in an instant to retrieve the line, should it break. Sleet, pounding the decks, made of them yellow shadows in their streaming oilskins. White heaps of hailstones built up behind every protection, and Mick’s grey windblown hair was iced with them. It was July, Sam reflected, with a whimsical vision of the soft green lawns and rose gardens of Hardacres flitting through his mind.
‘’Ere she goes,’ Mick grunted, as another swell lifted them. But it was smaller, and the line held without trouble, and the two that followed were smaller still.
‘We’re making it,’ Sam said.
‘Shut up,’ Mick growled. He had less time for superstition than any seaman Sam had ever known, but there were moments when even Mick Raddley was canny. ‘Ah, ye damn fool,’ he added in disgust, as the bow of the tug slammed into another green swell of tremendous proportions. The gale was whipping the top off it, and showering them with spray. ‘Well, hang on,’ Mick shouted grumpily, as if the swell was actually Sam’s creation, and he wasn’t sure it shouldn’t be allowed to sweep him into the sea. Sam grabbed for the rail, and a wall of water hit them, making them both scrabble for footing, drenched in tumbling foam. They staggered to their feet as the Mary Hardacre plunged into the trough, and the tow rose up on the swell. The mountain of green water stood between them, blotting out the freighter, and the tow-line itself was momentarily engulfed. Sam heard again the sharp, electric hum of straining steel and then the line parted with a thundering crack, like cannon-shot.
