Arthur McCann 0cm

by Leslie Thomas

  I was taken to a simple iron bed in a simple iron room, a corrugated roof and sounding metal walls like the sides of a ship, which I supposed at the time was to make the sailors feel at home, at sea, as it were. It was like being in a tank or a hold, with the men's talk booming and bouncing from the green-painted walls and every burp and belch echoing like a roll of thunder around the enclosed place.

  A tottering man, a lame janitor, showed me to one bed, but a sailor approached and, shaking a warning head, said: 'Don't put him next to Senga. Senga'U be crawling in with him.' The tottering man nodded with bleak understanding and beckoned me to the far side of the dormitory to another bed. There was a striped mattress, a pile of folded blankets, and a scratched wooden locker. The man who had prevented me sleeping next to Senga strolled through the alley-ways between the beds, and sat on the end of my bed.

  'They should never stick anybody next to Senga,' he sniffed, 'specially a young kid like you. They ought to know that.'

  'He's a pineapple, is he?' I said with the voice of experience.

  ‘He'll be asking you over to his bed for a drink,' he agreed.

  'It's a funny name,' I said. 'Senga. Where did he get that?'

  'Agnes backwards,' he explained. 'That's how he is, see.'

  'What's your name?' I asked.

  'My name's Sirod,' he said and his eyes dropped.

  ‘Doris backwards ?'

  'You catch on quick, son. But you don't have to worry about me, mate. I'm sort of inactive. A smouldering volcano. You won't have any bother from me, in fact I'll look after you. Keep an eye on you just like your mother would. Did you get sunk?'

  ‘Torpedoed,' I nodded. ‘Must have been the last one of the war.'

  'What ship?'

  'Queen of Atlantis,' I said.

  'Oh, aye, I've sailed in her. Old Gander still the mate?'

  'He was.'

  'Gone?'

  'Gone.’

  'Randy old pineapple he was. You probably know. He used to get the cook's boy to shoot at him with one of those guns that shoot off a rubber sucker. You know, the things kids have. He used to stand there, stark bollock naked, and get this kid to shoot these things at him. Downright disgusting.'

  'With me it was boxing,' I said. 'But he's gone now.'

  'Sporting day over, eh?'

  'For good,' I said. A drooping man, thin and bent as a feather, not even glancing at us, shuffled between the beds and collapsed face down on to the bed next to mine. He was so light the springs hardly gave beneath him. He pushed his grey head into his elbows and began to weep.

  'Who's that?' I asked.

  'Nobody knows,' the sailor said. 'We call him Rider Haggard, for want of anything better. Greek or something. Don't speak to anybody and no soul speaks to him. Greek's a funny lingo. I've got a bit of German myself, and I've tried that on him but he just bursts into bleeding tears.'

  'So you don't know what he's crying about?'

  'No idea, mate.'

  'It must be something big if he keeps on doing it.' I looked across at the man, who was sobbing heavily into his arms.

  'I s'pose it must be, at that,' he agreed looking at the weeping neighbour as though seriously considering the

  phenomenon for the first time.' But I don't s'pose we'll ever know.'

  'What's your name? Your real one?' I asked.

  'Billy Freeman,' he said. 'I'm Aussie.'

  'My name's Arthur McCann,' I said. My outstretched hand was immersed in his huge soft paw. He was a big, hairy, powerful man. I could not understand how men like that could be pineapples. 'I'm from South Wales.'

  'And I'm from New South Wales!' He roared a laugh worthy of a joke ten times as good.

  'Why don't we ask him what's the matter?' I suggested.

  'Who?'

  'Him.'

  'Rider Haggard? Well, I've tried. I've told you. I've tried German.'

  ‘Have you tried English ?' I said.

  'Well, no I haven't tried that. Not myself. I mean he's Greek and I've tried German. I told you.'

  I got up from my bed and moved the pace to the next bed. Nervously I put my hand on the heaving shoulderblade. It was as fragile as a bird's wing. I felt it wince at my touch.

  'What... is ... the .. . matter?' I asked as though I were attempting to speak Greek. Billy Freeman watched from the edge of the bed like someone witnessing an attempt at faith healing.

  'What... is ... the . .. matter?' I repeated.

  'Arseholes,' whispered the man from his pit of tears.

  'English,' I said.

  'So he is,' breathed Billy. ' I never saw such a marvellous thing.'

  I had retreated to the bed and with Billy watched the almost childish respiration of the shoulders as the man continued to weep. Billy shrugged again: 'Never saw such a thing,' he said again. He got up.' Come an' meet some of the more sociable lot. You don't have to worry about any of them from the pineapple point of view, apart from Senga, that is. We're not sure about the Russian, because he's got those great big Russian, goo-goo eyes, and he rolls them and sings in a girl's voice. But even I can't tell, and I'm a veteran, but we call him Sivam, just to be on the safe side.'

  ‘Mavis backwards,' I said.

  'You're picking it up,' he said. We had moved from the bed. Billy glanced back. 'Fancy Rider Haggard being English. Never saw such a thing.'

  We did a sort of ceremonial tour of the booming room. We met the others.

  'Rumble Silkin. Got a bad belly.'

  'John Pasco. He's a Mex.'

  'Teddy.'

  'Mr Cawling. Deaf.'

  'Jones.'

  'Sir Michael Mountley. English, like you see.'

  'Arab.'

  'William Little.'

  'Flybutton.'

  When I went back to my bed the feathery man was still sobbing. As I watched with concern and wonder his heaving increased and his sobs grew stronger. Then a trickle of water ran from his mattress, about halfway down the length of the bed.

  I was almost speechless at the phenomenon until I realised that he was weeping at one end and weeing at the other. I was very concerned and sad for him. But the others said he didn't matter.

  That night I dreamed of Rose, her face, round and luminous with love, beaming at me from the front of a barrage balloon. Miles below my father, raging, was trying to pull the balloon down to the earth. Formed up around him was the firing squad sent by Winston Churchill to execute me. (By then, of course, in my awake life, I had realized that this was a fraud. I was growing up.)

  In the morning an official came to see me, to take my particulars on a series of forms. He was a clean, young, man and he kept saying: 'It's only the Japanese now. It's only the Japanese.' It was as though he was waging a personal war and had to get it done. I was delighted and surprised when he gave me ten dollars, for which I signed. I asked him if he came from the Distressed Mariners Office and he said he did, so I gave him two dollars to return to the old man who had lent me the money the previous day. I thought he was the sort of person who would be honest about something like that. In addition I asked him if he knew the man in the Welcome Home Fund Office and he said he did and that this man did a fantastic job, something I readily acknowledged because I had seen him doing it.

  The Australian Sirod came to my bed later and said that they were going to have an outing that night and that now I had some money I could join them if I liked.

  ' What are you going to do ?' I asked.

  'You'll see,' he winked. 'We have a great time where we go.’

  'It's not pineapples, is it?' I asked nervously. 'I'm not going on any pineapple treat.'

  'A different sort of fruit,' he said, and winked again. I began to look forward to it immediately because I was sure that at least some of them were going out after women in the city and after my dream of Rose and the Balloon I was feeling pent up in a young man's way. I had not wanted to be a sailor but since I had been shanghaied into the profession, and already shipwrecked, I was going to be a sailor
in every way, including the women. I went for a walk through the long, tall city, now dazedly back to its normal self on this day after the victory, and saw that the women were very good and well dressed, not like ours at home tired with no stockings and wearing dresses made of blackout material and such stuff.

  In the event the fruit that Sirod spoke about turned out to be coconuts. Six of us went to Coney Island for the evening, which surprised and disappointed me, because I had been to plenty of fairgrounds. The Englishman who called himself Sir Michael Mountley won three coconuts by bowling the ball overhand, cricket fashion, and we went to the beer tent to examine the prizes.

  Notwithstanding my disappointment in the place for the outing, I felt my spirits welling and warming because I was a sailor among sailors, a man among men (give or take a few). Sivam the Russian was with us, and it was true he had huge eyes which always seemed to be brimming with sentimental tears. Sir Michael Mountley called everyone 'dear chap' even the woman at the coconut shy. Rumble Silkin was an Indian with dyspepsia and Mr Cawling was called ‘I-can-'ear-yer' Cawling.

  In the beer tent everybody drank several bottles, with me anxiously keeping up, and then we all went on the big dipper, and after that had some more beer.

  The lights of Coney Island seemed to be revolving about my head. Sivam wanted to fight with everybody, and was eventually taken by the others to a boxing booth where a mountainous Negro was challenging all comers to stay three rounds with him for thirty dollars. Sivam stripped to his huge Siberian waist, was in the ring, with our encouragement urging him on, and then out again almost immediately as the Negro uncompromisingly hit him on the jaw. He came back at us through the ropes like some huge projectile. We got him back into the fight again and this time the boxer hit him on the nose and in a minute we were carrying him bloodily through the fairground in much the same way as the children our street used to carry home the drunken men.

  I think we took Sivam to a hospital but I've never been certain of this because I never saw my shipmates again after that night. The beer and the blood and the big dipper had all taken their toll of a callow youth. I reached the Sailors' Home and there collapsed spectacularly in front of reporters, photographers and a tall Jewish lady called Mrs Nissen-baum, who had been awaiting my return.

  My story had been discovered. The Boy From The Lifeboat, they called me. New York in its victory frenzy was looking for a hero and they had found him. I was overwhelmingly glad it was me.

  Six

  Her name was Rebecca Nissenbaum and she was a big and beautifully made woman. To me, at that young time of my life, she seemed about the size of the lady who was the Statue of Liberty, but, of course, much warmer.

  Everything about her was large but perfectly kept. I've never seen such outsize, lovely, hands on a woman, the nails like sea shells, the fingers girded with thick rings, gold gems, the palms and the backs like the choicest white meat. Like Rose she had a heavy cloud of black hair, but whereas Rose's had been wild and hanging, or hurriedly pushed up into pins and combs, Mrs Nissenbaum's hair was built and arranged. It sat like a jet turban above the splendid contrast of her creamy face. Each eye was a portrait in itself, painted and shaded, embellished with streaks of black and purple, and at each centre a sumptuous pupil the size of an egg and a black centre so riveting that I felt no man could have the strength to turn his face from it. She had extravagant lips like a film star on a poster and her clothes, chosen to accentuate the superb white drum of her neck, her powerful breasts and hips, came from a leading dress designer for outsize women. Jewellery grew on her like fruit; her furs seemed to have kept their animal life. Her smell was such that you knew she was on the way even before she turned a corner; like an expensive breeze. She was thirty-five and she said she came from a poor Jewish family in the Bronx.

  That, of course, even if it were true, was a long time before she met Mr Benny Nissenbaum, who was rich and had a house at Riverdale but was, at that time, missing presumed dead in Okinawa.

  Only shadows remain from the first evening when she took me in her cavernous car from the Sailors' Home to her house. The stormy Coney Island beer within me gave me a shipwrecked appearance which went aptly alongside the story of my junior heroism as retold in the New York newspapers the following morning.

  These were brought to me with my breakfast by a maid and I floated in the huge bed, watching the sun supported by the tops of the trees outside my window, like Oliver Twist on his first morning in Mr Brownlow's house.

  Mrs Nissenbaum looked seven feet tall when she entered on elaborately platformed slippers, all clothed in fluffy pink and white garments like a brilliant ice cream sundae. Despite her size she seemed to float in the room. Her smile was magnificence itself.

  'You're awake,' she said with a thrillingly deep tone. 'Better' are you?'

  'Much better, thank you,' I said, staring at her.

  She smashed a lovely fist into my pillows. 'Your picture's in the newspapers. Maybe you saw it already.' At her hem waddled a fussy toy dog. God, what happened to him afterwards! She called it Errol Flynn and she was always picking him up and cuddling him and pushing him inside her folding garments, next to her warm bosom.

  I nodded when she said about the newspaper pictures and felt an uncertain smile grow on my face. Did she realize I had been drunk?

  'Exhausted,' she said, sitting with astonishing lightness on the edge of the bed. 'Every bit exhausted - and little boy you sure looked it.' She picked up one of the papers and shook her head faintly at the spreadeagled figure of myself in the arms of my fellow sailors. 'For God's sakes,' she said unbelievingly. ‘Imagine this city sending you to that dump when you had been sunk and shipwrecked. Imagine! It should have been the brass bands and the ticker tape even.'

  'I didn't mind,' I muttered modestly. 'Everybody was busy celebrating the end of the war. I must have slipped by unnoticed.'

  'Disgrace on America,' she said brushing my remarks aside with her words and my toast crumbs from the bed with a soft sweeping hand.

  ‘Thank God, I have a friend who is the secretary of the

  Distressed Mariners Committee, and she called up yesterday afternoon and told me all about the disgrace.' She leaned forward and enveloped my thin hand in hers. 'Arthur McCann,' she said sincerely, her black eyes like guns, 'I want to apologise for the City of New York and for the United States of America for failing in our duty. Even ignoring the rules of common hospitality.'

  'That's all right, really it is,' I said, embarrassed and overwhelmed. 'I didn't expect anything.' I felt I had to make a more fulsome gesture. 'Plenty of others, younger than me, have gone and got killed in the war.'

  To my surprise she began snivelling into the counterpane, picking it up like a big handkerchief and dabbing her eyes and her mouth with it. She was so large and she used it so elegantly that it hardly looked out of proportion.

  ‘My husband, Benny David Nissenbaum,' she muttered. 'Captain Benny Nissenbaum. Missing believed killed, Okinawa.'

  'Oh, I am sorry,' I said genuinely, patting her hand in return.

  'Must be killed,' she continued mournfully. 'It's only a two bit place and I don't see how nobody, and surely not my Benny, could go missing without them noticing. Not Benny. He's the sort you'd notice anywhere, so he's not just missing. He's killed completely. Finished. Blown to bits, I say, because I think they'd have noticed him even if he was just dead like everybody else. Benny always stood out in a crowd.'

  ‘I'm sorry,' I muttered inadequately once more.

  'Arthur,' she said looking up dramatically. ‘I am a Jewish person and we always make sure that our loved ones are commemorated in the way they would like. I don't think no stone tablet is good enough for my Benny, nor a million candles. He's worth something more than that.'

  ‘Of course, Mrs Nissenbaum,' I agreed. ‘I should think he is.'

  She paused and her dark head dropped forward like a bison's. 'My husband deserves a living memorial, Arthur.

  And I want you to
consider yourself to be that memorial Will you do that? I want you to feel free to use this home as your home, and to feel that Benny Nissenbaum had got his hand on your shoulder. You'll be like a walking stone tablet to his memory.'

  I sat stunned in the bed, not knowing what to say.

  'You'll be my Benny's memorial, won't you, Arthur?' she said, those eyes filling her face again. 'His walking tablet?'

  'Yes,' I said uncertainly. 'But what do I have to do? I've never thought of being anything like that.'

  'Nothing,' she said. 'That's nothing you have to do, Arthur. Just be here and think of this lovely home as your lovely home.'

  ‘It's very decent of you, Mrs Nissenbaum,' I said. 'And I'd love to walk around in memory of your husband, Benny. But I'll have to go back home, won't I? I've got to go home to my mum and dad.'

  'But not yet,' she pleaded. 'Not yet Arthur. The war's only over just a couple of days. Let the sea settle down. You have some more bagels and coffee and be comfortable. The bathroom is right through there. Benny's toothbrush and his shaving things are still on the shelf and I know he would want you to feel free with them. And all I want you to do Arthur is to give a little thought to my Benny, in pieces like he is, when you are using his blades.'

  'I will, of course I will.' I promised. 'I don't shave very often.'

  At this she rolled her lovely head and whispered, 'So young.' Then stood up and went, strong, smooth, silent, like a big female machine, towards the door. She turned there hopefully: 'There's no Jewish in the family, is there Arthur?'

  I said I didn't think so, although my father always said my grandfather Murky was like a Wandering Jew, something I could never comprehend because, at other times he always said the old man had never been anywhere. Poor Murky, when I think of him now, and the killer roller skates.

  She hardly seemed to hear. 'Ah, well, I suppose it was too much to expect a nice Jewish boy to get himself shipwrecked in a lifeboat just for my convenience. In this life you can't have everything.'

  So there was I, who knew nothing of Jews or was even aware of Jews, in New York as a walking, talking memorial to a decimated man called Benny Nissenbaum. My lack of understanding of Judaism was complete. When Mrs Nissenbaum told me that she and her husband had met at a barmitzvah I sincerely believed this to be some sophisticated drinking place in the city. For me, at that time, a Jew simply meant someone who had, more or less immediately, come from Jerusalem or appeared in The Bible. In the street we used to sing: