Able Seacat Simon

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  Chapter 14

  It was several days before I was to gain any real understanding of why we were still trapped halfway up the Yangtse. After the usual Sunday morning church service, the crew were told to gather on the lower mess deck, and once Captain Kerans had all the men assembled together, he explained that we were in the middle of what he called a ‘diplomatic deadlock’. The local garrison commander, who had authority over the shore batteries that had fired on us, was not prepared to let us go.

  Peggy and I sat together on one of the gun decks, the watery sun like a blanket on our backs, watching the antics of a small group of plump brown and white birds, who were bobbing on the water a few yards from the Amethyst, poking through the surface with their pencil-like beaks.

  I couldn’t help but contrast the scene with the starkness of the captain’s words. ‘If we attempt to move, we will be fired upon,’ he explained grimly. ‘Until such time as we are prepared to admit that the Amethyst fired first.’

  There was a swell of angry protest at this outrage. He raised a hand to silence it. ‘Which I have, of course, emphatically denied. And shall continue to do so, as we are not in the business of colluding with such lies. Quite apart from anything else, it would be a gross betrayal of the men who have died here. But I’m afraid that leaves us in something of a bind, and I’m going to need you all to be strong. As of now, we are in reasonably good shape. Talks continue – agonisingly slowly, but they continue – and at the highest level, so I am at least hopeful that it won’t be too long before the communist leaders take heed of the truth – that there is a somewhat trigger-happy garrison commander at the root of this mess – and that we’ll be allowed to continue our journey to Nanking.

  ‘But, in truth, I cannot say how long things will take. So though we must hope for the best, we must also prepare for the worst. Keep occupied, do everything we can to make the Amethyst seaworthy, and be understanding about the difficulties and privations that may lie ahead. We are at least lucky that we have assistance from the nationalists and can get our hands on some fresh food, though with the communists taking control of both banks of the river now, in places, I don’t know how long that might continue. We must also preserve our oil, for obvious reasons, so frugality is going to be key. To that end, I’m going to review our use of it on a day-by-day basis. It may well be that at some point soon we’ll have to shut down the boilers at night. Which won’t be comfortable, especially with the temperatures rising as they are, but I know I can rely on you all to be stoical.’

  The captain knew he could also rely on me doing my part. Since the first rat I’d given him, I’d caught another two, and though our paths hadn’t crossed much he’d spotted me the previous morning and to my delight had said, ‘Well, now – so this is our master rat-catcher! Very glad to make your acquaintance at last, young Simon. Keep up the good work!’ Then he’d smiled and strode off, hands clasped loosely behind his back, leaving me puffed up with pride.

  He looked around at the crew now and, following his gaze, so did I. So many of the remaining crew were so young themselves, and it shook me. Not to mention Lieutenant Strain, the fleet’s electrical officer, who now looked every inch the weather-beaten sea dog, despite having only joined the Amethyst at Shanghai the night we’d sailed – a taxi ride to Nanking was all he’d been after. As it stood, he’d been lucky to survive.

  ‘As I say, men,’ Captain Kerans finished, ‘this is a difficult situation – and one not of any of our making. And all we can do is accept our place in it with fortitude, and trust that everything that can be done is being done to expedite our safe passage. In the meantime, I know Lieutenant Commander Skinner would have been extremely proud of you. As am I. You are a credit to His Majesty’s Navy.’

  Captain Kerans had the men fall out then, and despite the morale-boosting words, it was clear that the reality of our capture was beginning to sink in, and the mood quickly dipped again. I could see it in the slump of shoulders as the crew dispersed, in the low mutterings of discontent that floated up to me and Peggy.

  I could mostly sense the growing anger, which was wholly justified, that the Amethyst was being pinpointed as the aggressor. That to admit to an outright lie would be a condition of us being freed, just to save the face – and perhaps the bacon – of a communist soldier who’d done wrong. And that anger was good, I thought. Fortifying and good. It would give the men a much needed reason to stay strong.

  But it seemed Captain Kerans had been right when he’d used the words ‘agonisingly slowly’. A week passed and then another, and a new routine became established; one of hard physical work to keep the Amethyst in peak condition, which meant maintenance and cleaning and drills for the men, and round-the-clock rat-hunting for me. And while we got on with the business of managing our silent, stranded ship, the officers would be back and forth across the Yangtse in a communist sampan, back and forth, back and forth, all done up in their whites – to meetings with the communists, which always promised much but in every case failed to deliver.

  The weather was a constant irritant too. The temperature rose and kept rising, but more often that not, there was no pleasure to be had from it. ‘There’s just too damned much weather!’ Frank was moved to comment one day, as we were treated to lashings of rain and winds strong enough to blow a man right off his feet (let alone a cat) alongside the inevitable soaring temperatures, dense, swirling mists, and humidity so high it made everything wringing wet anyway. ‘Can’t we just have one ruddy type at a time?’

  And then, perhaps inevitably, came the news from the captain that in order to preserve the precious stock of oil we still had, the boilers would be shut down at night. This left nothing but the emergency lighting to rely on, and also meant there was no ventilation.

  The news was greeted with grim acceptance, as the anger still held sway. They would not beat us. However hard they conspired to make life difficult for us, the truth was the truth, and every man was going to stick by it. To collude with their lies would be to betray our dead friends, so they could do what they liked.

  Naturally, the rats were thrilled to bits.

  Chapter 15

  By mid-June, the temperature on board was becoming unbearably hot. By day it was in the hundreds and by night, not much cooler, and with the oil situation critical and no guarantee of getting more, the boilers remained shut down and silent every night, making the Amethyst as quiet as the grave.

  It was strange and unsettling. A ship was a living, breathing thing. Whether at sea or in port, it was never meant to be completely silent. I knew this from my days as a kitten in Hong Kong. I would be mesmerised at night, often, by the big ships in the harbour – always lights showing, bells and whistles, the low chug and throb of all the engines and boilers, sailors running around everywhere, blurs of navy, flashes of white – seeming to crawl over the infrastructure like ants. This silence was different. It was complete and unbroken, and it was only now I felt it that I realised how peculiar it was.

  I suspected the silence was the last thing on my friends’ minds. Just the heat, and the humidity, and the inability to sleep; so much so that little by little, the sleeping arrangements changed. Forced to swelter and sweat through the long sticky nights, many would often give up their hammocks and sleep on camp beds out on deck.

  Sleeping on deck became popular for other reasons too; the fact that the ship – now such a hothouse, due to the necessary lack of ventilation – was becoming infested with insects. Mosquitoes hid everywhere – they were extremely good at hiding – and stalked their prey with commando-like precision. I was lucky, as was Peggy – they had no interest in us – but the men were plagued constantly, many of them covered in angry-looking bites, and driven to distraction by the constant itching of them.

  There was also a big increase in the cockroach population. Where toying with a cockroach had once been a happy diversion for me, there were now so many running around that I scarcely registered them, even when they twitched my finally sprouting
whiskers. Where the rats had their runs, so the cockroaches did too, though where the rat runs followed routes behind pipes and under furniture, the cockroaches – nimble, quick, and entirely without limits – would scuttle along bedsteads and hammock ropes and pillowslips, and if a human got in the way they’d just scuttle straight over them, their antennae waving gaily as they passed.

  It was an education in the curious sensibilities of humans; I knew cockroaches were high on the doc’s list of ‘health crises in the making’ because, like rats, they spread diseases. But it turned out the sailors didn’t care about that. No. In the main, they were just very, very frightened of them. There was no logic in this. Not that I could see, anyway. Yet the sight of a cockroach would have the biggest, burliest seaman shuddering – especially the younger ones – and I wasn’t sure they knew why themselves. But what was very clear was that they found it impossible to ignore them. If they weren’t jumping up and down on them – though never in bare feet – they’d be springing up, going ‘aagh!’ and ‘yuck!’ and ‘ruddy bleeders! Yarggg!’, shaking themselves down as if they were crawling with scores of them, rather than just one, and doing strange little dances on the spot.

  There was an entirely different attitude towards the moths. Strangely, given that moths were far superior when it came to flying (and often sat for minutes at a time on the men’s faces, when they dozed off, if only they knew) they attracted nothing like the same frantic response. A moth was looked upon benignly, brushed away relatively calmly – though as the weeks passed and the heat grew their numbers began increasing, the cry of ‘Cover that ruddy light off – we’ll be swamped with the bloody things!’ became a common one.

  But it was the rats – always the rats – who were posing the worst infestation, and by mid-June – six whole weeks since we’d been taken hostage by the communists – there was little choice but to stop using the aft part of the ship entirely, and let the rodents have the run of the place.

  As a consequence, the men were even more crammed together in the heat and, when not working or on watch (Captain Kerans was becoming infamous for his ‘obsession’ with keeping everyone occupied) attempted to amuse themselves not only by reading, or playing cards (or, touchingly, writing long letters that couldn’t be posted) but by thinking up ways the evil scourge could be exterminated. Whenever the opportunity arose, boots were lobbed at any rat who was bold enough to run around in daylight.

  These days, such boldness was common to most of them, and all I could do was my best. But it was fast becoming an unequal battle. I made kills every day now – rats were there for the taking – but for every one I finished off there seemed to be a dozen more.

  ‘Breeding like rabbits!’ Sid observed one evening, after the meal was cleared away. ‘We’ll soon be overrun with the wretched things!

  Sid, the youngest rating, had recently become a particular friend. To add to the woes already heaped on us by the communists, he’d suffered an injury a few weeks back when trying to adjust a steel cable. When he’d been taken ashore by the doctor, it was discovered he’d broken his arm, so he’d been in need of a little extra help and comfort.

  I was sharing his hammock in the mess now, curled on top of his feet to keep his toes warm and, despite the chatter of the men, it was impossible not to hear the rats’ constant scurryings and scrapings beneath and around us.

  ‘Wish they were rabbits,’ remarked the other boy sailor, Martin. ‘Least then we could put them in a pie and eat the blighters!’

  Martin, too, had had a tougher time than most. He and Bannister, one of the stoker mechanics, had been among those put to shore. They’d spent time in captivity – the plan being to use them to help coerce the captain. But they hadn’t co-operated, and had not long been returned.

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ said Sid. ‘Now you’re making me feel sick!’

  Sid was particularly queasy about the rats, having woken up one morning to find one half dead and squealing, dangling a scant three inches above his head, after a kind soul had rigged up a snare with some fuse wire. ‘Well, how was I to know you planned to sleep there?’ the sailor had huffed.

  As it was, my kills were mostly lobbed over the guardrail into the Yangtse. It became the ritual to wish them a safe journey to the north shore, where the ‘bloody commies’ could roast them for dinner. I worked hard to keep the supply up, knowing my contribution was vital, as no other method of killing them seemed to work. Which was not to say the men didn’t try – in a fit of furious determination upwards of fifty traps were laid in a single afternoon. The next day, not a single one was sprung.

  It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the feeling became prevalent that the rats were more organised than we knew. They certainly seemed so – and so confident! They were increasingly bolder and braver. Poor Sid, who’d been dozing in the sick bay one afternoon, just after his accident, was roused from his slumbers by one calmly nibbling at his toes.

  There was also talk of several sightings of a rat to beat the lot of them – a giant of an animal who they’d nicknamed Mao Tse-tung, on account of him seeming to be the ringleader. ‘Big as you, he is Blackie,’ Jack had helpfully told me. ‘I reckon you’d have a job on your hands, taking him on.’

  ‘Nah, he’s a sight bigger,’ Sid had even more helpfully corrected him. ‘Job on his hands? I reckon that rat could see him off if he wasn’t careful. You’d best keep away from him, Blackie.’

  ‘He’s the one, though,’ Martin agreed. ‘He’s the King Rat, no doubt about it. He’s the one that needs dispatching to the afterlife, the filthy bugger. Before he sires any more of the blasted things.’

  I’d never thought about rats having an afterlife before. Did they too have their souls in the stars? I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I had to concede that the idea made some sense to me, even it didn’t inspire any finer feelings for the filthy vermin. I was a member of His Majesty’s Navy and I had no time for that. Not for animals that caused so much misery for my friends.

  I did think quite a lot about this legendary Mao Tse-tung, though. That perhaps Jack and Sid were right. Perhaps he would be too much for me. I’d already dealt with a couple of sizeable males, and, even with my strength returning and my whiskers coming along nicely, I was not fully fit yet, and it had been no small matter to catch them and finish them off. It seemed the bolder they got, the more well fed they got – while the men faced the meat running out in a matter of days now, the rats, gorging on grain and rice, were growing ever plumper. The plumper they were, the heavier and bulkier they were, and though I was healing well – barely limping now, as Lieutenant Hett had noticed recently – I weighed no more than I ever did, nor, I thought, would I.

  But for all my ever-present anxiety about facing down the fabled ‘King Rat’, when the day of reckoning came, I had no time to even think, much less be frightened. It was all just so sudden, so unexpected, so unlike any rat encounter before it.

  I had simply turned a corner onto the quarterdeck one morning, and there he was – it had to be him – looking as bold as you like. He was waddling across the deck in my direction, staying close to the bulkhead, but seemingly oblivious of all the sailors milling about, getting on with their duties. At first I could only gawp. He had such a proprietorial air about him (or so he thought; a rat could never aspire to such a thing) it really was as if he was entirely without a care. King Rat. Afraid of nothing and no one.

  I’d sunk down to my belly before I’d even consciously thought about it, my instinct kicking in before my eyes had even registered what I’d seen.

  He stopped too, and stared at me, his dead eyes like fish eyes. The same dull, unblinking gaze of a sandfish on a slab. His whiskers, in contrast, were quivering and questing, causing the air between us, which carried the scent of him, to tickle my own. He was a brute and his stench made me nauseous.

  Jack had been right, though. Sid even righter. He was a very big rat. Even face on he looked huge so, though I couldn’t properly see the length and sprea
d of him, there was no question that he was almost as big as I was. Not as big, which I registered gratefully, even as I stared. But heavier. So much heavier. A fat rat indeed. An unwelcome glimpse of the tip of his tail soon confirmed it. It was a good foot beyond the end of his body.

  I settled and I watched and I waited, as per usual, vaguely conscious of movement at the edges of my vision. The men on deck had now noticed him too.

  ‘Go on, Blackie,’ I heard someone say to me – in no more than a whisper, though my fear that it might give the rat cause to turn and flee was soon forgotten. Quite the opposite. He was actually edging towards me.

  I stayed where I was, mindful of the things my mother had always warned me. With an animal this size, it would be foolhardy to ignore them. He rose up as he kept moving forward – though not in a straight line but using a strange angled walk. Then I realised. He was circling me. Trying to come around the side of me. The better to spring? Then I must get the advantage and spring first. I side-stepped, and now I could see the bulk of his body, but with my adrenaline pumping and my hackles fast rising, there was no question of not taking him on, giant though he was. I had my friends to think about. I could not, would not, walk away.

  He slipped past me again, and I was treated to a flash of his rodent teeth. Huge pegs, they were. Perhaps the biggest I’d yet seen. Deep yellow, curving up to the roof of his mouth. I would have to spring and get my jaw locked high up on his neck. I spun around, sprang and pounced – no room for waiting, too dangerous – and in one move had my own teeth buried deep into the fur of his upper back.

  He whirled then, unbalancing me, sending me over onto my flank, heavily, so I curled my paws round him to stop him gouging at my eyes. And he squealed and squealed and squealed – high, high, and higher, scrabbling and pulling me round with him, using all his strength, which was consider- able, to free his front legs. My jaws were on fire from the extent I’d had to open them, my breath coming in rasps as I tried to keep them locked. I couldn’t stand up and, even if I could, I hardly dared to – I knew it would only take the tiniest amount of slackening and he’d be out, he’d be free, he’d be turning on me . . .