Acts of Mutiny (24 page)

‘Look! You can see their wings,’ Rosalind said.

I studied them. I could just detect the exotic wings, frilled out beside them, on which they would glide. There they leaped again, skimming like chromium-plated cigars, like surface-skimming missiles. The timelessness of the sea and the flying fish held me then, as it does now. Sometimes a fish skims ahead, and I am pulled along. It is a happiness. And yet the story must be told.

Rosalind was aware of my presence without taking her eyes off the skimmers. When she had looked enough, she told her mother she would go down to the hold to see their cat. Dilys suggested she invite me. Dutifully, Rosalind enquired did I want to go with her?

We collected Finlay and a boy called Peter from where the ping-pong was set up. Finlay looked at me but made no objection. So I tagged along. Then Rosalind took us on a route through ante-rooms and passages I had never seen, down to the storage realm – before the hold proper – of miscellaneous pets and odd accoutrements. It was through a strong door which gave on to a short flight of metal stairs. In my imagination I cannot find it again with any precision, though I know it was somewhere in the very rearmost part of our first class region. I cannot be sure quite by what password or key we penetrated that lowered environment of the pets.

‘Only people with an animal are allowed down here.’ Rosalind, of course, would come down frequently to look at her huge cat.

To begin with, the region beyond the door was utterly different in character to the finished and panelled appearance of the passenger accommodation. There was a strong smell, as you would expect. A dog began barking as soon as we entered. Then another took up die sound, and then two more. Rosalind threw the handle of a large metal switch. Pools of low-wattage electric light illuminated the between-deck space. Its headroom was reduced. There was barking all around and it stank. Its floor was of untreated planking, upon which our feet sounded with a booming echo amid the din of the dogs.

‘Shut up, Pokey. Doc! Stop it this minute!’ Rosalind located the excited ones and settled them down.

Electric bulbs were fixed here and there to girders or stanchions. Where their lightwash reached, boxes and crates of all sizes could be seen. Rosalind pointed out where in this village of packing so-and-so’s tortoise lay labelled, or whose guinea pig or pedigree rabbit was usually to be found asleep around which corner.

‘A steward comes in to look after them. That’s his job,’ she explained. ‘They moldy sleep.’

We felt clearly the ship’s recovered movement beneath our feet; I imagined the pets had learned to be both bored and soothed by it. And to have given up because of the dark. Perhaps they were drugged. But now there came sounds of scuffling and stirring from all quarters. They hoped we would feed them, or reassure them. Rosalind appeared to know all their names. She took Finlay in tow. We boys followed on. Interspersed among the cages and sealed crates were other inexplicable pieces of hardware: a vintage motor bike, a squat palm tree, a small fleet of prams and parked pushchairs. Some of the crates were standing open as if their contents were presently in use.

In the unusual light the ship’s skin was also visible, showing its flanges and bolts; while above our heads a great number of pipes ran off into the darkness; some as thin as the conduit for wire, others as fat as drainpipes.

The dogs took up barking again. Rosalind shouted at them. We followed her, impressed, as she led the winding way along a particular ‘lane’ to the Finch-Clark pet crate. Someone in the crew had attached a notice to it: ‘Danger. Man-eating Cat’. We gathered round in the dim light and peered inside. ‘Titus’ was indeed prodigious. He was the size of a respectable dog.

‘It’s a hormonal abnormality,’ Rosalind pronounced. ‘It started when he was fixed.’

‘Fixed?’ Finlay enquired. A dog barked again. Another. The community of the semi-darkness all became excited at once.

‘Now then, Sukey! Just you stop it! She’s the ringleader. I’ll come in a minute.’ They seemed grudgingly to respond to her, settling down. ‘You know. Fixed. So they can’t have kittens.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘So they can’t … you know. Do it.’

‘So he won’t want to.’

‘Having his balls cut off,’ said Peter. We nudged each other as boys.

‘Having his bits all off. He won’t try anything then,’ Finlay said firmly.

‘What. Willy and all?’ Peter sniggered.

‘Don’t be disgusting, Peter,’ Rosalind intoned loftily, before shouting at the dogs again.

And Finlay sided with her. ‘Yes, Pom,’ she said, looking scornfully at me. ‘Don’t be disgusting, Pom.’

We all poked at the extraordinary creature, which seemed docile enough, then explored further the resigned and morose animal world that lay about us. Rosalind was in her element. Perhaps she spent much of her time here. Perhaps, I pondered morosely to myself, they had kept her mother here until today.

‘This one died.’ She indicated an empty cage, and assumed a tragic tone. ‘He was so lovely, Ben.’

‘What was he?’ Finlay asked.

‘The loveliest golden retriever. He was so silky. But he was so old, too. He died in the storm.’

‘There’s a free cage, then?’ Finlay said.

‘Yes.’ Rosalind affected a kind of sob.

‘Pom could go in it. There’s a cage here for you, Pom.’ Finlay turned to me.

The others all laughed.

‘He’s so disgusting. He needs to be in a cage. Don’t you, Pom? Disgusting!’

I was shocked. The other three children seemed united in their laughter. It seemed they knew exactly what Finlay was laughing at. They had grouped themselves together, subtlPerhaps it way, insidiously – leaving me quite out, quite stranded.

I tried to make light of it. ‘Yes. I’ll go in the cage. It’s a cage for a wild Pom.’ I made a step forward.

But they laughed with genuine derision, taking their cue from Finlay’s piping Australian accent. ‘Yeah. Wild Pom! Wild Pom! Wild Pom!’

‘Shut up!’ I heard myself call out. ‘Bloody shut up!’

‘Oh, it swears does it? Bloody Pom! Shut up, Bloody Pom!’

They all laughed again.

‘He’d just fit in nicely.’

‘Then he’d be fattened up and eaten.’

‘In his red shorts!’

‘And his stupid shirt!’

‘And his disgusting fez!’

‘He’s a Commie!’

It was no more than that. As if in complete accord, they moved away together, back towards the door, making the message complete, and leaving me alone in the middle of that maze. I had fooled myself for a brief interlude that they were my friends again.

Rosalind paused by one cage that stood upon another.

‘This is Rocky, the McAlisters’ mynah bird.’ She flicked its wire mesh.

‘Doo wah wah. Doo wah wah,’ the bird sang. ‘Last tra-a-ain to San Fernando.’

They all laughed. I tried to laugh too from where I stood, but they ignored me.

‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.’

‘Dirty Commie. Dirty Commie,’ Finlay crooned to it. The others were delighted.

‘Don’t step on. Don’t step on … my blue suede shoes,’ the bird replied.

And then they departed, leaving me for the moment paralysed, watching them climb the metal stair – ‘the ladder’ as my father would call it. So the habitual naval word comes to mind now watching them again in my mind’s eye, seeing the slot of light from the open door.

‘Turn the light out after you, will you?’ Rosalind’s face appeared in the slot. ‘When you decide to come out. And make sure the big door’s shut.’ The slot disappeared.

They did not lock me in. Fighting my tears, I made towards the stair. I heard the mynah bird, Rocky, flutter cramped wings inside his cage, and whistle the beginning of a hymn. ‘Lead us heavenly father, lead us. This is the BBC Light Programme.’ He subsided, and then shook up his feathers one last time to get off a parting scold, ‘Washed in the blood of the Lamb!’ like some Baptist great-aunt.

I thought of the sea, through the moving floor. We were just under the water-line now, perhaps. Beyond the metal skin, there would be flying fish lagging back, making ready to accelerate the length of the hull and fling themselves off the bow wave. There would be sharks also keeping pace, maybe, hoping for kitchen waste. There would be barracudas, sea snakes. And, I let myself imagine, further off, sea horses, starfish, Portuguese men-of-war, nautilus conches.

The dogs barked again. I would not give Finlay the satisfaction of meeting me soon about the ship, knowing I had crawled after her out of my humiliation. I stopped and began to cry. Then looked about me. Nor would I pay her the homage of tears.

I should become hard at last, after my father’s wishes, become a man as brazen as my tradition demanded. The barefoot sailors on the gun deck, tested, grogged, unmoved by heat, cold or the lash, stood to the cannons ready to do their duty. They could lose life or limb. They were willing slaves, duty-at-noon. Proud of it. Iron hard on the inside. Steel-proof on the outside. Proud of the way they could bear it.

It is the facility of children to sneak into places they are not supposed to go, to solve puzzles, to open those seals and stoppers designed to flummox adults. The fiercer the child, I believe, the more against the odds, the more slippery and impossible its achievement. But at first I employed my energies merely destructively. There was, for no good reason that I could see, a radiogram, standing beyond the cages, wedged in between cabin trunks. I opened it, took out the twenty or so heavy discs from their slot inside and stamped somebody’s precious old gramophone collection into the decking. ‘Oh, it was the storm, the storm,’ I said to myself, by way of explanation. ‘Oh, dear. Oh, what a pity.’

I sat on the vintage motor bike for some minutes and, unable longer to stifle the tears, wept again.

The next remembrance I have, however, is in a different space altogether. I have come down another ladder; we are surely well underwater now. There is the vibration noise of the ship, much louder. We must be near the drive-shaft housing for one of the screws. Yes, near to me somewhere I fancy I can hear the blades taking endless hold of the water, forcing it away from us, driving us on. Here, it is much darker, and more cramped. In my imagination I have to stoop, but this cannot be right – for I am a child. Yet there is a sensation that I have gone far deeper still into the nautical past. Though this is a colour I put on it. And maybe from just such associations I insert the obstinate hang of tar to the stink of paint, sea-rot, old oil. For stink it does. How hot it is, too, and heavy the air.

There is a very faint light – perhaps through some door I have got undone, from the other place, but perhaps not – to which my eyes are becoming accustomed. It is an empty space, set aside in a low region of the hold; I sense by the floor’s motion I am nearer the stern of the ship.

But I am not here on my own. I said it was empty. Not a human presence; no indeed. But there is something. Some very sentient life is here, a hidden creature which I loathe and detest; and yet I feel at home with it. I have been drawn here. I have come to pet it; to feed it.

But this is all far too unlikely; and my memory is playing me false, surely.

There is a very long flat shape – I can just make it out. Most probably large crates. Something very stale and ancient like strong sunken piss. It has about it the feeling of sea deeper than light has reached; of water far below the play of currents, which has remained for millennia over the same bedded mud and ash. It has the quality of being very occupied.

But this is my fantasy, surely.

I edge close up to it. It could, of course, be a set of long, low trailers, maybe, boxed up, bright as newly painted Dinky toys; some consignment of tyres, rubbery-smelling; of medical supplies; of bricks. It could be munitions – steel-blue, a little well-greased gunrunning; which might explain its requiring such isolation down here. It could of course be anything.

It is speaking to me. I know its old heart. I recognise how huge and terrifying it longs to become here, right up near the surface where the pressure is so much less. It is cramped. Has always been. Longs to spread out its great nose-wrinkling shape, to lie massively upon the world finding easement at last. It whispers to me to let it out, let it out. That it would mean no harm.

Faint light clings along what seem to be wires growing and seeping out of the crate. They are black lines, phosphorescent, as if they have broken the tropical sea by night and are still wrapped in a mantle of curious plankton. They stretch up and out like the elongations of wings. They are extravagant. They clutch to the smallest cracks in the decking, the bolt ends in the interior skin of the hull, the rust-fretted girders in the low ceiling, the pipes. Look how they cling to that conduit there over by the side. And one of the ducts they have netted around so thickly it appears to be a lifetime’s sea-web of a great crab spider. There are lines, cages and traps, like so much flotsam of a whole wrecked trawler. As if the presence in the crate had hooked its existence to this one support and would cling to it come hell or high water. It wants me to let it out.

I cannot. I have a knot in my tongue and we are back in the house at Woolwich. But it is not old picture-books and kid’s stuff. Someone is speaking to me very quietly, persuasively.