Acts of Mutiny (32 page)

It was water from nowhere, water that for all I knew had never touched a human being before. An immense outside was sucked in and contained in our small pond, permitting us to occupy it for only the briefest while.

So when not troubled about the shark, I amused myself with various speculations: that while swimming forward, I might actually be swimming faster than the ship. Or that we were not moving at all, but the earth was rotating under us and sluicing a continuous wave up through the dark body of the hull for me to ride its crest. Or that the people who stood around the pool were somehow looking out to sea when they watched me. Sometimes I was a ship within a ship, and the Leviathan lay concentrated inside me. Sometimes I was Jonah, or Geppetto, or the sailor in the
Just So
story who had forced a grating into the
Armorica’s
throat.

I thought to myself how all water was joined up. We were far, far from the murky green stuff I had bathed in at Brighton, or the toxic tide which slunk past Woolwich, yet there was a fluid chain. Out here the only thing which might have contact with my home was the sea, caged but not caged.

I considered the shape of those scoops in the ship’s belly by which the sea must be caught; and how the great ducts might rear up so high through its body. What were they made of and how were they shaped so as to form into the cave behind the gratings? If I inadvertently drank, did I take up plankton? Phosphorescence? Would I die horribly of dehydration? What did my shipmates add to the sea before sending it back? I queried, too, whether the water we had sported in went straight down to the smaller pool used by the ten-pound emigrants behind the drop of the steel wall, almost out of earshot, almost out of mind.

At other, more sensuous times, I simply allowed myself to float, and have the wavelets of my own making lap back over my chest from their reflection against the sides. Or I would lie face down for as long as I could hold my breath and wonder how it would feel to have been born a pearl fisher, to spend a life of bursting lungs amid the rocks and rays and giant clams. I would dive to the bottom of the pool and come up holding an imaginary shell, which would contain the longed-for pearl. I should perhaps give it to Penny. Or to Robert to give to Penny.

And whenever I looked down again it would strike me how clear the Indian Ocean was within these tiles, while all round the ship it lapped so thick a blue. I could make no sense of that. The water held me for mockery; then when I came up it laughed and sparkled. I made it my friend and wore it next to my skin like a dolphin.

A day or so out of Colombo, a new buzz started to replace the indignation at Robert and Penny’s brazen love. I did not encounter it myself until the Sunday morning. By then its alarm had widened out, and built up – into something quite substantial enough to place alongside and even overtake a sexual scandal now several days old.

My memory, fishing for meaning, locates its source in the pool, or near it, where a couple of Barnwell’s aircrew, maybe, loosened by drink one afternoon, perhaps, gave the game away: should I say set a live shark among us, wriggling, slashing, showing its rows of teeth and growing by the minute. The talk ran from bar to lounge, from deck to deck, from cabin to cabin quicker than flames, almost more immediate than a tannoy announcement.

We were carrying the bomb.

It was not just a sensationalist rumour – as put like that it must sound. For who would believe such a story? What sense would it make? So bald, so ready-made a fantasy, so simplistic an extravagance could amount to no more than the foolish imaginings of children, from whom it would inevitably have come. And who would have listened to children in those days? That nonsense of the squid!

No, it came quite otherwise than that. It came in such a detailed and comprehensive form, and fitted in so well with certain undeniable features of the voyage, that it was either a brilliantly insane forgery or the absolute truth. No child could have dreamed it up. Why, it promised to ruin our whole enterprise. Of course it had versions, some conflicting, some silly. If you will, like the varieties of shark: nurse, tiger, hammerhead, whale, carpet, wobbegong and the rest of their kin. They are all still identifiably shark. I heard all the rumours. I did not understand them – children’s minds do not jump to adult conclusions. I summarise:

That we were helping to run a massive stockpile into Malaya, contrary to explicit parliamentary assurances to the Tunku. That moreover, despite the new Testing Moratorium, there were assemblies and materials to be slipped into Australia for continuing experiments at Maralinga, this time without the knowledge of the Canberra Assembly. That the
Armorica
was therefore being used to get round the official diplomatic position and killing two fabulous birds with one stone.

Everyone was preoccupied at the evening dance. The following day’s housey-housey was abandoned. For report furnished detail: even such precise code-names as Rats, Kittens, Vixens and the like; or the fact that if you stored a nuclear device disassembled of its trigger then it did not count as what it was, and that was how Parliament …

But even if all this were very well, none of our business and what you never know can never hurt you, yet the rumours said that there had actually been some sort of accident during the storm. That a sealed container had broken loose somewhere in the bowels of the ship, got up speed and ruptured a duct or pipe. That sea water was extremely corrosive. That a small leakage of one – or a considerable flood of the other – had occurred which, because of its extremely sensitive nature, had only just been able to be repaired.

This accounted for the presence of Barnwell’s aircrew, who had come on board at Gib to make good the damage; and it also explained the ship’s unseemly haste. Yet even there it did not end. There was worse to come: the suspicion of contamination. Which had been covered up – naturally. Whoever would dare admit to it? Ha ha! – and people did emit grim chuckles at first. But, to compound the whole intricate and lunatic suggestion, Mr Barnwell, who it turned out had been the link, the person responsible, the voyage-long minder as it were, had said that persons affected by contamination were to be covertly monitored in Australia, since this was exactly the kind of data which no one could legitimately get, and if there were to be a nuclear war, the more we knew, the more effectively … You could at first not help laughing.

The voyage was transformed. The legend rose
fully-formed
, yes, out of the pool – by some indiscretion, some overhearing, some camaraderie – who knows how exactly. Suffice to say it rose, without warning. And even as it thrashed and snapped it remained, contrary to the regular habit of rumours, curiously intact and self-consistent – for we had plenty of leisure for examining the detail, for going on to cross-check with what so-and-so had heard, for arguing and talking it through. And further, as time went on it somehow refused to drop away; rather hung on grimly.

Which was the more surprising, since it could not possibly be true. It was a damned lie. For who could imagine the government allowing such a deception in the first place? Who could ever believe that those entrusted with the duty of care, the maintenance of standards, the upholding of decency, the pilotage and welfare of the future, would ever contrive to do such a thing against their own, and against their allies?

So the whole company of the ship in the first class section – which is to say the vast majority of the vessel’s population – were thrown into surges of alternating belief and incredulity. For two days they endured in a torment. Denial – the refusal to submit to inconvenient nonsense – was plagued by anxiety over what might be safe to eat, to drink, even to touch. Acceptance was mocked by the general reluctance actually to broach the matter with the authorities, as if that would be the ultimate breach of decency, even though if the rumour were true there was clearly not a second to lose. Children’s lives were at risk. Everyone’s life was at risk.

And yet no one was doing anything. Surely they secretly prayed for some counter-story to begin: that it was all a hoax, that some Lascar had gone mad and floated the whole tale for a grudge against the English, that it was actually a parlour game – like a murder mystery – arranged by the quartermaster as part of the entertainment. That like that
War of the Worlds
broadcast by Orson Welles before the war, it was just something that had gone wrong at the outset and got horribly out of hand. That the wretched thing would lie still and die.

A thousand miles out from the Bay of Bengal, the sea lay mysteriously flat and oily, heaving fractionally in places like glass made flexible. Only where the
Armorica
was sluicing her way through did it assume its normal character of wave with spray thrown off; though the water itself lacked clarity, as if an invisible weed grew below. On deck there was always a breeze, of course, because of our movement; but no natural wind lay beyond us.

In addition it had become very hot; the air seemed to have been baking for days above the stale surface. Such oppressive conditions filled the ship with a stifling tension, though I steeled myself to that and sat apart in the improvised classroom, the better to apprehend any secret codes or messages contained in Mr Tingay’s lesson.

The Sunday school had been moved to the little ones’ play room. Mr Tingay’s general text related as usual to how lucky we were. He told us the story of Abraham and Isaac. I did not know it – or had never attended when they had us read it in the religious instruction class at Bostall Lane. I was struck, and moved, by the hint of bleating that entered his voice as he read the passage:

‘And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together. And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him upon the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

‘You see,’ said Mr Tingay, ‘Abraham desperately loved his son, but he also loved God.’

MrTingay continued with a discourse on the promised land, which I now saw formed some kind of overarching theme to his lessons. God’s chosen were always on the run, leaving something unspeakable behind, some Moloch or other. God’s chosen wore the mark of their bargain with him, a mark in the soul as well as upon the body. Some hint of recognition flickered in me, of the mark that left no mark, no scar. By whom had I been chosen? I was thrown into agitation. Mr Tingay knew.

None of the other children seemed surprised or upset by his words. MrTingay was considerably exercised about the world-wide proliferation of Molochs and Baals and used the terms to tell us something about himself and his mission to the heathen. I pictured the Molochs as huge sea creatures, although some were probably wild animals from the desert. The Baals were enormous poisonous lizards.

This, however, was to be almost our last meeting, he said, and we had come to know each other quite well already. He wanted to describe to us the challenge and importance of his work. For there were still those benighted black heathens aplenty who were doomed to abominations of their own kind, and it was his calling to venture into the interior and rescue them from their falsehoods.

While we, his little children of the promise again, would be safe eating the milk and honey of our new life in what he referred to now as White Australia. Because the sacrifice of Jesus, as opposed to the failure to sacrifice Isaac, which was all part of it, had made us Christians. It was all very confusing.

‘Now which of you children knows what a sacrifice is?’ I watched the others search their heads for an answer. Mitchell Coote knew. ‘It’s when you have to give something up to God, sir.’

‘It’s when you have to give something up to God. That’s right, that boy. And God so loved the world He gave up His son. So that everyone, not just the Israelites, could enter the Kingdom. And soon we all are going to make our own kind of entry, aren’t we? We’re all going to make a new life for ourselves; which puts us in the same boat,’ he chuckled, ‘in one sense at least, with those first wandering fathers in the Bible. We too are on an adventure.’

‘But we live in Melbourne, sir, me and my sister,’ Mitchell said, ingenuously. ‘We’re just going home. Does that mean we’re Philistines?’

‘No. Of course not.
Ahem.
Very good. Very good. Some of you are not quite English. I was forgetting myself. Well, no matter how you came to be in Australia, that doesn’t make you Philistines, who were the people of the sea and worshipped Dagon, you remember, and not the true Jehovah.’

I looked at him sharply, muddled. And then Finlay asked whether the Abos were black Philistines who had human sacrifices and were cannibals, and I hated her for the fact that I was excluded now from everything, and I tried to grow self-righteous in Mr Tingay’s defence. I did my best.

Until, by some stretch of meandering and theological argument even more obscure and above our heads than all before, he told us the story of Samson. From that point, try as I might, I found myself completely bamboozled and frustrated. All I could make out was that in the promised land the father was uncertain whether to stab the child, set him alight, or do it to a ram; but the blind hero would, in the brilliance of rage, find a way to pull the whole of creation down upon himself, killing everyone in the process. Poor Jesus was unfortunately sacrificed in there somewhere. And this was love.

By the time it came for me to draw my picture I was very angry: I could not tell whether I was doing seagoing Philistines, or leviathanic Israelites, or white-marked Christians and thus-chosen-to-pass-through-the-fire-to-Moloch. I chose to represent the strong man on Brighton pier tearing it down from underneath. His false wife was there. Of course it exploded in a huge column of flame which obliterated much of the drawing.