Endangered Species (18 page)

The ship settled.

‘I read somewhere that surgery is rather like a mixture of carpentry and plumbing . . .' Mackinnon transferred his attention to the flesh above the crushed area, cutting back the muscles to expose the main blood vessels. He found the first and picked up a piece of surgical thread. ‘And seamanship, I suppose.'

He fumbled the reef knot, but he managed it at last. As he exposed the second blood vessel Taylor had the thread ready and tied the ligature himself.

Good, thought Mackinnon, working on. The boy is proving himself. Perhaps this experience would be the making of him. There was no trace of his customary superciliousness.

Between them they secured all the identifiable veins and arteries. Carefully Mackinnon folded back the skin and the heavy pad of calf muscle he had saved, exposing the splintered bones of the shin. Then he reached for the saw. It was a perfect, miniature tenon saw made entirely of stainless steel. As he drew it across the tibia and fibula the Chief Steward passed out and slumped to the deck in a dead faint.
His fat bulk made a slopping sound in the water that washed back and forth.

‘Never could hold his drink, you know.'

Taylor laughed with unnatural loudness. He liked the Old Man's jokes, but the off-beat sense of humour was something of a revelation. The axis of their relationship had shifted as they had been thrown together by the happenings of the afternoon.

Mackinnon folded the pad of calf muscle with its resilient covering of skin over the sawn ends of the bones emerging from the red ooze of the amputated leg. He reached for the sutures and began passing the stitches so the threads of the ligatures dangled clear. Supplementing the crudely stitched seam with butterfly closures, he poured Cetrimide solution liberally over the stump.

‘I think you can ease that tourniquet now.'

Slowly, blood suffused the flesh of the stump through the lesser blood vessels and capillaries. There was no pumping flood; the ligatures were holding and it merely oozed along the jagged line of the stitched joint.

‘So far so good.' Oddly he felt no more confident than when he had started. If anything the second leg daunted him. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and watched Taylor as, unbidden, the Third Mate wrapped lint around the ghastly wound and finally bound it with a length of bandage.

‘Now the other one . . .' Mackinnon lifted the right leg. ‘Pity Freddie fainted, he could have done this.'

‘So could I.'

Mackinnon stared unhappily at the bloody mess. ‘This isn't the Royal College of fucking Surgeons.' He sensed defeat. His hands began to shake again as he reached for the scalpel.

‘Goddamnit . . .'

He raised his head, blowing the sweat off the end of his nose and avoiding Taylor's eyes.

‘All right, sir. Here, give it to me.'

Mackinnon felt the scalpel taken from his quaking hand. He did not resist. A wave of nauseous exhaustion passed over him and he clutched at the edge of the table, willing himself not to topple on to the Chief Steward. For one awful, self-recriminatory moment he thought he might be drunk, but he knew he was still horribly sober. He watched, fascinated, as Taylor took over.

The Third Mate worked methodically, debriding the damaged tissue with a strange intensity. He doused the area with Cetrimide solution and exposed a length of the calf. He asked Mackinnon to plunge his hands into the warm mess twice to assist in the tying of the ligatures, and Mackinnon heard him muttering to himself in the ferocity of his concentration.

‘Make her clean,' he seemed to be saying, ‘kill all the germs . . . hate . . . fucking . . . germs . . . bacteria . . . streptococci . . . 
spirochaetes . . . microbes . . . the microbe is so very small . . . how does it go?'

With clinical brutality Taylor sawed through the bones and folded the preserved pad of flesh to form the stump, duplicating the captain's method.

‘Nearly there.'

The curved needles of the sutures caught the light and then he straightened up.

‘Dressing, sir . . .' Mackinnon passed lint and bandage. ‘Now the tourniquet.' Both men watched anxiously for haemorrhage. A dark line of blood formed round the seam.

‘No leaks.' Taylor was triumphant. They exchanged smiles across the body, shaking bloody hands in a spontaneous, ridiculous British gesture. At their feet the Chief Steward stirred.

‘Well done, Mr Taylor.'

‘Congratulations, sir.'

‘I think we'd better give her some more morphine.'

Beside them the Chief Steward got unsteadily to his feet, staggering as the ship lurched heavily again.

‘What's the time, Freddie?'

The Chief Steward looked at his watch. ‘Er, half seven . . . I'm sorry, sir.' He gazed down disbelievingly at his soaked and stained clothes.

‘Forget it, Freddie. Here, you missed the last round.' Mackinnon handed the bottle to the Chief Steward. There was barely a teaspoonful of Scotch in the bottom.

Being on the wheel Macgregor had seen little of the rescue. From Gorilla Mackinnon's and the mates' comments he had built up a picture of the scene alongside and in between frantic concentration on the steering he had glimpsed the motor lifeboat as it made its journeys to and from the derelict junk. Once, when the ship was stopped and he stood idly at the telemotor, he had left his station to peer curiously over the Old Man's shoulder, peevish that he was missing the action. Gorilla turned on him and sent him back to his post with such a blistering admonition that he spent the rest of his time sulking bitterly.

After Mackinnon had hove the ship to and Rawlings had relieved Taylor, he himself was relieved and went below. He was already irritatingly late for his tea. The accommodation seemed stuffed with squatting Chinks or Gooks, or whatever. The thin, wasted orientals slumped exhausted in odd corners, spread out from the saloon and the smoke-room in a kind of diaspora as they searched for and found their family groups. By this time most had eaten the fried rice prepared by the Chinese galley staff. The high-pitched and jarringly unfamiliar crying of small children and the smell of the strangers thickened the air.

He entered the mess-room to find Braddock nursing a tiny bundle and endeavouring to spoon thinned condensed milk into the baby's mouth. Opposite Braddock, Pritchard sat with a mug of tea, mouthing at the baby and diverting its attention from Braddock's best endeavours. The two men had discovered the child had no relative apart from the woman stretched out on the duty mess table.

‘What's all this then?' Macgregor stared round the mess-room, his expression one of truculently false incredulity. ‘Bairns an' wimmin in the fuckin' officers' saloon . . . What are youse, then? Stupid bastard you look!'

Pritchard watched the line of muscle ripple along Braddock's jaw. ‘For Chrissakes drop it,' he said, before Braddock replied. But Macgregor was in no mood to take advice. Mackinnon's rebuke had angered him and he was in search of a victim. Braddock and Pritchard with a snot-nosed kid would give him no trouble.

‘Och, piss off. Youse all runnin' round like daft kids. Youse wanna see the officers. Jeesus, bluidy faggots!'

Pritchard shook a cautionary head at Braddock who moved as though to pass the child over. Magregor turned away, opened a can of beer from his locker and then produced a bottle of malt whisky.

‘Where the hell did you get that?' Pritchard asked, for Gorilla Mackinnon let no one below the rank of petty officer have a bottle. A tot or two, by all means, but not a bottle.

Macgregor leered, gratified to have excited envy. ‘Ah'm no so stupid as youse think.' He found a mug and poured a chaser.

‘Number Three upper 'tween deck,' Braddock said. ‘He's got a whole bloody case of the stuff.'

Pritchard stared at Macgregor. The Glaswegian winked at him, a leering superior wink that bespoke, not the complicity of conspiracy, of jacks together, but the hard, selfish, city-bred snide of ‘I'm all right'.

‘You don't give a toss for anything do you?' Pritchard said, his eyes narrowing.

Macgregor grinned and shook his head. This sudden regard pleased him; the strength of excess, of being recognised as possessing no moral scruples, of actually shocking Pritchard, the tamed officers' arse-licker, gratified Macgregor immensely.

It was beyond Macgregor's capabilities to articulate this
sensation, but it flooded him with a fierce, primitive joy. He had never felt like this before and now knew where and how to seek pleasure. He did not realise this fact immediately, but it gradually dawned on him in the following hours with fateful consequences.

What shocked Pritchard about Magregor was the lack of any redeeming feature. He had known hard cases in abundance, tough, guiltless and unscrupulous men; but never had he known one who, during the course of a voyage, had not revealed some scrap of sentimentality, whether towards the
Mum
tattooed upon their arm, or a girl somewhere, even a dockside whore upon whom a rough affection was bestowed. But Magregor was past his comprehension.

Perhaps a woman could have discovered some good in Macgregor, but Macgregor had never had a proper relationship with a woman. The product of a broken home, whose childhood memories of a council flat were of a ceaseless arguing punctuated by parental violence, drunkenness and absence, Macgregor had escaped to sea. For the turbulence of what he knew of family life, of damp and neglect, of cold baked beans, bed-wetting and incessant noise, of the eternal televised images glowing amid the chaos of squalor, he had exchanged the harsh, lonely environment of a merchant ship. He had had a girlfriend once, more out of desperation than affection, an attempt to conform or be laughed at by other children, a slow, pathetic creature who had discovered an easy way of ingratiating herself with boys. The liaison had lasted until her mother caught them at the base of the stairwell. He had been thrashed senseless by his father and had run away for the first of many times.

The sea life had taken him up and offered him a purpose, but the easy access to drink, the loneliness and the temptations of open stows of cargo had proved too much for him. He had become a lost soul and Pritchard knew it.

‘You're a rotten little bastard,' Pritchard said.

Stevenson's inspection of the upper deck was, of necessity, a cursory, torchlit one, for it was already dark. With the ship pitching into the heavy sea and the wind tearing at his clothing, reducing him again to a chilly state and reminding him his clothes were still damp, he made no attempt to venture too far forward of the main superstructure. To have ventured further would have invited certain death by being swept overboard, for the forward deck was already awash with every alternate wave that the
Matthew Flinders
met head on, white surges that foamed and hissed out of the gloom. Satisfied that there was nothing loose (and with Macgregor hatches he had at least the reassurance that the holds were secure), he made his way back through the occupied public rooms.

In the smoke-room he found the girl interpreter drying her hair on a towel given her by one of the stewards. A tired smile crossed her face as she caught sight of him and he experienced a surge of pleasure at her recognition.

He asked how she was. ‘Okay,' she replied, the word set on two distinct notes. He was struck again by her good looks, her elfin face. The points of her small breasts showed beneath her ragged cotton shirt, raised by her uplifted arms. Desire, sharp and urgent, galled him.

‘You are from Vietnam?' he asked, squatting on his haunches beside her.

‘Yeah.'

‘What is your name?'

‘Phan Thi Tam.' He struggled to repeat the correct intonation. ‘Okay,' she said, ‘you say Tam.'

‘Tam,' Stevenson repeated and she nodded with apparent satisfaction. He put his hand on his chest. ‘My name, Alex.'

It was her turn to repeat the name. She attenuated the
l
, giving the sound a sing-song quality he found enchanting.

‘Very good,' he said. ‘Have you had something to eat?'
He held one cupped hand up to his mouth and made a scooping motion with the other, as though taking rice from a bowl. She laughed, an infectious sound redolent of relief and relaxation.

‘Yeah, sure. Everybody eat.'

They were silent for a moment, weighing each other up, and then she said, with a positiveness which reminded him of how she had decisively seized and ascended the ladder from the motor lifeboat, ‘I okay, Alex. Thank you.'

He stood and gazed down at her. The exhausted boat people were settling to sleep. The smoke-room was lit by only a single bulb and it side-lit her face, throwing the lines of her cheekbones, the ridge of her nose, the convolutions of her lips and the curve of her eyes into delicate relief. She would look like that on a pillow, he thought, then reality displaced romance and he asked, ‘Does anyone else speak English?'

She flashed a quick glance about her. It was at obvious variance with the rapport he assumed they had just established, and he remembered the ammunition clip he had forgotten in her presence. She was no longer looking at him.