Endangered Species (22 page)

He no longer had the confidence of the spider; suddenly he had become the fly transfixed in the web, the eternal loser, a sensation made worse by the knowledge that his downfall was largely self-inflicted. Taylor had reached the moment when he had to decide whether God existed or not, for without what he conceived God to represent, he was utterly without resource. And although Taylor had glimpsed the infinite in a tropical night, his search was no longer outside in the wilderness of wind and water now battering the
Matthew Flinders
. It had nothing to do with the typhoon; it was within himself. He was bound to his body, unable to leap into the infinite in search of the inconceivable concept, that which cannot be grasped, that which ‘God' was used to evoke.

But the numinous moment of hope had gone. Writhing down into himself to discover a spark of fire divine enough to light his weary soul to hell, he found – nothing.

And his isolation was the more terrible because, like Prometheus chained to his rock, he was bound to this battered ship while vultures ate his liver before his very eyes.

There was a knock at his cabin door.

‘Ol' Man wants you on the bridge now, Turd.' The cheeky Scouse pun on his rank made him look up. Pritchard stood in the doorway.

‘Aye, aye,' he answered mechanically.

‘Ol' Man's up top an' its blowing like fuck,' Pritchard added by way of encouragement, for Taylor's cabin stank of whisky and his eyes were glassy in the harsh glare of the cabin lights.

‘Thanks.' Taylor was conscious of Pritchard's stare and
rubbed his eyes.

‘Oim jus' making a cup of tea. It'll be in de chart-room, okay?'

‘Sure. Thanks. I'll be right up.'

Taylor lowered his hands. Pritchard had gone. He could wash the tears from his face now.

Mackinnon stood in the wheelhouse and found himself functioning in a somnambulist state, awake enough to be ready to react to the slightest demand on him, but in a kind of half-doze which conserved his energy. He could keep going for hours now. Inches from his nose the clear view screen whirred noisily, except that the noise was but one note in the howling cacophony battering his dulled senses. He stared down at the familiar foredeck of the
Matthew Flinders
burying itself to the rail as the stern lifted and the bow hurried forward in a scending motion, driving onwards in pursuit of the preceding sea. Spray filled the air, so he looked through a dense mist and came to rely upon the endless pull and flex of muscle and tendon, and the tremors of the twisted hull, to tell him of the stresses to which each thrust of the sea subjected the ship.

On the starboard quarter the white, shaggy heads of sea after successive sea reared and roared until they formed a backdrop to the other part of him, the spirit recharging itself from resources deep within him, leaking energy into his brain and muscles like intravenous glucose. In this trance-like state Captain Mackinnon preserved himself for a long time, deriving his strength from his communion with God. The God he knew existed beyond the realms of childish or academical shoreside theology. The God John Mackinnon had discovered from the life he had led at sea. It had never been a matter of doubt, though the precise nature of God's substance raised itself occasionally as a matter for mild private debate in the Captain's mind. Nor did Mackinnon nurse the ridiculous and rooted prejudice that
God in any way, by placation or prayer, by supplication or sacrifice, took any real interest in him personally. Sparrows might fall and God might notice, but God did not prevent their death.

But God did exist; of that the Captain entertained not the slightest doubt whatsoever.

Now, as the typhoon worked itself steadily up the Beaufort scale he wondered why he had never before noticed God's presence in the wind. This howling madness had a primeval quality about it as it clawed at them and forced the mighty ocean to do its bidding. It was a delusion to think that it obeyed studied and recognised patterns of behaviour, for it did no more than conform to a predictable average. In truth it reserved to itself the right to do as it pleased and to manifest itself as chaos, a random storming of atoms, a noise that drove into his brain, numbing him, assaulting his innermost self and demanding entry into his very soul.

Such a thing
had
to be God!

Mackinnon passed from the world of men. From the planes of puny power; from the world of directors and chairmen, of politicians and playboys. He stood upon his tiny bridge amid a world of elemental force and numinous presence.

He, too, felt his isolation now, not merely the loneliness of command, but that of judgement before Almighty God. And, oddly, he felt no fear, only a great wonder.

Macgregor had never known God. God came in the same category as art, justice and love. God was bullshit. Macgregor knew fear and hunger, loneliness and hate. Just now he was full of fear. When Pritchard had got him out of his bunk and he had pulled himself together he had emerged on deck to claw his way to the bridge.

Out on the open boat-deck he had seen for the first time the size of the seas rushing at them from the hellish darkness
astern. God was not in the wind for Macgregor, only the devil of a fate that had forever had a down on the Macgregors of this world. Macgregor was not awestruck, for his imagination was incapable of encompassing anything bigger than his own enormous grudge.

For Magregor the boat-deck was a lonely place inhabited by malignant demons intent on impeding his progress to the bridge. Eighty feet of bucking teak planking ran wet with spray, inches deep across its surface, so that it plucked at his feet. Lit harshly by the minimal lighting the
Matthew Flinders
burned at sea, it was a place of steel corners and jutting dangers, of winches, boat davits and ventilators. Magregor was sodden and bruised by the time he had been buffeted forward to the bridge ladder.

Pain was the spur that goaded Macgregor. Pain had always unleashed a venomous resentment in him which generated its own hatreds, feeding his enmity for all things. Deprivation, poverty and neglect had been Macgregor's world since birth and even the tolerant, pragmatic regime of the Merchant Navy was something to be fought and resisted in a hopeless, endless fight with a world of circumstances always implacably hostile.

He had sworn viciously as he had been bruised but, taking the wheel, fear and the enduring instinct to survive kept him company again, compelling him to do his duty and keep the ship on the course Mackinnon desired. But Macgregor was no true seaman and lacked the instinctive response that makes a good helmsman. He was unable to anticipate the movement of the ship and was, at best, merely a reactive operator. For a while he kept a tolerable hold on the ship, but then, from time to time, he lost her and she threatened to skid round towards the dreaded position of broaching.

On each occasion Mackinnon stirred from his post to stand like Nemesis at Macgregor's elbow, silent, forbidding and all-powerful. Unperceiving of much existing outside his immediate self, Macgregor feared Captain Mackinnon more
than the typhoon and fought, in self-justification, for control of the ship again.

Taylor was there too, threatening Macgregor in a more physical way, and by his very presence as the Captain's satrap triggered off Macgregor's smouldering resentment against all whom providence had elevated above and thus against him. Macgregor had not forgotten the threats made by the Third Mate. The insensate hatred that ran bilious in his personality poured itself into his ego.

In the radio-room Sparks finished writing to the dictates of the dots and dashes crackling through on the airwaves. Bracing himself he tapped out his acknowledgement of the signals then made his way to the bridge. Halfway along the boat-deck, fifteen minutes after Macgregor had traversed it, he paused and took stock of their situation.

‘Christ,' he muttered, unaware the wind had actually dropped a little, even though the effort of moving forward made him gasp, ‘if the wife could see me now . . .'

He found the Captain and stirred him from his trance. On Mackinnon's instruction, he read out the contents of the messages by torchlight.

‘Both from Hong Kong Radio, sir, for the Master,
Matthew Flinders
. The first one's an acknowledgement of our typhoon information and then a request for clarification of our flag state, sir.'

‘What the hell do they want that for? They can find it out by ringing the agent.' Mackinnon's voice was genuinely puzzled.

‘I, er, think it may have something to do with the refugees, sir. It's my guess they want you to admit you're not British.'

‘What d'you mean I'm not British?' Fatigue made Mackinnon testy.

‘Well, the ship's no longer British, sir.' Sparks's voice bore traces of the patience of the experienced. He had never
aspired to command, settling early in his career for a specialisation that made him forever subordinate. It was, he was fond of saying in his cups, why he made such an excellent husband.

‘You think we may have a problem with the immigration people?'

‘It's very likely, sir. I read something in the
Straits Times
about the camps in Hong Kong being overcrowded.'

‘Were we supposed to leave those people to drown?'

Sparks was wisely silent at Mackinnon's outraged rhetorical question.

‘It's just a guess, sir.'

‘Yes, yes, I know. And you're probably correct. What's the other message?'

‘It's from Dentco, sir and personal. D'you want—'

‘No, no, read it out.'

‘It's confirming your wife's time of arrival, sir, tomorrow evening.'

Tomorrow evening. Mackinnon turned once more to the wheelhouse window. Tomorrow evening. Where would he and his ship be tomorrow evening? It seemed an eternity distant.

On the bridge Mackinnon considered what to do next. With the wind on the starboard quarter the
Matthew Flinders
would slowly move out of the path of the advancing typhoon on a curving course. This was a result of the indraught of the air as it circulated and was drawn towards the eye of the storm. The wind-generated waves did not alter their angle with the same speed, they lagged slightly, so the nearer the eye an observer was, the more the angle increased until at the centre all was confusion as waves rushed in from every point of the compass.

As the actual wind constantly created new waves, the ‘old' waves, the cumulative residue of air that had now moved on, were left behind as swell waves. Dispensing with the landsman's notion of ‘waves', the seaman refers to the inequities in the sea's surface as ‘seas' and ‘swells', a precise rather than a pedantic differentiation. A swell, though it might be monstrous in size, is a decreasing force; losing its angular shape it becomes rounded, like an ancient mountain. It possesses no breaking crest, but if unimpeded it will travel thousands of miles across an ocean as it gradually decays, long-distance evidence of a gale or storm, an observable early warning. In this decaying state it will do no more than cause a ship to roll if she is beam on to it or pitch if she heads into it, with a consequent corkscrew motion at
other angles. With sea and swell astern the motion is called scending, for it contains a precipitate forward motion not unlike a sleigh-ride.

The swells then assaulting the
Matthew Flinders
were still relatively young. They possessed enormous kinetic energy and it would be a long time before they became mere benign ground swells, low and slow. Their rolling and pitching motion was a danger because they were still steep and the period between the passing of their crests remained short. More important, their angle was not yet significantly different from the wind-made waves that were constantly being produced by the screaming air as it rushed towards the vortex. The combined effect was to produce a very steep, comparatively short sea that flung the ship wildly about and in which the danger of being pooped remained.

Captain Mackinnon was well aware of this and it presented him with a dilemma. In theory there was a classic remedy: oil. The less easily answerable part of his problem was how to deliver the oil and who was to do it. There were notable examples quoted in the seamanship books of, as it was quaintly put, ‘the efficacy of oil in quelling the sea'.

Oil, and only a little of it, was necessary, spread in a thin film which damped down the breaking seas, robbed them of their crests and therefore rendered them much less dangerous.

Captain Mackinnon had seen plenty of oil slicks during the war and could vouch for their practical value; moreover, Mackinnon knew that God helped those who helped themselves.

There were drums of lubricating oil stored in the steering gear. They could be reached by going aft from the engine-room through the shaft tunnel and up the escape, the route by which he had earlier ordered the greasers, accommodated aft under the poop, to use. From the after end of the shaft tunnel, access to the poop was achieved by ascending the vertical ladder of the tunnel escape shaft. The
steering flat was conveniently close to the greasers' lavatory. Half a bale of waste dropped into one of the pans there and kept sodden with viscous lube oil would, with an occasional flushing, spread astern of them, damping down the seas and rendering them, at least on a comparative scale as things now stood, relatively harmless. Resolved on this course of action, Mackinnon turned from the window.

In the wheelhouse Taylor stood keeping a watchful eye on the useless runt Macgregor. Taylor would organise the matter, Mackinnon concluded. Judging by his recent performance he was at his best with a task to attend to. After amputating legs this would be simple.

Holding on to the engine telegraph, then edging round Macgregor, Mackinnon began to shout an explanation of what he wanted done.

Taylor bent to hear what the Captain was saying, taking his attention from the helmsman. For some time Macgregor's steering had been steady; he seemed to be getting the hang of the thing and, in any case, had only about another fifteen minutes before he was relieved. Standing over Magregor, glad of something to do, Taylor's mood had swung back again to one of groundless optimism. He was actually amused by the grunting effort Macgregor put into his exertions, writing off fifty per cent as being for his benefit. Had he been less introverted, Taylor might have smelt the musk of the man, the exudations of fear and anxiety. For a man unused to any form of real responsibility, this supervised torture was a hell to Macgregor from which there was no escape.