Endangered Species (31 page)

Suddenly he made up his mind. Turning forward, he began to run.

A man running on a wildly bucking deck experiences two sensations: that of weightlessness as the deck drops from under him; and that of weighing far more than mere avoirdupois as it changes and rises rapidly beneath him. The first makes him run on tiptoes, the second causes his knees to buckle; in neither case has he control of himself, for a lateral movement of the ship may set an unanticipated sideways component into the equation of balance, and a deck has too many excrescences to allow unimpeded movement. Thus Stevenson fetched up sickeningly against a boat-hoisting winch, just as Macgregor had done hours earlier.

When he reached Captain Mackinnon's cabin, he sank to his knees on the damp carpet before the ship's safe. Catching his breath he tried to recall the combination number. Miraculously the safe opened at his first attempt. Lifting out the revolver he carefully inserted the handful of bullets and snapped the magazine into the handle. Finally he put the weapon inside the waistband of his uniform shorts and buttoned his shirt over his belly.

Outside in the alleyway he paused by Rawlings's door. Then he knocked and, opening it, put his head into the Mate's stuffy cabin.

‘Mr Rawlings,' he called. Stretched out on his mattress the
Mate stirred.

‘Eh? What is it? What's the time?'

‘I think the Old Man could do with a relief on the bridge,' Stevenson said, ‘or some moral support. We're in the vortex. I think you should be up top.'

‘What about the Third Mate?' Rawlings asked, still fuddled with sleep.

‘He's dead,' snapped Stevenson, bringing Rawlings to his senses, before backing out and slamming the door. He peered for a moment up the stairwell to the chart-room. He could hear the low buzz of conversation, presumably Mackinnon and the helmsman. He slipped below.

He thought of all the places the Vietnamese might have gained access to: the gyro-room, the stores alleyway. He quizzed the assistant stewards, but no one had released a key or opened a locker for hours. The galley, a worse shambles than on his earlier visit, yielded nothing, and he probed yard after yard of cable tray with a mounting hopelessness. His task daunted him, for there were so many hiding places on a ship.

He clambered gingerly through the heavy engine-room door, its weight swinging dangerously against his injured shoulder. A wave of hot air and a thunderous noise met his entry. It was to Stevenson, depite his long years of sea service, an alien place. The strict lines of demarcation drawn up by the twin, inter-related disciplines of the British Merchant Navy existed to its bitter end. Class, tradition, personal inclination and sheer English snobbery ensured it.

Thus, even in the extremity of near-desperation, Stevenson entered the huge space, as big and awe-inspiring as an English mediaeval parish church, with a sense of being a stranger. For him to search the vast labyrinth was impossible, but to communicate his apprehensions to Reed was no more than common sense demanded.

As Mackinnon stood on his bridge, Reed still occupied his own command post: the platform. Stevenson shouted the
nub of his intelligence and Reed shook his head and pointed upwards.

‘Ah can see the engine-room door from here. Every time it opens ah can tell – the draught alters a bit. You become used tae these things. Nobody's been below, Alex.'

Somewhat reassured, Stevenson made his way aft along the shaft tunnel. Number Twenty-three Greaser nodded and smiled.

‘Okay?'

‘Okay.'

He climbed upwards through the escape into the sodden squalor of the poop. Here Chinese faces greeted him.

‘No good,' said Number One Greaser, ‘plenty water come in. No good. Come Hong Kong-side, go home. Ship finished. No good. Big wind no good. Company no good. Bastards Ay-ah . . .' and he swore a complex Cantonese oath, continuing all the while to bale out his cabin.

‘You okay, Number One?'

‘Oh, sure, Secon' Office' all okay.'

‘You see boat people come aftside?'

‘Boat people?' the old man queried incredulously. ‘Fucking boat people plenty no good,' an they too were united genealogically with the oath. Admiring the greaser's incredible fortitude, Stevenson made his slow way back to the accommodation via the shaft tunnel and the engine-room while the
Matthew Flinders
crashed and banged her wracked way across the airless void of the vortex.

Guilt, Mackinnon knew, wore a man down more surely than anything. It acted upon the soul with a persistent corrosive power.

If he was susceptible to the workings of conscience.

The qualifying afterthought made him smile wryly to himself. Mackinnon could see little guilt about Rawlings.

‘Thought I'd come up and see if you wanted a relief, sir,' he drawled.

‘Very kind of you,' Mackinnon replied dryly, undeceived.

‘We should be out of the eye soon, the cloud's beginning to build up ahead,' Rawlings went on.

‘Aye, it is. It'll be a head wind and we'll keep her away to the north-east until the wind moderates to an eight or nine before we haul round to the north.'

Rawlings moved forward and jammed himself in the port forward corner of the wheelhouse in imitation of his commander. ‘Wind's stripped miles of paint off the derricks,' he remarked.

‘So it has,' said Mackinnon unmoved from his own vantage point. For a moment they were silent, both thinking it no longer mattered, then Rawlings asked:

‘Are you going below, sir?'

Mackinnon shook his head. ‘Not yet.'

‘Well, there's no point in both of us—'

‘I quite agree,' broke in the Captain. ‘I'd like you to go below and have a look at the woman.'

In the absence of the Mate, Captain Mackinnon resumed his train of thought. Characteristically, he rejected the theory his over-active brain was erecting as a carapace to cover its own inner secrets. Guilt was not universally destructive; it was not even universally acknowledged, for no one of the Captain's generation was able to grant a grain of goodness to
all
mankind. He was dissembling: guilt lay heavy on the Captain's ageing soul. Guilt had once driven him to the verge of alcoholism. Guilt had sprung the metaphysical locks of his fate-laden philosophy, guided his thinking as he jostled his lonely conscience through the current crisis wherein he pitted his skill against the typhoon. He recalled the ideas he had had earlier, seeking to drive them further, closer to the truth.

In order to make judgements a man needed more than experience, experience merely gave him options. What he had drawn on in the past hours was more than cunning, in its original sense, the sense that linked it with knowledge. What
had guided him was his intuition, his own luck, a sense bounded by its own restraint: his guilt.

Again and again, in these moments of enduring, of waiting until the ship battled her way out of the typhoon, his mind went over and over these abstract obsessions: how things turned full circle, of cause and effect; luck and guilt, opportunity and misfortune; and overall – fate. Somewhere – Conrad, wasn't it? – he had read that life was a ‘droll thing', a ‘mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose'.

The concept chilled him.

No landsman could ever truly know the loneliness of the sea life; how omnipresent was the job, how few the distractions. If a man's conscience was troubled, guilt grew like a wart upon his nose, conspicuously, unavoidably. And from an early time Captain Mackinnon had acquired his measure of guilt to hump about the world's oceans; no very great thing, perhaps to a landsman. No very great thing to many seamen either; a peccadillo, one might say, except the indiscretion was passionate and, in its own intense way, sincere. Its power to trouble him lay in this sincerity; its power to destroy, in the fact that it was inimical to his sworn love for Shelagh.

He had for many years enjoyed his share of inconclusive skirmishes with the whores of Hong Kong and Japan; the willowy, long-haired Chinese in their brocaded silk
cheongsam
, the dainty, erotically tantalising Japanese in either traditional
kimono
or cheap copies of Yankee fashion. On a cold night in Yokohama, the tiny, brightly lit bars, each with its glowing brazier, hot towels and the solicitous attentions of willing and concupiscent women, were a welcome distraction. Jubilant
mama-san
welcomed the foreign seafarers like Trojan heroes and their blandishments were well-nigh irresistible. Mackinnon recalled, too, the lost world of Blood Alley in Shanghai, closed down by the crusading Communists not long after he
had been bombed in the Whang-Po on the old
James Cook
. There a man, no matter how perverse his tastes, or how far gone in debauchery, could find satisfaction for the most bizarre appetite.

For the young Mackinnon most of this had been no more than a colourful backcloth, something to be enjoyed as an accompaniment to a run ashore, but never indulged in seriously, for at his shoulder stood the constant shadow of Shelagh. Nothing, he had consoled himself when the temptation became unbearable, was worth losing her, for she had come into his life after he had faced death in an open boat and only a fool would hazard so obvious an intervention of fate.

But, in the end, Mackinnon had been a fool.

It was his first voyage as Chief Officer. As almost her last influential act before her death, the elderly Mrs Dent had sanctioned his appointment to the
Sir Robert Fitzroy
, Eastern Steam's newest cargo-liner. They had completed their discharge of the outward cargo at Kobe and been ordered into dry dock, since the ship was suffering problems with her tail shaft and stern gland. There they had suffered delay, first from a typhoon, then from the prolonged attempts of the original builders to evade responsibility for a scored shaft. The wranglings of solicitors in the distant United Kingdom drew a curtain of idleness on the ship; her crew awaited the outcome uncomplaining, for the bright lights, the girls and the cheap shops of post-war Japan beckoned. Eventually even Mackinnon's pretence to being busy could be sustained no longer. A night in a bar loosened his appetites. Warily he refused a second. Instead he took a train to Kyoto, intent on enjoying the sights. The young woman sitting opposite him was dressed in the western fashion with a cotton print dress and high-heeled shoes. Her black hair fell to her shoulders with the seductive curve of a permanent wave copied, Mackinnon thought, from Jean Harlow. She was reading a copy of the
Mainichi Daily
Times
, betraying a knowledge of English, and his restiveness must have communicated itself to her, for despite the demure attention she paid to her newspaper their eyes met several times. Though both shied nervously away, this mutual avoidance in so confined a space inevitably caused Mackinnon's nervously crossed legs to brush her precious nylons.

‘I'm sorry,' he stammered as she lowered her paper, sensing antipathy from the other occupants of the carriage, sober, serious middle-class Japanese in dark
kimono
and business suits.

‘Okay,' she said, her accent American. ‘You are English,
né
?'

‘Yes,' he replied.

‘But not a tourist, you have not any camera,' she said, ‘and not army.'

‘No.' He smiled. Her accent and her deductions, together with her aping of western fashion, reminded him that her contact with westerners was a result of American occupation. He tried to place her age. Ten years his junior? ‘Well, perhaps today I am a tourist,' he admitted. ‘I am going to see Kyoto.'

‘
Ah-so
. Kyoto is very beautiful.' She smiled wistfully. ‘So, I think you come here on ship.'

‘Yes.'

‘And you are the Captain,
né
?'

‘Not quite.'

She frowned. ‘You are Lieutenant-Number-One?'

He nodded. ‘More or less.' She shook her head at the idiom. He leaned forward in his seat, aware of the increase in hostility the conversation was generating in the compartment. ‘In a British ship, a cargo ship,' he added, eager to dissociate himself from all engines of war. Then, inspired, he reached for her paper. ‘May I show you?'

He found the shipping pages and pointed to the announcement that the MV
Sir Robert Fitzroy
was
dry-docked but it was anticipated she would be open for loading in a week's time and that prospective shippers should contact her agents.

‘
Ah-so
.' She pronounced the unfamiliar syllables of the ship's name. Gently he corrected her.

‘Fitz-roy,' she said carefully. ‘This is English name, yes?'

‘Yes. Your English is very good. Do you read the
Mainichi Times
for your work, or to improve your English?'

‘For both,' she replied, ‘but it is always best I talk to somebody.'

‘Better,' he said, grinning at her, ‘always better . . .' He tried to explain the difference between the comparative and superlative.

When he had finished she said, ‘I show you Kyoto.' Her eyes sparkling, she added, ‘And you talk English to me. That will be
good
.'

‘What is your name?'

‘Akiko.'

‘Okay, Akiko-san, I agree. My name is John.'

He sat back content, looking at her as she stared from the window. The train raced on. The factories and smoking chimneys surrounded by the tiny, fragile houses of the inhabitants passed in a blur. Already the burgeoning of Japan's industrial might was rising from the ashes of defeat.

He was never quite certain where Akiko was going that day. He learned later, when they sat in a small tea-house and he asked her about her family, that her only relatives were an aunt and uncle.

‘You have no mother or father, no brothers or sisters?'

‘My father was a soldier,' she said expressionlessly. ‘He was killed in the war. My mother . . .' She turned her head and caught the eyes of an elderly couple in drab
kimono
of brown, her voice faltering. Mackinnon regretted his question.