The Golden Reef (1969) (8 page)

Keeton was on to Bristow before he had time to ram the bolt home again. The breech of the Lee-Enfield was open when he hit Bristow. Bristow went down and the rifle fell from his hands. Keeton hit him again; the bullet had scared him and he wanted to get the fear out of his system; perhaps he could beat it out by smashing Bristow.

Bristow began to howl. There was blood on Keeton’s knuckles; he did not know whether it was his own or Bristow’s. He did not care.

‘You murdering bastard. I ought to kill you.’

Bristow was whimpering, all the fight gone out of him. ‘I didn’t mean to hit you, Charlie. It was just a joke. I aimed to miss.’

‘I don’t like that kind of joke.’

He went on hitting, smashing his fist into Bristow’s stomach, into his face, into any part of him that was vulnerable. Bristow stopped howling suddenly. He lay on the deck, not moving.

Keeton picked up the rifle, carried it to the side and dropped it overboard. When the water cleared he could see it lying on the coral. As the ripples passed over it, it seemed to twist like a snake; it became sinuous, the barrel no longer stiff and straight; it might now have been made of rubber.

Keeton left Bristow lying on the forecastle and made his way aft. He lifted the cat off number four hatch, holding it by the tail. He swung it round and round in the air and then suddenly let go. The cat flew away over the ship’s side and fell far off in deep water.

The days passed, the weeks, the months. The flesh rotted from the body suspended in the engine-room; the face became a grinning skull, mocking the two survivors with this reminder of the ugliness that lay beneath the envelope of skin and flesh, of muscle and sinew.

‘It gives me the creeps,’ Bristow said.

Keeton looked at him stonily. ‘You give me the creeps, fat boy.’

They had settled down into a state of neutrality, but neither made any pretence now of liking the other; all that had been finally brushed away by the bullet that had passed so close to Keeton’s ear. That was the kind of thing that could not be forgotten; it had left a scar on their relations that would be there always.

Bristow had made an attempt to smooth things over. ‘I never meant to shoot you, Charlie. It was the drink that done it, not me.’

‘It looked like your finger on the trigger. I never saw a bottle of whisky that could fire a rifle.’

‘You know what I mean.’ Bristow’s voice was plaintive. He looked a mess after what Keeton had done to him; his lips were split, his eyes black and puffy, his whole body a mass of bruises. ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing. You hit me and I lost my head. I was angry. Well, you know how it is. You were angry too.’

‘I had a right to be angry.’

‘Look,’ Bristow said. ‘Suppose we forget it, forget the whole thing. We got to live together. I promise you it won’t never happen again.’

‘You can bet your sweet life it won’t happen again,’ Keeton said. ‘But I’m forgetting nothing.’

Bristow gave up shaving and allowed his face to become covered with an unkempt ginger beard. Keeton was more fastidious; he preferred the feel of a clean-shaven chin. He trimmed his own hair with a pair of scissors because he would not ask Bristow to do the job for him, and he took regular exercise to keep his body in condition. While Bristow became progressively flabbier, Keeton remained tough and hard, ready for any eventuality.

To add to the supply of fresh water, the extent of which they had no means of determining, they spread tarpaulins to catch the rain when it fell. Those days when the rain was falling and they were confined to the shelter of the accommodation were the most trying of all. The patter of the rain was a monotonous background noise that frayed their nerves, and the feeling of being cooped up became almost unbearable. Even in fine weather the ship was their prison; but then they could walk the decks, lie in the sun or scan the horizon through binoculars.

The thought of the gold possessed Keeton’s mind. It became an obsession, blotting out everything else. He even hated the thought that Bristow might have half of it. He wanted it all.

Each day he would go down to the strong-room and look at the cases of gold. He would stare at the naked ingot; he would pick it up and caress it, drawing from it a sense of exultation. He tried to calculate what the whole treasure was worth, but he had no values on which to base his calculations. He did not know the price of an ounce of gold, for it was a value that had never previously interested him. And how many ounces were there? That he could not tell either. What kind of figure could one reasonably put upon the whole? Ten thousand pounds? More than that surely. A hundred thousand? A million?

Once when he went to the strong-room he found the door standing open, and he experienced a shock such as a miser
might feel on discovering the theft of his savings. For a moment he had the ridiculous idea that thieves had broken in and had stolen the gold. Then his brain started to work normally again. What thieves? A wreck stranded in the wastes of the ocean was free from that kind of intrusion.

He went into the strong-room and found Bristow with a chisel in his hand. Bristow was levering up the lid of another case.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Keeton demanded.

Bristow began to stammer. He looked at Keeton and he looked at the chisel in his hand. He seemed to be wishing he could hide it somewhere.

‘I was just looking. Checking up.’

Keeton felt a surge of resentment. ‘What right have you—’ he began, and then stopped.

Bristow was on the defensive. ‘As much right as you, I should think. You come down here often enough. I’ve seen you. This stuff’s half mine, don’t forget. I got a right to look at my half anyway.’

‘Your half! You don’t deserve half, you spineless—’

‘Now take it easy, Charlie,’ Bristow said. He gave Keeton a sharp glance in which apprehension was mingled with suspicion. ‘Here, you aren’t thinking of taking the lot for yourself, are you? Because that wouldn’t be honest, you know. Fair’s fair when all’s said and done. Besides, there’s enough for both of us to be rich.’

Keeton said: ‘Neither of us is going to be rich if we can’t get this stuff away.’ He was thinking how ridiculous it was to be arguing about the share-out of the gold when in all likelihood it would never be moved from its present resting-place.

‘That’s true enough,’ Bristow said. He looked at the gold and shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a crying shame, that’s what it is, a crying shame.’

‘You can cry if you like,’ Keeton said.

When the first storm hit the ship Bristow was scared. Keeton was uneasy too; he was afraid for the gold. For his own skin he no longer had any fears; it seemed to him that without the gold life would not be worth living anyway.

The wind stirred up the sea and flung it over the
Valparaiso.
Waves battered against her hull until she shuddered under the impact. Inside the ship Keeton could hear the keel grinding on the coral; it was an ominous sound.

‘She’s going to break up,’ Bristow muttered. He tried to draw courage from a bottle of brandy while Keeton looked at him with contempt he did not trouble to conceal.

‘The ship’s got a stouter heart than you. She’ll fight it out.’

The
Valparaiso
fought it out and the storm passed. The wind died away and the sea went down. The next day the sun shone hotly and the moisture on the decks evaporated and vanished as though it had never been.

‘You see,’ Keeton said. ‘She didn’t break up.’

Bristow was lying in his hammock with his stomach protruding like a well stuffed pillow. Seeing it, Keeton had the idea that perhaps Bristow was storing away a reserve of food in case of a future shortage. If famine came he would be able to feed for a time on the fat accumulated in his own body.

‘Not this time,’ Bristow admitted. ‘But maybe next time or the time after.’

‘We’ll worry about that when it comes.’

‘I’m worried about it now.’

‘You’re not just worried. You’re dead scared.’

‘All right, so I’m scared. So would anybody be what didn’t want his nut seeing to.’

‘I’m not scared.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ Bristow said.

Keeton painted the ship. It was something to pass the time; he hated to be idle. And while he painted he thought over his plan. He hated to let Bristow in on the plan, but he supposed it would be necessary. Unless something happened to Bristow.

Bristow thought painting was just another symptom of mental decay. ‘What good is a coat of paint going to do this ship? She’ll never sail anywhere again. Let her rust.’

‘I like painting,’ Keeton said.

‘You’re mad.’

‘Maybe I am. How do you fancy sharing quarters with a
madman?’

Bristow looked uneasy. ‘It don’t do to joke about things like that. You never know.’

‘Who said I was joking?’ Keeton asked, and left Bristow to meditate on the question.

The months passed slowly. Time was meaningless. For the two men on the wreck the days were a monotonous and unending repetition. They had no news; they knew nothing of what was going on in the world. They had no knowledge of the rejoicings of VE day, no suspicion that in another part of the Eastern Hemisphere a bomb had been dropped that was to alter the entire course of history. On their iron island they were insulated, left alone and in ignorance of all that occurred in Europe and in Asia, and in the council chambers of the nations. They could not know that the war was over and that demobilization had started. They lived on in their splendid isolation, and while Keeton painted and fished and practised shooting the sun and the stars with Peterson’s sextant, Bristow lounged in a hammock and ate and drank and slept.

A hundred times Keeton decided that now was the time to get away; a hundred times he altered his decision and waited. Bristow made no attempt to persuade him to take this irrevocable step, for the open boat held no attraction for Bristow. Only when storms battered the wreck did he feel that perhaps it would have been better to have got away while the going was good.

Keeton’s own thoughts were centred on the gold and his plan for taking it. It was unfortunate that success depended on Bristow’s co-operation but he could see no way round this problem; and the plan itself was so simple in its essentials that he did not see how it could fail. Nevertheless, he put off revealing it to Bristow until the revelation could be put off no longer. He had decided that it was time to take the initial step, and that step was to get away from the
Valparaiso.

So, with some reluctance, he broached the subject to the man who, unwelcome though he might be, must through force of circumstances become his partner.

‘Johnnie,’ he said, ‘I want to have a talk with you.’

Bristow looked surprised; since the rifle episode they had spoken to each other but they had not talked.

‘What would that be about, Charlie?’

‘Leaving.’

Bristow sat up. ‘You’re thinking of going?’ There was a trace of uneasiness in his voice and he did not look happy. Only when the
Valparaiso
was being shaken by rough seas did he feel any urge to leave the wreck. At other times the undoubted comforts of the ship were inclined to seem infinitely preferable to the hazards of an open boat.

‘Yes, Johnnie,’ Keeton said, ‘I’m thinking of going.’

Bristow pulled nervously at his straggling beard. ‘Oughtn’t we to hang on a bit longer? We might still be picked up.’

‘I don’t want to be picked up.’

‘You don’t want to? For Pete’s sake, why not?’

‘If we’re picked up we lose the gold. You want your share, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course I do, but—’

‘So we’ve got to get away.’

‘In that boat?’

‘How else? Now, listen; I’ve worked out a plan. First we make for the Fiji Islands.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if my calculations are correct they’re the nearest.’

‘How far?’ Bristow asked.

‘About four hunded miles maybe.’

Bristow looked aghast. ‘As far as that? We’ll never make it. Not in that boat.’

‘Plenty of people have sailed further than four hundred miles in open boats.’

‘Maybe they have, but—’

‘Do you want to stay here and rot?’

‘Well, no, but—’

‘Then it’s the boat or nothing.’ He had made his decision and he knew that Bristow would fall into line; he would never face being left alone on the wreck. ‘Now this is the plan – when we reach Fiji we say nothing about the ship being on a reef.’

‘I don’t see—’

‘Oh, for crying out loud!’ Keeton’s patience with Bristow had no great endurance. ‘What have you got for brains? Dough? What happens if we say the ship is on a reef? They send out a salvage expedition for the gold. And what do we get? A big thank you and nine months’ pay. That’d be fine, wouldn’t it?’

‘Oh,’ Bristow said, and he thought this over. ‘Oh, yes, I see what you mean. But how do we explain where we’ve been all this time? Nobody’ll ever believe we’ve just been drifting about in an open boat, living on rain water and fish.’

‘It happened like this,’ Keeton said. ‘After the others left the ship and the storm died down we managed to patch up the only remaining lifeboat, and then because the ship was gradually sinking we got away in the boat. It was just in time, too, because we saw the ship sink not half an hour later. After that we sailed for about a week before drifting up on an uninhabited island. We stayed on the island for about nine months, living on coconuts and fish and hoping to be picked up. Finally we decided to take a chance again in the boat.’

‘Well, that’s not far off the truth anyway. It sounds likely enough. But I still don’t see how we get the gold.’

‘We scrape some money together; it may take us a few years but it’ll be worth it in the end. Then when we’ve got enough we pick up an old fishing boat or something of that kind which we can sail out here, and we take off the gold.’

A grin slowly spread over Bristow’s face. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Charlie. You’re the boy with the brains, I’d never have thought of that.’

‘I know,’ Keeton said. He turned away from Bristow. ‘We leave tomorrow.’

Bristow turned his head and stared out over the wide, rippling surface of the sea. ‘It’s going to be a long voyage,’ he said. ‘Oh lord, it’s going to be a long, long haul.’

They stocked the boat with provisions; they filled wooden breakers and metal cans with fresh water and stowed them in with the provisions. They rigged a canvas awning over the fore part of the boat and put under it mattresses and blankets. Keeton
also took Peterson’s sextant and the charts that he might need.

‘Don’t you think it’ll look queer you having them?’ Bristow asked. ‘You wouldn’t be expected to know anything about navigation.’

‘I’ll get rid of them before we make our landfall.’

‘How about taking a few bars of gold?’

‘Talk sense. How would we explain that?’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be a bit difficult. Pity though; we could have used some gold to buy that other boat.’

‘We’ll just have to work for it.’

Keeton made a last survey of the ship. He climbed up to the bridge and looked at the gaping hole in the boat-deck that had been torn by the shells from the submarine. It seemed that all that had happened half a century ago. He was no longer the man he had been then; he was older, harder; his outlook had subtly changed. He knew now exactly what he wanted, and he meant to get it whatever obstacle might lie ahead.