Deck boy, p.16
Deck Boy, page 16
Soon I found myself on the edge of town – at least the part that seamen know. There were few streetlights. People sat on verandas, watching as I passed. As I reached the squares, light spilled from wooden buildings and concrete doorways. Above my head the ever-stirring palms were silhouetted against a sky of deep, intense blue.
Most of the shops were shut. A man who spoke little English, his teeth brown and last strands of hair greased back, sold me a strange-flavoured ice cream. I handed him a five-pound note and got a fistful of crumpled notes and coins in return. After a few licks I dropped the ice cream down a drain and wandered on.
Three local youths gathered in a doorway, watching as I drew close. One picked his teeth. Another, barefoot, sat on the step. My heart quickened, I got ready to run. But none moved or commented as I passed by and soon they were left behind.
The bars were livening up. A crowd of foreign seamen, chattering loudly and larking about, approached me down the pavement. With good-humour they parted to let me through.
A girl in a tight skirt stepped into the glow of a streetlight and gave me a smile. It was my biggest fright yet. I hurried across the road.
The walls of the bars were crudely painted to attract customers: big-busted señoritas with flowers in their hair, happy drunks, south-sea islands, blossoming trees, sailors in bell-bottoms, girls winking, couples dancing. Meet your friends in here read a sign beneath a bar-room scene of leering seamen with foaming pints and girls on their knees.
For half an hour I wandered the town. Bats flitted above a fountain. I bought a baseball cap with Panama printed across the front. One by one the last shops were closing. There wasn’t much for me, I thought, in Colón and Cristóbal at this time of night, and turned back towards the docks.
A church doorway stood open and I went in. The holy statues and smell of incense were unfamiliar to me but I liked it, liked the peace, and sat for a few minutes. There in the gloom were the Virgin Mary, Christ on the Cross, the figures of saints I did not recognise. I found them comforting. A hunched old lady, the only other person in the church, sat saying her rosary. A cluster of candles flickered in the draught. On my way out I hesitated by a small stone font on the wall, uncertain whether a boy brought up in the Church of England was permitted, then dipped my fingers in the holy water and crossed myself. As I reached the pavement it was nice to feel a cold drop trickling between my eyebrows.
Charlie had told me where to find Matteo’s but I had no idea where I was and had given it up, so it was a surprise to see the name flashing above a decoration of green neon palm trees, red neon stars and a blue neon lagoon not fifty metres away. I’d had enough of the town by that time and wasn’t in the mood, but I thought at least I could look in. Tucking my money to the bottom of my pocket and drawing a very apprehensive breath, I ventured through the entrance.
At the age of fourteen I had never entered any bar by myself, let alone a tropical waterfront dive like Matteo’s. At once the heat and noise enveloped me: loud music, sailors shouting, women screaming orders. The room was bursting at the seams and so, from what I could make out, was a darker room beyond. Every table was full. Waitresses in sexy clothes and money belts squeezed past with bottles and trays. Sailors grabbed their bottoms and caught their waists with hairy arms.
I circled the room looking for Charlie, Smoky or any of the Trader crowd. Accidentally I trod on the toes of one of the waitresses. She turned on me with flashing eyes and a torrent of furious Spanish. I backed away, apologising profusely, my cheeks on fire.
The people I knew were not there. I thought I would wait ten minutes and fought my way to the bar. The barman, fat and sweating, shouted at me angrily and pointed to a table. I didn’t understand what he meant. He shouted again.
A woman stood at my shoulder. “You are Eenglish?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He tell you it is table service only.” She was thin as a stick and as old or older than the mothers of my friends, but with her hair dyed a matt black and a feathery green dress cut short, she didn’t look like any of them. “You are lonely boy, yes?” She took my hand. “Come, I find you a place to sit. You buy me a drink.” Her eyes scanned the room.
“No!” I pulled my hand away. “Thank you. I was just looking for a friend. I’ve got to go.”
Careless how many waitresses I trampled, how many drinks I spilled, I hurried from the room and took to my heels across the square. Behind me the hubbub I had caused faded into the night.
Steve Twists his Ankle
“YOU’RE BACK early.”
Philip was relieving the AB on gangway duty.
“Didn’t fancy it much.” I told him about my time ashore. “What’s doing on board?”
“Quiet as the grave.”
We were taking on fresh water. Two hoses from the quay pulsed rhythmically. An engineer checked one of the couplings.
“Not be so quiet when they start coming back.”
“Off duty by then.” He nodded. “Messman didn’t go ashore.”
A hunched figure sat on the fo’csle head. His crumpled white jacket and trousers glowed in the moonlight.
“Poor Ossie. Is he OK?”
“Seems happy enough. Just wants to be alone for a bit.”
But I knew more than Philip. “I’ll go up and have a chat. See you later.”
Limon Bay was bathed in moonlight. The majestic ships lay at their moorings.
I crossed the foredeck and climbed to the fo’csle head. Ossie half-sat on the windlass, his pumpkin face uplifted to the moon. It was full and fat, riding high. Small clouds shone white against the night sky.
“Hello, Ben. Been ashore?”
“Mm. For an hour or so.”
“Lovely night. So peaceful.” After the bars and drunks and women of Colón, Ossie’s voice was strangely pure. “I’m g-glad you’ve come. You or Barbara or one of the others.”
“Hardly anyone left on board.”
“Yes, I know.” He hesitated. “B-Ben, can I ask you to give me a little hand with something?”
“Course. What is it?”
“I’ll show you.” He pushed himself to his feet. “But you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone.”
“Depends what it is.”
“Nothing bad. You d-don’t even have to do anything, just keep a l-lookout for a couple of minutes.”
“I don’t want to get involved in any more trouble. Things are bad enough already.”
“No one will even know.” He turned and bumped into me. “Please, Ben! While everyone’s ashore. It the only ch-chance I’ve got.”
We made our way to his cabin. The door was locked. “And you won’t tell anyone?”
“It’s nothing bad?”
The baby-blue eyes slid away. “No.”
“All right then, Ossie.”
“Say it again. Say I p-promise not to tell.”
“Oh, come on!” I said. “Get on with it.”
As the door swung open a smell of joss-sticks and fish hit me in the face. I prepared myself for something strange.
He switched on the light.
At first glance, Ossie’s cabin was much as I remembered it. Then I saw the casket containing his mother’s ashes. It had been taken from his locker and now stood in pride of place on the chest of drawers with a squat candle at each corner. At that moment they were unlit.
He shut the door behind us. As I looked around I spotted other objects. Playing cards were spread on the coffee table. Several were named: The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hanged Man, The Fool. A well-thumbed book lay beside them: The Tarot – Practice and Interpretation.
His Ouija board was propped in a gap beside the day bed.
No wonder Michael was worried.
Attila lay on the bunk. A dish of water and another containing a fish head stood beneath the washbasin.
“Would you like me to r-read your fortune?” Ossie gathered up the cards.
“Not right now.”
“No, but sometime. It’s accurate, you know. You’ll be surprised.”
Attila stretched and yawned. He jumped down, brushing Ossie’s ankles.
“All right, all right.” Affectionately he rubbed the cat’s ears. “You’ve had all you’re g-getting. Off you go and find some mice.” He opened the door and Attila slipped into the alleyway.
It was hot in the cabin. I loosened my shirt. “What do you want me to do?”
Ossie crouched to a drawer beneath his bunk. I saw work trousers, socks, underwear and what looked like a folded crimson cloth. With care he lifted out three objects wrapped in crumpled brown paper and set them on the coffee table.
They were dolls, puppets, crudely shaped out of wax. Unravelled string had been moulded into their heads for hair: one natural, one red as ink, the third coloured black. Staring dolls’ eyes, blue, green and brown, had been pinned into their faces. It wasn’t difficult to guess who they represented. The nearest, thick-set with the wax round an eye roughened, was plainly Jumbo Ryland. The second, with bulging arms and shoulders, was Steve Petersen. The third, and most carefully shaped, was Lenny Rathbone with his hollow chest and mean lines around his mouth.
A darning needle had been thrust through each.
“They wouldn’t leave me alone so I m-made these.”
Voodoo dolls. I didn’t want to touch them.
“Can you tell who they are?”
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Yes.”
“You don’t mind?”
“It depends what you’re planning to do.”
“They’re not f-finished yet,” he said.
“I can see that.”
“No, I mean they’ve got to have something personal in them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Belonging to whoever it is they r-represent.”
“Like what?”
“Hair, rings, nail clippings, buttons, that sort of thing.”
I thought about it. “And this is your chance to get it, while everyone’s ashore?”
“Yes, but I need a lookout. Will you keep watch while I go into their c-cabins and see what I can find?”
“Then what, needles through the heart?”
“I don’t know. I’ve not stabbed these through the heart, have I?”
I looked down at the table. Steve’s doll was pierced through the foot, Lenny’s through its mouth, the bosun’s through an arm. Why those parts, I wondered, then guessed it was because of Steve’s swaggering fitness, Rat’bone’s cruel talk and Ryland’s violence.
He showed me a roll of sticky tape and three sandwich bags. They were labelled. I read one – Steve Petersen. “Are you ready then?”
I didn’t like it. “All right, let’s get it over with.”
The stewards and greasers had their cabins on one side of the ship, the deck crew on the other. A short alleyway connected them. We walked through.
Ossie halted and listened. No voices, no music disturbed the hum of the donkey engine. The bar was empty.
“You wait along there,” he whispered. “That passage that leads to the g-gangway. Give me a signal if anyone comes.”
“What sort of signal?” I asked. “Hoot like an owl?”
“Very funny. I don’t know, call for Attila.”
“How long are you going to be?”
“Depends what I can find.” We stood by a blue and beige curtain. “This Steve’s?”
“Yes.”
“And Lenny’s?”
I counted. “Three along.”
“Right, off you go.” He peeped through the curtain and vanished inside.
I walked to my lookout spot, wishing I had stayed ashore.
Two minutes, three minutes ticked by. Ossie emerged, fastening the top of a bag. He held it up for me to see, gave me a thumbs-up and hurried to Rat’bone’s cabin.
I was certain, I knew we would be caught. A trickle of sweat ran from my hair.
Ossie did not appear.
There were footsteps on deck. I heard voices. The footsteps receded.
I relaxed.
Then someone appeared at the far end of the alleyway. It was Philip. I backed out of sight. There was a knock and questioning voice. “Ben?” I peeped round the corner and saw him looking into my cabin.
He went away.
Ossie emerged from Rat’bone’s door. “Two down, one to go.” He mopped his face with a handkerchief. “I d-don’t fancy doing this again.” He passed me two sandwich bags. Instinctively I took them. “Now, which is the b-bosun’s cabin?”
I led him round the corner.
“Keep a good lookout.” He slipped through the curtain.
With the bags in my hand, waiting was even worse. The minutes crawled by. I pushed the curtain aside. “Hurry up!”
He was bending over Ryland’s pillow, dabbing it with a strip of sticky tape. “Just be a minute.” He pulled a comb from his pocket and raked it through the bosun’s hairbrush; a tangle of black hairs gathered in the teeth. He dropped them into his bag along with the sticky tape. I left him scraping whiskers from the washbasin and returned to my post.
Soon, to my intense relief, we were back in Ossie’s cabin.
“Ohh!” He pushed the door shut. “Thank you, Ben. I’d never have dared do it on my own.”
I sank onto the day bed. “What have you got?”
He dropped two bags on his bunk and examined the third: “A disgusting sock, b-broken specs, a used sticking plaster,” he peered at the tape doubled back on itself, “and a few red hairs.”
“No need to ask who that is. You took his glasses?”
“They’d had it, look, one of the arms is missing. Anyway, why should I care?” He picked up a second bag. “Steve Petersen.”
It contained a strip of white towelling. “What’s that?”
“Sweat band. And some long hairs and a bit of writing.”
“What’s the writing?”
“Start of a letter. Found it in the waste bin.”
“Let’s see.” The paper was crumpled, the handwriting clumsy. I smoothed it out:
“Dear Mats,” I read aloud. “I hope you and mum are well. I am well but all is not good on this ship. The bosun and the AB I told you about are – ” That was as far as it went. Are what, I wondered. What did Steve feel was not good?
I passed the paper back. “Tell me again what you do with all this stuff?”
“Mould it into the d-dolls so they’re linked to the real people.”
“Then what?”
“Just hope it works.” Carefully he tore the excess paper from the letter and rolled the writing into a ball. With both hands he broke the doll in half, dug out some of the wax and pushed the writing and hairs into the space. Holding the body above a lighted candle he sealed it shut again. “I just c-can’t stand up to them, Ben. Michael’s told the chief steward and they’ve had a warning, but if they k-keep on at me I’m going to be ill again. Barbara told me I had to fight back. This is one way – trying to anyway.” He removed the darning needle and smoothed over the hole.
It was madness. As Ossie went about his preparations, his big face like the moon outside, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
“Do you expect it to work?”
He took Steve’s sweat band and hung it round the doll’s neck. Then he lowered his head and shut his eyes as if he was praying. His lips moved but I couldn’t make out the words. The needle lay on the table. He warmed it in the candle flame. Slowly and deliberately he thrust it back through the doll’s foot.
“Ossie,” I said again to my troubled friend. “Do you expect it to work? I mean really?”
He raised his head but didn’t see me for a moment and blinked to bring his eyes into focus. “Who can say, Ben. Prob’ly not. The devil looks after his own.”
But when Steve Petersen returned to the ship after midnight it was by taxi and he was in pain. Two of the crew, drunk as himself, had to help him up the gangway. He had caught his foot in a drain and badly torn the ligaments in his ankle.
PART FOUR
THE GREAT OCEAN
The Praying Mantis
AT FIVE-THIRTY next morning the pilot came aboard. At six we cast off to begin our passage through the Panama Canal. At two in the afternoon, fifty miles and six locks later, we sailed out into the Pacific Ocean.
I’d been through Suez with dad and that was great too, but Suez was just a straight channel through the desert with sand tumbling to the edge. Panama was different. A series of locks, each over three hundred metres long, lifted Pacific Trader from the blue Caribbean. Locomotives called mules climbed slopes as steep as switchbacks to tow us through. The top gate swung open and we emerged into a chain of freshwater lakes fringed with jungle. Tropical birds flew about the trees. I saw a water snake and far away, through Aaron’s binoculars, what I’m sure was an alligator. We sailed along a channel cut by hand through the solid rock of a mountain that towered above us: Samuel told me that over twenty-seven thousand labourers, mostly black, had died of yellow fever, dysentery and malaria during its construction. Then the tropical forest closed in and after a few more miles we descended the southern series of locks that led to the Pacific.
It was fantastic. I spent the entire morning peering from portholes and leaving my work to run out on deck.
Charlie enjoyed it less. In fact Charlie did not enjoy it at all, for like half the crew he was hung over from the night before. The new haircut was great but his head throbbed and his eyes were sick. “Oh, shut up, Ben!” he snapped when I joked about it. “It’s not funny. I’m dying here!” He tottered back to the lavatory.
His return in the early hours was described by Brian, who came from Newcastle and had been on gangway duty:
“Him an’ that stuck-up bastard of a cadet come back round the same time. Charlie’s in a great mood, singin’ like a lintie an’ givin’ us a bit dance. But the cadet, he’s one o’ them gets nasty drunk. Pickin’ on everyone, askin’ to get his face smashed in. Anyroad, turns out he can’t stand Charlie, goes for him like a stoat after a rabbit. Catches him by the collar an’ starts draggin’ him round the deck. But yon Charlie –ye mightn’t think it to look at him but he’s strong as a horse – he knocks the cadet’s hands off an’ pushes him into the middle o’ next week. So he falls an’ hurts hissel’ an’ Charlie’s standin’ over him an’ callin’ him a thief an’ an ignorant git. Tells him any more trouble he’ll pull his effin’ arms off. But yon Tony, he’s so drunk an’ stupid he gets up an’ throws a punch, but he misses an’ goes down again. It were great.”
