Deck boy, p.23
Deck Boy, page 23
“Oh, surprise, surprise!” Barbara patted Luigi’s arm. “She’s nothing but a little flirt. We’re staying here on dry land, aren’t we, dear.”
Sandeep blushed, handsome and shy.
Smoky produced a battered notebook. “I’ll stay an’ all. Get down a couple of sketches. Makings of a great picture this.”
We were soon sorted out. Charlie and I went with Nadia. So, to my surprise, did Ossie, whose idea of exercise was walking up the alleyway to make a cup of tea.
The rafts, orange inflatables with no outboards, were pulled ashore at the foot of the lake. We pumped up the pressure, tipped out the rainwater and launched them, wading out to step aboard. Nadia guided us into the current. Slowly at first and then faster, we were carried along. An outcrop of rocks drew closer, we turned the corner – and all at once were being swept downriver. I clung to a strap and trailed my free hand in the water. Nadia plied the paddle to keep our blunt nose pointing ahead. Charlie’s black eyes danced. Ossie, who had hardly spoken a word all day, regarded me with eyes as dead as oysters.
“Come on!” I poked him with a foot. “Stop brooding.”
He averted his big white face. I wondered why he had come at all, if he was determined to be so miserable.
A short distance ahead the hillsides were steeper, the jungle pressed closer. We speeded up. The roar of the river filled my ears. “Hold on tight!” Nadia fought to keep us midstream. We swung round a bend and I saw white water. A huge swell rose above some hidden sill of rock. The raft slid over and suddenly we were in the rapids. Giant boulders split the stream; leaping water was all about us; spray smacked me in the face . The raft bucked and slewed like a rodeo horse. I was flung into the air, hanging on to the strap. A second time I was soaked to the skin. As we reached the bottom, a ferocious narrows lay dead ahead. We sped through and were spat out the far end like an orange pip. It was fantastic!
The river levelled as it ran into a stretch about two hundred metres long. In the sudden stillness I heard a scream and looked back upriver. It was Michael, shrieking as he clung to Sandeep’s arm.
“Look at him,” I said. “He’s not that scared.”
Charlie grinned.
I took off my shirt, then pulled it back on as a big fly that looked as if it would sting, landed on my chest.
Nadia had got wetter than any of us. You could see her lacy bra and brown skin through the stuff of her blouse.
Charlie caught me looking and raised his eyebrows appreciatively.
Nadia caught us both looking and shifted her position. “You keep your eyes to yourselves,” she said good-naturedly. “I’ve heard about you sailors. You’re worse than the boys in Suva. Next time I go with Michael.”
We laughed.
But not Ossie who sat gazing downstream, lost in a world of his own.
“Come on, mate, buck up,” Charlie said. “It was brilliant!”
We waited for Sandeep then paddled ashore and pulled the rafts from the water.
“Do you want us to carry them back?” I said.
Sandeep shook his head. “We’ll take them up on a trailer.”
“Is that more rapids?” I nodded to smoke that rose above the rocks downriver.
“Yes, but not for the rafts, much wilder. Kayakers come up from town sometimes. People have been drowned there.”
“Can we go and see?”
We walked down the riverbank. Dragonflies danced among reeds. Toads plopped into boggy pools. I found myself in the lead, clambering over roots, pushing through bushes and climbing up to a flat rock that looked down on a wild ravine. Grass and ferns grew in the crevices. The river was a tumult, surging between boulders and rebounding from rocky walls, sending a rainbow high into the air. How anyone could even think of tackling such a descent was beyond me.
“That Sandeep.” Michael arrived beside me, vivid and blond and flushed with the sun. “Isn’t he gorgeous!” He refreshed his insect repellent. “If it wasn’t for Luigi I couldn’t be responsible for myself.”
I smiled and stepped to the brink.
“Oh, come away!” He plucked at my shirt. “It gives me the shivers.”
“Yeah, but look at it. Wow!”
Ossie joined us, wheezing with effort.
“Look at the state of you,” Michael told him. “No wonder, all that lard you carry around. You need to go on a diet.”
Ossie craned his neck to look down at the crashing water.
“Why didn’t you take off your lifejacket?”
He didn’t seem to hear the question.
“You’ll die of the heat. Come here.” Michael loosened the tapes and left them hanging.
The toot-toot of the minibus recalled us to the track. Smoky had driven down from the lake. We pushed through the undergrowth and piled in. Soon we were back at the lodge. “What do you want to do now?” Nadia said as we stood in the shade.
It was after two and we hadn’t had lunch. Her uncle could hardly be expected to feed ten of us.
“What about heading down to the coast?” she said. “We can get something to eat and go snorkelling. If you want to, that is. Maybe you’ve got to get back to the ship.”
“Snorkelling,” I cried.
“Food.”
“Back to the ship? Are you mad?”
We gathered up our possessions.
But Michael was gazing around. “Where’s Ossie?” he said.
The Rescue
WE LOOKED at one another. Where was Ossie?
“Prob’ly gone for a pee.”
“Didn’t head into the house,” Sandeep said.
The only bushes he might have sheltered behind were in the garden. Kevin checked. There was an awful silence.
“Anyone see him in the minibus?”
“Didn’t sit beside me.”
“Well, when did you last see him?”
No one was sure.
“He was up on that rock,” Michael said. “With Ben and me.”
“Oh, God! D’you think he’s fallen in?”
Michael and Barbara shared glances.
An icy feeling gripped me in the stomach.
Nadia drove back up the track. I jumped out with some others at the foot of the lower ravine and she headed on to the top with the rest. We forced our way through vegetation. Creeping vines cut my legs. Something bit me behind the ear and drew blood. I reached the water’s edge. A hundred metres upstream, at the bottom of the perilous descent, the river boiled between rocks. At my feet it swirled and levelled, flowing on through dense undergrowth until a mile downstream it reached the clearing around the lodge.
There was no sign of Ossie. I half walked, half waded a short distance upriver and climbed a boulder to get a better view. A corner of something orange caught my eye. The current swept it out then carried it back again. It was a lifejacket, trapped in a backwater on the opposite bank, half hidden by a fallen tree, stripped of its bark and bleached by years in the sun.
I shouted and pointed. A little below me Michael also was shouting. “There! There!” Fully dressed, he waded into the water. “Behind that rock! Those bushes! See?”
“No! Wait!” Sandeep tried to stop him.
But Michael was too far out, splashing and calling. He flung himself full length and struck out for the opposite bank.
The current was too strong. For every metre he swam across, the river carried him down two. In a minute he was no longer trying to rescue Ossie but struggling to reach the bank before he drowned.
Philip stood a short distance downstream. He pulled off his shirt and trousers and dived headlong. I had forgotten he was a schoolboy swimming champion. With powerful strokes he cut across the current and caught the flailing Michael beneath the arms. Soon they reached the far side and floundered ashore.
Michael fell back, coughing water. “My hero!” He struggled for breath. “I think I need … the kiss of life.”
“In your dreams.”
“Oh, well!” He coughed some more. “Worth a try. Can you … reach Ossie?”
Meanwhile Sandeep, too, had stripped to his underpants and crossed the swirling river. As I returned to my earlier position, I could see Ossie better. His hands were knotted in branches and at first I thought he was trying to crawl from the water but it was only the river moving his legs. By the time Sandeep had manoeuvred him to a place where he could be taken ashore, Philip had joined him. Together they hauled Ossie up the bank. Sandeep put an ear to his chest and listened intently.
How Ossie had survived the descent of that wild ravine I have no idea, but survive he did, unconscious and badly beaten, but still breathing. His shoes were missing, his shirt survived by a single button. Neither Sandeep nor Philip was expert in first aid though they knew a little. They laid Ossie on his side in the recovery position with his head down the slope and checked for broken bones. There seemed to be none though three injuries were obvious: a badly grazed arm, a gash in his side and missing teeth. Uncertain what else to do, Philip rocked him to empty the water from his lungs and stomach.
A minute passed. And another minute. Ossie’s hand moved. His leg twitched. He lay still again then suddenly was racked by a spasm and water gushed from his mouth. More water. An arm stirred as if to wipe his lips.
Philip rose. “He’ll live.”
Michael joined them, kneeling alongside. As Ossie came round he gave him a push. “Oh, you silly, stupid …!” he said, and burst into tears.
Nadia’s uncle kept a small boat with an outboard engine at the lodge. The Fijian servant motored upstream and ferried Michael and Ossie to a little landing stage. Sandeep and Philip swam back and the bus picked us up a few minutes later.
Ossie was in pain. Nadia cleaned his wounds and put a dressing on the cut which would need stitching. We helped him aboard the minibus and accompanied him to the hospital in Suva where Nadia worked as a nurse. For two hours, when we might have been snorkelling in the blue Pacific, we sat in a waiting room while Ossie was examined. In addition to the visible injuries, he was found to have a broken rib and extensive bruising but hopefully nothing more serious. They kept him in for observation and further tests. Unless there were complications, a doctor told us, he should be fit to rejoin the ship in a couple of days, though it would be a week or longer before he could resume duties.
Barbara took Michael’s hand as we drove back through the city. “Poor Ossie!”
Michael squeezed his fingers.
“But how the hell did he fall?” Kevin demanded. “That story about feeling dizzy and tripping over a root or something. I mean, he didn’t even let out a yell. No one heard him or anything.”
“For God’s sake, boy!” Smoky said. “Are you daft as well as blind? What do you expect him to say?”
Kevin was silent.
I looked from the window. A group of children in ragged shorts were playing football. Their shouts rang on the afternoon air.
Christmas at Sea
ON WEDNESDAY, with Ossie back aboard, we left Fiji and headed south to New Zealand. Thursday was Christmas Eve. We worked until midday then showered, changed and gave ourselves up to leisure and parties.
Some of the crew, even rough tough ABs, had decorated their cabins with streamers and red-cheeked Santas bought at the market in Suva. I delivered my Christmas cards and hung those I received over a string on the bulkhead. Laughter, music and the smell of booze drifted down the alleyways. I wandered from cabin to cabin but couldn’t settle: I didn’t want to read, didn’t want to drink, didn’t want music, didn’t want to sit, didn’t want to lie on my bunk, didn’t want to sunbathe, I don’t know what I wanted. At least, I do know what I wanted but I couldn’t have it. What I wanted was Christmas the way it had been all my life: Christmas with my gran; Christmas with my dad when he could get home; Christmas with my friends in Westport.
A bit before ten I was thinking of going to bed when I heard singing – not tapes, people. Christmas carols. I went to investigate. The source was Samuel’s cabin. I knocked and pushed back the curtain.
His cabin was different from others in the alleyway. The only illumination came from his bunk light with a handkerchief thrown over it, and some flickering tea-candles around a nativity scene on the chest of drawers. Philip and Brian were there. So, to my surprise, were Smoky and Barbara, of whom Samuel disapproved, and Steve Petersen. As I entered they were singing Once in Royal David’s City, accompanied by Smoky on a mouth organ. Samuel had got some carol sheets from a church in Suva and handed me one as I entered. Philip made room on the bunk but just as I found the place the carol ended.
“That was lovely, folk,” Samuel said in his deep voice. “What next? Come on, Ben, you just arrived. You choose.”
Others threw in their suggestions: “The First Nowell … O Little Town of Bethlehem … Away in a Manger.”
“Good King Wenceslas,” I said.
Smoky cupped his hands and practised a few notes then nodded:
Good King Wenceslas looked out, we sang,
On the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even …
It was Christmas turned on its head but I loved it: seamen in vests and T-shirts, brown with the sun, singing carols about shepherds and snow in Samuel’s cabin with the ship rolling to the long Pacific swell, the porthole open, and fat southern constellations dancing overhead. Very different from school assemblies back in Westport, the Midnight Service at St Matthew’s with a glittering tree beside the altar, and Carols from Kings, which was gran’s favourite programme ever. For as long as I could remember, we had watched it with a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake every Christmas Eve. Before my voice broke, she had always asked me to sing Once in Royal David’s City, like the boy in the choir.
Others joined us, many smelling of drink, until the cabin could hold no more and the overflow sat in the alleyway with the curtain thrown back over the door. Samuel, it turned out, was a lay preacher, and he read the Christmas story from the Bible and asked if we would like to say a private prayer for friends and families back home, and people like us all over the world who could not be with their loved ones at this time.
It was the part of Christmas I liked best.
Then it was Christmas Day with the sun high above the mast, pinning us to the ocean. Despite the occasion, someone had to clean the bar and mop out the washroom. Who else but the deck boy? I whizzed through my tasks and well before eleven was finished for the day. As I returned to the cabin, I saw that Christmas messages had been Blu-tacked to the bulkhead outside a dozen or so cabins. They were from Barbara who had been on the vodka. I read those that were nearest:
To Aaron, Best wishes for a very Happy Xmas. If you can’t be good be careful. Love – Mother.
To the Divine Charlie, Lots of love and Christmas hugs, from – Mother.
For our lovely Ben, I hope your first Christmas at sea will be the best ever, Lots of love – Mother.
It was the first Christmas greeting I’d received from any ‘mother’ and I carried it into the cabin.
Charlie sat hunched over a jigsaw.
“Where’d you get that?” I said.
“Present from Michael and the rest of them. They’ve got something for you an’ all. Said to go round to the cabin when you come back from work.”
“A present! I never got them anything.”
“Me neither.”
“I thought we weren’t giving presents.”
“That’s all right, when we get to New Zealand we can take them out for a drink or something.”
“I’m fifteen!”
“Pictures then, milkshake and sandwiches. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.”
I tried to make out the jigsaw. “What is it?”
He passed me the lid. A girl in tight shorts and no top sitting astride a Harley-Davidson. “Very sexy,” I said. “More your taste than theirs.”
“Yeah, she can give me a lift any time.” He laughed. “Oh, you’ve got another present too. On the bunk.”
It was a pound box of chocolates, the same silvery-blue selection we had been given when we left Westport. A handwritten card was Sellotaped to the top: Deck Boy Bennett : With all good wishes for Christmas, J. J. Bell, Captain.
I was surprised. “Did you get one?”
“Yeah, so did Aaron. Everyone, I suppose.”
“Captains always do that?”
“You must be joking.”
I tore off the cellophane. “Want one?”
“Thanks.” He took two.
Everyone knew, even the lowliest greaser down in the bowels of the engine room, that Captain Bell, ‘the old man’, as captains are known, did as little as possible and left the running of the ship in the hands of his first mate. At the same time, he had a kind word for everyone and was popular.
I squashed a caramel with my tongue, took a Turkish delight and threw the box back on the bunk. “I’ll go along to Michael’s then.”
“Drink before lunch?”
“Yeah, OK. We need to dress?”
“Well I wouldn’t go like that. Most people tidy themselves up a bit.”
As I was walking round, Ossie emerged from his cabin. The official story, the story put about by his friends – though I don’t know how many believed it – was that he had stumbled into the ravine, it was an accident. Now, four days later, the bruising was at its height. Most was hidden by his clothes but he had shown Barbara and me the day before. Ugly patches of purple, green and yellow, some big as a spread hand, covered his body. The gash in his side was a long black scab fuzzy with stitches. More scabs covered the scrape on his arm and lesser wounds. The captain had radioed ahead for dental treatment when we reached New Zealand.
“Hello, Ben.” He smiled painfully. “Happy Christmas.”
His broken teeth made me wince. “Happy Christmas, Ossie. How are you feeling today?”
“Not too bad, thanks.” He was carrying the urn containing his mother’s ashes. “Thought I’d just, you know … Christmas Day. The decks will be quieter.”
I said, “Are you coming to the lunch?”
“Michael and Barbara said to go with them. You going with Charlie?”
