Kitabı oxu: «Acts of Mutiny»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE Motion

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

PART TWO Cargo

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

PART THREE Foam

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

PART FOUR Trench

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE Motion

1

I HAVE A knot in my tongue. Left over right, tuck under. Right over left, tuck under. The rabbit comes up through the hole. Or does the dog go round the tree for his bone? My child-knots forgot their creatures. I produced only poor knobs of string, for all my father’s detailed instruction. His prim exemplars shone from my bedroom wall, white cord on a mahogany panel: bowline, reef, clove hitch, carrick bend, sheepshank, figure of eight, Turk’s head, eye splice …

This morning we buried him over at Sidcup. There was a reception at his sister’s, a gathering of family, and of family ghosts. I choked on sandwiches, lacked conversation. Then I drove alone from Bostall Heath down towards the river edge, past Lesnes Abbey Woods, past Bostall Lane Infants – which still stands. To my roots, downstream of the City, downriver of the new Thames Barrier. Water folk, Navy folk, my family have been here for generations. I was the one who broke away. Since quitting the Navy I have worked at the airport, on the other side of the capital, in Immigration.

The street is unchanged. These are turn-of-the-century terraces, smoke grey, built by the Royal Arsenal Co-op. Nothing can shift or clean them. On our side the row heaves into a small rise, about twelve feet proud of the pavement – as if on the lift of a frozen wave. The house itself looks as it used to, the gate jammed not quite open, always to be dodged around. There is the same crumbling pebble-wound at eye level in the flight of sixteen concrete steps up to our front door. My father called them ‘the ladders’.

I see myself with my albatross eye. Just this afternoon. I am poised to go in, but turn towards the weather, snow clouds heaping up over the Isle of Dogs. Because I have not been a dutiful son; for years I never visited, and all the differences are reproaches. To the right is the vast Thamesmead estate, where once the road petered out. There was a green foot-bridge over the railway line. I would watch my father bicycling away to his plot, a vegetable sack slung across his brawny shoulder, growing smaller against the duns and sedges. In the distance, the Plumstead marshes rotted off level towards Barking Reach.

Over the opposite roofs, Canary Wharf tower: a designer biro stabbed up through the earth’s crust, scribbling on those sagging grey-bellies. The first snowflakes are already coming dark on the flurry.

From here we would have smelt London’s soot fallout, or, according to the swirl of the wind, the West India Docks, the arsenal’s chemicals, the mud at Galleons Point. Here in the dark of each new moon my father had us turn over our silver money for luck. Now it is too late. Delaying at the door, I find excuses. If I drove straight back across the City I could avoid the blizzard – even pick up the tail end of my shift at the airport. Or I could wait for Carla at her flat and try to talk things through. After all we had only just begun, she and I.

But I ought really to go in.

Entering the hallway is like being swallowed. As if through the second door along Pinocchio might actually find his old man, the naval artificer, still working by his lamp at some Marconi chassis, waiting, with the smoke wisping up from the solder. I do half expect that special smell, of burning dust and Fluxite, mingled with the leftover flavour of kippers. But it is empty, of course, and icy cold.

The house has been modernised and remodernised. The back room no longer swims in its browns and greens. He is not, of course, at the table, his repair gutted on the spread newspaper, his sweet-tin of resistors and condensers tipped out all of a wire jumble.

We once squeezed in. We were pressed by furniture: lacquered, oak-stained, brown-draped. Even when I was a child it was out of date, like a workman’s Edwardiana, pickled. The two bucket chairs in leather, shiny with use; the heavy oak table and five mock-Chippendale chairs; the gloomy bureau; the rust-coloured dresser; the wireless table in the corner; the china cupboard – there was scarcely room for the fireplace. There was scarcely room even for the tea kettle on its hinged iron platform beside the grate. My grandfather the gunner, who lived with us, would swing it round into the flames, and then force his huge khaki-shirted frame slowly along the last side of the table and into his carver, beating upwind, braces strung tight and heaving at his waistband like the main-sheets of a square-rig.

The place is quite empty, and brims with its own incommunicable loss.

On the tight margin of floor in front of the hearth I can imagine my small self – stretched out by the french windows’ gloam. I lie reading my London’s River at Work and at War, lost in its illustrations, a romance of barges. The sails are tan, the river mud-green, the lines of the vessels wood on wood. And there are tramp steamers, painted iron with a fuss of tugs: grimed hulls, the ochres and rusts of their superstructure. Dark outpourings of smoke blot cranes and whole expanses of page. That was the river I knew; an oilscape of docks. Even the sun – I lived in sepia, my growing up here was an unbroken stream, brown as varnish, leading inevitably to the sea.

I swear the boy looks up. Is it me he is afraid of?

My scalp tingles. I remember another time back there on the doorstep with Erica my mother. We too are hesitating to go in, having hauled our suitcases to the top of ‘the ladders’. She grips my arm. We are coming home. I remember it well. Clear, in fact, as daylight. It is from my first voyage in a voyaging life. But – this is the astonishing thing – in forty years I swear that particular scene and that childhood sea-passage have never once entered my head. Of course, it is coming to me now, there was a whole year I did not live here at all. Had gone to the ends of the earth with … Mr Chaunteyman was his unusual name. And I am caught up suddenly in a romance of names: Penny Kendrick, Robert Kettle; and the Indian Ocean. Clear as you like.

2

It was January 1959. They met on the journey out. Before Port Said they pretended there was nothing between them. After Aden it was undeniable. Yet ‘nothing’ of it had been spoken. Penny was joining her husband in Adelaide. Robert was going up-country.

‘I’m starting with a team at the observatory, the tracking station,’ he had said. Every sentence in each other’s hearing took on an extra meaning, like a jewelled, coded gift.

Now they and the Madeleys stood together near the aft end of the boat deck, past the run of white lifeboats. The sun dropped without ceremony into the Indian Ocean just to the left of the ship’s wake, scorching it for a moment or two with orange flares. On cue, there rose a warm, slightly scented breeze from the sea.

‘I suppose we really ought to be getting ready for dinner, if you’ll excuse us, Penny, Mr Kettle,’ Mrs Madeley said. ‘Come along, Douglas, I think.’ She picked up two of the empty glasses with their fruited cocktail sticks, as if to include the pair of them in her command.

‘Calm as you like.’ Douglas addressed the sea but was following his wife with cautious, elderly steps.

Penny seemed to comply. ‘Yes. I must decide what to wear. So uncomplicated for the men, isn’t it. They can just rush down at the last minute and hurl themselves into a dress suit.’

Robert felt desperate with her; then hated himself for it. They strolled back as a foursome, past the housing for the smokestack, towards the stairs in the white steel wall of the bridge. To their right the shapes of five lifeboats were slow white moments running out.

Penny stopped to rummage in her bag. He waited beside her.

‘We’ll see you shortly, then? Perhaps a drink before?’ Mrs Madeley raised her voice from the companion-way door, which she held open. Strains of some light string trio crept up from below. Douglas, his long tropical shorts unflattering above brown knees and scout socks, had reached it now and was edging inside.

‘Probably see you in a minute,’ Robert called. He dreaded the next ritual Pimm’s. ‘Isn’t there a film tonight, Douglas?’ Penny’s words ‘so uncomplicated for the men’ mocked him. His feelings were jangled.

Yet Penny had managed to contrive them a moment; effortlessly, daringly – unless she was only checking her bag for her compact, or whatever, and actually did intend to follow the Madeleys away.

‘Not our sort of show, Mr Kettle,’ Douglas answered. ‘We like musical comedies. Can take any amount of them, can’t we, dear?’ They disappeared downwards. Penny straightened, and allowed her straw bag to hang from her shoulder again.

So at last Robert was alone with her; really alone for only the third time on the voyage.

‘In Adelaide?’ She continued the conversation several days old. He read her tone, as if the intervening time with its meals and games and the ship’s daily run had collapsed. ‘Did you mean an observatory in Adelaide? There would be one?’ she asked.

‘Oh no.’ His nerve wavered. They had missed each other. She had not known where he would be going. She had not allowed for it. ‘Well, yes, there is one in Adelaide. But I meant up in the salt lakes. Beyond the hills … North. The desert. The Flinders Range.’ Some anxiety made him forbear to trot out the government name of the town-cum-missile-base, although there was no real reason why he should not. There was no secret. Nothing to feel ashamed of. For a moment his sunburn from the Red Sea began to itch again, and to ache.

They waited for a moment in the deck tennis markings. Then she moved under the boats to lean on the rail; and he stood next to her.

‘When I mentioned the tracking station, I thought you’d know’

‘I don’t. Tracking what? And what lakes would they be? I don’t know anything … about the lie of the land.’ She shifted her hands on the rail, through which as always the churn and drive of the engines could be felt, a constant background.

‘I thought he might have told you. Your husband. You said he’d gone out to Adelaide “in the weapons interest”.’

‘To the research establishment at Salisbury, yes. But he doesn’t write to me about that sort of thing – they’re not quite supposed to, are they? Anyway, it isn’t really an interest we’ve managed to have in common.’

Robert laughed and caught her smile, the lipstick now star-glazed. How unfamiliar it was still, that here, close to the Equator, day just switched off, and then it was dark; without lingering or pause for reflection. What did he write to her, then, was what he wanted to ask. But dared not.

He looked up at the swinging, coruscating lightfield itself, and tried to-make himself consider it professionally. But it had such a personal quality – as if the huge stars were curving down to meet them and the dusted blackness was only something rushing the other way.

Besides, more intense even than the visual drama above was the knowledge that her hand on the rail was a mere inch from his own. But he would not look at that. Achernar, the southern tip of Eridanus, River of Heaven. Follow the jab down: Reticulum, the Net, just rising. If they could stay out here all night, they would see the Southern Cross. He had waited to see it last night. It reminded him that a difficult and salty continent lay somewhere down there, under the dark line of the horizon. Keeping still, they could hear the subdued crash of the bow wave, and feel the ship’s eastward movement. It was dodging sideways in order to call at Colombo, and then Singapore. It gave them some time.

Her voice: ‘I didn’t have the courage to ask you before, exactly what on earth we’re going to do when we get there. Because it makes a difference to what we do now, doesn’t it.’ She stated it flatly, not as a question.

So they were a fact. She had just given it form and lodged it in between sunset and dressing for dinner. He was amazed, full of joy; that people could do that, and it was them. And he was also afraid. Shouts and laughter reached them from just below. Late for their high tea, a party of children, myself the last amongst them, could be heard along the promenade deck. They funnelled inside somewhere, chattering. Robert felt for her hand, and held it, touching his fingertips cautiously round to her palm.

She returned the pressure. ‘You can change your mind. If you’re not sure.’

‘I never imagined. I’m sure, but I never imagined.’ He noticed how snatches of illumination leaked out from the decks below or crept between cracks in the fittings.

‘Liar, darling.’ She smiled again.

Ventilator cowlings, pipes, davits, and a spice wind from behind them: their astonishment continued, as the ship slipped on into the tropic dark. He felt they were bathed in a wordless beauty that did not belong in the world. Yet it was palpable; it was all around them.

For the first time in his life he felt at home. ‘You are braver than I am.’

From that moment the whole ship also acknowledged them as a fact. And although people said nothing quite directly – although they continued furious and put out – they no longer attempted, in the shape of Mrs Madeley, or Mary Garnery, or Paul Finch-Clark, or a general conspiracy that operated out of the Armorial’s paintwork, the furniture, or the tannoy, to keep them apart.

3

Flashes of memory are glittering, dangerous things. Lifted from the Falklands War, I was too ashamed to show my face. For some weeks I believed myself one of those poor souls who cracked on the way south and had to be flown home before hostilities even began. No shame in that – it happens. But to me it felt as though I had let everyone down, the family member at last who shirked when England expected.

It was only gradually my nightmares started to cohere. Subdy my coward’s badge was streaked through with fire. I had been there after all, trapped in the inferno of my burning destroyer; yet still unshakeably convinced I had ducked my duty.

Even as the true events bore themselves in, I could not relate to them. I watched news footage of my stricken vessel and remained disconnected. A carapace had shaped itself so closely around the horror that as it split open I was both naive and knowing at once. But that was a military disaster, and the eerie phenomena of battle stress are now well documented.

Memories have their species, though. Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches, if such could accompany so large a ship so far from land, roosting suddenly on the wires above the boat deck in order to catch their words, or sense their thoughts. Their love is birdlike, full of vibration and scribbled chattering. Or like the schools of flying fish that would skim and dart on the bow wave. Or like a current and its accompanying breath that presses imperceptibly now this way, now that upon the vessel’s direction, enveloping them both. This is a memory of what must have been. It is the most beautiful of all the memories, one of ornament, how it was between them.

And I would spend my time telling you of them only, bringing them to their consummation, had not voices of an altogether different nature begun to attend the passage. Consider the steely-eyed albatross, riding empty air above the mainmast head, looking down. This was – I saw it happen.

And there is the memory that comes back like a spit in the face, like a gob of poison. It was Hugh Kendrick’s visit long after we had arrived in Adelaide, with his terrible story of the lovers in the desert, and what I had done. That strikes at me with its own coil, clear, and of a piece – with detail like scales. How I felt like a salamander in the fire that night after the scare at the township dump. That memory refuses to leave me, yet I cannot make it fit.

You are cast adrift with me now, and must trust in my navigation.

Creatures of air see nothing beneath the surface. The ocean has layers. Deep down there are lanterns, great-swallowers, dragonfish, star-eaters who rise up near the surface only for the night sky, and then sink back nearly a mile at dawn. Beneath them in turn it is perpetually sunless. There the blanched light-emitters blitz and glow. Angler fish, gulper eels, black bristle-mouths, oarfish. No living mariner knows of these depths; though thirty thousand corpses reach them a year, and scarcely a news column of concern.

Consider the scars across the forehead of an old sperm whale. These tell of the giant squid. Consider the tentacles. Consider the hideous beak. This is a species that eludes us, lying in wait, unfathomably huge, maybe. It is rumoured to rise up once in a century to take a ship or two. It throws us into confusion.

But memory can play us false. No record of the Armorica exists. Not with the shipping company itself, nor with Lloyd’s, nor with the Maritime Museum at Greenwich; not even at the Admiralty. I have rung everywhere and anywhere that passenger liners might be registered or listed. It is the same polite response: that I must be mistaken. We have nothing here on file in that name, sir.

I have pulled rank, requested double-checks, paid for searches. I have been told to ‘hold the line’ and have patiently held. I have insisted: ‘But I was there. I once sailed in her.’ To no avail. And my family also deny knowledge. My aunt claims she is too upset to think about such things. Anyway, she has no recollection of all that. Why had I never bothered asking when my father was alive? It is almost as though I had killed him myself. Erica, my mother … is too ill. Moon-faced, full of drugs, she attended the hospital rather than the funeral. They may give her electro-shock. Under general anaesthetic, of course: what only the body undergoes, the nurse said, the mind need never know.

Memory is a dangerous subject. Let me warn you once more. Quite apart from this bereavement, I have been under pressure. There was a woman the other day – she was brought to an interview room. I found her badly disfigured, burnt, presumably. The eyes brown, the silver hair still showing traces of a youthful black, the skin a pale tan – what original was left of it. She was scarred massively at one time or another, but who knows by what. Perhaps an unfortunate household accident. And she might have been anything, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Algerian, Vietnamese. She was screaming in a quiet, tired way that was horrible. She could have been white, even. I lost my temper – I suffer from dark moods. I almost lost my job. The department has to be careful; we pride ourselves. She was referred and will be deported, of course.

She claimed … but how can you determine a torture victim? The doctor examined her. What are its precise badges? Terror? Depression? Incoherence, yes. Apathy, very often. She could give no precise account of what she had experienced. She was crazy, certainly; and articulately incoherent in her own version of English. There was an accent, but not a definitive one. She had seen God up there on the way. Courtesy of Qantas. She was the Holy Ghost and I was the recording angel.

Then she demanded asylum, claiming Commonwealth citizenship – for what that is worth – but could give no country of origin. I have seen a lot of claimants, fished out of passport queues, flushed out of cargo holds. I have seen forged documents exposed, and various scars upon the body, some genuine. The airport becomes its own island beach, where the world’s wretched are washed up. She could, as I say, have been anything. She called me ‘frozen-faced douanier’, and she is right, it is my official persona – policeman of boundaries. Perhaps it was Carla’s presence that made this particular encounter stay in my mind, just after the night of our intimacy. A woman’s body, that Terra Australis Incognita. Carla is a member of my department. We sometimes work together.

Could I have mistaken the name? Armorica? It is some slip, perhaps, where an idea loops back on itself and we find ourselves positive about an erroneous fragment. That is a commonplace of the witness-box, after all. No two people ever see quite the same incident. Details get confused. Could I have crossed one ship’s name with another? A burnt woman …

While I should have been writing reports, I have been researching passenger lists: for the relevant years from the relevant companies. No Ralph and Erica Lightfoot appear. No David Lafayette Chaunteyman. There are two Kendricks and one Kettle, but they are not Penny or Robert.