by Mark Hayes
My stomach started to heave once more. I felt dizzy and not far from collapse. Blame lack of sleep, lack of decent food, the lack of half a bottle of single malt and the sudden need for a bottle of aspirins or something stronger. Blame all that, and the bursts of light setting my brain on fire.
I waited, in horrid anticipation, after the burning after image of the S slowly faded away but no further burst of light came. And slowly I calmed down, but the burst of adrenaline had woken me up once more, and I knew sleep would elude me for a while.
In the mirror, my reflection looked haggard. After all that had happened the night before in Calcutta, I’d had no time to shave that distant morning past. No time for much as I had been running late already. Now I had two days’ growth of beard and the look of a man who was running on fumes. Which in fairness I was.
I remember muttering something into the mirror along the lines of “What the hell are you playing at? Why on god’s green and occasionally pleasant earth would I know where Wells is? You sent me to find him. You put me on this damn rust bucket. What the hell do you expect me to do?”
If they had lip readers watching me, they deemed not to answer my questions. About which, considering the mode of communication, I was somewhat pleased.
A few minutes passed and I poured water into the sink, deciding I may as well have a shave, and generally clean myself up a bit before I crawled back into the bunk. Tired though I was, I was wide awake now.
So I lathered up and commenced carefully guiding my cutthroat around the handsome ridges of my face. It’s remarkable how a good shave can make you feel human again no matter what the circumstances. By the time I was half done I was feeling a little drowsy once more but a whole lot happier. So I was almost cheerful by the time I lifted my chin and started to scrape the blade up the line of my throat…
‘F I N D W E L L S’
I dropped the razor and stemmed the blood from the nick I had just given myself before the N. By the W, I was cursing The Ministry, Gates, Queen Brass Corset and the entire population of the bloody Empire, rather loudly, a wave of nausea sweeping over me again.
Minutes later, I silently and calmly forced myself to finish shaving. Because nothing looks worse on a man than a half-finished shave.
‘Find Wells’. ‘Where is Wells?’ Well yes, I would love to find the damnable man, and when I did, I was going to punch his lights out and give him a good kicking for putting me in this position.
“Where is Wells, indeed…” I muttered as I finally climbed back into my bunk.
In fairness, it never occurred to me specifically which Wells they wanted to know the whereabouts of that morning after the dog’s watch, and why they thought I might know. Looking back on it now, knowing all I know about what was happening elsewhere at the time, I have a suspicion it was not the one I was thinking of.
The only firm conviction I’d come to that morning, however, was as long as they could blast messages at me in that fashion, sod shaving, I was going to grow a bloody beard. It seemed a safer bet all-round.
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH
The Northern Frontier
Three weeks passed without me plunging to my doom.
They also passed without me passing out. No blows to the back of the head. No mad women with scalpels for fingers tried to slice out my eye. No Sleep Men came along to gas me into unconsciousness. No former friends tried to have me arrested. Screaming hordes didn’t charge over the hill. Angry cuckooed husbands didn’t challenge me to duals when I was strung out on LSD. The 95th Cossack regiment didn’t start shooting in my direction. No one tried to stake me out over an anthill and cover my unmentionables with strawberry jam. No more bright lights burning messages into my skull either, thankfully. Indeed, no one, in fact, tried to kill me, arrest me or stick mechanical insects in my eye.
You’d think I would be bored, wouldn’t you?
I would have taken bored. Instead, it was three weeks of something akin to a living hell. One in which I lived on shredded nerves alone.
That said the beard was coming on a treat.
I was First Officer of the Johan in name only. No one obeyed a single order that issued from my lips, or would’ve even if they understood them. Which it is perfectly possible they didn’t, as no one aboard spoke English other than me, the Captain and the newly demoted second officer. At least, that is, they never did so in my presence. All I heard from the crew was Hindi, and my ear for languages had managed to pick up all of three words. None of which were the kind you could use in polite company.
The words in question were ‘Lanata hei’ and ‘Veshya’, which if I understood them properly meant I was capable of asking for sexual congress with a lady of negotiable virtue in broken Hindi and that was about it. There were other words I also came to recognise but not understand. ‘Chutiya’ for example. Which I am reasonably sure either means ‘yes sir’ or ‘wanker’, I suspected the latter.
The language barrier did nothing to help with the sense of isolation I soon started to feel. I am by nature a sociable man. I like a game of cards or a push of dominos while I partake of a nip with fellows of the same strip. Being a social pariah was something new to me. I laugh easily and have been known to take a good-natured ribbing as well as the next man. Even at Rudgley, while I was never what you could call popular, at least I’d had friends. I may have hated that bloody place, but soon recalling my school days seemed like memories of paradise compared with life aboard the Jonah.
As the only Brit on that fine ship of the Empire, I guess I represented a symbol of the resented Imperial authority. Which was somewhat ironic as I found myself lacking even a modicum of authority among the crew.
The chef spat in my food at every meal. He didn’t even pretend to hide it, just dredged up a gob full from the back of his throat as he served me. I could by rights have put him on a charge right there and then but what good would it have done me? At best the Captain would make his disapproval known, for the sake of face at least. Then snicker about it behind my back with the rest of the crew, and slip the cook some rupees to do it some more. So I put on a brave face, pretended not to notice, and let it go.
I know what you’re thinking. You think this sounds ridiculous. You think that no ship of the Empire would be run in such a way. But this was a Company ship, not the Royal Air Navy. Here, I was an interloper, as the Captain had made plain from the start. Unwanted and unneeded. So, if the chef’s insults ran me off the ship, it would be all the better to the Captain’s mind and the chef wasn’t the only one to hurl phlegm in my direction. Let’s just say I took to avoiding walking below gantries as much as possible if only to preserve my dignity.
Such as it was.
I felt I was walking a tightrope, and there was no net. Literally in this case, given the ship cruised along at two hundred feet up most of the time. We were in the backwaters of the northern frontier, running supplies and mail between the scattering of small forts that littered the line. There was little else up there. So I could be ‘dropped off’ at any point, or thrown if we’re being accurate, and if I was… Well, I’m sure the Captain’s report would read something like…
I regret to inform you that first officer Smyth while undertaking an inspection of the lower gantries, lost his footing and fell from the craft. I send you his personal effects including the half-drunk bottle of scotch that was found on the gantry… Please forward my regrets to his family. He was an exemplary officer when not in his cups.
Captain Muhatma Jackson
The Jonah’s Lament EICAN
Well, that would be if he even bothered to file a report. Given his ‘paperwork be damned’ attitude, he may not even have done that much. Instead, I imagine, he would draw my pay and split it with his newly promoted first officer Singh. Lord knows it would hardly be the first time a ghost drew pay from the Company coffers for a while.
The worst that could happen from their point of view was probably the chance I might land on a yak or something when I hit the groun
d and in doing so annoy a local farmer. The chances of my body being found by anyone who gave a damn were slim to the point of anorexia, but more importantly, in my opinion, I’d be dead. Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn how much trouble it did, or didn’t get them in afterwards. My ceasing to be among the breathing was the bit that concerned me.
Of course, there were worse fates than a swift death from a two hundred foot drop. I suspect all of them occurred to me during my time aboard that ship, generally, while I was failing to get any sleep.
People had been known to survive falls like that in the past, not very often, but it did happen. Catch a few tree branches on the way down, and it might be enough to slow your descent. Slow it enough so that the impact doesn’t kill you. Just breaks both your legs or leaves you crippled in some other way. Then it’s just a matter of waiting for a tiger or something else with sharp teeth to come along and make a meal out of you. Or you could just bleed out slowly over several agonising hours. Even if you survived that, the best you could look forward to was likely a death from starvation and exposure. This is discounting gangrene setting into your wounds, maggots and blowflies slowly eating away at you or the vultures getting bored with waiting for you to die.
If you believe I’ve put too much thought into this, you need to understand that this is because it was the favoured subject choice for my rare conversations with SO Singh. Well, I say conversation, that’s misleading. What actually happened is he spent a playful half hour each morning recounting all the ways a man could die if he survived such a fall. Generally, while he was shaving around his pencil thin moustache with a cutthroat and I lay on the bunk next to him, trying in vain to catch some sleep after pulling the dog’s watch.
Sleep was something that singularly failed to come whenever my fellow officer was about and playing merrily with his razor.
My best course, I decided early on, was to take the jibes and the insults in a pretence of good humour. So I took a page out of the current Viceroy’s book and played the harmless bumbling fool for all it was worth. Even Boris’s worst political enemies would admit that Mr Johnson had the common touch. His appeal among Indian’s and ex-pats alike was legend. How a multi-millionaire, old Etonian, who read classics at Oxford, managed to convince people he had the common touch, I will never understand. But it seems if you fall off the odd elephant, have floppy hair, and bumble about in public giving off the impression you’re nine parts idiot, you can convince people you give a crap about them and not just your own pocket. But if it worked for him, then perhaps playing the bumbler would help keep me alive a while longer.
So that had been my plan, at least, until I had a chance to gain a little respect from the crew. A chance I knew could be filed under ‘slimmer than the aforementioned anorexic’.
At least, while I played at being a bumbler who didn’t realise the threat he is living under, the crew were enjoying themselves. Therefore, I reasoned, as long as they continued to enjoy victimising the colonial, I was probably safe from the long drop. Though I knew only too well such a respite was limited in its nature, and the crew would just follow orders, other than mine, of course, so they were not the arbiters of my survival, that was the man I shared a cabin with.
Sharing a cabin with the SO was the cause of a daily gauntlet, which had so far included everything from my shoelaces being tied together while I snoozed between shifts, to a razor blade in the soap.
“Oops sorry, old man, how did that get there?”
We didn’t speak much beyond the morning’s litany of doom beyond the guardrail. He didn’t listen to my orders such as they were, not that I issued any. And most of the time I couldn’t make sense of a word he said in any regard, as he conversed with the crew and Captain in Hindi. A language I was readily growing to despise.
Even the soldiers at the little forts we visited were almost exclusively by Hindi speakers, so I barely heard a word of the mother tongue from one day to the next. The occasional white officer in command of those forts, as it was always a white officer, would speak with Captain Jackson in their own offices and inevitably the Captain invited the second officer along with him. So usually when we moored anywhere, I was left aboard ship, figuratively in charge, as long as I didn’t try to do anything rash like issue an order. As such, I didn’t even get to hear a few relished words of English on our travels from my fellow Brits.
The Captain occasionally would deem to see me in his cabin. But that was mainly when he felt like shouting at someone. Inevitably he would call Second Officer Singh in shortly afterwards and give him the orders for the day in Hindi while dismissing me, which no doubt added to the contempt I was held in by all aboard. After all, if the captain doesn’t care to send his orders through you, then who gives a damn what you say.
If there was a plus side to all of this, it did mean I’d little to do and could walk the ship at my leisure, all be it with a degree of fear inspired caution. I’d avoid crossing another shipmate on the gantries for a start. It did, however, allow me to go poking my nose here and there in all the nooks and crannies of the ship. A nasty habit I shared with scoundrels and policemen the world over, not that there is generally much between them in my experience. It has however always been a firm belief of mine, stemming from my childhood in the East End, that you should always endeavour to find the best places you can stash things. Or failing that find the stashes belonging to other people. This may have been foolish as an exercise given my circumstances. Sometimes it is better not to know something after all. But foolish or not, these little searches of mine did at least prove to be rewarding.
Our good Captain Jackson or the Second Officer Singh, and I suspected both, had a little side operation going. Stacked at the very back of the cargo hold, behind a bulkhead panel, were several crates of the local Indian scotch, as well as a dozen or more bottles of the good stuff. They were clearly selling it on to the dry northwest for a tidy profit.
There was other contraband as well. Stuff that they were picking up from the hill tribes, I suspected, and shipping south for a fee. All fairly run of the mill stuff, to be honest. I strongly suspect that every boat in the air is carrying something it shouldn’t be to somewhere while not asking too many questions about it. If it’s not the captain running it, it’s the first officer or come to that it’s the gunnery deck officer who is responsible… So all told it was hardly a surprise to discover it happening on board the Jonah.
There was a plus side to being party to this information from my point of view, however. That being that I could try my hand at blackmail if I needed leverage to stay alive. Though I’d no illusions about my chances of survival if I did.
I’d a stark choice, you see. Make myself useful somehow, indispensable if possible, or expect to get the drop once they were tired of ribbing me. The main reason I was still alive was probably because kicking me off the ship in literal fashion too soon would look bad if anyone came snooping. Which would do me no good in any regard if they did, and I didn’t see my masters at The Ministry as the overly sentimental types.
So for three weeks, I took what contempt came my way and tried to shrug it off as much as I was able. Public school education, you may be surprised to learn, does have some benefits, and the development of a thick skin is one of them.
Then after our third Sunday in the air, our patrol took us south again to restock, and no doubt drop off the nose powder for the discerning that was hidden down in the hold.
It was then things came to a head, and when they did so it was in a way I didn’t expect.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
The Sunset In The East
We put down for the night in a little town call Sangura northeast of New Delhi by a couple of hundred miles. It was a fair ways south of the foothills of the Himalayas and the uppity hill tribes we were supposed to be keeping an eye on. A safe enough place, you would imagine, to compress the gas sack and pump air into the bladder thus making the whole ship heavier and sinking us towards the ground. Not an unusual
manoeuvre in safe territory.
The ship dropped to about twenty feet, and the cargo winch started up. I was on duty at the time, but the Captain was the one issuing the orders. I was doing my best to stay out of the way on the aft deck of the gondola. The aft was open to the elements and housed the airship’s main gun, a battered old howitzer on a pintle ring mount that allowed it to be swung port or starboard. The deck to either side sloped away allowing it to be depressed low enough for a fair old shot at ground forces. The baffle springs looked shot to me. So much so, that if you tried to fire the thing, there was a chance the recoil would rip it free, sending the gun and its unlucky crew off the other side. It might, at a pinch, have taken one or two shots before it wrenched free, but in the condition I found it I’d be damned before I was the one taking them.
If there is one thing I know, it’s gunnery. More precisely I know how to make sure that the guns are safe to use. One of the first things they teach you at gunnery officer school is how to keep your boat’s cannons up to scratch. Mainly by telling you horror stories about guns ripping open their own ship’s air sacks or blowing the magazine. If that happens, then the one officer who was bound to become surplus to requirements is the gunnery flag, because there is not much you can do anymore when you’re reduced to a brown stain on the deck plates.
The wisdom that they impart to you is twofold. Firstly you need to know your boat’s guns like the back of your hand. Secondly, you need to have a good gunnery sergeant maintaining them.
Or to be more exact, you need to know what a gun in good repair should look like but for god’s sake don’t try and fix them yourself.
There was no gunnery officer aboard the Jonah so I’d taken it upon myself to inspect the guns on my first day. Old habits, I guess.