The German Numbers Woman

by Alan Sillitoe

  The boat chopped into the swell, ever forward with lift and crash, as if to eat all water in its way. A strong northeasterly encouraged them along, no other vessel seen for days, Waistcoat saying it was a good thing too.

  His stomach none too settled, he went on deck for air, feeling every good reason for tumbling overboard. In like a bomb, and down he would go, pressure building up to burst his lungs, suddenly warmer, and then dead.

  A hand gripped his elbow. ‘Put this on,’ Richard shouted.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’d know why, if you went over.’ The life jacket was pulled tight. ‘We won’t want to lose you, though even with this it would be touch and go if you went in.’

  ‘I never think about it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have climbed aboard one of your trundling old aeroplanes without a parachute, would you?’

  He looked, as he supposed, along the wake, his favourite stance. ‘What clouds do we have?’

  ‘Fair-weather cumulus, or some such stuff.’

  He saw the photographic plates clearly, from the folders given out at training sessions: archipelagoes of vari-sized fluffballs, others coming up behind like slow-moving cavalry across the sky, elongated and flat, plenty of blue for them to float in. What else might be coming up was hard to say, which may have been why Richard added: ‘You never know what to make of clouds like that.’

  Two sheerwaters, battered by heady showers, took refuge on the upper deck. Richard was sorry Howard couldn’t see them. ‘We pick up passengers all the time,’ he told him. ‘Tens of thousands of square miles of water around us, and these pathetic bits of living flotsam cling to anything that promises a bit of rest. They feel the closeness of our warm blood, I suppose, as if they can pick up directional beams from it, so subtle only they can detect it. We probably send a Loran grid of rays in all directions, which they know how to use, and home in on us. They find it a comfort before they fly off and die, their last touch of life. By getting close I expect they renew the ability to live, pick up a few scraps from the wake as well. That sort of rest can bring enough survivor’s strength to reach land, or another boat halfway to it. Sea birds are a perfect balance of fragility and endurance. We’ve picked up some who feed and strut about as if they’ve taken command and will live forever, but a day or two later we find them dead under the davits. That body we thought so nice and plump and full of life turned out to be hollow, its skin like a drum, so that when you press it there’s nothing in between. Then again, you get a scraggly pathetic specimen half dead on the boards, looking at you with its button eyes as if to say goodbye, and a few days later it’ll go winging away towards land hundreds of miles off. I think they use such an intricate navigation system that they can always get to the exact point aimed for. I don’t suppose that pigeon called Jehu had any difficulty finding a place it wanted to go to.’

  Howard appreciated the lecture. ‘You think not?’

  ‘The chief wondered if you hadn’t sent it off on its travels for some reason or other. He mentioned it to me on the bridge last night when he was wandering around in his dressing gown because he couldn’t sleep. At such times he’s crippled with a persecution mania. I said I thought it a funny idea. I told him you kept the pigeon as a mascot, for good luck. But he’s got a bee in his bonnet that you wanted to use it for communication. Well, I thought, at such a barmy idea, how are the mighty – and not so mighty – fallen. I laughed, and said if so you’d only wanted to send a loving message to your wife, though you’d be more sure of one reaching her if you put it in a hooch bottle and dropped it overboard. It might even get there in ten years. And you could get more writing in it than on those micro-dot pieces you’d have to use in a pigeon leg capsule. In any case, I said to him, how can a blind man write, especially on a bit of sparrow’s arse paper?’

  ‘It just flew away.’ Howard aimed a look at him. ‘I was sorry to lose it.’

  ‘I expect it only went fly-around. It’ll be back.’

  ‘I’d like to think so. What does the sheerwater look like?’

  ‘It’s a Manx, I suppose. Slate-black, with a mottled neck, bit white underneath. There are two, man and wife maybe. I always like a bit of bird life on board. The place doesn’t seem so desolate.’ He lit a cigarette, cupping the match flame from the wind, and passed it across before making one for himself. ‘It’s no good hoping they’ll take your thoughts or longings away. They’ve got business of their own, and can’t consider us at all. The best thing for you is to get below, out of the rain. Stick to the radio. Try to hear something that’ll stop us from sliding into the big hole we might be digging for ourselves.’

  Richard had come as close as possible to warning him, without knowing for certain there was anything to warn him about. What better friend could a man have? Friendship was a priceless bond, yet everyone on board was already betrayed, though perhaps more in thought than reality. So much hung in the balance, but who in the scales of villainy would weigh more precious than anyone else? ‘You can be sure I’ll do my best.’

  ‘You’re one of us,’ Richard said, as if to cauterise Howard’s wound, ‘and don’t forget it.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘There’ll be a bit of ready cash when this is over, maybe even more than you expect. Waistcoat can be generous when the pressure’s off, and he coughs up the gratitude.’

  ‘I’m not in it for the money.’

  ‘That could be why he doesn’t trust you. Try seeing it as if you are for a change. Or at least let him think so.’

  ‘I thought it best not to appear mercenary, being as I’m such a useless lump on the boat.’

  ‘Never a good policy.’ Richard let his cigarette go into the scuppers. ‘Everybody has a value, and that includes you, so when the sea chops up be sure to wear your Mae West. The low’s still moving north, and it’ll take a while yet – though we should be clear in a few hours, according to the gen you got from Punto Delgado. Nice bit of interception, that. Waistcoat was pleased to know we’d have a calm sea when we got there.’

  So he was one of the crew, no matter how he had set up the machinery of getting caught. He was in it for the money, and there was no reason for them not to succeed if his warning hadn’t taken. In gloomier moments, he felt there was little chance that it had, and if all went well, and he landed back in England with more money in his pocket than had ever been there before (how would he explain it to Laura?) there would be little he could do to compromise them.

  Crossing the Azores Current meant they were only a hundred and fifty miles from the island, and no regular watches were set or, rather, everyone was on watch. Waistcoat put himself beside Richard at the wheel, Cleaver stood upright like a soldier, and fiddled with his sextant, while Howard kept out of their way at the radio, and Ted Killisick in the galley provided nonstop food and drink. Paul Cinnakle tended his precious engines, and Cannister and Scuddilaw were posted on deck as lookouts fore and aft. The booze had been locked up by Waistcoat, and he would keep the key in his pocket for forty-eight hours.

  The sheerwaters did a graceful flyover – part of their ceremonial before departure – and headed south as if the boat was too slow, outlined against the clearing sky. Far to starboard, an escarpment of cloud, like the long trunk of a giant tree, stretched as far north and south as could be seen, stationary, waiting for a wind to rush it towards them.

  Richard didn’t like the look of it, but it was fruitless to worry about what might never happen. If it did happen no amount of worry would have stopped it, and if it didn’t happen you had worried for nothing. Such phenomenon often melted before it got to you, so what the hell? If everything goes all right tonight, he thought, I’ll be too happy to worry from then on.

  Howard could get nothing intelligible from the waveband he needed to hear from, as if the world roundabout was drawing them into radio emptiness, or to extinction in the earth’s biggest hole. Higher up the frequency there were weather reports, and a few ships working messages from the coast, ta
nkers mostly.

  On one frequency he heard a forlorn low-note squawking, like the sound Jehu made after an excursion around the boat before flopping hungry and exhausted back on deck. It was as if he was tuned into its body moving north under the menacing cloud base, picking up the faltering rhythm of its wing beats straining to keep up the rate and stay airborne, but losing heart at the distance still to go. Its throat was making the noise, and by some technological quirk the bird had assumed the properties of a radio, so that he could hear its discouragement and the valiant beating of its wings not many feet above the clawing wave tops, hoping for a boat or plank of wood to rest and maybe feed on.

  He flipped the needle away from a breaking heart, feeling more blighted by his state of blindness than at any other time. Why now was impossible to say, but the depression had to be climbed out of, so he turned back to the radio, into his all-enveloping home, no different now – except for the motion of the boat – to when he had been in his room on land. Locked in the darkwarm cloth of the ionosphere and all its noises, he was himself wherever he might be. No need to seek a reason for existence, even though too far off to hear Moscow or the German Numbers Woman since, more than anything, he had become part of the Flying Dutchman, that ever-travelling phantom hulk of the marine void forging along to who knew where.

  Ted put a mug of coffee and a saucer of biscuits in front of him, clicks and rattles of comfort, almost the way Laura had so often done when he had been numbing his mind with too many wasted hours at the radio. Care for each other stopped people sliding uselessly into a state of living death. Talk and action bound them, and a blind man must find a role for himself, so he called thanks as Ted walked out, marvelling that he was again part of a crew whose survival depended on their concern for each other, but this time the mission was to pick up something deadly. The effect would be little better than unloading bombs onto cities, a high explosive powder to destroy the minds instead of bodies.

  His hand was close to the VHF transmitter switch. The range was short, not much further than the horizon, so if he sent a mayday call who would pick it up? If he began to talk into the microphone and no other boat was apparent, he would be killed for nothing. He couldn’t do it. In any case, it was foolhardy, too stupid even to contemplate. To die in such a cause needed courage, like going on and on regardless into a wall of flak. He couldn’t imagine it anymore, too old except for the imagination – a pathetic substitute for action. He would never do it, had no wish to, was afraid to, was at one with them in their game, hoping all would go well, a wish he hadn’t imagined on setting out. The boat had a set purpose and he had become part of it. Blindness wouldn’t save the state of his soul if they were caught. After taking in the truth, up to now impossible to acknowledge, he felt exhilarated at knowing that the height of a blind man’s existence was in being accepted as a villain by the rest of the crew. He drew his fingers back from the transmitter switch.

  He stared into the froth of the wake as if to let the air cleanse him, but he had calmly accepted whatever was coming, no greater bliss to be got from the world. Whatever he had been on starting out, he was now in their thrall, and would not be the same person when he got back to Laura, though the picture of such a reunion wouldn’t come, no matter how hard he tried to see it.

  Cannister was by his side when he went to the bows. ‘I’m keeping a lookout, see?’ Jack explained. ‘With a pair of old rusty binoculars. They’ve got a purple haze at the top of the right-hand circle, but they’re good enough. They work. I bought ’em for a tenner at a junkshop in Pompey. They make me look like a real bloody captain on the bridge, like in “The Cruel Sea”, or something. But you seem full of thoughts, Howard. Are you getting tired? You never say much. You’re waiting for that pigeon to come back, I suppose.’

  Spray curled up and caught his face, cool out of the afternoon humidity. The splash across his eyes, as if to make him see again, sent vision after vision, each crowding the other out, showing the sky and the pale receding beam of the wake he would have preferred to be looking at. None of them opened onto the detail of everyday life on the boat which he wanted to see, as if he’d been blinded for his sins, but even more sins would not let him see again. God was oblivious to your sighs, and whoever did not hear could not exist. You were left to argue with yourself. He laughed, in his new guise of buccaneer, hoping it sounded hearty enough. ‘I was wondering how far we are from Blighty.’

  ‘No good in that. Never look back,’ Cannister said. ‘When I change watch and go to the stern I’ll have to look back, until we hit the coast. Orders is orders. See that blob to port? It’s a bloody great tanker, right on the horizon.’ He laughed. ‘No, of course you don’t see it. The funny thing is you look as if you see everything. Even the chief thought you might be putting it on, though I don’t think he does anymore. Best not to think about Blighty till it’s under your feet, then you don’t need to.’

  ‘I wish I was putting it on,’ Howard said.

  ‘I’ll bet you do. But you should go on top sometime for a change, and make it seem as if you’re taking a shufti from there. You might feel a bit better. You’d get a different bump under your feet at least, with everything all around you. It’s a long day, though. The last day always is. I’d rather be back in Hartlepool with the family, but on the other hand I’ve got to be here to earn enough money to keep ’em. They’d never forgive me if I didn’t. Four kids eat a lot o’ popcorn. How many you got, Howard?’

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘Don’t you want some?’

  ‘I never thought so.’

  ‘My buggers just came, so I had to shake their hot little hands when they did. I wouldn’t be without ’em now.’

  Howard was curious. ‘Do the others have big families?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say big ’uns, but they all have kids. Except Richard, he don’t mention any, but he don’t mention much anyway. People who go on jobs like this are often good family men. Not much else you can do these days. I’ve got a nice bungalow to keep up, and a wife who likes to be taken out now and again. I like to go out a bit as well when I’m on shore. I did seven years in the Navy, but there wasn’t much money in that, so I fell into this trade. Waistcoat likes to employ men with a bit of service behind them. Makes him feel good. He knows he can trust ’em in a tight corner. He’s even glad to have a bloke like you from the RAF, blind or not, though you’ll never get him to say so. I think in some ways he regards you as lucky, a bit of a mascot, if you don’t mind me saying so. Up in Geordie land where I come from it used to be thought lucky, for instance, if a black man knocked on your door on New Year’s Eve. Or was it Christmas Eve? When we was kids we used to black our faces with a bit of Cherry Blossom and go knock-a-door. If we didn’t get a penny or so we got a bun or a piece of lardy cake. They was happy days, Howard!’

  ‘Has Waistcoat been in any of the services?’

  Cannister’s laugh almost drowned the sound of the engines. ‘Him? I wouldn’t like to say what kind of service he’s been in. Whatever it was, though, it’s made him as hard as nails. Mind you, as long as you do as you’re told, and do your work, he’s all right. He’ll stand by you, as much as he can stand by anybody. I sometimes think he’s a bit off his trolley when he gets to yammering his filthy language, but that’s only a cover. He’s a peculiar bloke, that’s all. I know he nearly cut your windpipe when you came on board and he found out you was blind, but he’s the sort now who might even ask you to come on the next trip because he’s got some notion he’ll need you – or for some reason he’s even taken a shine to you. He’s a funny bugger, I tell you. That tanker’s gone now, right off the radar screen. Let’s go and see if old Ted’s got his urn on the boil. I’ve never known him not to. Chuck the old sod overboard if he didn’t. Just follow me, then you’ll be all right from the soupy sea. Seems you’ve seen the last of that pigeon. I expect a shite hawk’s had it for its elevenses.’

  Balancing his tea mug and a large bun Howard made his way to where S
cuddilaw was looking ahead. ‘How much longer before we see land?’

  Scud took him by the shoulders, turned him for orientation. ‘Not long. It’ll be over there, but you won’t see it, I’m sorry to say. A sight for sore eyes for the rest of us, when we do. Not that I’ll see it properly, either, because it’ll be dusk already, if not dark. We’ll see the light winking at the end of the island, and it’ll be welcome after coming all this way. We shan’t get too close, because we don’t want anybody to see us. It’ll be black-out, like in the war, even cigarettes doused, and because I smoke sixty a day that’s a rule that gives me the willies.’

  Judy was somewhere in the distance, waiting for them to draw near. What would she be doing? She would be peeling an orange, putting it segment by segment into her mouth while gazing north to penetrate the darkness, hoping to see a vision of Carla. She would only find a blind man who had fallen in love with her voice. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting this girl Judy, who works on the other boat.’

  ‘You know her, do you?’

  ‘No, I’ve only heard her mentioned. What’s she like?’

  He laughed. ‘She’s her own woman, Judy is. Mad as they come. You can never tell what she’ll do next. One minute moody, and the next all lit up. A good sort, though. She likes a bit of fun. The trouble is, you never know where you are with her. She likes blokes one day and women the next. You can’t take liberties, and that’s a fact. She knows how to put you down if you try anything.’

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Look like?’

  ‘I’m asking because I shan’t be able to see her.’

  ‘Oh well, you won’t miss all that much. She’s tall and gawky. A bit of a tomboy, like a lot of women who’ve worked a few years on boats. She’s got a nice enough face, though. Once you’ve seen it you’ll never forget it. Grey eyes and a beaky nose.’

  ‘Is she blonde or brunette?’

  ‘A shade mousey, though she’s been known to dye it a few times. Normally more blonde than brown. You seem quite taken by her.’