Another Great Day at Sea

by Geoff Dyer

  Yes, Beachbelly was bouncing back to the beach. Shore leave! Liberty! Freedom to explore the fleshpots of Bahrain! More exactly, the chance to use his Gmail account—from his hotel room. To eat proper food (less of an issue since he’d been gobbling leftovers from the Captain’s kitchen) and drink beer. Beer! But did he even want beer? Hadn’t he enjoyed the booze-less sleeps and the absence of the feeling of tipsiness and wooziness which usually signalled the day’s sag into night? Would he in his small way miss the institutions of ship life he was so impatient to leave behind?

  And it’s not like I suddenly stopped enjoying being on the ship. Something was almost always being added to the apparently unchanging routine of the day. The whole of one morning was taken up with replenishment at sea (RAS). On the starboard side we were refuelled by a boat riding along next to us, umbilically joined by six pairs of hitched and drooping fuel lines. It was the equivalent not of pulling into a gas station but of having a gas station pull alongside you. Forced into straitened circumstances the ocean foamed and rushed between us like a white-water river. The other boat was battleship grey, as, I suppose, was ours—a shade of camouflage that seemed more effective in the Atlantic than here where sky and sea were always Arabian blue.

  On the other side, in a far less intimate relationship, was another boat from which a helo flew back and forth, coming to us with a low-slung load of supplies, returning empty-handed. The trio of boats surged along together like this for an untold distance in finely calibrated—and extremely dangerous—harmony.

  Even without exceptional events like this my life was more interesting than the one to which I would soon return. On my penultimate morning I went up to Vulture’s Row to watch the surge and return of planes. One of the chiefs I’d had lunch with a couple of times was already up there.

  ‘How ya doing?’ he called out.

  ‘I’m great, thanks,’ I yelled back. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Sun’s shining, wind’s blowing, jets are flying,’ he shouted back. ‘Doesn’t get much better than that!’

  He was right—but it could so easily have been a lot worse than that. It had been tricky arranging dates that fitted in with both the Navy’s logistics and my own surprisingly crowded diary. The first dates proposed were in late November, at the tail end of the deployment, when the carrier would be making its dismal way back across the Atlantic. I couldn’t make those dates but I also pointed out that the weather, at that time of year, in the middle of the Atlantic, would be terrible and that I had been traumatized by the episode of The World at War devoted to the Battle of the Atlantic (the merchant convoys, the wolf packs). When this was relayed back up the chain of command the fact that I was unable to make the dates got deleted so that it seemed that all I cared about was the weather. I straightened this out: yes, of course I preferred nice weather to nasty but that was secondary to my other commitments and obligations—thank God! I realized now that it would have been not just unbelievably dreadful but completely pointless to have been on the carrier in the heaving and grey Atlantic in late November. No jets flying—i.e., the carrier might just as well have been a cargo ship—and weather so cold that the so-called flight deck would have been like an empty highway in the middle of the ocean. Rough seas and the crew counting down the days and minutes, waiting to get home with nothing really to do (though you can bet they were kept busy) in a state of steadily increasing boredom and impatience.

  41

  For his last evening Beachbelly would not be getting any leftovers from the Captain’s cook. Because he would be back eating slop with the rest of the crew? No, because he was dining at the Captain’s table. The Captain’s in-port cabin—as it was bizarrely called—was modelled on a room in the Bush family home but with smaller windows (covered to prevent telltale light beaming out into the hostile night, the enemy night). The lighting was not soft but the furnishings were, the sofa was. Beachbelly sat on it somewhat stiffly, looking around. Lots of portraits of Bush and family looking midway between regal and regular, not troubled by the knowledge that, having chased Saddam out of Kuwait, they’d passed on the chance to settle his hash for good (thereby making a rod for their son’s back). Maybe the pictures were taken before that, when their main worry was that this son of theirs was showing signs of being a bit of a retard.

  There were seven guests for dinner, plus Captain Luther, who had not yet joined them. Beachbelly was the only civilian, but he was wearing a clean and pressed shirt that he’d kept in reserve for precisely an occasion such as this.

  The Captain arrived in his flying suit as if he’d just flown in, business class, in an F-18. Everyone jumped up, including Beachbelly who stood for a few seconds in compromised at-ease attention until the Captain waved them all to table. Beachbelly was seated immediately to his right. He did not need to understand the exact significance of this to be conscious of the honour. To his right was someone he’d interviewed a few days earlier whose name he’d forgotten and whose rank he’d never understood (though he knew it was high). Beachbelly got the impression that this high-ranking neighbour was wondering why his unranked neighbour had spent the last two weeks wasting everyone’s time.

  The table was set with wine glasses, filled either with water or iced tea. The mere presence of these glasses initiated in Beachbelly a craving for wine more intense than any actual wine could have satisfied. Everything about the table and place settings cried out for a decanter of burgundy, but there was no decanter and there was no burgundy. It was like a vision of life after everyone had been twelve-stepped into sobriety and Beachbelly was the only one tormented by the knowledge that it didn’t have to be this way, that there was a place for moderation, for staying up late, for opening another bottle and saying things like ‘One for the road, anyone?’ or ‘Night cap, Cap’n?’

  The food started to arrive and Beachbelly was not disappointed: Thai coconut soup, followed by crispy duck breast, mango chutney and perfectly cooked rice. Perhaps it was no better than the food he’d scrounged up the last couple of nights but there was a big difference between scoffing it like a stowaway and enjoying it here, as a legitimate guest at the Captain’s table.

  Just before joining the carrier Beachbelly had read Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table in which the narrator passes on ‘a small lesson’ learned in the long sea voyage from Ceylon to England. Contrasting the lowly status of the table where he dines every night with that of the captain’s table where people were ‘constantly toasting one another’s significance’, he insists that ‘what is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric.’ Maybe so, but the food is certainly better which, at this point in the deployment, was all Beachbelly cared about.

  And Ondaatje’s point, he decided, was itself a form of rhetoric. It all depends on who’s at the head table. Captain Luther had a permanent sparkle in his eye, could not have done more to put people at ease. He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing but he was, of course, the Captain so everyone was on their best behaviour which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself. The day before he’d completed a marathon on the treadmill—a good place to be, he claimed, since he was ‘never more than a gurney away from a defibrillator’. Perhaps part of him longed not to be the Captain, for a relationship of complete equality where everyone is judged not by their rank but by the content and quality of their wisecracking. It was impossible to get a sense of him outside of his Captainness. But it was difficult to imagine his equivalent in the Royal Navy being any more charming or equable. Beachbelly wondered if it was acceptable to initiate a topic himself, was tempted at times to venture some conversational gambits but then thought better of it. What would it have been like to have dined with the Captain in Paris, where he was travelling after the ship docked in Marseilles on the way back to Virginia?

  There was talk of baseball or football, none of which meant anything to the
English Beachbelly. He didn’t mind. He was, as they say, savouring his duck breast, savouring both its inherent duck-breastness and the fact that it was not whatever slop they were eating on the rest of the carrier. He looked up when he heard the Captain say, ‘The event horizon of information. It goes there and stays there,’ and wished he’d been listening to what had led up to this interesting remark rather than concentrating solely on his now-vanished duck breast. It too had passed over the event horizon.

  The sparkle in the Captain’s eyes could not conceal the impacted tiredness behind the sparkle. On a good night he got five hours sleep. That’s what he’d been aiming for last night, setting his alarm for six thirty, but there’d been phone calls every half hour from about three thirty about ships approaching too close, stuff that, while not exactly urgent, required his authorization. Beachbelly could not have handled that. He was not a leader. He was Beachbelly and Beachbelly loved his sleep.

  Dessert arrived—a chocolate thingy—and then everyone signed the menus and posed for pictures. Coffee and herbal teas were served, dinner was over—the Captain took a call on his radio—and everyone was trooping out, returning to their stations. It occurred to Beachbelly that he could have relaxed more than he had, but he remembered that, at the time, while they were at table, he’d judged it inappropriate to appear too relaxed. The main impression, though, was the sheer speed of the dinner. It had flashed by but rather than feeling short-changed he wondered if this was a model that could be adapted for use back on the beach. Invite people round for eight p.m. and send them off, full-bellied, by nine. It would never work—because of the ingredient so conspicuously missing from the Captain’s dinner: alcohol, booze, wine . . . But how nice it was to get up from the table not feeling half asleep and semi-deflated, but bouncy as a ball, ready for Ensign Newell’s promotion in the Flag Mess.

  42

  The Flag Mess filled up with more than a hundred sailors and airmen in flying suits, digital camouflage or coveralls. It was crowded vertically as well as horizontally: not everyone was my height, but the gap between heads and the low ceiling was conspicuously minimal. Paul was being promoted alongside another ensign and their part of the ceremony was to be followed by other awards for various outstanding performances. Admiral Tyson was making a short speech. I could barely see her above the sea of heads but she had no trouble making herself heard.

  ‘This is a big deal in case you didn’t know. We got two ensigns up here. One has been in the Navy for fourteen years and one’s been in for eight years. Both of these guys started as E-3s in the Navy and here they are today being promoted to JGs [Lieutenants Junior Grade]. What that tells me—and I say this every time I get the opportunity so you might well be sick of it.’

  I wasn’t sick of it—I hadn’t heard it before—but I had the feeling I’d had many times before on the boat, far more frequently than I had it in the normal course of civilian life, of intense liking for someone combined with intense admiration. A lovely combination that—and one that the admiral embodied: to be admirable and likeable.

  ‘One of the things about the military is we all come in for whatever reason but it’s a level playing field and you can make of it what you will. The opportunities are there to succeed and you can go as far you want to. So today we’re gonna make ’em JGs and who knows how far they can go.’

  Then, turning to Paul and his colleague, she said, ‘I wish your family and friends were all here to see this, but we know we’re your best friends anyway.’

  In her down-home way the admiral was as impressive a speaker as Stonewall. The fact that she—an admiral—could speak in this homely style was actually one of the most impressive things about her. In her way she exemplified the achieved ideal of the level playing field on the occasionally pitching deck of a flat top.

  I was glad that the last thing that happened during my time on the carrier was Paul’s promotion. He was the person I knew best, the person I had spent the most time with, and he was so deserving of promotion: someone who incarnated all that was decent, reliable, dependable—and who was charming, funny and so easy to be around. The older I get the more I like that: being around people who are easy to be around. When I was told—by Newell—that I would be escorted round the ship by someone (usually him) my heart sank but I ended up feeling less at ease when he wasn’t around. None of this, of course, can excuse the absurd moustache he’d continued to cultivate for the length of my visit; in a civilian institution that moustache would have been grounds not merely for passing him over when it came to promotions but for a dishonourable discharge.

  Two people took off the gold bars on Newell’s collars and replaced them with silver ones (so that the promotion seemed like a relegation or downgrading). The first of the returning jets came thumping down on the flight deck, drowning out Paul and his companion as they swore an oath to ‘to defend the Constitution’.

  After the ceremony was complete the admiral advised us of a potential change to the ship’s schedule, which would not affect the planned date of return to the US—though the November weather could be relied on to do that. This bit was classified, the admiral said, so I felt somewhat conspicuous, standing there with a pen and notebook, jotting it all down. A couple of people looked me over, not suspiciously, just in an acknowledging-the-security-risk way. I tore the relevant page out of my exercise book, crumpled it one-handed and fed it into the nearest thing to a shredder I could find, namely my mouth.

  43

  On my final morning a woman called Angela came to change the sheets and prepare the room for the next guest. The place where I’d been sleeping in such privileged isolation could not have been more different from her berthing: she was sharing with more than fifty other women —though it didn’t seem to worry her.

  ‘I know how to share. I’m more adjustable than most. Instead of making them adjust to me I adjust to them so it’s easier for me to commune. I prefer to have my own space, but I know how to make it comfortable so they don’t have to worry about me and I don’t have to worry about them.’

  She was twenty-eight. Before joining the Navy she’d been a supervisor at UPS, and before taking care of the guest suites she’d been up on the flight deck.

  ‘How was that?’ I asked.

  ‘We carried the chains, we dived and ducked, at night we washed the jets. We had to get the sea salt and sand off of ’em. Check the engine oil, check the level got good, check the tyre pressure.’ She made the flight deck sound like a potentially dangerous garage back home in Chicago. Then she made it sound like something else, in rural Illinois: ‘Flight deck, once you know it and know what to avoid, it’s like being in a river.’ She had the gentlest, sing-songiest voice I’d ever heard. Her voice was like a river and I could have listened to her for hours, just floating along, going with the flow of words, hearing her say, about the flight deck, ‘It makes the time go by fast. When you’re up on the flight deck time flies.’

  Time was not flying for me. It had stalled. The minutes were anchor-heavy. I was eager to leave, to have done with noticing and remembering and trying to pay attention to complex explanations of things and processes I could not understand while worrying about banging my head the whole time. The fact that I was a volunteer did not diminish the tension of these last moments. It all came back to the first new word I’d heard: the trap. You’re on the boat and you’re trapped. Well, I was done with the trap and impatient for the cat. I wanted them to send me on my way to Bahrain, a place I had no desire to go to or see. I wanted to get back to my wife and my flat with its nice lighting and windows, its dimmer switches and quiet, where it did not sound, every couple of minutes, as though the roof over one’s head was going to be rent asunder by forces so intense and clamorous they almost defied comprehension. I’m ready to go, I said to myself, ready to slip the surly bonds of earth, so put me in that bird, strap me in, and shoot her up.

  44

  I was ready to go, impatiently waiting for Paul, and so, for the last time, I resor
ted to the equivalent of calling him on the phone: I farted and, sure enough, like rubbing the lamp to make the genie appear, this brought him knocking on my door. For the last time we walked the hall of mirrors, through the knee-knockers and walkways that were busy, as always, with people cleaning, polishing and shining and standing aside to let us pass. At the ATO shack Paul and I said goodbye. No hugs or tears, just a handshake, eye to eye, man to man, Christian to atheist, sailor to civilian.

  The ATO shack was already crowded with people waiting to fly out. Among them was a woman we’d lunched with occasionally, part of the group of young graduates who worked in the reactor. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with something about Chicago on the front. I could see the shape of her breasts and her bare arms. Her hair was down—she had very long hair. Worried that if I sat anywhere near her I would not be able to keep my eyes off her I sat on the other row, facing away, facing the wall, thinking about what I’d seen and, more tormentingly, what I’d not seen. How effectively her uniform had concealed not just the body but the womanliness within. Even when they were exercising in T-shirts and shorts, I realized now, the women had none of the Lycra allure of gym classes in the city or the supple, quasi-erotic confidence and calm that one notices (without appearing to) when a bunch of women go to a café after a yoga session. No, they were just pounding along on the treadmills for all they were worth. The only sexual impulse I’d had—and it wasn’t even remotely sexual, just a diluted form of romantic curiosity—had been concentrated on the woman from the hangar deck with the luminous eyes. And now I was suddenly conscious of that absence, of thoughts and feelings I’d not been having.