Death Ship

by Jim Kelly

  The shoreline itself was an almost continuous necklace of houses, ranging along a spectrum from glass-and-concrete second homes to shacks built of driftwood and corrugated iron, boarded up against spring tides.

  ‘That’s thirteen hundred; we’re close,’ called Shaw, waiting as Valentine trudged the high water mark. The sea was high, but still unnaturally calm, as it had been all summer after the storm-wracked winter. For Shaw, the temptation to simply run into the water was almost as strong as the one that was propelling Valentine up the beach, to the safety of dry land.

  Shaw knew something of Beachcomber, thanks to Lena’s business diligence. That winter, sitting outside one evening by the firepit, she’d floated the idea of opening up part of the restaurant as a gallery. If they added images to the website, they could attract new customers, and by rotating artists they could have a series of ‘private view’ evenings, invitation only, when they could offer a deal on food and wine. She said there was already a string of galleries on the coast going east towards the Chelsea-on-Sea villages of the Burn Valley – but nothing local, except Beachcomber, which she’d checked out, and officially classified as ‘eccentric’, if not ‘wacky’ – with no food, and a coffee offering she typified as ‘sub-Nescafé’.

  The sign, when Shaw glimpsed it, was neon, unlit, in the style of American Graffiti, the hut itself an old diner – nearly fifty feet of gleaming steel and sleek Greyhound Bus windows. Valentine noted a Stop the Pier poster, and a trailing flag from a radio mast which bore the campaign logo of STP. Inside, the whole length of the unit was a gallery, with a few pictures hung, but mostly accommodating sculptures made of driftwood or found objects from the beach. The old counter had a red bell, which, when Shaw hit it, seemed to echo round the metallic cigar case of the café/gallery.

  Valentine examined a work entitled Littoral 6 which appeared to be constructed from broken plastic bottles and a fishing buoy. ‘People pay for this rubbish?’ he asked, unaware of the clever play on words, while examining the price tag and whistling in appreciation.

  A man appeared, and it was immediately apparent he was also the artist; paint-spattered dungarees hung from bony shoulders, on a frame which could have been driftwood itself, beneath a weathered face, eroded by sea and sun. His exact age was as difficult to calculate as most flotsam: possibly sixty, but probably a decade more, with silver hair cut close to his skull.

  The introductions were curt: his name was Joe Lester, owner of hut 1314, aka Beachcomber.

  ‘It was the website,’ he said, without further preamble, hardly glancing at the proffered warrant cards. ‘I put up photographs – mine, other local artists. This guy posted on the site, said he was looking at Hunstanton online and saw a link for the gallery. He said it was the word that caught his attention: beachcomber. As a kid he’d spent a lot of time walking beaches. He wrote about the word – I guess you’d say he was eloquent on the subject – so we had that in common, an interest in the shoreline …’ Looking out the long diner window at the sea, his eyes narrowed, the tanned face creasing in dark lines. ‘He said strandloper was better – that’s the South African, right? For the tribes on the coast who lived off what they could find. Apparently, their rubbish dumps were full of shells and whalebone – that’s what Hartog reckoned. That’s what sets us apart, Homo sapiens, from the uncouth lot – the Homo erectus. We scavenged on the beach. Salvaged stuff. That’s smart …’ He searched for the right word. ‘Adaptive. So that’s a kind of pure vision of the beachcomber as one with nature, an eco-warrior. I tweeted the text, and loads of people joined in – hashtag beachcomber.’

  Valentine, bemused, pointed at a coffee machine and asked if he could have a cup. Wordlessly, Lester gave him a metal token for the slot, and as his arm extended from his shirt sleeve, Shaw noted a tattoo, faded, but reading The Rock. The interruption seemed to derail his thoughts, so that he had to look out to sea again, trying to reconnect with the thread of the narrative.

  ‘Anyway, we had a good chat online, then he turns up, walked through that door one day, what – three weeks ago, more? Sat right there, drinking coffee. I had to tell him then that the English version isn’t so starry-eyed. Beachcombers. One up from tramps, just runaway sailors who lived off the land. Vagabonds. Riff-raff. I have to say I feel kind of more at home with that …’

  Shaw nodded, distracted by a mural on the wall which advertised Beachcomber’s food, with a telephone number for booking, replete with bulbous, graffiti-like numbers, including a pair of Continental sevens.

  ‘Did he say why he’d made the trip?’ asked Shaw.

  ‘Well. Sort of. On the website he saw something he wanted, so he’d come to buy it.’

  Lester had a laptop on the old diner counter which he flipped up. The Beachcomber website had a gallery feature which allowed him to arrow through the images until he reached a photograph of several items of flotsam scattered artfully amongst glistening rocks. There was a long blue float, some rope, a seal’s skull, and a piece of wood bearing the letters Cala.

  ‘He wanted to know if I still had this piece and where I’d found it. It was round the back on the grass bank. I said he could have it – I found it a year ago – but he gave me fifty pounds, which was good of him. I asked why it was precious and he just said, “Long story” – which in my book is shorthand for don’t ask.’

  ‘And where did you find it?’ asked Valentine, pulling a face as he sipped the coffee from a paper cup marked with the STP logo.

  ‘About half a mile north of the old pier. I walk the line …’ Lester smiled at the Johnny Cash. ‘With a torch in winter if I need it.’ Lester examined the grain in the wooden bar top. ‘It’s odd, it’s been gone thirty-five years, but when I walk this beach, my beach, I still see it, the old pier. Graceful – that’s the word. The one they’re putting up looks like the conveyor belt on The Generation Game. Bloody eyesore.’

  Shaw spun the laptop so he could see the picture that had enticed Dirk Hartog across the North Sea. ‘It’s a ship’s name board, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Certainly. He said he was thinking of some scuba diving off the beach, thought he might find the rest. I said he’d be better off out on the sandbanks. This is just flotsam. The wrecks tend to be out near the deep channel.’

  A detail still troubled Shaw. ‘You walk the beach after dark?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t sleep nights – well, not much. And I don’t sleep indoors much either.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re with the lifeboat right, the hovercraft?’ Shaw nodded. ‘Thought I knew the face. Next time you’re in the lifeboat house, have a look at the rescue board: the night of thirty-first January 1953. My name’s up there. Joseph Lester, aged four.’

  ‘The North Sea floods?’

  ‘We lost my sis. Mind you, wasn’t for the lifeboat, we’d have all gone.’

  Shaw held up both hands. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to open old wounds …’

  ‘No, no. S’fine. Here, I’ll show you.’

  He led the way out the back of the diner and up the grassy seawall to the grit road, beyond which stretched the reclaimed land, marred by a caravan site, a mobile home park, a sandy track linking a line of post-war prefabs, and a field of rough grass dotted with the kind of tents that have picture windows and a canvas veranda. Every tent had a tethered car, as if they were on leads.

  ‘We were over there … beyond that line of chalets. Dad worked on the roads, navvying, so it was all we could afford. A Sunday, of course, which didn’t help, so there was no warning. These days – radio, internet, TV, radar – we’d have been evacuated. Back then, nothing.’

  Valentine reached the top of the bank, his narrow chest heaving.

  ‘The water came over the bank along at Heacham, then back up here. About one in the morning. First thing we knew, there was three feet of it in the house, and no electric. So Mum lit a candle. We had to get on the top bunks and wait. Me and my sister thought it was an adventure. When the water got to the door handle, Dad went out, wading – tryin
g to, anyway. There was no moon and no lights. Mum got up with us on the bunks, and then the candle went, and we got cold – really cold.’

  Lester fumbled in his pocket for cigarette papers and tobacco, his fingers shaking. Shaw looked away, embarrassed by the intimacy.

  ‘That’s the thing about the sea: it comes at you, in waves, and I’ve never had a problem with that. But the water that night, it just rose, so it felt like we were just sinking, and it seemed to crush the air so it was hard to breathe. Others – we could hear loads of people talking, and shouting out for help – they had to sit tight too. I held on to sis but in the end she was colder than the sea. We ended up sitting on the rafters under the roof. Light came, Mum knew she was gone. Still don’t like it – the moment of dawn, the first light. Never know what you’re going to see.

  ‘The TA got to us first – just the local lads, but they did a great job, and some of the US servicemen from up in town. The lifeboat crew had got some small boats out and they brought Dad. He tried to bring her back – that was the worst bit really, the effort, because in the end he just got angry – with her, but really with himself.’ Again, the eyes narrowed as he considered Shaw. ‘He never got over it. Simple thing to say, hear it a lot, but it’s true. Most of us, it’s a slow realization – that life’s been a failure. Dad, he knew that morning. He was thirty-one.’

  Shaw wondered if Lester’s support for the STP stemmed from that night in 1953, whether it was an attempt to restore the landscape, and the seascape, to what it had been before the tragedy had overtaken his family, with its graceful arrow’s-flight pier: a bid, in short, to wind back the clock.

  ‘Between here and Lynn, they lost sixty people,’ said Lester. ‘Difficult to believe. Three hundred and more on the East Coast. Up in town, they didn’t even know. Thought it was a winter storm, end of story. They call it a tempest on the memorial, but most people thought it was just a gale. They laid in bed thinking, I’m glad I’m not out in that. Holland – three thousand dead. They don’t forget. The sea can kill you. That’s what I see when I sit on the beach: a killer. People spend their holidays in the water. Me? I give it a miss.’

  Shaw looked back out to sea, thinking about Dirk Hartog.

  ‘To be fair,’ said Lester, ‘and I am a fair man, the government didn’t want anyone to remember about us. Eight years after the war, morale shaky, trying to rebuild the cities, last thing they wanted was a national emergency. So we just got on with clearing it all up. And burying the dead. Sis is at Heacham: Safely in harbour – Mum chose it, it’s from The Tempest. Most of those who died lived in one-storey housing on reclaimed land. Today we’d be white trash.’

  Out beyond the mobile homes a child flew a red kite.

  ‘So I don’t sleep nights,’ said Lester, smiling. ‘I walk the beach. Sorry – that’s a bloody long answer to a short question. I’m looking for anything really. Dad said I’m watching the sea, to make sure it doesn’t happen again, but that’s just imagination. I just can’t abide a roof.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Robbie Ross had worked a double shift in the underwater caisson, the damp cold of the concrete chamber getting to his joints, so that his left elbow, left knee, and the finger joints on both hands had swollen up, making his body feel bloated and arthritic. In the cacophony of noise within the box he had to flash his torch three times at the foreman to mark the end of his shift, heading for the cage. This moment, the jolt of the lift cable and the giddy rise, always set his spirit free, so that he could almost smell the open sea above and envisage the stretched blue wire of the horizon.

  The cage clattered between its iron-clad walls, coming to rest at the decompression chamber entrance, marked in red capitals: MANLOCK. Through the observation porthole he could see two men were in the airtight chamber, but the attendant was already spinning the airlock wheels and Robbie’s ears registered the sudden, sharp hiss of decompression. As they trooped out the far end of the womb-like chamber, he took their place, discarding his overalls, boots, and socks in the cradle provided, and sitting in his shorts.

  As the attendant programmed the computer control panel with Robbie’s details – time in the caisson, age, and medical profile – he took a picture through the porthole to send to Marc. The boy hankered for the life of a tunnel tiger, and Robbie, with Donald’s blessing, was thrilled to be a role model. One day he’d have to have a heart-to-heart, man to man, painting perhaps a more realistic picture of life underground. The money was good, but the working conditions were often brutal, and the death rate – particularly in China and the Far East – was eye-wateringly high. Robbie had promised himself retirement at forty, if he lived that long.

  Adding a text line – Coming up for air! – he sent the image to Marc’s phone.

  The attendant was a man called Royle, an outsider in Robbie’s world, because he worked for the company that manufactured the manlock, and maintained a studied air of superiority, literally setting himself above the world of the caisson, with its realities of sand, and rock, and muscle.

  Royle always had a book at his workstation, which consisted of a narrow metal pull-down seat by the observation port, and a small desk top. His world was scientific, spotless, set against the civilized hum of electronics.

  Robbie, following the manual instructions laid down in the contractual code, made eye contact with Royle and put both thumbs up. The LED display in the manlock wall showed 28 MINS, the time period for his decompression, without which he would be exposed to the risk of the bends – the potentially lethal condition suffered by divers returning from the depths – although no tunnel tiger would ever call it such, preferring its historically accurate forerunner, caisson’s disease.

  As an apprentice, digging a road tunnel under water on the outskirts of Manila, he’d seen a victim of the bends, a man who’d skipped the manlock to find a bookie and put his month’s wages on a horse running in Singapore. They’d all been hauled up from the caisson by the warning bells and they’d had to file past the body, twisted and distorted like a victim of medieval torture, finally released from the rack.

  It had been Marc, a studious boy, who had discovered the origins of that strange short form – the bends. US engineers had used caissons to build the East Bridge in St Louis, and twelve men had died in agony. The Brooklyn Bridge, Marc gravely informed his uncle, had cost 110 lives. One of the symptoms was seizures and cramps which made the sufferers stoop forward, a posture reminiscent at the time of the latest dance fad in New York – the Grecian Bend, in which women, in corsets and bustles, bent forward at the waist in a posture that seemed to mimic the graceful figures of an Athenian frieze. Ross thought it was a macabre metaphor, the cramps of death mirrored in the dainty steps of a dancehall craze.

  Scrolling through the pictures on his smartphone, he flashed past images of little Eric in bed at the hospital, clutching the plywood kit Robbie had bought him of the Empire State Building. Glancing up at the attendant’s porthole, he noted that Royle was not at his station. Despite his aloof good manners, Royle was a smoker, and they all knew that beyond the manlock exit a gantry led to one of the outside platforms, where a blind eye was turned to the half-dozen addicts who found the rig’s smoking ban intolerable.

  Robbie took a deep breath. His T-shirt stopped above the elbows, exposing the skin, and he felt a minute skitter of legs, so that he went to brush away the insect that must have sneaked in through the airlock. But there was nothing there. Taking another deep breath, he was vaguely aware that something about that unseen insect was significant. He felt another, above his ankle, and scratched vigorously. The first insect had somehow switched his mood from joy to a numb sadness, but the second flipped him back on to a high, and his face, stupidly, broke into a broad smile.

  On his phone he found an album of pictures of his girlfriend, Jantine. She worked for the company at its worldwide headquarters in Rotterdam. The pictures showed a white beach, with Jantine on a raffia rug. She had long legs, which were very thin, and angular ar
ms, so that there was something brittle about her that made Robbie anxious. Astonished, he found himself wiping a tear off the screen of the smartphone. Guiltily, he looked up at the porthole, but Royle was still freighting his bloodstream with nicotine.

  Robbie’s double shift had been seven hours long, and he promised himself now that he wouldn’t do it again, even if they did pay treble time. Fatigue was making his limbs twitch, and he couldn’t shift an image from his mind of his bunk bed in the accommodation block. As a foreman’s mate, he had a single room, so he could close the door, open the window, and sleep. His body, ahead of his mind, seemed to subside into an imaginary mattress, a subtle nausea seeping through his nervous system. When he looked up again, Royle was back at his post, but – briefly – the image doubled up so that he saw two metal portholes, in twin orbits, trying to meld.

  At this point, in retrospect, he was close to death. His skin crawled with insects, but he was too tired to activate the necessary muscular response. His shallow breathing left a bead of sweat disfiguring the T-shirt. A series of vignettes from his life did not so much flash past as appear in a stately series, as if someone was showing a slide show on the inside of his head. The idea of God, as a disembodied projectionist, made him laugh out loud. He had no energy left to fight his way out of the coma that was drugging his brain, as its blood supply began to fizz with oxygen.

  There was no order to the images, but they were all so vibrant they made his heart race. Images of childhood, fragments from his travels, a woman he’d met in Piraeus who’d given him a pomegranate, a previously unremembered image of his mother standing at a kitchen sink.

  And then the final image.

  The family flat on a stillborn winter’s day, looking out at the estate, the 1930s stucco facades blotched with damp like gunshot wounds. The ground floor, but the fifteen above pressing down. The smell of Christmas dinner clogged his nose and mouth like a gas mask, especially the gamey edge to the turkey juice, and the hot steam from the Brussels sprouts. Alone, but surrounded by family voices, he was waiting for something, someone. Outside, snow fell in feathery cartwheels, and when a car crept past, all he heard was the baseline creak of snow compacting under the tyres. Opposite, in the living room of a council house, the lights of a Christmas tree winked on and off. Pressing his face against the window, he could feel the cold, while his breath misted the glass. A doorbell rang.