Spit and Polish

by Carl Muller

  ‘So? Wait an’ do what? Come go!’

  They had left the armoury at twelve minutes to midnight. Bollocks, coming in, had flipped. There was the dead man, half out of his coffin, a mug on his chest, an empty bottle on the floor. He refused to be convinced.

  ‘He’s alive,’ he howled, ‘an’ have been drinking also! See the mug!’

  The poor man was shaking terribly. Herft tried to make him stand, but he preferred to crawl. He was bathed in sweat and made queer noises in his throat.

  There was little else to do. Hauling him up, dragging him along while he kept sagging like a sack of walnuts, Herft made painful progress to the sick bay. Bollocks was in bad shape. He had a high fever. He was pushed into a bed. He lay there, quiet for a while, kept trembling, then he would suddenly gasp, break into a howl and try to do a bunk out of the window. Eventually, he was strapped down, an icebag plonked on his head and on the advice of the duty PO, a deck shoe kept at hand to be jammed into his mouth the very next time he began to blast off. It was shock, of course, and he sank into a delirium and took three full days to get sensible.

  Abeysakes was re-laid and a shipwright summoned to screw down the coffin lid and make things shipshape. Ryan and Hughes were brought on defaulters parade and grinned through the proceedings. It was decided to send them to sea with the pious wish that that they would get sozzled and fall overboard. Bollocks was recommended a change of air and, within a week, was drafted to the Elara where, strangely, he got typhoid too and was hurried to the Mannar Hospital. There, the Catholic nursing sisters took him to their bosoms and gave him a Bible and a Devotion to Our Lady of Good Succour and told him how much God loved him and he listened and wept, and did not die.

  But he grew stranger with each passing day. CO Gunasakes shook his head. ‘Man is round the bend. Can’t keep him here. What’s that thing around his neck?’

  ‘A rosary sir.’

  ‘And why is he wearing long green pajamas?’

  ‘Won’t wear anything else sir. Real basket case, sir.’

  ‘Well, he can’t stay here. Call Signalman Krause. Colombo will have to put him somewhere else.’

  It was thought that the sea would put him right. ‘He can sweat out all his madness in the engine room,’ Darley said.

  ‘But sir, we sent Hughes and Ryan on board.’

  ‘So? Send Bollocks also. Look around, Number One. You see any other oddballs around? You come and tell me. Ship them all out. Vijaya’s the place for them.’

  The Vijaya had languished at Kochchikade for many months. The men were pleased. Carloboy would go to Gemunu to meet the rest of his friends, exchange fruity words with Yeoman Barnett and keep abreast of the Navy’s many comings and goings. He was pleased with himself. Victor had summoned him one morning.

  ‘At ease, von Bloss. You seem to be the most educated rating I have. Can you type?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Good. You will be Captain’s secretary. You will work in the cabin next to mine. Type the monthly returns, all correspondence, stores and gunnery reports. Think you can do it?’

  ‘Why, yes sir.’

  Victor nodded. ‘Oh, also, I want the bulletin board outside the sick bay maintained. Make it interesting. Give the men something to read. Put out a piece every day with something on naval history or of some interest. Terms, traditions, anything. Do you know what a block ship is?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You sure? What is it?’

  ‘It’s a ship that is scuttled at a harbour mouth to block entrance to a harbour, sir.’

  Victor regarded Carloboy interestedly. ‘That’s right. Who told you that?’

  ‘I read it somewhere, sir.’

  ‘Hmm. I bet there’ll be many on board who don’t know that. Tomorrow you explain what a block ship is on the bulletin board.’

  ‘Very well sir.’

  ‘Good. I will tell the master-at-arms. You will report to the Captain’s office every morning.’ Victor nodded pleasantly. ‘Why did you join the Navy, signalman?’

  Carloboy had wondered about this many times. ‘Personal reasons, sir,’ he muttered.

  ‘I see. But why the lower deck? Why not as an officer cadet?’

  ‘I—I don’t know sir.’

  ‘Well, next year there’s the HNET coming up. The Higher Naval Education Test. See that you sit it.’

  ‘Yes sir. Sir, why?’

  ‘If you get through you are selected for officer training.’

  Carloboy was silent.

  ‘Dismiss, signalman.’

  He clicked to attention, marched out. Captain’s secretary! That was something. Above all, it got him out of deck duties. He bumped into Hughes and Ryan on the foredeck. ‘So how do you like Kochchikade?’ he asked.

  Hughes closed one eye. “S’all right. Have a small hooch place near the docks.’

  ‘You buggers made poor Bollocks crazy, no?’

  ‘Who? Us?’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Von Bloss, look at this place. See the quartermaster. Blowing his bloody whistle the whole day. Colours, Captain’s guard, duty rounds, saluting the quarter deck, kit inspection, divisions, painting sides, chipping decks, polishing . . . you call all this being sane? All the buggers are mad anyway. You’re mad, I’m mad, right?’

  Carloboy grinned. ‘Well, if you put it like that—’

  ‘That’s the only way to put it, my boy. This is a floating asylum!’

  ‘Well, I’m Captain’s secretary now.’

  ‘I knew it. Even the captain is mad!’

  Carloboy stared out at the lorries lumbering like a procession of fat ladies on the road to Muwal. Below him, as he leaned over the guard rail, the water lapped inkily. He had relished these long months at anchor. He went where he pleased, had upset many applecarts in Wellawatte, Dehiwela and Kalubowila and made Barbara’s mother, Mrs Heinz, a very angry woman. His adventures ashore were infinitely more interesting than his watch hours on the Vijaya and will certainly bear recounting.

  In Talaimannar, Stoker Mechanic Bollocks was waving a Bible and telling all and sundry that lo! there was a plague in the congregation of the Lord.

  ‘Plague? You’re the bugger who brought the plague!’ Able Seaman de Neys hooted, ‘Came and got typhoid.’

  ‘If the land of your possession be unclean, then pass ye over unto the land of the possession of the Lord!’ Bollocks thundered, ‘Rebel not against the Lord!’

  CO Gunasakes snorted. ‘You’re going to be passed on to the possession of the Vijaya, my lad, and that’s that!’

  ‘So shall the Lord bring upon you all evil things until he had destroyed you from off this good land,’ said Bollocks piously.

  ‘You calling this the Lord’s good land?’ asked Petty Officer Caldera, ‘you’re madder than the maddest!’

  ‘You shall perish quickly from off the good land which he hath given unto you,’ Bollocks maintained stoutly.

  ‘Oh fuck off!’

  Carloboy sighed. They were under sailing orders. The Vijaya was to carry out anti-illicit immigration patrols in the Palk Strait area for three weeks. This meant, of course, 21 excruciating days. Water would be rationed to a basinful per man per day. Carloboy tried to console himself. He would be at sea again. That was the credit side. But he was having too much fun and games ashore right now and didn’t like to leave. Not now anyway. Not when he had discovered Angeline and the way she had stood thirteen feet above his upraised head, her legs apart, so that he could know how deliciously naked she was under her short home dress.

  It had all begun on the day the men in the neighbouring houses decided to help Angeline’s father clean his well. This well was a menace to man and beast. It lay smack in the middle of a small coconut garden where boys played cricket and threw stones at Mrs Singaraman’s chickens. A calf had fallen in one day and so had Errol Juriansz who was backing up to catch a tennis ball. The neighbours kept insisting that Angeline’s father build a wall round the well but he had said, ‘Only rou
nd the well what for? If building better to do round whole garden. Then nobody can come in and no more any more trouble for me.’

  This was not welcomed either. Everybody tramped Jambupathi’s garden. So the well remained unprotected, claiming tennis balls by the score. Crows dropped festering tidbits into it. Jambupathi ignored it. He had pipe-borne water. The well was useless, unwanted. Also, it smelled. Too many dead chickens, too much dirt, too many soiled sanitary pads. Sonnaboy von Bloss told the neighbours, ‘Let’s clean it.’

  ‘Better if we just filled it with sand and closed it up,’ neighbour Orville said.

  ‘No, men, all we need is to clean it, then put some sticks round like a fence.’

  Mrs Ludekens agreed. ‘Every week this damn Dehiwela municipality cutting the water. What they’re doing God only knows. Better to clean and keep. Then all can have some water in emergency, no?’

  ‘Enough of buggers here to clean,’ another neighbour Winston said, ‘where’s your bugger?’

  ‘He’s at home. Off day. You get the boys together, I’ll tell Carloboy to come.’

  Angeline could not be shooed away. She was a tall, dark girl of seventeen and she loved mini skirts and her black thighs would glisten when she walked. Carloboy had not paid her much attention—not until he was waist deep in the putrid well water, sending buckets of sludge to the surface where a team of boys hauled energetically. Looking up, Carloboy saw the girl smile down at him. She stood boldly, at the edge and her short skirt swirled, and Carloboy was looking up her long legs, the bush of black hair and the way her thigh dimpled into the roundness of her buttock. She knew where his eyes were. She spread her legs, twitched the bottom of her skirt, seemingly slapping at a fly.

  ‘Hurry up with those buckets!’ Carloboy yelled. He wanted to clean that well as fast as he could.

  Mrs Heinz had blown a fuse. Her daughter! Her good, quiet, grey-eyed daughter who studied so well and never missed a Mass or an evening of Sunday school. Mrs Heinz had not minded Carloboy coming in, sitting in a corner of the veranda with her Barbara. But it had offended her deeply to see her daughter with a leg cocked over the arm of her chair while Carloboy explored under her dress. It also struck her that her daughter seemed to be enjoying it immensely and this certainly called for a show of maternal wrath. She ordered Barbara to the kitchen, ordered Carloboy out of her house. She then proceeded to execute on her daughter a stinging slap which was followed by another on the cheek of her younger daughter, Rose.

  ‘Told you, no, to stay in the front and not to allow your sister to be alone with that fellow!’

  Well could Rose have asked if she were her sister’s keeper but the slap rendered her speechless and caused a terrible ringing in her ear. Mummy was in no mood, she thought, and ran to the bedroom to cry.

  Angeline was so much easier. Old Jambupathi and his frowsy wife never had time for their children. One boy played guitar in a band. The other spent his days throwing stones at every mango tree in the neighbourhood. Angeline went to the Holy Family Convent in Dehiwela and waggled her backside at every male in Vihara Lane. Carloboy took her to the rice field behind her small house. She told him how Uncle Winston next door had deflowered her when she was thirteen.

  And there was Caryll and her sister Heatherine who lived across the canal, and their brother Royston who also wanted to join the Navy. Heatherine had latched onto a simp of a fellow who walked in a spidery way and spent long evenings on the beach where Heatherine masturbated him with gusto. Caryll, the younger, was a bubbly sort of girl, small, round-faced and with her hair fringed on her forehead.

  Old man Collum was proud of his brood. ‘I’m a bastard,’ he would say after his third drink, ‘my father had women all over the place.’

  His wife, who had a double—no, treble chin, and a beak of a nose, puffed all the time and complained at the heat in their tiny box-like home which consisted of a postage stamp veranda, a single big room, a tiny kitchen and a smelly toilet.

  Caryll was really no conquest. All Carloboy had to do was lead her to the room where they sat on a bed, and tell her to shed her knickers. The mother huffed and rose, scratching the underside of her breasts.

  ‘You children behave yourselves,’ she said, and went out.

  Carloboy fucked Caryll and she was pleased. She said he did it better, much better than Royston. ‘He does it every day. On the other bed sometimes Daddy is doing to Mummy and Royston comes and does it to me and Heatherine.’

  Carloboy nodded grimly. He wouldn’t dream of entering that smelly washroom. He wiped himself on the sheet and buttoned his trousers. He had to get out, go home, or go to Eardley’s, bathe. For the first time he began to feel that he was unclean. He never went to the Collums’ again.

  ‘You bastard,’ he told Royston outside St Lawrence’s Church one day, ‘you’re screwing your sisters.’

  Royston raised an eyebrow. ‘If not? If my father can do, why I can’t?’

  And now would come three weeks of northern patrols. Well, maybe it was all for the best. Home was uncomfortable enough. Barbara shot imploring looks at him in church. Caryll would squeeze into the pew and hiss, ‘Why you are not coming now? After Mass come go home.’

  The Sinhalese girl had taken to bathing at the well, then going to the woodshed to change. All this fence climbing was bound to be noticed . . . and his mother had asked one day, ‘What are you doing in those peoples’ garden?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, crawling back.

  ‘I saw what you were up to,’ Beryl had scolded.

  ‘So?’

  If those people come to complain or anything, I’ll tell your father.’

  ‘Oh shut up. Tell him what you’re doing, will you.’

  Maybe a spell up north would settle a lot of things. He was quite cheerful when he told his father he was sailing on the Wednesday.

  ‘Going to catch kallathonis?’ Sonnaboy grinned, ‘Bring a glass and put a shot.’

  The next morning two new men joined the Vijaya. Stoker Mechanic Bollocks and Electrician Aubrey Ranasinghe. Captain Victor groaned. Ranasinghe was a handful. He liked to hit first and inquire about one’s health and general wellbeing later. He had scrapped his way from recruit to electricians mate and broken Leading Seaman Sena’s jaw and Writer Pala’s collarbone.

  Bollocks stepped on the quarterdeck, very much a borderline case. He stared up at the sky and held a big Bible in his hands and there was a rosary around his neck. He bowed to the QM and swayed to the boatdeck, his long, green pajamas trailing in the dirt. He sang, ‘The cross is near, the cross is here, my sins have fallen from me,’ in a melancholy voice as though he regretted the whole business from the bottom of his heart. The sound was very like a dog whining to be let out at night.

  At least, the men agreed, northern patrols wouldn’t be so bad. Not with Bollocks, and Ranasinghe, and Ryan and Hughes.

  ‘Where’s that son of yours?’ Mr Greyman asked Sonnaboy.

  ‘Gone to Palk Strait. Gone to catch illicit immigrants.’

  ‘I don’t know about all that. When is he coming back?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What about his illicit immigrating in my kitchen?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re asking what? Came creeping in my kitchen When we were in the front. What, men, small girl, no?’

  Sonnaboy cocked a bushy eyebrow. He couldn’t understand what the man was on about.

  ‘My servant girl, men. Small girl. Came to the kitchen and carrying on.’

  ‘Carrying on?’

  ‘Yes, carrying on. She’s sitting on the kitchen table, cloth all tucked up and your one standing and doing and her legs round his waist, Bella saw and screamed and dropped the baby’s bottle also.’

  Sonnaboy offered Greyman a drink. ‘Boys, men, that’s the way, no?’

  ‘But small girl men.’

  ‘What to small? If can sit and do like that? In the village must be doing on top of the grinding stone also. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. No
w Bella wants to send her away.’

  ‘These women are mad. Just tell to keep. Every servant someone jumps if go to send away, nobody will have any servants left in Colombo.’

  ‘That’s also true. Cheers.’

  On the Vijaya Bollocks muttered morosely outside the Captain’s office. Carloboy had told him that the Captain was busy. ‘Fuck off,’ he had said crisply, ‘think you can just barge in like this?’

  ‘But it is Sunday,’ Bollocks said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘A service on deck. A word of prayer.’

  ‘Oh piss off!’

  Bollocks said, ‘But the Lord has set me over the congregation.’

  Carloboy stared. ‘What congregation, you bloody lunatic?’

  ‘I will go out before them for they are as a congregation which have no shepherd.’

  ‘Will you get your filthy pajamas out of here!’

  Victor growled, ‘What’s the bloody row there? Von Bloss, what the hell—’

  With a swiftness surely come from the Lord, Bollocks nipped in, Carloboy said ‘Hey!’ and tried to grab the man but he was already doing his prophet act at Victor’s desk. ‘Captain, sir, you are an ungodly man!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Should you not be on deck, telling the men of the wisdom and understanding of the Lord? Lo! He will put words in thy mouth that will give subtlety to the simple and knowledge and discretion to the young . . .’

  ‘Will you get the fuck out of here! Von Bloss, get the SBA—’

  ‘Turn us at my reproof? Behold, I will pour out my spirit upon you—’

  ‘Shut up! Pour out your spirit in the fucking sea! What are you waiting for? Drag this bugger out of here!’

  ‘Woe unto you! The Lord has called and ye refuse. He has stretched out his hand and no man regarded—’

  Carloboy grabbed the man around the neck, hauled him to the door. Bollocks waved his Bible. ‘Transgressors! Walkers in the path of unrighteousness!! Let me go, you of the crooked way!’

  Outside, with his knee jammed into the man’s spine, his forearm tight around Bollocks’ neck, Carloboy called for help. Hughes and Sims seized Bollocks.

  ‘Sick bay,’ Carloboy panted, ‘bugger is really off.’