Endangered Species

by Richard Woodman

  ‘Hey, you guys, come and have a butchers at this lot.’ He paused, sensing reluctance and insisted, ‘Come on!’ Stevenson and Taylor followed him on to the boat-deck, dodging the streams of water that cascaded down from the lower edges of the sagging awnings. By the rail and beneath the awning’s shelter they joined Captain Mackinnon and Chief Officer Rawlings who were staring through the persistent rain.

  The long line of merchant ships of many flags and nationalities lying alongside the shallow curve of the wharves of Keppel Harbour stretched as far as they could see on either hand. From the adjacent fairway, the muted grumble of slow-running, high-performance diesel engines announced the approach of a curious sight. The five Britons stood silently, staring at the rain-splashed strip of grey water and the burden it bore.

  A sleek, evil-looking patrol launch of the Singapore Defence Force was coming up Keppel Harbour. A filthy brown haze of exhaust smoke trailed astern, throwing into sharp focus the light grey paintwork and the red and white of her ensign, but partially hiding what she was towing. As the big launch came abeam of the Matthew Flinders they saw clearly what it was.

  Trailing astern of the immaculate patrol boat came a mastless junk, half the size of its tug. It was crammed with people, so crammed that no one individual could be discerned from the mass, like ants round the entrance to an ant hill, but with one important difference: the ants would have heaved with a common energy, a mass of moving legs and bodies.

  The people aboard the junk were immobile.

  They sat, or lay, or stood like statues and it seemed to the watching British officers their stillness was not that of exhaustion, or hunger; not even of an oriental fatalism or hopelessness, but the awful dignity of silent reproach and this had, in some extrasensory way, preceded them, alerting the watchers to their coming.

  They were towed the length of Keppel Harbour, past the idle ships of two dozen nations; past the manifestly opportunist convenience of, perhaps, no more than half that number of so-called national flags. It seemed, too, they dragged more than a cloud of the patrol boat’s foul exhaust gases behind them, for as they passed the Matthew Flinders’s officers, surprise had changed to a sort of half-comprehended embarrassment. The five men looked sheepishly at one another, and then avoided each other’s eyes as though they were in some way guilty of something they were unable to put words to.

  Then, in a hiss of intensification, heavier rain swept down the harbour, driving in under the awning and the watchers turned away for the shelter of the accommodation and the five-course dinner awaiting them in the saloon.

  Stevenson was the last in the queue as they stumbled over the sea step in their haste. Perhaps because of the upsets of the last hour he felt most acutely that dumb accusation. He looked back.

  The heavier rain had overtaken the boatload of refugees. They were blurred against the brown diesel fumes of the still-audible patrol boat, and then blotted out, as though nature itself was affronted.

  But Stevenson was left with the indelible memory of several scores of people remaining perfectly motionless.

  Captain Mackinnon was depressed and aware that if he did not put a stop to this solitary drinking he was going to go to bed drunk and wake up tomorrow with a thumping hangover. In defiance of common sense he poured himself another gin and slopped the remains of a tonic bottle into the glass after it. Not wanting to drink the gin so undiluted he rose unsteadily to his feet, barked his shin on the corner of the coffee table and bent to reach in his drinks locker. He withdrew the last bottle of tonic, opened it and filled his glass.

  A faint sensation of nausea uncoiled itself in his belly and perspiration broke out on his broad forehead. He swore horribly and trenchantly under his breath. He had been here before.

  Alcohol, the inescapable lubricant which oiled the working of human imperfection, was too easily obtained, too freely part of the everyday, aboard ship. It accrued to itself a host of little rituals, small steps and bobs and curtsies of a sinister measure, the dance of a slow death.

  There was no denying the sight of those unfortunate refugees had disturbed the self-confident equilibrium of Captain Mackinnon’s life. He did not know quite why, for he was largely an unimaginative man, except that their plight had raised doubts in his mind. Firstly he doubted his own right to happiness, and his imagination in contemplating retirement saw his future solely in such terms, though the practical difficulties and trials of his life had conditioned him also to doubt its actual existence. Moreover, such an occidental assumption that he had earned his retirement was palpably unjust in the face of the misery he had just witnessed. And finally he doubted the value of human endeavour that seemed, eternally, to fail to achieve what must be achieved to improve the reality of existence.

  He had found the imposition of these depressing considerations too gloomy, too insuperable to shrug them off ashore, and had settled to his longely binge, putting off the agent’s invitation until the following evening.

  Bleary-eyed he stared about him round the cabin and swore again. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, he would abandon this, this obverse of the panoply of command, to be sitting with Shelagh who had long ago pulled him back from the abyss upon whose edge he now teetered, remembering . . .

  And, remembering, he knew the answers to his doubts: his love for Shelagh, their love for each other, marked him as lucky. He was a lucky man and Shelagh proved it. Not as lucky as some, he thought reasonably, but luckier than most; luckier than many men he had sailed with, was sailing with at the moment, and a damned sight luckier than those poor devils of boat people that had been towed pathetically past them three or four hours earlier.

  Lucky he might be, but happy he was not.

  It was foolish to imagine the world would ever be free from strife and injustice, poverty and hunger. There were so many people, more than the earth could support, even if the hugely rich and, perhaps, the not so hugely rich, relinquished some of their excess wealth.

  Was he, a self-acknowledged lucky man, too greedy? The thought troubled him. He did not acknowledge what some had embarrassingly called heroism when he had brought the lifeboat ashore, but he reckoned he had paid the tariff by fighting in a war and skirting the edges of other conflicts. His uneasy feeling of not having paid enough, or not having kept his payments up, worried him. He felt touched by disappointment and uncertainty.

  He experienced a surge of self-justification, falling back on a fierce, defensive pride in that to which he belonged. The Merchant Navy had fought the longest, most vital battle of the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic. He had read somewhere that proportionally more of its men had died than in any of the so-called ‘fighting-services’, but they were mere sailors, scarcely men of the pipe-and-slippers/ missus-and-the-nippers variety, and few wept over their copious drownings. Now, Mackinnon bitterly reflected, they were going down the tube, redundant, too expensive (though God knew they cost little enough, now as then). Only merchant seamen could be treated with the cavalier dismissal which stopped their pay the moment their ships were sunk. He remembered Bird railing about the outrage in the YMCA in Belfast . . .

  But it was in the past now. The world had turned; their fates were governed by the accountants and even the old oligarchs, like Mrs Dent, were outré. It was bad luck on Sparks and Stevenson, of course, and even on that square peg Taylor who, Mackinnon considered, would never have survived in an open boat and had never been asked to, but it was not as bad as being aboard that rotting junk with the detention camp looming.

  For himself, Mackinnon concluded, compromising an old man’s selfishness with a due appreciation of good fortune, he could acknowledge his luck, deserved or not. There was no doubt about that. He had only to keep his nose clean for a week or two more, then Shelagh, and Rome and Florence, and the thing would come full circle . . .

  His eyes fell on the big art book Shelagh had insisted he bring with him. He had trouble focussing on the gilt title, printed in Times Roman on its dark spine, but he had no nee
d to read it. He knew it and its new, unopened state reproached him: The Uffizi.

  He wondered why he had not opened it, aware that he had been moved to do so several times but had drawn back and postponed the moment. For pleasure? No, for wholly superstitious reasons, as if the physical act of opening the book and feasting his eyes upon the illustrations would be a direct challenge to providence, inviting its malice in thwarting his desire. So he had left the book, promising to look at it the moment he came down from the bridge for the last time, an act of finality which marked his passing from active employment to retirement, an act marking his transition from operating as John Mackinnon, Master under God of the motor vessel Matthew Flinders, to pensioned status under the direction of his wife. He laughed at himself, then thought again of Shelagh, of her handing him the book and he asking, laughingly, ‘What the hell’s the Uffizi?’ And she had given him one of her silent go-on-with-you looks so he was still not quite certain.

  He had not much noticed the girl in the Antrim farmhouse. It was only after they had reached Belfast and were kicking their heels waiting for a passage back to Liverpool that he found himself thinking of her. Then he almost forgot her; but not entirely, so when John Mackinnon caught sight of the girl at the bus stop outside the David Lewis hospital in Liverpool he recognised her at once.

  ‘Hullo,’ he had said, filled with cocksure manhood, coming up to her in the twilight while the gaunt outline of Bibby’s bombed warehouse reared up against the pallid wash of the sunset. ‘You’re Shelagh, aren’t you?’ He paused as she stared at him not denying her identity, confused. ‘From County Antrim,’ he added helpfully. ‘D’you remember me? The apprentice that was washed up in the ship’s lifeboat? We arrived at your farm one evening and I frightened you.’ He thought he might be frightening her now, but he ploughed on. ‘I’m John Mackinnon and I remember you very well.’ He had held out his hand while a curious mis-thumping of his heart told him, though he did not know it at the time and only recalled it now, that they had been brushed by the passing wings of fate. And then, after she had recognised him, he walked her into town and paid for two seats at the cinema, learning of her arrival in Liverpool and her desire to become a nurse. He was uncertificated Third Mate of the George Vancouver then, just paid off from a fourteen-month voyage and already signed on the James Cook preparing to sail to join the Fleet Train in the Pacific in the final struggle with Japan.

  Before the ship sailed for Manaus he and Shelagh had, as the saying went, been walking out together for long enough to know.

  Yes, Captain Mackinnon mused with the persistent profundity of the mildly drunk, he was a lucky man, and leaving the glass two-thirds full, he stumbled through to his night cabin and fell across his bunk.

  Stevenson passed a glass of beer to Taylor and both men crossed the tiny dance floor and sat down.

  ‘Chas, I – er – I’m really sorry for what I said earlier.’

  Taylor shook his head. ‘Forget it, Alex. I asked for it anyway.’ He made an obvious effort to change the subject. ‘The Mate certainly wanted to get rid of us this evening, didn’t he? Practically kicked us down the gangway.’

  Stevenson agreed, relieved after the tense taxi ride that Taylor bore him no ill-will. ‘We don’t want to talk shop, let’s make the most of tonight.’

  They both stared round the bar. It was still early, but already a couple of Norwegians were necking furiously in the shadows. The girls were Chinese and writhed with sinuous enthusiasm round their captors. The sight made the two Britons uncomfortable. As yet only one other ‘hostess’ was in the place, a beautiful Malay girl who sat alone at the bar, apparently content with her own company. It was obvious to Stevenson that she was having a disconcerting effect on Taylor.

  ‘Odd about that boatload of refugees this evening,’ Stevenson tried.

  ‘Sorry?’ Taylor turned from the girl, abstracted.

  ‘Odd about those refugees. I mean, I couldn’t help feeling, well . . .’ Stevenson’s voice trailed off uncertainly.

  ‘Ashamed?’ suggested Taylor.

  ‘Yes, something like that.’ Stevenson struggled with words adequate to fit the deep impression the sight had made on him, aware too that the mood of confidence between them had been damaged by his earlier insult, yet eager to re-establish it even if he did run the risk of a rebuff from the younger man. ‘It left me feeling guilty that we could do nothing, but certain that we ought to do something . . .’

  Taylor smiled engagingly over the rim of his glass. ‘Ah, that’s the guilt engendered by your pampered overfed western lifestyle. You see, you haven’t been bred to accept it as your birthright; you are full of the Protestant work ethic that automatically conditions you to suspect the good things of life whether they are in your lap or someone else’s, while at the same time it drives you to accumulate more and more material wealth and to justify your existence by hard work.’

  Stevenson digested Taylor’s words, aware of the underlying irony but uncertain whether or not it was aimed at Stevenson or turned upon himself. Taylor did not give him time to arrive at a conclusion.

  ‘I don’t suppose those poor bastards in that junk would actually feel real envy for you. Their predominant feeling is probably one of relief at getting to Singapore with an underlying fear about what happens next.’

  ‘That sounds a bit callous,’ Stevenson said, warming to the conversation and driving to the heart of the matter. ‘I get the impression that your well-to-do forebears bore the burden of their wealth with – what shall I say? – commendable fortitude.’

  Taylor laughed. ‘Ah, the old Whig philosophy was pretty good. Had distinct advantages, you know. A lack of conscience was one of its first attributes. Very useful, did away with all awkward moral dilemmas.’

  ‘I hope you’re not intending to employ it tonight with her.’ Stevenson nodded at the solitary hostess.

  ‘Why not?’ Taylor grinned again, then his mouth twisted and his expression hardened. ‘Oh, don’t say “because you’re married”, for Christ’s sake, because as far as I’m aware the instant I’m at sea Caroline forgets I exist. If she occasionally recalled me I might get the odd letter. No, Alex, if you want to make me the conscience of the western world, forget it.’ He stood up and added, ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  Taylor walked across the bar and Stevenson watched him strike up conversation with the girl. She seemed reluctant at first, but Taylor was gently persistent. Stevenson felt a prickling of lust followed by a wave of jealousy. He took a long pull at his beer. When he looked again Taylor was sitting alongside the girl and the barman was pouring them both drinks. He sat in the gloom of his secludedly desolate table and printed aimless patterns on its top with the condensation formed round the base of his glass.

  It occurred to him that this was Taylor’s retribution. This abandonment in the face of Taylor’s success at picking up the girl was a refutation of his own accusation that Taylor was no great Lothario. Stevenson watched the pair, their heads close together. No, there was no triumph in picking up a bored professional, and so cheap a revenge was too shabbily obvious to be Taylor’s style. If, Stevenson concluded as he motioned the barman for another drink, it was revenge Taylor was meditating, then it was a more profound one than a levelling of a petty score with himself. Taylor had mentioned Caroline’s failure to write; perhaps it was she whom he wished to humiliate.

  ‘Don’t you want to be introduced?’ Stevenson looked up. Taylor loomed over him, the girl at his side. She was undeniably lovely, with a skin-tight black dress cinched at the waist. It had a high neck, though her shoulders were bare, and a short hemline. From his observations when she had been at the bar, he knew its back was non-existent. He struggled, gentlemanly, to his feet.

  ‘Sharimah,’ Taylor said, ‘meet Alex.’

  ‘Hi.’

  Stevenson felt again the prickle of intense desire. Her breasts swelled the soft, slightly elastic material of the dress, but it was her face that transfixed him.

  He
was no first-trip apprentice to be cunt-struck by the first painted trollop who squeezed his knee, but he would have had to have been insensible not to have been moved by her genuine beauty.

  ‘Hullo . . . what are you drinking?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ put in Taylor, ‘my shout’ – meaning hands off, I picked her up.

  Stevenson sat again, opposite the girl. Raven hair fell to her shoulders and the light brown of her skin was taut over high cheekbones. Her face escaped full oriental flatness by a well-made nose suggesting the miscegenation of a Portuguese seaman somewhere in her ancestry. From eyes as dark, Stevenson thought, as the tropic night, she confronted his scrutiny, carried out with the thunderstruck wonder of half-drunk admiration. She pouted crimson lips around a cigarette and seemed to blow a mocking kiss as she withdrew it from her lips.

  ‘You like girl too?’ she asked him as he inhaled the smoke from her lungs. Taylor was on his way back from the bar, his eyes daring Stevenson to poach.

  He shook his head and she shrugged. ‘Pity,’ she said with honest, whorish candour. ‘You very good-looking man.’

  Someone put some music on and one of the Norwegians was dragged on to the tiny dance floor by a giggling Chinese girl. Taylor had just eased himself alongside Sharimah.

  Stevenson stood. ‘Would you like to dance?’ he asked and then stared at Taylor. The girl looked from one to another and Taylor shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said, his tolerance edged with a touch of sarcasm, ‘I buy the drinks, you dance.’

  ‘Just one,’ said Stevenson placatingly, holding out his hand to Sharimah.

  ‘Just one.’

  They swung into the faintly ridiculous gyrations of the dance, Stevenson awkwardly, his eyes on the body of the girl, while she, automatic in her movements at first, abandoned herself to the music and the inflaming of Stevenson’s passion. Beyond her bare shoulder, he could see Taylor’s smouldering eyes devouring Sharimah’s figure.