As he spoke the Matthew Flinders rode high on an approaching sea, broke through the crest and dived into the following trough. Even at her reduced speed she hit the advancing face of the next wave with a jarring crash and made them rock on their feet. The flare of the bow threw the water out on either side where the wind caught it and flung it back at the front of the superstructure. The windows of Mackinnon’s cabin were opaque with white spray striking with a violent whoosh.
He hurriedly issued some further orders concerning water, food and a watch on the boat people. ‘Any questions?’ he finally asked. ‘Right, let’s get on with it.
The officers’ duty mess was a small, bare chamber off the galley alleyway used by deck and engineer officers in port when working flat out. Its central item of furniture was a fixed, Formica-topped table over which a clean sheet had been spread. In one corner stood a locker bearing a sink, draining board and hot-water urn. When the Captain arrived after his consultation with the Chief Engineer, Freddie Thorpe, the Chief Steward, and Taylor were already there, the urn bubbled encouragingly and beneath it, on the draining board, lay the case of surgeon’s instruments thoughtfully provided by Eastern Steam. In the matter of expertise, the company were laxer. It was, in the directors’ combined opinion, a matter of historic precedent. As with most things on board the ultimate responsibility lay with the Master. While common usage condoned the delegation of most routine activities, the extraordinary nature of their present task demanded Mackinnon’s personal attention. If the woman was to die through ineptitude, only Mackinnon’s ineptitude, backed by the consoling motive of his best endeavours, would satisfy the coroner at Hong Kong. Moreover, as far as Mackinnon was personally concerned, notwithstanding the ensign waving above the Matthew Flinders’s wildly pitching stern, anything else would be a dereliction of duty on the Captain’s part.
The Chief Steward finished swabbing the table as Mackinnon arrived.
‘Very well, Freddie,’ Mackinnon said, placing a large roll of towels on a steel-framed chair shoved in one corner, ‘bring her in.’ The Carpenter and one of the seamen brought the stretcher in and they clustered round, transferring the groaning woman on to the extemporised operating table.
‘Shut the door, Chippy,’ he said as the Carpenter withdrew. Mackinnon addressed Taylor. ‘D’you think you can help us, Mr Taylor? We’ll all need strong stomachs.’ Unrolling the towels he produced a bottle of whisky and set it on the table alongside the inert body of the woman. ‘You’d both better have a damned good swig.’ He indicated the bottle, aware of his own nervous apprehension. ‘Wash the outside, Mr Taylor. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need more of that before we’re finished,’ he added, rinsing his hands in the bowl of disinfectant Thorpe produced. The fat, elderly little Chief Steward was sweating profusely, his face unnaturally pallid, his silence a testimony to his self-control.
Mackinnon remembered Freddie was due to retire and had seen this sort of thing before, during the last war.
Last war? The words shamed him. What lay between them was human wreckage from what was, essentially, only a long, if intermittent continuation of the same cataclysmic event. A great, apparently endless uprooting of humanity. He stood and waited for the bottle while the woman groaned.
Mackinnon watched Taylor shudder as the raw whisky hit his stomach. ‘I’ve had Sparks call Hong Kong for some advice, but with nothing there but a handful of patrol craft we can’t expect the Navy to help at this distance. The Yankee helicopters at Subic Bay will be grounded in this weather, so it’s up to us . . .’
The reluctance of the three men to do anything was nearly tangible. Almost unconsciously the whisky bottle went round again, the occupation of drinking from it more important than the shallow panting of the drugged woman. Taylor felt a prickling desire to urinate and shrunk from the thought. The recurring fear made him shift uneasily on his feet and this shambling recalled Mackinnon to his task. He examined the assembled kit and cleared his throat.
‘From what I can remember my wife once telling me about amputations . . .’
The gruesome collection of stainless-steel carpentry tools that lay in the bottom of a large, drained, still-hot saucepan made Mackinnon pause. He nodded appreciatively and, he hoped, encouragingly at Thorpe as the man mumbled inaudibly, indicating the pre-threaded sutures that lay on a piece of lint.
‘Is there some surgical thread?’
Thorpe rummaged in a box brought down from the ship’s dispensary and produced what the Captain sought.
‘This is very well organised, Freddie . . . have another slug,’ he said casually. ‘Now . . .’ He turned his attention to the woman, drawing their eyes to their hapless patient. ‘Let’s have those drawers off, Mr Taylor.’
Taylor picked up a pair of scissors. They were warm. He tried not to think of anything beyond the job in hand. He began to snip at one leg of the black cotton samfoo pyjamas. The desire to pass water was forgotten. There was an oddly virtuous feeling in what he was doing. He worked his way back to the lower end of the woman’s left leg. The cotton had become entangled in the torn flesh and thickly congealed blood. He cut the bulk of the trousers away and dropped them on the deck, leaving the ribbons of their tattered hems buried in the darkening mess that had been her feet.
Moving to the other leg he repeated the process, finally ending the job by snipping the elastic waistband and pulling the remnants of the garment from under the woman’s buttocks. She wore a thin pair of nylon knickers. He glanced enquiringly at Mackinnon.
‘No, we can spare her blushes.’
Mackinnon felt the need to joke, to inject a reassuringly familiar obscenity into the situation, full, as it was, of paradoxes.
‘Just ease her over, Freddie, on to one side, and I’ll give her a shot.’
Mackinnon was aware that Thorpe, like Taylor, like himself, needed something to do. To the man’s credit he turned her gently, pillowing her abdomen against his own beer-bred rotundity, though his breath came in gasps.
Mackinnon squeezed the fifteen-milligram tube of morphine sulphate until he saw a tiny worm of the drug wriggle from the attached needle.
‘Pull ’em down a touch, Mr Taylor.’
The Third Mate eased the waistband of the knickers and Mackinnon pinched a large lump of pale and flaccid buttock, driving the needle in and squeezing the tube until it was flat.
‘Looks as harmless as doll’s toothpaste, doesn’t it? Make a note of the time, Freddie.’
It was five past six.
Mackinnon moved down to the feet. They were quite crushed, a mess of blue-white bone and bloody muscle which terminated in odd and half-detached toes. He bent and sniffed, making himself think of raw steak and what Shelagh had long ago told him when he had confided his horror at being unable to help an injured man.
It was curious how things repeated themselves, he thought picking up the scalpel. Or perhaps it was not. Perhaps there were only so many things that could happen to a man during his life, given that he had spent it in, so to speak, the same place. The infinite variety of events that supposedly accompanied a career at sea were largely a figment of the imagination of novelists. It may have been true once, but even the proximity of death, he had learned, was not a concomitant of adventure but a dreary, inevitable and depressing business.
The man he had been unable to help was neither pirate captain nor cannibal chieftain. He had been a tall Dyak, crushed under an eight-tonne Ramin log being loaded from the rain forests of Borneo to be split into mouldings and sold in high-street do-it-yourself shops back in Britain.
Oh, he had done his best. He had got his seamen to replace the parted bull-wire and re-reeve it through the snatch block and, as the unfortunate Dyak screamed, they had pulled the log with brutal efficiency from his crushed thigh. And then Mackinnon, grabbing the ampoule of Omnopon from the apprentice sent to fetch it, eased the man’s pain until, for God Almighty’s sake, the poor fellow smiled, asked for a cigarette and coughed at the unfamiliar taste of the a
pprentice’s Capstan Full Strength.
‘Ease the tourniquet a moment.’ He waited for the gush of blood. Should take her pulse, he thought, but what was the use? These were desperate measures and the pumping action of the heart could be clearly seen. If it was weak there was nothing he could do about it. He ought to ease the tourniquet on the other leg, but the mess discouraged him. One thing at a time. Festina lente. The Latin phrase drifted out of his boyhood memory. How many hours had he dozed over such meaningless drivel? Lucullus apud Lucullus, lux in tenebris. He could do with some of that now: light in darkness. Why had they tried to ram such crap into his head? Why had they not taught him how to cut the crushed feet off another human being?
He felt angry. His hands had begun to shake again. The woman’s blood was pumping out over the sheet.
‘Okay, tighten up again.’
He recognised Rawlings’s Parker ball-point pen wound in the strip of towel that Taylor gently twisted back and tucked in upon itself. He tried to remember how quickly gangrene set in.
‘Let’s hope we’re not too late,’ he said. Taylor grunted in agreement. The woman’s breathing seemed easier, though her eyelids fluttered.
‘Watch her tongue doesn’t drop back and close her windpipe, Freddie.’ The Chief Steward nodded, swallowing bravely as though extricating his own tongue from a dry throat, and held the lolling head.
Mackinnon began to strip away the torn and broken flesh from the bones of the lower leg. Keep thinking it is just a bit of steak. Keep thinking of Shelagh boning a joint. Keep thinking of Shelagh and what she said. Just keep thinking of Shelagh as you scrape and cut. Shelagh . . . the bloody Uffizi . . .
‘D’you know what the Uffizi is, Mr Taylor?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Taylor did not take his eyes from the woman’s legs. ‘It’s the principal art gallery in Florence. Houses one of the finest art collections in Europe.’
‘Very good. Titian and Raphael and all that lot.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘You haven’t been there, then?’
‘No, sir.’ Mackinnon felt gratitude that Taylor had not visited the Uffizi. The utter inconsequentiality of the conversation struck neither man and Thorpe was too introspective to be listening. As Mackinnon debrided the leg, Taylor unthinkingly flicked the severed flesh clear of the table.
‘Conrad called the sea life a useful calling,’ muttered Mackinnon cutting away the final piece of wreckage from the woman’s left leg.
‘I’d say this was pretty useful,’ said Taylor, ‘though I don’t know what she’s going to do with no feet.’
The Matthew Flinders lurched into a wave, rolled in the growing cross swell and lifted her bow. The deck angled sharply as the bow drove out of the supporting wave.
‘Hold tight,’ hissed Mackinnon. The three men waited. The ship pitched downwards, pounding into the next wave, kicking her stern high into the air so that her screw raced and she stopped dead in the water, her bow buried. Its inherent buoyancy sought to lift it from tonne upon tonne of seawater. The whole fabric of the ship groaned with the strain imposed upon the hull. The crest of the wave under which she laboured rolled aft, exploded against the bridge front, further shaking the ship, then poured in cataracts down the main-deck alleyways. The Matthew Flinders’s stout teak doors withstood the onslaught, but nothing could stop gallons of water squirting in round their edges and flooding the interior. From outside they could hear the protesting squeals of the boat people, followed by a murmur of fear and accompanied by the roaring obscenities of the ship’s company. They found themselves standing in a bare half-inch of water as it washed around the table legs and the gory remains of the woman’s foot.
Both Taylor and Thorpe clasped the woman, their heads together above her near-naked loins, refusing to let the inert body submit to the peremptory demands of gravity. Mackinnon had hold of her left leg, his great fist tightly restraining it like a second tourniquet.
The ship settled.
‘I read somewhere that surgery is rather like a mixture of carpentry and plumbing . . .’ Mackinnon transferred his attention to the flesh above the crushed area, cutting back the muscles to expose the main blood vessels. He found the first and picked up a piece of surgical thread. ‘And seamanship, I suppose.’
He fumbled the reef knot, but he managed it at last. As he exposed the second blood vessel Taylor had the thread ready and tied the ligature himself.
Good, thought Mackinnon, working on. The boy is proving himself. Perhaps this experience would be the making of him. There was no trace of his customary superciliousness.
Between them they secured all the identifiable veins and arteries. Carefully Mackinnon folded back the skin and the heavy pad of calf muscle he had saved, exposing the splintered bones of the shin. Then he reached for the saw. It was a perfect, miniature tenon saw made entirely of stainless steel. As he drew it across the tibia and fibula the Chief Steward passed out and slumped to the deck in a dead faint. His fat bulk made a slopping sound in the water that washed back and forth.
‘Never could hold his drink, you know.’
Taylor laughed with unnatural loudness. He liked the Old Man’s jokes, but the off-beat sense of humour was something of a revelation. The axis of their relationship had shifted as they had been thrown together by the happenings of the afternoon.
Mackinnon folded the pad of calf muscle with its resilient covering of skin over the sawn ends of the bones emerging from the red ooze of the amputated leg. He reached for the sutures and began passing the stitches so the threads of the ligatures dangled clear. Supplementing the crudely stitched seam with butterfly closures, he poured Cetrimide solution liberally over the stump.
‘I think you can ease that tourniquet now.’
Slowly, blood suffused the flesh of the stump through the lesser blood vessels and capillaries. There was no pumping flood; the ligatures were holding and it merely oozed along the jagged line of the stitched joint.
‘So far so good.’ Oddly he felt no more confident than when he had started. If anything the second leg daunted him. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and watched Taylor as, unbidden, the Third Mate wrapped lint around the ghastly wound and finally bound it with a length of bandage.
‘Now the other one . . .’ Mackinnon lifted the right leg. ‘Pity Freddie fainted, he could have done this.’
‘So could I.’
Mackinnon stared unhappily at the bloody mess. ‘This isn’t the Royal College of fucking Surgeons.’ He sensed defeat. His hands began to shake again as he reached for the scalpel.
‘Goddamnit . . .’
He raised his head, blowing the sweat off the end of his nose and avoiding Taylor’s eyes.
‘All right, sir. Here, give it to me.’
Mackinnon felt the scalpel taken from his quaking hand. He did not resist. A wave of nauseous exhaustion passed over him and he clutched at the edge of the table, willing himself not to topple on to the Chief Steward. For one awful, self-recriminatory moment he thought he might be drunk, but he knew he was still horribly sober. He watched, fascinated, as Taylor took over.
The Third Mate worked methodically, debriding the damaged tissue with a strange intensity. He doused the area with Cetrimide solution and exposed a length of the calf. He asked Mackinnon to plunge his hands into the warm mess twice to assist in the tying of the ligatures, and Mackinnon heard him muttering to himself in the ferocity of his concentration.
‘Make her clean,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘kill all the germs . . . hate . . . fucking . . . germs . . . bacteria . . . streptococci . . .
spirochaetes . . . microbes . . . the microbe is so very small . . . how does it go?’
With clinical brutality Taylor sawed through the bones and folded the preserved pad of flesh to form the stump, duplicating the captain’s method.
‘Nearly there.’
The curved needles of the sutures caught the light and then he straightened up.
‘Dressing, sir . . .’ Mackinnon p
assed lint and bandage. ‘Now the tourniquet.’ Both men watched anxiously for haemorrhage. A dark line of blood formed round the seam.
‘No leaks.’ Taylor was triumphant. They exchanged smiles across the body, shaking bloody hands in a spontaneous, ridiculous British gesture. At their feet the Chief Steward stirred.
‘Well done, Mr Taylor.’
‘Congratulations, sir.’
‘I think we’d better give her some more morphine.’
Beside them the Chief Steward got unsteadily to his feet, staggering as the ship lurched heavily again.
‘What’s the time, Freddie?’
The Chief Steward looked at his watch. ‘Er, half seven . . . I’m sorry, sir.’ He gazed down disbelievingly at his soaked and stained clothes.
‘Forget it, Freddie. Here, you missed the last round.’ Mackinnon handed the bottle to the Chief Steward. There was barely a teaspoonful of Scotch in the bottom.
Being on the wheel Macgregor had seen little of the rescue. From Gorilla Mackinnon’s and the mates’ comments he had built up a picture of the scene alongside and in between frantic concentration on the steering he had glimpsed the motor lifeboat as it made its journeys to and from the derelict junk. Once, when the ship was stopped and he stood idly at the telemotor, he had left his station to peer curiously over the Old Man’s shoulder, peevish that he was missing the action. Gorilla turned on him and sent him back to his post with such a blistering admonition that he spent the rest of his time sulking bitterly.
After Mackinnon had hove the ship to and Rawlings had relieved Taylor, he himself was relieved and went below. He was already irritatingly late for his tea. The accommodation seemed stuffed with squatting Chinks or Gooks, or whatever. The thin, wasted orientals slumped exhausted in odd corners, spread out from the saloon and the smoke-room in a kind of diaspora as they searched for and found their family groups. By this time most had eaten the fried rice prepared by the Chinese galley staff. The high-pitched and jarringly unfamiliar crying of small children and the smell of the strangers thickened the air.
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