He entered the mess-room to find Braddock nursing a tiny bundle and endeavouring to spoon thinned condensed milk into the baby’s mouth. Opposite Braddock, Pritchard sat with a mug of tea, mouthing at the baby and diverting its attention from Braddock’s best endeavours. The two men had discovered the child had no relative apart from the woman stretched out on the duty mess table.
‘What’s all this then?’ Macgregor stared round the mess-room, his expression one of truculently false incredulity. ‘Bairns an’ wimmin in the fuckin’ officers’ saloon . . . What are youse, then? Stupid bastard you look!’
Pritchard watched the line of muscle ripple along Braddock’s jaw. ‘For Chrissakes drop it,’ he said, before Braddock replied. But Macgregor was in no mood to take advice. Mackinnon’s rebuke had angered him and he was in search of a victim. Braddock and Pritchard with a snot-nosed kid would give him no trouble.
‘Och, piss off. Youse all runnin’ round like daft kids. Youse wanna see the officers. Jeesus, bluidy faggots!’
Pritchard shook a cautionary head at Braddock who moved as though to pass the child over. Magregor turned away, opened a can of beer from his locker and then produced a bottle of malt whisky.
‘Where the hell did you get that?’ Pritchard asked, for Gorilla Mackinnon let no one below the rank of petty officer have a bottle. A tot or two, by all means, but not a bottle.
Macgregor leered, gratified to have excited envy. ‘Ah’m no so stupid as youse think.’ He found a mug and poured a chaser.
‘Number Three upper ’tween deck,’ Braddock said. ‘He’s got a whole bloody case of the stuff.’
Pritchard stared at Macgregor. The Glaswegian winked at him, a leering superior wink that bespoke, not the complicity of conspiracy, of jacks together, but the hard, selfish, city-bred snide of ‘I’m all right’.
‘You don’t give a toss for anything do you?’ Pritchard said, his eyes narrowing.
Macgregor grinned and shook his head. This sudden regard pleased him; the strength of excess, of being recognised as possessing no moral scruples, of actually shocking Pritchard, the tamed officers’ arse-licker, gratified Macgregor immensely.
It was beyond Macgregor’s capabilities to articulate this sensation, but it flooded him with a fierce, primitive joy. He had never felt like this before and now knew where and how to seek pleasure. He did not realise this fact immediately, but it gradually dawned on him in the following hours with fateful consequences.
What shocked Pritchard about Magregor was the lack of any redeeming feature. He had known hard cases in abundance, tough, guiltless and unscrupulous men; but never had he known one who, during the course of a voyage, had not revealed some scrap of sentimentality, whether towards the Mum tattooed upon their arm, or a girl somewhere, even a dockside whore upon whom a rough affection was bestowed. But Magregor was past his comprehension.
Perhaps a woman could have discovered some good in Macgregor, but Macgregor had never had a proper relationship with a woman. The product of a broken home, whose childhood memories of a council flat were of a ceaseless arguing punctuated by parental violence, drunkenness and absence, Macgregor had escaped to sea. For the turbulence of what he knew of family life, of damp and neglect, of cold baked beans, bed-wetting and incessant noise, of the eternal televised images glowing amid the chaos of squalor, he had exchanged the harsh, lonely environment of a merchant ship. He had had a girlfriend once, more out of desperation than affection, an attempt to conform or be laughed at by other children, a slow, pathetic creature who had discovered an easy way of ingratiating herself with boys. The liaison had lasted until her mother caught them at the base of the stairwell. He had been thrashed senseless by his father and had run away for the first of many times.
The sea life had taken him up and offered him a purpose, but the easy access to drink, the loneliness and the temptations of open stows of cargo had proved too much for him. He had become a lost soul and Pritchard knew it.
‘You’re a rotten little bastard,’ Pritchard said.
Stevenson’s inspection of the upper deck was, of necessity, a cursory, torchlit one, for it was already dark. With the ship pitching into the heavy sea and the wind tearing at his clothing, reducing him again to a chilly state and reminding him his clothes were still damp, he made no attempt to venture too far forward of the main superstructure. To have ventured further would have invited certain death by being swept overboard, for the forward deck was already awash with every alternate wave that the Matthew Flinders met head on, white surges that foamed and hissed out of the gloom. Satisfied that there was nothing loose (and with Macgregor hatches he had at least the reassurance that the holds were secure), he made his way back through the occupied public rooms.
In the smoke-room he found the girl interpreter drying her hair on a towel given her by one of the stewards. A tired smile crossed her face as she caught sight of him and he experienced a surge of pleasure at her recognition.
He asked how she was. ‘Okay,’ she replied, the word set on two distinct notes. He was struck again by her good looks, her elfin face. The points of her small breasts showed beneath her ragged cotton shirt, raised by her uplifted arms. Desire, sharp and urgent, galled him.
‘You are from Vietnam?’ he asked, squatting on his haunches beside her.
‘Yeah.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Phan Thi Tam.’ He struggled to repeat the correct intonation. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘you say Tam.’
‘Tam,’ Stevenson repeated and she nodded with apparent satisfaction. He put his hand on his chest. ‘My name, Alex.’
It was her turn to repeat the name. She attenuated the l, giving the sound a sing-song quality he found enchanting.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Have you had something to eat?’ He held one cupped hand up to his mouth and made a scooping motion with the other, as though taking rice from a bowl. She laughed, an infectious sound redolent of relief and relaxation.
‘Yeah, sure. Everybody eat.’
They were silent for a moment, weighing each other up, and then she said, with a positiveness which reminded him of how she had decisively seized and ascended the ladder from the motor lifeboat, ‘I okay, Alex. Thank you.’
He stood and gazed down at her. The exhausted boat people were settling to sleep. The smoke-room was lit by only a single bulb and it side-lit her face, throwing the lines of her cheekbones, the ridge of her nose, the convolutions of her lips and the curve of her eyes into delicate relief. She would look like that on a pillow, he thought, then reality displaced romance and he asked, ‘Does anyone else speak English?’
She flashed a quick glance about her. It was at obvious variance with the rapport he assumed they had just established, and he remembered the ammunition clip he had forgotten in her presence. She was no longer looking at him.
‘No. Some speak French.’
‘That’s not good,’ he said, ‘no one speaks French aboard here.’ He was troubled, annoyed that he had found the ammunition and that it somehow spoiled things with this girl. For a moment he was moved by her plight and his power, then he chid himself for an arrogant fool. What was he thinking of? ‘You get some sleep now,’ he said. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she replied, smiling again.
But Stevenson was aware it was no longer a smile of spontaneity. He was wounded by the realisation.
‘For God’s sake . . .’ he muttered at his own stupidity as he made for the bridge.
CHAPTER NINE
Master Under God
Captain Mackinnon regretted the whisky the moment he stepped on to the bridge. Indispensable as it had been to his recent performance as a surgeon, it was a disastrous accompaniment to what was now required of him. Out on the bridge-wing as the Matthew Flinders staggered under the onslaught of yet another heavy sea, Mackinnon could see he was in for a long and lonely night. In the darkness he studied the height and period of the waves as the breaking crests, exploding with a malevolent luminosity of thei
r own, roared down upon them. The near-gale he had left the ship hove-to in had become a storm, the wind above fifty knots, he estimated, Force Ten on the Beaufort scale.
Waves of fatigue had swept over him as he had cleaned himself in his cabin, washing the blood from his hands, staring at the lined and bronzed yet pallid features in the mirror.
In a moment of weakness he had leaned his face against the cool glass and groaned. Shelagh was flying out to Hong Kong: the recollection stiffened him. In a day or two she would expect him to bring his ship into the ‘fragrant harbour’ of the Crown Colony. And the Matthew Flinders was his ship, despite the owners, despite the foreign flag their prostituting minds had seen to gaud her with, for he bore the responsibility. He had dried his hands and climbed to the bridge.
But on the bridge his resolution faltered. It was pot-valour, he realised, and with the self-knowledge came the cautionary thought that he had better be careful. The drinking of the whisky had reminded him of a time when consolation for all things lurked in alcohol.
He stood, bracing himself against the wild motion of the deck, and drew air into his lungs. He had come up here where he belonged, where duty bound him in an almost mystical bondage, to nurse his ship through the typhoon. He turned and made his way into the chart-room.
He found Rawlings bent over the chart-table, his legs widespread as he flicked the pages of his nautical tables.
‘You got something then?’
‘Not very good, I’m afraid, sir,’ Rawlings said, scribbling a final line of figures and reaching for the parallel rules. ‘The overcast was just about total and the horizon poor, but I managed three intercepts through gaps in the cloud, two of which were of Vega and similar enough to give me reasonable confidence in the fix.’
In view of the observational errors inherent in a poor horizon and quick glimpses of stars through rents in fast-moving scud, they could reckon the position to be accurate to within ten miles at the best. Nevertheless Mackinnon was pleased. It was better than nothing. Under the circumstances Rawlings had done very well, and he said so.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Rawlings, ‘there we are.’ The Chief Officer stepped back and let Mackinnon peruse the chart and the neatly stencilled stellar fix. It showed the ship over one hundred and fifty miles south-east of Point Lagan on the coast of Vietnam.
‘Those poor bastards made nearly two hundred miles in that wreck,’ he said, laying down the brass dividers.
Rawlings grunted. ‘Two hundred miles to where?’ he asked.
‘God knows. Beyond the fact that they were free.’
‘This typhoon, sir,’ Rawlings said anxiously, as if recalling Mackinnon to something he had forgotten, ‘I’ve been looking at the nav. warnings.’ The Chief Officer reached out for the signal clip.
‘There’s a mistake in the plotting,’ said Mackinnon.
‘Oh, I didn’t think . . .’
‘I spotted it earlier,’ Mackinnon cut in, pleased not to have had Rawlings draw it to his attention and feeling it partially made up for his irresponsibility with the whisky bottle. ‘Then we sighted that junk and’ – he shrugged – ‘the priorities shifted, you might say. Have we had any more warnings?’
Rawlings picked up a pink signal form lying under the lead weight holding one corner of the chart down. ‘This came in five minutes ago. I was going to plot it the minute I finished the star fix and let you know.’
Mackinnon read the pink chit out loud:
De Hongkong Radio to CQ (all ships)
Severe Tropical Revolving Storm now Typhoon David centred on position 10° 30’ north 115° east stop Winds within 200 miles of centre estimated cyclonic force 8 within 75 miles of centre force 10 to 11 gusting to force 12 stop Centre estimated moving NE at 12 knots stop Ships with information please report stop Ends
‘This is already two hours old.’
Mackinnon looked to the barograph on its small shelf on the after bulkhead. The aneroid-driven pen had drawn its violet line in a steep downward curve. Setting time against atmospheric pressure on the instrument’s printed graticule, Mackinnon drew cold comfort from the fact that in the last three hours the air pressure had dropped seven millibars. He swore softly, feeling a physical sensation of his belly knotting up with apprehension. He turned back to the chart-table.
Rawlings was again plying parallel rules and dividers, measuring the distance between the estimated position of the typhoon’s centre and his own stellar fix. The legs of the dividers spanned over four degrees on the vertical scale of latitude, each of which represented sixty nautical miles.
‘Two hundred and seventy-three miles away over the Tizard shoals, and the wind nor’ nor’ west, at force nine or ten.’ Rawlings gave voice to Mackinnon’s thoughts.
‘It’s a ten already,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s either much closer than indicated, or much more severe.’ He stopped and looked up as Stevenson joined them. The Second Mate stared down at the pool of lamplight illuminating the chart of the South China Sea with its two fateful positions neatly inscribed in Rawlings’s pedantic hand.
‘If we continue to lie hove-to with the wind on our starboard bow,’ Mackinnon continued, ‘we will probably find ourselves on the perimeter of the dangerous semicircle and in danger from the centre.’
His two officers were both nodding agreement, their faces grim.
‘And if it doesn’t recurve a touch, sir, as seems probable at this latitude, we’ll be in a very dodgy position.’
‘Dodgy would be an understatement, Mr Stevenson. Very well,’ Mackinnon came to his decision, ‘we put the wind on the starboard quarter and run out of the path of the storm, then.’
‘We’re as snugged down on deck as we can be, sir,’ Stevenson reported. ‘The Chief Steward’s got one of his staff on duty with the refugees.’
‘Good. Mr Rawlings, let the engine-room know. I’ve already warned the Chief we’re in for a blow. Better tell the duty engineer to make sure the greasers use the shaft tunnel to get to and from their accommodation. The after deck will be far too dangerous.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
‘And ask Sparks to come up; we’ll get a signal off to Hong Kong. Carry on, then. I’ll take the bridge for a while. I’ve sent the Third Mate to get his head down for an hour. You can put a man on the wheel, too. I don’t care a damn what the makers of the bloody auto-pilot claim, I want flesh and blood on that wheel . . .’ At the expression a vision of the Vietnamese woman’s smashed legs swum into his mind’s eye. He addressed Stevenson. ‘You turn in, son. Oh, by the way, you did well in the boat this afternoon.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘You’ve all done well,’ Mackinnon said to Rawlings, as Stevenson disappeared. ‘Taylor surprised me. He did one of the amputations.’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed Rawlings, bracing himself as the ship crashed into another monstrous sea and lurched into the succeeding trough. He followed Mackinnon into the greater darkness of the wheelhouse. Ahead of them the night was pallid with spray and it struck the windows with a lethal rattle.
‘How is the woman?’ Rawlings asked.
He could just make out the shrug of Mackinnon’s epauletted shoulders in the gloom.
‘I don’t know really. We aren’t bloody surgeons.’ An edge of defensive desperation could be detected in the Captain’s voice, but it had steadied again when he added, ‘If gangrene sets in she’s had it, I’m afraid. How’s her baby?’
‘Last seen being given the feed of its life in the seamen’s mess.’
‘I’m glad of that,’ said Mackinnon.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘We had a tot or two to get through the bloody business, mister,’ Mackinnon replied harshly, realising his breath betrayed him, ‘but I’m fine, fine. Now, let’s have a man on the wheel, get Sparks up here and let the engine-room know what we intend doing.’
And as Rawlings picked up the telephone, Captain Mackinnon jammed himself in the forward corner of the wheel-house and waited for h
is orders to be passed to the engine- and radio-rooms.
This was not the first typhoon Captain Mackinnon had experienced, though he felt in his bones it was to be the worst.
‘Only two things really frighten me at sea,’ he was fond of saying to his officers by way of a cautionary tale, ‘fog and fire.’
Heavy weather was rarely a real problem to ships as stoutly built as the Matthew Flinders, ships which had been designed specifically for these unpredictable waters; for old as she was, she had scantlings more massive than the welded boxes passing for today’s new tonnage. But there was in this wind, Mackinnon thought, something malevolent. The spooky conviction that he had been a lucky man for too long hovered again on the margins of his sensible mind, dragged from the dark recesses of his self-centred subconscious by the overdose of Scotch.
Not that Captain Mackinnon believed in a vengeful God. He merely knew the sea and the wind to be indifferent, and his career to be a piece of monstrous arrogance, a puny, quite insignificant attempt to attain some sort of superiority over these mighty elemental forces in the name of John Mackinnon, human soul. When someone coughed behind him he realised he had been leaning, his forehead on the glass of the wheelhouse windows for some time. He grunted interrogatively and stirred.
‘Sparks, sir. You sent for me.’
‘Oh, yes.’ He led the Radio Officer into the chart-room and dictated the signal to Hong Kong Radio, giving the ship’s position, the barometric pressure and the speed and direction of the wind.
Sparks raised his head, Biro poised: ‘Anything else, sir?’ he prompted.
‘No . . . oh, yes, better let them know we intercepted a junk of refugees. Have we had a head count?’
‘Freddie made it one hundred and forty-six.’
‘Good grief!’ Mackinnon’s surprise was genuine. He had not imagined there were so many, despite the crowded appearance of the junk’s deck.
One hundred and forty-six additional human souls were laid as extra responsibility upon him. He looked at the bridge log recording the navigational movements of the ship. In Rawlings’s script he read out an abstract of the dead-reckoning position, the time and the bald entry: Embarked 146 Vietnamese refugees from derelict junk. No. 1 mlboat abandoned due deteriorating weather. Proceeded, C ° 015°T.
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