by William Pitt
I don't know why I went down there, but I did. I would have been well within my rights to refuse, even on account of my age and not even considering my rank. But I went anyway. I suppose there was some motive of impressing the owner and my crew, and somewhere in the decision was the thought that I had to be back in New York three weeks from then.
She rolled and then, in that penitent way that ships have even in the worse storms, I felt her steady and steam straight and true as though she were on a minor lake. I knew it would last fifteen seconds at the most. I saw the car go by, backwards, through the clouds of choking fertilizer dust. The man on the floor was trembling like a ship-wrecked mariner on an island of crates, just beyond the vehicle's reach.
I dropped down on to the floor of the hold and immediately made a run for the car through the fertilizer dust filling my eyes and my throat. It had to be then or never. I was not even sure in my mind what I was going to do, but I knew they were all watching me. Running at it, I swooped and picked up one of the trailing ropes which had previously held it secure. Then, when I was almost there, the wretched ship pitched forward again, at a hell of an angle. It was as though the car had been waiting for me. All the God-knows-how-many tons of that grinning silver bulk was suddenly coming my way.
For a moment I froze then I jumped like a frog, clean over the charging nose. I even heard the bo'sun laugh as I went hurtling through the thickly fertilized air, hit the pointed roof of the bonnet and slid brilliantly down the other side. I was sprawling on the floor when the car hit the sacks again. It would be charging back at any second and I was in its path. Like some funnyman I tried to get to my feet, but the sudden lifting of the ship threw me forward on to my face again. The car was coming back. I could hear it and turning my apprehensive eyes I saw it careering towards me. In that moment of fright I was actually swimming on the floor of the hold, my legs and arms performing an authentic breast stroke, which miraculously carried me a fraction to one side. When the wheels were only feet away and running at me, I twisted and felt them go by my head.
'Oh Jesus,' I was praying. 'Oh Angie! Oh, Pamela! . . . Oh, Mrs Nissenbaum!'
Somehow I managed to get to my knees, then my feet. The car was right back into its first position now, a missile loaded into its launcher. At a queer monkey gait, I began to climb the steep uphill slope, trying to make for the bags of fertilizer which would offer me sanctuary. Then, I was running downhill, as the bow dived again. Running, scrambling, staggering, with that bloody car snorting down at my heels. I made it to the bags by two seconds at the most. I fell forward just as the bonnet and the bumper slammed into them again. All around the bags were exploding and the choking dust was in my throat, my nose and my eyes. I couldn't see the car any longer, only hear its metallic destruction of itself and most of the things around it.
'Oh, Angie,' I managed to cough again.' Oh, Pamela . . . Oh, Mrs Nissenbaum.'
'You're the first person they've ever had in this hospital suffering from bone meal fertilizer gassing,' said Pamela at my bedside. 'There's a doctor who says he's going to write up your case for one of those medical papers. With pictures of your lungs and windpipe.' She sighed. 'It's just like you Arthur. When you get your picture in the paper, it has to be your inside.'
'Nobody will recognize me, you mean,' I said. Speaking was still painful for my throat, despite all their pumpings and pummellings it still seemed lined with broken glass.
'Well, hardly,' she sniffed. 'Not from your lungs they won't.'
'But it will have a caption, I expect,' I argued painfully. 'It will say whose lungs they are.'
'That's not the same,' she said. 'Not the same at all.'
'Well don't nag me about it,' I grumbled painfully. 'I didn't arrange all this you know, Pamela. I didn't actually fix it. God, I feel like a bag stuffed with sawdust.'
'They quite like having you in here,' she conceded. 'Being as they've never seen anything quite like you before it gives them a chance to do a bit of their experimenting, I suppose. That man who gave you the kiss-of-life . . .'
'The bo'sun,' I said.
'Yes, him. It was ever so amusing to hear him describe it. He kept getting mouthfuls of that fertilizer stuff as he was breathing into you. He said you kept spouting the muck out like a combine harvester.'
'Well I'm glad everyone was amused,' I mumbled. 'Mr Cohen wasn't though.'
'Scrap metal, that Rolls,' she confirmed. 'It's down at the dock now. They say it's the first Rolls-Royce ever to be wrecked at sea. He was quite nice, really, that Mr Cohen, for a Jewish gentleman that is. He felt he had to explain why he couldn't do anything but sack you, so he took me out for a drink at The Queen's Hotel and we got on so well that we ended up having dinner together.'
'Oh, did you ?' I croaked nastily.
'Yes. It was a pity you had to mess up a job with a nice man like that, Arthur.'
'How's our fiat ?' I coughed.
'The fiat? What a funny thing to say. It's all right. But very steamy and damp since the laundrette was put underneath.'
'A laundrette? The baker's gone?'
'Of course it's gone. You could hardly have a bakers and a laundrette in the same couple of rooms could you? The cakes would go soggy. As it is everything gets steamed up and damp upstairs.'
Every time I gathered myself to say a long sentence the bone meal rose in my gullet and blocked it and I had to lie still until the nurse came along to pummel me and make it come right up. It was a very nasty experience, like sicking up old porridge. It happened now and Pamela couldn't look, so she went off to the other end of the ward and, while the nurse was pummelling me, I could see her having a cheery laugh with a professional footballer with a broken leg who was in the bed near the window.
Eventually when another lot of fertilizer had been disposed of, she came back and stood at the side of the bed. ' I'm going then, Arthur,' she said.' I'm glad you mentioned the flat because I wanted to have a chat with you about things anyway.'
'About the steam?' I said. 'We'll complain, darling.'
'No, not just that. Things in general. But I'll wait until you get out of here and you've stopped bringing up those wood-shavings. Then we'll have a nice talk.'
'Can't you tell me now?' I asked. 'Visiting time's not finished yet.'
'No, I won't now,' she said, kissing me briefly on the cheek, and turning to go. 'The last thing I want to do is upset you when you're ill.'
It was the last day of the season for the putting green in the park. In fact it was the last hour of the last day of the putting season; October, with the day going to ashes around us, and our lives too, although I did not realize it at the start.
I had said to her: ' When are you going to tell me whatever it is you are going to tell me?' She was quite fat now, in her thirties, but still pretty in her plumpish way, and although I still had thoughts of Angie in New York, I honestly think at that time I could have stayed with Pamela forever and been comfortable.
After all I had never actually had Angie, lovely as she was. I had only been in her close proximity. What you never have you never really miss. At that point I might have even given up the sea and got a shore job and tried to build a decent, everyday life with Pamela. We might even have a late child.
'Let's go down to the putting green,' she said.
'Now?'
'Yes, now. We can have a game and I can talk to you.'
'But it's three o'clock nearly, and they close it for the season about this time of the year. It's probably closed now.'
' Let's go and see,' she insisted.
So we went. A funny thing happened on the way. Well, not funny, but odd in its own fashion. A man with a terrible stutter came, up to us in the street and asked the way to the bus station. It turned out that the poor bugger was not just a stutterer, but was deaf as well.
We had to yell at him and he kept stammering back telling us there was no need to shout. But it broke the ominous silence between us; we bent towards him as though he was a conveniently
lost child and we both took turns at explaining and shouting, and trying to make out what he was saying, and somehow, it suddenly restored earth under our feet; it gave to us something we could do together, some common interest.
'You don't realize how well off you are until you meet somebody like that, do you?' I said hopefully. I was reluctant to let our new tenuous contact fall apart without making every effort to cement it.
'He's only lost the bus station,' she sniffed.
'He had a bit of a job to ask where it is,' I pointed out. 'And more of a job to hear the answer.'
'I suppose he was quite brave really,' she conceded. We were at the bowed iron gates to the park now. I could see the old, white man who looked after the putting green in the distance, beyond the closed tea kiosk and the band stand. ' You ought to have been braver, Arthur,' she said to my astonishment. ' All your life, you ought to have tried to be just a little bit more brave. Can you understand me?'
'Brave?' I said. 'What are you talking about?'
The old, white, man came towards us and I asked for the hire of two putters and two golf balls. He stared at us, first me then her, with aged astonishment. ' But it's packing up,' he said wheezily. 'Putting's finished for the winter. I'm just going out to collect the little flags and put the stoppers in the holes.' He glared at us challengingly. ' It's all finished, I tell you.'
I would have gone away, but Pamela said: 'It says on the notice that it's four-thirty when putting is finished, so even if this is the last day it's not four-thirty yet.'
'But it's nearly dark by then,' he argued. 'The council says that I can pack up when there's nobody else who wants to putt this afternoon, because it's the end of the season. Can't you see that?'
'We want to have a game,' said Pamela.
'It's chilly and it's getting dark,' he said. ' I was hoping to go home.'
'Hard luck,' she said uncharitably. 'We want a putt.'
'Trust you,' he snarled, as though we did it out of spite every autumn when he was ready to quit. 'Just trust you.'
Ill-temperedly he handed two putters to us and two chewed up golf balls and almost snatched the money from me. We walked away, leaving him hunched and scowling, and went to the small arrow marked 'Hole One' at the edge of the green.
'We didn't have to play, did we?' I said. 'The poor old bugger wants to go home for the winter. He's cold.'
'That's just your trouble,' she said.' Backing away. Never getting in and getting things. That's what I was saying before.'
'What?'
'About you. You're just not brave enough.'
'Christ! Not brave enough? I'm the one who nearly got stuffed with fertilizer trying to save a bloody car in a force nine gale.'
'I'm not talking about that,' she said. She put her ball down and struck it truly towards the hole. It never looked like going anywhere but down into the cup and it did with a single, confident plop. I hit my ball sullenly, not hard enough. It rolled and stopped a foot short.
'What I'm saying, Arthur,' she went on, 'is that you, you, could have really been somebody. When I first met you that night I thought you might really turn out to be something important later on in life. Honestly I did.'
'I can't say I remember you showed it,' I grunted. My anger was low, for over it was a cold sludge of unhappiness; now I sensed what she was going to say to me. I prayed she wouldn't say it, because I really did love her.
She putted the scarred ball towards the next hole, carelessly, but laid it up to within three inches of the lip. 'Your trouble,' she sniffed more at the ball than at me. 'Your trouble, Arthur, is that you've spent your life trying to be ordinary. Ordinary, that's what. In everything. If you'd set out with a bit of guts to be GREAT you would have been GREAT. Or very nearly. I know it, Arthur. Instead you've held back, sniffling along like some timid bloody hedgehog.'
I stared at her with genuine astonishment. She looked up at me, 'Your putt,' she invited. Then she looked behind us, and I did too, and the white, anxious attendant was following us, taking up the flags and filling in the hole which we had played. He put a neat little round of turf fixed to a tin base into the hole and stood belligerently with the miniature flag in his hand, waiting for us to continue the game.
I putted my ball in a dream. 'How can you say that to me?' I said.' God Almighty, Pamela, I'm only in my forties and I've got my extra master's certificate. I'm a bloody sea captain, I'll have you know!'
'I'm cold,' called the old man querulously behind us.
We both looked at him. He looked cold. Pamela said to me:' You could have been anything. Anything. An admiral 1 But you'd rather be a bus conductor.'
'I would not!' I protested. 'And there's no admirals in the merchant service, you ought to know that. But I am the master of a vessel.'
She walked to the hole and tapped her ball down carefully. ' I wouldn't count on that either,' she said.' Mr Cohen says there'll be an inquiry about his Rolls breaking loose. He says cargo adrift is a very serious matter and the responsibility of the master of the ship. You could find yourself down to first officer again.'
The possibility had already occurred to me. 'Thanks,' I said miserably. 'That should give you something to laugh about.' I mechanically knocked the ball towards the hole and missed. I knocked it the other way and missed again.
'If you're going to play, play properly,' snorted the slowly pursuing attendant. ' I'm not hanging around watching you playing ping pong.'
'Sorry,' I called back apologetically.
'Sorry indeed!' she snorted. 'Sorry! Don't say sorry to him. That's you all over. Why don't you go and give him a kiss?'
'Lay off,' I said, glaring at her. 'The poor old sod's cold.'
'Go and rub his hands, then,' she said.' Give him a hug. What you should do is to tell him to shut his trap and let us get on with the game. He's being paid. He's cheating the ratepayers if he goes off early.'
We played a few more holes in silence, the attendant, bending and following us like some peevish pilgrim crouching in prayer and collecting sacred flags at every few steps to some shrine.
'You've always been so . . . well, so wet,' she went on again. I turned my sullen face towards her and saw to my amazement that there were tears filling her eyes. I had never seen her cry.
'You're crying, darling,' I said moving towards her.
She backed away. 'Keep off,' she said. 'I'm crying for you because you're such a fool. You screw everything up in life because you're afraid of offending somebody or other. While you've been in hospital I've been reading that bloody great book you've been writing all these years . . .'
I froze in mid-putt and turned to her.' All The Coloured Lights Of The World by Arthur McCann', I said. Nobody had ever seen it before. 'You've read it?'
' They brought it home with the rest of your things,' she said guiltily but still defiant. ' And I read it.'
'I wondered why you were so upset,' I muttered. The putter shook in my fingers and the ball wriggled drunkenly down the green. I heard the attendant snort derisively. I said: 'All those women and things. They're not real, you know, Pam. I only made it up. You mustn't get annoyed because none of it is real. It's only a book.'
'God give me patience,' she muttered. 'You're such a blind, buggering fool. Don't you see? It would have been a hundred per cent better if they had been real! Christ, I would have thought you had some blood in your guts anyway. Not just that sawdust.' She turned on me. I thought she was going to grasp me by the lapels. 'Can't you see? Can't you understand? I could have been happy with a man like that, no matter how many women he screwed in no matter how many places! At least he would be a man. Not a fucking ninny!'
'Swearing!' shouted the old man behind us. 'Swearing, abuse and disagreements on the putting green. It's against the by-laws.'
'Wrap up!' she snarled at him in a fury now. And stop sniffing after us or I'll strangle you and that will really be against the sodding by-laws.'
'Strangle me?' He stared at her horrified. 'But I'm sixty-six.'
'There's no age limit,' she bellowed. 'Clear off before I do it.'
Scraggy mackintosh hanging about him, he backed away towards his hut. ' I'll get the superintendent to you,' he trembled. ' I'll go and get him now. You can't threaten me like that.'
We watched him go. There seemed to be no more to say about him. 'I thought you were happy,' I said to her. 'All these years, I thought you were happy just being here and waiting for me to come home. You shouldn't have said you'd marry me if you weren't sure.'
She was about to strike her ball, but she swung the putter through the air over its head instead. 'You might as well know now,' she said. 'That I never did say I'd marry you. When I sent you that telegram it was to say nothing doing. The answer, Arthur, was " no ". But you had to lose the bloody thing before you read it. I was going to marry Charlie Hughes, the butcher in Commercial Road, if you want to know, but he ditched me the night before you came home. Then you turned up like some shining Prince Charming, all innocent and happy, so I thought I might as well have you instead.'
'Oh no,' I breathed. I stared at her because I did not believe she was suddenly saying these things. 'Oh, no, that's not true. You didn't want to marry me?
'Look, Arthur, I didn't, Get that straight. You were a romantic sop then and you still are now.'
'You mean I ought to have been tough with you?'
'Tough! Violent, that's what you should have been. And you should have gone around the world belting and kicking all those women like the man in your book, then you wouldn't have come home every time like some pent-up bloody missionary. God, you used to give me the creeps.'
'Perhaps I did,' I said desperately. 'Perhaps I did do that to all those women.'
'Too late to start making out you're a good fuck now,' she said blatantly. 'You don't know what it means. You're the only man I ever knew who folded his socks before getting into bed with me.'
'A person can be tidy and passionate,' I argued quietly. Then I realized what she had admitted. 'You've . . . you've had affairs then. With other men.'