Preservation

by Jock Serong

  So I climbed off the cot. I have the strength, you know. Nobody checked because nobody thought to. I will always have this small advantage: check the Scotsman, check the Englishman. Never mind the Bengali. One may hear a great deal, may know and keep a great deal, when one is more or less invisible.

  I inched my way across the floor. Plain, waxed boards, cool under my feet, your voices soft through the wall between us. Done in five short steps. Not a creak from the boards—bare feet are my handwriting—and I have an ear to the door. I want to hear you talk, Mr Clark. Maybe later, when you are done, I will take my turn to speak.

  I ask myself now, where did all the misfortunes start? Perhaps it was the day my father took me to see you. You sat in an office at Campbell and Clark’s wharf, airs like a maharaja. A hundred yards downstream your family’s terrible boat was already sucking in ooze from the river.

  The office made you comfortable and it impressed the traders, I am sure. But it offered no welcome to small men such as my father and me. We could only approach such a door because my father was your manservant. No other lascar in the city of Calcutta would dare to knock.

  The two sipahees at the door were low-caste men who knew my father. They stepped aside, we entered, and you bestowed an audience upon us. He had told me in advance to bow in a deep salaam, hand to forehead, before we said a word. You watched; your eyes gleamed at the sight. Then my father told you I was sixteen years old now—yes, a slight lad but a quick learner—and he wanted me to take over his role as your manservant. My father would still come to Sydney with the November voyage, but as the serang of the lascar crew, responsible to all and not just you. He believed it was time for me to learn the job.

  The punkah wallahs worked the fans while my father spoke; the air barely moved. You heard him out but it was clear your heart was not in it. Prasad, you complained, I am accustomed to your ways, and you to mine. Why must I start again?

  My father was accustomed to your ways: he carried them out in a china pot first thing in the morning. He knew this would be your line, and he rounded you easily. First, he said the mistri—the man who hired all of the company’s labour—had approved the switch. This was not true, Mr Clark, I later found out. But you are too lazy for checking. Then he spoke of his standing among his fellow lascars, the forty-four of them who would be the backbone of the crew. He knew them all, from the tindals to the topas, the Mussulmen and the Hindus. Over the years he had come to know their families. Long before you arrived in Calcutta.

  You were outfoxed. You cursed—peevishly—and told us to tell the captain, Mr Hamilton. Then you ordered us out of your office. So it was done: my father would sail as the serang, the man who stood between the lascars and the crew. He would calm them, keep them going, more so because he was not tied to you throughout the voyage.

  You remember that day, I am sure. The moment of that decision. Perhaps, on the other side of the door now, you regret it.

  The thing was cleared with Mr Hamilton, who cared little, other than it meant he gained a full-grown man among his crew instead of a boy. And we went home, my father and I, to tell my mother that it was done. Standing before her, my eyes were now level with hers where only months ago I had looked up at her. In its own sad way, it spoke of the need for me to go. She wept a little. It must hurt, I know, to send her only son away to sea. But I also knew it was my duty to follow my father: our family’s long tradition. I had been on the river, around it, for years already; collecting scrap, running messages for the merchants and fighting other boys for a place among the lumpers.

  There was no time to think of the losses, but my mother bore all of them.

  Now I hear you telling the lieutenant about the voyage. Some of the truth; but only some.

  You should speak of that evil man and how we all shrank from him. Even when he came on the day we sailed, late but not worried. He showed his papers. Ran his hand over the tea chests to make sure they were packed correctly. His long body, cruel hands. That voice, pouring English like a strange oil. And those eyes, I cannot think how to describe them but they were night-eyes. I am Mr Figge, he told us. From Sumpters. Speaking as though he knew and loved every man on board: he tousled my hair like he was some great ruler granting small kindnesses.

  What sort of merchant, I wondered, wears trousers that reveal his ankles?

  In the dull days across the ocean he spent his time in one cabin or the other, the door closed, talking endlessly—to you, to Mr Hamilton—about who knows what. I must take care here: he talked to both of you but never at the same time. As if he was feeding two animals that ate different food.

  He talked like an expert about many things, never minded that the man listening might be backed against a bulkhead, nowhere to go. Perhaps he did not know how forceful he was. Perhaps he knew well and it amused him.

  Sometimes I would ask my father about the strange man and he would speak firmly to me. It is none of your concern, he would say. You are a bright and attentive boy but your imagination runs away with you. Leave it be. Attend to your duties. And I tried to do so. But I could see changes over the long weeks at sea: his talks with you became more urgent. When we crossed the equator, before the gales, Mr Figge brought the second mate, Mr Leisham, into these talks. He looked scared, as you did. Sometimes Mr Figge had you or him up against a door, or the masts, pointing his finger and speaking low and firm. He paid no mind to whether he was watched.

  He was watched. By me, but I’m never seen. That one night I was clearing the remains of your meal from your room, out of view in the passage. Mr Figge was talking to Mr Leisham in that way I’d seen, pressing him. Seven thousand gallons, I heard him say. I knew he did not speak of the tea.

  I felt no loyalty to you but I knew that did not matter. I brought you water, meals and messages, and of course I took away the chamber pot. These were my duties. As the ship heaved and wandered sideways I cleaned those meals off the walls, and off your coat and your blankets, when you threw up. You would sometimes forget it was me and go to my father for something: my father, who had known you long enough, would steer you back to me. I am serang now, he would remind you. It is the boy you seek. And you would come looking for me.

  Then the gales began and we thought they would never end. You told the navy man about Mr Leisham falling from the rigging, but you did not tell the detail: the moment that Mr Figge told the captain to send him up there. There’s no need to hand it, Mr Hamilton said of the topsail. It will soon enough tear itself free anyway.

  Send him, Mr Figge said: calm, very still. Don’t make me repeat myself.

  And those eyes took hold of the captain’s and I saw he would not let go. So up went Mr Leisham. The masts were swinging, the tips eighty feet high, and by the time she rolled fully off one beam and onto the other, they drew an arc that might have been a hundred and fifty feet through the air, and Leisham inched his way up there with terror all over his face. Each time the roll switched to the other side the rigs’d throw over and he’d bear-hug whatever he’d been grabbing at that instant and this went on for so long, so long. And the miracle was, he got it done—he got all the way to the topsail yard while we watched him, whipping through the evening sky like a monkey aloft in a tree and he managed to hand it in: one furl off, two, three, and the more of it he tied onto the yard, the more it thrashed around him and the mounts and eyelets lashed him and the blows to his hands were breaking his knuckles, they must have been. He had his feet in the rat-lines, and he clung and he clung until his terrible death.

  And the worst horror of it was watching Mr Figge standing there on the poop. Unbraced, legs apart, riding the swell. Mouth just slightly open, as for demons to pass back and forth. The worse our journey became—the leaking boat, the wretched weather—the less Mr Figge worried. He smiled wherever he went. Laughed, even.

  You told of the storms well enough, Mr Clark, but you see them only through your eyes. You were dry enough most of the time, down aft and not often above decks. I brought you food to c
alm your belly. For us it was not the same. Our suffering led to fear, then panic. The captain had us in the bilge water, stuffing rags in the gaps, our skin like pastry, tearing on everything: corners, splinters, nails. But that pain was nothing beside being thrown about inside that small space in the dark, in every direction. The body would go slack for a moment after days of no sleep; the very moment the ship would toss you fully at a beam or the side of a cask. The whole great mass of the cargo was edged in by its own weight, and in the dark it threatened always to collapse.

  Here and now, behind the door listening to you Mr Clark, I feel my guts turn again at the memory. The smell in there: lamp oil and human waste, and something else—old seawater, or the pork. That water could come out of there only one way: by our labour. It is not the work of an Englishman nor a Scot to clear six feet of water from the hold. Such work falls to the lascars, since anyone can remember. The captain roared at us to man the pump on deck but cold and sickness had made us angry and at first we did not move. I say ‘us’ but in truth I was spared because I was your boy. I wonder now if my father foresaw all this. He led the men against the captain, saying no one could stand up straight out there in the wind and spray, let alone work the pump. I watched him stand up for the rest of them, with such skill that none could call it mutiny. I loved him and I admired him for that gentle strength. The other lascars looked to him too. Their serang, their protector.

  The stand-off ended with an order that the men go below and bail with buckets, since they refused to stand on the deck in the frozen rain.

  Twenty, thirty men went below then and began the bailing. Weak and moaning, staggering under the gallons. It was easy to slip, more so for those standing on the steps or working with their backs against the ribs of the hull. Sometimes they went under, coming up with the dreadful water in their mouths. Sometimes the waves rocked the ship so hard that the bilge-muck itself made waves that crashed from one side of the hold to the other. I saw their eyes in the dark, my father’s too. I came to understand what he had done for me.

  The bailing lowered the water level—as far as anyone could know when the water level kept moving. Over the long hours I often slipped away from you, Mr Clark, to see my father, but he had become a ghost. His eyes were empty and he showed no sign that he knew me. I brought him water, which he sipped only before handing it on. I could feel how much he wanted to drink it all, but he held firm: a great man, working in a hole. The others drank fast, till the water was gone. Any break in the work meant others had to work harder. And if the water rose again, we all knew the captain might send them back up to the pump.

  Mr Kennedy, the carpenter, worked in the bow all this time. His curses and shouts reached the men bailing the hold, fuelling the fear that drove them. The ship was taking sly hits at him, catching him unawares. One moment he stood, the next he was on his back in the water. He swore like there were not enough curses in the world to fit his anger.

  And you, Mr Clark, through all this you had me attending to you as though we were not part of the night, as though we stood on firm ground. You asked for pen and paper, for messages to and from the captain’s cabin, tea and bread while you talked with Mr Figge. What could there be to talk about? I fought with the pot and the tiny cooking fire, the close work making me retch.

  Even now I believe the men were ahead of the water, but just before dawn something changed. Mr Figge came to the doorway of your cabin and demanded you speak to the captain. The way he spoke, not the words, was enough to compel you. He was a tea merchant, which made him your customer, I imagine. But does that explain your shaking?

  Only minutes later the captain ordered the lascars to the pumps once again. And no one would move. They stopped their bailing, my father too, and you could see the water rising again as they waited for someone to speak. It was my father, of course, who did.

  No, he said, and only that.

  I cannot have all of us perish because of the selfishness of a few, said the captain. He looked unsure whether my father understood him, but he did. You leave me no choice, the captain said next, and he walked off. I was standing near the two of them and I could see the faces looking up from the hold, hear their hard breathing over the slopping of the bilge water. My father looked as though he could not be moved. But the men around him, their eyes most of all, seemed broken.

  The captain came back with Mr Thompson and Mr Kennedy, who had left the bow and wore drier clothes. You saw all of this, Mr Clark. You saw that they all carried pistols—not pointed but shown to us—and you could see Mr Figge coming along behind them, his right hand low. He stood behind the others but I too could see him in full, standing as I was off to the side. In his right hand he had a whip, a cruel-looking thing I had not known the vessel to carry.

  I am ordering you directly to have these men attend the pump, the captain said to my father.

  When nobody moved or spoke, Mr Figge pushed forward and used the whip, bringing it down through the hatch and into the hold where the men were. Then he reached in and took one—a boy whose name I never learned—and pulled him out by the hair. The boy screamed and tripped as he came up the steps, a clump of hair and some bloody flesh coming away in Mr Figge’s hand. I saw him flick it back into the hold. Urgent words between the men, and they started to climb their way towards the hatch.

  On deck they took their places at the pump brake, one by one bringing the great timber handle down, waiting for it to draw, then going again. No man could stand more than a quarter-hour of the work before he fell to the deck. Those who waited were lashed by the rain and the salt spray. The work would warm them, then break them all over again. Those who had just had their turn could not be roused to speak. My father went through these terrible hours along with them, trying not to show the pain. I cried for him as he suffered: I dreamed I was small again, so that he could shelter me.

  Mr Figge walked among them without a thought for the weather, kicking here and punching there. Dull, heavy fists that splattered on wet skin and hair. Why, Mr Clark? Why was a tea merchant so keen to drive men beyond their endurance? You knew the answer then and you keep it now, buried in your half-told story.

  The first to die was an old Bengali, locked onto the brake handle by cramp. His effort stopped. They took him down and he lay on the wet deck, a puddle of a man. No one thought much of it, for it was the way each man finished his turn. But he never moved. We stood around him, uncertain, then Mr Kennedy came up, took the man by his wet jacket and lifted him. He walked to the gunwale and threw him over.

  There were sounds of horror. Kennedy took the pistol from his belt and pointed it directly at the men: first one, then another. He watched them down its barrel with the hammer back and high like a rearing snake. The work that was left in the men was nearly gone. And as it went, the price of pulling that trigger became lower.

  So the work started again, and the next to fall was a boy who spat blood from the sores in his gums. The cramps knotted him, and he dropped hard onto his face with nothing to slow him. I do not think that killed him. It was more that the wick that burns within just failed. His eyes and mouth stayed open all the while, and it was the rain on his open eyes that told the rest of us he was gone. A boy, I said. No more than twelve.

  That two men died working a pump may sound strange, looking back in daylight from a village under fair skies, but that is no reason for it to slip from your account, Mr Clark. Nor that three more died before the storm was over. Five of our number dead and no respect given them. No fire to cleanse them, tossed overboard like the night soil.

  The last part of our voyage was as you told it. The patching of the leaks stopped the water, but that only delayed the fate that awaited us. They threw some cargo overboard, the things that were not so valuable. You saw, like me, that Mr Figge said nothing as the tea went over.

  Then, when the ship came to rest on that shoal and we rowed ashore, none of us knew who we were anymore.

  Broken light, I remember, and boulders: great domes and s
tacks, silver and white and grey and crowned with a curious orange dusting. Boulders with fierce faces, graceful ones, split and pocked ones. The one that looked to me like a woman swollen with child, waiting at one end of the beach with her lonely eyes on the sea.

  Grasses shivered in the hollows between. Soft to the touch, it seemed, but no: the points pricked the fingertips. The colours and the hard grasses and the sharp edges of the dry weed high on the beach, they all said we had landed somewhere else, where the lives we all lived had nothing to offer us. You and I knew as little as each other, sir. Which for the first time made us equals.

  I was luckier than most. I had shoes. And I had my father. He never made a fuss of me. He was the centre of many demands and I could see the weight of it on his face in that crowded jollyboat as we rowed to shore. But I felt his love like a cloak over me. As we spread on foot over the hummocks of that empty place, a mood came over the party that even the light of the sun on the white sand could not lift. Six men were gone: Leisham and the five of ours. But something else was gone too. The pistols, the whip—they had done their work. Now it was them and us.

  8

  When Grayling entered the guest quarters he was struck immediately by the smell, the thick tallowy reek of the doctor’s ointments.

  Figge lay apparently unmoved. His head a wild artefact on crisp linen, like a dog had leapt up and deposited it there. He rolled his eyes towards Grayling; some weather in the man had changed.

  ‘I have tea coming, Mr Figge. Better stuff, I hope.’

  ‘You are wanting to talk again, lieutenant?’

  ‘Yes, that’s my aim. I have an hour set aside so we can really—’

  ‘You don’t have the journal with you.’

  ‘No I don’t, I—’

  ‘You said you’d bring it.’ His voice slowed, like a waiting storm that drew power from the sea. ‘You said you would read it to me.’