Endangered Species (5 page)

They drove recklessly inshore as the sun set unseen behind the grey veil of the persisting overcast. The lifeboat's keel struck the sand with a grating, the boat broached and lurched amid a welter of breaking seas that rolled up to the high-water mark and spent their energy in a sibilant roar.

Staggering over the gunwale while the waves thumped on the bottom of the heeling boat and broke over it in deluges of bitterly cold spray, they found their legs incapable of bearing their weight and fell full-length in the shallows. After a while Mackinnon floundered ingloriously up the beach and lay gasping beyond the reach of the waves. Eventually he heaved himself shakily to his feet and found a
path. Calling his intention of getting help he followed it inland.

He seemed to walk miles before, in the last of the twilight, he stumbled into a muddy farmyard and found a solitary figure scattering kitchen scraps to a bevy of hens. The girl looked up and gave a little shriek. She retreated, calling her alarm at Mackinnon's approach. A door flew open and a lozenge of orange lamplight spilled out across the yard. It was instantly disfigured by the shadow of a large man with a shotgun.

‘And who the divil are you?' the man challenged, the click of the gun lock sounding clear in the evening air.

‘Seamen,' Mackinnon gasped, ‘British seamen . . . we've been torpedoed.'

He remembered clearly standing there while the big Irishman came up to him and, finger on the trigger of the shotgun, cautiously scrutinised him. The man walked round him before asking, ‘How many of you?'

Mackinnon told him and led him back to the beach while the man sent his daughter to inform the police.

‘Where are we?' Mackinnon asked as he stumbled down on to the sand where his shipmates had huddled and the lifeboat looked like a beached whale in the darkness.

‘County Antrim,' the man said gruffly and they returned to the house until the police arrived. The girl came back with the police, peering at the survivors with shy curiosity, a girl of his own age with large dark eyes and hair that looked brown until the lamplight caught it and it flared into a rich, dark gold.

Mackinnon heard the man called her ‘Shelagh'. He did not then know that she was destined to become his wife.

Ah, well, Mackinnon concluded chuckling to himself, Shelagh deserved a reward for her constancy; if, he thought looking down at his pot-belly floating like an island between his chin and his toes, she considered the reward worth having . . .

A splash woke the Captain from his self-contemplation.

‘Afternoon, sir,' said a head bobbing up beside him. It was Taylor.

‘Afternoon, Three-O,' replied Mackinnon and began a slow dismissive crawl to and fro, irritated because his solitude had been broken.

The thunderheaded cumulonimbus clouds Captain Mackinnon had observed over the distant mountains of Sumatra produced an electric storm during the first watch, the eight to twelve in the evening. For hours the flickering of vast electrical discharges illuminated the huge nimbi from within, deluging the forests of northern Sumatra with torrential rain. It was an awe-inspiring sight which reached its crescendo around midnight as the Second Officer once again relieved the Third.

‘The odd thing about it is the lack of noise. It must be over a hundred miles away,' drawled Taylor.

Stevenson agreed. ‘All the same, it's pretty impressive.'

‘I wonder,' Taylor went on musingly, ‘what the Spanish and Portuguese thought of it when they first came out here. I imagine they'd have regarded it as an omen.'

‘I expect they consulted their priests and clutched their crucifixes.'

‘Do I detect a touch of ancestral Scots Calvinism? Tut, tut, prejudice and all that – not allowed today.' Taylor stared south again as the lightning flashed on the two figures, throwing sudden, momentary shadows and lighting the disembodied face of Stevenson fighting his annoyance over so thrown-away a remark. ‘Still,' Taylor went on archly, ‘it was an improvement on examining the entrails of goats.'

Irritated and unthinking, still half-doped from his brief, two-hour sleep, Stevenson said, ‘The Portuguese didn't do
that
. It was the Greeks and Romans . . .'

But he need not have bothered. The next lightning flash illuminated Taylor's face in such stark relief that the
contempt of his expression seemed to hang between the two of them long after darkness had returned. A pent-up fury burst from Stevenson.

‘You really can be an arrogant sod, Charles,' he snapped.

Taylor turned and Stevenson knew from his voice that he was smiling. ‘I know, Alex. And it
does
annoy you, doesn't it?'

Then he was gone, his tall, thin figure dropping down the bridge ladder so that Stevenson had the very distinct, though quite ludicrous, impression that Taylor had dropped down to some hellishly subterranean level, and not the boat-deck of the motor vessel
Matthew Flinders
.

Charles Taylor stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel round himself. Padding back to his cabin he opened a can of beer. Between vigorous rubs of his limbs he knocked the beer back. When he and the can were dry he picked up a book and threw himself on his bunk.

He was tired and the print danced before his eyes; he was unable to read a word. He snapped the bunk light off and lay staring upwards into the darkness, but he found it impossible to compose himself for sleep. He was angry with himself for annoying Stevenson, angry at his self-revelations of the night before and vaguely hurt by Captain Mackinnon's obvious unfriendliness of the afternoon. It seemed, in keeping with his strained marriage, he, Charles Taylor, was incapable of maintaining a single human relationship.

He felt the big Burmeister and Wain diesel engine thumping relentlessly far down below. It missed a beat as the governor cut in. Every turn of the screw took them thirteen feet away from home.

Home . . . what the hell did that mean, anyway?

With the inevitability of a clock hand ticking away the moments to the hour of execution, Taylor's mind crept inexorably round to thoughts of Caroline. It was incredibly true that as his mind's eye fastened itself upon her image his
heartbeat increased, so that his reaction was as real as if she had walked into the room and was, even then, sliding out of her silk robe, her white body a pale flame in the gloom.

He turned over restlessly, but she did not leave. He rolled over on to his back again and she bestrode him like a succubus, her wide smile tormenting him until, as always, he forgave her and succumbed to the blandishments of her remembered flesh.

‘Hujan! Hujan!'

Stevenson looked up from the cargo plan. The air was suddenly much cooler now, and clouds had overrun the brazen dome of the sky. The first heavy raindrops fell as the Chinese stevedore came running up.

‘Rain come, Second Mate. We put hatches on now.'

‘Sure.' Stevenson nodded assent, folded the cargo plan and, stuffing it hurriedly into the breast pocket of his khaki shirt, began walking swiftly aft to the seamen's accommodation. Already the labourers were emerging from the hatches, chattering happily at the respite from their work, grinning at the hurrying officer.

‘Rain coming,' one remarked, proudly demonstrating his knowledge of English. ‘Plenty rain.'

The alleyway was dark after the glare of sunlight and he blinked as he stopped in the doorway of the crew's mess-room.

‘ 'Ullo, Sec. What can we do for youse then, la?' The unmistakably Liverpudlian accent of Able Seaman Pritchard greeted him from a haze of cigarette smoke. From within this uncomfortable fug came the familiar pop and hiss of opening beer cans.

‘Rain's coming,' he said. ‘Get the hatches closed.' Pritchard rose, but his watch-mate, Able Seaman
Macgregor, continued to swig the freshly opened can. ‘Don't be all bloody day,' Stevenson added, staring at the reluctant sailor whose eyes shifted from the Second Mate to Pritchard as the latter flicked him on the shoulder.

‘Come on, la. Get your arse into gear.'

Macgregor slammed his beer can down hard on to the Formica-topped table so that a fleck of froth flew from its opening.

Stevenson strode out on deck again, irritated by the silly incident. The glare of the sun had gone and the sky was darkly overcast. The billowing cumulus that had drifted up from the Rhio Islands of Indonesia twenty miles to the south were no longer picturesque adornments on the horizon but vaporous sacks sagging overhead from which dark curtains already swept the tank farm on Pulo Bukum.

The raindrops, huge, heavy and icy after the heat, struck Stevenson and made dark patches the size of old pennies on the
Matthew Flinders
's deck. He clambered on to the nearest hatch-coaming, seized the end of the hatch-wire and pulled it. A snag in a steel strand bit painfully into his palm and he swore, tugged the greasy wire free and unscrewed the shackle pin, all the while hauling the heavy wire across the gaping pit of Number Five hatch.

‘Hold on there, Sec.'

Pritchard, his hands encased in leather gloves, took the shackle and made it fast to the lug on the Macgregor hatch cover. Looking up at the cargo winch, Stevenson watched with mounting annoyance as Able Seaman Macgregor, with an air of proprietorial leisure, put the thing into gear, disengaged the derrick cargo runners and set the wire tight.

‘Okay, Rob Roy,' Pritchard called, jumping clear. With a grinding banging which reverberated from bulkhead to bulkhead and from the ship to the godown walls on the wharf, the huge steel slabs were jerked by their tie chains one after the other from their neat vertical stowage under the overhanging deck of the contactor house and slammed
horizontally over the opening of Number Five hatch. Even as Macgregor lazily swung himself from the forward winch control to the after one, Stevenson and Pritchard had run round to repeat the operation at Number Six hatch.

‘In de good ole days,' grunted Pritchard as the two men attached the wire to the cover sections of Number Six hatch, ‘the bloody 'prenticle boys would've given us a hand.'

‘Yes,' said Stevenson, ‘and I'd have stood and bawled at you from under my solar topee.'

Pritchard grinned at the Second Mate as he waved at Macgregor and both men backed off. So much for the lifestyle of bourgeois privilege enjoyed by officers of the latter-day Merchant Navy, thought Stevenson, with a twinge of resentment. The numbing clatter and bashing that followed silenced his repartee.

‘Come on, Rob Roy,' Pritchard yelled at Macgregor, ‘there's more work forrard,' adding, as he followed Stevenson along the starboard outboard alleyway where the labourers were settling down on coconut mats amid cigarette smoke and a universal hawking, ‘I know de bloody things have the same name as him, but you'd think he invented dem. If youse hurry, Sec, you can drive the winches and let that little sod earn 'is keep.'

Stevenson was pleased that Pritchard disliked Macgregor. Perhaps the Liverpudlian was just ingratiating himself, Stevenson thought as he heaved himself up the steel ladder on to the top of the contactor house between Number Four and Five hatches, but he considered himself a fair judge of character. Pritchard was a grafter and Macgregor a waster. The resentful glare that Macgregor threw him when he eventually caught up with the Second Mate and Pritchard confirmed his judgement.

‘Where de fuck 'ave youse been?' Pritchard greeted him as the rain began to pour with a seething hiss that drummed on the steel deck. A foot above the well-deck a heavy mist seemed to hang as the raindrops bounced back before finally
falling and forming a shallow lake that gurgled its way into the scuppers and poured over the side.

By the time they closed the last hatch they were all three soaked to the skin. Stevenson climbed down from the forecastle winch controls and they stood for a moment under the overhang, catching their breath before running aft to the shelter of the accommodation.

‘Thanks Pritch, Macgregor . . .'

The Glaswegian looked up slyly. ‘That should be worth a wee beer, eh, Sec?'

Stevenson stared at the man, the effrontery of the suggestion silencing him for a moment. Pritchard snorted, contemptuous of his watch-mate, and began to walk aft, as though braving the rain was preferable to being a party to Macgregor's ploy.

‘Ah'm bluidy soaked, mon,' Magregor whined, looking down at himself, his voice wheedlingly pathetic, as though he alone had taken the full force of the rain.

‘You cheeky bastard . . .' Stevenson knew the instant he spoke he had been trapped. Macgregor's mood changed instantly to a posture of truculence; his eyes blazed with hatred. He was the affronted one now and Stevenson bit his indiscreet lip with annoyance.

‘You canna talk tae me like that, mon. Ah'll take the matter up wi' the Union. Nae struck-up prick of an officer's going tae call me a bastard.'

Stevenson turned angrily away, strongly tempted to hit Macgregor and stop his silly blather but determined not to put himself further in the wrong. He made to follow the disappearing figure of Pritchard.

‘Hey, you stuck-up English snob, ah'm talking tae you . . .' There was no mistaking the provocative aggression in Macgregor's voice and Stevenson swung round, holding his clenched fists by his side with an effort at self-control.

Macgregor stood with his jaw thrust belligerently forwards. Stevenson could have sworn he wanted the
Second Mate to hit him, to fulfil some ancient, imagined or inherited grievance.

‘Listen, Macgregor, you know very well I didn't use the word seriously, so button your lip! As to my being English, just remember I'm as Scots as yourself!'

Stevenson saw the fox cunning of quick-witted malice appear as a gleam in Macgregor's eyes.

‘Bullshit,' he said contemptuously, ‘and just
you
remember that ma name's
Mister
Macgregor tae you.'