Authors: Martin Booth
An uncontrollable urge rose within Sandingham until it took over his whole being. It was like the mountain of emotion he had always felt at the moment of love-making, a terrible madness at once orgiastic and all-wonderful.
He ran over to the dead soldier on the deck and turned the unconscious form on to its back. Knowing nothing, his brain blank of all but a primal desire, a sort of lust he could not understand or assimilate, he buried the hatchet deeply four times into the corpse’s sternum. Its legs jerked as each incision interrupted the closing-down of the circuits of the nerves.
‘Let’s get off this sodding liner!’ Baz’s voiced shouted from somewhere distant. ‘I’ve had enough of cruising.’
As if to encourage him, the
Lisbon Maru
took a shuddering lurch and Sandingham half-slipped, half-rolled across the bridge. He clamped his fingers on to the chartroom door.
‘She’s going over! Jump!’
Baz was at the end of the bridge. It was only thirty feet to the water.
Dropping the blood-smeared hatchet, Sandingham, standing up at a crazy angle, looked over his shoulder, his eyes ranging backwards and forwards over the bridge. There was his own personal murder in a puddle of brain tissue, bone splinters and blood. His own shattered handiwork. He looked away from the body and his eyes searched for Tom Pedrick. He wanted to call out for him, but the words would not shape in his mouth.
‘Get a move on! Another five minutes and you’ll be listed missing on active service. Jump, for the love of God!’
Baz waved his arm, beckoning to Sandingham. In doing so, he lost his equilibrium and fell towards the sea, changing his clumsy pitching into a dive on the way.
The deck slewed a bit further. Spent cartridge cases clattered down the slope.
Suddenly, Sandingham’s mind cleared. The power that had gripped his soul evaporated as rapidly as it had begun. He felt utterly emptied. If a man could change into a base animal and then return to human shape these would be his feelings.
‘Fuck!’ he screamed, unable to command another oath. ‘What for? God, what the hell for?’
In his anguish, he swung the fire axe across the bridge. It arched through the air and shattered the circular glass of the ship’s engine-room telegraph. The brass handles protruding upwards bent awry.
He scrambled down the deck. The angle was increasing and the surface of the sea was nearer now. Baz was in the water some yards off, waving to him again. He raised himself on to the rail, crouched, hugged his legs and let himself roll.
* * *
When he hit it, his knees bunched to his chest and held close by his arms, the water was not as cold as Sandingham had prepared himself to expect. Had he been able to look at himself he’d have been hard put not to have laughed. There is little more foolish than seeing an unmanly man trying to act the hero but playing the clown.
Yet he had just killed another being, and this was what gods did. Now he was a god, for all his scrawny flesh and blotchy, sore-covered skin.
As he surfaced, he heard Baz’s voice from nearby.
‘Over here, Joe. Paddle over here.’
There was a swell running and the up-and-down motion made Sandingham dizzy for a few minutes before he could gather his senses. The ship was not so badly affected by the swell: it was obvious that the stern, now well submerged, had come to rest on a reef or sand bar. It was also just as obvious that no one in the stern hold could now be alive.
‘This way, Joe! Joe? Can you hear me? Where the fuck are you? Joe? Joe?’
It was Baz’s voice again, but fainter. Sandingham wondered, in the bright, warm sunshine, if this was so because he was drifting away or because Baz was drowning.
This made him strike out in the direction of the voice. He did not call out in return. What was the use of that in the circumstances? he thought. A voice gives nothing except comfort, and he had no comfort to give.
The sound of Baz’s voice disappeared, lost in the hills and valleys of the ocean.
The saltiness of the sea upon his many sores jerked Sandingham alert. The sting was not unbearable: more a prod to his senses than a power-sapping ache. The occasional spray off the swell tops brought tears to his eyes. In a moment of coherent thought he realised how lucky he was, in that there was no oil slick on the surface. Oil inhaled to the lungs or swallowed into the guts was a sure, slow and steady killer. That had been the fate of sailors in the Atlantic on convoys: he’d heard so from a tar he’d met in Hong Kong who had come east for some ‘sex, sun and fun far away from the sodding convoy patrols’ of the war in the west.
Suddenly, thinking of this, Sandingham realised that the sailor had been one of the bodies he’d seen sprawled on the roadway at Wong Nai Chung Gap. How strange, he considered, that he remembered that now months (or was it years?) later, when at the time it had not registered on his brain at all. Or was this an illusion? Perhaps he was drowning and this was the first act in the last replay of his life that all dying men see …
‘Wake up!’ He spoke aloud.
‘I am awake,’ he answered himself.
‘Then don’t drop off. Stay alert. Where there’s life…’
He chuckled.
Someone else laughed.
‘… there’s hope. What a time for a cliché, dear boy.’
He looked around. Halfway up a four-foot-high wall of swell was a head. It was bearing down on him. On it was a naval officer’s peaked cap. The crown and anchor badge glimmered in the reflected sun. It was a dress-uniform cap, not one to be worn on deck in action.
‘Didn’t Nelson wear dress uniform at Trafalgar?’ asked Sandingham as the current took him towards this apparition.
‘Trafalgar?’ The head pronounced it ‘Tra-fal-gar’, breaking the syllables up. ‘I believe he did. But I swore when they took me I’d not be parted from this cap. Besides,’ the head added, ‘I’ve yet to pay for it. Got the bill in the post the other week, believe it or not. “Gieve, Matthews & Seagrove, Ltd, 21, George St, Hanover Square, W. and all major ports.” Marvellously efficient! Why don’t you climb aboard?’
Sandingham noticed that the officer was hugging the side of a large crate-like box bound with iron hoops, his head and cap bobbing above his jacket wafting horizontally just underneath the surface. Sandingham reached the side of the crate and, in fumbling for a hold, discovered a handle.
‘I’ve the hinges here. Grab hold of the catch, but for Pete’s sake don’t open the door. I’m sure the air inside is all that’s keeping it buoyant.’
‘What is it?’
‘A cold-box.’
After a time, they could hear the distant throb of marine diesels. They seemed to be getting nearer, but the swell was such that neither man could see a craft, even when on the summit of a wave. All around them in the sea drifted other prisoners. Some clung to flotsam – wood planks, furniture, deck equipment. A very few had life-jackets, and one had a life-preserver on. It hadn’t lived up to its name. As he drifted by, Sandingham saw that the man was dead. His arms moved with the water as though he were feebly attempting to swim, but his mouth was open and water slewed into it and out again.
The diesels came closer.
‘We’ll be picked up now,’ said the officer. Sandingham did not think to ask his name. He spoke with the sure conviction of a master mariner of years of sea-going experience who knows the ways of men afloat.
‘Listen!’ Sandingham blurted, his mouth filling with sea water.
Both men twisted their heads. A mile away there was a dim explosion, the sound muffled by the water and the swell. They rose on the next crest. The
Lisbon Maru
was stern down, bow up in the water. Her list to port was more pronounced. Dust was thrusting out of her straight funnel in gouts, like a locomotive shuffling to leave a station. The Japanese troops’ laundry, which had been hanging out to dry on some of the jib wires and mast stays, flapped merrily in the breeze. The fo’c’sle and fore deck were smothered with mobile dots.
‘They’re men!’
‘No,’ replied the officer. ‘They’re dead men.’
The swell carried them down into a trough. A small wavelet on the side trickled over Sandingham’s head, cool and refreshing where the sun had tightened his scalp. It was as if the sea were nursing him. They rose on the next run of water.
The surface was empty. The ship had gone.
Sandingham spun his head from side to side.
‘Dead men. They were dead men,’ the officer repeated. He took off his gold braid cap. The skin on his fingers was wrinkled from the water.
‘God have mercy on their souls,’ he said with genuine reverence.
He replaced the cap.
‘Now,’ he spoke clearly with the defiance of a determined survivor, ‘to be rescued.’
The marine engines came nearer. From a swell ridge, they caught sight of a Japanese gunboat. From the stern fluttered the
hi-no-maru,
the white flag with the vermilion sun disc at the centre. The sides of the boat were manned. The men were holding what looked from that distance like short boat-hooks.
The craft came nearer. It was not slowing.
‘My God!’ said the officer. His words were incredulous, like a man seeing a miracle performed personally for him. ‘It can’t be! They’d never!’
The bow ploughed through the first group of prisoners. The undertow sucked some into the hull, took them down and under the keel and along and through the propellers. The sea pinked, then returned to jade green.
The gunboat turned about and returned to the area of the sea in which the prisoners were treading water, waving, shouting for attention – for saving, for mercy. Some merely shouted. There was a chatter of rifle fire. Some men dived, others jumped in the water. Others still merely rolled over and faced down to the sea bottom thirty fathoms below, viewing with their sightless eyes the way of their going.
So taken was Sandingham by this vista of carnage that he failed to see a second gunboat approaching their cold-box. The first he knew of it was a pumping vibration in the water around him. He turned his head and there it was. The grey sides of the hull loomed above him. Japanese soldiers were peering over the rail: many had their rifles to their shoulders. A command shrilled out over a loudhailer. Sandingham thrust his body downward behind the cold-box. He felt the box shiver as the bullets struck it, then died in the water. They hissed for a second as they sank.
Sandingham surfaced. The gunboat was past, but the officer was gone. Upon the sea floated his peak cap, the right way up. Had not Nelson been shot because a sniper had spied his gold-threaded uniform from the enemy rigging? he thought. The irony of pride, the courage of conviction: and all that was left to show for it was an unpaid invoice in a London clerk’s ledger.
Sandingham stared at the cap as it drifted away, slowly turning about and about as the wind took it.
He was being carried on a fast current towards some islands. Other men were travelling in this direction with him. Some were dead, some were weak and some were strong. A number were dying. Others were stubbornly holding death at bay.
Some were going to land on the islands. It was obvious even to Sandingham at surface level that they were heading towards the shorelines. Many of them, he feared, might be smashed to pulp on the rocks he could distantly hear being pounded and thudded by the sea. Some would be whisked past such a fate only to drown, later that night, far out in the lonely vastness of the sea, slipping slowly into death. A few would be more fortunate.
* * *
Dusk fell.
Upon and within the sea, like glow-worms hovering in the night of the water, phosphorescence shone on and off. Every wave-break, every fragment of spray, every movement Sandingham made – though he made few now, being tired to the point of exhaustion, his arms numb from the gripping of the cold-box – glowed radium green. The magic of the sea took him. It was like a fantastic dream.
Gradually the dream became a reality. Brighter and whiter lights appeared, bobbing and pitching on the swell.
With all the strength he could muster, Sandingham threshed his feet and tried to steer the cold-box towards the nearest of the lights. For all he knew, they could be some weird marine
ignis fatuus,
a
doppelgänger,
a mirage of dying, the last cruel trick of the day.
It was a sampan. In it stood two Chinese fishermen, their wet torsos glistening in the lamplight. Each had hold of one end of a net. Sandingham was soon snared in it, like an ugly, brown fish. Had he gill slits, he’d have torn them on the mesh. Instead, it was the flesh of his fingers, bloated from his time in the sea, that were cut, and cut badly.
He was too tired to speak much. He just muttered to them, ‘Yan … Yan … Ts’ing … T’sing…’
Cantonese not being spoken so far north up the coast, they didn’t understand him, but they dragged him over the wooden gunwale of their sampan and laid him on the deck. Around him, sardines and anchovies flapped their last.
‘M koi nei,’ he gasped, but the two men just grinned and studied him before fumbling with his wrists and fingers, stroking his neck in the light of the hurricane lantern by which they were fishing; a strange series of actions, like the preliminaries to a primitive ritual of love-making.
He realised they were looking for a watch, a ring, a St Christopher. When they found nothing, he feared they would throw him back, a worthless fish, inedible and unsaleable. Then he remembered next to his testicles was the small, waterproof pouch he had made from inner-tube rubber and fat. In it was nothing of value – a rolled-up photo, a pinch of tobacco, three matches … He prayed they’d not find it. They didn’t and, having found nothing else either, seemed to decide to help him.
Sandingham had ruined their nets, but they did not seem angered. They gave him a mouthful of fresh water and propped him against the bow board while they dropped their catch into wooden pails of water. This done, they hoisted their sail and set off in the direction of the nearest island. It was now near midnight.
Sliding in and out of consciousness, Sandingham heard others calling from the sea. He paid no heed and, in his half-wakening state, hated himself for his selfishness. He was safe.