hands and went off. I watched him hunch up as he retreated between two engines. He was lighting a new cigar. What did it say on the firework tins? Light the blue touch paper and retire. The question biting me was this: did he know more about the situation in Paradise than he was letting on?
The Shed Super had gone off too, and I was left alone with Tommy Nugent and the busted engine. Tommy took his watch from his waistcoat pocket.
'All set?' he said.
'Aye,' I said,
'Be a lark, this, won't it?' he said.
'Aye,' I said. 'Hope so.'
Chapter Ten
'I want this rolling to stop,' I said.
It helped not to look at things – to keep my eyes closed. But there was no help for it; I had to look. On the table beside the chart was the coffee pot, a tin of Abernethy biscuits, a box of wax matches (the label showed a cat with glowing eyes and the words 'See in the Dark') and the Captain's pocket revolver. It had a beautiful walnut stock, worn from use by the looks of it. The chart itself I had given up on. It showed only sea: there was a fold where there might have been the beginnings of land. A north point was drawn at the top of it: a sort of glorious exploding star with a capital N riding above, and I felt we must be moving in that direction for the chart room was growing colder by the second. If I had thought on, I might have come to a different conclusion about our direction of travel, but all I knew was that the sun was rising somewhere and making the sky violet, which was more or less the colour, I also knew, of one of the last rooms on land that I had been in.
As the light rose, the rain had eased a little and the figure on the bridge stood a little more clearly revealed as a man in a great-coat and a woollen hat. He hardly touched the wheel, but just stood by it with arms folded, looking always forward (I had not seen his face) where the prow of the ship plunged and rose with great determination. I could see it all through the windows of the chart room: the fore-deck rising one second, half under swirling waves the next.
Until I'd fallen to staring at the objects on the table I had been talking, but I could not now quite remember what I had been saying or for how long. I could not lay hands on my pocket watch, and I could not see any clock in the chart room. I'd started by demanding – in-between the head racking electric pains – to know how I had come to be aboard, and where we were going. I'd told them that I was a copper, and the Captain had said, 'I am the authority on this ship.'
I'd wanted to know whether my face was as red as my hands, whether or how the Captain and the Mate were connected to the Paradise guest house, and how long I had spent on the coal heap. But I'd given up with the questions after a while: the two would not answer, and the Captain barely spoke at all. I'd always known it would be like this on a ship: the man in charge would be the man who said least. It was a little that way on the railways.
Instead, and in return for a borrowed shirt, guernsey and oilskin, and coffee in a metal cup (they had offered me bread but I was not up to food), I had begun to tell them what had happened. I resolved to lay it all out, in hopes that the more I spoke the more I would know. There was much more to it than I said, but I began to give the Captain and the Dutchman the main points of the tale. I did not know what to leave out, so I left out nothing that seemed material and I was encouraged in my speech by the way the pair of them listened closely, and by the way they were not put off even when my own tales began to include the stories of others, as a ship carries lifeboats.
But the Captain was now looking at his pocket watch. I had not got to the meat of the story; I had not got to Paradise, but the Captain was nodding to the Mate, who turned to me and said, 'We are going, my friend.'
He motioned me to stand.
'Where?' I asked.
'For'ard,' said the Captain.
I rose with difficulty to my feet, and contemplated, through the windows of the chart room, the waves washing over the bows.
'You're too deep laden,' I told the Captain.
He nearly smiled, but it was the Dutchman who replied. 'We have a sea running,' he said, as if it was something the two of them had arranged between them.
The Captain remained in the chart room, but gave his revolver to the Mate, who followed me down the steps we'd come up, and back alongside the fore-hold. It was now full morning, although not much of one: grey light and wild, grey waves, and the white moon still hanging in the sky, waiting to see if it was really day, but its turn of duty done. The grimy fore-sail shook, like something troubled – it wanted to take wing and fly.
'You don't let any man come for'ard,' I said to the Mate. 'You keep the whole ship's company aft.'
All save the man at the wheel. But I left him out of it.
'You save your breath, I think.'
'For what?' I said.
'Sleeping,' he replied, and I heard myself asking, 'Was there something in the coffee? The second pot? Something for sleep?'
Or was it the return of the thing that had done for me the first time?
At any rate, the foc'sle took an eternity to arrive. With the movement of the ship, our way was all up and down and not enough along, and the sight of the sea exhausted me. It stretched away on all sides, with no vestige of land to be seen. At the end of our walk the Mate held open an iron door which gave on to a short ladder, and this I was meant to climb down. 'I'm all-in,' I said, more or less to myself, and I would have slept at the bottom, in the metal corridor, the companion way as I believed it was called. But another door was held open for me, and I stepped into an iron room about the size of an ordinary scullery.
'What's this?' I asked.
'Let us say… sick bay,' said the Mate.
The Captain would not have tried a crack like that, I thought, but the Mate was a livelier sort, for all the greyness of his face. He closed the door with a clang and seemed to have trouble locking it, for the grating noise carried on for minutes on end, but it hardly mattered since there was no handle on the inside. On the floor, I could just make out a tarpaulin and a great, roughly piled chain with links about a foot long; one end of the thing rose up and disappeared through a hole in the roof, and that was about it as far as entertainment in the iron room went. So I put the tarpaulin about me, lay down in the space between the chain and the wall, and fell instantly to sleep.
Chapter Eleven
I was curious to discover whether I still had the knack of firing but did not get away to a good start: as we stood waiting to run onto the turntable, I couldn't open the firehole door, so Tommy showed me the trick of the lever.
'It wants a light touch,' he said. 'The harder you try, the harder it is.'
That went for the business in general, of course. It was all in the relaxed swing of the shovel. Tommy was now stowing two biggish-sized kit bags in the locker, ready for the off. (My own bag was already up.)
'What've you got in there?' I asked him.
'Toothbrush,' he said, 'and all that sort of doings.'
'Who usually fires on this run?' I asked.
'Oh, we have various,' he said, and he explained how that complication came about, which was something to do with the mysteries of Sunday rostering in the North Shed – and a bloody nuisance too, since he had to run out with some right blockheads. 'Here, do you think it'll be safe to drink the water in Paradise?' he ran on. 'What's the programme?'