Westbound, Warbound Read online

  ‘Whisky wouldn’t help with that, you’re right. However…’ Reaching to replenish Andy’s glass and his own. ‘Next item on the agenda then – you game for a run ashore, Holt?’

  What he’d planned on, obviously; they couldn’t all three have gone ashore, and he wouldn’t have wanted Fisher’s company in any case. He added, ‘Happens I know an address or two – one in particular, if it’s still there. Up to it, are you?’

  ‘Well.’ Andy had shrugged. ‘Why not. About time I stretched my legs.’

  ‘Stretch more ’n them, lad!’

  * * *

  Halloran must have had a tot or two before they’d joined him, Andy thought, and downtown he insisted on having a few more in a bar where they were joined by two of the ship’s wireless officers and the second mate of an Anchor Line steamer. Those three had been on beer all evening, and Andy was taking it as easily as he could – for reasons of economy as well as not much wanting to get drunk, especially in view of the evening as planned – but Halloran was well on his way, had been buying himself doubles while giving them a tedious account of how he’d come to be available for the mate’s job in PollyAnna. He’d worked mostly on tankers in earlier years – the depression years, in which there’d been twice as many merchant seamen thronging dockyard streets as treading ships’ decks – but all right, he’d been lucky, maybe hadn’t realised how lucky; he’d got his first mate’s certificate – which you needed before you could be taken on as a second mate – and then after the statutory period of sea service, his master’s ticket, which after another couple of years at sea would have qualified him for a first mate’s job if there’d been one going, but which in the tanker line when that time came there hadn’t been.

  ‘Case of dead men’s shoes, I suppose.’

  ‘You’d suppose damn right…’

  The others were at most half-listening by this time, but Andy had some interest in it – having thought about tankers, off and on, and anyway he didn’t want to offend the man. He prompted, ‘So you pulled out, eh?’

  ‘Not just like that. Want to know where the next meal’s coming from, don’t you? The way it was then, you did. By God, you did… No, I hung on a while. I’m thirty-one years of age – you know that?’

  He nodded. ‘You mentioned.’

  ‘So then, late twenties… But I tell you – tankers – not all beer an’ skittles. Quick turn-rounds is the worst – load and unload so quick, hardly time to dip your wick and you’re away again. What’s more, the tanker berth is bloody miles out of town, often as not – go ashore, where are you? So I’m thinking, might make a change, and so happens I get to know the marine super of Grant Shipping – Glasgow. You’d know, the tartan funnels, cargo liners? Seemed there was a future there – first mate’s berth at that, tailor-made. I go for it – wham, I got it – two-year contract. And run into a bit of good luck financially – for a bloody change… Well – cut this short, there’s a young lady I’m taken with.’ He nodded to Andy: ‘Yeah. Her. So a year back, we made it legal – she being over twenty-one –’

  ‘Thought she was twenty-one now.’

  ‘She is – end of this month she’s –’

  ‘Year older than me, that makes her.’

  ‘And I’m counting on regular employment with Grant Shipping, so seven, eight months back I moved her up to Clydeside. Greenock. She found the semi we got now – renting, mind, and it’s still an arm and a leg, but there we are – home of our own, steady job, prospects of command – looked to be, and should’ve been – and all Clyde-based. Well – steady job, my arse! Renewal of contract time, fuckers don’t want to know. Marine super’s retired, new sod don’t give a damn. I’m out, finish – rent to pay, wife to keep –’

  ‘Hard cheese.’ Dewar, the chief wireless officer. Pasty-faced and flabby-looking, but all right, quite a decent sort. Scotsman, bachelor, came from Crieff in Perthshire. Halloran telling him, ‘So happens by this time I’m not stuck for a bob or two, thank my stars things aren’t as they were – which I can tell you –’

  ‘Lucky feller, then.’ Dewar sucking at his beer, others nodding, Halloran insisting, ‘Point is, if I had still been on my uppers’ – the forefinger jabbing, black stones of eyes malevolent, tone condemnatory – ‘been finished, wouldn’t I. And what that amounts to is never trust fucking owners. Never!’ Tossing his whisky back: he’d sworn it was raw spirit but had still managed to down a few. He was blinking at Andy now: ‘On our way, then?’

  They drifted out. No great surprise that none of the others wanted to tag along: Dewar catching Andy’s glance, raising his eyebrows, Andy shrugging… Halloran then starting again on how badly Grants of Glasgow had treated him; Andy cut in with, ‘Food now, eh?’

  ‘Bugger food!’

  ‘I want some anyway. Sorry, but –’

  ‘You bloody piking, Holt?’

  ‘Something to eat, that’s all,’ he added, into the mate’s glare of contempt, black eyes half hidden in narrowed sockets but still gleaming, snake-like, their darkness matching the short crinkly black hair and blue-black jaw: he never looked as if he’d shaved since yesterday. Andy telling him relaxedly – aiming for that effect at any rate – ‘First, eat. All right?’

  ‘If you want to duck out, sonny boy –’

  ‘I said, I don’t. Hungry, that’s all.’ The mate had been facing him with his fists clenched and shoulders bunched during this exchange, and he’d remembered again that someone had said – in Cardiff, it must have been – that he was a sight too ready to lash out. Even more so when stinking of whisky? Unless it was bluff and bullshit when it didn’t look to him like a walkover? He was calming now, anyway; Andy assuring himself that this was nothing to back away from. He was a stone lighter, maybe, but also younger, taller by three or four inches, had the reach and knew how to use it, had boxed for Conway against various other institutions – he’d acquired a bit of a reputation, even. Could risk insisting on satisfying his hunger therefore – hunger first… ‘How about curry? Speciality in these parts, isn’t it?’

  They had beer with it. Andy had thought this might have finished Halloran off, but if anything it seemed to sober him a little. And he – Andy – paid the bill, since the mate was making no move to and it had been at his own insistence they’d come here anyway – but it left him distinctly short, and in the gharry, clopping though the dark to wherever Halloran had told the man to take them, he asked how much the rest of it was going to cost them.

  It did actually matter. As a Blood Line third mate his pay was £120 a year. On top of which there was now to be this much talked-about war bonus of £10 a month – doubling that income, which would be really something – but it hadn’t actually manifested itself yet, and until it did he wasn’t spending it.

  Halloran muzzily and belatedly caught on to what he’d asked.

  ‘You mean Queeny’s?’

  ‘If that’s what it’s called.’

  ‘Cost you fuck-all, old son. My shout – eh?’

  ‘No – thanks, very generous, but –’

  ‘You paid for the curry, I pay for the –’

  The alliteration made him explode with laughter. Andy trying to quieten him down, embarrassed by the bawling of obscenities into the sweaty, odorous night, and telling him all right, but strictly as a loan, he’d repay him when they got back on board; Halloran shaking his head, guffawing intermittently and repeating that line over and over until the gharry driver pulled his scrawny old horse down from a trot to a walk and stopped at the entrance to a stucco’d building in what looked like a business section of the town. There was a sliding metal security gate and a turbanned guard who clashed it open and salaamed to them, and had clashed it shut again by the time they reached Queeny’s mahogany front door.

  Queeny wasn’t Indian, she told them, she was Iranian. She wore a strikingly decorative as well as revealing sari and sat at an ornate desk in a large reception room strewn with carpets and furnished with sofas and armchairs. As Halloran and Andy entered
from a curving flight of stone stairs under coloured-glass chandeliers, two male attendants who might also have been Iranian – or Indian – rose and bowed, then leant against the wall on each side of double doors at that far end, while Queeny came slinkily from behind the desk and squeezed Halloran’s and then Andy’s hands, managing somehow to stroke as well as squeeze, telling them that they were fortunate, this was so far an exceptionally quiet night; in what way might she have the pleasure of being of service? Halloran muttering, with an elbow into Andy’s ribs, that they hadn’t come to have their teeth pulled; then, having raised no laugh, staring at her down his nose and adding, ‘Two prettiest girls you got. Prettiest for me, runner-up for this sahib.’ Andy looking around and taking it all in: the decor, furnishings, the woman’s purring voice and opulent, silk-wrapped figure, and the two men leaning with their arms folded and eyes almost as dark as Halloran’s – as hooded, too. The woman murmuring meanwhile that she’d been assured – oh, many, many times – that she was by far the prettiest, while as for the skills born of experience and artistry as well as passionate nature and womanly inclination –

  ‘Young girls is more to my liking.’ She’d shrugged. His loss, not hers. She called some instruction in God only knew what language to the attendants, one of whom slid out of the room. Andy came back from studying a picture of naked Persian girls with a sex-crazed satyr to find that the subject under discussion now was money; Halloran had counted some out but was keeping it in his hand until he saw what he’d be offered. Queeny glancing at Andy: ‘You are paying for this gentleman also?’

  ‘Sure.’ A wide grin. ‘He paid for the curry, I pay for –’

  He’d checked himself – open-mouthed, gazing at the girl they’d brought to him. Indian – probably – and no more than fifteen. Sweet-faced, small and tiny-waisted, with surprisingly large breasts, all of her visible through the diaphanous material of her garment. Halloran finding his voice again, grating, ‘Oh, yes. Hell, yes!’ and dropping the handful of rupee notes on Queeny’s desk. Andy had a girl beside him too, smiling up at him. Slanted eyes, skin the colour of oiled teak, full lips… ‘You come, big boy?’ She wasn’t as young as the other – which was just as well: despite that little one’s provocative physical endowment it would have felt like copulating with a child – and this one was extremely attractive – actually, more so – and there he was, slightly but not at all obviously drunk, with an arm around her now and one of hers around his waist, moving towards the double doors Halloran and his girl had gone out of.

  She was heaven, this one. Truly was. All right, so he’d been very much taken with her at first sight, but it had never occurred to him that a whore in a brothel would be – could be – as she was. As – well, no other word for it – as loving. Then it was over, his time up too damn soon – his fault, mostly – and reality, the plain commercialism as clear as a bell in her bright ‘Come see me again, big boy?’ He was trying to delay it a little, telling her how terrific she was and that he really liked her, when a colossal shindy broke out in the next room or the corridor or both: a female shriek, door crashing open, Halloran roaring obscenities over the girl’s screams, then other voices too, as well as thumps and glass or china shattering. Andy’s own girl wide-eyed, rigid, seemingly in shock, wrapping herself up while pointing at his discarded clothes and squealing, ‘Hurry, hurry!’ and ‘Your friend, your friend!’ Halloran had gone for that child with his fists, allegedly; this one screaming, ‘He striking her!’ – having heard it in all that yelling, Andy assumed – not doubting the truth of it either. She – the little one – was still inside her room, although its door had been flung open and slammed a couple of times, Queeny out of it again now, wailing, Andy’s girl staying put like the other – standing orders presumably for any such emergency situation – but sending Andy out half-clothed and with his shoes in his hands, head buzzing, trousers on and pulled up, shirt flapping loose – finding himself then face to face with Halloran who had a male attendant clinging to each of his arms and his trousers around his ankles. The girl must have sounded an alarm of some kind to bring them all running, and Queeny must have left Halloran to be hauled out by these two while she’d been seeing to the kid; howling now over Halloran’s bellows of protest – indignation? – ‘I call police! You filthy man!’

  Andy began, ‘Hey, Dave –’ and Halloran’d swung round, getting one arm free at that moment and stooping sideways to drag his trousers up, shouting, ‘Bitch pulled a bloody knife on me!’ The attendants had got him moving anyway – or the mention of police had – and Queeny was now out in the corridor, preceding them mostly backwards towards the reception room, counter-claiming – to Andy – that his friend had puked over the girl and when she’d tried to get away from him he’d begun hitting her; if she’d as much as touched a knife it would have been only in self-defence. Fingers to her own cheekbones, wailing, ‘Here, skin broken, so hard he strike her!’ Andy didn’t doubt this was the truth, because it was in character: Halloran looked like it, was like it. Shouting as those two quite skilfully forced him through into the reception room, ‘Who pays the fucking piper calls the fucking tune – right? Take your fucking hands off me, Sambo!’ He’d flung that one off him again and near-missed with a back-hander at the other, Andy managing to get past them then, to urge the woman, ‘Please, no police. I’ll take him. He’s just drunk, he –’

  ‘Yes, you take! Not come back, not ever!’ Addressing the attendants then in rapid Iranian or Bengali, Hindi, whatever it was they spoke, while Andy urged Halloran to calm down and come on, get the hell out before she changed her mind. Didn’t want to end up in police cells, did they…

  ‘We could take these two, easy. You and me, make fucking mincemeat –’

  ‘And end up in cells. Not on your life. Come on…’

  Halloran panting like a dog, staring at him: getting his brain to work, maybe. He’d ceased to struggle and those two were cautiously disengaging themselves from him. You could smell vomit on his breath. So that bit of it was true. But it was a reasonable guess that Queeny wouldn’t want the police in here, especially as the kid was almost certainly under age; if in Calcutta there was such a thing as under age. She was saying something now about compensating the young lady for her injuries; Andy told her firmly – sure that he was right, that the last thing she’d want was a police doctor examining the girl-child – ‘No money. He gave you about all he had, we need some for a gharry and I’ve none at all. I’m sorry she was hurt, but –’

  Halloran growled, ‘Shouldn’t’ve pulled a knife, should she. Had it under the donkey’s breakfast.’ Donkey’s breakfast being foc’sl slang for mattress. They were on the stairway by this time, lurching down with the attendants following, panting from their exertions and keeping out of range of Halloran’s fists. The mahogany door then – Andy pulled it open and one of them called through to the man on the gates to open up. This time, no salaams. Andy asked Halloran, outside, ‘She pull the knife before or after you hit her?’

  3

  This now was 2 December. Andy had taken morning stars and had a good fix from them; Don Fisher as navigating officer had been up there too, of course, and Halloran, who as always had that morning watch, the four to eight. The Old Man had arrived on the bridge while they were busy with their sextants on the wing; he’d only turned in at about three or half-past, Fisher said, would have come up again in the first light of dawn because in that half-hour or so as the stars faded and the horizon cleared was a time you might see smoke or even a warship’s fighting-top. Might, but please God would not. There was a surface raider about though, for sure. One indication being the boat with the bodies in it five days ago, and another, several distress calls the wireless officers had picked up since then. None of them seemingly very close, as far as they – Messrs Dewar, Starkadder and Clowes – had been able to tell. You didn’t always get a position with the call for help, and without it could only estimate very roughly how near or far it had been by the strength of the signal, the o
perators’ judgement of that. The raider invariably ordered his victim: Do not use your wireless, and had his own operators listening out, so that at the first Morse peep, the start of the ‘RRR’ that meant Attacked by surface raider, and the sender’s four-letter identification, the enemy’s guns would open up. In the Graf Spee’s case, one of her secondary armament – five-point-nines, if that was what they were – would be more than adequate. Then, abrupt end of message.

  Might as well say, abrupt end of everything.

  Andy was on the bridge again before eight, to take over the watch from Halloran. Who, in the interval of something like eight weeks since Calcutta, had been glum-faced and uncommunicative, discussing (with Andy, anyway) nothing but ship’s business, almost as if he thought he’d been in some way wronged. Maybe, Andy reflected, one’s revulsion had shown through more plainly than one had realised. Maybe still did – or might seem so to Halloran. Ludicrous, if so, that anyone who could behave as he had should display such sensitivity on his own account. But quite possibly one’s disgust had shown. As had some scratches on Halloran’s right cheek – the nails of the girl’s left hand, one might guess, either through her being left-handed, or unable immediately to free the other, Halloran having presumably been on top of her when he’d vomited. It was a mental picture that recurred frequently and in itself was sickening, while another guess was that with her right hand she might have been groping for the knife – if there’d been one; if that hadn’t simply been an attempt at justifying his attack on her. Anyway, at breakfast in the saloon next morning, with the din of the engineering work back aft already clanging and clattering, drilling through their skulls, the Old Man had obviously seen and wondered about those claw-marks; Halloran offering no comment or explanation, skipper glancing quizzically at Andy, no doubt aware they’d gone ashore together. But getting nothing out of either of them, had let it go, switched to discussing with the chief the fitting of the gun and gun-deck – which was being done of course by dockyard engineers but on whose work a sharpish eye needed to be kept.