We were trapped on the Yangtse. That much had been easy to establish. Time and again, some effort was made to free the ship, and as sure as the sun rose every morning, hazy and ineffectual, we’d be fired on by the communists on the north bank. Even so, there was work to be done on deck – urgent work – so what was left of the crew (less than half the ship’s company, I estimated) were labouring at all hours, courageously, right in the enemy’s sights, doing what was needed to make the ship seaworthy again. They were stuffing sandbags into holes, piling flour sacks around the bridge and wheelhouse, clearing wreckage from the decks, pumping out water from the wardroom, and frantically jettisoning whatever could be jettisoned – including oil – to try to get the ship back on an even keel.
What it seemed we weren’t going to be able to do, though, was actually go anywhere. Which meant the Amethyst had, to all intents, been captured by Mao Tse-tung’s men, even if they hadn’t boarded us, and would remain where she was till they decreed it otherwise.
Much as I craved their company, I stayed hidden from my friends for several days. Unable to walk properly, and fearful of being touched – even in kindness – I knew the best thing would be to keep myself out of sight and out of the way until I was strong enough to resume my own duties. So in the days and nights that followed I tried to keep to the shadows and secret places – an observer until I was healed enough to be anything else.
Everyone still on board seemed in shock, just like I was. Bar Peggy, who, being a dog, skipped around with her usual abandon, there wasn’t a crew member on board who didn’t look traumatised and exhausted.
I’d not seen Jack at the funeral, and I feared for him. I could only hope that he was in the wireless room, as reason told me he would be, busy tap-tapping away, sending his signals to the admiral, relaying whatever messages our new captain required.
I feared for all my friends, be they injured or able-bodied, on board or otherwise. I felt their pain. Which, having been born a solitary creature, was a strange new sensation for me. And it struck me how particularly wretched it must be for the fifteen young boy sailors who’d joined us just a month back, who, when out on deck, thin as reeds and as pale as the moonlight, looked so wide-eyed and jittery and terrified.
It was perhaps three or four days after the attack when it hit me why. It was when I watched the usual detail – the mop and bucket men who usually took such pleasure in their good-natured teasing – come out onto the quarterdeck and start scrubbing away at the corticene, and in such a fury that at first I thought they must be on a charge over some transgression. Then I noticed something not previously evident from where I was sitting: that what they were scrubbing away at, with their buckets of steaming, frothing water, was not the usual sooty deck grime, but blood.
If I hadn’t seen that red water run in streams into the scuppers, I imagine I would very soon have worked it out anyway. What I’d misread as fury was actually pain; pain not only evident from the grisly task they were detailed to perform, but from the tears streaming down the young ratings’ cheeks.
There was nothing in the world short of physical impossibility that would prevent me from doing what I could to help, though I soon realised that I would have my work cut out.
First of all, I was missing half my whiskers. I was missing half my eyebrows, and a great deal of fur from my hindquarters, too, but it was the damage to my whiskers, which had all but been burned off in the explosion, that distressed me the most.
I had known this from the outset, of course, because it would be impossible not to, but now their loss anguished me anew. It was one thing to move around all the familiar lighted places, but now I was keen to hunt again, I was doubly bereft to be without them as, when night fell – and particularly in the dark places below – I found it so much harder to see.
But see I must – and as a matter of urgency, too – because the rats, who must have rubbed their nasty little claws together in spiteful glee, had become bolder than at any time since I’d joined the crew of the Amethyst. As I lay up, cleaning my wounds, trying to will myself stronger, I could hear them moving about the ship, creeping and scuttling and defecating along their rat runs – an advancing horde (much like Mao Tse-tung’s communists, I thought grimly) with just one thing on their minds. The spoiling and purloining of our now doubly precious stores.
I made my first rat-catching foray in the small hours of the night. The ship, always sleepy at this hour, was preternaturally still, with just the slap of river water sploshing weakly against the hull and the ever-present drone of the night insects.
I took a route I knew welclass="underline" past the wardroom, down to the galley, through the tight space between the ovens, then down to the very back of the stores, where everything ahead of me was solid black. And oh, how I felt crippled without my whiskers to help guide me, constantly having to stop and nudge my nose up to make up for the unsettling loss of vision.
I hobbled. Doubly lame. Like a blind animal in a blind alley. And because no one had ever told me, I had no idea when, or even if, new whiskers might start growing. I could only trust in logic, albeit without a great deal of confidence, and hope that they would grow again, and soon.
I padded on doggedly, and at last I caught a strong rodent scent – strong enough to have me quivering with anticipation, and pausing to take both stock and soundings. And almost immediately after that came the all-too-familiar scufflings and scratchings of a rat dining on food that didn’t belong to it.
I slunk round a pipe then, cold against me, and at last spied my prize. And when I fixed it in my vision (albeit hazily, without the reassuring confirmation from my whiskers) I sank down again slowly, trying to focus; trying to ignore the scream of protest in my hips. Whatever I currently lacked, I reminded myself firmly, one advantage I did have was my silence – my ability to stalk prey without creating so much as a whisper of unsettled air.
But there was no point in lingering. I would only stiffen up. I tensed myself and sprang.
And, to my horror, I missed. My claws found nothing more substantial than a scrape of scaly tail, and even that, as if to taunt me, caught my ear like a whiplash, as the filthy animal made good its escape.
There was no getting away from it. I felt desperately sorry for myself. My body ached, my ear hurt – the rat must have caught the spot that had been burned already – and it took some minutes before I was able to properly catch my breath.
Worse still, though, were the thoughts swirling in my head, which, like the rat, seemed to mock me for my arrogance. What had possessed me? I was in no fit state to hunt – even a cockroach could now evade me – and I had no idea when or if I would be. I had gone, at a stroke, from being a valued crew member to a burden, a useless liability to my friends. And as I made my way forward, with no clear idea where next to lie, I felt the welling of shame stinging my eyes and my gait becoming sluggish – as if grinding to a halt, much like the Amethyst herself, a prisoner of my own feeble state.
Thank God for my ears, though. At least they hadn’t failed me, and for the noise that, though distant, was caught by them now. I turned my head a little. Listened hard. It was regular. Tinny. And I realised – daring to hope now, my failure all but forgotten – that it was coming from the wireless room. Was it Jack?
I limped off to find out, climbing awkwardly over the barriers beneath the doorways, which, it seemed to me, had almost doubled in size. But as I neared the noise, the deficiencies of my hind legs mattered less to me, with my only goal – my only need – being to know if Jack was alright.