‘Do you want some more water?’ I asked him, taking the empty mug.
He shook his head. ‘You think Sadeq saved you the trouble.’ He smiled, but it was more a grimace. ‘I’ve shat my pants, haven’t I? Fouled myself up.’ And he added, ‘This place stinks. If I had something to eat now…’ The ship rolled and I had to steady him. ‘I’m hungry, but I can’t contain myself.’ He gripped hold of my arm. ‘It’s my guts, is it?’
My fingers where I had held him were a sticky mess. I reached for the blanket, wiping my hand on the coarse cloth. I could clean him up, but if I got water anywhere near the wound it would probably bleed again. I started to get to my feet, but the clutch of his hand on my arm tightened convulsively. ‘Don’t go. I want to talk to you. There are things… Now, while I have the strength… I was going to escape, you see. I was going to Iran, then maybe cross the Afghan frontier and get myself to Russia. But you can’t escape, can you — not from yourself, not from the past.’
His voice was low, the tone urgent. ‘No,’ he said, clutching hold of me tighter still as I made to rise. ‘The Lavandou. You mentioned the Lavandou. My third ship. A boy. I was just a boy and my mother dying, you see. Cancer and overwork and too much worry. She’d had a hard life and there was no money. My father had just died, you know. His lungs. Working in the mines he was when just a boy. The anthracite mines down in the Valleys. He was underground. Years underground. A great chest he had, and muscles, huge muscles. But when we laid him to rest he was quite a puny little chap — not more than six or seven stone.’ His voice had thickened and he spat into the mug, dark gobs of blood.
‘Better not talk,’ I said.
He shook his head urgently, still clutching me. ‘I was saying — about the Lavandou. I was twenty-two years old… and desperate.’ His fingers tightened. ‘D’you know what it is to be desperate? I was an only child. And we’d no relatives, you see. We were alone in the world, nobody to care a bugger what happened to her. Just me. God! I can still see her lying there, the whiteness of her face, the thinness of it, and all drawn with pain.’ His voice faltered as though overcome.
‘They knew, of course. They knew all about how desperate I was. She needs to go into a clinic. Private, you see — not waiting for the National Health. And me at sea, unable to make sure she got proper attention. It’s your duty, they said. And it was, too — my duty. Also, I loved her. So I agreed.’
He stared up at me, his eyes wide, his fingers digging into my arm. ‘What would you have done?’ His breath was coming in quick gasps. ‘Tell me — just tell me. What would you have done, man?’
I shook my head, not wanting to listen, thinking of Karen as he said, ‘The ship was insured, wasn’t she? And nobody got hurt, did they?’ His eyes had dimmed, his strength fading. I loosened his fingers and they gripped my hand, the cold feel of them communicating some deep Celtic emotion. ‘Just that once, and it went wrong, didn’t it — the Lloyd’s people twigged what I’d done, and myself on the run, taking another man’s name. God knows, I’ve paid. I’ve paid and paid. And Mother… I never saw her again. Not after that. She died and I never heard, not for a year. Not for over a year.’ He spat blood again and I could see his eyes looking at me, seeking sympathy.
What do you do — what the hell do you do when a creature like that is dying and seeking sympathy? At any moment he’d start talking about the Petros Jupiter, making excuses, asking my forgiveness, and I didn’t know what I could say to him. I thought he was dying, you see — his eyes grown dim and his voice very faint.
‘We’re wasting fuel,’ I said, unhooking his fingers from my hand. I think he understood that for he didn’t try and stop me, but as I got to my feet he said something — something about oil. I didn’t get what it was, his voice faint and myself anxious to get out into the open again, relieved at no longer being held by the clutch of his hand.
Clouds had come up and the wind had freshened. Back on the poop I put the engine in gear and headed east into the Straits. We were broadside to the waves, the dhow rolling and corkscrewing, spray wetting the parched timbers of her waist as the breaking seas thumped her high wooden side. I was hungry now, wondering how long the sbamal would blow. No chance of a hot meal until I could get the dhow to steer herself and for that I’d need almost a flat calm. But at least there were dates in the store.
I secured the helm with the tiller ropes and made a dash for it, coming up with a handful just as the bows swung with a jarring explosion of spray into the breaking top of a wave. I got her back on course, chewing at a date. It was dry and fibrous, without much sweetness, and so impregnated with fine sand that it gritted my teeth. They were about the worst dates I had ever eaten, but being a hard chew they helped pass the time and keep me awake.
Towards noon the wind began to slacken. It was dead aft now, for all through the forenoon hours I had been gradually altering course, following the tankers as they turned south through the last part of the Straits. Soon our speed was almost the same as the breeze, so that it was hot and humid, almost airless, the smell of diesel very strong. The clouds were all gone now, eaten up by the sun, the sky a hard blue and the sea sparkling in every direction, very clear, with the horizon so sharp it might have been inked in with a ruler. There were a lot of ships about and I knew I had to keep awake, but at times I dozed, my mind wandering and only brought back to the job on hand by the changed movement as the dhow shifted course.
I could still see the Omani shore, the mountains a brown smudge to the south-west. The wind died and haze gradually reduced visibility, the sun blazing down and the dhow rolling wildly. The sea became an oily swell, the silken rainbow surface of it ripped periodically by the silver flash of panicked fish. The heat ripened the stench from the lazarette beneath my feet. Twice I forced myself to go down there, but each time he was unconscious. I wanted to know what it was he had said about oil, for the exhaust was black and diesel fumes hung over the poop in a cloud. I began listening to the engine, hearing strange knocking sounds, but its beat never faltered.
Water and dates, that was all I had, and standing there, hour after hour, changing my course slowly from south to sou’sou’east and staring through slitted eyes at the bows rising and falling in the glare, the mast swinging against the blue of the sky, everything in movement, ceaselessly and without pause, I seemed to have no substance, existing in a daze that quite transported me, so that nothing was real. In this state I might easily have thrown him overboard. God knows there were fish enough to pick him clean in a flash, and skeletons make featureless ghosts to haunt a man.
I can’t think why I didn’t. I was in such a state of weary unreality that I could have had no qualms. I did go down there later, towards the end of the afternoon watch — I think with the conviction he was dead and I could rid myself of the source of the stench.
But he wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t unconscious either. He was sitting up, his back braced against the stern timbers and his eyes wide open. It just wasn’t possible then. I couldn’t pick him up and toss him overboard, not with his eyes staring at me like that. And as soon as he saw me he began to talk. But not sensibly. About things that had happened long, long ago — battles and the seeking after God, beautiful women and the terrible destruction of ancient castles.
He was delirious, of course, his mind in a trance. And yet he seemed to know me, to be talking to me. That’s what made it impossible. I got some sea water and began cleaning him up. He was trembling. I don’t know whether it was from cold or fever. Maybe it was fear. Maybe he’d known and that’s why he was talking — you can’t throw a man to the fishes when he’s talking to you about things that are personal and take your mind back, for he was talking then about his home in Wales, how they had moved up into the old tin hills above a place called Farmers, a tumble-down longhouse where the livestock were bedded on the ground floor to keep the humans warm in the bedroom above. It was odd to hear him talking about Wales, here in the Straits with Arabia on one side of us, Persia on the other. ‘But you wouldn’t know about the Mabinogion now, would you?’ he breathed.