CHRISTOPHER WALLACE

The Pirate

For Ann, For Fiona

With thanks for the friendship

of the McLeish family

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

The Pirate

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Pirate

I asked for a price, Jesus Christ, I actually asked for a price.

There have been many low moments for sure but this one stands the test as one of the worst imaginable. Not that I thought this at the time; no, it all seemed reasonable, another transaction. The scary thing was that when I heard my voice making the enquiry it didn’t shock me, not at all, I listened to what I was saying and ploughed on regardless. Go down deeper. I was cool with it, cool with everything. Days later when I was a little less high and remembered what I had been asking for it made me feel sick enough to need to run to the bathroom. And when I got there I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering who was on the other side of the glass. I looked for a long long time. Half an hour, one hour? I tried and tried but didn’t have the time to find him.

Miguel and Torres ‘Tony’ Carcera didn’t look particularly shocked to hear it either, that’s when I realized they were the real thing. The only issue for them was how much, there was never going to be a set fee for this kind of deal, no; pitches like mine must have come along so rarely that every case had to be treated as a one-off.

Big Tony toyed with his drink, sticking a fat cigar-shaped finger into his glass to mop up the dregs of the froth left on its sides. The finger of a thug, filthy, oil-stained, the real thing, nail chewed to a stump that gave up less than halfway on its struggle to the tip. He stuck it into his mouth and sucked, blinking slowly at his brother, long eyelashes, dark and effeminate yet perfectly suited to the macho pout that rested so easily on his lips. The pout of a psychopath. I don’t know, it seemed to say, you work something out for me, brother, how much would it be for us to kill someone?

Miguel gave all the signs he was thinking it over. It was as simple a matter as just quoting a price and terms of payment; he was pondering the wider picture.

‘So this guy, it’s you or him, yeah?’

That was how he saw it, and I had to agree.

‘Well, we can help, but we need to know what happens when he’s gone, yeah?’

Miguel liked to know you were following him, that you were on the same level of understanding, that you were listening intently to the guttural drawl of his Catalan voice, following every word of wisdom that came out of him. He was a weedy-looking guy with thinning jet-black hair tied tight into a ponytail. You could tell that somewhere along the line Miguel had had it rough, maybe his childhood in the cockroach palace high-rises of the mainland, maybe prison in Barcelona, maybe a lifetime keeping the lid on his younger brother’s wilder enthusiasms. In years gone by he would have made a perfect extra in one of those spaghetti westerns, a pistol-toting desperado blown away by Clint Eastwood in the first reel. Miguel wanted a starring role though, one that meant he was around to stay.

‘What do you mean? Are you asking if anyone is going to come looking for you?’

A wave of his hand throws the question off. A different hand from his brother, more gold rings, cleaner, more delicate; a hand that found it easy to turn to brutal chores all the same.

‘No, I mean here, the bar, Puerto Puals marina, yeah? Who inherits?’

‘Who inherits? It’s my fucking bar, I get to have it back, I own it anyway.’

‘The other places?’

‘I guess they go to whoever Herman has left them to, the organization, whoever. What does it matter?’

‘It matters because we want to help you, Martin, not just with this problem but anything else to follow. You come to us for help, and we are looking for opportunities here in Mallorca. We know bars, me and Tony, we run them, in Barcelona. Nightclubs, discotheques … We got ideas, haven’t we Tony, yeah?’

Tony licked his finger by way of reply. Miguel moved his chair closer to mine, warming to his theme, speaking faster, forcefully. I could feel his breath on my eyes.

‘Us and you, Martin, yeah? You think about it. What a team, you, me and Tony. Nobody fucks with us.’

I didn’t like the way this was going, I only wanted them to murder someone, why couldn’t they just agree and name the price?

‘I’ll think about it. And you guys think about how much you want to charge me. Listen, I got to go, things to see to tonight. Can you excuse me?’

‘Sure, yeah.’ Miguel smiled. Neither brother moved an inch though, they were already sizing the place up, already acting like the new fucking owners, did they expect me to leave them here?

‘You got a girl coming round?’

To my surprise it was Tony doing the asking now; maybe he was trying to reach out to his prospective business partner.

‘You bet. A shy girl, should be a good lay. I don’t want you two handsome guys distracting her, so I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you …’

The two boys smiled, perhaps not fully appreciating the irony I had intended.

‘Hey Miguel, maybe we should hang around to see Martin’s new girl, maybe she’d like a threesome?’

‘Hey, me first, yeah?’

‘No, fuck you, you guys can wait, me first this time.’

‘Hey, what do you mean, if she likes me, she has me, she won’t need use of either of you when I’ve finished, yeah?’

‘Hey, fuck you.’

The general tone of the debate now established, it proceeded, the two of them arguing about the order in which they would take their pleasure from a girl who did not exist. The strange thing was, I suspect that somehow they knew there wasn’t any girl about to call, but that they enjoyed sparring with each other anyway, as if it was a rehearsal for the kind of argument they would have if they became partners in the Arena Bar. All they had to do to make that happen was to do what I had asked them, kill someone. The real thing. The shit I find myself in.

I was born in Greenock. Just like Captain Kidd. I could tell you about Greenock but you wouldn’t thank me for it. Not that it would take too long – in fact, the opposite; it’s more that it has no particular relevance to what I am about to tell you about the rest of my life and the shit I find myself in. And you will probably need all your strength and powers of concentration and whatever compassion you might have at the outset to deal with that. So the only thing you really need to know about Greenock is that it is what I left behind, like Captain Kidd three hundred years earlier, and that anyway the decision to leave wasn’t taken there but in another place, on the shore of a foreign land many hundreds of miles away, and that when I decided to leave I left everything behind, there would never really be any road back. Not that I knew this at the time, it’s just the way these things go. When you choose to become a pirate it is a strictly one-way ticket, you are on a ship that can never turn round.

The shit I find myself in. I will amaze and appal you with it, none of which you can ever have imagined. The shit in my head. Too much goes on inside my head, things I never share. For all I have achieved, for all I’ve been able to do and say, and for all the tenacity and spirit I have surprised even myself with, there has been a price to pay. And part of that price has been the way I have had to dig so deep to make my way along the bastard path I have chosen; the way I’ve had to dig so deep inside, the way I’ve had to do these things alone. I didn’t know it at the time but all this came at personal cost, not just isolation, detachment or separation. It’s the way I have lived as a stranger, removed from everyone and everything, a stranger to myself. There will be men right now serving time in solitary confinement who have more companionship than me. At least they would know for what they stand, who they stand for and how that relates to anyone else.

I will try to explain but perhaps you will never understand. Maybe you can be a dispassionate bystander to these events in the same way that I was, even when I was at the heart of them. Something changed in me along the way so that I forgot how to judge, or how to empathize … how to feel angry about things, the right things other than just when losing money or graft. So you can watch and let me try to explain how it is and even how it might have been in a different life and in a different time, like three hundred years ago. I will show you another life, one that has grown with me from childhood, one that I chose to ignore until almost too late, one I never shared. You see, I was a normal boy, in a normal town going to a normal school. And I would read normal books full of exciting tales and adventures of piracy and duels on the high seas. But even then, when the villainous Blackbeard or his dastardly men fought their enemies, I knew whose side I was on. The shit I find myself in goes all the way back to then because I grew up with all these battles in my mind and eventually tried to live as a pirate, just like Captain Kidd. Like him I became a hunted man; somewhere along the way the whole world turned against me without explanation. Understand, if you can, that in this life there’s only so much they will let you get away with, and it’s not always the criminal stuff they object to. No, if you really want to confront the system you’ll have to attempt something much more subversive than that.

I will tell you what it is of course, and how I found that I had been declared an enemy without anyone ever telling me why, just like my heroes before me. Let us study the past, to see if we can find where it was I crossed the line of acceptability, and let us study the old maps, the antiques of a bygone age; perhaps X still marks the spot. Let us find where the stinking treasure is buried.

Great moments in my life. Gatwick Airport 1989, the unwelcoming, strange and tiny country lying between freedom and tyranny that is the Goods to Declare zone. I walk in, struggling manfully with rucksack, holdall, oxygen tanks, mask, mouthpiece and flippers. I would need at least another three pairs of hands to keep this lot together, and then maybe I could appear more serene, like a scuba-diving Vishnu. The sound is of a thump and things spilling as I make it to the only occupied desk. I have to snatch to keep the pile together and stop the rogue elements crashing to the floor, swearing under my breath in frustration.

‘What have we got here, sir?’

The officer on duty is a little startled and taken aback by my obvious ill-humour though he tries not to show it. He looks a kindly type, even under his prison guard garb of white nylon shirt and black tie. His skin strikes me as being very pink, the freckled bald scalp to layers of double chin one big ball of its different shades with only a grey moustache to break the colour code. He’s maybe four or five years from retirement and ten minutes from lunch. The sort of guy my father would play bowls with.

‘Diving gear … bought it in Spain. Some of it brand-new, most of it about a year old. The breathing apparatus is the expensive stuff, it’s specialist equipment so that you can go down deeper, not your normal scuba bits. The belt in the lining of the suit is the BCD … sorry, buoyancy control … see? Yeah, special. Anyway I’ve kept the receipts because I knew I would be bringing it back sometime, but I didn’t know what kind of import duty I would be liable for, or whether I’d have to pay on all of it or just the new stuff. Must be worth about eight hundred pounds all told. What do you reckon the score on tax is?’

Go down deeper. I’ve thrown myself at his mercy and he’s not going to thank me for it. I hand him the receipts and he’s almost reluctant to take them. The gentle wind-down towards lunch that he must have promised himself is looking in distinct jeopardy. I watch him peer at the crumpled pieces of paper in his hand, they are all in Spanish and won’t mean a thing to him. Not that he’s about to admit that to the much younger man opposite him, the ridiculously tanned and footloose hombre with his tousled hair, faded jeans and hippyish air who has obviously spent the last couple of years in his carefree life having a whale of a time diving, sunbathing and fornicating with all kinds of exotic types you sometimes see in Nothing To Declare. No sir, the dedicated customs man will not admit to any kind of inadequacy to someone like that.

‘Hold on sir, if you would.’

And now the test, the biggest test of nerve I’d ever had up to then, as I’m left to stare at the gear whilst he vanishes behind a panel door to consult with his colleagues and superiors. There are security cameras above me capturing all this for posterity, and I begin to concentrate on my performance. It would be better if I could look frustrated rather than aggrieved, agitated rather than nervous. The trick is to look normal, whatever that is, I guess the trick is not to appear extreme. I’m Martin Law and I’m normal, I tell myself. I used to live in Spain and now I’m coming home. I take in a breath and let out a little sigh. The air in here is stale, there’s no ventilation, no windows, just the cameras and fluorescent lights above, white Formica tabletops, plastic chairs and lino floor below, these being the only props for one of the key scenes in my life. These and the gear in front of me of course, and maybe the dust that has settled on every available horizontal surface in sight. I stare at the door behind which my fellow performer has disappeared and catch a dull reflection of myself staring in. Is there a problem? My hair, is it too extreme? It had been bleached in Spain, streaks of blonde to join the other strands that had turned yellow under the sun. Hair to go with the times. Maybe not. Anyway, I’d been concerned that I might look too much the beach-bum and dyed it dark just before this trip. Very dark, jet-black in fact. I hadn’t meant to at the time, but that’s the way it goes with hair dye, and now I was left like an impersonation of Elvis during the Vegas years. I studied the impossible mop on the top of my head; it definitely had a sixties showbiz look, a third-rate nightclub crooner or a sleight-of-hand magician … A magician, yes, let me tell you about magic, that would be relevant.

How does a magician make something disappear? Easy. He doesn’t, he just hides it. He will invite you to look for it in all the obvious places – up his sleeves, under the hat, inside the box. He challenges you to search in all the usual kinds of places, but when you do it is on his terms. So he turns his palms one way and then another, he waves the sleeve under your eyes, he lifts the lid on the box; and when you look you assume, because of the confidence he shows whilst doing all of this, that there really is nothing there, the answer must be elsewhere, somewhere else he is not showing you. This is not magic at all then, merely a trick, a confidence trick based on his confidence your thoughts will be elsewhere when he is actually showing you the only places where the item could be concealed.

The relevance of this? Well, it’s like someone having the confidence to walk up to a customs inspector in Goods to Declare and have the nerve to explain to him how a BCD works – or would work if it didn’t have three kilos of cocaine stuffed inside – and giving that man the headache of having to work out the import tax that is liable on the rest of the mess that’s been brought in when all he really wants to do is have a good rummage through everything and then piss off for lunch.

Go down deeper. My reflection is shunted out of view as the door re-opens and my fellow performer returns. He is perplexed, like an audience stooge who has to admit defeat to the delight of the rest of the crowd. Well I just don’t know, his shaking head seems to say, go on then, show me, where have you put it? But of course I’ll do nothing of the kind. A grim sort of smile emerges under his moustache. He’s fumbling for some sort of way out that doesn’t leave him open to ridicule.

‘Sir … You said most of this stuff was over a year old?’

I sense there must be a mountain of forms that he doesn’t want to fill in. Lunch is calling him.

‘About eighteen months … the purchase receipts are dated –’

He puts up a hand to stop me talking, he has no desire to hear the detail, he’s already made up his mind.

‘I guess we can let you through on this occasion, given the relative age of the goods in question. Is there anything else you wish to declare, sir?’

I’m beginning to like this guy but there is nothing else I feel inclined to tell him. He nods and with a wave of his hand I’m gathering up the gear again and walking out of customs. Abracadabra. I’m twenty-three years old and I’ve just earned more than he will ever make in his lifetime. I went deep down inside and was able to hold my composure. I’ve passed the test.

Originally I had studied to be an engineer, like James Watt. Engineering has a fleeting relevance to the events I’m about to describe so perhaps it is worth lingering on this subject and my studenthood in general for a moment.

So what can I say about it? I suppose engineering in itself was never something I had a particular fondness or aptitude for, aside from a bit of tinkering with bikes and boats – of which more later – but it was what I found myself immersed in during my very last teenage months and most of my twentieth year. Quite why is still difficult to fathom. In those days you finished school and you went to college or university in Glasgow and studied. The only way out was by being too thick for the process or such a genius that you by-passed any Scottish stop and went straight to Oxbridge. I fell into neither category. I fell into engineering after a two-minute interview with my careers teacher at the end of sixth year. An interview, I might add, with all the depth and interaction that you have with your average dentist whilst he’s giving you root canal treatment, and only slightly less pleasure. So it came to be agreed that I would enrol at The University of Strathclyde and in the autumn of 1984 I was to be found living in a tiny room, six feet by twelve feet, on the thirteenth floor of the art-deco splendour at the Baird hall of residence, downtown Sauchiehall Street. Glasgow might not have an awful lot going for it as a hedonistic metropolis but after nineteen years in Greenock it was like New York, believe me. Even my little cell with its white walls, single bed, wash-basin and desk seemed like a Manhattan penthouse suite looking down on the throbbing alleyways of decadence below when compared to the dormitory set-up back home. Far away now, though the memories of having to share everything – walls, air and light – with my older brother are still close enough, and all with the glorious sound of my father next-door snoring loud enough to warn the ships to keep from the shore of the Clyde. Yes, my student days were carefree days by comparison, even if they only amounted to barely three hundred. I didn’t know it at the time, it was just the way things were going to work out. A few hundred days of getting drunk as cheaply as you could, trying to get stoned as frequently as possible, and toiling to get laid. Just a hundred-odd shots at this bohemian debauchery before it was over. Sometimes myself and other like-minded souls even stayed up all night.

What would I have been like then, I wonder? Well, young I suppose, youthful and youthful-looking, no doubt in a wholesome and earnest way. The look I craved was that of an amphetamine-washed Iggy Pop, or a Satisfaction-era Keith Richards. Sadly, the face that confronted me in my bed-sit mirror would have had more in common with a tubby farmer’s lad reared on generous portions of Aberdeen Angus, rhubarb crumble and custard. A shy lad at that, boyishly shy, guiltily holding a tenuous notion of what it was he wanted – libidinous sex, a life of excess, high times – and an even more tenuous notion of how he might actually get it. A normal boy brought up in a normal west of Scotland household wanting the normal things. There were many others like me of course, and we sought each other out at the normal places; the student bars, alternative clubs and Cure concerts. We could tell each other by our spiky hair with long fringes, our grey raincoats, and our curious way of dancing, twitching our shoulders whilst gazing vacantly at our shoes like heavily sedated battery hens let loose on an electrified floor. Laughable now but normal then, ordinary boys expressing their individuality by dressing and acting the same. Where I differed I suppose was that I was more willing to push it a little further than the rest, always hungering for anything a little more intense on the basis of the timeless equation that more insane plus less legal equals more fun, a formula which must have marked me down at those times as mad, bad and interesting to know. For a while I wasted energy trying to take people with me before realizing that the most interesting journeys are those where you travel alone. Back then these were the first signs of the way my life was to go, back then this would have been one of the first opportunities to draw the line, to settle for what those around me wanted – the four years of harmless frolics as a Glasgow undergraduate, a decent degree, future wife and job at the end of it. I didn’t know I was rejecting it at the time, I only wanted to experiment for a while before taking it all up again at some point in the future. A naive assumption to go with the times. I would later come to learn that there is no such return option. Once a pirate always a pirate. Like Captain Kidd.

Then there is the other story, the one I read. The story I rewrite so many times in my head so that in the end I star in this one too. An adventure story. I will be thirty-five soon. You would have thought that I would have grown out of these things rather than into them but I suppose that’s the way it is with me, everything over and over if I’m ever going to learn any lessons. Anyway, I’ll share this tale as well, why not, I enjoy playing it through, rehearsing the cast. It’s meant to be over three hundred years old, and truth be told it is authentic to the period. I have read all there is to read so that you can be sure of that. So it is spring 1698, although what will happen is just as resonant to the here and now, just as relevant. It is how things maybe could have been.

It begins with a man walking on to a ship, one he knows will never reach its stated destination. He boards anyway. Why? It’s impossible to tell at first, maybe he doesn’t even know, except that he’s some kind of fugitive, a man on the run, a misfit born outwith his time.

The ship lies at harbour and is being prepared for a long voyage when he arrives. He travelled far to be here, from the north, another port – Greenock, in Scotland – although he has journeyed across land to this part of the southern Devon coast. A trip that has taken him from one country to another, across mountains, plains and rivers, a multitude of dialects passing like languages as he progressed by coach, horse and on foot. Yet this distance is as nothing compared to that he is assigned to undertake once he steps on to the Anne’s deck.

As he approaches the vessel for the first time he pauses briefly to study the activity all around him at the quayside; the loading of cargo into the timber holds – bales of linen, cases of carbines, brass pans and carpets, barrels of spirit, firkins of gunpowder, spare sails and rope, lots of rope. Nothing moves without the application of strenuous labour by men on and off the ship. Nothing seems to move without being noted by the men with pens and notebooks. There is a strange sourness in his mouth for a moment as he realizes that those who do not sweat are undoubtedly the ones who are making the money here. Who were they? The officiators, the clerks, all the king’s men; the supercargoes – agents of the merchants who had funded the voyage – the tax inspectors, the captain’s mate. He noticed that they managed somehow to maintain composure and concentration amidst the distractions all around; the screeching and bawling of the traders pitching their goods to the departing ship’s crew, the barking of stray dogs sniffing excitedly at the tubs of lard and tallow about to be loaded. All ignored, eyes fixed instead on the glimmer of silver that the boat represents.

He let his own gaze linger on the freight still on land. Which goods would be traded with the savages on the Guinea coast, he wondered, and which would make it all the way to the table of some rich colonist’s plantation mansion in Jamaica? This was only a passing concern to him though, something to occupy his mind other than the growing disquiet he felt when studying the vessel itself, all creaking timbers and spindly masts. So this was the craft that would take them to the edge of the world? She seemed barely able to hold water amongst the gentle lapping tide at Plymouth dock; what chance would she stand in the wilderness of the oceans, how would she cope with the malevolent mountains of waves that lay waiting for her there? He had once persuaded himself that he was happy to let fate decide his path for him – looking at the worm-ridden hull of the Anne he wondered if he was giving it the chance to make his path lead him anywhere other than the bottom of the sea.

As he moved nearer the gangplank the cacophony around grew ever more shrill in its urgency. Here the agents and tariff men counted aloud and traded insults as well as the goods they sought to barter. Here the merchants yelled their demands for payment. Small children, hands and faces blackened by exposure to the hot tar being painted on the ship’s bow, darted in between the departing crates, pilfering fingers eager for any spillage that might fetch a coin at the paupers’ market. Incessant noise, incessant demands, incessant questions, unrelenting squalor. Yes, the sea might make for a desperate gamble but it could also mean freedom, the one escape left open for men like him. Even a craft as unkempt and graceless as the Anne could be a transport of beauty capable of taking him to a heaven away from this hell. Only a few more steps to endure as he picked his way through the last casual traps of trip-ropes, splintered wood and excrement that marked the very end of England’s shore. He gripped the varnished rail of the Anne’s deck and hauled himself aboard. He did not look back, even though the premonition that he would never live to see it again grew all the heavier as he cleared the land in that final stride.

It was the captain who came to see him, announcing his presence outside the cabin with a hearty cough and gurgling of phlegm. A hand knocked loudly on the door.

‘Are you there, sir?’

‘Here, aye.’

The door opened and an almost ashen, pock-marked face confronted him. He put his book down to the floor and swung his legs free from the hammock.

‘Martin Law, sir, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Thank you for accepting me aboard.’

‘Doctor Law, yes?’

The uncertain smile which greeted the remark verged upon the bashful. ‘Aye … and you are Captain Henry?’

‘Correct.’

A silence then hung between them. Evidently the captain expected the new arrival to lead in conversational matters, perhaps at this stage offering some presentation of credentials as to his suitability for the voyage. The younger man declined to do so, for surely his initial letters and the acceptance he had received in return correspondence had completed such formalities beforehand.

‘How long until we set sail?’

The captain took off his hat and scratched at his shaven head, black fingernails clawing at the silvery stubble as if being filed upon a piece of flint.

‘Some time after even tide. There is much still to be loaded and properly stored below deck. It may be that we cast off before the latter is complete and we bind the cargo down once we are under way. We might make back some time, aye, if the sea is calm … Still, we cannot leave of course until the damned tariff-keepers have had their fill.’

There was another quiet as the captain contemplated the blight of inspectors that assailed his ship, leaving the other to study his complexion. How old had he been when the smallpox struck? To leave scars like that it must have been severe, life-threatening. Did it ever recur? The medical journals spoke of fevers that would erupt amongst some men in the heat of the Africas; were these new diseases or old ones rekindled from deep inside? He would have to seek out what the books had to report. The captain moved to bring his mind back to practical matters.

‘I take it you have arrangements in place to bring your personal cargo aboard?’

‘I have no cargo as such, sir, only a few volumes of writing to assist in my work. These should be at the quayside shortly.’

‘No cargo? No personal venture? As ship’s surgeon an allowance has been made for you in the stern hold. I would rather you kept this cabin clear of possessions, there will be seven or so using it once we are under sail. Please have your books directed to the holds.’

He knew that the captain’s bafflement was understandable. The wages for voyages like this were pitifully poor, the only worthwhile consolation for those privileged enough to receive it was the opportunity to speculate on their own efforts to trade during the course of the trip. Senior crew-members such as the captain could expect to multiply their earnings tenfold by such means and the tonnage allowances permitted to each were eagerly sought and guarded.

He watched the captain move to the door before halting.

‘So … Doctor … If you are not taking up your due I take it you would have no objection to others doing so?’

‘On my behalf?’

Another silence, another scratch of the scalp. ‘On the ship’s behalf, sir.’

‘Of course.’

The captain smiled. His first smile. It lasted but an instant. ‘Then I should bid good day to you, Doctor. I have work to do.’

From Glasgow to the south of France, summer of 1985. My first summer after starting university, four of us – myself, Paul, Ian and Maurice, all Strathclyde first years – living in two tents at a campsite a mile or so inland from St Raphaël, the heart of the Côte d’Azur. The excursion and its location was my idea, as was the stop-off en route in Paris to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. Not that we thought the stiff Lizard King would appreciate our visit, it just seemed appropriate to pay tribute to someone whom we, laughably, thought to be a kindred spirit. Jim Morrison had lived and died the full rock-and-roll trip, for him there was nothing that was forbidden, nothing that he denied himself. He had tested the parameters of the possible to glorious destruction. We four gathered around his tomb in silent salute and then made our way to the train that would take us south, our group preferring not to hitch its way there because it was deemed too risky by our parents. Welcome to the home of the existentialist French, where you live for the moment, once you’ve checked out it’s OK with mum and dad. Yes, things would have to change, for me at least; soon it would be time to cut loose.

France was liberating though, almost immediately. After a little more than a week’s stretching on the sun-baked sands I changed colour and became a different person. The heat also killed any appetite I might have had, it would have been from that time on that I took on the thin shape I have now, losing any normal appetite at least. And the rest of the boys? Well, I had taken them there, not that I had set myself up as expedition leader or chief fucking scoutmaster, but as the only one with any idea and any kind of will to see it through I became the travel coordinator, navigator and complaints department rolled into one. That would also soon change – I hadn’t sought this sudden elevation and I wasn’t cut out to be a consensus leader. Camping wasn’t really my bag either, truth be told, it was the lack of money and alternative options that had forced us under canvas. The site itself – Les Acacias – had been recommended by two Australian girls I’d befriended at Gare du Nord. They described it as the hang-out and rendezvous for the Riviera’s dispossessed, by which I took them to mean poor, but which just about described everyone when compared to the Cartier-garbed hommes and femmes hanging out in the yachts and restaurants of St Raph and the glitzy brand-new marina at Port-Fréjus. Millionaires, all of them, so it seemed. I’d never seen wealth like that before, the jewellery, sunglasses, white linen suits and limousines. Wealth worn and flaunted, to my open-mouthed wonder, though studiously ignored by the rest of the have-nots for whom the word ‘insouciant’ could have been especially devised. No, it was far, far away from the drab and rain-soaked quays at Greenock and Port Glasgow. It was hard to believe that the water that lapped these harbours of my youth was part of the same worldwide ocean. There was something that drew me to the sea in these places, even though I always felt as if on the outside of the people and activity that gathered around them; at home it had been almost by choice, here I wanted in, I wanted to belong to the crowd who had it all.

The Aussie girls had told me of the enlightened policy regarding campsite rents at Les Acacias, in that very few people actually paid them. You were meant to of course, the total due was added to on a daily basis, but most of the patrons tended to prefer a midnight exit through a hole in the hedge when their time was up. Strictly speaking then, it was those particular customers who were the enlightened ones, and with budgets being tight I intended to join them. Knowing this in advance, I had Paul give his passport number when we checked in. I wonder if he has ever had any comeback from our eventual abrupt departure? Perhaps, maybe many years later, he was arrested on arrival at EuroDisney with wife, in-laws and screaming kids because of this shameless plant. I hope he can forgive me for setting him up. The shit he found himself in.

Anyway, at the height of the season there would be over a hundred tents rigged up on the hissing summer lawns, one giant lattice weave of wires and ropes, zips and poles, all intolerable sweat-holes under the morning and afternoon sun, damp with cold condensation at night. I remember queuing for the toilet every morning behind some farting Belgian, and the smell of gas and cooking bacon bringing out a curious sensation of nausea and hunger at the same time. Everyone would congregate at the wash-houses to shower and shave, then you would wait in line for fresh rolls and croissant at the site shop, the same place you would buy your cheap white wine at the end of the day. All of this was achieved with a degree of harmony the United Nations would have been proud of; there was a huge cast of nationalities managing to get by, despite their different languages, colour of skin, and reasons for being there. I remember it as almost like being in a Benetton ad. After a day or so of witnessing the clear-out that would occur after breakfast, when an assortment of beat-up cars, creaking trucks and rusty buses would arrive to pick up the same people we had been behind in one queue or another, I realized that whilst there were some holidaymakers on site, they were in the minority, everyone else was working.

One of the pick-ups was a yellow Volkswagen dormobile, showing up every day, audible before it was visible, its bleating, rasping engine shivering and shuddering as it coughed its phlegm of exhaust into the fresh morning air. The driver was a stringy guy in a vest, cut-off jeans and sandals. Usually the same vest, cut-off jeans and sandals, but that’s the French way I suppose. He had dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, again the French way, like Charles Aznavour. I guessed he might have been in his late thirties, although he seemed cool about this, in fact, cool about everything. It came to pass that one fateful day he caught me looking at him; I would have been getting up to meet the guys for breakfast some way into our second week. When he saw me he motioned for me to hop in and join his crew in whatever it was they were leaving to do. A simple gesture was all he needed to convey what he needed to convey; a shrug and a dropping of the chin, cheeks puckered, a stabbing sweep of his arm towards the back of the van. Blink and you would have missed it, blink and the door to a new way of life remains shut. I didn’t miss it, nor what was meant by it, and in an instant we understood each other in a way that would have been impossible to communicate by him in his fractured English or me in the ‘plume de ma tante’ French that had recently been drilled into me at school but had proved – surprisingly – to be less than fucking useless when tried out on natives who didn’t behave in the beret-and-onions way the textbooks would have had us expect.

So what did the rapid fire mime mean? Well, firstly that there was some kind of scam going on, one that I was invited to join, probably at a low or lightweight level, and that this venture wasn’t likely to be one currently under investigation by Interpol – I wouldn’t be joining in an armed robbery or sophisticated international fraud. In fact, it would be simple enough to pick it up as I went along, as indeed the others who were packing into his Tardis-like vehicle had done before. Most importantly though, the gesture indicated he was reaching out to me, trusting me to come and try, and not to squeal or rip him off if I didn’t like it; I’m cool with you, the motion said, can you be cool with me? I took a look at the state of those clambering in – there didn’t seem to be much room left amongst the German chicks in bikinis, Parisian hipsters with their stubble and crew-cut hair, half-caste reggae-boys in Bermuda shorts. I turned to seek out Ian and Maurice who had been behind me at the check-out in the camp shop; they were outside juggling rolls, fruit and wallets as they counted out their change. I knew where I belonged and where I wanted to be. The rattling door was closing over as the rusty machine revved up. I smiled through the window and they held it long enough for me to squeeze in. The tin rocket took off. I was a passenger looking out on its convulsive spurt of fumes, wondering where it would take me.

It was dark when the Anne finally cast off, Captain Henry quarrelling with the customs men to the last over a set of barrels which he insisted were to be loaded empty. The tariff-keepers seemed dubious and threatened to stay and observe the procedure until it was completed. Martin would hear later that the captain had told them this would happen at daybreak and had thus persuaded them to depart from the scene. Sure enough, no sooner had they done so than another set of traders appeared, men who made quick work of filling the casks with French brandy. The anchor was raised the very moment they were done and the booty on board. Below deck in his quarters Martin listened to the grumblings over the captain’s apparent greed and his willingness to employ such deceit and subterfuge simply to avoid the ten per cent duty which should rightfully have been due on the outgoing goods. There were other complaints too; that the late loading had left the stacked cargo now out of balance, heaviest highest in the hold and not properly bound in the evening darkness below deck. What might this do to affect the ship’s stability in the open sea? These arguments would be aired over and over as the voyage progressed, and initially Martin would remain indifferent to them. In fact, he was almost reassured. Captain Henry had proved that he was an experienced mariner; his actions, although dishonest, were hardly those of a novice.

They did mean however that by the time the vessel began to move it was loaded to the full, every possible inch carrying provisions of one type or another. Martin found no space where the captain had directed him to lodge his books and duly stacked the volumes in the cabin, disobeying the earlier instruction. Here they would be safe from the water that would wash through the decks when the waves were high, here they would be close to hand if needed. Martin was not dissatisfied with this outcome, his only concern being whether the colleagues who would share this space would be offended by his presumption. In time he would learn that they, like himself, had their attentions focused on other matters.

Forty-four hands in total, that was the roll call when the Anne made off for the Guinea coast. Martin was surprised at the number, having witnessed earlier in his youth the ships leaving Greenock with a fraction of such a crew. He surmised that this quantity of men was indeed required and would have been taken only if strictly necessary, given the efforts of Captain Henry to cut the costs of the voyage on every other front. In the full light of day it was the state of the sails which had shocked the most; a patchwork of discarded rags, hastily sewed seams struggling to cope with the scarcely bracing winds of the Channel. Still, the almost admirable philosophy of the trip seemed to be to mend and make anew in these early, gentle days, rather than have the ship tied at anchor whilst the same work was carried out in presumably more expensive surroundings. Consequently Martin was to spend his initial weeks observing the industry of the crew on the decks as the carpenters, coopers and even blacksmiths went about their business. Sailing men on sailors’ wages, earning less than their fellow craftsmen back on land – this had to be another ruse of the parsimonious captain. All the while Martin would try to ignore the creaking sound of the hull under strain as the Anne sat deep in the water and the sight of a hundred rusty nails growing ever more prominent by the day, like green shoots appearing through the earth in spring. Perhaps it is as well that there are so many of us, he thought, there is ample enough work to do.

Yet he knew that the fact that there were over forty hands manning a three-hundred-ton vessel owed more to the demands of the cargo that they planned to load off the African shore than it did to prudent maintenance. High numbers of men would be required to guard and subdue the holds filled with savages once they were on board, and perhaps to ensure that there were enough of them left once the malarial and yellow fevers had taken their toll on the outgoing crew. Back on shore the bars and taverns of the coastal towns were rife with tales of trading ships arriving back carrying nothing but ghosts once the illnesses that lurked in the jungle had taken their grip. Some said it was the lands themselves that were cursed, damning any civilized man foolish enough to visit. Others blamed the savages and their magic, and their attempts to poison the soul of the white man. Whilst Martin found no reference to either theory in his medical volumes he knew that it stood to reason that at least a quarter of the men he watched would die of such affliction. Yet they, like he himself, had boarded regardless. Indeed, to his knowledge, there was never a shortage of those willing to enlist and bed down in the vermin-ridden corners of the merchant fleet. This curiosity, he thought, watching the toils of the crew against the shifting backdrop of the restless sea, had to be worthy of debate and investigation, and he made a note to question the captain on his views later in the voyage, once he was sure he had gained his confidence.

But such a day seemed far off as the Anne followed her early course towards Cape Verde, blown by the favourable wind. Captain Henry kept himself remote, locked in his cabin with his papers, issuing instructions through his bosun and mates. It was only the purser he had time for, and the two would be in conference from dawn to daybreak poring over the balance sheet, if quarterdeck gossip was to be believed. And so it was that Martin found himself becoming fascinated with his more accessible new shipmates: some old like the master craftsmen on board, riggers and carpenters bearing the scars of a lifetime spent at sea, all bent bones and rotten teeth, with sallow skins that were testimony to endless scurvy-plagued voyages; others younger, boys hardly in their teens but already marked by the poverty and brutality of their childhoods ashore. Martin would watch them and wonder if their adoption of the sailor’s life was a noble defiance of the hand that fate had dealt them or a surrender to the inevitable. Were they like him, chancing a final throw of the dice in the hope of a different kind of life on the seas or merely succumbing to a different kind of servitude from the one they could expect on land? Irrational though he knew it was, he felt more of an affinity with the men climbing the masts and rigging than he did with his cabin-mates on the quarterdeck. That he who was educated, like them, and born into the relative middle-class privilege of officer life should somehow feel removed from them and more at one with the common crew was a cause of an unsettling disquiet. Was this not the trip that was going to cure him of such conceits, were these maritime endeavours not the ones that would so occupy his thoughts as to leave no room for such subversive and ungodly meanderings in his mind?

That was the problem at this stage of the journey, the paucity of stimuli to exercise his faculties. For all that he chose to observe the men of the ship at work and amuse himself with the formulation of theses as to each one’s past and future prospects, he knew that these were not his charges and represented neither reason nor purpose to his presence on the Anne. No, he would have to wait for his work to begin, once they were moored off the African shore. Then the trading would start and his scant medical knowledge would be put to the test. Which of the negroes on offer would make the best slaves, which would be most likely to survive the trip to the Americas, which hid the fever they were already surrendering to? Ship’s Surgeon. A gloriously impotent title, he reflected bitterly. Who amongst the crew would seek his advice for their ailments? None. They would be better served following their own instincts, given the inadequacy of his expertise. Somehow the tawdry nature of his qualifications seemed ever more transparent now his maiden voyage was underway. Conversations with his fellow officers had been strangled, stunted affairs as he struggled to conceal what he felt were ruinous shortcomings. Ship’s Surgeon. By what right did he answer to this preposterous title? By virtue of the handful of lectures he had attended, by virtue of the boxful of dusty volumes he had brought aboard to saddle the Anne with even more dead weight? Yes, these, and a curiosity which did not always serve him well when dealing with figures of authority, and the ten guineas which had secured him his practitioner’s certificate. No, the privilege he had been born with had brought him to the title, his space in the quarterdeck cabin and his exemption from onerous duties on deck. Was this the reason for the vague sense of guilt which ate at him with a growing relentlessness, the same sense of guilt which he had taken to the sea to escape? Perhaps, he thought without pleasure or emotion, perhaps. For this identification was worthy of no respite, it was a diagnosis without cure. All he could do was wait for Africa, wait to busy himself amongst the savages; at least they were unlikely to be inquisitive about his past.

The stringy guy in the vest and cut-off jeans turned out to be called Henri. Once you were up close to Henri you could appreciate why he didn’t tend to talk much. Not that I hadn’t seen worse teeth, just that they usually belonged to horses or ancient shrunken heads. Once you were up close you could study his skin colour and still be none the wiser as to whether this was a tan or ingrained dirt. For all this, my first impressions of the man were accurate, he was cool about most things; cool with you if you were cool with him. I’m about to describe how I, on the face of it, ripped him off after he’d trusted me enough to give me my start in the apple donut trade, although I can’t say I meant to rip him off from the start, it was just the way things worked out. Anyway, in advance of going through how this came to be, let me also point out that for every franc, centime and pastry that I took from him I would estimate that I repaid him twice or threefold in increased revenue from my efforts and those of the recruits that I brought to him. I’m sure he knew this and would be cool if I were to see him right now. And how I would like to see him now, a friendly face; could he take me back to those times?

Henri’s van took us to the beach where we would meet with the car of Henri’s pal. Henri’s pal’s name is not relevant, he was just the supplies man, he had made the journey to the bakery whilst Henri had been gathering his itinerant workers from the campsite and a host of other equally prestigious Riviera addresses. We, the contents of the van, were then introduced to the contents of the car, the donuts. Our mission was then explained to us in tones of exhortation. That mission was simple and straightforward: sell the bastards, lots of them. At least, that was how it was explained to me on that very first day, in a mixture of Henri’s, and giggling German chicks’, pidgin English. They knew I would have a hard time that day, they must have been pissing themselves at the look of bewilderment on my face as I was kitted out like a cinema ice-cream girl – minus torch – with my tray of donuts, bag of change and patch of land to patrol. I was shown the rendezvous point where the van would come to collect me and my leftovers at the end of the day’s toil. The money I would be paid was dependent on my own success in selling; this was made very clear, together with the final, crucial, part of the briefing.

I never figured out whether this was Henri’s own personal scam or whether he was part of a higher chain. Quite who had decided that what the droves of horizontal French crammed up beside each other under an eighty-degree-plus heat like a giant herd of poisoned wildebeest at the side of the waterhole really wanted, and wanted with a perverse craving that defied all logic, was apple donuts ripened under the sun by being walked up and down the beach all day was never made clear. The chances are that if I’d have met that person on that first day, the encounter would have resulted in extreme violence. I trudged my way through the few narrow corridors of sand left uncovered and unclaimed by beachtowels for over three hours without selling a single crumb. Occasionally I would pass a fellow hawker from the morning crew and would be dismayed to see their inventory now significantly depleted. Mine seemed to be breeding in the tray – I’d started with around thirty and must have had over forty by lunchtime. It did strike me of course, that I was at a disadvantage in not being able to shout my pitch in French. Somehow I’d forgotten to ask how this might be done, maybe I’d just assumed that English was the recognized tongue of seaside cake selling. Around midday I sat down, defeated, ready to rest my burning feet. Suddenly, an ambush. A pack of predatory old crones waddling along the beach perimeter by the road fell victim to a strange hunger. Seven donuts later, they left. I had my first sale.

To understand the point of it all is to understand that I had let them come to me. Unwittingly, sure, but I had toiled and toiled and not sold a single thing until I had stopped and stayed still and thought of something else. It seemed obvious later that nobody was ever going to buy from a stressed-out malcontent with a bead of sweat dropping from his nose. No, they were only going to be tempted by someone at ease with himself, someone confident in the power of his goods to attract purchasers by their own merits. Forgive me for lingering on the details and understand that there were lessons I learned on that beach, that summer, with that tray of donuts – universal lessons that formed the foundation of everything I became. At the end of the season my friends made their way back to Scotland, back to university and the coming term. I didn’t need to, I had received my education.

The main lesson? That there are signals we give off, signals that tell the world how we would like to be accepted. That how we are accepted is in our control. That sometimes when we are freed from the expectations of others who know us from our past we can surprise ourselves with the energy and eagerness with which we reinvent ourselves, how we reinvent how we would like to be received. And some of the signals are easy to change – the way we dress, or wear our hair, the language we speak – all external signs, all easy. The ways we think and confront the world, these all come from inside, these are harder. The way you gesture for someone to get into the back of your van. An example? I’m trying to sell fucking donuts. I want to be approachable, warm, uncomplicated, purposeful; someone with integrity handling quality goods. What I don’t want to be is withdrawn, burdened, arrogant; someone with whom the transaction, however brief, is going to be unpleasant. I need to be a success, not a victim of the tray hooked on to my shoulders. The signals I give will dictate whether the market sees me as one or the other.

I sold another three items on that first day, and ate two myself in lieu of lunch. My total day’s commission was fourteen francs, just over a pound in real money. It was still more than Henri had expected, being used as he was to the negligible impact of new starts. They all had to go through this learning curve before they decided to give up or get very good. I wasn’t going to give up, although the hardest part of the day was trying to persuade the lads back at the campsite that my efforts had been worth such a derisory wage. How they laughed. Within the week though, things were different, I was carting round my own ice-box and selling my own range of drinks bought from the supermarket and suitably marked up to reward my investment, as well as my original tray of sugared delicacies. I could clear a hundred and fifty francs, more than ten times what I had made at the very start. Hard work, sure – not so much I let it look that way; the signals I gave were the opposite. So much so that my initially dubious companions soon joined me in the endeavour. And when they did we sold to a plan, my plan.

My plan involved the occasional lifting of the daily wage to even higher levels. This involved exploiting the weak point in Henri’s operation, and I’d known what that was from the very first briefing he’d ever given me, in fact I’d known it from the moment he’d gestured for me to climb into his wagon. Henri’s operation was illegal. You weren’t allowed to sell anything on the beach without the appropriate licence, let alone organize whole squads of hawkers to cover every grain of sand. The CRS – the municipal guard – were out there on the same ground determined to maintain public order. Henri had mentioned them in what he probably thought was a casual way right at the start. If you see them, he’d said, drop the tray and keep your money, run like fuck. According to him they would detain us if we were caught but he’d already given the game away. The CRS were never likely to imprison us, not for more than a couple of hours anyway. What they were likely to do was to confiscate our goods and sales proceeds, that’s what scared Henri. Hold on to the money he’d said, hold on to it so you can give it to me. Sensible advice? Perhaps not. Perhaps, occasionally, you just can’t run fast enough and they take all your merchandise and your revenue and your change. Perhaps no one else sees this and Henri just has to take your word for it. Perhaps it happens to everyone once in a while, perhaps it’s inevitable that way. In my plan, such an occurrence would take place to each one of us every three weeks. We just happened to have repeated bad luck that way. Henri cursed it as much as we did, muttering in his curious way as he drew his breath in, so that the words all came out as one, almost backwards in the anguished tongue of the possessed; mer-mer-merde!

We would look the other way whilst he came to terms with his grief. There never were any arrests, the CRS and gendarmerie didn’t seem that interested in us. Just as well – I was soon carrying goods which were more dangerous than apple donuts.

Great moments in my life. Sometime last year, sometime in the morning. Sometime when what I had to do was clear enough. I’ve closed the bar maybe ten minutes ago, at which point I felt as if I would fall asleep in mid-conversation with the two remaining customers who were busy telling me what a great place I had, what a great guy I was and how they envied me my lifestyle here on the island – the sunshine, the spot here at the marina, the holiday atmosphere. So sincere, so drunk, so very keen that I understood exactly what a great guy I was. Were they Danish, or Dutch? Doesn’t fucking matter, they all speak in the same, confident English with American a’s and r’s. MTV has a lot to answer for. They tap their feet to the latest bland anthem going out to Europe on all the screens like mine, talking to me as they groove along. My bar is a happening place thanks to the satellite pap my guests steal their accents from. ‘Martin … up … Marrt-in, could you turn the volume up?’ And so I do, and then shout above it to ask the usual stuff, had you heard of Puerto Puals, of the Arena Bar, will you be back?

These are not the questions at the front of my mind though, those are to do with the money. Do you know how much you have spent here, how much you owe me, how much I have taken in total tonight? No, neither do I but I’m dying for you to go so that I can see, so that I can clean this place up and get it ready for tomorrow morning when we open for breakfast and start this whole thing up again like we do all summer. Go on, fuck off. I pour a couple of whisky shots. The third glass, my glass, already has its liquor in it, flat ginger beer, not that these two will notice. An old trick, if you want someone to leave, ply them with cheap whisky. If they drink it as fast as they should, once they have seen me down mine in my impressive manly gulps, the dizziness and nausea will carry them out the door before I can shout time. Yes, goodnight, thank you gentlemen, that last one was on the house.

When they leave I count the takings. A so-so night, every table outside taken in one way or another. Some Germans who laughed loudly and bought a lot of beer. Some middle-aged British who sat quietly, probably intimidated by the whole ambience of the bar and the glam parade it’s part of, here by mistake at the club of the beautiful people. They drank even more beer and the best part of three bottles of Irish Cream, we nearly ran out of ice trying to stop the stuff from curdling in the heat. And some girls, Scandinavian girls. Young, early twenties, four of them, all blonde, all Identikit minis, cream lace crop-tops, blue eyes and brown limbs. I gave one of them the treatment for a while, I thought she was going for it but then they were gone, all off to a club to dance under the ultra-violet so that their white bits can at last sparkle. A realization from my early years in Spain: girls like this don’t sunbathe to get brown, they do it so that everything can be bright against them – their flashing eyes, their perfect teeth, the whiteness of their underwear, your dick.

I take twenty thousand pesetas for my immediate needs and put the rest of the cash inside the safe-bag for banking tomorrow. The chairs outside are already chained with the parasols tied down and locked, these being the last instructions given to my crack new staff before I sent them home. The glasses can be done in the morning, I just stack them by the dishwasher. My mind is slowing right down as tiredness takes over once more. How many hours’ sleep will I get before I’m back in here – three, four?

Not really sleep at all, more a fucking cigarette break; I try not to think about it. What time does the cleaner come, is she coming at all, do I have to do the fucking toilets? The last is not really a question, I know I do. The shit in my toilets, I mean, you would be amazed and appalled by the shit in my toilets, stuff you can never imagine. The men’s and the women’s. Both as bad. Shit on the floor, on the walls, everywhere but the lavatory pan. Dregs of cheap cocaine on the cistern, on the washbasin, on top of the paper dispenser, everywhere but up the nose of whoever was snorting the shit. Sometimes there might be syringes in the waste baskets, spent and used, like the tampons in beside them, and the condoms chucked in the corner of the floor. The shit in my toilets, God knows what will be in there tonight, but experience has taught me that whatever there is it is better faced now than in the morning when I come back. Seeing it now, it will irritate me, something else to be sorted before I can hit my bed; tomorrow, in the cold light of day, it would break my heart. All this energy, investment, hope, to be landlord to a cast of animals, is that what it was all about? No, I’ll deal with it now, my cleaner can do the easy stuff if and when she shows – the tables outside, the windows, the walkway. Easy yet still part of the show, the never-ending show I find myself starring in.

I go into the cupboard to retrieve the heavy-duty gear, the scrubbing brush and disinfectant, the pine-scented detergent that burns off the surface stone from the ceramics and five layers of skin from my hands. There are some rubber gloves in there somewhere but I’m too tired to go hunting, I want this over and done with even if I go to sleep with my fingers stinking of this stuff enough to poison a room. At least it might scare off the mosquitoes. Tooled up, I enter the gents. It’s not so bad, I can do this on autopilot, bucket and mop to wash the piss from the floor, wipe for the basin and bottom of the walls, attack of the brush for the crap clinging to the rim of the bowl. For a fleeting second, I watch myself doing this in the mirror, I want to stop and banter with my reflection – you should see yourself pal, you look fucked. Darkness around my eyes, hair lank and greasy, skinny as shit, the friendly face of a psychotic is smiling grimly back at me, you looking for trouble? We both get the joke. Definitely the sexiest lavatory attendant in town tonight. So much for cool travails.

I stop. I thought I heard something. Could have been outside, could have been those two guys coming back after throwing up, maybe they saw the lights still on. Shit. I hear it again, it’s closer than that, it’s inside. This is worse, I can feel my heart begin to race to a faster beat, I’m suddenly wide awake, am I being robbed? I put down the brush and slowly lift the mop handle; if there’s someone there they are going to feel this, I work too fucking hard for anyone to come in and help themselves to what’s mine, I don’t care if it’s the biggest guy in the fucking world who’s about to beat me to a fucking pulp, I swear he’ll know about me and this wooden pole first. OK Martin, cool it, I tell myself, the adrenaline has got to be controlled, go deep inside, compose yourself and think, then you can take anyone. I hold still – the sound is coming from the women’s toilet, someone is in there. I wonder whether to kick down the door and surprise them. Maybe not, maybe it’s just a drunk who went in and fell asleep, it’s happened before.

‘Hola? Come out for Christ’s sake, everybody’s gone home.’ The shouting is loud, I’m sending a signal, I’m not scared you cunt, you’re not in control of this now. I try to turn the handle. It doesn’t shift, the lock is on.

‘Come on!’ I’m banging hard, maybe it’s a junkie, out of it and about to expire, how can I get in there without breaking my own door?

‘Martin?’

A voice, a female voice, small and fragile. I calm down.

‘Yeah?’

I hear the lock being turned. The door slowly opens.

‘Do you want to fuck me?’

It’s one of the Scandinavian quartet who were in earlier on. She’s standing stark naked in front of me looking kind of alarmed at the mop that’s pointed at her face. I hadn’t realized she’d sneaked back in, I hadn’t realized she was so keen or was even falling for the treatment. I take in the view. Five-foot-six, maybe seven, small by Swedish standards. Small-to-medium tits pointing east and west, tanned skin with tiny white hairs in a line from her navel to the chestnut pubes; wide hips, about ninety-seven per cent beautiful. She has a confidence that comes from being at one with her own sexuality, either that or she’s just wired on something, maybe just plain nuts. Anyway, it’s her that wants to cool the scene down, trying to fix me in the eye. Don’t be scared, Martin. I like that. I’m tired and I stink of bleach and I’m still annoyed that she scared me pulling this stunt but I know that I will fuck her, like I promised myself I would fuck someone for every shit night that I was stuck behind the bar, or for every hour spent talking to boring Danish sailors, or for cleaning the shitty toilets when I’m tired enough for a coma. Sure baby, I’ll fuck you, I have to, it’s my destiny. Sex is a talent. And I have it.

Another moment, the next one that comes in the sequence, or does it? In my mind it happened next but the truth will be that it was a few days later, for various reasons. The first was the sex; it was good, surprisingly good. The Swedish girl turned out to be German, I can’t remember her name, and it’s not really relevant. I remember her talking, until I placed a finger on her lips to show there was no need. I led her from the back through to the main bar area. She waited as I switched off the lights and lit the candles at the front tables. She was naked but comfortable with it, I liked that. I turned the CD player and amplifier back on, the disc I wanted – Roberta Flack, First Take – was already on, I had been playing this music more and more to wind me down last thing. Once it started to play I was ready to give my guest the attention she deserved, advancing on her to place a kiss on her silent mouth, gently forcing her backwards until she could retreat no further and her white cheeks touched the plaster walls. I tried to kiss with delicacy, no tongues, kissing only with lips, kissing lightly, briefly; kissing to set the pace, a tender pace, not rushed. I kissed her like this until the feeling was there that we were synchronized, that we were in tune, and then I began to explore the touch of her skin, a soft skin, perfumed with the moisturizer she must have used after her days in the sun. I felt her with the backs of my hands, brushing lightly down her sides, the tops of her arms, then massaging the tightness from her collarbone to shoulder. I turn my hands outside and then run them gently down again, this time the touch lingers and there is more contact, I let my wrists and forearms warm and rub against her, moving inwards towards her breasts, closing in to gently grip her nipples between fingers. My palms are still turned backwards so that when I slowly clench my fists they gently push each breast upwards, cupping them in reverse, softly squeezing each nipple. I kiss them with an open mouth, my tongue coating their tips and sides in saliva. The song on the music system has changed, Roberta is starting to sing ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, my hands release their light grip on cue and I bring them up to run my fingers through her hair. And then they go down again, down to her hips then circling in with the lightest of touch from my fingertips across the tops of her thighs. She shifts her stance slightly, kissing me with more urgency, parting her legs so that I can touch the insides of her thighs but again I concentrate on the lightness of my fingers, brushing the skin almost teasingly, dabbing the lips of her vulva with restraint, and then breaking off from her kiss to place one of my own behind her ear as my fingers make their way towards her clitoris. Her arms are around my neck, hugging me close so that I can hear her quickening breaths. I can sense her whole body tensing as the circle my hand is drawing centres more and more on her velvet lips and the moistness around them. She pushes her legs further apart and tilts her hips towards me. She lets out a sigh and then begins to sink, sliding down against the wall, down to her knees.

She unzips me and draws my cock out, she strokes me and kisses its sides. Then her mouth is open and I’m in then out of it, in then out. This is not unpleasant, but it leaves me with nothing to do. I turn my head to one side and see our silhouettes reflected in the bar window. A man is having a blow job, he’s still fully clothed. I feel remote somehow, even though that man is me. I pull off my shirt, throw it across to a chair; my aim is good, a thought that seems to demand my concentration more than it should at this moment. I bend to put my hands under her arms to lift her up. She looks puzzled – did I not enjoy what she was doing, was there something wrong with it? I look at her; no, nothing wrong, just me going mad, my mind wandering off for some insane reason. Occupy me, please, involve me somehow.

With one hand I separate her legs and with the other I guide myself into her, pushing hard, full penetration in one thrust. After the tenderness, the rough selfishness, my preferred combination. Show them a tender side, and a tough side, it works every time. I’ve seen women leave a gentle man for a rough one, and vice-versa. The trick is to offer both, to explore both. I think of good sex, the best sex, and I always think of Jim Morrison singing with the Doors, how his voice could be soft and gentle, but what gave his performance its edge was the knowing that at any moment it would break into something more base and brutal and that he was almost struggling to keep that element within him under control. That’s what makes it compelling, particularly for women who have their own take on this, that it’s their destiny to accommodate both in a passionate man.

So.

That was why we were now doing it standing up, then doing it sitting down with her astride, doing it both of us on the bar I’d only recently wiped down. I liked to look at her against the marble, her delicate tanned skin against the stone; I put my weight on her, pinning her down by the shoulders, pushing and grinding so hard into her pelvis. A real work-out, and if there was a down-side to it at the time it was only in the way she kept stopping me and then grabbing my scalp to pull my face right up to hers – not to kiss, but so that our eyes were an inch apart. This was the signal she wanted to give to me; that this was intense, special, a one-off connection of soul-mates on an astral plane rather than a holiday screw with a horny bar-owner. Pulling me away from kissing her nipples so that she could head-butt me again with her passion and our special togetherness in that moment. So it’s this staring, staring, staring. What the fuck was she looking for, what did she want to tell herself she’d found?

I came the once and then we shared a couple of lines that she’d brought along – good stuff, actually – so that I was ready for round two which lasted longer, almost too long, so that by the end I was squeezing and pulling and pumping everything so I could just shoot and get back to cleaning up the bar. We finished when I finished, right that very second. I knew it was selfish but I was looking to lock up and get out of the bar sharp. This must have upset her; I think she was hoping for us to go off somewhere together at that point, perhaps to watch the fucking sun rise, and for her to ask more of her questions – when did you know that we had … you know … clicked, when did you first notice me; Martin, how did you know we’d be lovers? My English, she says pleadingly, my English not good enough to tell you how I feel. Thank fuck for that, I don’t want to hear it. I put a finger to her lips again; silence please, we had our moment, don’t spoil it now.

So by then time was running out for me to make it home, as in ‘home’ home, and I knew I was heading for another couple of hours in the flat I’d been loaned round at the side of the complex by one of Herman’s colleagues. I’d taken the key never intending to use the place but by now had spent most of the week there with one thing and another. When I let myself in and looked at the bed lying unmade from the night before I felt a wave come over me, maybe a feeling of regret that here I was again, or a sense of resignation or whatever. A completely bare flat with nothing in it but that bed; yes, something stirred when I saw that. Home, I told myself, make it there tomorrow, slip off for a few hours in the afternoon, it’s overdue. And then I sat down to think about this some more. I woke up three hours later, mouth dry and every other inch of me sticky and clammy. Cocaine always gives me night-sweats and I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on.

Time to get moving again, it must be around seven. Time to pull myself together for another day only I’m staggering from room to room in exhaustion, a ghost let loose in the blinding daylight. I peel off my clothes as I wander towards the shower. And when I make it into the cubicle and slouch against the tiles and watch the water that has flowed from my head to toes disappear down the drain I start to dream, the same dream that haunts me in moments like these when the day ahead is still to happen, the dream about water.

There are six of us in a boat far out in the ocean, floating in a calm in the middle of an endless expanse. Five of them surround me, sitting silently, waiting for me to make a move: for whilst I am the one in control of the situation, it is me they all want dead. I know this with a heavy certainty that could drown me even before I hit the waves lapping the sides around us. The sound of the water becomes a call, an invitation to step over the side out into the deep, to walk the plank into the only means of escape. The water will one day take me, always waiting to take me down.

And this is the thought always haunts me in my waking moments, when I’m moving too slow to distract myself with the shit that makes up my life. It casts its grip on me, almost impossible to shake off, even without the drug-induced paranoia that I’m trying to rinse out of my head after the night before. Today, there is help from outside; a blast from a car horn and a squealing of tyres on the bone-dry coastal highway outside is enough to snap me out of the morbid premonition and return me to the present. The noises serve as an abrupt reminder that out there Mallorca is waking, outside the traffic is already building and jousting in the macho Spanish way. Outside, the island is kicking and screaming its way into the day, tetchy and irritable, like a newborn baby left hungry and hot under the stifling heat. I turn the shower to cold and raise my face to take the shock.

Once I dry off I face my next immediate problem, clothes, or lack of clean clothes. I’ll go without underwear until I make it home and I’m lucky to find a black T-shirt that I had left behind at the flat a couple of days before. Doesn’t smell that great, but better than the one I slept in. The trousers are a matter of real concern though. My fawn linen pair look creased and lined enough to pass for a pair of pyjama bottoms, which in a way they were, and that’s nowhere near the worst of it. Somehow, although I don’t quite remember the particular detail, I must have started with the girl last night when I still had them on. She herself, lousy bitch, presumably in the heat of the moment, or in the middle of squeezing my hand and locking on her full eye-contact number, had forgotten to warn me that she was having her period, or having it all over my fucking trousers. The shit I find myself in, desperately scrubbing the crotch of my priceless designer gear with shampoo so that a blatant red stain can become a fairly obvious maroon one. No wonder she was so fucking horny, she’d found a man who cared enough to want to connect despite all that. Or one who failed to notice. Until now. How am I going to pass this off and serve breakfasts without looking a complete dick?

This, truth be told, is the final spur to me going home that morning, going home to throw on an unsoiled pair of jeans and consign the present pair to history. That is what made me do it, to walk over to the bar with my hands covering my stained soggy crotch, open it up, wait for the cleaner, give her a note to give to Sarah telling her to do everything the best she can until lunchtime when I was planning to be back, and to ignore Herman’s note that had been waiting for me in the door like a fucking German’s beachtowel claiming the space and to just head for the jeep and then head off, away from the marina and inland, up the side of the mountain towards the villa at Paguera.

An enjoyable drive, almost an hour I recall, enjoyable up to a point, that point being when I arrived. I had never made the trip at this hour; the road was curiously quiet and slow, it was the hordes of cyclists who were responsible for the latter, middle-aged Swiss pumping their way up the incline in their Lycra shorts and gaudy jerseys. A surreal vision, bankers and credit managers acting out their fantasies of being tour professionals. I smiled for them and turned the car’s music system off. The windows were down and the air blowing in seemed to be making a better job of clearing my head than the cold water had earlier. I tried to take in the colours and impressions of the island as the bikers would have been seeing them if they had not been so intent on exhausting themselves; the sweeping verdant hills and narrow valleys filled with wild olive, pine and dwarf palms; up in the higher, drier stretches the scatterings of carob trees standing defiantly and incongruously green under the Balearic sun’s strongest rays, a hazel carpet of carob pods covering everything at ground level, insulating the earth from the heat. I passed auburn-coloured hamlets and cottages in amongst the growth as the winding route led on to Camp de Mar and Andraitx. If I stare and stare I am reminded of why it was I came to live on this island, or rather why it was I came to stay.

I turned off and headed sharp left, a new road taking the jeep uphill towards another plateau and another scattering, this time of villas, built within the last five years, built for privacy, to accommodate new wealth. The last of the three, with its iron gates and driveway pointing to the heavy wooden porch doors is the one I draw up outside. There is no other car here, I can change clothes in privacy. Then I notice the gates are unlocked and I’m annoyed, they shouldn’t have been left like this; if the house alarm has not been set I’ll be seriously pissed off. On the doorstep itself I’m relieved to see that it has; I punch in the code, find and use the key and I’m inside, walking into the cool air and on to the tiles of the open-plan hallway and lounge. Right away, I notice that something is missing, not in the sense of stolen missing that would reduce me to a panic, but missing as in not there, the things that would give this home its normal atmosphere. Yes, it’s the atmosphere that’s not here – the mess of child’s toys on the floor, the pictures above the fireplace, gone. Into the kitchen and there is no food, no fruit in the bowl or bread lying out on the carving board. Walking slower now, into the bedroom, I open the wardrobe, no clothes hanging, other than mine. I sit down on the bed and contemplate the weight of the evidence, it’s back to the dream about water and the heavy certainty of knowing events are closing in, the heaviness that could drown me then and there in this room on a mountainside. My wife has left me. My wife and child are gone.

The storm woke him from his sleep in the dead of night. Not that this had come as a sudden shock. If anything the swerving climb and pitch of the bow had imparted an almost agreeable rocking motion to the cabin and his hammock, one that comforted him in his slumbers, worming its way into his dreams and the fleeting visions of a childhood spent in churches, idling away the moments during prayer meetings. So deep was his surrender to fatigue and the serenity of his reveries that when the roar from outside finally erupted into his consciousness and brought him so sharply back into the present it took almost a minute for him to gather his wits and realize where he was. He woke alone. To be fair, there were more than a few disconcerting factors which stood in the way of a ready understanding. The first was the dark, the pitch-black which greeted his eyes. Second were the noises that he found impossible to identify: the strange sound the wind made as it toyed with Anne upon the waves, a shrill howl recognizable only to those sailors who had heard it before. To this was added the percussion of the men vomiting on the deck, retching as if in arranged sequence, bells being rung in a tower. Then, more ominously, the stirrings of the cargo in the holds, groaning like anguished souls, then thudding like the anarchic drums of a marching military band.

Martin moved to seek his breeches in the gloom, something telling him that he should be on deck alongside the officers though he knew there was little he would be capable of or expected to do.

They were three days from Tenerife, or so they had told him, progress had been swift, the tempestuous regions of the Arab waters successfully behind them. He cursed himself for believing such assertions as he fed his legs through the seat of his pants. The ship suddenly lurched to starboard, sending him falling into a collision with his books now stacked in a growing sprawl on that side of the cabin. He let go of the waistband as he steeled himself in an instant for impact with the wall and floor but his legs were trapped, as securely fastened at the ankles as if in a pair of leg-irons. He hit the floor with a whiplash force, tasting blood in his mouth immediately, before the force of the ship correcting itself sent him rolling back to the middle of the floor. To his astonishment he could now taste salt on his lips, sea-water salt – the waves had reached high inside the Anne. Everything was awash. Another curiosity. Should he live it had to be worth questioning the captain on this too.

He did not wear a hat, though it did not stop him instinctively reaching for it as the full force of the gale hit him once he emerged from the cocoon of the cabin in the quarterdeck. He smiled momentarily, realizing that to an observer it must have appeared as if he were trying to secure his very head against the might of the elements. A preposterous notion, it was as well they were all preoccupied with more pressing matters, huddled against railings, posts and the helm. Nobody stood erect, everyone crouching to present a smaller target to the angry blusters that would have them over the side.

He wanted to join them, to find out what it was they were doing, to offer his help. For weeks he had felt the outsider, the interloper with no legitimate place on board. Suddenly, with the white spray of the water lashing every inch of him he felt an exhilaration that verged upon delirium, as if the ship had been thrown into a realm of opposites where he belonged and they did not. He was calm, invisible, and comfortable in his mind for some reason that the vessel would not sink, that the waves had no quarrel nor place for her. He felt an urge to seek out the captain, to offer his services for whatever the emergency demanded. He wanted to show that he felt no fear, not of the storm, nor the captain himself, or any physical challenge that might have to be met before the night was out. As the ship fell deep into the chasms that yawned open between the rolling waters he felt the gravity keeping his boots on the timbers of the deck grow lighter, so much so that he might be left behind whilst everything else plummeted downward. Again he suppressed a laugh at the oddity of it all, wondering also in that moment if his amusement was that of a madman, for whilst he could not see the expressions on his shipmates’ faces, he could be sure that mirth would not be shared amongst them. Had he finally gone insane?

Another thunderous wave smashed into the boat on the starboard side, punching in like a left hook from a vicious opponent who had already set the target up for the hit with a delicate series of jabs to prime it into position for the final blow to strike with full force. It felt as if the Anne might topple over, might give up the fight and fully immerse her deck and masts in a desperate bid for inverted stability. Martin looked up and saw the sea above his head, the floor that was once the deck now vertical, like a wall. One more inch and she might have been tempted to revolve the full way but no, the stubborn and spirited nature of the craft suddenly asserted itself as she swung back to reverse herself with an urgency that spoke of an anger at the indignity she had suffered by baring her belly to the air. Martin slid back the full width of the bow, the momentum of the shift lifting him back on to his feet as he came to a halt. He landed right in front of a cowering nest of crew-men clinging to a rail, appearing before them like an apparition that had materialized out of nowhere. There were six of them: Wells, the first mate, Fotheringham the purser, and four deckhands in their sodden rags. They looked as one up to his figure, standing tall, unblinking, traces of a smile lurking somewhere about his eyes.

‘Good evening gentlemen,’ he said, in a voice they would recall as sounding as if he were making their acquaintance in a rowdy tavern, ‘… I think this will be a night we will all remember for some time.’

It was his second premonition. It would prove to be as accurate as the first, though it was not the night itself that they would remember, but his part within its events. This night would almost come to be regarded as the night the voyage started, for prior to it, Martin’s presence had been noticed by only the few who had shared his acquaintance in the confines of officer quarters. This was now his first moment, his real arrival. Later, during the battles that would be fought, there would be those who sought him out in the midst of the action, eager to share his space. There were those who thought him to be untouchable, blessed, impervious to any bullet or blade. This was the night that it all began, when the first of them saw a reason to follow him.

The men were gathered outside, bracing themselves against the excesses of the storm for a reason. They were under orders to check the movements stirring in the holds below. Occasionally, the ship would shudder as if she was being assailed from the deep, her bow scraped along a reef or even shaken by the tentacled grip of an aquatic monster hiding under the waves. For the captain and his crew however, the truth was all the more disturbing; the threat came from within, the precious goods that gave purpose to the entire venture had broken loose and were in danger of destroying both themselves and the ship. Captain Henry had ordered that the movement be halted and this group had gathered around the hatch that would give entry down into the after hold. None however showed any inclination to pass inside, instead they crouched with an ear to the opening as if waiting for a signal from below.

‘Is there anyone down in there?’

Martin had to shout just to hear himself in the rain-soaked gale. His question drew only a shaking of heads by way of reply.

‘What is the problem?’

Again, no one rushed to reply. Martin had the feeling he was breaking some kind of silent truce between the men. He had had enough though of being treated as an interloper.

‘I will go inside.’

He placed one leg on the iron hinge that held the hatch door open and prepared to climb down. An arm appeared to halt his progress and pull him back towards the deck. It was Fotheringham, who appeared excitable and spoke between taking in gulps of air.

‘There is no problem here, Doctor, we have been listening out for stray cargo for the last hour. Everything in this hold is properly stacked and bound, I will swear by it.’

‘Then why won’t you let me go in and check?’

Fotheringham shook his head in a display of exasperation. ‘Because you have no business down in the holds, sir. It is dark inside, there is nothing to see, and if harm should come to you when down below I have no intention of being held accountable for it.’

The look on Martin’s face made Fotheringham draw the young surgeon closer; he spoke more quietly, pressing his mouth close to Martin’s ear. ‘It is dangerous, sir … a man could be crushed … there is no point in courting danger. We must only enter if strictly necessary and that will be if we hear something that makes us feel that is an appropriate action. Then it will be one of the hands, sir; them that were responsible for stowing the cargo should also be charged with securing it when it breaks loose, that’s what the captain says.’

‘Where is he?’

‘The captain? Up on the forward hatch. That’s where it sounds as if something is happening, they will have the Devil’s job to fix that. I wouldn’t go bothering him now, and I wouldn’t go volunteering to go inside either … Unless you want to be judged a fool, or just plain impertinent, sir. Understand?’

Martin paused; he didn’t understand, but the debate hardly seemed worth entering. A fool or impertinent. Whose opinion was this meant to be, the captain’s, or his supine lackey’s? How could it be that the ship – and all aboard – were in danger, yet the situation could only be saved by those who were expendable rather than those charged with command?

The Anne rose up on another menacing swell, the surging motion passing through from side to side leaving them all clutching at the rails and each other for safety. All except Martin, who rode it in his boots, hands staying still by his side as he eyed the purser with an expression approaching distaste.

‘As long as he doesn’t take me for a coward I shall be well satisfied.’

He turned and moved forward, striding against the full force of the wind as he made his way along to join the second group of men on deck. This was much larger, over twenty gathered around the opening to the largest of the holds. As the bows were lifted by successive waves, the Anne’s prow was left high in the air, making Martin’s journey an uphill hike. He gradually edged higher, closer to the advance party clinging on near the summit. He could hear the captain’s voice as his bellowed instructions were blown down towards him.

‘No lamps … Let your damn eyes do their work!’

The tone was harsh; Captain Henry meant his men to obey. Martin saw immediately that this group had the more demanding of the deck assignments, foremost and most exposed to the elements, entrusted with the largest hold, the one that was making the most noise. Even to a novice sailor like himself, the difference between the echoes emanating from this space and the one he had just visited was distinct. Here also, the men were set about their business; desperately tying down the sails to the yards to stop them being inflated by the blasts of wind, sweeping the water from the deck that the waves sought to deposit every time they launched an assault over the bow, feeding the lengths of rope into the deep, dark, dangerous pit that was the hold where their colleagues were now surveying.

‘Captain Henry?’

The captain’s head jerked around swiftly. His mouth was drawn tight.

‘What?’ He looked at Martin with immediate distrust, as if he did not recognize him. His expression barely changed when the stranger’s identity finally registered. What use a surgeon in a crisis like this? ‘… What is it, man!’

‘I am here to let you know my services are available, sir.’

The offer seemed to leave the skipper wrongfooted.

‘Aye … Of course. We have … no need. No injuries.’

‘I will do whatever is required, please be assured of that, sir.’

The captain waved a hand, the motion almost dismissing Martin and the rain as one and the same irritant.

‘How many are down there?’

The captain ignored the question. It was left to the second mate, Gardiner, to furnish an answer. He tugged Martin to one side, perhaps fearful of being overheard by his superior.

‘Jim and Peter … the lads. It was them who was meant to have it all secured when we left port, so them ’as to sort it out, Captain says. He’s not best pleased, no, sir … Can you smell the scent of alcohol?’

Martin pushed his head directly over the hatch; a sweet odour met his nostrils, mixed in amongst the damp wood and salt spray. He nodded. Gardiner stepped closer and spoke with the voice of a man in mourning.

‘Spillage, for sure, aye. Captain Henry is not best pleased,’ he said solemnly.

The captain’s displeasure was obviously the prime concern of the ship’s senior crew, a matter more pressing than the danger of the loose cargo itself. Martin wondered how it could be that one man could impose his will so absolutely over others. Was this a hindrance or a help in this current predicament, did their fear of him lessen their fear of the storm, was that the intention of this grim leadership? Or was he a simply a latter-day Canute, trying to command the waves through the hold he had over the crew?

The Anne was gaining height suddenly, pushed upwards by a rapidly forming crest so that for a moment she was perched atop a peak within the ocean, gazing down on the waves below. Martin instinctively broke free of Gardiner’s conspiratorial embrace to survey the scene. He felt his heartbeat quicken as he scanned across the horizon towards the nearest summit. Here was another mountain, a mountain on the move towards them, built on a roaring wall of water at least forty feet high. He struggled to find the words for what seemed an eternity, eventually hearing himself screaming with all his might towards the captain.

‘Another one on the way, sir … starboard side. Haul the lads free! Get them to safety, sir!’

In reply, a flash of angry eyes, a glare to warn of future reproach. Captain Henry addressed his comments to the darkness of the chamber below.

‘Get our cargo fixed, hear me? Make it fast, damn you!’

Martin pushed Gardiner aside to gain access to the rope attached to the men in the hold. The ship was plummeting downward as he did so.

‘Pull them out!’

His hands were wrapped tight around the cord when the wave struck, his intention having been to drag the pair free singlehanded if necessary. Instead, the rope instantly became his means of staying aboard as the full might of the sea raged over and across the tossing deck. He held tight as the ship turned on its side whilst the breaking wave flooded the open hold and swept three hands over into the frothing deep. In that instant he could have been forgiven for believing that the Anne had become submerged, such was the force and volume of water that poured over her bows. Yet somehow she remained afloat, righting herself anew although rocking the stern deck free of another two crewmen in the process. No one saw them go, it was only their final cries for help that lingered.

The stinging of the sea-water acting on his raw hands brought Martin back to his senses. He felt a surge of despair as he looked into the hold, now filled to its very brim with the water that lapped at the hatch.

‘Bail! Bail out the hold!’

The shouts of the captain and ship’s mate had the rest scurrying for buckets and pails, the first of which began to dip into the watery space and relieve it of its unwelcome liquid cargo. Progress was chaotic and slow, the ship continuing to bob and pitch with such violence and unpredictability that seldom would a full bucketload leaving the hold contain more than half of that by the time it was raised clear, the rest spilling back to whence it came. Martin tugged vainly on the rope. Surely what he was watching was a demonstration of the wrong priority being exercised? He looked once more over the bow of the ship. It was now almost a minute since the giant wave had struck. In the moonlight he could see no sign of any other approaching. He would have to take his chance, and take it now. The penalty would be a lifetime of never forgiving himself for not doing otherwise.

The others, to a man, were all studying the entrance in glum silence as he stripped off his jacket. He tried to slow his breathing down, inhaling longer, fuller lungfuls as he lifted his leg on to the side of the hatch. His foot in place, a spring off the deck with the other had him skipping up and over the side and plunging into the uncertain waters of the hold. They greeted him with an icy shock. Reaching for the rope as a guide, he pulled against it to go down deeper, tentatively feeling for the top of the original cargo with his legs. He tried to open his eyes, but they were useless, blinded and stung by the sea salt. All he could do was fight his way down, groping for any kind of familiar shape in the numbing cold. He touched what he imagined to be wooden crates, barrel rims, other ropes and rigging as his discomfort and the lack of air began to bite. The darkness under the water he could have expected, the silence he did not, nor the relative peace this granted from the cacophony of storm and bellowed orders above. Of its own, aside from the cramps and giddiness he was beginning to feel, this was almost worth staying under for.

He had kicked to return to the surface when his left hand ran through what he thought was a mop. Instinctively, he stayed to explore the immediate area surrounding it, in case what he had touched was a scalp. He was floating horizontally and his by now frozen fingers met the texture of more wood, more canvas, more ragged splinters that had once been proud veneers; then shockingly, something less rigid – a substance, a shoulder, an arm, a hand that he squeezed with his. Martin tore blindly at the wall that seemed to have pinned down the components of the torso he had discovered. Was it his imagination or had the other hand sought his, had it pressed his palm in a feeble attempt to signal that Martin’s help was needed? He pulled on the rope with urgent vigour, hoping that those above would themselves take its fluctuating tension as a sign that they too should join the effort to free those trapped below. He was running out of air and knew he had to return to the surface, trailing his arm in the darkness a final time in order to deliver a departing handshake, a simple physical gesture that could perhaps impart a more complicated hope; I have found you, I won’t forget you, I will get you out. He kicked again for the surface.

As soon as his head was above water, the sound of pandemonium returned. Martin tried to shout as he regained his short breath. He had returned to the same scene as before, men vainly trying to empty the hold one pail at a time. The difference in the waterline was negligible and it was beyond belief that only one man held the rope that could be another man’s saviour.

‘He’s alive … For Christ’s sake pull him free, all of you, we cannot let them die like drowned dogs!’

‘Steady with the bailing, men … Master Bosun, can you feel any response to the pulls on the rope?’

The bosun looked blankly at the captain. Martin would later wonder if he had actually heard the question above the rain and wind. The lack of a ready answer seemed good enough for Captain Henry.

‘No response. You have found nobody with your antics, Doctor. The men will bail out the hold as ordered. You will join us on the deck now, sir, at once if you please.’

‘There are two men down there. I have touched one, he is still alive … I beg you, Captain, give the order to haul them out, all hands at once!’

Something in the way he had said it, rather than what he had said, made the men halt their labours. His voice had been that of reason, bereft of anger, fear or even any hint of consternation; it had simply said what had needed to be said. This was the first time Martin would learn that men will listen to a calm voice rather than an imploring one.

‘On deck … now, sir!’

All except the captain would have heeded his call. Martin gave the slightest of nods to the skipper. I have heard you. He raised his knees and ducked his head under the water again, kicking and pushing, diving down with his arms in one fluid movement.

Captain Henry confined Martin to quarters once he finally climbed out of the hold and returned to the deck. He went back to the hammock where he had been sleeping only hours before. The same hammock, the same cabin, the same ship. Yet everything had changed.

The bodies of the two young deckhands originally sent down – Jim O’Rourke and Peter McGill – were recovered just after daybreak. By then the storm had subsided and some of the water in the hold had seeped out of the ship of its own accord. Once the Anne began to sit higher in the water this process moved it faster than any army of buckets could ever have hoped to. In hindsight, the crew realized that the sudden flood had stabilized the loose cargo better than poor Jim and Pete would have managed, however heroic their efforts. May they rest in peace. Their bodies had looked battered and beaten when eventually retrieved, limbs had been broken and twisted in the struggle that must have ensued in the chaos of the dark below.

The two men were wrapped in coarse calico cloth and dispatched back to the waves that had killed them the evening before, the skipper obviously deciding that the longer they stayed aboard, the more their presence might adversely affect crew morale.

In accord with the tradition that dictated all men be present when the captain conducted the funeral rites, Martin’s curfew was briefly withdrawn to allow him on deck.

‘… Harrison, Jones, Kennedy, Cooper, Smith, O’Rourke, McGill …’

Captain Henry’s voice as he read out the list of the dead was steady, strong and authoritative. As if, thought Martin, the presence of the Bible in his hand granted him the right to speak on behalf of God. The God whose will it was that the men be lost so tragically in the night to the storm. The same God who was to be thanked that he had spared the Anne.

‘… Praise be to God. Amen.’

The weather was kind that morning; calm, a gentle breeze working its warm air through the ship’s sodden timbers, effortlessly blowing the wet sails dry. A blue sky arched above the gathering of men on the dot on the sea like a cathedral roof. Somewhere, at some point between the madness of night and the tranquillity of the dawn, the boat had been slipped into Paradise.

So it was that the captain read out the names to a sun-filled morning, those names being uttered together in the ceremony and thus united for eternity; as crew, comrades, and victims of the tempest. Martin listened and knew that this was the history as Captain Henry would record it in his log for posterity. He would write how, under his stewardship, the steady progress of the Anne had come to an abrupt and unfortunate end when confronted by a rage of unimaginable power. How, under his command, the men had held their resolve despite daunting odds, had remained steadfast, protecting cargo and vessel, a testament to the discipline captain and crew displayed when faced with the most severe of tests. And with his own hand, pondered Martin, Captain Henry would exonerate himself from any blame attached to the deaths of the men under his command. O’Rourke, McGill. Drowned aboard ship. A strange history. Left to die in order that the cargo be protected, so that their bodies could become buffers for the more precious goods being transported, the ones Captain Henry had ordered be stacked in such haste at the outset of the voyage. They had died so that the captain’s authority could be maintained in the face of impertinence from the lower ranks. Harrison, Jones, Kennedy, Cooper, Smith. Ordered to remain on deck so as to defy the waves that might claim them whereas lesser captains would have had them serve no immediate purpose and stay in quarters. O’Rourke, McGill. Drowned aboard ship. Bodies as cargo. Never again, thought Martin. Everything had changed.

Now let me introduce a great influence on my life, someone who has floated in and floated out, probably without ever realizing the effect he was having. Someone of whom I thought warmly, until recently, very recently; although when I reflect in any kind of detail on the past, I realize he is consistently linked to the very worst decisions I have ever made. Someone of whom now, when I’m trying to remember from whatever memories I have of him, I realize I know nothing at all. I mean, I can tell you what he looked like, how he looks now, the few things he said when I first met him, and the way he finds it impossible to say anything without employing a drop of his languid shoulders to add whatever nuance of irony or malice is required for his pronouncements. All this I can tell you, but what strikes me in doing so is that every attitude, belief or opinion I thought he had is exactly that – those that I thought he had. Because Jérome never gave anything away, at least willingly, and maybe that’s what drew me to him in the first place. This would be back in the heady days of my donut-selling spree at Camp Les Acacias. I had never met anyone like him before, anyone so aloof, so distant, and yet so in tune and central to the mood of the moment. His was a presence that rock stars spend years perfecting; of the people but removed from them. At least, that’s the way he struck me. The doubts came later, too late, that my adulation could be misplaced. You see, I had been raised in a world of certainties, knowing my place in a cheerless family living a cheerless life in a damp and cheerless corner of a cold and cheerless country. Still, the future was there for us to grasp, if we were ready with the grim application required for success, so there was no reason not to be happy, no excuse at all. Then here, in the south of France in the summer of ’85, I meet someone who really doesn’t give a shit about anything. I really mean anything. Nothing touched him, nothing stuck. So when I try to describe his character perhaps the most relevant thing to say about Jérome is that he had no character, only characteristics. He could have stepped right off the page of an airport novel, one with a cover of a girl in a bikini holding a gun, or maybe an open suitcase full of cash. As shallow as that in that regard, paper-thin I guess, albeit in an endearing sort of way. Nothing ever exciting or angering him, the only thing that ever mattered being whatever it was he wanted to do at that precise instant. Tomorrow? The shoulders droop comically, like a withered flower in a cartoon; irrelevant

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