Deck Boy, page 34
Word had gone round and the crew came running to see the grisly sight.
“Stand back. Stand back. Right,” Captain Bell addressed the ABs who had opened the hatch. “Let’s have him out of there.”
They waited while the mate took photographs for the police.
There was room in the hold for only two men. One took his head, the other his ankles and they lifted their shipmate, stiff as a board and so cold that he burned their fingers. The man holding the head stumbled on a carcass of mutton and fell backwards with Rat’bone on top of him. Briefly he was trapped.
He screamed: “Aahh! Aahh! Get him off me!”
Samuel jumped to his rescue and the appalled man scrambled from the hold.
“Ohhh!” He shuddered, scrubbing at his hands. “I couldn’t stand him even when he was alive.”
The body was hoisted to the hatch cover. I thought, this is what they’d have done with me if I’d been left down there in the locker. One arm had frozen at right angles as if he was pointing. I was glad he wasn’t pointing at me.
“Stand back,” Captain Bell said again. “Give us a bit of space.”
He tried to lift Rat’bone’s singlet to see the wounds but blood had frozen it to the skin.
“We’ll have to leave him to thaw for a couple of minutes.”
“Like picking the wrapper off a packet of sausages,” somebody said.
A strand of hair, warmed by the sun, fell to one side. His eyelashes defrosted. Ice crystals melted and trickled down his cheek like tears.
Where was Ossie? I had scanned the crowd a couple of times but he wasn’t there, conspicuous by his absence. Perhaps, with dinner interrupted, he had remained at the serving counter or gone to his cabin. Since the loss of his pills he had taken to sitting on sacks of potatoes in the store-room where it was cool and dark and no one disturbed him.
Not that evening:
“I see you there! You wicked, black, son of Satan!”
The shrill scream made everyone turn. Ossie stood at the rail, two decks above, looking down on the proceedings. He wore his black cassock, a big wooden cross resting on his chest. In his right hand he carried a staff of two-by-two like an Old Testament prophet. He had cut a series of blue sixes across his forehead with some sort of pen, so savagely that blood trickled down to his eyes.
“Your sins have found you out now, haven’t they? No more plotting and planning now, spreading your evil through the ship. The Maggot’s put a stop to you.”
He drew back his arm and flung the staff. It missed the body and rebounded from the hatch coaming. People ducked as it rattled about their heads.
“Bosun.” The mate spoke quietly. “Take two seamen and arrest that man.”
Captain Bell said, “Don’t hurt him, he’s sick.”
“Take care,” the mate said. “He might have a knife.”
“Poor beggar.” Captain Bell shook his head. He looked down at the dead Rat’bone and repressed a swear.
The bosun’s party detached itself from the crowd.
Ossie spotted them. “Your turn next, Ryland. I know about you, what you and that cadet done to our Ben. I’ve got your measure.”
I had not spotted a bag at his feet. He rooted inside and produced something with a gesture of triumph. I could not make it out then saw it was a wax manikin, the same as the ones he had made in Panama. He grasped it with his left hand. In his right hand, though I could not see it, he held a thick sailmaker’s needle.
“See, this is you, Lenny Rat’bone! There! There!”
One, two, three – six times he plunged the needle into the doll’s chest and flung it at the dead man on the hatch cover. Like the two-by-two it missed, struck the metal beam with a crack and shattered into fragments. They fell among the frozen mutton.
The bosun hurried from deck to deck.
“Now you – Cyclops!” Ossie produced a second doll and threw the bag aside. “Hair, see, got it from your cabin. An’ a ring. Missed a snotrag recently?” A scrap of cloth was knotted round its middle. “Got you that burn last time, remember? This time – ” He jammed the needle into the doll’s back and screwed it round.
The bosun was upon him. Ossie dodged behind a winch. The seamen cut him off. It was over in seconds. One got an arm round his neck. Unseen by the captain, Ryland thumped a fist into his stomach, clubbed him across the head. They dragged him out, choking and screaming and struggling.
“Shut up!” Ryland called down to the mate: “What you want doing with him?”
“Lock him in the fo’csle.”
Captain Bell murmured in his ear.
“No, take him to the sick bay,” the mate said. “Inner cabin where the bunks are. There’s bars on the porthole.”
The captain scanned the crew and found Barbara. “Stay with him, Tanner, see he’s all right; you should be safe enough. Jones, you’re a strong reliable chap, wait by the door just in case. I’ll come along when I’ve finished here.”
Barbara and Samuel departed. Slowly the buzz died down.
Captain Bell gave a deep sigh, the sigh of a man who had been at sea too long. He looked down at the thawing body. Trickles crossed the canvas. With the tips of his fingers he hooked up Rat’bone’s singlet. Stab wounds showed black through the sticky red. I craned my neck and counted six. He held it while the mate took more photographs.
“Any sign of a knife, Two-oh?” he said. “One of those big galley jobs by the look of it.”
The second mate and Philip searched among the carcasses. “Could have fallen through.”
“Over the side more likely,” the captain said. “Leave it for now, police job anyway.” He pulled down the singlet and stepped back, wiping his fingers on a handkerchief. “Better get him back in the cold.”
Returning Rat’bone to his resting place was less respectful than it might have been. Kevin was sent for a sheet of polythene in which to wrap the body. He returned with two plastic sacks, one stencilled ‘carrots’, the other ‘baking potatoes’.
“Taters! That’s very nice!” Lampie commented.
“It’s all I could find,” Kevin protested. “They are clean.”
“They’ll do fine, son,” said Captain Bell. “Just to keep off the frost.”
“Like freezer bags.”
“That’s right, like freezer bags.”
“Sick bags would be too good for him,” Michael said, “what he did to Ossie.”
The projecting arm posed a problem. Either it had to be broken and forced down to his side, or a sack had to be slit and the arm left sticking out like a signpost. So one bag was cut and pulled over Rat’bone’s snarling head, the other over his feet, and they were bound like a clumsy parcel with one bare arm protruding. Then two sailors grasped the bags and slid him to the brink of the hold. Unnoticed by one, the arm swung upright and Rat’bone’s fingers clawed up the leg of his shorts. He gave a yell and jumped back.
“Ooh! I hate bodies.” He rubbed his leg as if the chill of death had got right into his bones. “Give me the creeps.”
Another AB took his place. Carefully they lowered their shipmate into the smoking hold. But the plastic was slippery and pulled from their hands. The body slewed and fell. With a noise like a coconut, Rat’bone’s head bounced off the frozen mutton.
Michael gave a shriek of laughter and clamped a hand over his mouth.
“Come on there, show a bit of respect.” There was a twinkle in the second mate’s eye. “Philip, straighten him up. Put him on his back.”
Michael said, “Once defrosted do not re-freeze.”
The hold was sealed and covered. Beneath the plugs the cold tightened its grip on Rat’bone’s thawing body.
The pantry boy turned on the seawater hydrant and sprang into the pool with one of the greasers. The crowd dispersed.
I joined Michael and we leaned on a rail, catching the last rays of the sun. The sea was gold, so bright it hurt my eyes. I turned my back.
“Deserves everything he got.” Michael was unforgiving. “Poor Ossie.”
I had been thinking about it. “How much do you know about all this?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know perfectly well, you and Barbara.”
“What about me and Barbara?”
“He tried to stop me reporting the loose canvas.”
“Well, he’d just come down for a swim, probably wasn’t very interested.”
“Oh, come on, Michael.”
“What?”
“Hiding the body like that, it’s too big a job for one man.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked me in the eye. The look was too direct, his face was too honest. With a jolt I realised that my suspicions were correct. Michael and Barbara, having met Ossie sometime during the night, had helped him to get rid of the body. Whether he had gone to their cabins or they had met by chance, there was no way of knowing. In either case, it made them accessories to murder. What a nightmare for my two gay friends, finding Rat’bone covered in blood then carrying him about the ship! Small wonder Michael was unwilling to admit it.
He hid his face by turning to the sunset. Neither of us spoke and after a while he pushed himself from the rail. “Well, see you later. This girl needs a shower and a few stiff gins.”
I changed the subject: “Captain handled it well, didn’t he?”
“Who, Daddy Bell? He’s an old darling. Got class. Not many of his sort around. Incidentally,” Michael took refuge behind his camp manner, “I don’t think I’ve told you, I just love those trunks. With your eyes and colouring. Like those gorgeous Australian boys you see at the Olympics.”
“They’re just trunks,” I said. “Ten dollars.”
“Don’t give me that. Don’t pretend to be all macho and innocent with Michael. He can see through you.”
He was right, I did quite fancy myself in them.
“You’re nothing but a tease. If Luigi was here he’d give you such a slap.”
“Michael, stop it.”
He laughed. “Anyway, if you want any dinner you’d better get along now.”
“Kevin’s put it in the hot cupboard,” I said. “Going to have a dip first.”
He went below and I returned to the diving platform. With a tremendous per-lunk I joined the others in the pool then stood, ducking and ducking again, scrubbing my chest and hair as if the clean ocean water could wash away the proximity of death.
The Fatal Snack
“IT’S JUST wicked,” Michael said. “When you think what he was like that day we signed on, remember? We went to Chez Marilyn. He was so happy, so pleased to see us all. I know his mother had died but that was a blessing really.”
“Fat old cow,” Barbara said. “Sitting there like the potato witch, sucking the life out of him.”
Michael nodded. “The hospital had got his medication sorted out. It was a fresh start. And now this, it’s too awful to think about. And it’s all the fault of that ugly scrag out there in the deep freeze.”
“And the bosun,” Barbara added.
“That’s right, and the bosun. And the sooner someone does the same to him the better it’ll be for all of us.”
It was three days later, nine in the evening, and we sat in Michael’s cabin. By that time we had travelled north beyond the Great Barrier Reef, turned west through the Torres Strait at the north-eastern tip of Australia, and now were sailing through the jewelled seas of Indonesia. At midday the sun stood right above the mainmast and although twice we had been assaulted by torrential rain squalls, most of the time the skies were hot and clear. Occasionally we passed close to an island and lined the rails to see the jungle-covered slopes and white shores lined with palm trees and villages.
But while the rest of us enjoyed our days in this tropical paradise, Ossie, locked in the sick bay with a guard for his own protection, grew steadily worse. His friends called it schizophrenia; the rest, more simply, said he was barking mad. His mood changed by the hour. Barbara had done his best to scrub out the line of blue sixes on his forehead. The cuts had scabbed over but some of the ink had got beneath his skin and it would take a surgeon to remove it.
That evening, when I had called before dinner, I could get little sense out of him:
“See that island this afternoon, Ossie? Great smoking volcano.”
He wasn’t interested. “Look, Ben, it’s snowing.” He had picked a cushion to pieces and threw a cloud of feathers into the air, laughing as they floated to the deck. He did it again. Little white feathers clung to his hair and shoulders.
“That’s nice,” I said, wondering how it was all going to be cleared up. “A bit hot for snow though.”
“This is hot snow.” He had taken out his dental plate and gave me a broad smile, revealing the gaps where his teeth had been broken in the rapids.
“How are you feeling anyway?” I said.
The smile faded. “All right, I suppose, but I can’t find the lizards. And they won’t let me have mum’s ashes.”
“Lizards, Ossie?”
“You know, those green ones, long as this.” He held his hands out. “Forky tongues. They were here yesterday but now they’ve gone. I’ve looked everywhere.”
There were two bunks in the sick bay; a scatter of clothes and magazines lay on one. He lifted them aside but found no lizards hiding underneath. “Maybe Tiger saw them off. You know Tiger. What’s his name?”
“Do you mean Attila?”
“That’s him, Attila.” His brow creased and I thought he was going to cry. “Where’s Attila, Ben? My little Attila.” He looked around his hospital cabin, grasped the bars on the open porthole. “Puss-puss. Come on, my lovely.”
I could not tell him that Attila, showing complete disregard for the man who loved him, had immediately moved in with Aaron and me. Of the two of us he favoured Aaron and sprang up to sleep on his bunk.
Back in Michael’s cabin I told them about my visit. “But why is he talking about lizards – on a ship?”
Barbara explained: “One of the greasers brought him a jigsaw, an old Indian temple or something, you know, sinking back into the jungle. There were lizards on the rocks. Somebody must have taken it away.”
Now he told me it made a sort of sense. “And all those feathers,” I said.
Michael laughed. “I’ll take the Hoover along later.”
I pictured it. “He’s got a lot of friends.”
“Well, I should hope so. He’s a nice man and he’s been very badly treated. Life’s given him a raw deal. People like you and me, we don’t know how lucky we are.”
There didn’t seem any answer to that.
I ran my finger down a dewed can of orange. “But that other,” I said. “You know, about Rat’bone. Tell me again. I don’t quite follow what happened.”
“We could end up in jail,” Barbara said, “you do realise that. For years likely. Maybe in Singapore. That would be lovely, wouldn’t it? For murder – manslaughter anyway. Helping to conceal a body. Accessories after the fact.”
“But I’m not going to tell anybody.”
“What about Charlie if he comes back?”
I hesitated. “Not if you don’t want me to.”
For three months Charlie and Smoky had kept my own secret. They’d been terrific about it: one silly joke, one careless word and I’d have been on the first flight home. If they could do it, so could I.
“All right.” Michael was back in his schoolboy mode: no make-up, hair parted at the side. A decadent schoolboy with a large gin and a cigarette. “Where do you want to start?”
“Why you don’t give up smoking?”
“I have,” he said shortly. “This one’s just to remind me what a disgusting habit it is.”
It wasn’t worth pursuing. “That night,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”
“Right.” He sat up and tucked his feet beneath him. “Rat’bone had been on the lager – with me so far?
“No need to be sarky.”
“And about one o’clock he wakes up and goes for a pee. On the way back he must have seen a light in the galley – ”
“So he goes to look,” Barbara said, “and he finds Ossie in there, helping himself from the fridge.”
“That’s right, he couldn’t sleep so he’d gone to the messroom for something to eat but there’s only these curled-up sandwiches. Galley’s locked, of course, so he goes to get the keys from the chef, finds him snoring like a pig and takes the keys off his locker. You probably don’t remember but we’d had beautiful roast silverside that night, so he takes it out the fridge and cuts himself a beef sandwich. Half a gateau in there too, so he cuts a good slice of that and makes himself up a nice tray. All it needs now’s a cup of tea. So he’s boiling the kettle and tidying things away when who turns up but Rat’bone in his chopped-off jambies and droopy vest.”
“Starts in right away,” Barbara continued. “You know the kind of thing: ‘That’s how Maggots get so fat; I’ll have that or I’ll report you to the chief steward; how’d you fancy a good thumping, getting me in trouble with the old man?’ Then he sees the knife Ossie’s been using to cut the beef. ‘What if I stuck this right in your fat belly?’ he says, and he goes to pick it up.”
“One of those big butcher’s knives,” Michael said. “Nine-inch blade, sharp as a razor.”
“That’s right. Anyway, Ossie grabs up the knife before he can get it and he points it at him. Scared out of his wits. Threatens him with it. Tells him to get out the galley, leave him alone.”
“Yes, I can follow all that,” I said, “but it’s what happened next. That’s the bit I can’t understand.”
“Me neither, not exactly. Take a psychologist, I reckon. Anyway, Rat’bone’s so used to Ossie being his victim, backing off like a rabbit, he’s sure he’ll never use it and he stands there tempting him. ‘Go on then,’ he says. ‘You got the knife, use it. I dare you.’ But Ossie’s terrified. ‘Come on, right here,’ he taps his skinny chest. It’s like Ossie’s hypnotised, he can’t move. ‘See,’ Rat’bone says, ‘you haven’t got the bottle. You’re chicken. You and all your poof mates, you’re just pathetic!’ And Ossie doesn’t know what happened next. Really he doesn’t. All he can remember is how easy the knife went in. He couldn’t believe it, right to the handle. And the surprised expression on Rat’bone’s face. And when he falls over backwards, Ossie stabs him five more times to make six, his lucky six. And this is the bit that gets me, then he just leaves him lying there and boils up the kettle again and makes his mug of tea – like nothing’s happened.”
