all aboard
by Patrick Johnston
August 30th, 1940 - Jack is allotted a bunk several decks down with along with a bunch of army grunts. Third Class, just above the engine rooms. The noise is brutal. He takes one look and decides that the decor, company, and ambience are not really to his taste. The place will be rank in a few days. Stale air, sweat and tobacco. He goes up a few decks and ensconces himself in one of the more modest cabins in First Class. A mid ranking Officer opens the door. Jack, reclining on the bed, smoking a cigarette, gives him a sternly questioning look. The officer mutters a brief apology and quickly leaves. The trick is to always to act like you belong, but never to overplay your hand.
Jack gets to eat the fine food in the First-Class Dining Salon. He places a dog-eared manila folder with the words ‘Eyes Only’ on the dining table. This is sufficient to deter others from taking a seat at his table. He eschews the offers of champagne. He is politely aloof, and dresses impeccably in his bespoke civilian suit. The Brass just assume him to be either a high-ranking bureaucrat or an Intelligence man. In either case such sorts are best kept at an arm’s length.
He spends his days reading and smoking cigarettes. In his cabin when the weather is bad. Up on deck when the sun shines. He has never been, before, on a long sea voyage, so has borrowed copies of the works of Melville, Conrad, Stevenson, H.G Wells and Jules Verne from his father-in-law’s collection, so as to mark occasion and time. The days pass.
He reads a lot. He smokes too much. He sleeps a lot. He hovers hypnagogic, half inside the dreamworld, half out. He follows the storylines. His role is that of an aloof observer. He has the contrived disinterest and utter fascination of an anthropologist. This is not mere pass-timing, but research. He has an intuition that some of this exploration will bear fruit, perhaps in unexpected ways. When the moment is ripe. He searches the Story Lines looking for narrative stubs. He has a handful stashed up his sleeve. You never know when you might need one to get yourself out of a tight spot.
And the drift drifts like the tides…
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And the drift drifts like the tides…
Mr. Marlow is wont to reminisce and recount the tales from his younger days, as we sit and smoke our pipes and sip our rum. Some evenings we sit on the deck of his sloop enjoying the cool change of the breeze. Other days, on the veranda of the makeshift tavern that overlooks the waterfront. On the particular evening in question, I recall that we were aboard his sloop. The pain in my hip was intense that day, and I was in no hurry to commence my limping journey back to my digs. The path churned by the rain and commerce of the day. Perhaps my reticence to leave was detected by Marlow, in the slump of my shoulders, and slowness to drain my cup, for he reached across and refilled it with a generous draft of the spirit, and then set about the quiet ritual of refilling his pipe. Tap-tap-tap. Tobacco, moist and pungent.
We sat in companionable silence whilst he completed his task, listening to the lapping of the waves. Finally, lighting the pipe, he settled back into his sea chair, with a gentle sigh. I thought that perhaps the talk was done for the evening, and it was his simple intent that we should sip our rum and gently puff upon our pipes for so long as the mood might last. However, after a few minutes of quiet reverie he cleared his throat and began to speak.
- It is oft said that Sailors are a breed unto themselves, he began in his slow calm manner - in their capacity for superstition and flights of fancy. Myself, I do not presume to judge the rights or wrongs of this supposition, but it seems to me that a man who lives his life at the mercy of the sea might perforce see or experience such things as that might defy the rational logic of a more landbound existence.
Since this is not at odds with my own observations I nod acquiescence, although it is clear that he speaks now without the need for an audience.
- Did I ever tell you about the fortunes of Captain Jack? He does not pause for an answer, nor does he expect one. It is a tale that he has told any number of times, although each telling differs markedly from the last in many of its details.
Captain Jack, although simply Jack he was known in those early days, first set sail from the port of Glasgow on the thirtieth day of August in the year of our lord 1840 Anno Domini, having taken the kings shilling on that very day, and within barely an hour had climbed the gangway to find himself upon the planks of His Majesty’s Ship Venus…
The scene is set: a bustling harbour where trade ships and warships and transport ships line the wharfs. Ships of industry and commerce. Ships bristling with guns. Old passenger ships refitted and repurposed to carry men to war.
And the drift drifts like the tides…
So, up the gangway.
Master Daniel Hansen welcomes you aboard…
His wooden leg is carved in the shape of an erect penis, but inverted, so that its head abuts the deck. Tap-tap-tap. Circumcised, of course, so there can be no mistaking the intent. ‘Oakey Dan’ he calls it.
- This leg be for pegging! he leers at the new hands as they board the ship.
- Welcome aboard! It’s the seafarer’s life for ye! But note ye well: it’s not all Rum, Bum, and Concertina - there’s a trivial side this travail, also. There’s cargo to be stowed. There’s decks to be swabbed and sails to stitch. There’s frayed ropes need amending. It’s all in a day’s play.
- Swab the decks, my jolly Jack Tarrs. Up anchor and let away the ropes! Hoist the sail and fly the rag! Man the Crow’s Nest and shiver m’timbers! We sail with the evening tide for distant shores! It’s a quest to the west, lads, against the turn of the world.
Tap-tap-tap goes his pegging leg. He’s an old hand and knows how to run a type ship.
Their destination recedes before them.
And the drift drifts like the tides…
If the ship sinks, Jack is rescued by Dolphins. They teach him their language and they teach him the secrets of life and death. A dove guides his way. He washes up on Ararat, where strange misshapen creatures fossick along the shoreline. Watchers. And there he builds for himself a tower of words.
A tower of words whose meanings slip faster than the thoughts they carry. Of dazzling spires and minarets, follies, and arching bridges. A soaring edifice of impossible architectures. Staunch ramparts bound together by gossamer threads. Insane recursive structures that fold back and mirror themselves over scales of intricacy and size, with ornate buttresses that plunge as they give support and rise as they take support from a myriad of levels whose styles and materials traverse ages past and yet to come. Holographic and endlessly rearranging.
There are words of life and words of death. There are words of lovers and fools. Wisemen and imbeciles and pawns and princes. Practical, esoteric, and profane. Whispering doubts. Vaunting ambitions. Verloren hoops. Jack lies wretched in the shallows, sometimes blank, sometimes watching, sometimes living as it all unfolds. There are people. Their words and motives are unknowable, but they seem to act with coherent purpose. An androgenous being with a strange accent is trying to tell him something in languages that he can’t understand. It wears clothes from another time. Chimeric, it’s face and body keep changing.
He traverses the levels of Babel as a sequence of tests and trials, as he progresses towards the pinnacle. Some of these are mental or moral puzzles, where he must solve riddles or ethical dilemmas. Other times he must fight. He fights battles in gladiatorial arenas, where burning white sand and hot ferrous blood and viscous passion in the air and nostrils. The crowd exults as he delivers the death strike. The crowd exults as he is eviscerated.
He fights knife-handy sailors in basement dive bars. He duels with ancient flintlocks and effete fops. He holds the smell of sweat and blood and breath and shit and fear as he braces in the shieldwall, friends and enemies intimately close in living and dying. He traverses an alien landscape with weapons whose mechanisms are beyond his ken but whose processes are reassuringly familiar. You point, you fire. Massive bursts of energy wreak epic mayhem on bodies, vehicles, and structures. He is part of a small team. They instinctively coordinate and pre-empt. They move and act as a single organism. A decaying rotten moon looms ominous above.
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If the boat is boarded by barbarous buccaneers Jack changes his name to Jim and disguises himself as a cabin boy using a disposable face. He forms a plan to save the day.
He inveigles his way into the Pirates’ trust. Careful Jim! There is an old sea-cook, Silver Bill, who takes Jim under his wing - stick with me, Jim Lad… He has a wooden leg. He calls it ‘Oakey Dan’. Jim had better watch himself.
The Pirates are looking for rum, Navy Rum, and for bread… maybe Silver Bill’s baking skills are not up to scratch. They grab their loot and make off for a secret island. Faces in the fog. A mad castaway called Munro ben Gunn lives there dreaming of cheese… toasted mostly. Maybe that’s what the bread is for… The rum is for drinking. Yo-ho-ho!
Jim outwits the Pirates. He maroons them on the Island and goes to enlist help from His Majesty’s Navy. They confront the pirates and Jim reveals himself to be none other than Jack Ward in swashbuckling disguise - It was I who set the ship adrift…
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If the ship stalls, it stalls stuck in the endless now…
The minutes drag...
Endlessly…
The ship hangs dead. Half the crew are down with Long Scurvy. They are suffering from sumie lung. It takes more than a barrel of limes to sort that. They skulk listlessly below decks in their hammocks. Lacking the enthusiasm even to muster a desultory wank.
A few of the crew remain fit enough to man the typewriters. They beat out sentences on the rickety keyboards, and the type-bars dart out to leave their marks on the yellowing paper. But the ship remains becalmed. The sentences, although grammatical, lack meaning. The words they produce are insufficient to generate a narrative that is strong enough to get the ship moving. Fragments of meaning coalesce but fail to cohere and flow.
The Captain sulks in his staterooms. And so, inertia. And so, the Doldrums.
Welcome aboard the good ship Covid.
Somebody needs to get a narrative going…
Movie pitches are the best bet, because no matter what the initial premise you can take them pretty much any direction you want to go. Just so long as there is a Producer who is willing to go along.
What starts as a story stub for a WW2 movie can easily transmute.
- So, it’s about a British guy who is charged with busting a ring of black-marketeers in the Middle East, right at the edge of the warzone. The black-marketeers are in league with the Nazi’s and are running gold and guns to support various groups who are making all kinds of trouble for the Brits…
Fail we may, but sail we must, be the weather all fair or foul.
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And the drift drifts like the tides…
When the ship sails, it sails across the far northern reaches of the Atlantic, part of a convoy of warships and troop and supply carriers. Strength in numbers, but anyway the U-boat wolf packs are rarely this far north just yet. Jack spends four days spewing his guts. The days seem eternal.
Sighting the shores of Newfoundland and Labrador, it turns to the South, hugging the coast of the North Americas. Past New England. Past New York, that was once New Amsterdam. Down past the old slave states. Cotton for Liverpool. Always keeping close to the coast. And down past the coast of Florida, you can almost imagine the beaches. You can almost imagine lying in the sun on the beaches… But there’s a War to be on with, so that dream recedes before them…
Into the Caribbean, berthing briefly in Nassau. A day-pass. Spending like sailors. Drunk like judges and buccaneers. Not Jack. Some birds fly the coop. AWOL. Not Jack. Somebody else’s criminals. And onward through the sharks and pirate waters, past Cuba, and Dominica, and hitting a whole new continent, South America – the coast of French Guiana, Brazil, Cape Branco – noble white cliffs – and on, and out, and eastbound.
The Sea, the Sea, the open Sea! The mighty Ocean. Snot green and scrotum-tightening. Following the South-East Trade Winds. Across the South Atlantic, with only the Albatross in the sky above them, but whales, and dolphins and flying fish in the water below. They are lucky, the passage gentle. Shite-hawks drop bombs off Cabo Verde. Mostly the shit hits the water. The damage is minimal. And then… Land-ho! The shores of Africa. Sierra Leone for fresh water.
Past Cape Town and on past the Cape of Good hope. Dolphins in their wake, celestio-aquatic guides, alien intelligences with motives unknown… they speak in tongues. Click, click, click. The dolphins guide them past Cape Agulhas, (Cape Fear, jagged needles, jagged ship-killing needles). Nine days shore leave at Durban. Some more men grant themselves a leave of absence. And on and on and up the east coast of Africa, between Mozambique and Madagascar. Lions to the left of them, Lemurs to the right of them, as onward to the valleys of death they sail…
And up past Tanganyika and Kenya, and the rhino-snout Horn of Africa. Past Aden. We’ll be seeing you later. Up through the Red Sea, and on, up, to the Gulf of Suez. And then the canal. Suez. Modern miracle of hydraulic engineering in a land whose history has been defined by such feats. Finally docking in Ismailia, in the Kingdom of Egypt. The long way round. Some eighty odd days at sea.
And then by train to Cairo. The heat! Crikey, the endless heat! Meet the Chief – a whiskered dipsomaniac with the dry cunning of a Fennec. A few days to acclimatise. We ain’t in Blighty anymore. A bit of sightseeing. The pyramids at Giza. The Sphinx, nose bitten, face smitten. Heliopolis. And then it’s off to work…
They send Jack up to Tel Aviv to the Police School where he spends nine weeks learning how to speak some basic Arabic. Then they give him a pass and warrant that states that he is authorised to be in any dress, in any place, at any time in the execution of his duty, and that all service personnel and civilians are duty bound to assist him if and when required. There is some power in that pass. By Jingo.
And then it’s back on a ship down through Suez, and back down to the Southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, to The British Protectorate of Aden.
Photo of Patrick Johnston
BIO: Patrick Johnston is an Anglo-Australian writer and former professor of psychology and neuroscience. His work has appeared in The Louisville Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Thin Air Magazine, and Litro Magazine USA, among others, and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the author of the novel The Gaps Between the Stories. He lives nomadically and writes at dr-patrick-johnston.com.