He was just leaving, looking puzzled and unhappy, when one of the crew, squatting on his hunkers below the workbench, held up one of the missing bolts. All eight of them were there where they had fallen, covered with dirt and a pile of steel and wood shavings. The place looked as though it had not been cleaned out since the ship had been handed over by the Army.
I stayed until the cross-members were securely bolted together; then I took the bos’n with me up to the bridge. Holland had to be told. A first officer who was drunk, never took a watch, never checked the cargo, was one thing. But not checking the bow doors, leaving those cross-members unsecured — that was something different: gross negligence that endangered the ship and everyone in her. But we were dropping the pilot, and Holland wasn’t on the bridge, only Luke. I turned to the bos’n. ‘Where’s Mr McAvoy’s cabin?’ I was so angry I decided to have it out with the man myself. ‘Where is he?’ I repeated as the bos’n stood there gazing dumbly at his feet.
‘Okay, kum,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Mi suim.’
I was thinking McAvoy must have some hold over his captain; otherwise Holland would never put up with it. But that was no reason why I should. And then to find him tucked up in his berth in the obvious place, in the first officer’s quarters right across the alleyway from the spare cabin I had been allocated aft of the wardroom. He was lying flat on his back, his pale blue eyes wide open, a vacant stare, the skin of his face haggard and drawn, and so drained of blood he looked positively yellow, as though he were suffering from jaundice. ‘McAvoy. Can you hear me?’
He must have been getting on for sixty, a hard little monkey of a man with battered features and a scar running white under the hairs of his half-bare chest. ‘Why aren’t you up on the bridge? Why haven’t you secured the bow doors?’ I didn’t expect any reply, but I thought I saw a flicker of comprehension in those dull, lifeless eyes. They were like two pebbles that had dried out and lost their lustre. ‘Where do you keep the stuff?’
That at any rate got through to him, his eyes suddenly wide and alarmed. ‘Fu’off. None of your fu’ing bus’ness.’
I started searching his cabin then, emptying drawers, lockers, the lot, and flinging everything on to the floor. ‘Ge’out,’ he screamed. ‘Ge’out, d’ye hear me?’ He had hauled himself up to a sitting position, his head gripped in his hands as he groaned. ‘Wha’ye looking for?’
‘You know bloody well what I’m looking for.’ I reached over the bunk and shook him. ‘The bow doors. Don’t you know enough to have them braced? Now come on. Where is the stuff?’ He started to fight me off, his nails clawing at me, his teeth bared. ‘All right,’ I said, flinging him back on the bed. ‘I’ll find it in the end. And when I do, I’ll break every goddam bottle. Understand?’
‘You do that,’ he breathed, ‘I’ll kill ye. Aye, I will.’ He was staring at me, his eyes alive now with malevolence. ‘Wha’ are ye doing on this ship anyway?’
‘Standing in for you, you useless bastard.’
The malevolence deepened to blazing anger. ‘You call me that again-’
‘I’ll keep on calling you that until you’re on your feet and sober enough to do your job. You’re supposed to be the first officer. You’re a bloody menace. A danger to the ship, do you hear me?’ I left him then, knowing I had got under his skin and wondering just how dangerous he’d be when the drink was out of him. If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have been a little gentler with him.
The bos’n was waiting outside the door, and I made him show me all the likely places. In the end we found it tucked away in a locker behind the life-jackets, half a dozen bottles of whisky and two of vodka. We carried them through the wheelhouse and out to the bridge wing, where I jettisoned the lot. We were out through the Heads now, and the ship was rolling.
Holland came into the wheelhouse just as I was getting rid of the last bottle. ‘What’s that you’re throwing overboard?’ he asked me. And when I told him, he said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ He didn’t wait for me to explain, but added as though to justify his forbearance, ‘He suffers from melancholy. He’s a manic-depressive. I think that’s the medical term. Without a drink inside of him he’s no good at all.’
‘Well, he’s no good with it, so it makes no difference.’ And I told him about the bow doors. ‘If you’d had that southerly buster when you were coming down the coast … ’
‘Well, we didn’t,’ he said sharply. ‘Anyway, they’d have held. We never use those cross-members. Takes too much time. And Mac,’ he added, ‘he needs his liquor. Without it he goes crazy. He’s afraid.’
‘Of what?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Death. Devils. All the dark imaginings that inhabit men’s minds. He’s quarter French and quarter Mortlocks.’ He didn’t tell me what the other half was. He didn’t have to. It was Glasgow Irish, the accent unmistakeable. ‘He was with my grandfather through the war, and afterwards. Fought with him, ran the schooners, taught me most of what I know about the sea. Never mind,’ he added. ‘I’ll see he gets enough.’
I was about to argue with him, but then I thought better of it, knowing that men who have been together a long time develop ties that are sometimes closer than blood relations. Shelvankar would fill me in on the details. It was Shelvankar who had shown me to my cabin, a talkative little Indian Fiji who acted as radio operator when he wasn’t dealing with stores, fuel, cargo inventories and bills of lading. He came in shortly afterwards with the latest weather forecast. It was good; easterly Force 3 decreasing, sea calm with a slight swell, some rain showers, visibility moderate. The general situation indicated that conditions would further improve as we headed north to the Queensland coast.
Holland spiked it and turned to me. ‘Care to take over, Mr Slingsby?’ I nodded, the formality not lost on me. ‘Course 010°. Keep her about five miles offshore.’ He stayed there for a while, watching as I entered up the log, checked the chart and the Pilot. Apparently satisfied, he said, ‘Luke will relieve you at four. I’ll take the last Dog.’ And he left me to it.
There was only one ship in sight, a coaster heading north up the coast and about two miles ahead of us. A shower of rain was drifting across the sea to the north-east. I stood for a while by the portholes, watching it as it swept across the coaster, enjoying the movement of the ship under me, the lift and roll as the blunt bows breasted the swell, the steady throb of the engines under my feet. The tank deck below me, made strange by the ungainly bulk of the Haulpaks, rose and fell, the heavy vehicles straining at the chains as she rolled. Once, trying to make the lee of Barra, we had been caught out in Force 10. If we’d had this sort of a load, I thought, we’d have gone to the bottom.
I was alone except for the helmsman, everything so familiar, yet because of him it was different, the skin of his face a glossy black below the woolly halo of his hair and no means of communicating with him except in Pidgin. He was from Shortland Island. I checked it out on the Solomon Island Chart 214; it was a small island just south of Bougainville. ‘Are all the crew from the Solomons?’ I asked him.
He shook his head. ‘Sampela long Bougainville en Buka. Buka bilong Solomons wantaim. Nau Papua Niugini.’
I went back to the charts, found the one that gave the planned details of the Buka Passage, and with this and the Admiralty Pilot I began to familiarise myself with the approach. It was something I always did. I have an orderly mind, and I like to know what lies ahead of me before I make any sort of a passage. When I had finished with that, I turned back to the chart we were currently using, the Pacific Ocean 780, South West Sheet. It was old and faded, much used, with many pencil marks only half rubbed out in the area of the Solomons. Looking at it, I wasn’t surprised that Holland was worried about navigation. Sometime in the second night out we would be off Sandy Cape. We would have to leave the Australian coast there, just short of the Great Barrier Reef, and head north through the hazards that littered the chart between Queensland and New Caledonia. Variation between true and magnetic at that point was given as 10°E.