Deck Boy, page 21
“You’d never have known about them if Ben hadn’t told you.” His big round face was earnest. “I never expected it to work myself, not really, not just like that. But it did, and I’m glad. They deserved it.”
Michael tried to digest it. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.” He drank off the last of his gin. “And what’s this about a spell. Ben says heard you muttering something.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t tell me?”
“It’s forbidden.”
“Forbidden? Who by?”
“Don’t keep on at me, Michael. I knew you would, that’s why I never told you.”
“But Ossie, do you believe all this magic stuff, this voodoo, whatever you call it?
“It worked, didn’t it? I’ve been studying.”
I glanced up at his bookshelf. It held three or four paperbacks. A bigger book lay on the bunk, hastily hidden beneath a pile of washing. A corner protruded. Michael pulled it out, a tattered black volume with antique gold lettering on the cover: Necromancy, a Dictionary of the Occult by – the name was mostly worn away but something like Aydin Baghdatur. There was a second book, Secrets of the Tarot. I had not seen them before. If Ossie had a collection of such titles, he kept them well hidden.
“If you want to know what I done here, Michael,” he said, “if you really want to know, I’ll tell you. There’s four things you need.” He counted them on his fingers. “What they call the image: you’ve got to have a manikin or something to work on – it doesn’t have to be wax, it could be cloth, or wood, anything really. Then some personal things to connect it to the victim. The punishment – like the needles or fire or something. And lastly the words – and the words are secret.”
“What about the chicken innards?”
“That’s more for divination, telling the future, like the tarot cards. But yes, you’re right, sometimes you need something like that: pebbles, bones, salt.” He took the books back and covered them with his washing. “I don’t want to keep talking about it.”
“So that’s the three of them punished.” Michael rocked the Ryland doll by the needle stuck in its back. “What about these? Do you want them dead?”
“They killed Curly. Luigi says he’d have cut their throats. Barbara says he’d have helped him. Back in India they’d have been hung.”
There didn’t seem any answer to that.
Ossie unwrapped the Steve doll. To my eyes, at least, it appeared unchanged from Panama, just the one darning needle stuck through its foot. Presumably he didn’t think Steve Petersen deserved to be killed, or maybe he hadn’t got round to it yet.
Steve was, I thought, the last of his enemies, but there was a fourth package in the drawer. Ossie handed it to me. Why me, I wondered, and opened it on my knee.
It was another wax figure, one I had not seen. Unlike the others, this was not pierced by needles but bound hand and foot with string. A crude gag covered its mouth.
“Who’s that?” I said.
Ossie’s weak eyes were watering. He mopped his cheeks and gave a little smile. “See if you can work it out.”
Michael examined it. “I know.”
He handed it back. Squiggles for curls, the scratched outline of a shirt and shorts.
“Tony?” I said.
Ossie beamed
“What’s he done to you?”
“Nothing, except he’s mates with the other three. I done that one for you, Ben.”
“For me!”
“Everyone knows he’s got it in for you. So I tied him up, tried to make him a bit helpless like. Only I can’t get anything personal, him living up there with the officers.”
“I can,” Michael said.
“Not for me!” What with the beer, the fumes and now all this, my head was spinning. “Leave me out of it.”
“Been a right pig, what I heard,” Ossie said. “He deserves it.”
“No way!”
I threw the doll back in the drawer. Bound and gagged, it stared up at me from the gouged hollows of its eyes.
Into the Candle Flame
WHEN A secret is betrayed it’s not long before everyone knows. I told no one except Michael, not even Charlie, but Michael’s lifeblood was gossip. There may have been other leaks too, because Barbara spent a whole evening with Ossie at the Ouija board and Kevin went to have his fortune told by the tarot.
However it came about, word of the voodoo reached Ryland and the next night, fuelled by rage, painkillers and whisky, he stormed through the ship to confront Ossie. I wasn’t present but got a first-hand account from the pantry boy who shared a cabin with Kevin:
“You in there?” Ryland’s face was crimson, his eye livid. “Open up!” He hammered on the door. “D’you hear! This is the bosun!”
Ossie didn’t reply.
“Open this door! I want to talk to you.”
A small crowd gathered. Ryland turned on them “What do you lot want?” He raised a fist but they didn’t disperse.
“Bagot or whatever your name is, open this bloody door. I know you’re in there.” If Ossie thought the bosun would go away he was mistaken.
“This is your last chance. I’ll count to three. If you don’t open up, I’m going to kick it in.”
Some thought he was bluffing.
“One … two … Right, I warned you. Stand back.”
He raised his leg and gave the lock a tremendous blow with the flat of his foot. It burst open. The door crashed back.
Ossie was in his underwear. An alb, a long white robe worn by Catholic priests, lay on the deck. Feverishly he was tearing down the drapes from his bulkhead, tumbling everything into the drawer beneath his bunk. Candles flickered in the sudden draught, haloed by the smoke from joss sticks.
Ryland stepped into the cabin. “Dear God!” He looked around and for a long time seemed struck dumb. “You’re out of your mind.”
Ossie cowered away.
“What a stink!” Ryland switched on the overhead light and opened the porthole. “This is what you were doing back there on the Star of Bengal. They come and took you away.” He plucked at a corner of material and uncovered one of the dolls.
Some of the crew, the pantry boy among them, had followed him through the door. They gazed into the open drawer.
“So,” Ryland said at last. “It’s right what everyone’s saying.” He picked up the doll in a meaty paw. “Disgusting! You’re sick! Who’s this meant to be then?” He turned it over, using his bandaged arm with difficulty. “Steve? Big muscles an’ a bloody great needle stuck through his foot?” He tore it out. “Another in his head. What you planning, hit ’im with a meat cleaver?”
He tossed the doll onto Ossie’s bunk and threw the cloth aside. The next he picked up was Rat’bone, scraggy and dirty. The bosun gave a barking laugh. “Not hard to tell who that is. Poor sod!” His fingers were strong. He wrenched out the cruel needles, grimacing as if they were embedded in flesh, and gave Ossie a burning glance.
“Don’t suppose you know who clocked him in the mouth?”
Ossie was terrified. He shook his head.
“No, I don’t suppose you do.”
The bosun picked up Tony, bound and gagged, a few personal items added since the day before. “God knows who that’s meant to be.” He threw it with the others. “And I suppose this is me.” He examined the ugly doll – the tangled hairs, speckled whiskers, scarred eye, fragment of underpants, canvas needles through arm and back – and suddenly was consumed by anger. Dropping the doll in the drawer, he hit Ossie across the head, punched him in the stomach and hit him again. Ossie’s nose began to bleed. “How dare you! Making this thing, this – puppet! Going into my cabin! Raking through my belongings!” He snatched the doll up again and tore out the needles. “Stabbing it with these bloody … How’d you like it if I stuck ’em in you? How’d you like that, eh?” He shook them in Ossie’s face. “For two pins I’d do it an’ all. In your fat neck, in your eyes.”
The pantry boy thought he was actually going to do it but Ryland threw the needles aside. He broke off the doll’s head, pulled off the red cloth and everything that connected him with it, and thrust the pieces into his pocket. He did the same with Rat’bone and Steve and flung the remains out the porthole.
Abruptly he stopped. “What if I did do it to you? Yeah, how’d you like that?” He grabbed some candles and crushed the hot wax together, mingling it with what was left of the dolls.
“No!” Ossie covered his head with his arms. “No, please!”
Ryland tussled with him and pulled out a fistful of hairs. With a horny thumb he jammed them into the wax. “Couple o’ buttons off that jacket.” He wrenched them from the back of the door. “Yeah, and these?” He took Ossie’s toothbrush and comb. “And your watch. And this picture, you and some ugly old tart.”
“Not that!” Ossie struggled to get the photo back.
“Oh, means something to you does that? Good.”
Squeezing and softening the wax, Ryland rolled everything into a misshapen ball. “That enough is it, mixture rich enough? I reckon so. Right, what we do now?” He looked round for inspiration. “How about this?” He recovered three of the canvas needles. “This is you now, right? Well, how does that feel!” He plunged one of the needles, eye-deep, into the ball of wax . “And that!” He added the others, pressing them until the needles disappeared.
“Ahhh!” Weeping with distress, Ossie sank to the deck.
“Now burn!” Ryland pulled the marlinspike from his belt, jabbed it into the studded ball, pushed a few last candles together and held it over the flames. “See how you like it.” The wax smoked and melted, dripping to the chest of drawers. The photo caught fire. A corner of gold watch appeared. There was a smell of burning hair.
At length the bosun carried the fluttering ball of flame to the porthole and tossed it out. Bright for a moment, it arced towards the ocean and was extinguished. “I hope you drown!” He wiped the spike on Ossie’s trousers which were lying on the bunk and returned it to its sheath. “Let that be a lesson not to play games with other people’s lives.” Contemptuously he looked down at the helpless messman. “You’re fit to be locked up.”
He turned to the group of seamen who blocked the entrance. “Out my way.”
At the same moment Barbara, who had been in the messroom, came running down the alleyway. Through the crowd he saw Ossie huddled on the deck. The bosun shouldered him aside. Barbara grabbed him by the shirt. “What’s been happening?”
The bosun turned. “Take your ’and off of me,” he said dangerously, then saw that it was little Barbara. “Oh, it’s you, ducky. Well, do your mate a favour and tell him to lay off the creepy stuff. Get himsel’ a good shrink.”
“He wouldn’t be into ‘the creepy stuff’ if ignorant brutes like you left him alone.”
“Don’t give me that. Nutters like him shouldn’t be at sea. Bloody poofs neither.”
“How about animals that murder their shipmates?”
“Still on about that?” He sneered. “Let you into a secret. I wish it had been the lot o’ you. Now out my way.”
But Barbara was sturdy and wasn’t going to be pushed aside. He bounced back off the bulkhead and spun the bosun round.
“I’m warning you.” Ryland raised his fist. “Lay off me or I’ll – ”
He never got to say what he would do because Barbara grabbed his forearm, red-raw beneath the bandages, dug in his nails and gave it a vicious twist. The bosun screamed, staggered, slumped to one knee.
“Quits!” Barbara kicked him in the ribs and pushed through the crowd into Ossie’s cabin.
Someone had helped him to the day bed. Ossie sat staring into space. Blood was smeared across his cheeks.
“All right, I’ll look after him. Thanks.” Barbara ushered out the onlookers, all but the pantry boy who was a friend, and wedged the door shut.
“Come on, Ossie love.” He put an arm round the fat shoulders. “He’s gone now, the nasty old Cyclops. Barbara’s here. Nothing to be frightened about.”
As Ossie gripped his fingers, Barbara felt a large cold ring. He looked down and saw a death’s head, an iron skull and crossbones laughing up into his face. He shivered and moved his hand away.
“You’re all right now,” he said. “Ssshhh!”
Dump It
OSSIE WAS badly shaken but little by little, with the help of friends and his medication, he became calmer and the trouble died down. Neither side wanted Captain Bell – ‘Ding Dong’ as he was affectionately known – or the mate involved: Ryland because it would resurrect the accusations from the Star of Bengal, and Ossie’s friends because it might lead to his being sent home.
With the bosun hurt and Rat’bone sick, it was a good time aboard Pacific Trader. Freed from Rat’bone’s influence, Steve was a changed man and tried to strike up a friendship with several of the crew, me among them. Lampie, good-hearted beneath his crabbed exterior, took charge of the work on deck and gave me better jobs. Under Samuel’s guidance I learned to splice wire and overhaul the heavy blocks used in cargo work. Twice a week the engineers showed films on a big open-air screen rigged across number four hatch. Charlie and I won the deck tennis tournament. After work, as the sun sank on the starboard bow, we splashed in the pool and swapped stories on the warm deck. On Sunday I took the wheel again, the unpleasantness of last week not entirely forgotten. A couple of times a few of us carried our mattresses out on deck and slept restlessly beneath the stars.
One afternoon brought the idyll to an end.
“If you don’t put them back I’m going straight to the mate.”
“I bet you would too,” Tony mocked. “That’s just your style. Paki bloody two-shoes. You’re jealous, that’s your trouble.”
“I’ve warned you about ‘Paki’ before,” Charlie said. “How if I smash your face in first, then we’ll go and see the mate? Suit yourself.”
We had knocked off for smoko. Tony and Philip, taken off watches for the long haul across the Pacific, had been set the task of scrubbing out the lifeboats and checking the lifeboat stores – food, water, equipment – against a list. Tony, dishonest as ever, had stolen a Swiss Army knife and a jar of barley sugar. Aaron, working on the funnel deck, had seen him. When Charlie heard about it he was incensed:
“Have you got no wit? That’s to keep men alive! When their ship’s gone down and they’re stuck out there in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“I don’t need a lecture from some bloody ordinary seaman. Anyway, who says I took them, where’s the proof? It’s a load of lies.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that in your pocket right now?” He grabbed for Tony’s shorts. “Let’s go have a look in your cabin, see if there’s a nice jar of barley sugar.”
Tony blustered. His face flushed.
“I’m going to check,” Charlie said. “I’ll get Lampie and I’m going to check, every single day that cover’s off. If we find the knife’s gone, or the hand compass, or any of the stores, I’m going to report you. You’re not fit to wear the uniform!”
He came away but it was not the end of the incident.
Two mornings later, some time after smoko, I was mopping out the crew bar when there was a tap at the entrance. I looked round but there was no one there and the alleyway was empty. Some silly trick, I thought, but as I returned my eye fell on a scrap of paper. It lay on the table closest to the door. I knew it had not been there earlier because I’d wiped the tables before I started on the deck. I picked it up, a hastily-written note in thick pencil:
Ben,
Search your cabin. Now!
Things might be hidden there.
Be quick!
Who had left it? Search the cabin? Things might be hidden there? What did it mean? I abandoned my mop and ran the length of the alleyway. A half-eaten bar of chocolate, my own, lay melting in the heat. I popped a couple of squares in my mouth, sucked my fingers and pulled out one of the drawers. It contained my shirts, underwear and a few odds and ends. Nothing was hidden there. I turned to my jeans and sweaters in the drawer under the bunk. Nothing there either. I tipped up my mattress. To my astonishment a leather wallet lay underneath. What was that doing there? Whose was it? Terrified someone would see me, I turned my back to the door and opened it. Half a dozen five and ten pound notes were tucked into one pocket, a small wad of papers into another. It took only seconds to find a name I recognised: Timothy James Nettles – the second mate. I was holding the second mate’s wallet!
Horrified, I stared around the cabin, looking for somewhere to put it. In the end I tucked it against my stomach under my T-shirt. Was there more? The note said things, plural.
I ran to fetch Charlie. He was working with Smoky on the foredeck, greasing cargo blocks in readiness for Fiji.
“You’ve got to come!” I pulled him by the arm.
He shook me off. “What is it?”
“Just come.”
He looked round at Smoky.
“On you go, boy.” Smoky threw him some cotton waste to scrub his hands. “Time for a fag anyway.”
“Hurry!” I dragged Charlie to the steps and ran back to the cabin.
”Someone left this in the bar.” I showed him the note. “So I started looking. Found this under the mattress.” I pulled out the wallet.
“Whose is it?”
“Second mate’s.”
Charlie wore a filthy T-shirt and shorts. He stared at me then back at the note. “Who’s it from?”
“No idea. We’ve been set up.”
“Not hard to guess who by – that bloody senior cadet!”
“Or Rat’bone or the bosun.”
“Second mate’s wallet? Nah, not their style. It’s because of the lifeboat.”
“What do we do? There’ll be somebody here in a minute.”
Charlie was decisive. He drew a deep breath. “Dump it.”
Dump it? Forty or fifty quid? The second mate’s driving licence?
“An’ search the cabin.” He yanked open a drawer.
I stood uncertainly.
