Алистер Маклин - South by Java Head

Her face was thinned down now, the cheekbones very prominent, and the great scar on her left cheek more livid and uglier every hour as her skin darkened under the burning sun. She was smiling at him now, a small painful smile through sun-cracked lips, then looked away and nodded at Peter. But it was McKinnon who caught the look, interpreted it correctly, smiled in return and lowered the dipper into the little warm, brackish water that was left in the tank.

Almost as if by a pre-arranged signal, a dozen heads lifted and followed every movement of the dipper, McKinnon’s careful transfer of the water from the dipper to a cup, the eagerness with which the little boy clasped the cup in his pudgy hands and gulped the water down. Then they looked away from the child and the empty cup and looked at McKinnon instead, bloodshot eyes dulled with suffering and hate, but McKinnon just smiled his slow, patient smile and the gun in his hand never moved.

Night, when it came at last, brought relief, but relief only of a very limited nature. The burning heat of the sun was gone, but the air was still very hot and stifling and oppressive, and the pitiful ration of water each had received just as the sun had gone down had only whetted their appetite for more, made their raging thirsts all the more painful and intolerable. For two or three hours after sunset people shifted restlessly in their seats in the lifeboat, and some even tried to talk with others, but the talk didn’t last very long: their throats were too parched, their blistered mouths too sore, and always, at the back of everybody’s mind must have been the hopeless thought that, unless some miracle occurred, for some of them tonight’s would have been the last sunset they would ever see.

But nature was merciful, their minds and bodies were exhausted by hunger and thirst and by the day-long energy-sapping power of the sun, and by and by nearly all of them dropped off into a restless muttering sleep.

Nicolson and McKinnon went to sleep too. They hadn’t intended to, it had been their purpose to share the night watches, but exhaustion had dug its fingers as deeply into them as any, and they dozed off from time to time, heads nodding on their chests, then waking with a start. Once, waking out of a short sleep, Nicolson thought he heard someone moving around the boat, and called out softly. There was no reply, and when he called out again and was again answered with silence, he reached under his seat and brought out his torch. The battery was almost gone now, but the feeble yellow beam was enough to show him that all was quiet, that nobody was out of his or her place, every black and shapeless shadow lying sprawled lifelessly across thwarts and bottomboards almost exactly where it had been when the sun had gone down. Not long afterwards, just as he was dozing off again, he could have sworn he heard a splash reaching down through his deep-drugged mists of sleep, and again he reached for his torch. But again there was no one there, no one moving around, no one even moving at all. He counted all the huddled shadows, and the number was right: nineteen, excluding himself.

He stayed awake for the remainder of the night, consciously fighting against an almost overpowering tiredness, against leaden eyelids and a woolly, fuzzy mind, ignoring the demands of a parched throat and dry, swollen tongue that seemed to fill all his mouth that he should let go, let his quivering eyelids fall and bring a few hours’ blessed oblivion. But something far back in his mind kept telling him that he mustn’t let go, that the lifeboat and the lives of twenty, people were in his hands, and when these urgings were not enough he thought of the little boy asleep less than two feet away, and then he was wide awake again. And so a night that was the epitome of all the sleepless nights he had ever known dragged endlessly by, and after a long, long time the first faint streaks of grey began to lighten the eastern horizon.

Minutes passed, and he was beginning to see the mast clearly silhouetted against the greying sky, then the line of the gunwale of the boat, then the separate and distinct forms of the people lying about the boat. He looked first at the boy. He was still sleeping peacefully in the sternsheets beside him, wrapped in a blanket, his face only a white blur in the darkness, his head lying pillowed in the crook of Gudrun Drachmann’s arm. She herself was still sitting on the lower cross seat, twisted round at an uncomfortable angle, her head on the sternsheets. Bending down more closely, Nicolson could see that her head wasn’t resting squarely on the seat but against it, the edge of the wood cutting cruelly into her right cheek.

Carefully he raised her head, eased a doubled corner of the blanket over the edge of the seat and then, moved by some strange impulse, gently moved back the wave of blue-black hair that had fallen forward over her face, concealing the long, ragged scar. For a moment he let his hand rest there, lightly, then he saw the sheen of her eyes in the gloom and knew that she had not been asleep. He felt no embarrassment, no guilt, just smiled down at her without speaking: she must have seen the gleam of his teeth against his darkly-tanned face, for she smiled in return, rubbed the scarred cheek softly, twice, against his hand then slowly straightened, careful not to disturb the sleeping boy.

The boat was settling deeper in the water, the level inside already two or three inches above the floorboards, and Nicolson knew it was time and past time to bale it out. But baling was a noisy business, and it seemed pointless to wake people from the forgetfulness of sleep to the iron realities of another day when the boat could go at least another hour without being emptied: true, many people were up to their ankles in water, and one of two actually sitting in it, but these were only tiny discomforts compared to what they would have to suffer before the sun went down again.

And then, suddenly, he saw something that drove away all thought of inaction, all thought of sleep. Quickly he shook McKinnon awake – he had to, for McKinnon had been leaning against him and would have fallen had Nicolson risen without warning – rose, stepped over the after thwart and dropped down on his knees on the next lower cross seat. Jenkins, the seaman who had been so dreadfully burnt, was lying in a most peculiar position, half-crouched, half-kneeling, his bloodied wrists still tied to the thwart, his head jammed against the tank leading. Nicolson stooped and shook him by the shoulder: the seaman fell further over on his side, but made no other movement. Again Nicolson shook him, more urgently this time, calling his name, but Jenkins would never be shaken awake nor hear his name again. By accident or design – probably by design, and in spite of the ropes that bound him – he had slipped off the thwart some time during the night and drowned in a few inches of bilge-water.

Nicolson straightened his back and looked at McKinnon, and the bo’sun nodded, understanding at once. It wouldn’t do the lifeboat’s morale any good at all if the survivors woke and found a dead man in their midst, and that they should slip him quietly over the side without even a shred of a burial service seemed a small price to pay for preserving the already fading reason of more than one who might lose it entirely if he opened his eyes only to find already in their midst what he knew must eventually come to all.

But Jenkins was heavier than he looked, and his body was awkwardly jammed between the thwarts. By the time McKinnon had cut free the securing ropes with his jack-knife and helped Nicolson drag him to a side bench, at least half the people in the lifeboat were awake, watching them struggle with the body, knowing that Jenkins was dead, yet looking on with eyes lack-lustre and strangely uncomprehending. But no one spoke; it seemed as if they might get Jenkins over the side without any hysterical outbursts or demonstrations, when a sudden high-pitched cry from for’ard, a cry that was almost a scream, made even the most tired and lethargic jerk their heads round and stare up towards the bows of the boat. Both Nicolson and McKinnon, startled, dropped the body and swung round: in the hushed stillness of the tropical dawn, the cry had seemed unnaturally loud.