Scott Mariani - Star of Africa

‘You a Limey, right?’ Mitch asked with a gap-toothed grin. ‘I sailed with Polaks, Krauts, Gooks, Jappos, Eye-ties, all sorts. Never sailed with a Limey before.’

Welcome to the United Nations. ‘Got a problem with it?’ Jude said.

Mitch shrugged. ‘So what’s your story? You don’t look like no sailor to me. More like a college boy. Daddy’s a lawyer, right? Or a doctor. Wants you to join the family firm and this is your way of telling’m to go screw himself.’

‘I’m not a college boy,’ Jude said firmly. ‘I’m anything but that.’

Mitch grinned again and punched him in the arm. ‘Hey, just fucking with you, man. Lighten up. Betcha I’m right, though, huh? The daddy thing?’

Jude felt like telling him to keep his nose out of his business, but that didn’t feel like the best start to a happy working relationship with his fellow crewmen.

‘My father’s dead,’ he said after a beat, and then repeated it, as if somehow he had to make it doubly true. To have lost one father, only to discover another you didn’t want to know – that had been a difficult and confusing time and he wanted to put it behind him. Closure was the best way. ‘My father’s dead. So’s my mother. There is no family firm. No family at all. Just me.’

‘Shit, man, sorry to hear it.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Jude said, looking around at his new quarters. There wasn’t a lot to see. Being the most junior of the crew, he had been lodged in what he suspected to be – and later discovered was – the smallest and most cramped of the cabins allocated to the ABs. He had no problem with that, however. He intended to enjoy every minute of this adventure to the full. After stowing his backpack in the locker next to his berth, he followed Mitch back down onto the cargo deck and was immediately plunged into the hectic activity of helping to load the rest of the containers on board prior to shipping out.

Mitch, the amiable bigot who liked to poke into people’s personal lives, quickly turned out to be not such a bad guy at all, to Jude’s relief. ‘Don’t you mind Skinner,’ Mitch advised him as he showed him how to lash down a container to prevent it from slipping in heavy weather. ‘He’s one mean, tough, hard-assed sonofabitch and a hell of a screamer, but do your job, keep your head down and your nose clean and he won’t give you too much shit.’ Which was good to know.

‘What about the other officers?’ Jude asked.

‘We don’t call ’em officers in the merchant marine. You got Frank Wilson, the chief mate. We just say “the mate”. He’s okay, I guess. Between you and me, he likes a drink. Starts every trip with a full case of Jim Beam. Catch’m on a good day, you wouldn’t know it, but …’ Mitch rolled his eyes knowingly. ‘Then you got Diesel, he’s what we call the chief. Chief engineer,’ he explained for Jude’s benefit. ‘He’s only about a million years old, knows every nut, bolt and rivet of this ol’ tub like you wouldn’t believe. Guzman, second mate, he’s a slob, eats like a hog and he’s so full of lard he can’t hardly move. The boys call’m the Guzzler, but not to his face, okay? Then you got Ricky Marshall, the third mate. Real straight-up guy. You ask me, he oughta be captain.’

‘Got it,’ Jude said, making mental notes of it all. ‘And what about the captain? What’s he like?’

Mitch gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘I sailed with Cappy O’Keefe a bunch of times, been loop the loop around the damn world together twice, three times, maybe more. He’s comin’ up for retirement. Ain’t the guy he used to be. Spends most of his time in his cabin, writing long emails to his wife back home in Indiana, while he leaves it to Wilson and Skinner to do all the hard work. Then Wilson and Skinner pass it all down to the rest of us. That’s pretty much the system here, kid. Better get used to it. You’ll earn your money on board this ship, believe me.’

Jude was unafraid of hard work, which was just as well, because Mitch hadn’t been joking. By the time the Andromeda was finally loaded up and ready to set off, Jude was drenched with sweat and fit to drop from exhaustion – and his first day on board had barely even begun. He watched from the deck as, to the deep throb of the diesel engines, they made their way out of the port and through the lesser shipping towards open sea. It was a heady feeling for Jude, and tired as he was, he couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Before long, the land sank out of sight and they were alone under the vast empty bowl of the sky, with nothing but the deep blue-green waters of the Indian Ocean from horizon to horizon.

The voyage had begun.

And if Jude had known then how it was going to end, he would have dived straight into the sea and started swimming back to shore.

Before now, Jude had never been on any kind of boat for longer than a few hours at a time, and he’d wondered about things like ocean sickness. But the Indian Ocean was as smooth as an endless sheet of blue glass, and after a couple of days he’d found his sea legs and the gentle movement of the ship felt as natural as being on land.

It might take him a little longer to get used to the heat, which was oppressive and humid everywhere except on the outer deck, where it was just scorching. And the three hours’ sleep a night, four if you were lucky, took some adapting to as well. No time in the merchant navy to lounge on deck with a gin and tonic in your hand, admiring the view and counting dolphins. That was for sure.

He was getting to know his way around a little better, as well as getting to know his fellow crewmen. The mess and canteen were situated down on A Deck, two floors down from his quarters, where a lot of tired and hungry sailors would gather to recuperate from their shifts, to eat, smoke, gulp gallons of coffee and shoot the breeze. There were fourteen ABs aboard including himself – although, as far as he could see, some of them didn’t really seem to be that able-bodied at all after so many years at sea. A number of the sailors were in their sixties, work-hardened and leathery as hell but beginning to show the strains of a lifetime of physical hardship. For many of them, this was the only life they’d ever known, and Jude quickly learned that it was one that seemed to attract some very colourful characters. The casual, totally non-uniform dress code among the ABs wasn’t exactly what he could later expect to find aboard a Royal Navy ship, either. Tatty sweatshirts, faded jeans, military surplus gear, anything went. Steve Maisky, an ageing hippy who for reasons best known to himself insisted on being known as ‘Condor’ and claimed to have been hopping ships ever since dodging the draft for Vietnam in 1972, jangled with beads and bangles and had grey hair in a ratty ponytail that hung halfway down the back of his Grateful Dead T-shirt. He was benevolently disapproved of by Lou Gerber, a white-bearded ex-US Marine five years his senior, who strutted about in khakis and combat boots with a shapeless fatigue hat jammed on his balding pate to protect him from the sun.

Jude had developed a liking for Mitch and thought he could learn a lot from him. During work and breaks, the older man regaled him with all manner of colourful and sometimes improbable tales from his twenty-odd years in the merchant navy. Mitch had seen the world, all of it. There was, he claimed, not a bar or gambling den or whorehouse in any port town on the face of the planet that he hadn’t frequented and in some way left his mark on. He’d been thrown out of many, barred from several. He’d been carried back comatose to his ship on a wheelbarrow more than once or twice. He’d been knifed in the ribs over a card game in Sri Lanka and shot at by a disgruntled pimp in Hong Kong. He’d won more bare-knuckle fights and arm-wrestling bouts than he’d lost, made a ton of money on them, too. He’d had more women, and probably fathered more children, than he could count or remember. It had been, he told Jude with a contented grin, one hell of a crazy run and it wasn’t nearly over yet.