Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“I am from Bom Porto. Montedor.”

The boy stared up at him for a moment, and giggled nervously as if George had cracked an incomprehensible joke.

“We’re neighbours, you see. Do you know Bom Porto?”

“Yes, sir, I have visited there.”

“When was that?”

“Two, three years ago.”

“I was there. Your ship refuelled in Bom Porto? I expect you saw me. Remember the bunkering station? That was me. What was the name of the ship?”

“It is a long time. I do not remember.”

“I never forget a ship,” George said. “A German ship, was it? Tarmstedt? Nordholz? Katerina?”

“I do not know.” The boy stared down at his black plastic shoregoing shoes.

“Never mind,” George said. “It is too cold to remember things. What you need is something warm to put on. You are not in Mindelo now, you know; you are in England. It is a very frigid place. You must have proper clothes.”

“I am not too cold, sir.”

“Nonsense. Come down to my boat, and I will find you some English clothes. Then you can go to look for your girl.”

“I am obliged sir, but it is not necessary.”

“Idiot! I want you to have them. What is your name?”

“Paulo Joaquim Pedeira.”

“Well, Paulo Joaquim, I am George.”

“Yes, sir.” He slipped George’s grasp with a fluttering wriggle, like a scared bird. Poor bloody kid. Europe must have accustomed him to expecting only kicks from strangers. Now he stood frowning at the water, his waif’s body topped by a fantastical bush of wiry hair; an exotic tropical plant on a dull Cornish quayside.

“Here—” George said, holding out Vera’s bag. “You take this, and I will go down the ladder first. What do you like to drink? Whisky? A beer?”

The boy didn’t move. He stared at George, his lips moving soundlessly like an actor rehearsing. Then he said, “Excuse me, sir, for a favour, but I do not like to bum-fuck.”

“NO! NO! NO! I do not ask you down for that! That is not what I mean at all!”

“There is a boy on the ship. A German boy. With white skin and white hair. He will do it for some money. I will speak to him, if you wish, sir.”

“No!” George shouted from a swirl of nausea in his chest.

“I apologize, sir, but it is late, and I must find a woman.”

Brokenly, George said, “But you must have a jacket — something for the cold …”

“Boa noite, o senhor.” And he was walking, at a trot, towards the custom house.

“Paulo Joaquim!”

The footsteps on the stone paused for a moment.

“You make a left turn,” George called. “Go up a little hill. There is a bar there. The Falcon’s Nest. Ask for a man called Mr Jellaby. Jellaby . He will find you a woman.”

The boy’s voice came thinly back on the still air. “Jay … Lay … Bee? Muito obrigado, o senhor.”

He lay on his berth in the forecabin of Calliope , under a pile of threadbare naval blankets. They were the same blankets that had once gone to make up Sheila’s infant cot in Aden, and it seemed to George that some faint, sweetish scent of her babyhood still clung to them. He fingered a torn corner just above his left eye, and remembered how she had used to chew on it for comfort. When he’d put the light on in her room, he’d watched her face suddenly convert from tearful panic to a sly and toothy smile. He could have sworn that she was winking at him.

“All in order, Number One?” George said.

“Gog,” said Sheila. “Gog. Gog. Gog,” and held out her arms to be lifted from the cot.

He’d left the transistor radio switched on to catch the shipping forecast at 0015, and the oil lamp over his head was still burning, making the cramped cabin bigger with its shadows. George opened a book. It was an old Bom Porto favourite, James Agate’s Ego II , but the light from the lamp was too erratic and George himself too shaken to follow those funny reviews of dead plays. He had a go at listening to the voices on “Today In Parliament”. They were talking about rate capping, but he didn’t have the faintest idea of what rate capping was. So he lay under the blankets studying the insides of his eyelids and waiting for the people on the wireless to say something that he understood.

Gale or no gale, he’d go. Whatever the weather. It felt like a bitter lifetime since he’d climbed on to the plane in Bom Porto, yet he still hadn’t managed to actually arrive in England. Going to sea, he might — just might — manage to come home.

Under the blankets, George set sail up-Channel. The wind was a brisk northwester, a wind to blow the cobwebs out of any man’s soul. England slid smoothly by on the beam, a rim of violet coast no thicker than a pencil line. It grew as he closed with it — turned into sculpted woodland, castles, church towers, cliffs of chalk … a warm and welcoming water-colour England, its seagoing counties laid out in a bright patchwork. Under engine now, he motored deep up creeks and dropped his hook in the rivery shade of village elms, where he lay in secret, watching the lights in the water and listening to the voices on the shore. Off Portland Bill, he weathered a small, convenient gale. George was brave and elated as the boat tumbled in the waves, its deck streaming with green water, its timbers slamming. She could take it. She’d look after him. Then, becalmed, he lay to anchor in the Downs, where the sea was trapped like a pond behind the Goodwin Sands.

The lamp overhead flickered. The light changed to a greasy, streaky sort of dawn, with Dover an elongated smudge on the port quarter, and the tide running fast under the boat, spilling it out into the North Sea. George, his pipe drawing nicely, swung on the wheel, bringing the wind hard on his sails, and steered for London. The sea was now broken and littered with traffic. At first, George saw tea clippers, Thames barges and trading schooners under full sail: on closer inspection they resolved into container carriers, lumpy coasters, oil tankers and roll-on roll-off ferries as big as apartment blocks, with Calliope bouncing about in their wakes like a discarded bottle.

Blue water turned to brown and the flatlands of Kent and Essex came suddenly in close, with marshes, cooling towers and the icy glint of passing cars on wide and windy roads. George went out on deck, lowered his sails and took up position in the long upriver cavalcade. Gravesend. Tilbury. Greenhithe. Dartford. Ships, wharves and warehouses crowded around the boat. The air was meaty with the smells of coal dust, tar and cinnamon. Shirt-sleeved longshoremen unloaded cotton bales from an open hold and watching faces stared from high windows.

The packed city slowly opened to include him. Things fell into place as his twin masts fitted themselves among London’s myriad of masts, cranes, spars and funnels. He was enfolded at last by a world he understood — a world which in its turn comprehended George.

Somewhere up there round a bend in the river past Greenwich Reach, there was a dripping lock-gate waiting to receive him. There were figures on the dockside; his clever daughter, her pregnancy as rounded and firm as an apple, and Tom beside her. They were waving. George too.

Yes. There was somewhere one could live. There must be a vacant patch of dock wall, crumbling, grassy, with a pair of rusty mooring rings to tie one’s life to. Snugged down with the barges and the lighters, he’d be a free and easy man in thermal underwear and old trousers. Maybe Calliope was a bit small to set up house in — well, he’d buy a Thames barge. But the thing to do was to keep floating. On land, it was too bloody easy to find oneself awash and sinking.