Acts of Mutiny - Derek Beaven

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– piracy, egalitarianism, the construction of an alternative and licentious marine economic under iron hand. And the ship is a famous microcosm, naturally; something of a well-tried metaphor. By this token, all crimes by another name are simply mutinies against the nation, which is doing its best for heaven’s sake, steering its lawful course.

      So let all who sail in her bear in mind mutiny’s traditional punishments. They swell in sympathy – beating with a knotted rope’s end, caning with a rattan, the cat-o’-nine-tails, confinement, irons, gagging, the grampus, the gauntlet, death by flogging, death by hanging, death by drowning, death, death … Like an insistent drumming in the brain. Mutiny and Punishment are the systole and diastole, the Navy’s heart-throb.

      Before we did the deed Mr Chaunteyman went away for two months. He flew places: he was off to California in the mo-o-orning, as they sang on the wireless. ‘What d’you want me to bring you, kid?’

      I told him I wanted an Indian head-dress – and waited in an ecstasy of yearning. When he came back he brought instead a shrunken head and a three-stage plastic rocket that ran on tap water and compressed air. It was from Disneyland. You pumped it with its own plastic pump, and it would go up three hundred feet. But we had nowhere wide, open or spacious enough to try it out. Whereas in Australia … That word was now being breathed secretly between Erica and myself.

      He also brought a rubber toad, and a model dinosaur. The hollow shrunken head was female, charcoal black, with long raven hair and a string to hang it up by. ‘Hey, Disneyland’s just wonderful. One day I’ll take you.’ And if I had been disappointed at all about the head-dress then my heart leaped up again: after Australia, the world.

      My father still said nothing, seemed to suspect nothing. His electrical repairs, however, veered into chaos. As the season closed in he would sit at night as usual with someone’s television eviscerated on the back-room table. But in the blaze from the hearth, under the intense glare of his clip-on lamp, he sweated with frustration, and swore wickedly under his breath – because the picture would not hold still, the resonances would not be tuned, there was sound-on-vision, inexplicable ghosts, fireworking valves; even, one torrid winter evening, a cathode-ray tube catastrophe. Not the grand implosion, but a vicious glass scar cracking right down the screen’s face as the vacuum gave. And the radios fared no better. Hisses and untraceable dry joints bedevilled them. His storm was micro-electrical.

      Though I understood nothing about his circuit diagrams, with their arcane signs and calculations, I felt their significances almost dance in my stomach. The power that ruled the world moved enigmatically – and I had begun to be convinced that by virtue of our enchanting visitor I, like my suitcase, possessed a core of magic deep inside me. The feeling persisted on the Armorica, under my seasickness.

      Perhaps I had not made myself clear to Mr Chaunteyman. An Indian head-dress – an Indian head. He might have misheard. The head was extraordinary, in its own right. With a a fine nose and shrivelled ears, it had a grisly beauty. I would run my finger down its cheek, then turn it over and peer inside. Its smeared and gluey-brown interior looked quite convincing as skin. It had pride of place in the suitcase. I had read of the Amazon jungles, the South Seas, the Coral Islands, the Typee.

      Our leaving had been a sudden stroke, while Dad was at work. I wondered now, to the throbbing wind, why I could recall no agonising, no regret, no attachment. Beyond Mr Chaunteyman I had no emotions. In fact, the more I examined the mental snapshots of home, the more I saw nothing but the dirty tidescapes of the river whose approaches I haunted. Once I had gone with another boy to look at the three-masted schooner that had come in to Greenwich all the way from Norway. Masts and wharves and the masts again of the Cutty Sark. We went under the foot tunnel, scared out of our wits that the Teds we had seen on the other bank would come down to meet us half-way. But we emerged unscathed. ‘Run away to sea?’ my friend said, jokingly. I had blushed. Then we rode back through Charlton along the riverside. What they call Mudlarks. Now my impressions remained of shadow along the wharves, and the astonishing mud laid bare by the tide. Of a filth hanging on to the timber baulks, fascinating, weed-dressed, under a fitful sunset.

      We poor sailors have always been good with the needle. We can seam and pocket like invisible menders. Like flatfishes who flounce on to the seabed and take up its imprint, even the shingle’s detailed patchwork; we are good at matching appearances, and hiding them.

      We sailors have always been the slaves Britons should never be. We sewed up our lips – you would never have known us complain, authentically, officially, of our conditions of service. Murmuring, after all, was mutiny; and punishable. Inarticulate as children, we cried only over food – or grog. And now I, overnight it seemed and with hardly a look back, was glad to be away. My Atlantic was a tantalising enigma, the gateway to something, hiding everything. My father’s betrayer, I made myself one with that great ocean – I had become that rarest and most serious of beings: a full-blown mutineer. And with my rebellious magic might yet regulate the forty-foot waves.

      Joe Dearborn, the man with whom he shared his cabin, called Robert the mad scientist. Joe himself was one of those necessary phenomena who turn up uncannily on cue. If there had been any doubt as to his existence, Robert concluded ironically that he would have had to invent him. It was just his luck. Several days into the severe weather Joe was still laid low, but the word about curative teas with strange-sounding names had got about. In his case it was a preparation of the African Zizyphus tree – the original lotus. So the cabin steward claimed, winking at Robert the only hoodwink that was to get past his companion in the duration of the voyage.

      ‘Could you be a mate, Bob, and get them to send me another cup of this stuff? It does wonders. I wish I’d known about it before.’

      Their cabin was very small. Robert, as lucky first comer, had secured the top bunk. Viewed from this vantage point it was nothing more, under a low white ceiling, than an assembly of cupboards and drawers faced with hardwood, a mirror, a sink, a porthole, and an angled, rattling door.

      ‘Ah well,’ Joe had said. ‘Maybe we’ll swap half-way.’

      The only disadvantage to the arrangement was that whenever he wanted to go to bed to sleep or study, he had to climb a ladder past the wiry, living presence. In his top bunk there was a personal light, and a personal ventilator, and a curtain. But they could not insulate him.

      ‘I can’t see how you can do it. Take me, now. I don’t mind a good book; in fact, I’ve been quite a reader in my day. But it really does beat me how you can swot that stuff all the time, Bob. Do you honestly find it interesting, or do you have to force yourself? You do, don’t you?’

      The trouble was that Joe was nobody’s fool, and so his comments were neither idle, nor ignorant. Effortlessly, good humouredly, they pinned Robert squirming. He had to take his room-mate very seriously, precisely for being so sharp – and such a pervasive force in the cabin, even when he was supine with seasickness. In fact, he grew by confinement – because he was always there. Many of Robert’s most basic functions had now to be experienced entirely within, so it felt, a Dearborn universe. He radiated outward from his bedclothes in innocent shafts of neighbourliness, bounced from the wooden surfaces, reverberated from the ceiling, mingled with the soft pulse and rattle of the engines, and reeked from certain drawers. It was a complex, wonderful thing. Robert hated it.

      Joe had an ivory chess set wedged, open, on the locker top beside his bunk. It was very beautiful, oriental, with one army of combatants stained a bright, Chinese red, as if they were exotic food. It was designed for travelling: the little board contained within the box, and each square walled off with a delicate, carved, and partly padded barrier. So every piece sat always in silk-upholstered luxury. He had got it in Singapore on the way out.

      Joe worked for a Kalgoorlie mining concern, and was going home via Perth. He was not Australian, but had been out there so long that he might just as well have been. And he had made good – enough to travel in a degree of style these days, and take his time. ‘Need a

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