Death Ship episode 1

In my previous posting (back in June), I led with the unfinished quote from Rabbie Burns ‘The best-laid plans…’

It referred to my intention to get back to this (semi-abandoned) blog by offering up some of my short stories. That was supposed to be a weekly effort but it was months before story number 2 appeared. This time, I’m giving a twist to it which may (or may not) make me more attentive to producing something more frequently. It’s going to be a single, longish story posted in probably 8 episodes. I’ve called it Death Ship and here’s…

 

Episode 1

We were less than a day out of Kristiansand when the first body was found. The seas were piling into the Skagerrak Strait under a force eight. It had been blowing for four days. We’d set just two jibs and the fore topmast staysail, the courses, lower topsails and lower staysails on all three masts and the spanker to steady her. As she beat out into the German Ocean, the carpenter’s workshop was the last place anyone wanted to be. There, up in the bows, you felt the sea’s full violence. Jack Stretton had no choice. As part of his watch, he had to start his fire inspection rounds under the foredeck. In the gloom, he heard the carpenter’s door banging back and forth. He pushed it open. Davie Strachan’s body lay against the workbench. His head had been held face down in the vice and then beaten until it resembled a crude bowl filled with silvery red substances in which floated fragments of bone.

A few minutes later, I was looking at it with the captain, Big John Michie. We were wondering how to report it to Mr Anderson, the ship’s owner.

“If the police hear about it, we’ll be held alongside for days, maybe weeks,” said Big John.

“Aye,” I said. “I can just hear what he’ll say to that.”

Big John nodded.

“We canna keep quiet about it, though. Not with the crew telling the tale in all the bars.”

“Is it something you want to hide, then?” I asked.

He shook his head. I looked again at Davie’s open skull.

“No easy matter to pretend it’s an accident,” I said. “That vice is deep in his cheeks. There was a lot of pain.”

“Aye. But I canna just leave him there. With this wind we’ll soon be needing work done down here.”

As if she agreed with him, the ship dived steeply into a trough and we had to hold the rails tightly to keep our footing. Only the vice kept Davie from sliding under the bench.

“And where can I put him?” Big John went on. “God knows how long it’ll take us to get home with the wind on our nose like this. He’ll smell worse than a hold full of herring.”

It was interesting that he seemed to have less curiosity about the killing than about how it would interfere with sailing the ship.

“You’re the master. It’s your decision,” I said.

“Aye, thanks.”

He wasted little time reflecting. He was right: he couldn’t store a decomposing body in a fully laden ship where there was hardly space enough for the crew. And, with superstition a part of every seaman’s thinking, other troubles would inevitably grow from the corpse. When we went back on deck, he ordered the sail maker to break out some canvas and sew the body up in it. We’d then cover it with pitch and drop it over the side. The death would have to be reported but, with no body to look at and no-one caring much about what happened to Davie anyway, Big John hoped that Mr Anderson’s trade would not suffer unduly.

****

OK, that’s it for now. I’m not expecting reviews, praise, suggestions, textual analyses or anything similar. I would, of course, like to know if any reader wanted more but chunks of the complete story are ready to follow later… (Remember, ‘later’ is a flexible concept here.)

Sammy Reid

The best-laid plans…
When I decided to restart the blog by unearthing the occasional story, I’d imagined it being maybe a weekly exercise, but…
Here, 4 months later, is offering number 2.

 

Sammy Reid didn’t seem to have much going for him. He wasn’t particularly good at any subjects in school, didn’t play for any of the sports teams. His girl friends (there were only ever two of them), were unexciting, and he seemed quite content to tag along with local gangs of kids who were almost as unpopular as he was. The only grown-up he’d ever respected was Mr Henderson, an English teacher who was teased and laughed at by most of the other kids

In his teens, he didn’t have enough qualifications to get to university so when he left school he didn’t move away from home, had no job, and the little money he made came from delivering goods to homes in the neighbourhood and running errands for the local grocer.

By the time he reached his seventeenth birthday, some of the few friends who’d stuck with him through all his youthful hopelessness started actually to feel sorry for him. He’d always been such a loser. They supposed it wasn’t his fault. It was just a fact. Also, because he’d never known anything else, he sort of accepted that life was predictable, unexciting and nothing ever changed much.

When change did come, though, it was a big surprise. His mum and dad, ashamed of his regular failures and resenting the fact that he was costing them money and not doing anything to contribute to the expense of running the house, were always nagging at him to get a job. He didn’t mind that. He couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been complaining to him about something or other. But one day, he saw an advert in the paper for a factory warehouseman’s assistant at a business just on the edge of town. ‘No qualifications or previous experience necessary’ it said. He would only have to work Monday to Friday from 9 am to 6 pm, there would be regular wages, and two weeks holiday whenever he chose to take it.

So, just for something to do, and without really thinking whether he was capable of doing the job, he phoned the number at the bottom of the advert, and arranged to go to the factory to meet the boss.

On the evening before the interview, he was in the pub with Derek and Judy, Derek’s fiancée. They were two of the five people who were still his friends from school. Derek was an electrician and Judy worked in a dress shop. When he told them his news, he wasn’t surprised that they didn’t seem as excited as he was about it.

‘You’ll be a dogsbody, mate,’ said Derek. ‘Bottom of the heap.’

Judy nodded and said, ‘Yeah, it’s probably better if you don’t get it.’ Then added, ‘Never mind, you probably won’t, anyway.’

It was insulting but Sammy didn’t take it that way. It was typical of Judy. She’d always been like that with him, making remarks about how ordinary his (two) girl friends were, laughing at the awful way they dressed, yawning at the feebleness of Sammy’s attempts at jokes. It was pretty obvious that what she felt for him wasn’t really friendship but contempt (or, on better days, pity).

Derek wasn’t much better.

‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high,’ he said. ‘There’s lots of unemployed guys about nowadays. There’ll be plenty going for the job. And they’ll have all the stuff you haven’t got – experience, qualifications, personality.’

Sammy nodded along with him, seeming to agree with Derek’s assessment of his chances. He was used to it, after all. Derek had been saying that sort of thing to him since primary school.

Strangely, though, he hardly heard Derek’s words. He’d been staring at his shirt and only just noticed how ugly it looked. Its stripy red design clashed very starkly with the orangey-yellow of the tee shirt underneath it. It made Sammy wonder why Judy hadn’t noticed it.  She was supposed to work in fashion after all. Why hadn’t she told Derek how horrible it looked.

And, even though it seemed such a trivial thing, that’s when, at last, Sammy started to become the person who would eventually get the job he was going for and start making his way up through the company ranks until he’d become sales coordinator for the whole of the south-west. Because after he’d said his goodbyes to the two of them and started to walk home through the darkening evening, he began, for the very first time, to wonder why he’d always accepted the insults and opinions of others as being true. Judy, as usual, had been rude about his chances of getting the job, but what was her opinion really worth if she – a person who worked in a dress shop – could bear to be engaged to someone who had no idea of colour co-ordination? How could she find Derek and his horrible shirt attractive? As for Derek himself, what the hell did he know about working in a warehouse? He’d passed most of his electrician’s exams but no others.

And, on this gentle evening, after all these years of insults and put-downs, Sammy suddenly remembered something Mr Henderson had said when he’d chased away a couple of sixth-formers who were bullying Sammy in the playground.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ he’d said. ‘They’re not as tough as they think they are. You’re OK, Sammy. It’s like Oscar Wilde said, “Quite often, your real life isn’t the one you actually live”’.

Sammy didn’t understand it at the time but, thinking about Derek and Judy made it seem clearer. He’d always listened too much to what others had said. Like all the rest, Derek and Judy expressed opinions about him as if they were true facts. But none of it was what he was feeling inside. They didn’t really know him at all. Their ideas were just that – ideas. Their own ideas. But they were warped, twisted, wrong. They couldn’t know what was going on inside Sammy’s head, what he was thinking, who he was. Only Sammy knew that. And suddenly, he realised he’d never really been the person that other people thought and said he was. Like every one of them, he was an individual, special. There was no-one else like him.

So the Sammy who sat at the interview the following day felt confident, looked good, talked well, even misquoted Oscar Wilde and was so impressive that he got the job. They even paid him more than the advert had offered.

Restarting

In the early days I used to write regular blog posts but my basic idleness cut in. Then for a while, I posted stories, either stuff I’d just written for the sake of it or when I co-wrote 800-word stories with my good friend Eden Baylee, but then it all stopped. So, just to keep the site alive I suppose, I thought it might be an idea to post the occasional story from amongst all the hitherto (unseen by anyone else) stuff that was lurking in my files. There’ll be no theme or philosophy or advice or anything useful in them; they’re just for entertainment.

I’ll pick them at random and they may last for a while or this might be the only one before the idleness cuts back in. We’ll see.  The first is one I wrote a couple of years or so ago. I called it…

 

GENESIS

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” OK, everybody’s heard that. They don’t all know it was Aristotle who said it, but they’ve heard psychiatrists talking about it or seen TV programmes about it. And it’s true. The person we become when we grow up was already there in the kid we used to be. There are a few things I can remember from back then that prove it. Maybe not when I was seven, but certainly when I went to secondary school. And definitely when my mate Billy arrived. I was fourteen by then but that’s close enough for me.

He came when I was in second year and his house was on the way to school so I used to wait for him and we’d walk there together. He had a big influence on me. I haven’t seen him for years now but, back then, we spent all the time together. He was a Catholic, which was interesting because I wasn’t anything. I sang hymns and stuff at Boys’ Brigade and went to Sunday School, but Boys’ Brigade was just so that I could play football and Sunday School was because Pamela Biscombe went and I liked looking at her.

But Billy went to Mass, and confessed, and ate and drank Jesus every Sunday. Well, that’s the way I understood it at the time. It sounded brilliant. Sitting in the dark, making up stories for this shadowy priest behind a screen. Stories about all sorts of stuff, like touching Pamela Biscombe, or peeing in the classroom during playtime.

At the time I thought Billy said his father was a priest. It was only later that I realized it was the other way round. But what I think now isn’t important; it’s how we were then that matters for what I’m telling you.

Billy’s the reason I’m so successful in the magazine business. Well, not the reason but he helped me to write stuff, set me on the path, if you like.

The time I’m thinking of was when we had to write this essay for Miss Blore. Today they’d say she does Religious and Moral Education, then it was just called Scripture. We had to choose one of the seven deadly sins and write a story about it for her. She gave us a list of them and we had to find out about them and pick one. I had no idea where to start. No Google then, remember. It was all books, libraries, encyclopedias.

I was moaning about it to Billy on the way home, but he was a godsend (maybe literally). He knew the list already, knew what they all meant, too. So, the same evening, he came round to my house and we just talked about it. The trouble was, another thing Miss Blore had said was “Write about what you know”. So we went through the sins one by one to see whether I knew anything at all about any of them.

Sloth was easy. Boring, too. I did it all the time. Or, rather, I didn’t do it. It’s true, I think in those early days I was too idle even to be slothful. And nothing’s changed. Pride was the same. I couldn’t see how you could write an essay or a story about that. I mean, back then I didn’t really know what pride was, but my mum often used to tell me off about something, then say “I hope you’re proud of yourself”, so I suppose I must have known something.

Anyway, it didn’t take long to cross them off the list. The next one, Wrath, looked better but not much. I thought it just meant getting pissed off at something or somebody, but Billy said it also meant being vindictive, taking revenge, and I really liked that idea. So I reckoned I knew what that was and it sounded more promising. I could write something about when Miss Blore said those nasty things about me in front of the class and I got angry, but in the story I could maybe kill her. I’d change her name of course. Maybe make her a budgie or something and step on it.

The other four seemed easy on the surface. I thought I knew them, sort of. They were all the same really, all about wanting something. I said so to Billy.

“Envy’s just wanting what somebody else has got, isn’t it?’
“Well, yes,’ he said, “But…”
“And greed and gluttony are the same thing.”

Billy was shaking his head.

“No. They’re different,” he said. ‘Greed means wanting too much, but gluttony is actually taking too much.”

I thought about it for a moment and said, “So gluttony is sort of doing greed instead of just thinking about it. Is that right?”

Billy didn’t seem sure. But it seemed clear to me.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “You start by being greedy and gluttony sorts it out for you. You want a piece of chocolate, so you eat the whole bar, or maybe two of them, and you’re not greedy any more. It’s been cured.”

Billy wasn’t sure. The priest (or his Father) had never said that.

The only one left was Lust and, I don’t know why, but that seemed to me the most interesting one. The others were just wanting, but Lust was… well, desire. You had to have it. I think I may have had it for Pamela Biscombe already. And when Billy said “Matthew says that “anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart”’, I knew I had. I knew Lust was my best sin.

“So that means,” I  said, “if you’re already guilty, you might as well do it”.
“Not really,” said Billy. “Dad, (or he might have said Father) says it’s about unspiritual not just sexual desires”.

But I’d already made up my mind.

“Listen,” I said. “Jesus died for our sins, right? Cross, crown of thorns, all that. That means these sins, we can just go ahead and do them.”

He protested, but I’d made up my mind. I went home, got out the photo of Pamela Biscombe which I’d cut out of the class photo and wrote about Lust. I was expelled.

Nowadays, they pay me big bucks for basically writing the same stuff. Thanks, Billy.