The Shape of Clouds Page 2

  I will be the luckiest child in town because I was born in my caul. I can spit on water, walk on it, give it flowers. I’ll never sail a sinking ship, and every port I visit will know my name. I am special, I am touched, I will never be drowned. It’s that simple.

  My mother knew about luck. She spat over her left shoulder, clicked the wind away with her fingers, took my caul, wrapped it in a lint-free cloth and carried it home. She wiped it and dried it slowly and carefully, and when it had shrunk to the size of a slice of bread, sewed it into the lining of a man’s leather cap. She rocked my cradle and sang a song for the dead in my ear. A song for the living or one for the dead, it never mattered to me.

  Nothing touched me, hurt me or changed my mind. I grew up in London, on the Isle of Dogs. I had a view of the river from my room, and could sit day or night and watch ships arrive, dock, unload, reload and leave. I watched the sailors come and I watched them go, and I copied their walk. The tides were my clock, and navigation lights blinked for me. I knew every tug by name, and every line flag that ever sailed up the Thames to the West India Dock, Greenland, South Dock or Shadwell.

  I was a strong boy and if other boys wanted to talk about why my father (Ralph) was not living on Strafford Street I would kick them in the knee and warn them that when he returned from a voyage to India and Australia, then he would nail their feet to the trapdoors on the pavement outside the Dock and Chain. As soon as I could think, I knew what I would do. Mother never told me that my father was a seaman but I knew that, somewhere, somehow, and I would be a seaman too.

  One day, Mother was down the road talking to Mrs Rodden of the baker’s shop. I was alone in the house. I was six. It was just before the war.

  I went upstairs to her dressing table, and sat on the stool. I looked at her powder compact, and ran her brush through my hair. She had a bottle of perfume, but I didn’t touch this. I looked at myself in the mirror, licked some crumbs from the corner of my mouth, and then I went through the drawers.

  The top drawer was full of underwear. I caught my sleeve on a hook on the back of something, and couldn’t get untangled. I pulled and all this stuff fell on to the floor, corsets and bras and belts all snarled up on my sweater. I had to get down from the stool to sort this mess out. I was standing in the middle of the room picking these frightening clothes off my clothes. They had so many clips and buckles and the more I tried the worse it got. I sat on the floor and concentrated on one corset at a time, then another, then a belt, and I took them carefully and dropped them in the drawer before they did any more damage.

  I opened the second drawer. There was a cardigan in it, some pullovers and a nightdress. Some mothballs rattled in the corner. I lifted the nightdress out, and held it to my face. It had lace around the collar. I smelt it. It was cotton, and very light. I put it back and rummaged under the other things, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

  The bottom drawer was difficult to open. It contained three shoe boxes.

  There was a dried bouquet in the first box, with a message attached. I couldn’t read the words. I touched one of the flowers and its petals dusted under my fingers. A money spider froze on one of the stems. Carnations and roses, all faded and over.

  The second box was heavy, and full of jewels. I know these were paste and gilt, but when I was in my mother’s room on that day I thought I had discovered the wealth of London. My eyes watered, the jewels sparkled. I could hear them singing, calling out in song, giving me instruction. I shut the box quickly, and pushed it to the back of the drawer.

  The third box contained a paper bag. I opened it and the man’s leather cap was inside. My heart jumped, and then beat faster. I thought I heard someone coming in the back door; I stood still and listened, but I had been mistaken. The wind, the cat, a stray dog…I was shaking but took the cap out of the bag and sat back on the stool, and turned it over in my hands.

  It was black with a handsome peak, and a thin strip of leather running around the rim at the back to a button at the front. It was lined with calfskin and cotton, and I could feel something through this, hard and ridged like a hand. I held it to my nose. It smelled of fog and dust, and something acid.

  I smiled at myself in Mother’s dressing-table mirror, and then I crowned myself with the cap. It covered my eyes and the back of it sat on my collar. I tipped it back and to one side, and ran my fingers along its peak. I whistled at my reflection, and winked at my smile.

  I knew again. I knew who I was and how I was going to sea, and how one day I would end up old and alone in a place like Port Juliet. Born old. Never be fooled.

  I knew this knowledge would detach me. I would never be like other people, and they would confuse my certainty with pride. Or arrogance. Or a bad temper. I’ve got a temper but only fools see it. Maybe I am too quick to judge, maybe I see fools everywhere, but maybe I am right to. At sea in storms with loads of shifting timber, or steel, or with broken pumps and filling bilges, then you have to have a temper, you have to know who the fools are. You do not sail every ocean for fifty years with only a caul in your cap. Luck is conscious. It needs friends, it wants to know you care.

  ‌4

  I have eaten lizard in Singapore, and been knifed in Odessa. I felt the blade kiss my bones, and pain screamed through two thousand miles to be with me. I had wished that pain on myself though I never deserved it. At that time my mind was bent rigid by guilt. I had been a neglectful son, and had punished myself by inviting trouble. I wanted to be hurt and humiliated in public, I wanted people to see that I was a bad man, and I wanted the severest sentence. I didn’t think but I lived, and this is the scar.

  In Marseille I took another man’s wife to bed. In Lisbon I met a woman who did things to me I could not write about, things with food and electrical equipment, and other instruments from a bosun’s stories. Limassol is a port for stories, and Haifa. I’ve been with women in Haifa who treated me like I was their dream come true, who kissed with a mouthful of wine and never spilt a drop. Who charmed beasts and dusted themselves with sugar and wrapped themselves in nothing but shade.

  Sea voyages make men dream beyond reason. The name of the next port will sound like a bell, and the ones left behind whisper the sorrow of partings in sleeping ears. Felixstowe, Hamburg, Dubai, Fujayrah, Karachi, Bombay, Colombo. Barcelona and the beach cafés of Sant Feliu de Guixols. Bells, whispers and women.

  No one has told me why Port Juliet is called a port. There are no ruined quays or the scattered remains of warehouses. I have not found the skeleton of a hulk buried in the sand, or rusted chains below the tideline. There are no broken derricks, split pallets or piles of discarded sacks. I would speak to Mr Boundy about this place’s name but I’d rather not ask questions. If he wants to tell me he will. And he will. He cannot keep quiet. Maybe, in return, I will tell him about Elizabeth Green, but then he will have to ask the right questions, and I will need to be drinking as I talk. Yes, the Elizabeth Green, the blonde from Missing You who made one great film and that was it. The fierce one who had never been a legend, who was not Joan Crawford or Lauren Bacall, who had always missed the best scripts. Who had glimpsed that immortality, the glimpse that maims, the one that kills but spills no blood. Who had disappeared for years, gone so long people thought she was dead, but she wasn’t, she was back, she had been rediscovered. Old and gorgeous. Her new film was called Raintown. What a lovely title. Elizabeth Green with a black dress and a blue silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. The one I knew and loved years before she knew me. The sailor’s wife is the sailor’s wrist, but the wrist needs a picture. The picture: a diamond brooch twinkling on her chest, and diamond teardrops hanging from her ears. A bloom of expensive perfume, a light dusting of powder, lipstick. A velvet purse. Coming down the road, picking a stray piece of cotton off her sleeve, coming to make my life complete. Things like this do not happen. They are dreams. My dream, your dream, their dream, the dream fulfilled. Out of the nowhere. Smaller in real life, and louder. Asking for a phone. A
vision of love in the place I want, and that place is my home.

  Our street was bombed in the war. Mother had refused to leave; we emerged from the shelters on a brilliant June morning and our house was gone. I saw part of one of my bedroom walls lying where the bus-stop used to be, a hundred yards down the road. A broken water main was shooting into the sky, and a rainbow formed above the destruction. Dust clotted and blew across the river, and I was yelled at by bystanders and a fireman. I turned to the sound of their voices and saw a loose firehouse snaking towards me. I ducked and rolled behind a heap of steaming bricks as the nozzle whipped over my head and spun back the way it had come. The hose followed, I covered my head and then the water was cut. I heard a long hiss and the hose was collapsing around me. I stood up and raised my arms. The rainbow was high, and went from the ruins to the river, and pooled its colours by the Greenwich buoys.

  Mother came, hauling the two bags she had carried to the shelters, and we went to stay with Miss Joyce of Shadwell, a retired geography teacher. She lived in a house that fronted right on to the river, and I had the top room.

  That room was my first bridge. I was captain and the women downstairs were crew. I organised myself and my equipment, spread my charts, issued orders and settled back in the helmsman’s chair.

  I set course for enemy waters, and bravely defied the U-boats. I signalled to Resistance fighters who had gathered on a lonely beach, and they rowed out to meet me. They had a wounded pilot with them, and he was transferred to my vessel. I sailed him home, once again evading the torpedoes, and his life was saved.

  And I was in tropical waters, and shipping water. Sharks circled, the crew became delirious with fear. The stores were ruined; we were living on raisins and rainwater. I was sick with malaria but would not leave the bridge. Jakarta was only two days’ sailing away, and a hurricane was forecast, but we would make it. We had to. The crew looked up to me, and I had given them my word. We made it.

  Imagination was my friend, and protected my luck from the Blitz. Then I saw my first wrecked ship and for weeks I became dislocated, as if my best friend had died and I had seen it happen, helplessly, unable to move.

  The SS Filles de Kilimanjaro was bombed in November, as she stood off the Limehouse Reach. She burned and sank in three hours; the river steamed and her stern stood up in the morning as if she were blaming me. I went down to look, and stood on the wharves as the salvage men went aboard, roped themselves together and climbed to the bridge deck to haul down the ensign.

  It was a cold day, and sleet blew across the river and around the staggered ruins of the docks, but I wanted to strip and swim across to the Filles de Kilimanjaro. I knew I couldn’t help or do anything at all, but I wanted to touch her. I wanted to run my fingers over her rudder and feel her rivets before she was hauled away.

  Mother came down with Miss Joyce, and they wouldn’t let me stay. I had to go back to Shadwell, but I looked over my shoulder all the way, and when I was in my room I stood at the window and asked the river how far to sea it went. How far it carried fresh water to the salt, and did it die somewhere?

  I heard the women talking. Miss Joyce said, ‘I think you should take him to the country.’

  ‘Maybe…’

  ‘If the bombs don’t get him, I think his head will.’

  ‘He is very imaginative. He always has been.’

  ‘My sister’s in Somerset, lives on a fruit farm. She’s got three children of her own, but I’m sure she could take you. She’s got plenty of room.’

  ‘Somerset… I don’t know. I think Michael would miss the river. I’ll have to think about it.’

  I thanked my mother. She knew how I felt. I told the river that I had never met my father, and I asked it to be him. It said ‘Yes’, and I believed it. The river would love and advise me.

  The SS Filles de Kilimanjaro settled in the mud, and the tugboats hooted around her stern, waiting for the tide. A fog came down towards evening, and the river faded. Faded but never gone, always there, always mine.

  ‌5

  We never went to Somerset, but when I was sixteen I went to a Thursday matinée and saw my first Elizabeth Green film. It was a light thriller called Dangerous Brew.

  Elizabeth played Joyce, the teenage daughter of a rich businessman who wants to make her own way in the world. She packs a bag, runs away from home and gets a job as a waitress in a coffee shop.

  The businessman is pacing up and down, frantic with worry, but his wife tells him not to worry. She says, ‘Joyce isn’t stupid,’ and ‘She’s doing what you did when you were her age.’

  ‘But I never had her advantages.’

  ‘Maybe she thinks they’re disadvantages…’

  The father thought about that, and knew there was truth in it.

  Joyce loves working in the coffee shop, and when she meets and falls in love with a customer called Danny, she feels her life is complete.

  But Danny is a liar and a thief, and tries to persuade Joyce to act as lookout while he robs a drugstore. He is caught and she runs.

  As I watched I was with her as she ran and hid. She couldn’t believe that she had been so wrong about Danny, and as she sat on a river bridge and watched lights on the water, I wanted to go to her and hold her and tell her that I was the kind of man she needed. She could have trusted me, I would never have used her, I would never have lied to her and put her in such a fix. In close-up, her face hazed and tears filled her beautiful eyes. Her skin looked thin, and all her nerves fizzed.

  My nerves fizzed… a policeman approached her… twenty-five minutes later she was home with her rich father and her mother. They sat in their sitting room and waited for the policeman to leave. I waited for an angry scene but it didn’t come. Everyone had learnt a lesson except me. I went to see Dangerous Brew every day for a fortnight, so I could repeat entire scenes word for word, and imitate Danny’s laugh perfectly.

  Dangerous Brew, Lost in an Accident, Captain Gentleman, Unit 505, The Forfeit Board: these are the titles of Elizabeth Green’s first five films, and I watched them all a few times, except Unit 505, which is a waste of time. She plays the only female member of Unit 505, a top-secret government organisation. She had to dye her hair black for that one, and spent most of the time nodding and agreeing with men in suits.

  Elizabeth Green, with your cheap films and your skin like glass and your hair tumbling on to your shoulders. Your blue eyes blinking, and your mouth opening slightly. I missed you when I went to sea but grew closer to you. I invented new roles for you, and you played them better than any I had seen at the Gaumont, endlessly.

  I was eighteen in 1945 when I left home and joined my first ship. Apprentice on the SS Iris out of Tilbury, carrying grain and sugar to Skolvig.

  My mother held me in her arms and I knew what she was going to give me. Her eyes were bigger than hope or the moon in the sky. We stood together at the seamen’s gate. The ship loomed behind us and the derricks swung the last loads aboard. The night was thick, and tried to swallow our words. Lights shone on the river, and all the things the river was flooded my head. Father, excuse, work, escape. ‘This is yours,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ I pretended.

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  The man’s leather cap was still in its brown paper bag; she took it out and brushed fluff off the peak. ‘Always wear it,’ she said. ‘I bought it when you were born. It’s lucky.’ She stroked the lining and started to cry. ‘You know why, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  She said, ‘You were born a special baby. You were born in your caul. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Sailors keep them?’

  ‘Yes. But do you know why?’

  I didn’t.

  She explained. Her womb, blood on her fingers, her waters not breaking, her first sight of my shrouded head, the midwife’s shriek. ‘Promise me, Michael,’ she said, and she put it on my head. She adjusted it carefully, and stroked a curl of my hair. ‘Will you?’

  I di
dn’t need to ask why. I reached up and touched her hand, and said, ‘I promise.’

  She kissed me.

  ‘Always,’ I said.

  ‘Darling…’

  She had never called me that. ‘Mother…’ I buried my head in her shoulder and breathed her scent of carbolic and coal smoke. She patted my cap and I looked at her. Deep lines creased around her eyes and mouth, and glistened with tears. She looked very tired, and for a moment I had to stay. I could not leave her under the damp stars, with the fog on the water and the drunk sailors who trailed through the gate. But the ship hooted and I turned towards the sound.

  ‘And don’t forget your mother.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Write, won’t you?’

  ‘Every day,’ and I showed her a pad of paper and a blue pen I had bought specially.

  ‘Promise again…’

  ‘Mother…’

  She took a deep breath and sprayed me with tears. ‘I’m missing you already.’ She gulped. ‘Michael…’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Mother.’

  ‘This is the night I’ve waited for.’

  Elizabeth Green said that to me. Who could have dreamed that?

  ‌6

  I wore the man’s leather cap for fifty years.

  I never lost it, it was never stolen, its seams were repaired a dozen times and the peak was patched.

  I became my own luck, and men I didn’t know prayed to share my watch.

  I retired as captain of the MV Spanish Key, drank half a bottle of malt whisky alone and said goodbye to my last crew in Felixstowe. I wanted to go home but I had no home to go to, no Strafford Street as I remembered it, no one who told amusing stories about my mother. I visited her grave, but the stone and the earth told me nothing. I laid some flowers on the grass, but as I was doing so I felt bad and empty. I wanted to talk to her, to ask her what I should do, but the words broke, the thoughts dissolved and I walked away with no idea at all.