Work Text:
The Wine Dark Sea
- - -
On his fifth birthday, his father drives him in the shining new motor-car to the docks, and tells him - the boy understands less than half the words – that they are to see the unloading of cargo from the shipping line in which they have shares.
Archie had been expecting sailing vessels, like the ones in his beloved board book; the bright pictures of gaily waving flags, men with feathers in their hats and women in colourful dresses, blooming out like bells around their waists.
But this is the world his father is building; a wall of slick steel titans aligned by the quay, barely confined by the red brick of the dockyard. Cranes reaching into the sky, the crashing of crates and the shouting, the slick of oil and guano and the reek of old seaweed.
Half stepping backwards in dismay, half craning his neck to attempt the impossibility of seeing it all, Archie falls over suddenly and starts crying, barely audible above the screech of gears.
His father picks him up with a kind of absent neatness, just as he would automatically straighten a picture, wipes his face briskly and tells him to attend: “This will be your world, one day, Archibald. Running a business is like running a machine, and you must know each cog and bolt of it, to know it is efficient.”
Archie knows that it is not allowed, to hide behind his father’s leg, even when a whistle squeals and he is scared.
A man in a dark blue suit, carrying a clipboard stacked with papers, comes to talk to his father and at his side another man, in a uniform with shiny buttons. This man tilts his head and smiles at Archie, reaches in his pocket and passes him something so small Archie is worried he will drop it from his short, blunt fingers.
It is a tiny sailing ship, whittled of one piece of wood. Archie clasps it carefully in both hands and blinks his tears away, delighted.
- - -
At fourteen, Archie knows the docks as well as he knows each floor of the white-and-silver townhouse where he lives, and feels more at home in them.
In the clothes he retrieved from the bag his mother had set aside for the church bazaar, he believes no one would realise he’s not a labourer. He doesn’t need the day’s wage, but it pays the bus fare to and from the suburbs, and it feels wrong to spend his father’s money on something of which he would certainly not approve.
He knows that if he is ever to be good at navigation – and his dreams and plans now are quite determined on the necessity of that point – he must stay at school and pay attention to his mathematics. Every day he can get away during the holidays, though, he’s here, immersed in the never-ending rhythm of loading and unloading, the simple pleasure of forming part a team. It is a world where men laugh and spit and curse freely, straightforward both in dislike and approval. They cuff him round the ear and sling arms round his neck and manhandle him exactly as they do each other, full of rough vitality, finding their own vivid colour and life amidst the great canyons of metal.
To be like them he buys himself each morning two halves of bread, perhaps a thick slice of bacon or cheese to go between them, and brings a cup to fill from the water tap.
The day that one of the men, having silently canvassed the opinion of the others in the gang, nods approvingly at him and passes down the line the shared bottle of beer, Archie swigs it almost too fast in his excitement, and struggles not laugh with happiness.
- - -
Twenty-five is young indeed for a first command, but any man will concede he deserves it, and Archie takes the helm of the SS Fiona with quiet pride and certainty. Some call him the wonder boy, and he lives with it. His father’s opinion of his decision to join the merchant navy was quite enough to weigh against any amount of flattery from anyone else.
He simply knows that he belongs here.
In the vastness of the sea, a ship – no matter how modern and powerful a machine it has been made to be – is lost, desolate, without a human hand to guide it.
It is for this that Archie loves the sea; for what it means, what it necessitates. Little worlds, little homes of riveted metal filled with cargo, twined about with fragile dreams and investments, suffused with tobacco smoke and housing an interdependent family of men, and his job to guide them smoothly and safely.
Standing on the bridge, he and his new first mate, a good man, Philip Chester, toast the voyage in cognac, and Archie rests his hand upon the back of his chair and can’t imagine ever wanting for anything more.
- - -
It is his twenty-seventh birthday, and Archie is drunk, and it has gone beyond the pleasant warm hum and into something close and sick and sticky; he is slumped on the table in the bar, still holding the empty rum bottle in one hand, gazing through the glass at a distorted vision of Chester and the girls.
Chester always finds them girls – Chester jokes that he could go without food or water more happily on a whole Atlantic crossing than he can without the company of women. Chester seems to be able to arrive in a port one hour and have two pretty girls on his arm by the end of the next – always two, he always remembers Archie, he’s kind that way.
The first few times, Archie let events run the course it seemed they had to, winding up in an alley between the sacks of rubbish, leaning back against a cold brick wall with Chester a few feet away the same, watching his girl sink down before him.
In the same way that any alcohol will get you drunk eventually, however foul it tastes, there was a kind of heat in it; at first he was fascinated enough by that not to let himself think too much about the rest.
The disgust is slow and creeping; he becomes unwilling to look down his own body as he washes. In some way the act is animal, in some way mechanical; none of it feels human, very little of it feels natural.
Chester likes it, though, and Archie doesn’t want to cause a rift between them, and so when they go out he drinks until he’s incapable and Chester laughs and slaps him on the back and calls him an old soak with great affection and if he’s noticed that Archie only ever drinks like that on land, he doesn’t say anything, because he’s kind that way.
If his birthday had fallen when they were at sea, there would have been a fine meal from the galley and even a cake – they have a good crew – and he and Chester would have sat up and toasted in one or two glasses and played some chess, and Chester would have sighed for women and Archie would have laughed, shaking his head in amusement and been quietly contented.
But they’re on land, and so Archie is drinking.
- - -
“Listen,” he says to the man they’ve brought before him – scarcely more than a boy, nineteen perhaps, a pale, thin face and a shock of black hair, struggling as the bosun and the first mate hold his arms – “it’s all very well to run away to sea, plenty have done it. But when you’re discovered, that’s it, understand? No point in fighting, is there? I don’t take kindly to those who attack my men.”
Archie is thirty-four, has seen the Fiona finally go to scrap and Chester get his own command, captained the Star of Ireland before she was sold by the company, and now, on the maiden voyage of the Karaboujan, it is the first time he’s ever wished someone else was in charge.
The boy gives his name as James Allan. There are bruises on him older than the ones he gained in the recent altercation and a strange twisting burn up the side of his leg that looks older still. He won’t explain why he’s running, but when he’s thrown in the brig the guard reports he has nightmares.
“I want to help you,” Archie tells him simply, having invited him to his cabin to try and get some sense from him. “We’re stopping at ports in several countries, I can help you choose where to go. Or if you want work here, there’s certainly enough to go round.”
He stands to tell him to go and think his options over, but Allan is muttering “Thank you, sir” and coming towards him, kneeling down, and it’s so far beyond what Archie had contemplated he can scarcely find the words to push him away.
Dark eyes blink up at him, and narrow as they watch his face. Allan smiles and shuffles forward, trapping him against the wall.
“Oh, let me, Captain. I want to thank you. Oh, do let me...”
Archie is left breathless, hot, horrified, unable to scrape the memory from his mind.
- - -
“I’m so grateful to you, Captain,” Allan says again, pressing closer to him at their table, smiling earnestly.
“I know, I know.” Archie waves him away and pours himself another measure of whisky.
There has never been a repeat of the scene in his cabin three years earlier, but Allan seems to know, somehow, that he thinks about it, that in his dreams it plays out again and again.
And Allan is so very kind to him, so polite, so deferential. He works hard and is popular with the crew, but he still takes the time to go ashore with Archie and thank him again for all he’s done, buying him drink after drink to toast the Karaboujan and their friendship, pressing so close and warm. Because this is what men do, isn’t it - he whispers in Archie’s ear - they drink together in comradeship, real men, don’t they?
Once, Archie wondered if Allan was trying to get him drunk to persuade him of something. If, after all, that was really what Allan wanted. An idle, pathetic dream but it made him yield at first when perhaps he still possessed the power not to.
Once, Archie worried that if he drank too much he’d say something he shouldn’t, admit something he ought to keep quiet, even from himself, but he’s discovered that after a certain depth, none of those needs matter much anymore and it becomes quiet and navigable as a Sargasso sea; he can walk back along the docks, his arm around Allan’s neck and barely notice.
“Let me help you with that,” Allan says in the morning, when Archie’s head reverberates like a cracked bell. The cargo manifold, plotting the course, ordering the coal, writing the log – “Let me do that for you, Captain,” Allan says so softly, placing a hand on him somewhere, stroking, until Archie falls away in shame.
- - -
Thirty-nine and Archie’s world has compressed into the four square walls of his cabin; his bunk and his chair and his whisky bottle. The way he came here is hazy now, the future non-existent; when he doesn’t drink he shakes, wracked with pain, and so drinking is simply necessary and all that is necessary. He helms nothing, not even himself.
This, he thinks, somewhere underneath it all, must be the end, for how can his life ever change now? Few people even know he exists; no one will come crashing into his world and set him free again; he cannot imagine anyone could have any use for him now, than anyone will ever nod his way and smile at him in simple pleasure in the sunshine.
- - -