Down to the Sea in Ships (13 page)

The agent gives us a list of three telephone numbers to call if we have any trouble in Suez, though we will be here only for as long as it takes the driver to whisk us through the town and away to Cairo. Khalid, slouching insouciant behind his shades, gives the lead: we might as well be invisible; we are as invulnerable as ghosts. There may be no police, no effective government and no certainty in Egypt, but the links of the company's chain are unbroken, untouched, as it draws us smoothly away from the docks and up the town's main street. Our five million dollar convoy transited without a hitch; at either end of the canal two more are forming up. The tiny cogs which turn that mechanism, ships' crews, will not be inconvenienced by a mere revolution.

Concrete buildings, haphazard traffic and the zig-zag of rush hour does not quite betray the significance of the Cairo–Suez road, the town's main street, but the soldiers do. This is one of Egypt's exposed nerves: the last battleground of the 1973 war (Egypt claimed victory after an Israeli column, making a grab for pre-ceasefire advantage, was ambushed on this street), it also saw the first clashes of the 2011 revolution and its first fatality. The street mounts a fine display of Egypt's recent relationships with the world, thanks to the soldiers.

The knots of tense-faced boys grip rifles of Soviet origin, local copies manufactured under licence during the Russian-backed eras of Nasser and Anwar Sadat. They stand clustered around armoured vehicles behind semi-circles of wire, aggressively out of place among the commuters, who ignore them. Their vehicles are based on an American machine, adjusted and customised into an Egyptian version by BAE, the British arms manufacturer, during the thirty-year predation of Hosni Mubarak, when Egyptian military spending became a kind of collaborative international larceny.

Tides of money were diverted from the canal to the arms manufacturers of Britain and America, to the generals and to Mubarak's kind and kin. The floods of cash avoided the commuters of Suez, leaving them, and most Egyptians, a couple of dollars a day. In Suez, where the ships pass ceaselessly, this injustice is particularly felt. You understand why Mubarak never visited the town. You see why the ruling army council feels the need to place combat troops every hundred yards along the street, and a roadblock at the end. You are surprised by the scale of the vast barracks just up the road, an inland sea of pointless weapons, but not by its existence. To travel from the canal, through Suez, across the evening desert and into a Cairo sunset is to follow the trail of one of modernity's great thefts. All along the way the soldiers, conscripted accomplices, stand looking on. They hold their rifles tight.

Khalid says farewell at the airport. We shake hands; his palms are damp. I go into Cairo. The Nile's east bank is a hot blizzard of pop music, scudding with grill smoke and all a-dazzle with lights. Families on special treats take spinning disco boat rides on the river, watched by hundreds along the quay. These are the people who brought down Mubarak. They are excited, Saturday-night-feverish and their faces are another Nile. Among them some must have most to fear from the army, others from the Brotherhood, and many must dread the counter-revolution, the canker of the corrupt, Mubarak's thugs and conspirators. Some among the leaning watchers must have been Mubarak's men. Couples buy cups of tea, entitling them to chairs on the rubbled embankments. The smoking steel rivers in Tahrir square are not entirely self-marshalling but the fact that anything moves is a great tribute to a street-level sense of justice. A taxi driver gestures with wild amazement and fury which veers into laughter.

‘He starts good! Mubarak! Good! And then – what? What? How can he do this? How? So many many houses! So much money money money . . .'

The driver is hammering on the wheel, squirming in his seat, battering the air with a frustration which has nothing to do with the infamous traffic.

IN ANOTHER TAXI,
in Singapore, the driver cannot hold back. ‘I'm just a smoky mountain boy!' he sings.

‘She was just seventeen!' he yodels, grinning.

Clifton was eighteen years at sea and he loves karaoke. We drive down boulevards of flowers. There is little traffic; instead I catch the scent of hibiscus sometimes, and barely a sniff of exhaust in the heat. When Clifton is not singing the Beatles he is talking about his amours in ports around the world.

‘Japanese girl best! Eight dollars one hit.'

‘One hit?'

‘One hour one hit. Vietnamese girls best like Japanese! Like get man hot and strong – hot and strong! I'm just a smoky mountain boy . . . Brazilian girls best! Best tit best ass! Vietnamese girls best, get man hot, hot –'

‘Were you in Vietnam a lot, Clifton?'

‘Vietnam 1967! On tanker. Two limpet mines in Vung Tau, Vung Tau, Song Saigon.'

‘Your tanker?'

‘Yes yes my ship. No one killed. Tanker don't sink. Bless my soul what's wrong with me! Shaking like a bird on a funny tree . . .'

Clifton's erotomania is soon explained. There is the heat, first. Not the heat of deserts this, no sear nor fire, no sun: this is a vegetable, tropical heat, heavy and wet. You could lie down under it and sweat delirium with a lover. Then there is the commodification: you can be hanged for dealing in drugs here, but the malls sell live flesh, packaged in make-up and short skirts. Hotel lifts carry teen beauty queens up to the rooms of portly Europeans. Far below the hideous towers, the poor wear uniforms and clean while everyone else shops. Every brand and chain you have ever seen seems to have a lookout on Orchard Road. Order is so respected, and the law so feared, that enforcers do not have to show themselves. The only similarity between Cairo and Singapore is the invisibility of their police.

Seafarers love Singapore because food and drink and goods are cheap. Visitors and expats love Singapore because the money is good and food and drink and sex and shopping are cheap. Clifton likes Singapore because it is safe, and he says it is not corrupt, and the money he makes with his taxi is good. I absolutely loathe Singapore because if this is the triumph of order and money it is also the end of taste, the suffocation of soul, the death of feeling, the humiliation of spirit and the murder of freedom. Singapore is unutterably dreadful, a gussied-up nightmare, the dominion of emptiness. Sooner be anywhere, sooner be in a hot swamp . . .

Tanjung Pelepas, ‘TPP' in sea speech, is a hot swamp. Perched almost as far south as Malaysia runs, just across the bridge from Singapore, the freight terminal of TPP is a cluster of cranes on a sluggish estuary, an operation designed to skim off a lucrative fraction of the container trade which pours through the city-state on the other side of the Johor Strait. At the end of an artificial peninsula, under smoggy mist, there is my ship, under cranes which are working, working.

They are loading the
Gerd
with nine hundred tonnes of clothes made in Indonesia which Americans will wear, seventy tonnes of edible fats and oils for the arteries of Peru and a dizzying, snapping, easily disposable five hundred tonnes of Malaysian rubber gloves for American doctors and nurses. Through the air swing four containers of car parts for Mexico and LA, tonnes of frozen crabs and fish fillets, Philippine pineapples, fourteen tonnes of polish, Indonesian coffee, Malaysian palm oil and frozen cake and the building blocks of Nicaragua, made in Thailand.

Three containers, not marked fragile (what would be the point?), carry sixty tonnes of glassware going to America from India, whence also five tonnes of perfume and make-up and twenty tonnes of plastic bags, for shoppers. Six tonnes of Cambodian-made trainers come aboard for Canadians. The holds are stacked with furniture for Chile and El Salvador, Cambodian clothes for Panama, eight hundred tonnes of shrimps and prawns, eight hundred tonnes of Thai rubber tyres, forty two tonnes of Pakistani dates going to the United States and a hundred and forty tonnes of pet food.

Our dangerous cargo is augmented with one crate containing fourteen tonnes of Thai fireworks, destined to explode in American skies. The most intriguing addition to the manifest (which the company releases months after the voyage), below the thousand tonnes of new electronics for the Americas, are a further eight tonnes of electronic equipment, destination Jamaica, ‘used'.

It is a joyful reunion for me but – back in the world of the deed, of the constant clock whose minutes measure thousands of dollars, where time is as tide, inexorable, where the ship will not be stayed, barring disaster, where the Captain rules with his absolutes and certainties – there is no sentiment. We exchange handshakes and grins and I distribute small presents: tea for Sorin, fizzy drinks for Chris, but I couldn't find a sufficiently specialist model train magazine for the Captain.

‘So you came back!' they say, pleased. Flying across the world to rejoin them seems to be taken as a compliment, or at least a sign of serious purpose. If they did not exactly miss my questions, curiosities and enthusiasms for things which seem ordinary to them, they appear to welcome my return. I am more than pleased to see them. I craned at the window of the plane as we came into Singapore, looking for my ship.

Land, loved ones, family, friends, work, talks, books, meetings, the job and the quotidian burden of being are all very well, but who would not leave them behind for a while? The sea is simpler. There are no worries here about school and children and relationships and the logistics of the everyday. There are no shops and no bills.

Doing normal things in normal towns felt vaguely decadent, knowing that the men who supply them were crossing the Indian Ocean. Supermarkets never seemed more wasteful or more profligate. The names of countries which produced the food are written without meaning and read – if shoppers read them at all – without care. Shop windows are ludicrous agglomerations of the wretched, cumbersome lumber of stuff, of ‘fast-moving consumer goods' (in which the ‘good' seems questionable) and so-called ‘consumer durables' of ever-diminishing durability. ‘Throw it overboard!' urged Jerome K. Jerome. ‘Let your boat of life be light . . .' It is a paradoxical thought on a ship with 50,000 tonnes of cargo space, and which depends, as all aboard depend, on people's appetites for stuff, on our inability to produce it where it is wanted, and the readiness with which we throw it away.

‘How were the pirates, Captain?'

‘No pirates, no, nothing like that . . .'

Later: ‘How were the pirates, Shubd? See anything?'

‘Oh yes. We saw helicopters and many warships. They were doing lots of checks.'

‘Any pirates, Chris?'

‘Every fishing boat looks like a pirate.'

The view from the bridge is muddy grey water and lowering cloud like boils of steam.

‘When I was first coming here you would see sea snakes in the water,' the Captain says. He is limbering up for a bravura performance.

Just after sunset we leave the berth. The night is as black as the bottom of the sea, the air thick and languid. All three navigating officers are on the bridge because this a corner of the world in which you want as much practice as possible. The egress from TPP, which will take us out into the Singapore Strait, is akin to pulling out of a car park into the confluence of two eight-lane motorways. The first channel is tight, leaving very little room to move. A ship is coming up towards us. Ships under navigation show red light on their port side, and green on their starboard.

‘Can you see his red?'

Naturally, in accord with the convention of the sea, we will pass port side to port side. That is not the problem.

‘Can you see his red, Second Mate?'

Shubd is staring through binoculars, so is Sorin, but though we can all see the green on his starboard side with the naked eye, there is no red showing. This means he is angling across our bows.

‘This is bullshit,' says the Captain suddenly, pointing at the electronic chart. The screen has the triangle representing the approaching ship neatly off our port bow, its course aligned in such a way that we could not possibly be blind to the red light on its port side unless the bulb had gone, the possibility of which is not even worth considering. The two hulls converge through darkness. The Captain's instruments are lying to him. There is very little time.

‘Starboard ten!'

‘Starboard ten.'

If we are where the automatic identification system (the AIS, an electronic chart that shows ships in real time) says we are this course could take us aground.

Sorin swears and jumps forward, pressing buttons on the radar console as the ship ahead shows red light, at last.

‘The gyro! The slave station is not adjusted – . . .'

The electronic chart realigns. We are exactly where we should be and the radar screen is a nightmare, spattered with heavy gold rain, every drop a ship at anchor or charging under way. One monster shoots across us, doing twenty knots, showing three lights. The confusion is doubled because the anchored vessels are all lit up while the movers show only navigation lamps.

All the Captain's humming and muttering stop. Now he almost dances around the bridge, studying screens, spotting buoys and gruffly teaching Shubd.

‘You see, Second Mate? Have they called you, Second Mate? Yes they have! You see here – . . .' He keeps talking, explaining where he is heading, where the hazards are, on which side we will pass them. We look out for certain buoys and certain depths as we turn north-east up the Strait.

‘Now we will have some fun with the echo sounder! Look!'

He is navigating by paper chart, electronic chart, by lights, depths and buoys all at once. Singapore passes in a strobing, towering, silent glitter to the north; to the south the Indonesian shore is a twinkle of oranges in the dark. Above the hum of the engine and the sigh of the air conditioning there is the Captain's teaching, radio static and the voice of Straits Traffic Control, an alluring tone, both soft and clear.