No Comebacks (13 page)

The Emperor was lying just beneath him, exhausted almost to the point of death. The huge body lay athwart the boat's wake, on its side, mouth half open. Hanging from one corner was the steel trace of an earlier struggle with the game-fishermen, still bright in its newness. In the lower mandible another hook, long rusted, jutted out. From Kilian's hand the steel wire ran to the third hook, his own, which was deep in the gristle of the upper hp. Only part of the shank was showing.

Succeeding waves washed over the marlin's blue-black body. From 2 feet away the fish stared back at Murgatroyd with one marbled saucer eye. It was alive but had no strength left to fight. The line from its mouth to Kilian's hand was taut. Murgatroyd leaned slowly down, reaching out his right hand to the fish's mouth.

'You can pat him later, man,' said Kilian, 'let's get him home.'

Deliberately Murgatroyd placed the jaws of the cutters either side of the steel trace, where it was spliced to the shank of the hook. He squeezed. Blood came out of his palm and ran in the salt water over the marlin's head. He squeezed again and the steel wire parted.

'What are you doing? He'll get away,' shouted Higgins.

The Emperor stared at Murgatroyd as another wave ran over him. He shook his tired old head and pushed the spike of his beak into the cool water. The next wave rolled him back onto his belly and he dropped his head deeper. Away to the left his great crescent tail rose and fell, driving wearily at the water. When it made contact it flicked twice and pushed the body forward and down. The tail was the last they saw, laborious in its fatigue, driving the marlin back beneath the waves to the cold darkness of its home.

'Bloody hell,' said Kilian.

Murgatroyd tried to stand up, but too much blood had rushed to his head. He remembered the sky turning slowly once in a big circle and the dusk coming very fast. The decking rose up to hit him first in the knees and then in the face. He fainted. The sun hung suspended above the mountains of Mauritius in the west.

It had set by one hour when the Auantcruised home across the lagoon and Murgatroyd had come awake. On the journey Kilian had taken back the trousers and sweater, so the cool evening air could play on the scorched limbs. Now Murgatroyd had drunk three beers in a row and sat slumped on one of the benches, shoulders hunched, his hands in a bucket of cleansing salt water. He took no notice when the boat moored beside the timber jetty and Jean-Paul scampered off towards the village.

Old Monsieur Patient closed the engines down and made sure the painters were secure.

He threw the large bonito and the dorado onto the pier and stowed the tackle and lures. Kilian heaved the cold-box onto the jetty and jumped back into the open well.

'Time to go,' he said.

Murgatroyd pulled himself to his feet and Kilian helped him to the quay. The hem of his shorts had fallen to below his knees and his shirt flapped open about him, dark with dried sweat. His plimsoles squelched. A number of villagers were lining the narrow jetty, so they had to walk in single file. Higgins had gone ahead.

The first person in the line was Monsieur Patient. Murgatroyd would have shaken hands but they hurt too much. He nodded to the boatman and smiled.

'Merci
,' he said.

The old man, who had recovered his chip hat, pulled it from his head.
'Salut, Maitre,'
he replied.

Murgatroyd walked slowly up the jetty. Each of the villagers bobbed his head and said,
'Salut, Maitre.'
They reached the end of the planking and stepped into the gravel of the village street. There was a large crowd of villagers grouped round the car.
'Salut, salut, salut, Maitre,'
they said quietly.

Higgins was stowing the spare clothing and the empty brunch box. Kilian swung the cold-trunk over the tailboard and slammed the door. He came to the rear passenger side where Murgatroyd waited.

'What are they saying?' whispered Murgatroyd.

'They're greeting you,' said Kilian. 'They're calling you a master-fisherman.'

'Because of the Emperor?'

'He's something of a legend around here.'

'Because I caught the Emperor?'

Kilian laughed softly. 'No, Engelsman, because you gave him his life back.'

They climbed into the car, Murgatroyd in the back where he sank gratefully into the cushions, his hands cupped, palms burning, in his lap. Kilian took the wheel, Higgins next to him.

'I say, Murgatroyd,' said Higgins, 'these villagers seem to think you're the cat's whiskers.'

Murgatroyd stared out of the window at the smiling brown faces and waving children.

'Before we go back to the hotel we'd better stop by the hospital at Flacq and let the doctor have a look at you,' said Kilian.

The young Indian doctor asked Murgatroyd to strip down and clucked in concern at what he saw. The buttocks were blistered raw from the contact backwards and forwards with the seat of the fishing chair. Deep purple welts furrowed shoulders and back where the webbing had bitten in. Arms, thighs and shins were red and flaking from sunburn and the face was bloated from the heat. Both palms looked like raw steak.

'Oh, dear me,' said the doctor, 'it will take some time.'

'Shall I call back for him in, say, a couple of hours?' asked Kilian.

'There is no need,' said the doctor. 'The H6tel St Geran is close to my journey home. I will drop the gentleman off on my way.'

It was ten o'clock when Murgatroyd walked through the main doors of the St Geran and into the light of the hallway. The doctor was still with him. One of the guests saw him enter and ran into the dining room to tell the late eaters. Word spread to the pool bar outside. There was a scraping of chairs and clatter of cutlery. A crowd of holidaymakers soon surged round the corner and came down the hall to meet him. They stopped halfway.

He looked a strange sight. His arms and legs were thickly smeared with calamine lotion, which had dried to a chalky white. Both hands were mummified in white bandages. His face was brick red and gleamed from the cream applied to it. His hair was a wild halo to his face and his khaki shorts were still at knee-length. He looked like a photographic negative. Slowly he began to walk towards the crowd, which parted for him.

'Well done, old man,' said someone.

'Hear hear, absolutely,' said someone else.

Shaking hands was out of the question. Some thought of patting him on the back as he passed through, but the doctor waved them away. Some held glasses and raised them in toast. Murgatroyd reached the base of the stone stairway to the upper rooms and began to climb.

At this point Mrs Murgatroyd emerged from the hair-dressing salon, brought by the hubbub of her husband's return. She had spent the day working herself into a towering rage since, in the mid-morning, puzzled by his absence from their usual spot on the beach, she had searched for him and learned where he had gone. She was red in the face, though from anger rather than sunburn. Her going-home perm had not been completed and rollers stuck out like Katyushka batteries from her scalp.

'Murgatroyd,' she boomed — she always called him by his surname when she was angry — 'where do you think
you're
going?'

At the midway landing Murgatroyd turned and looked down at the crowd and his wife. Kilian would tell colleagues later that he had a strange look in his eyes. The crowd fell silent.

'And what do you think you
look
like,' Edna Murgatroyd called up to him in outrage.

The bank manager then did something he had not done in many years. He shouted.

'Quiet...'

Edna Murgatroyd's mouth dropped open, as wide as, but with less majesty than, that of the fish.

'For twenty-five years, Edna,' said Murgatroyd quietly, 'you have been threatening to go and live with your sister in Bognor. You will be happy to know that I shall not detain you any longer. I shall not be returning with you tomorrow. I am going to stay here, on this island.'

The crowd stared up at him dumbfounded.

'You will not be destitute,' said Murgatroyd. 'I shall make over to you our house and my accrued savings. I shall take my accumulated pension funds and cash in my exorbitant life-assurance policy.'

Harry Foster took a swig from his can of beer and burped.

Higgins quavered, 'You can't leave London, old man. You'll have nothing to live on.'

'Yes, I can,' said the bank manager. 'I have made my decision and I am not going to go back on it. I was thinking all this out in hospital when Monsieur Patient came to see how I was. We agreed a deal. He will sell me his boat and I will have enough left over for a shack on the beach. He will stay on as captain and put his grandson through college. I will be his boat boy and for two years he will teach me the ways of the sea and the fish. After that, I shall take the tourists fishing and earn my living in that manner.'

The crowd of holidaymakers continued to stare up at him in stunned amazement.

It was Higgins who broke the silence again. 'But Murgatroyd, old man, what about the bank? What about Ponder's End?'

'And what about me?' wailed Edna Murgatroyd.

He considered each question judiciously.

'To hell with the bank,' he said at length. 'To hell with Ponder's End. And, madam, to hell with you.'

With that he turned and mounted the last few steps. A burst of cheering broke out behind him. As he went down the corridor to his room he was pursued by a bibulous valediction.

'Good on yer, Murgatroyd.'

THERE ARE SOME DAYS …

THE
ST KILIAN
ROLL-ON ROLL-OFF ferry from Le Havre buried her nose in another oncoming sea and pushed her blunt bulk a few yards nearer to Ireland. From somewhere on A deck driver Liam Clarke leaned over the rail and stared forward to make out the low hills of County Wexford coming closer.

In another twenty minutes the Irish Continental Line ferry would dock in the small port of Rosslare and another European run would be completed. Clarke glanced at his watch; it was twenty to two in the afternoon and he was looking forward to being with his family in Dublin in time for supper.

She was on time again. Clarke left the rail, returned to the passenger lounge and collected his grip. He saw no reason to wait any longer and descended to the car deck three levels down where his juggernaut transport waited with the others. Car passengers would not be called for another ten minutes, but he thought he might as well get settled in his cab. The novelty of watching the ferry dock had long worn off; the racing page of the Irish newspaper he had bought on board, though twenty-four hours old, was more interesting.

He hauled himself up into the warm comfort of his cab and settled down to wait until the big doors in the bow opened to let him out onto the quay of Rosslare. Above the sun visor in front of him his sheaf of customs documents was safely stacked, ready to be produced in the shed.

The
St Kilian
passed the tip of the harbour mole at five minutes before the hour and the doors opened on the dot of two. Already the lower car deck was a-roar with noise as impatient tourists started up their engines well before necessary. They always did. Fumes belched from a hundred exhausts, but the heavy trucks were up front and they came off first. Time, after all, was money.

Clarke pressed the starter button and the engine of his big Volvo artic throbbed into life. He was third in line when the marshal waved them forward. The other two trucks breasted the clanking steel ramp to the quayside with a boom of exhausts and Clarke followed them. In the muted calm of his cab he heard the hiss of the hydraulic brakes being released, and then the steel planking was under him.

With the echoing thunder of the other engines and the clang of the steel plates beneath his wheels he failed to hear the sharp crack that came from his own truck, somewhere beneath and behind him. Up from the hold of the
St Kilian
he came, down the 200 yards of cobbled quay and into the gloom again, this time of the great vaulted customs shed. Through the windscreen he made out one of the officers waving him into a bay beside the preceding trucks and he followed the gestures. When he was in position he shut down the engine, took his sheaf of papers from the sun visor and descended to the concrete floor. He knew most of the customs officers, being a regular, but not this one. The man nodded and held out his hand for the documents. He began to riffle through them.

It only took the officer ten minutes to satisfy himself that all was in order — licence, insurance, cargo manifest, duty paid, permits and so forth — the whole gamut of controls apparently required to move merchandise from one country to another even within the Common Market. He was about to hand them all back to Clarke when something caught his eye.

'Hello, what the hell's that?' he asked.

Clarke followed the line of his gaze and saw beneath the cab section of the truck a steadily spreading pool of oil. It was dripping from somewhere close to the rear axle of the section.

'Oh Jaysus,' he said in despair, 'it looks like the differential nose-piece.'