The Cat’s Table (6 page)

WE WERE BY now fully knowledgeable about most locations on the ship – from the path air ducts took in their journey away from the turbine propellers, to how I could slip into the fish preparation room (by crawling through a trolley exit), because I liked to watch the fish butchers work. Once I balanced with Cassius on the narrow struts above the false ceiling of the ballroom in order to look down at the dancing humans. It was midnight. In six hours, according to our schedules, dead poultry would be carried from the ‘cold room’ to the kitchens.

We had discovered the door to the armoury had a buggered latch, and when the room was empty we strolled through it, handling the revolvers and handcuffs. And we knew each lifeboat contained a compass, a sail, a rubber raft, plus emergency chocolate bars that we had already eaten. Mr Daniels had finally told us where the poisonous plants were in the fenced section of his garden. He pointed out to us the
Piper mephisticum
that ‘sharpened the mind’. He said elders in the Pacific Islands always took it before a critical peace treaty was debated. And there was the curare, growing almost secretly by itself under an intense yellow light, which when inserted into the bloodstream, he told us, was able to knock out the recipient into a long, unremembered trance.

We were also aware of more informal timetables, ranging from when the Australian began her roller-skating, before dawn, to the late hour, when we waited at the lifeboat for the prisoner to appear. We studied him carefully. We could see that round each of his wrists was a metal cuff. These were connected by a chain about eighteen inches long, so his hands were allowed some movement, and there was a padlock.

We watched him in silence. There was no communication between him and the three of us. Save one night, when all at once he paused in his walk and glared into the darkness towards us. He could not see us. But it was as if he was conscious of us there, that he had picked up our scent. The guards did not notice us, only he did. He gave a loud growl and turned away. We must have been fifteen yards away, and he was manacled, but he terrified us.

A Spell

IF OUR JOURNEY to England was recorded for any reason in the newspapers of the time, it was because of the presence on the
Oronsay
of the philanthropist Sir Hector de Silva. He had boarded the ship and was travelling with a retinue that included two doctors, one ayurvedic, a lawyer, and his wife and daughter. Most of them stayed in the upper echelons of the ocean liner and were seldom seen by us. No one in his party accepted the invitation to eat at the Captain’s Table. It was assumed they were above even that. Although the reason was that Sir Hector, a Moratuwa entrepreneur, who had ground out his fortune in gems, rubber and plots of land, was now suffering from a possibly fatal illness and was on his way to Europe to find a doctor who would save him.

Not one English specialist had been willing to come to Colombo to deal with Sir Hector’s medical problem, in spite of being offered considerable remuneration. Harley Street would remain in Harley Street, in spite of a recommendation from the British governor, who had dined with Sir Hector in his Colombo mansion, and in spite of the fact that Sir Hector had been knighted in England for his donations to various charities. So now he was cocooned in a grand double suite on the
Oronsay
, suffering from hydrophobia. At first we did not concern ourselves with Sir Hector’s illness. His presence on board ship was seldom mentioned by those at the Cat’s Table. He was famous because of his great wealth, and that did not hold any interest for us. But what did make us curious was our discovery of the background to his fateful journey.

It had happened this way. One morning Hector de Silva had been breakfasting on his balcony with friends. They were joking among themselves in the way that those whose lives are safe and comfortable entertain one another. At that moment, a venerable
battaramulle
– or holy priest – walked past the house. Seeing the monk, Sir Hector punned off the title by saying, ‘Ah, there goes a
muttaraballa
.’
Muttara
means ‘urinating’, and
balla
means ‘dog’. Therefore, ‘There goes a urinating dog.’

It was a quick-witted but inappropriate remark. Having overheard the insult, the monk paused, pointed to Sir Hector, and said, ‘I’ll send
you
a
muttaraballa
…’ After which the venerable, reputedly a practitioner of witchcraft, went straight to the temple, where he chanted several mantras, thereby sealing the fate of Sir Hector de Silva and closing the door on his affluent life.

I cannot remember who told us the first part of that story, but the curiosity among Cassius and Ramadhin and me immediately pulled the millionaire’s presence in Emperor Class into the foreground of our thoughts. We were busy trying to find out as much as we possibly could after that. I even sent a note to my supposed guardian Flavia Prins, and she met me briefly by the entrance to First Class and said she knew nothing. She was annoyed because my note had hinted at an emergency and I had interrupted one of her important bridge games. The problem was that at the Cat’s Table, the others were not talking about it much. Not enough for us. So we eventually approached the Assistant Purser (who, Ramadhin noted, had a glass eye), and he was able to reveal more.

Sometime after the episode with the passing venerable, Sir Hector was coming down the stairs of his great house. (The Assistant Purser used the phrase ‘climbing down the staircase’.) His pet terrier was at the foot of the steps waiting to greet him. A usual occurrence. This was an animal loved by all members of the family. As Sir Hector bent down, the affectionate animal leapt for his neck. Sir Hector pulled the dog off, at which point the animal bit his hand.

Two servants eventually got hold of the creature and put it in a kennel. While the animal was being caged, an in-law treated the bite. Apparently the terrier had already behaved strangely that morning, racing around the kitchen under the feet of the servants, and had been chased out of the house with a broom, before slipping back calm and muted at the last minute so it could await its master at the foot of the stairs. The dog had bitten no one during the earlier fracas.

Later that day Sir Hector passed the kennel and wagged his bandaged finger at the animal. Twenty-four hours later the dog died, having shown symptoms of rabies. But by then the ‘urinating dog’ had already delivered his message.

One by one they came. Every respected doctor who serviced Colombo 7 was brought in for consultation for a cure. Sir Hector was (save for a few illegal gunrunners or gem merchants whose worth would always be unknown) the richest man in the city. The doctors spoke in whispers all the way down the long corridors of his house, arguing and finessing the defence against rabies, which was already beginning to affect the wealthy body upstairs. The virus was travelling at five to ten millimetres per hour to other cells, and there were already symptoms, such as burning, itching and numbness at the site of the bite, but the terrible signs of hydrophobia were not yet apparent. As the patient was being given supportive care, the duration of the illness might last as long as twenty-five days before it was fatal. The terrier was dug up and checked once more to be certain of rabies. Telegrams were sent to Brussels, Paris and London. And three staterooms were booked on the
Oronsay
, which was the next ship leaving for Europe, just in case. The liner would stop at Aden, Port Said and Gibraltar, and it was hoped a specialist would be able to meet with the vessel in at least one of these locations.

But it was also being said that Sir Hector should remain at home, as it was likely that his condition would worsen during a possibly rough voyage where medical facilities might be minimal; plus the fact that there was usually a second-rate doctor on board, usually some twenty-eight-year-old intern whose parents had pull at the Orient Line headquarters. Besides, ayurvedic practitioners were now also arriving at the house from the Moratuwa district, where the de Silva family
walauwa
had existed for more than a century, and these men claimed to have successfully treated victims of rabies. They argued that Sir Hector, by remaining on the island, would be close to the country’s most powerful herbal remedies. They spoke vociferously in the old dialects he was familiar with from his youth, saying that the journey would leave him far from these potent sources. As the cause of the illness was local, the antidote would always be found somewhere in the same place.

In the end, Sir Hector decided to take the ship to England. Acquiring wealth he had also acquired a complete faith in the advancements of Europe. Perhaps this would prove to be his fatal flaw. The ship’s journey was twenty-one days long. He assumed he would be driven instantly from the Tilbury docks to the best doctor in Harley Street, where, he thought, perhaps there would be a respectful crowd outside, with maybe a few Ceylonese who were fully aware of his financial status. Hector de Silva had read one Russian novel and he could imagine it all, whereas a cure in Colombo seemed to rely on village magic, astrology, and botanical charts in a spidery handwriting. He had grown up knowing some local cures, such as quickly urinating on a foot to alleviate the pain from sea pencils. Now he was being told that for a mad dog’s bite the seeds of the black
ummattaka
, or thorn apple, should be soaked in cow piss, ground into a paste, and taken internally. Then, twenty-four hours later, he should take a cold bath and drink buttermilk. The provinces were full of these cures. Four out of ten of them worked. That wasn’t good enough.

However, Sir Hector de Silva did coerce one Moratuwa ayurvedic to accompany him on the sea voyage and to bring his sack full of locally gathered herbs and some Nepal-grown
ummattaka
seeds and roots. Thus, along with two established doctors, this ayurvedic boarded the ship. These medical men shared a suite on one side of Sir Hector’s central bedroom, while his wife and his twenty-three-year-old daughter shared one on the other side.

And so in mid-ocean the Moratuwa ayurvedic opened up his steamer trunk, which contained unguents and fluids, brought out the thorn apple seeds that he had previously immersed in cow’s urine, mixed them with some jaggery paste to disguise the flavour, and scurried down the hall to give the millionaire a cup of this catarrh-like sauce to swallow, followed by a good French brandy, which the philanthropist insisted on. This was carried out twice a day, and it was the ayurvedic’s only duty. So while the two professional doctors looked after the patient for the rest of the day, the man from Moratuwa had the run of the ship, though it was made clear his strolls were limited to Tourist Class. He too must have wandered about the vessel, aware of the lack of smells on the obsessively cleansed ship, until one day he picked up the familiar perfume of burning hemp and followed it to its source on D level, paused at the metal door, knocked, heard a response, and entered to be welcomed by Mr Fonseka and a boy.

We had been at sea several days when this visit occurred. And it would be the ayurvedic who revealed the last few details of the Hector de Silva story, with hesitation at first, but eventually nearly every interesting detail came from him. Later on, through us, he met Mr Daniels, who befriended him and invited him down to the hold to view his garden, where they spent hours arguing and discussing the forensics of plants. Cassius too made a new friend of the ayurvedic and immediately requested a few betel leaves from the southern doctor, who had brought a cache with him.

The surreal revelations about the man with a curse on his head thrilled us. We gathered every fragment of Sir Hector’s story and remained hungry for more. We cast our minds back to the night of embarkation in Colombo harbour and tried to recall, or to imagine at least, a stretcher, and the body of the millionaire being carried at a slight tilt up the gangplank. Whether we had witnessed this or not, the scene was now indelible in our minds. For the first time in our lives we were interested in the fate of the upper classes; and gradually it became clear to us that Mr Mazappa and his musical legends and Mr Fonseka with his songs from the Azores and Mr Daniels with his plants, who had been until then like gods to us, were only minor characters, there to watch how those with real power progressed or failed in the world.

Afternoons

IT HAD BEEN evident when Mr Daniels offered the three of us betel leaves to chew that Cassius was already familiar with them. By the time he was told he would be going to a school in England, he could already aim a jet of the red fluid through his teeth and hit anything he wished – a face on a billboard, the trousers that covered a teacher’s buttocks, a dog’s head through the open window of a passing car. Preparing for his departure, his parents, hoping to cure this street habit, refused to let him pack any betel leaves, but Cassius stuffed his favourite pillowcase with a mother lode of leaves and nuts. During the emotional farewell in Colombo harbour, as his parents waved to him from the jetty, Cassius pulled out one green leaf and waved it back at them. He was never sure if they saw it, but he hoped they had witnessed his guile.

We had been banned from the Lido pool for three days. Our assault on it that afternoon, armed with deckchairs, and under the influence of Mr Daniels’s ‘white beedi’, meant that all we could do was skulk the perimeter, pretending we were about to leap in. In our turbine room headquarters we decided to find out all we could about the passengers at the Cat’s Table, sharing any information we had picked up on our own. Cassius reported that Miss Lasqueti, the wan-looking woman who sat next to him at meals, had accidentally or intentionally ‘jostled his penis’ with her elbow. I said that Mr Mazappa, who as Sunny Meadows wore black-rimmed spectacles, did so to appear more reliable and thoughtful. He’d plucked them from his breast pocket and passed them over to me to show they were just clear glass. We all felt Mr Mazappa’s past must have been a furtive one. ‘As the good book says, I have crawled up a few sewers in my time,’ was one of his favourite conclusions to an anecdote.

During one of our constant palavers in the turbine room, Cassius said, ‘Remember the bogs at St Thomas’ College?’ He was lying back against a life preserver sucking condensed milk out of a tin. ‘You know what I am going to do, before I get off this ship? I promise you I am going to take a shit in the Captain’s enamel toilet.’

I spent more time with Mr Nevil again. With those blueprints of the ship that he always carried, he located for me where the engineers ate and slept, and where the Captain’s quarters were. He showed me how the electrical system worked its way into every room, and even the way unseen machines spread themselves throughout the lower levels of the
Oronsay
. I was already aware of that. In my cabin, one extended limb of a driveshaft revolved behind a panelled wall continuously, and I often put my open palm against the permanently warm wood.

Best of all, he told me about his days as a ship dismantler, and how an ocean liner could be broken down into thousands of unrecognisable pieces in a ‘breaker’s yard’. I realised this was what I must have seen in that far corner of Colombo harbour when the ship was being burned. It was being reduced to just useful metal, so the hull could be converted into a canal barge or the funnel hammered out to waterproof a tank. The far corner of all harbours, Mr Nevil said, was where such destructions took place. Alloys were separated, wood burned away, rubber and plastic melted into slabs and buried. But porcelain, metal taps and electrical wiring were saved and reused, so I imagined those who worked with him must have ranged from muscular men who dismantled walls with heavy wooden mallets to those whose specific job it was to pluck and gather coils of metal and small electrical fixtures and door locks, like crows. In a month they could make a ship disappear, leaving only its skeleton in the muck of some estuary, bones for a dog. Mr Nevil had worked all over the world doing this, from Bangkok to Barking. Now he was sitting with me, remembering the harbours he had inhabited at one time or another, rolling a piece of blue chalk in his fingers, suddenly meditative.

It was, he murmured, a dangerous profession, of course. And it was painful to realise that nothing was permanent, not even an ocean liner. ‘Not even the trireme!’ he said, and nudged me. He had been there to help dismantle the
Normandie
– ‘the most beautiful ship ever built’ – as it lay charred and half drowned in the Hudson River in America. ‘But somehow even
that
was beautiful … because in a breaker’s yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.’