Another Great Day at Sea Read online

  30

  We were a few minutes late for the FOD (foreign object debris) walk. By the time we got up on the flight deck there was a line of helmeted and vizored people, three or four deep, stretched across the bow of the boat, starting to walk towards us. (Ah, so this was the flight-deck promenade that we had observed from the helo a couple of days previously!) It was like Pellizza da Volpedo’s painting The Fourth Estate, re-enacted in some brightly coloured sci-fi future. Our cranials meant that it was silent as a painting too. A rainbow coalition of float coats, shirts and helmets—all framed by the horizon of sea and sky—it was a thoroughly impressive display of human-technological might but, since everyone was walking slowly, heads bowed, it was reminiscent, also, of something seen from time to time on TV news: a line of police officers combing the countryside in a similarly orderly line, looking for clues after a school kid has gone missing, oblivious to the bucolic surroundings, conscious only of what they are looking for.

  And so it was here. They inched forward. No one looked up, everyone was concentrating on finding the bit of metal or trash that had somehow ended up on deck and which could find its way into a jet’s air intakes. The planes were unbelievably powerful but this power co-existed with a heightened vulnerability and susceptibility to sudden and catastrophic failure. ‘It takes about 80,000 rivets, 30,000 washers, 10,000 screws and bolts to help make an aircraft fly,’ read posters scattered round the boat, ‘and only one nut to destroy it.’

  The line of silent people advanced towards us, a slow-moving force of anti-nature. We stood our ground and then turned and joined the hunt. A couple of guys held leather pouches. When people found something—a piece of metal, small bits of stone, stuff too small even to have a name—they held it up and dropped it in a pouch. I was reminded of the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert with its scrupulous adherence to the policy of Leave No Trace and a similar obsession with MOOP (Matter Out Of Place).

  It was a lovely day—it was a lovely day every day—but there was no time, at the end of the FOD walk, to just hang out, stroll around, enjoy the view. People dispersed quickly, went back to their sunless submarine life below deck.

  On the way back to my room I paused to listen to the Captain’s daily announcement. ‘It’s a bee-oo-tiful day to be at sea,’ he said. ‘A striking day. I think we ought to send our paychecks back to the Navy for the privilege of being at sea today.’

  31

  It had not escaped my attention that everybody on the boat had the teeth of Hollywood stars: white, straight, gleaming, uniformly perfect. Paul and I went down to the surgery to see how this orthodontic excellence and anonymity was produced and maintained. The walls of the reception were crammed with vari-coloured folders full of the crew’s dental histories. Just as I was thinking that it looked like a dentist’s in England—old-fashioned and ordinary—I saw something extraordinary: someone older than me, disappearing down a corridor. At last! Bryan Foster, the young guy showing me round, confirmed this sighting: there was indeed a sixty-year-old dentist on board. Sixty, by American standards, is not old, but in a context where the average age is about twenty-two he looked ancient, like an elder from a village in Afghanistan or a prophet left behind from some previous era of human development before the youth inherited the earth and took over the ship.

  As for Bryan—nice, normal-aged Bryan—he’d been in Afghanistan for eight months, spending some of that time in Helmand with British forces, dealing with combat casualties.

  ‘Facial injuries, that kind of thing?’ I said, assuming that combat demanded that his area of expertise perhaps extended to the zone around the mouth and teeth.

  ‘No, everything, sir. Tourniquets, amputations, disembowelments, IED blasts—everything you can think of. A lot of the enlisted sailors you’ll see down here are trained in dental and combat casualty care. We’re expected to be able to do everything.’

  I had discovered, over the course of the previous three or four years, how deeply I admired many of the soldiers that I had read about in books or seen in documentaries about Iraq or Afghanistan. But always, just as impressive as the fighting soldiers were the medics: the military doctors whose job was to patch together their mutilated comrades, luckless civilians caught up in fighting and, on occasion, their enemies. Bryan had done all of that and still managed to guide me round his current place of work as though nothing gave him more pride and satisfaction than the outstanding quality of orthodontics on offer. People sometimes talk of feeling ‘humbled’, but that’s not how I felt on the boat; it was more like an awareness of frequently being in the presence of superior individuals whose capacities and experience were quite unlike those I came across—I knew plenty of writers and artists—back at the beach.

  As Bryan showed me the various treatment rooms where patients were having teeth painlessly drilled and cleaned, their chewing and smiling potential enhanced, I was conscious of something else that often happened in the course of my assignment: I was not concentrating on what I was seeing and hearing. Instead of diligently making notes and asking questions about the way the surgery was run I was mentally rehearsing a pitch whereby maybe, as part of my research, if a slot was available, it would be useful, as part of my research, to get my crooked English teeth checked out, cleaned and polished. When I did finally raise the possibility Bryan considered it an excellent idea, was only too happy to demonstrate the excellence of the service provided. He looked through the schedule of appointments and asked if I could come back at eight. I looked at the clock. It was just after six. Consider this for a moment: I was being offered an appointment two hours from now. No, that is not a mistake. He did not mean two months, two weeks or two days—he meant two hours. I booked in, smiling my crooked, yellowy, freeloading English smile.

  ‘Oh there’s one more thing,’ I said to Bryan. ‘That old guy we saw? I hoped I’d get a chance to speak with him.’ I didn’t really have anything to ask him except the gloating questions ‘What’s it like to be so old?’ or ‘Hey, old-timer, how’s it feel to be the oldest guy on the boat?’ Bryan looked around but he was nowhere to be seen. And he wasn’t there when I returned to the surgery later that evening. He was never anywhere to be seen. And so he took on the quality of an apparition or ghost, a figment of my imagination, a spirit I’d conjured up to make myself feel younger.

  A sword-and-sorcery/martial-arts epic was on TV when I went back to the surgery. The volume was turned way up—not to cover up the dreadful sound of drilling and screams but because this was a carrier where any TV worthy of the name was cranked up like the PA at Glastonbury. I filled out a load of forms, joked that I hoped I wasn’t signing anything that meant I was liable for the full cost of labour and materials (ha ha!), was shown into a room and introduced to HM1 Wang, who tipped me back in the chair and went to work. It was the same kind of thing I’d had done in London—scraping and picking with prodders, deep-whiz polishing, flossing and, for dessert, a gobful of some kind of high-intensity fluoride trifle—but it felt more treat than treatment, or at least like a treatment in the spa sense of the word. You know that feeling when you’re having a massage or some utterly superfluous pamper-therapy and you feel time floating away? When you think you could lie there for the rest of eternity? That’s pretty much how I felt here, as if some impacted wisdom chakras were being painlessly unblocked. Certainly it’s the only time I have ever been to a dentist’s and wished I could have been there longer, had more done. What a shame it was just a clean, that there wasn’t some root canal work to be undertaken or an Amisian crown and bridge to be installed, a potentially agonizing experience (both physically and financially) that would have been rendered entirely painless by both the skill of the dentist and the knowledge that I was getting it entirely for free.

  The hour passed horribly quickly. The seat went back to upright mode. I looked in the mirror at my gleaming, whiter-than-they-had-ever-been (but still crooked), happy, almost-American teeth. Was this another reason why they were always smiling
on the carrier—to show off their teeth? Back in the reception it really was, as they say, smiles all round. I was even presented with a full set of dental records as a souvenir.

  It was nine thirty. I returned to my room and, for the first time in forty years, went to bed without cleaning my teeth.

  32

  The most crowded place on this crowded ship was the smoke pit: a little area towards the stern of the boat, on the starboard side, maybe five yards by five, with room for about twenty people to stand and smoke. (This is hearsay; it sounded so disgusting I didn’t set foot on it myself.) The queue to get out there was always immense, like the lines of junkies waiting to score crack or heroin in The Wire. There is a long-running connection between the Navy and smoking (the Player’s cigarettes my mum used to smoke actually had a sailor on the packet) but it seemed odd that the Navy didn’t simplify matters and declare the ship smoke-free. People would be cranky for a bit but after a while the craving for nicotine would pass and they would be relieved of this compulsion to waste so much of the little free time they had queuing up to smoke. The counter-argument is that smoking is a pleasure, one of few available during a sexless and boozeless deployment. Well, exactly: if you can go without booze and sex then why not go without smoking too? Especially since cigarettes are not a source of pleasure. A cigarette serves mainly to alleviate the craving for a cigarette, removes the pain of wanting a cigarette. Take away the cigarette and you take away the craving too. But, hey, what do I know? I’ve never had one.

  The incredible thing was that these smokers could have been enjoying the smokeless air of the fantail instead. This idyllic spot was always so empty that I’d assumed people were not allowed out there—but they were, apparently, except when planes were landing, when there was a chance of a jet smashing into the back of the boat and causing a mass of casualties. Even tonight, less than a minute’s walk from the smoke pit, there were just the guys on watch, looking out over a barely swaying sea. An oil well was perched on the horizon, glowing redly like a miniature sun, a fraction of the size of the eye-frying whopper we’re used to. It was like a dream of the astrophysical future when the sun had used itself up, run out of gas, was just an ember of its former self. It cast a dim reddish glow, hardly enough to illuminate the dark clouds of oil pollution that loured over it. Its days were numbered whereas the moon was in the ascendant: sharp as a disc and creating a foil glitter of our wake. In its low-key, not-with-a-bang-barely-even-a-whimper way, it was one of the most apocalyptic sights I had ever seen.

  Planes came in to land. Each, at first, was an orange blob of light, then a horizontal line of traffic lights—green, amber, red—and finally a solid roar of light screaming directly overhead.8

  As the days passed, I sought out more and more opportunities to hang out on the fantail, to turn my deployment into a kind of pleasure cruise with military accessories thrown in. On the flimsiest pretext I would ask to be escorted there so that I could sit on a capstan and gaze at the sea and sky: the turquoise foam bath of the carrier’s wake, sometimes a tanker perched idly on the horizon, the constantly circling helos. I never quite had the nerve to don my headphones and listen to the nautical playlist I’d prepared prior to boarding (and which I’d never listened to), though I probably could have got away with it under the pretext of putting Bose’s patented noise-cancelling system through its paces.

  The monotony of life at sea is not confined to the jobs people do. Seeing the sun rise and set every day in the unchanging sky over the unchanging—and constantly changing—ocean is inherently meditative, and it was easy to fall into a cognitive trance out there on the fantail. (Actually, for many members of the crew, busy toiling away below decks, part of that sentence needs to be rewritten as follows: ‘Not seeing the sun rise and set every day in the unseen sky over the unseen ocean . . . ’ The sea, for many—probably most—of the sailors working in its midst was conspicuous by its absolute absence from their lives, except as the thing that obliged them to remain within the confines of the boat.) In my case this fantail trance took the form of a kind of mental seasickness whereby the clarity and fixity of the carrier’s unquestioned purpose gave rise to feelings—and questions—of purposelessness. Did the presence of these carrier-launched planes in the skies over Iraq accomplish anything at this moment in history (especially if one considered the actual and opportunity costs of doing so)? Wasn’t it in some ways an unbelievably expensive and noisy provocation? Weren’t the planes flying missions primarily because the boat was here and because that’s what planes do? This in turn raised other doubts about the constant guarding against risk and threat. The carrier would not have been at risk if it had not been here.

  So there I was: a tourist with a notebook, a marine anthropologist whose data was so thoroughly and distortingly mixed up with the means of obtaining it that it probably had no value as data, only as a memoir or a collection of camera-less holiday snaps. Here’s one of me and Newell on the flight deck. Oh, here’s one of me on the fantail with a guy whose name I can’t quite re-member . . .

  But lest we forget—lest I forgot—I was not without rank, purpose and station. G. Dyer (FRSL) was writer-in-residence and by residing here (on the fantail, whenever possible) and scrawling in his school exercise books he was doing his duty, serving his country (or, at the very least, fulfilling the terms of his contract).

  And it was not all plain sailing out there on the fantail, un-der-neath the scorching sun. Iranian boats would come close—whatever ‘close’ means in naval terms—as a test and provocation. The pot, in this instance, seemed to be calling the kettle black. We were in international waters, but at some points (I had heard) we were only twenty-eight miles off the coast of Iran. We were a big-ass warship capable of raining death and destruction on people’s heads twenty-four hours a day; we spent our time strutting round the Gulf like we owned the place; and our planes (to put the matter mildly) made a helluva racket. I’d have loved nothing more than to have seen Ahmadinejad step into a specially convened boxing ring on the flight deck and get his bearded ass kicked by one of the crew (a woman ideally) but, in the larger scheme of things, it seemed that our presence might be construed as provocative or, at the very least, intrusive. How would we have felt if the Eye-ranians had a carrier twenty-eight miles off the coast of Maine or Cornwall? Would we have tolerated that kind of stunt even for a millisecond?

  8. I had permission to be there while the planes were landing.

  33

  I got used to showering in the noisy, smelly bathrooms—with my flip-flops on in case of verrucas—but it was an experience devoid of pleasure. I never lingered, always tried to get out before anyone else came in. When it came to crapping I always picked a corner stall, figuring that a person on one side rather than both offered a 50 per cent increase in privacy. It was awful, sitting there, to see a pair of heavy black boots beneath the door of the opposite stall or the panel separating me from the stall next door, knowing someone else was engaged in a facing or parallel dump. The contrast that I’d been so conscious of in the gym, between my scrawny limbs and those of the grunting pumpers, also made itself felt here in the so-called head. Living on a subsistence diet, I alternated between manageable diarrhoea and stringy little turds. The sailors who were tucking daily into their burgers and hot dogs, meanwhile, were sitting there solidly—feet planted on the ground, straining away like weightlifters—and depositing swollen bicep turds that put the vacuum system through its paces. The gym ethos permeated the ship: the food gave the digestive capacities of the body a daily workout; at times, faced with the sheer amount of grease and fat confronting it, the digestive system must have been tempted to call it a day, but then the military training kicked in and the body had to suck it up, had to start breaking this stuff down, translating it into energy and power which was then put to work in the gyms and exercise classes until eventually the unusable residue—of which there was a vast amount—was bench-pressed into shape and passed on to the vacuum system which, in
turn, was in the grips of a constant, system-threatening workout that frequently left it prostrate and constipated, in a state of total collapse.

  I lost track of the number of times my local toilets were out of action. Often enough to make me approach them with a feeling of mounting anxiety which turned either to dread (what am I gonna do now?) when confronted with a notice on the locked door or relief (they’re working!) when the door opened and the promise of a fully functioning toilet made itself pongily apparent.