Another Great Day at Sea Page 5

  I caught the snapper’s eye. We snuck out.

  10

  I was always self-conscious on the boat, never felt like I was blending in. The crew members were too busy with their long shifts, their chow and everything else that occupied their crowded days to pay me any mind, but I felt as though I stuck out like a hitchhiker’s thumb. I kept circling back to Joan Didion’s sly declaration of her advantages as a reporter in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, one of which was that she was ‘so physically small’ that people forgot all about her. I, on the other hand, was probably the tallest, thinnest—and, to my chagrin, oldest—person on the boat. I was forever in the way, constantly saying ‘Sorry’ and ‘Excuse me’ and generally gangling around the place, never more conspicuous than when I was attempting to lurk unseen on the edges of the gym, like Peter Crouch looming into the penalty box.

  There was a line to get into the gym and there wasn’t a lot of space once you got in. It wasn’t just that the room was small—there was also the small matter of every person in it being the size of two people. Arms were as big as legs, necks the size of waists and so on. Three guys were running marathons—on treadmills. The rest were inflating themselves with weights. They favoured baggy shorts and T-shirts or singlets, to prove that however big they got there was always room for further expansion. Even the guys who didn’t look that big were plenty big. The bald guys looked like their skulls were pumped. Inked and slinky, the mermaid on a bicep had become six months pregnant by the time a set of reps had been completed.

  I’ve always been intimidated by gyms, have never been able to enjoy the towel-round-the-shoulder confidence of somebody who knows he can bench-press 250 pounds, or even knows what that means or how much 250 pounds actually weighs. I just know I don’t like lifting heavy things, especially since I had this wrist injury which stopped me playing tennis and which means that I’ve gone from being fit and thin-looking to just a feeble streak of unshouldered manhood whose only saving grace is that he doesn’t take up much space, who leaves plenty of room for others—especially now that I was several days into a quasi-hunger strike. I slunk in the corner like a whupped pup, wondering if a visible tatt of a bulldog would have made me look more or less pathetic. The room was bursting with straining flesh and grimacing biceps. Breath came in fierce snorts. There was the clank of heavy metal being laid roughly to rest. I was conscious that I was staring at these Tom-of-Finland arms and chests with an intensity that might have been construed as homoerotic. (There were a couple of women jacked into their iPods, working out, but it was overwhelmingly male in there.) Anthony Benning, the Fit Boss, was standing next to me, wearing a T-shirt and biceps. He had grown up in a military family but was actually a civilian, supervising the exercise programme on ship. From what I could see his job resembled that of a bouncer, stopping people getting in. The gym was filled to capacity so he was operating the one-in-one-out policy that you get at overcrowded nightclubs. I didn’t know what to say but, feeling I ought to ask a question, said:

  ‘How big can a human arm become before it stops being a limb and morphs into something else?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said, and so I changed my tune and came up with a different question, still physical, but less meta.

  ‘I said, “Are you the fittest person on the boat?” ’ I said.

  ‘Lot of people fitter than me.’

  ‘Lot of people fatter than me,’ I quipped back. Then, fearing the conversation was taking on a slightly unhinged quality, I asked him about the food, its compatibility or otherwise with fitness and well-being.

  ‘Most people eat healthier on the ship than they do at home,’ he said. This seemed stodgily plausible. I nodded in a way I hoped would not seem tofu-snooty. We stood without speaking, arms folded—his massively, mine meagrely—like spectators at a muscular orgy.

  ‘Don’t suppose you know anyone I can score some steroids from, do you?’ I said after a while. He smiled, shook his head, said he’d ask around.

  ‘Well, better make room for somebody else,’ I said, squeezing past him as though I’d just shattered the world bench press and reps record.

  11

  Everybody on the boat worked long hours, everyone did so uncomplainingly and without obvious signs of stress—though some looked plenty tired—but no one would have greeted news of the introduction of a new thirty-hour-day with quite the cheer of Commander Kimberly Toone, the ship’s senior medical officer. She was that rare thing: a high-energy person with nothing even slightly manic about her; she just happened to be in a very good mood all the time—probably from the day she came bouncing into this world. On her desk she had a jar filled with sweets; I kept helping myself to them in the course of our talk, chewing constantly, conscious that this was the nicest taste I’d had in my mouth since I came aboard.

  ‘So,’ I said, munching away sweetly. ‘Tell me all about it—the mishaps, the accidents, the injuries. What’s an average day like here in the Crimea?’

  ‘I’d say on average there are four accidents a day. Ten minor accidents on the busiest day. Mainly it’s things like crushed fingers, tractors running over toes. On this deployment there’s been nothing life threatening in terms of accidents.’

  The crushed fingers thing came as no surprise. Just as homosexuals have a highly effective gaydar so, over the years, I’ve developed a kind of sixth sense in the realm of health and safety. I detect potential accident and trouble spots without even having to try. I knew that the hatches, particularly the ones requiring a quite complicated manoeuvre with levered handles, were lethal when it came to fingers (especially if there was a difference in air pressure on the other side). That was why, whenever possible, I let Ensign Newell or the snapper open and close them as we made our rounds. They would never have guessed what I was up to; it just happened that my hands were always full (with notebook, water bottle and pen).

  ‘And then there are the facial injuries,’ Kimberly went on breezily. ‘People who aren’t paying attention and walk into ailerons or horizontal stabilizers and whack themselves in the nose. Some of those are like a knife edge. We had a guy recently who cut himself right across the nose.’

  ‘I’ve seen that guy,’ I said. ‘On my first morning!’

  ‘That might have been the guy who was hit in the face with a beer bottle when we were in Jebel Ali, so that’s a different story.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘In terms of accidents what happens here is pretty much what you’d expect from an industrial environment.’

  This was not the first time that I’d heard the carrier described as ‘an industrial environment’. In my teens the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’ used to come up quite a bit, and I suppose, strictly speaking, we were in a military-industrial environment, but the thing that struck me now was that I had never wanted to spend even a minute in an industrial environment (they are noisy, greasy, dangerous places) and yet I had signed up for this, a place that was also unusually vulnerable to infections and outbreaks (which, in my normal life, I am at pains to avoid). In terms of the risk of infection, being on a carrier is like living permanently on the tube—albeit a tube that hardly ever stops at a station and takes on very few new passengers, so maybe this analogy was not so helpful after all. Still, Kimberly continued, getting people inoculated against flu as soon as the vaccine became available was a matter of some urgency.

  ‘You know, we got everybody vaccinated with a flu shot in seventy-two hours. Five thousand people in seventy-two hours, that’s a lot of shots.’

  ‘The needle must’ve been pretty blunt by the end of that.’

  ‘Bent like a coat hanger. And gummed up with blood pretty good too. But our big success this deployment was the Bahrain bug.’

  ‘Tell me about the Bahrain bug,’ I said, reaching into the jar for more sweets. Instead of taking them singly, I was now just scooping them up by the handful.

  ‘We had a diarrhoea outbreak when we left Bahrain back in August. Epidemic viral gastroenteritis.’ Kimb
erly had been smiling throughout our conversation, but now her face lit up as though she were about to tell me that her daughter had won a full scholarship to Harvard. ‘Fifteen to twenty per cent of the crew were affected—or at least came to medical. Plus there were lots of emergencies stemming from the bug: people getting dehydrated and passing out because it’s a dehydrating environment anyway. I have a master’s degree in public health so this is the kind of thing I know about—and what I know is how simple it is to deal with. The big thing that helped us fight the bug was turning the spoons around so the crew weren’t allowed to serve themselves in the mess halls. That stops it spreading. If one person who has the bug touches the spoon he passes it on to everyone behind. We had a bit of a fight with the sailors. They’re told what to wear, when to sleep, what to do. Eating is one of those things that, it’s like, “It’s me, it’s my time”. And you’re taking away their ability to choose, taking away that last little bit of independence. So we got a lot of pushback. But within three to four days our symptoms were cut in half.’

  I was acutely conscious of two things: first, that I’d been clawing away at the candy jar with my bare hands; second, relief that I’d not been on board for the Bahrain bug, especially given the problems with the vacuum system that kept putting the toilets out of action. I was already investing a lot of energy into not banging my head and a good amount of cunning into making sure that if anyone’s fingers got crushed by hatches they would be the snapper’s or Newell’s, rather than mine. After this meeting with the MO I added another string to my bow of precautions: always looking out for anti-bacterial dispensers, never passing up a chance to sanitize my hands as if we were docked at the harbour in Camus’s Oran, a city in the grips of plague and pestilence.

  12

  The bridge: that much-filmed spot where John Mills would stand, soul and head bared to the elements in the Battle of the Atlantic, wearing a soaking wet polo neck, worn down by the war, ‘this bloody war’ as he called it. How deeply that war —the Second World one —seeped into our pores and brains when we were kids. I remember my friend Nigel Raeburn and I coming home from school on the bus: top deck, front row —the bridge! We were twelve at the time and Nigel started singing, ‘When this bloody war is over . . . ’ He wasn’t just singing a song the way he might have sung the latest hit single by Rod Stewart; he was channelling the battered spirit of British wartime resilience. It was as if a time machine had taken him back to 1941 and he was lost in a reverie about the loneliness and futility of being separated from his full-bosomed sweetheart who might have been Vera Lynn herself. Perhaps the strangest part of this story is not that he was able to slip back thirty years in this way but that I am able to skip back forty so easily. I can hear and see him now with his ginger hair and pudgy lips, as clearly as if I were there, on the bridge of that bus rather than on the bridge of the USS George H.W. Bush.

  The Bush bridge was sealed in, of course, not like the open-air one on which John Mills gallantly performed. A dozen people were up there, all doing something. A lot of that doing was looking out of the window and some of the looking was being done with binoculars. Planes were taking off relatively silently beyond the glass, specimens released from a technological aviary. It was all contemporary-looking but steeped in tradition too —as when a sailor suddenly piped up, ‘Captain’s on the bridge!’ Like everyone else I stood to attention, approximately. Captain Brian Luther was here to make his daily address to the ship’s company but first he admonished someone on the bridge for a gross impertinence: ‘I don’t wanna hear anything about the Pittsburgh Stealers on my bridge.’

  The Captain began his address by confirming what everyone knew: that it was ‘another beautiful day at sea’. The trick was not simply to repeat exactly the same thing but to re-establish the same idea —another great day at sea —through slight variations. Like this the ship’s company hung on his every word, always curious to learn exactly which version of excellence had been achieved and experienced on a particular day, thereby imbuing it with a specialness within the unbroken continuum of always-improvable-on greatness.

  The Avenger of the Day —this beautiful day —was Stremmle, a lanky twenty-two-year-old who the Captain invited to sit in the big chair ‘and drive the boat for a bit’. While Stremmle was driving the boat the Captain explained to the ship’s company that he (Stremmle) had volunteered for extra shifts, had done this and that, and was —this too was part of the daily incantation —‘an outstanding example of freedom at work’. Another nice part of this little ritual was that the Avengers got to call home to tell their sweethearts or parents that they were here and being honoured in this way. The Captain’s Avenger of the Day announcement ended not with a hierarchical nod of approval but a nicely democratic ‘Well done, shipmate’. In that instant Captain and Avenger were equals —and the promise was held out that any of the five thousand people on board had the opportunity to attain a similar relationship and, ultimately, to become not simply the beneficiary of the award but its bestower.

  13

  At dinner that night I fulfilled one of my investigative ambitions: I met someone taller than me. Taller and wider. HMSC Mitchell was a vast African American who seemed to have been definitively reconfigured by living on a carrier. You hear it said of certain stocky, well-built men that they don’t have necks. Well, Mitchell had a neck in the sense that he used to have one but since it was as useful, in the stooping corridors of the carrier, as a giraffe’s he had managed, courtesy of an accelerated, one-person form of evolution, almost entirely to internalize it, to bury his neck within his shoulders. This must have caused some discomfort but that, presumably, was less than the pain of repeatedly smashing his head open (though that, to judge by an abundance of scars and bumps, had not been entirely avoided). Was the procedure reversible? When he got off the carrier and was back in the open skies of Norfolk, Virginia, would his neck re-emerge as if from hibernation and allow him once again to walk as tall as nature had intended?

  He was so big, another member of the crew claimed, that he’d had his rack specially extended which seemed extremely considerate of the Navy. Mitchell laughingly denied this. Nope, he had to suck it up. Just folded himself into his rack like he was a fold-up bed and learned to sleep without too much wriggling around.

  The removal of the possibility of complaint—of being forced to suck it up—can have a liberating effect. There was no Wi-Fi on the boat and the usual email accounts—Gmail and Hotmail—could not be used. So I had to go through an elaborate procedure to obtain a special naval email address which I would check after dinner each day in the ship’s library. The library was somewhat of a sanctuary, though you might not have guessed it from the TV which was always showing films at high volume. No, the clue lay in the detailed additions to the ‘Rules to Live By’. These Rules declared that

  Any display of affection between shipmates while on board the ship . . . is strictly prohibited.

  Out of the way places on the ship are off limits for any male-female meetings.

  Here, in the library, the forbidden specifics were spelled out:

  Close proximity viewing of movies on computer or DVD player (Must maintain 1 foot distance between individuals.)

  Close proximity “hanging out”

  Leaning against or on another person

  It was well-stocked with books, the library, but the main attraction was the availability of laptops even though they were only rarely available. There was always a wait for one to become free and then a further wait to get online successfully. My account was particularly hard to use and, on this occasion, it froze almost as soon as I had logged in. I phoned the IT guy who said it would be necessary to reset my account which would take about fifteen minutes—by which time I had to be elsewhere for a meeting. This is the kind of thing which, in normal life, can make me go completely crazy. That is an understatement. A fraction of this annoyance can lead me to do something seriously . . . ‘childish’ is the word favoured by my wif
e. Childishness, here, was not an option. Inside I was screaming but I didn’t howl or whine, didn’t even raise my voice. I was haemorrhaging tears, my head was a balloon pumped full of blood. People talk about the red mist but I could sort of see the red blood welling up behind my eyes like the surface of the ocean viewed through a sub’s periscope. But I sucked it up. I pushed my chair back and stood up from the computer. I imagined myself picking up the chair and swinging the chair into the computer; instead I stepped up to the counter and spoke to the librarian politely. I said please and thank you. I had the face of a serial killer. I sucked it up.

  Good job I did, because the person I had to meet was none other than Brian Luther—the Captain. He and two friends were sitting in fold-up chairs on a port-side catwalk, smoking cigars in the dark. The sea was nothing but darkness. I could not see anyone’s face, just the red orbs of their cigars. Then a crew member rigged up a line of blue fairy lights; it was still hard to see but in a soft romantic way. With the Captain were Jeff Davis—Air Wing Commander: the Captain’s equivalent, in charge of the planes and the flyers in the same way the Captain was in charge of the boat and the sailors—and Jeff’s deputy, Dan Dwyer. Jeff was fifty, Dan forty-four and the Captain forty-nine. I had succeeded in meeting someone taller than me but, even among the most senior officers on the ship, had not yet found anyone older. We sat all in a line, facing out to sea.

  The Captain, I discovered in this intimate setting, was someone whose life embodied compromise and scaled-down hopes. He’d wanted to be an astronaut but had settled for bossing an aircraft carrier (or ‘driving the ship’ as he always put it). One of the things that had distracted him from his astronaut ambition was falling in love with ‘the ballet’ of carrier aviation. It was reassuring to have my first impressions of the flight deck confirmed by a higher authority. Like his two buddies the Captain had notched up thousands of hours as a carrier aviator; all three had ‘flown fighters across the beach in combat’. Jeff and Dan were still flying missions every other day but they were getting towards the end of their flying days. I asked about this, about the relationship between growing old—or becoming middle-aged—and advances in technology which were transforming what it meant to fly a plane and be a pilot. That was true, the Captain said, but their experience counted for so much. Dan, he pointed out, had over a thousand arrested landings to his credit. That added up to a lot of skill, a lot of thrills—and a whole load of scares. I could see the shapes of their faces, slightly illuminated when they puffed on cigars, but could not tell who was speaking. It didn’t matter because they all agreed on one thing: everything about the job was fun. They were like kids, the three of them, still delighted that they got to drive and fly around in these incredible machines. But they were in earnest, also, about dedicating themselves to a life of service, to something (though I don’t know which one of them said this) ‘greater than self’.