Gangplank

Another bad call. I hadn’t had a lot of choice, and what choice I’d had, I’d gone the wrong way. A quick apology? Not ‘the Mouth.’ It made it so much worse that the Captain told me that, as I suspected, after lunch he was going to let me have my way and cross over the Pacific and back with them, letting me off in San Diego so that, if asked, he could say that was my alighting point. Not now.

All the slaps on the back and supporting words did help. They made me feel good about the people I was leaving, that I was right that I had become part of something. But the fact was, part of it or not, now I was leaving it. Joe, deadpan as ever, gave me a brief nod, then turned away to light a new cigarette from the old, flicking his old one over to the dockside. Cook gave me a big hug.

‘You did Ugly a big favour you know. Because even though he is uglier than ever now, everyone is already calling him Dough-Boy. He’s not Ugly any longer.’ He slapped my back with a thundering crack, and passed me a piece of rolled oilskin. I knew it was the paring knife. I came down the gangplank and into the customs shed where the knife gave me an extra half hour waiting, while they called the ship and Cook confirmed I worked in his kitchen. I was in the USA. Never a part of my plans, and enough to give my mum kittens—on top of the grief she would already be feeling because I hadn’t called since Punto Arenas, nine days earlier.

I went into a dockside bar to pour petrol on the bonfire of my woes and came straight back to earth. I was refused service and shown the door.