Flying Dutch

SIX

Cheer up, for God’s sake,” said the other man in Quincy’s, with his mouth full, “you’re putting me off my asparagus quiche.”

His companion scowled at the little cardboard square under his glass. For reasons which it would be counterproductive to rehearse, he knew that the jolly little cartoon on the beer that of a Viking warrior drinking lager was completely inaccurate, but that wasn’t the thing that was upsetting him.

“I don’t want to cheer up,” he said. “Cheerfulness would be very strange behaviour just now, don’t you think?”

Suspense is a legitimate literary device only if responsibly handled. Know, then, that the other man’s name is Gerald.

“You always were a gloomy sod,” said Gerald, his jaws temporarily free, “even when we were kids. You had this knack of always looking on the black side. And what good does it do? Tell me that.”

“It enables me,” said Gerald’s friend, “to harmonise with my karma. My karma is presently as much fun as a traffic-jam on the M6. Therefore I am gloomy. If I were to cheer up now, I could suffer severe spiritual damage.”

“Funny you should mention the M6,” Gerald replied. “I was three hours—three whole hours out of my life—getting between Junctions Four and Five the other day. And you know what caused it all? Changing the light bulb in one of those street-lamp things. Pathetic, I call it, absolutely bloody pathetic.”

“Tell me all about the M6,” Gerald’s friend said savagely. “I’m sure it’s incredibly relevant to my getting the sack.”

“You have not got the sack,” Gerald said. “How many times have I got to tell you? You’ve been moved sideways, that’s all. It happens to everyone. I got moved sideways last year, and it’s been the making of me.”

“Gerald,” said his friend, “how long have we known each other?”

Gerald’s friend thought for a moment. “Good question that,” he said. He put down his fork and began to count on his fingers. “Let me think. Seventy-three, was it? Seventeen years. My God, how time flies!”

“I’ve known you for seventeen years?”

“Looks like it.”

“Why?”

Gerald frowned. “What do you mean?” he said.

“Why?” said his friend angrily. “I mean, what has been the point? Seventeen years we’ve been meeting regularly, sending each other postcards from Santorini, inviting each other to parties, having lunch; you’d think it would count for something. You’d think it would go some way towards creating some sort of mutual understanding. And now you sit there, drinking a glass of wine which I paid for, and tell me that getting transferred from Current Affairs to Sport is a sideways move.”

“Well it is,” said Gerald. He had grown so used to this sort of thing that he took no notice whatsoever. “More people watch sport than current affairs, it’s a known fact. Call it promotion.”

“Will you be able to get me seats for Wimbledon, do you think?”

“What’s Wimbledon?” asked his friend.

Gerald frowned. He didn’t mind Danny trying to be amusing, but blasphemy was another matter. “Doesn’t matter if it’s behind a pillar or anything like that,” he said. “It’s the being there that really counts.”

Danny Bennet ignored him. “Anything but Sport,” he said, “I could have taken in my stride. “Songs of Praise.” “Bob’s Full House.” “Antiques Roadshow.” Take any shape but this and my firm nerves shall never tremble. Sport, no. At Sport I draw the line.”

“You never did like games much,” Gerald reflected, as he cornered a radish in the folds of his lettuce-leaf. “Remember the lengths you used to go to just to get off games at school? You just never had any moral fibre, I guess. It’s been a problem with you all through life. If only they’d made you play rugger at school, we’d be having less of these theatricals now, I bet.”

“Have you ever tried killing yourself, Gerald? You’d enjoy it.”

“If I were in your shoes,” Gerald continued, “I’d be over the moon. Plenty of open air. Good clean fun. What the viewer really wants, too; I mean, quite frankly, who gives a toss about politics anyway? Come to think of it, maybe you could do something about the way they always put the cricket highlights on at about half past three in the morning. I’m not as young as I was, I need my eight hours. And it’s all very well saying tape it, but I can never set the timer right. I always seem to end up with half an hour of some cult movie in German, which is no use at all when I come in from a hard day at the office. My mother can do it, of course, but then she understands machines. She tapes the Australian soaps, which I call a perverse use of advanced technology.”

“Isn’t it time,” Danny said, “that you were getting back?”

Gerald glanced at his watch and swore. “You’re right,” he said, “doesn’t time fly? Look, I hate to rush off when you’re having a life crisis like this, but the dollar’s been very iffy all week and God knows what it’ll get up to if I’m not there to hold its hand. You must come to dinner. Amanda’s finally worked out a way of doing crême brulée in the microwave, you’ll love it. Thanks for the drink.” He scooped up the remaining contents of his plate in his fingers, jammed the mixture into his mouth, and departed.

With Gerald mercifully out of the way, Danny was able to enjoy his misery properly. He savoured it. He rolled it round his palate. He experienced its unique bouquet. It is not every day that a living legend gets put out with the empty bottles and the discarded packaging; in fact, it would make a marvellous fly-on-the-wall documentary. For someone else.

Perhaps, Danny said to himself, I am taking it rather too hard. Perhaps they were right, and I was getting a bit set in my ways in current affairs. Perhaps it will be an exciting challenge producing televised snooker in Warrington. Perhaps the world is just a flat plate spinning on a stick balanced on the nose of the Great Conjuror, and my fortunes are so insignificant as to be unworthy of consideration. Perhaps I should pack it all in and go work for the satellite people.

In the three years since his story (the details of which are not relevant hereto) Danny had often considered leaving the BBC and signing on under the Jolly Roger, but only when he was in no fit state to make important decisions. He had come as close as typing his letter of resignation on that day which shall live in infamy when they told him that they had no use for his searing revelations of corruption in the sewage disposal department of a major West Midlands borough, provisionally entitled “Orduregate”. That same letter had been typed and stamped when “Countdown to Doomsday”, his mordant exposé of the threat posed by a popular brand of furniture polish to the ozone layer, had ended up on the cutting room floor; while a third edition brushed the lip of the post-box after the top floor suspended filming of the script which would have unmasked a hitherto-respected chiropodist in Lutterworth as the Butcher of Clermont-Ferrand. But he had never done it. The final Columbus-like step off the edge of the world and through the doors of the South Bank Studios was not for him, and he knew it.

The fourth edition of his resignation letter, therefore, remained unwritten, and when he left Quincy’s he returned to the studios and went to see the man who was going to tell him everything he needed to know about sports broadcasting in twenty-five minutes.

“The main thing,” said the expert, “is to turn up on the right day at the right place and keep the sound recordists out of the bar. Leave everything else to the cameramen, and you’ll do all right. That’s it.”

Is it like this, Danny asked himself, in death’s other kingdom? “That’s it, is it?” he said.

“Yes,” said the expert. “Apart from the commentators, of course. They’re a real pain in the backside, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do about them, so don’t let it worry you. It’s basically a question of hanging on and not letting it get to you.”

“Even if they say “Well, Terry, it’s a funny old game?””

“That, my son,” said the expert, “will be the least of your worries.” He paused and looked at Danny curiously. “Aren’t you that bloke who did the thing about the buried treasure?”

“That’s right,” Danny said. The expert grinned.

“I saw that,” he said. “Load of old cobblers. You’re lucky you’ve still got a job after a stunt like that.”

“Oh yes?” Danny said.

“Listen,” said the expert. “I’ve been in this game a long time. The average viewer doesn’t want all that. No goals. No big girls. No car-chases. We’re living in the age of the video now, just you remember that and you won’t go far wrong.”

“Thank you,” Danny said, “for all your help.”

Now that he knew everything there was to know about producing sports programmes, he felt that he was ready to take on his first assignment. He was wrong.

“For God’s sake,” he exclaimed. “You can’t be serious.”

“Someone’s got to do it,” he was told.

“They said that about Monte Cassino.”

“What,” came the reply, “is Monte Cassino?”

“Be reasonable,” Danny urged. “Quite apart from the fact that it’s a fate worse than death, it must be a highly difficult technical assignment. Stands to reason. I’ve got no experience whatsoever. I’ll have no end of problems.”

“That’s right, you will. But you’ll cope.”

“I don’t want to cope,” Danny blathered, “I’m a perfectionist.”

“And look where it’s got you.”

Danny paused, but only because he had spoken all the breath out of his lungs. As he breathed in, a terrible thought struck him.

“This is deliberate,” he said. “Of course, why didn’t I realise it before? You’ve given this to me just so as I can cock it up and you can fire me.”

“You and your conspiracy theories.”

“Stuff conspiracy theories,” Danny snapped, “this is my career at stake. You can’t do this to me. I have friends.”

“Name one.”

Put like that, it wasn’t easy. The life pattern of a television producer is not conducive to the forming of friendships. The only one he could come up with was Gerald, and he probably wouldn’t count for much.

“Contacts, then,” Danny said. “I have contacts. All I’d have to do to get my own show on Channel 4 is snap my fingers.”

“All I’d have to do to get a show on Channel 4 is snap my fingers,” his interlocutor pointed out reasonably. “Look, stop being such a pain about it and go and film some yachts. You’ll like it once you get there. They tell me the trick is not to lean backwards too far or you’ll fall off the boat.”

“What boat?”

“You have to film it from a boat,” he was informed. “That’s how you film boats. They tell me.”

Danny fumed, like a cigarette discarded on flame-proof furniture fabric, and then said, “All right, you win. Where do I have to go?”

On the other side of the desk a very faint grin started to form, and out of it came the word “Bridport”.

“Bridport? Where the bloody hell is Bridport?”

“Bridport,” said the context of the grin, “is where the Bridport Old Ships Race starts from. Beyond that, I must confess I know very little. Mandy in the front office has an atlas, ask her.”

Mandy in the front office did indeed have an atlas, which was so up to date that it showed all the principal towns in the Belgian Congo. It also showed Bridport.

“You going there, are you?” she asked.

“No,” Danny replied, “I just needed reassuring it was still there.” He sighed and went to sort out his briefcase.

Aboard the protest ship Erdkrieger, all was not well.

“Woher,” someone said, “kommt der Gerucht?”

Someone else asked what the hell that was supposed to mean, and a third party translated for her.

“Where’s the smell coming from?”

“That’s the trouble,” remarked the second party from behind her handkerchief, “with being on a goddamn multilingual ship.”

Wherever the smell was coming from, it was not pleasant. Some of the ship’s company compared it to a Zellophanpapierfabrik; others got halfway through saying Exkrementeverarbeitungswerk before the vapours got into their lungs and reduced them to spluttering hulks.

“Sewage farm,” explained the translator.

“I guessed.”

In any event, it was a horrible smell, and horrible smells out in the middle of the sea can only mean one thing to the crew of an environmental patrol vessel.

“We’d better get those guys, whoever they are,” said the imperfect linguist. “You fetch the handcuffs and I’ll go connect up the fire hoses.”

The translator, a short, weather-beaten New Zealander, refused to budge. She was happy where she was. It might be cramped and wet and full of discarded foodstuffs, but it was out of the way of the terrible breeze that was carrying the Geruch in from wherever it originated. Her companion started off full of scorn, but came back rather quickly.

“Jesus,” she said, “it smells really awful.”

The captain, a tall, blond German, was going round issuing gas masks. They helped, but not all that much; they had only been designed to cope with relatively minor environmental pollution, such as mustard gas. Nevertheless, their morale value at least was sufficient to enable the imperfect linguist and a few other diehards to scramble out of hard cover and take stock of the situation.

Through the misted eyepieces of their masks, they could dimly make out a ship creaking slowly towards them across the whale-road. It was slow, and it was unnaturally quiet. But the imperfect linguist, whose name was Martha and who came from Bethlehem, Pa., knew what that signified.

“This is something big,” she said to the New Zealander.

“Is it?”

“I read about it,” she replied. “There’s some new kinds of waste so volatile they daren’t put them on conventional ships because of the danger of combustion; you know, sparks from the electrics, that kind of thing. So they use these sail-powered ships.”

“I never heard that.”

“Well you wouldn’t, would you,” Martha said. “It’s secret.”

That made sense, and the New Zealander scurried off to tell the captain, whom she eventually found inside one of the lifeboats, with a tarpaulin over his head.

The captain’s appeal for volunteers was truly a call for heroes, for the mission that was proposed called for selfless dedication to the cause. It demanded the sort of sacrifice that ought once and for all to sort out who were the real friends of the earth and who were the ones who just dropped in now and then for a cup of coffee and a chat. So rigorous was this selection process that the result was two people only. As the outboard motor of the dinghy finally fired and propelled the frail craft towards the poison ship, the New Zealander set her jaw and tried to think of the rain forests. It wasn’t easy.

“For Chrissakes, Jo, you nearly had us over,” remarked her fellow martyr, as they bounced off a rather bumptious wave. “This isn’t Indianapolis, throttle back a bit.”

Jo throttled right back while Martha checked the handcuffs with which they were going to chain themselves to the side of the poison ship. Deep down in the unregenerate parts of her brain, there was a tiny hope that the handcuffs would fall to bits and they could go back to the Erdkrieger with honour.

“They seem to be taking it very calmly,” she muttered as they came within fifty yards of their target.

“You what?”

“They seem to be taking it very calmly!” Martha yelled. Jo shrugged. By and large, she was thinking to herself, she was regretting that she hadn’t become a dentist like her family wanted her to. Dentists also have their part to play in the Great Society, and they don’t have to chain themselves to extremely smelly ships.

“If they turn the hoses on us,” Martha continued, “just try and kinda roll with it.”

“They don’t look like they’ve got any hoses, Martha,” Jo replied. “Looks a bit on the primitive side to me.”

“That’s just a front,” Martha replied confidently. She had been in this game long enough to know that all the masks of the enemy are fundamentally weird.

“Are those cannons sticking out the side?” Jo asked.

“Could be,” Martha said. “They sure look like cannons. Probably the pipes they pump the stuff out of, though.”

At last they could make out a human being on the ship. Two human beings, two human beings leaning against the rail looking mildly interested. They seemed entirely oblivious to the smell.

Martha seized the grappling-hook while Jo swung the tiller. There didn’t seem an awful lot you could get a handcuff round on the gleaming oak sides of the ship, but she owed it to herself to try.

“Hello there,” said a voice from above her head. “Are you lost?”

Martha blinked. “Are we what?”

“Lost,” repeated the voice.

“Don’t try that one with me, buster,” Martha said. “We’re coming alongside, and don’t bother trying to stop us.”

The taller of the two men gazed at her with a puzzled expression. “Do you really want to come alongside?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Takes all sorts,” replied the taller man. “Shall I drop you a line?”

Martha was about to say something, but Jo explained that it was also a seafaring term. “He wants to lower us a rope,” she whispered.

“What?”

“He wants to lower us a bloody rope!” Jo shouted.

“That’s right,” said the man on the ship, “I want to lower you a rope. If you’d like me to, that is. I’m not bothered one way or the other.”

Martha only had a few seconds to decide whether this was simple or duplex treachery. She decided on duplex.

“Lower away, sucker,” she replied. “See if I care.”

“Your friend isn’t very polite, is she?” said the man on the ship. He threw a rope to them, and Martha grabbed it and made it fast. Together, she and Jo hauled themselves level with the ship. With the best will in the world, there was nothing—absolutely nothing—to handcuff themselves to short of the rail that ran round the side of the ship. Martha thought of acid rain and the whales, and started to scramble up the rope.

“Hold on,” said the man on the ship, “it’s wet, you’ll slip.”

He was right.

Several other men had joined him now. There was sniggering. But no hoses. Martha was not enjoying herself. She was at home with hoses, she knew where they were coming from. But nobody seemed to be taking her seriously.

“Come on, Jo,” she panted as she hauled herself up into the dinghy again and seized the rope. She was feeling angry, frustrated, humiliated and above all wet, and a little voice in the back of her mind was saying that it really was about time the whales learned to look after themselves, or what the hell was the point of evolution, anyway? She dismissed it with the contempt it deserved. “Scared, are you?”

“No,” Jo replied. “I’m going up the ladder.”

“What ladder?”

“The one they’ve just lowered,” Jo replied, and stepped out of the dinghy.

Vanderdecker had just managed to say the “What can I do” part of “What can I do for you?” when the smaller of the two visitors deftly and entirely unexpectedly manacled herself to the ship’s rail. The second—rather unwillingly, Vanderdecker felt—followed suit.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

On the bridge of the Erdkrieger, the captain observed the scene aboard the poison ship and felt ashamed in his Teutonic heart. His Kameradinen had dared to go where he had been afraid to go, and that was not good enough. He proposed the motion—it was a fundamentally democratic ship—that they lower the other boats, and that they jump to it.

“Why,” Vanderdecker was asking, “have you two ladies chained yourselves to the rail of my ship? Sorry if that sounds nosy, but…”

“Because,” Martha replied, “we are sisters of our mother Earth.”

There was a brief silence, and then the first mate spoke.

“Captain,” he said, “if they’re her sisters, how can she be their mother?”

Vanderdecker smiled patiently at his first mate. “Not now, Antonius,” he said. “I’ll explain later. Environmentalists?”

“That’s right,” Martha said. “So…”

“So why are you chained to the railings of my ship? Practice?” Martha sneered, although Vanderdecker couldn’t see because of the gas mask. “Don’t act innocent with me. We know what you’ve got on this ship.”

“What have I got on this ship?” Vanderdecker said. “Go on, you’ll never guess.”

“Extremely hazardous toxic chemical waste,” came the reply, in chorus. Vanderdecker shook his head.

“No,” he replied, “you’re wrong there. Apart from a few tins of supermarket lager we got in Bridport last time, that is. It’s true what they say, you get what you pay for. I’m sorry,” he said, noting a certain hostility. “You were guessing what I’ve got on this ship.”

“If there’s no toxic waste on this ship,” said Jo sardonically, “how do you explain the smell?”

Vanderdecker shrugged and turned to the first mate. “All right,” he said, “which one of you forgot to buy the soap?”

“Very funny,” Martha snarled. “We know you’ve got that filth on board, and we’re not unchaining ourselves until you turn back to where you came from.”

“I promise,” Vanderdecker said solemnly, “there’s not so much as a thimbleful of toxic waste on board. You can look for yourselves if you like.”

Martha laughed. “What, and unchain ourselves? You’d really like that, wouldn’t you?”

Vanderdecker frowned irritably. “Look, miss,” he said, “if you think I’m getting any sort of thrill out of seeing two females in wetsuits and gasmasks chained to a railing, you’re working the wrong pitch. Try Amsterdam. And if you’re so damned nosy as to want to go poking about looking for seeping oil drums, then be my guest. If not, then please excuse me, I’ve got a ship to run.”

The two women stood firm and scowled at him. Just then, Sebastian drew his attention to the other four dinghies making their way across from the Erdkrieger.

Their arrival solved what could have developed into a very tedious situation. Once the raiding party had been over the Verdomde inch by inch, molesting the ship’s stores with Geiger counters and sticking litmus paper into the beer barrel, they had to admit that it was clean as a whistle. But smelly, nevertheless.

“Tact,” said Vanderdecker in German to his opposite number from the Erdkrieger, “is clearly not your strong suit. I admit we aren’t all lavender bags and rosewater, but we have been at sea for rather a long time.”

“But this ship,” said the German. “It’s so peculiar. Why are you sailing in a galleon?”

“Living archaeology,” Vanderdecker replied. “We’re reconstructing Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world.”

As he said this, Vanderdecker was conscious of a puzzled noise behind him. It was the first mate.

“So that’s what we’re doing, is it?” he said. “I was beginning to wonder.”

The smile reappeared on Vanderdecker’s face. Over the centuries it had worn little tracks for itself, and its passage was smooth and effortless.

“That’s right, Antonius,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”

“Who was Magellan, captain?”

“Later!” Just for a split second, the smile was disrupted; then it smoothed itself back. “We’re doing it in aid of the rain forests,” he said to the German, to whom this remark, astonishingly, made sense.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s very good. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“Not at all,” Vanderdecker replied. “I mean, we’re on the same side, aren’t we? All Greens together, so to speak.”

The captain nodded enthusiastically, so that the hose of his gasmask clunked on his muscular stomach. Vanderdecker winced, but imperceptibly.

“So,” he asked, as casually as he could, “where are you off to then?”

“Dounreay,” said the German cheerfully. “We’re going to sabotage the nuclear power plant.”

“Jolly good,” said Vanderdecker. “But isn’t that a bit counterproductive? Blowing up a nuclear plant?”

“Who said anything about blowing it up?” said the German. “We’re going to stuff tulips up the drainpipes.”

“What a perfectly splendid idea,” Vanderdecker said, through his Antonius smile. “Very best of luck to you. Got enough?”

“Enough what?”

“Tulips.”

“Ja, ja, we have Uberfiuss of tulips.” He waved proudly at the distant profile of the Erdkrieger. “Our whole ship,” he said, “is full of tulips.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Vanderdecker said, afraid for a moment that the corners of his Antonius smile would meet round the back of his neck and unzip his face. Then an idea occurred to him. “If you’re going to Dounreay,” he said, “you could do me a small favour.”

“Certainly,” said the German.

“Have you,” Vanderdecker said, “got any paint?”

“Ja, naturlich. Uberfiuss of paint.”

“Red aerosol paint?”

“Ja,” said the German. “Humbrol.”

“Then,” said Vanderdecker, “I don’t suppose you could see your way to painting a little message for me on the walls somewhere. I’ll write it down for you if you like.”

Thus it was that when Martha, Jo and the German were finally bundled off in vans by the Sutherland and Caithness Constabulary, they left behind them a crudely-inscribed but extremely visible message on the perimeter wall of Dounreay power station.

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD, it read. YOU

SMELL, MONTALBAN. YOURS, VANDERDECKER.