The Black Tide

That evening, strolling along the waterfront just as dusk was falling, I saw bin Suleiman’s dhow haul out into the crowded waterway and watched her crew hoist the lateen mainsail as she motored with a soft tonk-tonk round the down-town bend towards the open sea. From this I concluded that Baldwick’s employers must have their tanker loading at Mina Zayed in the neighbouring sheikdom of Abu Dhabi, a supposition that was to prove hopelessly wrong.

That night I had dinner at the hotel, in the roof garden restaurant where Varsac and our two other ship’s officers had got themselves a corner table with the sort of view over the dog-legged waterway that a sheikh’s peregrine would have, poised high in the air before a stoop. The Creek was an ink-black smudge curving between dimly-lit buildings. The only brilliance seemed to be the floodlit tracery of some sort of palace and Port Rashid with its cranes and ships and and an oil rig lying to its reflection, all brightly illuminated in the loading lights. Varsac hailed me as soon as I entered the room and when I paused at their table I found myself confronted by a ferrety little Glaswegian engineer with ginger hair and a grating accent. A cigarette burned unheeded on the plate beside him and in the middle of the table was an ashtray full of stubs.

‘Ah’m Colin Fraser,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘What’s yur nem?’

‘Trevor Rodin.’

‘And yur job on boord?’

‘Second mate.’

‘Aye, weel, Ah’m an engineer mesel’, so we’ll not be seeing very much of each other now. Sit down, man, and have a drink.’

The other man, a big Canadian, pulled out a chair for me, smiling, but not saying anything. I sat down. There wasn’t anything else I could do. Fraser turned out to be a casualty of the Iraqi-Iranian war. He had been in one of the cargo vessels stranded in the Shatt al Arab. It was Greek-owned and had been badly shelled. The end of it was her owners had abandoned her and he had been thrown on to the beach, an engineer with shrapnel wounds in the shoulder, no ship, no money, not even a fare-paid passage home. ‘Bankrupt the bastards were.’ The world was still in recession, the beach a cold place to be. ‘Och, the stories Ah could tell yen Ah bin on rigs, ferry boats, aye, on dhows, too, an’ if it hadna bin for our mootual friend Len B…’

He was drinking whisky and was half cut already, his voice rambling on about the despicable nature of employers and how it was they who had kept him out of a job, a black against his name and the word passed from owner to owner, even out to this godforsaken end-of-the-earth dump. ‘Ah couldna get a job oot here if I was to promise the effing agent a whole year’s salary. It’s me politics, see.’ As far as I could gather he

was well to the left of the Militant Tendency and back home in Glasgow had been a union troublemaker. “Colin Fraser. Ye remember surely? It was all in the papers. I took three cargo ships doon the Clyde and anchored them roond the Polaris base so the nuclear subs couldna move in or oot.’

He also claimed to have been a member of the IRA for a short time. Stranded in Belfast when his ship couldn’t unload because of a dock strike, he had been given a Kalashnikov and had gone gunning for the RUC in the Falls Road district with a bunch of teenagers. ‘Made bombs for them, too, in a hoose doon in Crossmaglen. But they didna pay me. Risking me life Ah was…’ It was an aggrieved voice that went on and on, the Glasgow accent getting harder, the ferrety face more vicious. In the end I ignored him and talked to the Canadian who had been recruited by Hals as first mate. His name was Rod Selkirk. He had been a trapper and a sealer, had then met Farley Mowat, whose book Never Cry Wolf had affected him deeply, and after that meeting he had stopped killing animals for a living and had switched to coasters, trading into the ports of the Maritimes and the Gulf of St Lawrence. ‘Guess I’m okay on navigation, but when it comes to figures …’ He shrugged, his body as massive and solid as you would expect of a man who had spent most of his life in the hard North of Canada. His round, moonlike face broke into a smile, causing the puffed lids of the mongoloid eyes to crease into fat-crinkled almond slits. ‘I’m an inshore navigator really,

so reck’n I’ll never make it any higher. I’d never pass the exams, not for my Master’s ticket.’

‘Where did you meet Pieter Hals?’ I asked him.

“Shatt al Arab, same as Colin here. I was tramping, and they just about blew us out of the water. The Iranians. They couldn’t reach the Iraqi shore, not to hit anything worthwhile, so they took it out on us. Just for the hell of it, I guess — a bit of target practice. Infidels don’t count anyway, know what I mean?’ The smile spread into a grin. He was a very likeable giant and he hardly drank at all, his voice very soft, very

restful.

‘What’s Hals’s job?’ I asked.

‘Captain.’