Mirror image

I stand with blade in hand at the mottled mirror. It's not what you think. I'm not about to do anything drastic.

I give my chin an ample lather with the soft badger hairs of my father's tortoise-shell shaving brush. The white foam is stark against my skin. It strikes me that, even though it's late February, I have something of a tan. I tap the blade in the bowl of warm water and hold it to my jaw. The boy in the mirror gives me a nervous grin. I'm no novice with a straight razor. I've been shaving a full six months ... on land. But at sea ... anything could happen.

I glance at the porthole, but the glass is steamed. I widen my stance and settle into the rhythm of the rise and fall.
Easy does it. Steady now. No need to rush.

I realise I haven't been clear on certain facts. I'm fifteen, you know that. I'm aboard a merchant schooner with my father, bound for Africa. You know that too. But there are things you might not know.

My name is Harry St John. The church is sending my father (and therefore me) to the farthest corner of the world. A vast desert in Bechuanaland, Southern Africa. My father, Charles Spencer St John, calls it the Kalahari. He points it out on the globe almost daily. If a more remote place on the planet exists, then I'd like to know where. Actually, scratch that, right now I couldn't care less.

He says it will be a grand adventure. He's so convinced he's taken me out of school a full year. He thinks I'll learn more than any year at school. I think he's mad. Mother's the real reason. We both know that.

Why Africa? Why not Africa? he likes to ask. We go to those who need us most (not a thought for what I need most).

The schooner, captained by the phlegmatic Henry J. Burroughs, is loaded with cargo and crewed by nine shipmates, one cook and two officers, including the captain and the first officer, Elliot F. Emery, three or four years my senior. There are six passengers aboard too. You are familiar with the flamboyant RH I. Seedat, the enigmatic German, Herr Hanz Oppenheim, and there is, in addition, the captain's wife, who seldom emerges from her cabin, their daughter, Celeste, spoiled rotten and full of airs and graces, and, of course, my father and I.

Why this ship? Well it could have been a luxury liner, but my father, true to form, elected the most economical route.

As though to confirm this fact, the floor gives a sudden lurch and I slam my forehead into the mirror with an almighty crack. The mirror shatters with the blow and it's only when I massage my scalp and frown at my splintered face, that I notice the dark drops that fall from the blade and colour the water crimson.

I press a white towel into the cut at my throat.
What have I done to deserve this?

A jade-handled cane

The Right Honourable Ibrahim Seedat taps his jade-handled cane against the railing to emphasise a point he has been making consistently, and unreservedly.

‘It is jolly well not right, old boy.’ He tap, tap, taps at the rail. ‘This is highly confounding. You say she does not respond to your most seemly advances?’

I blush. What do I care about the captain’s daughter? Except … ‘Well, it’s just that she seems to take care not to take notice of me.’

‘A great puzzlement indeed!’

It’s no puzzle to me. I'm fifteen and I've met my fair share of her type at school dances. She’s a senseless girl with very little to offer the world, bar, admittedly, a decent, if not handsome, complexion and, I suppose, if I must be honest, a certain grace ... but no more.

‘What you need, dear boy, is something that sets you apart. A jade-handled cane for example. A potent symbol of … well, potency … and elegance. It is an established fact that a gentleman must always carry a cane.'

A dandy he means. I have no interest in subjecting myself to the mockery of the shipmates. I can hear their jeers now. No thank you. My policy will be to ignore the silly, impertinent girl even more than she ignores me. But I play the innocent with him.

‘A cane you say?’

He swishes it with a dramatic flourish. Errol Flynn of the high seas. ‘On guard I say, what!’ Up he jumps, enacting an imagined duel. He strikes, he cuts, and he lashes out.

I laugh, despite myself, but am struck dumb when he staggers back, as if walloped by an invisible sword, into the ample shadow of a giant. Captain Henry J. Burroughs by name, sea dog by appearance, stone-silent Narwhal by nature. He looms. He stares. He frowns. Call me coward, but the man is terrifying. Both RH I Seedat and I retreat in mortified haste.

'A cane,’ the RH I Seedat repeats with a whisper. ‘A jade-handled cane.

I dream of Bach

In the gathering cabin gloom, I wait. The dinner bell is struck sharply at six and it brings with it instant salivation. Who would have thought such muck could entice even my taste buds?

Father has retired for an aperitif (vermouth no doubt) on the starboard deck with the German. I can hear their muted conversation through the half-open porthole. (Incidentally, it is one thing to know it's the starboard deck, but the fact I insist on being precise about it, annoys me. Why can't I just call it the right side of the ship? Have the captain's silent stares somehow fashioned a nautical bent in me? Am I to be a sailor? Better than missionary, I suppose. Although, frankly, I'd rather walk the plank than fall into either profession.)

I dismiss the thought as irrelevant and roll onto my stomach so as to gain a clearer ear to their discussion. The German, Herr Hanz Oppenheim, who cuts a mysterious, elegant figure under a sloping fedora, is in full swing. 'I dream of Bach,' he says, in his heavily accented way. 'That is to say, I hear him in my sleep und indeed as soon as I wake. He is as constant, I should say, as the moon. It is the robust muscularity of the tone, you see. Ah, the way the music transports you ... no schooner can take you there.'

Try as I might, I cannot hear my father's response, his voice is snatched up by the wind and scattered at sea. But I am certain I can guess his tone and manner. Congenial. Pleasant to a fault. That's my father. Mild-mannered on the surface and yet, underneath, certain of himself. Of his cause. Of his beliefs. His ... not mine. Let me make that clear. We are not in this together. I am shanghaied by my father. He has dragged me here unwillingly and unwilling I intend to remain.

'Oh the bombast!' the German declares. 'The sheer outrageous pomp of the man. One can only marvel.' I assume he speaks of Bach, but the timing is quite perfect.

From the dipping musty corridor, comes the resonating donnnnng of a struck bell, and I salivate.

Sea legs and sea dogs

Sea legs. I'm not entirely sure what they are, nor how to attain them, but I'm certain of one thing: I don't have them.

The Captain has sea legs. And then some. Apparently, he was born at sea, carried to his mother's arms by a long-winged albatross, swooping right out of the sky. That's what the shipmates say. I, of course, don't believe a word of it. He was born like anyone else. On dry land. He came to sea, probably in his teens, and worked up the rope ladder, rotting rung by rotting rung, until he stood at the helm of the Frontier with his weathered sea dog face and his faraway eyes that could pierce a London fog right through.

He stands above me and his gargantuan shadow looms over the deck. He adorns the bridge with his long beard and fixes his glittering grey-green eye on the undulating grey-green sea. He's nothing but a pirate to me. 'Yar, me hearties, ye scurvy dogs, to work with ye.' Of course, he doesn't really speak this way, but he might as well. His face might as well be made of sand it's so weathered and moulded by the wind. The truth is, he scares me. I have never met anyone like him. Someone made by the sea. Captain Henry J. Burroughs by name, sea dog by appearance, stone-silent Narwhal by nature.

We are two days at sea and, so far, the trip has been nothing short of disastrous. We set sail under inauspicious circumstances. No fanfare, no ticker tape parade, no waving army of fair maidens. Nothing but the shrill cry of gulls and the ripe stench of fish guts and the sting of salt on the air. Two days at the rail, lurching under the rise and tilt of this tin can boat leaves me white-knuckled and bilious.

Everything shifts on the schooner. The mast, the ship's furniture, even the windows. Plates on the table scuttle from one side to the other as I attempt to stab my gristle-ribbed slice of beef (at least I assume it's beef) with a blunt fork. And the thing is ... it doesn't seem to bother anyone but me. Even the Right Honourable Ibrahim Seedat seems at ease in these seas.

I know this because he turns to me today and says: 'I feel indeed at ease in these seas. Jolly good and all. What ho.'

'Jolly good,' I repeat, hurling, green-faced, over the pitching side.

'This is no storm, young rascal, save your sickness and incredulity for the whipping Atlantic wind and the walls of water. She is not upon us yet.'

The merchant schooner

The merchant schooner, Frontier, lies at anchor in the harbour bay. There is no wind and the dawn sea is a listless opalescent. She doesn't look a temptress to me, but then I suppose that's the point.

My father has a notion that the sea is a kind of desert. 'Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.' He recites a line from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and screws up his eyes to look at the brooding sun rise from the desert sea. 'It will bring you closer to God, this journey. You will see. Look ... it seems endless, does it not? Endless,' he repeats with a stress. 'Nothing for miles and miles. Featureless. But dismiss the sea as benign at your peril, Son.'

'The sea is a mistress and a temptress,' the Captain agrees. 'She must never be taken lightly nor ignored. She will call forth the Gods at will. She will shapeshift the wind and tear sail from mast. She is silent one moment and a she-devil Valkyrie the next. She must be obeyed.'

If you're anything like me, you don't like to be told what to do and what to believe. You like to find out for yourself. As far as I'm concerned the Captain can keep the sea and the caterwauling gulls. He can keep the fish guts and the sloping cabin. He can keep his bucket and scrubbing brush and all hands on deck and port and starboard and stern and whatever else. He can keep his sea, and so can my father. Take me home, I beg the sky, and the sky turns its back in return.

Today feels like a dream.
Today feels like ... like I'm floating. Well, I suppose I am floating.

The breathless Right Honourable Ibrahim Seedat appears at my side, fresh from his step-out from starboard to port. 'Ah there you are, young rapscallion, bidding adieu to the land, eh? Tallyho what.'

Originally from Calcutta, the Right Honourable Ibrahim Seedat (he refers to himself in this way all the time, though there is no indication why he's a right honourable anything) has been studying law in both Paris and London for many years and has acquired a peculiar turn of phrase. He informs me that he has an opportunity to visit an uncle in Africa who has made the acquaintance of a young woman who will make a most appropriate bride for the Right Honourable Ibrahim Seedat.

I nod and shrug and he sighs and shakes his head and beneath us the chained head of an anchor hauls upward, the engine coughs and splutters, a pall of black smoke rises into the pale blue and the opalescent sea ripples and churns.

The voyage has begun.