by Michael Bloor
(first published in Scribble Magazine, Issue No. 98, Summer 2023)
Forty years ago, when I first went to sea as a cadet, there was a saying among the older men: ‘A ship is just like a prison, except that in prison the food’s better.’ You couldn’t say that nowadays, because they don’t have karaoke in prison, whereas we have karaoke every Friday night on the tanker. The captain is expected to show himself on these social occasions. So there I was in the mess, though I was dog-tired, and way behind with the paperwork and the company emails. Before the end of the evening, I’d be called upon to perform my party piece, The Monkees’ I’m a Believer, chosen by me years ago because it required very little vocal range.
Beside me, seemingly equally dog-tired, was my Chief Engineer, Andy Souness. We listened apathetically to Nonoy, the Filipino fitter, putting his all into Elvis’s You Were Always On My Mind.
As Nonoy modestly acknowledged our applause, Andy leaned across to me and said: ‘Did you know that Elvis had a dead twin?’
Now, I’ve sailed with Andy for over four years, ever since he was promoted to Chief. You can take my word for it: that kind of remark was wholly out-of-character for Andy, who seldom volunteered any unsolicited information about anything. I was taken aback and said nothing.
Andy scratched his thinning hair and nodded at his can of coke: ‘Yeah. Jesse Garon Presley – he was still-born.’ There was a pause. Then Andy said: ‘Me too. I have a dead twin.’
I was taken still more aback. I knew Andy had been under some strain. The Ocean Ranger is an old ship and, on this trip, Andy’s engine-room team had suffered a series of nagging problems with the oily water separator, with the result that the regular maintenance schedule had slipped badly. Over the years, crew numbers in the shipping industry have been cut to the bone. When the Ocean Ranger was built, as well as the present compliment of Chief Engineer and Second Engineer, the ship carried a Third Engineer and a Fourth Engineer. The last two posts have disappeared, but as the ship gets older there are more breakdowns and there’s a bigger maintenance schedule. I didn’t need to be unusually perceptive to see that Andy’s narrow shoulders were starting to buckle under the pressure.
But before I could make some lame reply to Andy, I was called away to perform I’m a Believer. These crewmen are a kindly lot and, recognising that I was substituting volume for tunefulness, they all loyally joined in the choruses. Soon afterwards, the karaoke session drew to a close: it always finishes with Danilo, the cook, giving us his version of Unchained Melody. I’d decided that I must have a quiet word with Andy. As we walked back to our cabins, I asked him if he wanted a cup of tea before we turned in. A glass of whisky would have been better, but the company has had a ‘dry ship’ policy for more than ten years now.
Now, I’ve seen shipmates on the edge of a crack-up before – the absences from home, the long hours, the nerve-frazzling emergencies, they’re not easy things to take in your stride, year after year after bloody year. I can imagine how it can seem almost a comfort to step overboard into that numbing, empty sea. One of my several duties is that of ship’s medical officer: I’ve sat through the para-medic courses – I can suture a wound and differentiate a fracture from a bad sprain. But, it takes an effort to play the mental health professional when you’re due back on watch in four hours time. Nevertheless, I was responsible for my crew and I wasn’t going to hold back.
I knew what I wanted to say: Andy shouldn’t wear out himself and his team trying to catch-up on the maintenance backlog. I’d explain the position to Head Office on the satellite phone. But before I could get onto that, I knew I had to give Andy the space to talk about the dead twin. No easy task: when we’re at sea, we tend to steer clear of the painful topic of bereavements: we’ve all been stuck on a ship in the middle of nowhere when someone in our family has died. Only last year, it had hit me hard when I’d missed my father’s death. Anyway, passing Andy his mug of tea, I led into the topic as best as I could:
‘I’d no idea that Elvis had a dead twin. Did Elvis himself know?’
‘Oh yeah. His mum reckoned that was where he got his energy from: he felt he was living for the two of them, himself and his brother.’ Andy paused and then went on: ‘That feeling’s quite common, I think.’
‘Were Elvis and his brother identical twins?’
‘Dunno. Jimmy and I were. Even our parents couldn’t tell us apart sometimes. My mother used to dress us identically, which made things worse of course. Dad said: “The only way I can tell ‘em apart is that Andy’s the more cheerful one.”’
Andy must have seen the look of surprise on my face. He went on: ‘Yeah, Andy Souness really was a cheery soul, as a small child. Jimmy could be, well, morose… There’ve been some changes since childhood.’ He was scratching at his scalp again.
I nodded. I thought I was beginning to make progress as an amateur bereavement counsellor: ‘Perhaps you’ve been affected by Jimmy’s death?’ But I was barking up completely the wrong tree: I was assuming that Jimmy, like my father, had died comparatively recently.
He was scratching his scalp more and more furiously: ‘You don’t understand. He died when we were seven years old. We were fishing for sticklebacks and newts in the canal. We were only supposed to go to the canal when Grandad went fishing there, but of course we played there all the time. All the time. We even used to take the towpath as a short cut to school and back.’
Andy was staring sightlessly into his mug of tea. ‘Remember those fishing nets they used to sell at the seaside? Long bamboo handle with a hollow end? The metal rim of the net fitted into the hollow end? Yeah, we had those. We’d catch sticklebacks and newts and carry ‘em back in a bucket to an old fishtank in Grandad’s shed.’
‘Your twin drowned?’
‘Yeah, but not the way you think.’ There was a long pause. Andy screwed up his face. Then he started to speak again, very quietly: ‘My net got caught-up in some canal weeds. I gave a heave and the net parted: I was left holding just the cane handle. He thought it was incredibly funny. He was beside me, doubled-up with laughter. I was mad. Mad as blazes. I gave him a great shove and he fell right in. I watched him drown…’ Andy was sobbing now. It wasn’t the first time in my career that I’d seen a grown man cry, but I didn’t know what to say. ‘I watched him drown, I watched him drown. I was horrified. I tried to offer him the cane handle to grab onto. He didn’t grab it. He simply drowned in front of me.’
Andy was looking at me now, through his tears. I struggled to say something:
‘Look Andy. I think I do understand a bit now. You’ve been living for Jimmy as well as yourself, like Elvis. You’ve been pushing yourself too hard, for too long. You need to give yourself a break. You’re probably not sleeping too well. That maintenance backlog – just forget it…’
He shook his head, a mask of misery. “You still don’t understand: ‘Living for Jimmy as well as myself’. Sweet Christ! Didn’t I tell you that it was Jimmy who was morose? It wasn’t Jimmy who thought the broken fishing net was incredibly funny. It was Andy – Andy who thought everything was incredibly funny. So I shoved Andy in the canal. I watched him drown. And the only way I could carry on was to pretend to the world that Jimmy had drowned. ‘Living for Jimmy?’ Y’know, that’s almost funny. I’m living as Andy. I’ve been living as Andy since I was seven years old.”