Tamam Shud Read Free Page B

had to walk onto a cargo hoist.
    You can sling a horse, because even if it struggles, it can’t actually get out of the sling, but an elephant is another matter. There was a three-inch gap between the ship and the platform at the top of that hoist and I saw the elephant’s trunk go down and feel along the gap. She clearly thought: not a chance. That’s empty air under there. A horse can be pushed but even with six men shoving, when an elephant decides she is staying put, then put is where she stays. That elephant wouldn’t allow herself to be transported until an astute handler led the baby elephant onto the hoist by its little trunk and it got down all right. Even then, it was a struggle to make sure she didn’t leap after the baby. Wharfies hated animal cargoes.
    I used to love watching my father handle horses. The racehorses came over from New Zealand on our ships,the Union Steamship Company. My dad always got the job of soothing them so that they didn’t have the vapours and break something valuable, like their precious legs. A hysterical horse is a frightening thing, like a revolving chainsaw with hoofs that screams a lot. But they always behaved for my father because he had a secret weapon – a box of those XXX peppermints. They were round, flat, white tablets, so strongly flavoured that just licking one of them destroyed 55 per cent of your tastebuds and made your eyes gush water. Horses adored them. As long as his peppermints held out, even the stroppiest stud would follow my father anywhere.
    Some racehorses gave no trouble. The beautiful grey, Baghdad Note, was as tame as an old farm horse. On the other hand, one of the most splendid chestnuts I have ever seen decided to improve his chances of another peppermint by biting off my father’s vest pocket with the box in, luckily not taking any of my father with it. I had been reading about those flesh-eating horses in Greek mythology and I was glad that the Union Steamship Company hadn’t had to transport them to Diomedes because I knew who would have been leading them out of their loose box.
    Cargoes. Boxes and crates and sacks and bales and cases, all marked with their ports of exit and entry, all carefully stowed in the holds of the ship, so that they could be removed in order. Stowage was an art form then.A ship is not like a truck, with a low centre of gravity moving in one direction along a flat surface. It floats in an unstable medium and therefore it has to balance or the ship will cease to float. Unsecured loose cargo can punch right through the side of a vessel in heavy weather.
    As a result, the position of cargo master was a skilled and responsible one, requiring a sound practical knowledge of statistics, meteorology and physics, and a talent for organisation. He kept the chart of the ship on which every stowage was marked. A cargo master has to be a concrete thinker. Otherwise, he and a lot of other people are going to get very wet. If Somerton Man was a cargo master, as my dad suspected, all of this would have been true of him. There is other evidence to suggest that he might have been a seaman of some sort and a cargo master, who would not do manual labour, might well have Somerton Man’s unmarked hands and unbroken nails.
    Which brings us to the body itself and what everyone made of it.

Chapter Two
    What, without asking, hither hurried whence?
    And, without asking, whither hurried hence?
    Another and another Cup to drown
    The Memory of this Impertinence!
    The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , stanza 30
    Somerton Man, in extremis, was five feet, eleven inches tall, which is 180 centimetres. He had grey eyes, also called hazel – admittedly a fugitive colour – and blond to reddish hair, greying at the temples. He was healthy, well-muscled and clean, with manicured fingernails and toenails. He was uncircumcised. His legs were tanned. His toes were unusual, forced into a wedge as though he habitually wore tight,