A collaboration with PF Jeffery

( Published 'The Heliograph' 1998 )

The harbour was nigh choked with coloured streamers, as the 'Calm Sea' ploughed into the universe's wide horizons upon its maiden voyage. The crew's raucous shanties faded beyond the cheers of the bystanders on the wharf. Calm Sea's blooming sails became a gorgeous red and white butterfly tasting a world of undulating salt nectars: its only world, other than itself. Even the world of the crew intersected only tangentially with that of their craft. So much would be amply demonstrated upon the Calm Sea reaching a foreign harbour with no one aboard. Much later, the entire company would turn up at a costume ball in Bromley-by-Bow, but I race ahead of my story.

We who lined the promenade at Grange-over-sands, fluttering our handkerchiefs in valedictory salute, could not guess that we were witnessing the start of a great mystery of the sea. Alas, the story of which I thought I had raced ahead was the wrong story altogether, wrong in truth as well as relevance. More important were those of us who were left on that very wharf - together with the handkerchiefs we'd fluttered: mostly red and white or bearing colours unknown to sane rainbows. Eventually, these handkerchiefs turned up for sale in a cosmopolitan market near Upton park. How they - these frilly oblongs of coloured linen - made the journey to that esoteric quarter of East London from Grange-over-sands related to my reason for being on the wharf in the first place.

Let no one think I was a tourist holidaymaker or other such idler. My presence in the gay throng was strictly in the line of duty. I have the honour to carry the three lobed badge of a Revenue Tax agent, and was there on the track of that for which 'nefarious' is too mild a word. The theft and smuggling of handkerchiefs - and their contents - was a small but vital part in a plot which brought the world to the brink of destruction and - more to the point - deprived the Revenue of tens of pounds.

My mission was to apprehend the arch villain, Black Mallone - an albino who wore only scarlet garments trimmed with golden yellow. Unfortunately, this vague description fitted most people gathered in Grange-over-sands that day. I scanned the small print... One merry maker had a butterfly tattooed on the cheek, but no brass earring. Another had both characteristics, but the wrong ear was pierced. It didn't help that many had noses that actually looked like ears.

Conceiving a clever ruse, I made for the Sea Scouts' hut, taking the occupants by surprise. Soon, all lay senseless, and the tannoy was mine to command. "Will Black Mallone, the arch villain, please come to the Sea Scout hut," my words reverberated. "There is an urgent phone call from Aunt Jemima." Then I waited, hidden beneath a heap of disused union jack flags, hoping my hunch was right - that Black Mallone had such an aunt.

Meanwhile, my attention was temporarily drawn to a stickier matter. There was a consistency attached to the undersides of the union jacks (which I hoped did not derive from noses big enough to use them as handkerchiefs). But this concern was soon forgotten when I heard footsteps enter the hut. Not the careful ones of someone picking a way between the supine scouts, as I had done, but thuddy, clumpy, even sea-squelchy paces.

"Come out from under there!" ordered this someone.

The voice was disguised, a fact that, at the time, rose from simply another hunch on my part.

"I'm not here," I managed to splutter, banking on yet another hunch that hope was half the battle. Indeed, hope turned to prayer, as I desperately visualised myself as cabin servant on the Calm Sea, miles from this hut on the wharf. But I knew in my heart that oblong handkerchiefs were ill-suited to smuggling anything, let alone bodies.

"Don't worry, neither am I," the voice replied after a seemingly long pause, union jack fluff now tickling my nasal passages. Before I'd decided whether or not this was a trick, it continued: "Aunt Jemima is dead, you fool. After a chase, last Friday, her blazing car plunged over a thousand foot cliff into the shark-infested waters of Barking Creek."

"So, if you're not here, you must be Aunt Jemima yourself!" I suggested rather less incongruously that I could have ever imagined at the time. "But I don't believe that there are any cliffs in Barking of quite a thousand feet."

With each sneeze the flags grew stickier. The stickier the fluff, the more it irritated my nose. One of the sneezes, as sneezes never usually did, woke me up in a bed. So, at first, I suspected I wasn't waking up but falling into a sleep-induced dream, where the sleep was in turn induced somehow by the sticky consistency. I felt the bed moving as if it were a rock-a-bye cradle in a treetop. But, no - it soon dawned on me that nothing could rock like real waves. My prayer had come true, even if with the assistance of substances other than my own brain. I was cabin servant on the Calm Sea. But the prayer itself must have been a dream! There was an element of illogic which did not bother me too much. Why question salvation? Enjoy it while you have it, I say. And I sufficiently convinced myself that I now truly believed I was aboard the Calm Sea, instead of being one who waved it farewell from the wharf with streamers, kites and handkerchiefs. The crew's shanties, instead of fading, had stayed with me. So, I was upon that very butterfly I had dreamed of watching being born upon the cream-topped waves. A red and white butterfly.

Then, my eyes focussed more clearly. A face-masked figure, dressed in scarlet and gold, towered over my bunk.

"The next time you wake up," it said, "it will be in my dream."

Such nonsense made common sense to me, since it would have otherwise been more nonsensical to believe that anyone believed I could make sense of nonsense, which the masked figure evidently did believe.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"What is more important to me, who are you?" the figure countered.

"Black Mallone," I replied.

I bit my slip of a tongue. Could I possibly be the same individual as the one whom my mission was to apprehend? I obviously believed I was or would I have said something so obviously liable to disproof?

"You're not Black Mallone," suddenly announced the figure, "as I am."

Taking a large red and white butterfly from the cape pocket, the mask buried itself in it as if it were a handkerchief. Or, rather, as if both mask and butterfly were handkerchiefs by turn.

In the distance I heard the distant voice of something that must have been a cross between a crow and its nest, so bristly and squawky and seagully and spiky and interwoven and breezy did it sound, shouting:

"Walton-on Naze, ahoy! 20,000 leagues to landing at London East and Upton Park, Cap'n Pegleg!"

A return voice barked: "Up the Knots!"

And I staggered, still bleary-eyed, upon Calm Sea's swaying deck, to perform folding tricks with handkerchiefs and tangle-flicking with flagrope and releasing rainbow-winged flutterhearts to the salt winds and, my audience's favourite, doing saucy cartwheels - all whilst dressed as my Maiden Aunt Jemima persona which I handily bunked in for just such an eventuality as an order from Cap'n Pegleg. At least such roisterous Revues did help recoup the porthole tax that every ship's Cabin Servant alone was required to pay. And I coyly smiled at my albino assistant, who looked resplendent in scarlet and gold, as she went round the plug ugly crew with the butterfly net, gathering kisses as well as old pennies.