Another Great Day at Sea. Geoff Dyer
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us. Had the order come to abandon ship I would have been escorted, firmly and courteously, to the first available lifeboat because I was a civilian. As well as people stepping aside—one of them with a healing cut across the bridge of his nose and the remains of a black eye—there were always people cleaning. Everywhere you went, down every walkway and stairwell, sailors were washing, wiping, rinsing, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, brushing, buffing, polishing, shining.
Personally, I spent the rest of my time on the carrier ducking and diving or, more exactly, ducking and stooping. I walked the walkways and stoop-ducked through hatches, always focused on a single ambition: not to smash my head even though there was an opportunity to do so every couple of seconds. It was like staying in a cottage in Wales that had been epically extended and converted to nuclear power. Every time I pulled myself up to full height I was at risk. So I bobbed and weaved, ducked and stooped.
The older one gets the more obvious it becomes that the advantages of being short in this little life greatly outweigh the mythic benefits of being tall. In exchange for a slight edge when serving at tennis and being attractive to tall women (or so we delude ourselves) we spend our time folding our limbs into cars and planes and generally smashing our brains out. My fourteen days on the boat were the stoopingest I have ever spent, fourteen days that rendered the Alexander Technique obsolete, and made nonsense of the idea of good posture. I was on the look-out, right from the start, for other tall men with whom I could bond. Was I the tallest person on the boat? (Did the Navy have a maximum height requirement the way the police or the Army had a minimum one? If so was this ceiling height reduced further in the notoriously cramped conditions of a submarine?)
After five minutes of knee-knock and stoop-walk we arrived at my stateroom. Note the possessive pronoun. Not ‘our’, ‘my’; singular, not plural. I was taken to my room. The idea of sharing a room had so filled me with dread that, right from the start, I had been lobbying for solitary confinement. That would not be possible, I was told: the snapper and I would share a room with Ensign Newell and three other officers. Six in a room! But we writers need a room of one’s own, I claimed, trusting that any grammatical damage would be more than offset—in the eyes of the Navy—by the Virginia Woolf allusion. I like to write at night, I went on, and the sound of my typing would disturb other people. No need to worry about that, came the jaunty response. With jets taking off and landing you become adept at filtering out noise, so a bit of tapping won’t disturb anyone. It’s not just the typing, I replied (via the mediators who were arranging my stay on the boat). My prostate is shot to hell. I need to pee at least twice a night. What he needs to understand, came the Navy’s reply, is that space is extremely limited. Enlisted men and women are in berths of up to two hundred so to be in a room for six is an enormous privilege. What they need to understand, I replied, is that I’m too old to share. I’ll go nuts if I have to share. I grew up with no brothers and no sisters. I am constitutionally incapable of sharing. My wife complains about it all the time, I said. Basically, only the Captain and a few other people in positions of high command have their own rooms, came the stern rebuke. Well, maybe I could take the Captain’s room and he could move in with Newell and the boys for a fortnight, you know, reconnect with the masses, I emailed back (to my mediator, not intending this to go any further). As the time for my deployment drew near I tried to reconcile myself to the inevitability of sharing a room—I even bought a pair of striped pyjamas—but found it impossible to do so.
Imagine my relief, then, when I was shown to the Vice-Presidential Room in a special little VIP corridor of ‘guest suites’. I had got my own room through sheer determination and force of will. I had taken on the might of the US Navy and won. Newell escorted the snapper to their shared quarters, said they’d be back in fifteen minutes, but I didn’t give a toss about the snapper: he could have been sleeping out in the open, under the stars on the flight deck, for all I cared. The important thing was that he wasn’t sleeping here, with me, even though there was a spare bunk (or rack, as they say in the Navy). That would have been the worst outcome of all: sharing with the snapper, or any one for that matter. Sharing a room with one person is worse than sharing with six and sharing with six is in some ways worse than sharing with sixty. But to be here on one’s own . . . to have this lovely little room—with a desk, a comfy chair, a basin (for washing in and peeing in at night) and a copy of George Bush Sr.’s daughter’s memoir of her dad—was bliss. There was even a thick towelling robe—jeez, it was practically the honeymoon suite, a place where a man could devote himself single-handedly to the maritime art of masturbation.
There was one small problem and it became obvious when I’d been in the room for about three minutes. The crash and thunder of jets taking off. Good God! A roar, a crash and then the massive sound of the catapult rewinding itself or whatever it did. The most irritating noise in my street in London is an occasional leaf-blower. You know how loud—how maddening—that is? The noise here made a leaf-blower sound like leaves in a breeze, the kind of ambient CD played during a crystal-healing or reiki session. This was like a train rumbling overhead. It was nothing like a train rumbling overhead; it was like a jet taking off overhead—or in one’s head. It was a noise beyond metaphor. Anything other than what it actually was diminished what it was. It was inconceivably noisy but the noise of jets taking off was as nothing compared with the noise of jets landing. I thought the ceiling was going to come in. And then there was the shock of the arresting gear doing its business, so that the initial wallop and roar overhead was followed by a massive ratcheting jolt that tore through the whole ship. I knew I was one floor down, directly below the flight deck, and although I wasn’t able to work out exactly which noise meant what it seemed that my room was precisely underneath the spot where most planes hit the deck.
How was I ever going to get a night’s sleep? Especially since—as Newell explained when he and the snapper came back—this went on all night. I would be here two weeks. I would not get a minute’s sleep. Was it the same where they were? No, they were two floors down, Newell said. You could still hear the jets but it wasn’t anything like as noisy as here. We were yelling at the top of our voices, not quarrelling, just trying to make ourselves heard.
‘And this goes on all night?’ I yelled, repeating as a question what I’d just been told.
‘Round the clock. It’s an aircraft carrier. We’re sort of in the business of flying aircraft.’
‘Is there still a spare bunk in your room?’ I said, not knowing if I was joking. I was torn between relief at having my own room and anxiety about what having my own room entailed.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Newell. That’s where you’re wrong, I wanted to yell back. The essence of my character is an inability to get used to things. This, in fact, is the one thing I have grown accustomed to: an inability to get used to things. As soon as I hear that there’s something to get used to I know that I won’t; I sort of pledge myself to not getting used to it. There wasn’t time to yell all this; we had to complete a bunch of forms be cause, like a man driven mad by people in the apartment upstairs playing thrash metal, I was going right back up to the source of the racket, to the flight deck.
With the paperwork taken care of we stopped off for a safety briefing at the empty ATO—the ATO shack as it was always known—where we were handed cranials and float coats again. The shaven-headed duty officer showed us a plan of the deck, emphasized the importance of sticking close to our escorts, of doing exactly what—and going exactly where—we were told. All pockets were to be buttoned or zippered shut. No loose bits and pieces that could fly away. I could use a notebook and pen but had to make sure that I was holding on to them firmly, not pulling them in and out of my pocket the whole time. And watch out for things you can trip over—there are plenty of them. Any questions?
Loads! But there was no time to ask them. We trooped back up the narrow stairs to the catwalk and were back in the silent world of the flight deck. The empty sea glittered like a brochure (‘Ever Dreamed of Holidaying on an Aircraft Carrier?’). The sky was a blue blue, greasy with the reek of fuel (something the tour operators didn’t publicize). And there was something dreamlike about it: the cranial silence, for one thing, gave the visual—already heightened by the pristine light—an added sharpness. It wasn’t just that the aircraft carrier was another world—the flight deck was a world apart from