The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [6]
Ten minutes after I returned to my friends on D Deck, I was regaling Cassius and Ramadhin with the story of the prisoner’s crime. I spoke of it at the Lido pool and I spoke of it around the ping-pong table. But later that afternoon, Miss Lasqueti, who had heard the ripples of my tale, cornered me and made me less certain of Flavia Prins’s version of the prisoner’s crime. “He may or may not have done any such thing,” she said. “Never believe what might be just a rumour.” Thus she made me think that Flavia Prins had dramatized his crime, had raised the bar because I actually had seen the prisoner, and so had chosen a crime that I could identify with—the killing of a judge. It would have been an apothecary if my mother’s brother had been an apothecary.
That evening I made the first entry in my school examination booklet. A bit of chaos had broken out in the Delilah Lounge when a passenger attacked his wife during a game of cards. Mockery had gone too far during Hearts. There had been an attempt at strangulation and then her ear had been perforated by a fork. I managed to follow the Purser while he guided the wife along a narrow corridor towards the hospital, a dinner serviette stanching the wound, while the husband had stormed off to his cabin.
In spite of the resulting curfew, Ramadhin, Cassius, and I slipped from our cabins that night, went along the precarious half-lit stairways, and waited for the prisoner to emerge. It was almost midnight, and the three of us were smoking twigs broken off from a cane chair that we lit and sucked at. Because of his asthma Ramadhin was not enthusiastic about this, but Cassius was eager that we should try to smoke the whole chair before the end of our journey. After an hour it became obvious that the prisoner’s night walk had been cancelled. There was darkness all around us, but we knew how to walk through it. We slid quietly into the swimming pool, relit our twigs, and floated on our backs. Silent as corpses we looked at the stars. We felt we were swimming in the sea, rather than a walled-in pool in the middle of the ocean.
THE STEWARD HAD TOLD ME THAT I had a roommate, but so far no one had arrived to take the other bunk. Then, on the third night, while we were still in the Indian Ocean, the lights in the cabin suddenly blazed on, and a man who introduced himself as Mr. Hastie entered with a folded-up card table under his arm. He woke me and lifted me onto the top bunk. “A few friends are coming over for a game,” he said. “Just go to sleep.” I waited to see who was coming. Within half an hour there were four men playing bridge quietly and earnestly. There was barely enough room for them to sit around the table. They were keeping the volume down because of me, and I soon fell asleep to the whispers of their bidding.
The next morning I found myself alone again. The card table was folded and leaning against the wall. Had Hastie slept? Was he a full-time passenger or a member of the crew? He turned out to be in charge of the kennels on the Oronsay, and it must not have been an arduous job, for he spent most of his time reading or halfheartedly exercising the dogs on a small section of deck. As a result, he had energy to burn at the end of the day. So shortly after midnight, his friends joined him. One of them, Mr. Invernio, was his assistant at the kennels. The other two worked on the ship as wireless