Let me buy you a beer...

Listen to: Let me buy you a beer...

Let me buy you a beer
and I'll tell you about it,
Oh, I could have happily poisoned
the blasted Chief Engineer,
and although I didn’t mean to,
I really didn’t,
it's possible I did,
and I didn’t really care.

In the tortuous heat of the Yemeni summer,
I was glad to leave the sun-baked deck
where the ship’s searing hot steelwork
burned my skin at the slightest touch.
I headed to the ‘tween decks
and the musty stink of the lower hold
to check that the cargo for Aden,
from London and Bremen, was all put ashore.

I climbed past the patty piles
of steaming human shit,
dumped at the manholes
by the stevedores to stop us climbing down,
so they could filch the cargo
without being seen,
and I gagged at the flies and maggots,
swarming so close to my face.

I watched the last few crates of cargo
swayed aloft in nets
from the deep lower hold
to the dodgy-looking barges
moored alongside,
when I found three plastic bags,
full of drugs,
stashed in the shadows of the hold.

I gathered them together,
jammed them in the pockets
of my overalls,
and climbed back up,
up through the tween decks,
past all the shit,
the maggots and the flies,
and headed for the cool of the officers' bar.

I boasted of my prize
to the off-duty crowd,
and the pipe-smoking Yorkshireman,
the cheerless Chief Engineer.
He’d ‘never smoked drugs before,’ he said,
and opened a bag and packed his pipe,
tamping the drugs into the bowl,
grunting in his porcine way.

The chief sucked hard on his pipe,
and puffed away,
amid clouds of foul-smelling smoke,
while gargling another can of Tennents.
Through spasms of coughing
and choking on his words,
he tried bloody hard
to keep an insouciant air.

As he sucked and puffed
those near to him cursed and moved away,
he muttered and moaned
about not getting high,
‘Waste of bloody money—
there’s no fookin’ pleasure in this.’
he simmered,
and glowered at me.

The chief mate then entered the bar,
and wrinkled his nose at the dubious fumes.
Proudly, I showed him my haul.
He took one glance,
his eyes opened wide,
and he cursed me as a fool,
‘Go and put them back, you idiot—
it’s rat poison!’

We turned as one—
the off-duty crowd, the chief mate and me—
to look and laugh
at the chief engineer,
as he knocked out his pipe,
staggered to the sink,
spat and spluttered,
and slugged back his beer, while swearing at me.

…It’s your round by the way!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Well that certainly made me chuckle and I probably will do for the rest of the day.
28/10/2024, 08:47
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