Bear Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

personal matter. I didn't know either man or their respective backgrounds well enough to form a valid judgement.
        "Ah, "tis the good healer," a gravelly voice said behind me. I turned round without haste and looked at the pyjama-clad figure sitting up in his bunk, holding fast with his left hand to a bulkhead strap while with the other he clung equally firmly to the neck of a Scotch bottle, three parts empty. "Up the ship comes and down the ship goes but naught will come between the kindly shepherd and his mission of mercy to his queasy flock. You will join me in a post-prandial snifter, my good man?”
        “Later, Lonnie, later." Lonnie Gilbert knew and I knew and we both
        knew that the other knew that later would be too late, three inches of
        Scotch in Lonnie's hands had as much hope as the last meringue at the vicar's tea party, but the conventions had been observed, honour satisfied. "You weren't at dinner, so I thought--”
        “Dinner!" He paused, examined the word he'd just said for inflexion
        and intonation, decided his delivery had been lacking in a proper contempt and repeated himself. "Dinner! Not the hogwash itself which I suppose is palatable enough for those who lack my esoteric tastes. It’s the hour at which it's served. Barbaric. Even Attila the Hun-”
        “You mean you no sooner pour your aperitif than the bell goes?"
        "Exactly. What does a man do?"
        Coming from our elderly production manager, the question was purely rhetorical. Despite the baby-clear blue eyes and faultless enunciation Lonnie hadn't been sober since he'd stepped aboard the Morning Rose: it was widely questioned whether he'd been sober for years. Nobody least of all Lonnie-seemed to care about this, but this was not because nobody cared about Lonnie. Nearly all people did, in greater or lesser degrees, dependent on their own natures. Lonnie, growing old now, with all his life in films, was possessed of a rare talent that had never bloomed and never would now, for he was cursed-or blessed-with insufficient drive and ruthlessness to take him to the top, and mankind, for a not always laudable diversity of reasons, tends to cherish its failures: and Lonnie, it was said, never spoke ill of others and this, too, deepened the affection in which he was held except by the minority who habitually spoke ill of everyone. "It's not a problem I'd care to be faced with myself," I said. "How are you feeling?”
        “Me?" He inclined his bald pate forty-five degrees backwards, tilted the bottle, lowered it and wiped a few drops of the elixir from his grey beard. "Never been ill in my life. Who ever heard of a pickled onion going sour?" He cocked his head sideways. "Ah!”
        “Ah, what?" He was listening, that I could see, but I couldn't hear a damned thing except the crash of bows against seas and the metallic drumming vibration of the ancient steel hull which accompanied each downwards plunge.
        "The horns of Elfland faintly blowing," Lonnie said. "Hark! The Herald Angels."
        I harked and this time I heard. I'd heard it many times, and with steadily increasing horror, since boarding the Morning Rose, a screechingly cacophonous racket that was fit for heralding nothing short of Armageddon. The three perpetrators of this boiler-house bedlam of sound, Josh Hendriks's young sound crew assistants, might not have been tone stone deaf but their classical musical education could hardly be regarded as complete as not one of them could read a note of music. John, Luke, and Mark were all cast in the same contemporary mould, with flowing shoulder-length hair and wearing clothes that gave rise to the suspicion that they must have broken into a guru's laundry. All their spare time was spent with recording equipment, guitar, drums, and xylophone in the foreword recreation room where they rehearsed, apparently night and day, against the moment of their big breakthrough into the pop-record