Chapter 15 Cyclone Connie
Night! -- Darkness all encompassing, a black, insidious cloak. The powerless push of the
single red light serves only to amplify the depth of the shadows and the sense of isolation,
fear and futility.
Two men stand in a fractured room, -- an abandoned cell from hell, so utterly broken,
shattered and vandalised as to be unrecognisable.
They have been catapulted into a void; from the familiar with that precious perception of
control, to the alien and out of control. Over hanging everything is the inevitable expectation
of an imminent descent into chaos. They are abandoned and bewildered in a strange,
terrifying world.
Loss of control – chaos!
The floor hurtles down and away to the darkness of a deep abyss. Suddenly it climbs
skyward to intersect a wall lying on its side, a carnival house of fun -- or horror. There is no
assurance, no comfort of solid familiar geometry. There is only a fleeting, intermittent
angular shape disturbingly out of place on a curtain of moving curves. The solids are liquid
and the air, a liquid, is tangible, solid.
Only two of the wood framed windows have glass and they are criss-crossed with heavy
tape. Where glass should have been are table tops and cupboard doors or rough cut sheets of
plywood, nailed, wired or screwed against varnished frames. The whole structure is issuing
foaming streams of tortured water. Stripped of chattels and accessories, only the permanent
fixtures remain bolted in place. The once gleaming, polished surfaces and grey painted walls
now run with condensation in the stifling humidity. In places salt water has penetrated
minute openings and left shining snail trails, erratic arrows running down to the torrent
issuing like molten glass across the floor. Cascading down the steep slope the water crashes
into a wall and explodes upward through the holes in the duckboards in a dozen white,
frothing fountains. They subside, in readiness once again for the bubbling rampage back
across the room in an endless aquatic spectacle.
For the two men the darkness is intensified by the bedlam surrounding. A wild, inhuman
clamour -- a frightening, bestial scream penetrating steel and glass and timber to assault the
most vital, private and vulnerable core of the body. The sound is felt rather than heard as a
subliminal vibration that tests the senses and questions the essence of human achievement
and control.
It is a scene of terror and violence, demanding immediate, unconditional and grateful
submission to an overwhelming force. It is a palpable, honest and basic feeling – recognition
of the glory and magnificence of human struggle in the face of the overwhelming forces of
nature and the tantalising, imminent, inevitable, welcome reconcilement with the acceptance
of total, crushing defeat.
The all pervasive gale commands the attention on each of their senses in turn and on cue
as a choreographed duet, inseparable, they respond. Their stinging, red rimmed eyes are
drawn painfully, involuntarily by a sheet of spray hard driven across the glass. Their ears,
weakened by the constant moisture and lack of care, reluctantly heed a higher plateau of
shrillness as tortured air whistles around or through or under a new obstacle or another, even
more savage gust strikes like an angry fist. Their grievously tired muscles respond without
thought to the predictable motion and the occasional violent wrench that threatens to throw
them off their feet. Their lips and mouths and throats, dried and cracked by fatigue and the
hint of fear are suddenly awash with a suspended swallow. They sometimes sniff the air,
nostrils flaring, aware of a something new or perhaps the absence of the normal, the sudden
shock of one's own body odour or a sudden, too close surge of the smell of the sea and
occasionally in a rare weak moment the scent of utter despair, the reek of helplessness and
fear.
All around the tiny structure the maelstrom rages. There is nothing beyond the fractured
room for the two men -- out of sight, cut off by the vertical and horizontal barriers of timber,
steel and glass as if the prison cell itself is adrift on a storm mad sea.
The two men, aged and marked by exhaustion, stand in the shattered remains. One is
behind a large timber wheel, his bare feet spread wide, toes constantly testing the wet deck
for a hold as he struggles to maintain his balance against the erratic, violent movements of his
surroundings. His face is cramped in a painful convulsion but the other man can see glimpses
of the red rimmed eyes that mirror his own exhaustion. The helmsman stares at the lubber’s
line, his last and sole remaining reference to an ordered world. But the white and black
figures on the compass card are at the best, a moist, murky blur.
The other man has wedged himself upright in the corner of the cell, white rimmed
knuckles of one hand clutching a steel handle while the other periodically circles the glass in
front of him to clear a patch of mist. His white shirt and shorts are wet and stained with
perspiration and creased with lines of grime. The unmistakable flush of blood on one hip
indicates a hidden wound. He has been standing in that spot for the last eight hours. A dark
beard shadow mars his face, the grey patches of ageing clashing with the tanned complexion,
even as it pales with exhaustion.
The brass clock, its surface now dull and rimed with a salt frost, chimes eight bells.
Whether it is the last of the morning or the end of the dog watches, eight in the morning or
eight at night, a new day or the end of another is not obvious from the surroundings and the
instinct and biological clock of the two men pick the former. But the dense storm clouds and
torrential rain absorb the existing light like a blotter, the dusk like darkness of the new day
adding immeasurably to the exhaustion of the watch keepers.
Wilson's shoulders lift high and fall as he takes in a large breath and shakes his head from
side to side in a violent spasm to dispel the hallucinations brought on by exhaustion. The
eerie, impossible malformation of the window frames and the grotesque undulating waves of
steel beams and pipes on the deck head are so frequent and common as to be welcome and
normal. The sharp, almost painful flashes from the backs of the eyes are more frequent and
prolonged. He shifts his weight to the other leg and digs his fingernails into the heels of his
palms, an urgent, painful stimulus to bring him back to the job at hand. As he had often done
in the past, he could once again break through this temporary barrier of fatigue to a new
plateau of attentiveness, which would last until the onset of the next reverie or until the
emergency was over and he could sleep.