Free The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje Page B

nap, a chat with the one-eyed Assistant Purser – looking carefully into his glass eye as we passed – and visits to Mr Fonseka’s cabin for an hour or more. All these haphazard patterns of movement became as predictable as the steps of a quadrille.
    For us, this was an era without the benefit of photography so the journey escaped any permanent memory. Not even one blurred snapshot of my time on the Oronsay exists in my possession to tell me what Ramadhin really looked like during that journey. A blurred dive into the swimming pool, a white-sheeted body dropping through the air into the sea, a boy searching for himself in a mirror, Miss Lasqueti asleep in a deckchair – these are images only from memory. On the upper deck, in Emperor Class, some passengers had box cameras, and they were often captured in their ‘soup and fish’ outfits. At the Cat’s Table, Miss Lasqueti now and then did sketches in a yellow notebook. She may have drawn some of us, but we were never curious enough to ask, an artistic interest not being something we assumed in those around us. She could just as easily have been knitting a portrait of each of us using different-coloured wools. We were more curious when she brought out her pigeon jacket to show us how she could walk around on deck carrying several live birds in its padded pockets.
    Whatever we did had no possibility of permanence. We were simply discovering how long our lungs could hold air as we raced back and forth along the bottom of the pool. Because our greatest pleasure was when one hundred spoons were flung by a steward into the pool and Cassius and I dived in with competitors to collect as many as we could in our small hands, relying on those lungs for more and more time underwater. We were watched and cheered and laughed at if our trunks slipped down as we clambered out like amphibious fish with cutlery in our hands, gripping them against our chests. ‘I love all men who dive,’ Melville, that great sea-crosser, wrote. And if I had been asked to choose a career then, or at any time during those twenty-one days, I would have said I desired to be a diver in some similar competition for the rest of my life. It never occurred to me then that there was no such trade or profession. Still our slim bodies, almost part of the element, dumped our treasure and flipped back in for another helping, hunting underwater for the last spoons. Only Ramadhin, protecting his tentative heart, could not participate. But he would, slightly bored, cheer us on.

Thievery
     
    ONE MORNING I was persuaded by a man known to us as Baron C. to help with a project. He needed a small, athletic boy, and he had been watching me dive for spoons in the pool.
    First of all I was invited by him to have some ice cream in the First Class lounge. Then, in his cabin, in order to demonstrate my skill, I was asked to remove my sandals, get on the furniture, and move as fast as I could around the room, without ever touching the floor. I thought this was peculiar, but I leapt from the armchair onto the desk, then to the bed, and swung myself hanging on the door over to the bathroom. Compared with mine it was a very large cabin, and after a few minutes I stood there, barefoot on the thick carpet, panting like a dog. At which point he brought out a pot of tea.
    ‘It’s Colombo tea, not ship tea,’ he said, adding condensed milk into the cup. The man knew what good tea was. So far, we had been served what tasted like dishwater on the ship, and I had stopped drinking it. In fact, I would not drink tea for years. But the Baron made me my last good cup of tea. He had brought out very small cups, so I had to have several that day.
    The Baron told me I was athletic . He walked me to his door and pointed to the window above it. It was rectangular and had a small latch that could secure it shut. Now the glass lay horizontal, flat like a tray, allowing the air to come into and go out of the room.
    ‘Think you can climb through