The Ancient

‘Captain?’ She held out her hand but didn’t sit down, waiting to be asked. This was a different deal from the voyage out here. She had no passenger rights that normally elevated the ticket holder to the status of officers, only the good will of this man she’d never met, and Esther had an instinct for making herself worthy of good will when she needed to.

The man had an abstracted expression, his attention elsewhere. ‘Eh, yes. Lloyd Skinner.’

He took her hand without rising, shook it limply, moved the book he had been reading to one side as though it were in her way, then motioned in general to the three ugly plastic padded chairs beside him like a reluctant furniture salesman.

Skinner, she reckoned, looked to be in his late forties, perhaps even early fifties, but in direct contrast to his soak of a first mate he was in such good shape it was hard to tell. Whereas Matthew Cotton was probably only scraping the ceiling of his thirties, his hair had greyed prematurely, and his face was lined, brutalized, the flesh sucked from the bones by abuse, leaving him with the mask of a much older man. Skinner glowed with health. Sandy hair topped an oval golden-brown face with distracted blue eyes and a mouth that was perhaps a little on the thin side. He was powerfully built, and the arms that emerged from his short-sleeved shirt indicated that his body hadn’t always been behind a desk.

Esther gave an internal sigh of relief that at least the man in charge of this decidedly shabby tub seemed to be halfway human. She sat down happily.

‘I really want to thank you, Captain Skinner. I mean, this is way past kindness and out the other side.’

The man coughed into his fist while looking beyond her at the open door, then at the plastic plants.

‘No problem. These, eh, tickets, are pretty flexible.’ He gestured vacantly into the air and continued. ‘Merchant ships change their schedules all the time.’

Esther’s heart started to barnacle with lead.

‘Didn’t your first officer mention mine was non-refundable?’

‘Oh, we’ll sort it.’

‘No. I mean really. It’s a grace-and-favour ticket.’

The captain looked at her properly for the first time, and there seemed to be something akin to alarm behind his eyes. ‘You have family in the shipping line?’

Esther thought about Gerald McKenzie. Thought about his clammy hands on her breasts and his awful breath in her ear. Thought about him guffawing in the darkness of the theatre at the pathetic overwrought antics of Jim Carrey, his wet mouth full of popcorn. She gulped back a combination of revulsion and shame at how she’d used him, and like so many boys before, hadn’t let him use her like he’d planned.

‘No. No. It’s a friend’s father. He works for Croydelle.’

Skinner ran a hand over his jaw and neck and looked away again. ‘Ah. Well … whatever.’

There was an awkward silence, while Esther waited for some kind of confirmation that indeed everything would be all right, but was rewarded only by Captain Skinner looking down and touching his book absently as though he wished very badly to go back to it. She cleared her throat.

‘So will that still be okay?’

‘Mm? Oh yes. Yes. I’m sure. Your ticket. You can, eh, see the purser with it.’

He smiled weakly, then looked to a figure hovering by the door to the galley, more to avoid the awkwardness of this conversation, thought Esther, than out of an eagerness to be served. The glance, however, bore fruit.

A man in a stained white waiter’s jacket approached the table, handed them both a menu encased in a thick red plastic folder like that of a cheap diner, then disappeared again. Skinner straightened his arms and regarded the menu as though it were the printed fare of a state banquet.

Esther looked at the intent on his face and quickly reviewed her first impression. She ought to have guessed that no ordinary captain would employ such a drunk for his first in command, but the level of this man’s dismissive distraction seemed out of character for a man in charge of a large ship and sizeable crew.

The captain on the Valiant Ellanda had been a straightforward industrial boss, friendly, but very much in charge, his officers a reasonable selection of men doing their jobs and enjoying the limited social life at the end of their watches. That journey had been uneventful, the company boring, but the atmosphere comforting. This was disquieting. Esther glanced down at the paperback on the table, desperate to start a conversation that would at least engage him before he changed his mind about her free passage. She expected a Wilbur Smith or worse, the standard fodder of bored sailors, but what she saw shocked her, immediately halting the small-talk possibilities her brain was already preparing. He was reading an English translation of the Koran.

Esther looked from the book to the man and back again.

‘Are you Muslim, Captain Skinner?’

He looked at her for a moment as though she were mad, then blinked down at the book placing the thick menu gently alongside it. ‘Hmm? Ah. Ha ha. Good gracious no.’ He lifted the volume and looked at it as if for the first time. ‘Just working my way through the religions of the world.’

A small Filipino man entered the room, nodded to them both, showing no surprise at all at Esther’s presence, then sat down at another table and took out a book of his own.

‘Really? Some task,’ said Esther, quite genuinely intrigued and not a little impressed. She tried to force his eye contact back to her again by touching the book lightly. ‘You’re interested in theology then?’

Captain Skinner looked over at the officer engrossed in his own less contentious volume, a Filipino translation of some ancient Tom Clancy, then gazed absently again at the plastic pot plant.

‘Interested in the uniform stupidity of mankind.’ He looked back round at Esther coolly. ‘No offence of course, Miss Mulholland. If you’re religious yourself.’

She shook her head slowly.

‘Not at all.’

‘Then you might take my point.’

‘It’s certainly one view of spirituality.’

He smiled benignly as though they had been discussing the weather, then folded his hands neatly on the menu in front of him.

As the three expectant diners sat in a tense silence the Filipino man at the next table was joined by one other, and as if on cue the waiter appeared again, handed them both menus and shuffled to the captain’s table to take orders.

Esther endured the first course – some green wheatfloured soup – in miserable silence, listening to the two other men talking softly in their own language, occasionally laughing and nodding, enjoying an easy companionship. When the leathery steaks came and it became clear that her fellow diner had no intention of speaking, she decided it was too much. She was going to try again.

‘So where you from then, Captain?’

Skinner looked up as if he’d just noticed her. ‘Denver originally. Florida now.’

Esther beamed. ‘Gee. That’s a change and a half.’

He returned her smile without warmth, but the prompt seemed to work. ‘And you?’

‘Scranton PA, originally. Texas now. So guess I’m not one to talk.’

‘Ah. Hence no southern drawl,’ he said without interest through a mouth of fries.

‘Why I do declare I can manage when I try,’ said Esther in her best Pam Ewing.

Skinner ignored the burlesque but looked at her with renewed interest. ‘And you do what exactly there?’

Esther moved her food around a little with the fork to mask embarrassment at her failed entertainment. ‘College. Last year majoring in anthropology. This was my dissertation field trip.’

Genuine curiosity, the first she had noticed since their meeting, lit behind Skinner’s eyes. ‘Interesting. What do you hope to do with such a thing when you graduate?’

‘Well it’s a military scholarship. So I guess during the seven years of active service I’ll owe them after I qualify, at least I’ll understand people and their diversities of culture before I kill them.’

Skinner looked at her for a moment in stunned silence, then he put his big hands down on the table, threw his head back and laughed.

Surprised, but delighted at the reaction to such a feeble joke, Esther watched his face then joined in his mirth.

‘I guess we’re a lot alike, Miss Mulholland.’

And that was the last thing he said to her before he finished the remainder of his meal in cheerful silence, leaving her alone at the table to contemplate exactly how that similarity might manifest itself.

4

No matter what time of day or night it was, the accommodation block of the Lysicrates always housed someone asleep. Different shifts and watches meant the crew made their own day and night, and there was an understanding about noise and privacy that was delicately observed in the way that people living at such close quarters are forced to do. There were currently four bodies lying in their respective cabins.

The first officer was unconscious on his foam sofa, a crushed beer can held to his chest like a teddy bear. The second engineer was fast asleep in a neatly-made bed dreaming of his wife, and the sixteen-year-old deck cadet, the youngest of the crew, was snoring loudly on his back in a top bunk after having masturbated over a not-particularly-explicit porn magazine the cook had brought him back from Lima.

But although it was his turn to sleep, and with only another legitimate hour and a half in which to do so, Fen Sahg, a greaser and fireman, was wide awake. He had turned his back on the cabin in an attempt to avoid looking at the gaudy idols and 3-D posters his cabin mate Tenghis had fixed to every surface he could morally call his own. Even though he was staring fixedly at the white painted metal of the cabin wall, the image of Tenghis’s plaster Virgin Mary, her head inclined in pity, her white arms outstretched as though for his soul alone, was burnt into the back of his eyes. He knew the man only did it to rile him. They were both Catholics by upbringing of course, but Tenghis had taken exception to what he called Fen’s ‘wicked pagan superstitions’, and believed it was his duty as a good Christian to bring him back into the fold. It was true he was superstitious, but only with good cause.

Tenghis’s fears were hypocritical, since Fen knew only too well that Tenghis himself could have his moments too. They had both worried when two voyages ago the chief engineer brought his wife on the ship. Surely every sailor knew it was unlucky to have a lone woman on board. Two or three officers’ wives, well maybe that was okay. But one alone? No. And look what had happened. The cook had nearly sliced his little finger clean off during that storm south of Panama. There was no doubt amongst the lower-ranking crew who had been responsible for that. No, superstition was not always baloney and old women’s fears. But as to his wicked paganism, Tenghis was wrong too. To amuse his fellow crew members, Fen often held Saanti readings in the mess hall or his cabin, the method of prediction and revelation being an obscure Asian mixture of Tarot and ouiji. The Saanti showed him the truth of things, and he would be a fool not to pay heed. That didn’t mean he too couldn’t be a good Christian, and Tenghis’s sulk after such an evening, which would sometimes last for days, punishing his cabin mate by saying his rosary loudly in bed at random times, was a gross insult. But tonight it was not Tenghis’s irritating piety that was making him wakeful. It was thinking about the Peruvian stevedores.

Gossip in any port spread quickly, and Fen usually liked to help it along if it was juicy enough. So when there was a rumour that the stevedores were unhappy about the cargo of trash being loaded onto the Lysicrates, Fen was the first to make himself amenable to the gang chief to try and find out why. The chief was a small suspicious man from the country and it took a lot to befriend him, but since the ship had been lying here for so long, longer than any other vessel usually did, Fen managed by persistence to make the man take him into his confidence.

It certainly was an unusual load. The Lysicrates normally carried coal, iron ore or gravel, and even on other bulk carriers he’d sailed with he had never come across the bulk shipping of uncompacted domestic waste before.

And apparently he was not the only one to find it irregular, since there had been some kind of negotiation being carried on between the company and the dock authorities, which had caused the trash to have been sitting in a vast rotting pile in the dock’s loading area for nearly a week while Captain Skinner sorted out a bill of lading.

The rumours had started after two days. There were complaints about rats and roaches of course, but when a prostitute that visited the docks on a nightly basis had gone missing after servicing two of her regulars in her temporary boudoir inside an empty container, talk started that it had something to do with the trash. Fen couldn’t quite get from the man what he thought the connection was, but some names had come up, curiously none of them Spanish, but of a tongue he didn’t recognize, and there was a whispered uneasiness amongst the men about something one of them had seen in the great and stinking pile.

In itself this was merely the normal superstitious nonsense of simple under-educated working men, of which Fen was one, but he was more intuitive than most, and could usually distinguish the nonsense from the genuine mystery. What was bothering him now was that as he had watched the trash being loaded from the vantage point of the deck, Fen could have sworn he had seen something.

Rats probably, he reasoned, but then in fifteen years at sea, years when he’d seen just about every trick the repulsive vermin could perform in everything from grain to cocoa bags, he’d never seen rats undulate under a pile of anything in quite the way this grab-load of refuse had moved. If it had been rats, then there had been a lot of them, and working together. Because the surface of the junk had pulsated in a way that made him break out in a sweat. The thought of the rodents, however logical an explanation, was not in itself a particularly comfortable one.

Beasts that size that could move with such ordered intent were not beasts he looked forward to sharing a voyage with. But if the movement was not caused by rats, then Fen wasn’t entirely sure how he felt. A hot sensation had overwhelmed him as he’d witnessed the swift but substantial movement, and the unpleasant notion had swept across him that it was moving, revealing itself, for his benefit only.

Fen’s only consolation was that he had been so horror-struck by the sensation that he had made himself watch the grab drop the pile from a height into hold number two, monitoring it carefully as it fell, and could see all the individual pieces that made up the pile clearly revealed. Nothing alive and writhing had made itself visible against the bleached South American sky. No heavy rats tumbled and squirmed in the air, and neither did anything else.

Still staring at the wall, he turned over in his mind whether that was a comfort or not. Maybe the truth was that he never really saw the movement in the first place, that the talk of the stevedores had primed him with nervous expectations that his superstitious mind obligingly furnished.

Or maybe it was a simple trick of the sunlight and the unpredictable movements of the huge crane.

Fen sighed and turned back over in his bunk to look reluctantly at Mary.

This was not going to be a lucky voyage. First the girl passenger Cotton had brought aboard, and now the worry about what he thought he had seen. If sleep evaded him much longer he would get up and consult the Saanti. Then he would know.

The holy Virgin glared at him reproachfully. He would stare at her fixedly for the remainder of his rest period, because regardless of what his logic wanted him to believe, in his heart he knew there had been something moving in that trash. And whatever it was, it was now on board.

Adjusting the hard hat which was tipping over his eyes, Captain Skinner finished his leisurely perambulation of the long cargo deck, one hand in his pocket and the other holding the thin paper on which the details of the cargo were scrawled. He could see the second officer and the bosun leaning together on the rail, smoking and watching the dock hands mill about aimlessly on the harbour edge below them as they waited for the Lysicrates to go, and he detoured his route to join them. Instantly the bosun stamped out his cigarette and adopted a posture of readiness. The second officer made an upward nod of greeting and continued to stare down at the harbour. Skinner leant beside the officer and smiled past the two men at the lights of the port.

‘Reckon that’s us, Felix.’

The bosun smiled, nodded and left. Renato Lhoon, the second officer, tapped some ash overboard and looked up at his captain.

‘Chief Officer Cotton?’ enquired Skinner into the night air.

‘In cabin.’

‘Ah.’

The two men watched a cat dart surreptitiously along the edge of a wooden shed, spurred faster by a piece of coal thrown by the bored stevedore waiting to untie the ship. Skinner looked at his wristwatch.

‘Fifteen minutes.’

He smiled again at nothing in particular then left Lhoon to figure out what was required. It didn’t take much figuring. The second officer sighed, flicked his cigarette over the edge, tucked an errant shirt-tail into his neat pants, and walked toward the door of the accommodation block.

The door opened onto C-deck, the living quarters of the crew’s lower rank, and to advertise the fact, the hand rail outside each cabin sported a motley selection of garments ranging from socks to grimy T-shirts airing in the hot corridor.

An elevator served the decks from the bridge down nine floors to the propeller shaft in the engine room, but Lhoon decided that to stand and wait for it to chug and shudder to his command from wherever it happened to be, would give every passing cadet and ABS the opportunity to bend his ear on some gripe or other, and frankly right now, with the task of waking Cotton before him, it was the last thing he needed. He climbed the metal stairs without enthusiasm two floors to the officers’ accommodation deck and walked slowly to the door of Cotton’s cabin. As usual he tried the handle first, and as usual it was locked.

He coughed into his fist, then used it to bang the door twice. There was no reply. He banged again.

‘Matthew? Come on.’

A groan from within gave strength to the next bout of hammering, which Lhoon kept up relentlessly until he heard the groggy voice again.

‘Fuck off.’

‘We go now, Matthew. Your watch.’

‘Sail the fucker yourself, Renato.’

Lhoon started to bang with both fists now, and kept it up until the metallic snick of the lock being thrown rewarded his efforts. The small man stopped his assault on the door, turned the handle and entered. The cabin was in darkness save for the orange-and-white light of the deck filtering through the thin porthole curtain, and he flicked the switch behind the cabin door.

The lights of Matthew Cotton’s cabin revealed that at least tonight Lhoon would not have to dress him. He was lying back on the sofa again, fully clad, his arms across his face as a shield against the sudden glare. As far as the officers’ cabins were concerned, Cotton’s was no different in design. One room with a seating area and coffee table, a bed riveted to the wall and a half-open door leading to a shower room with WC.

What marked his out as unusual would not be immediately apparent to a casual observer, but to any sailor it was glaringly obvious. Unlike every other cabin on board the ship Matthew Cotton’s was the only one that was completely devoid of family photos. Even the youngest cadets, barely out of school, and the filthy and objectionable donkeyman whose mother would find him hard to love, had photos, framed or otherwise, of sweethearts and family adorning every possible personal space of their quarters. Nothing in Cotton’s cabin revealed anything about who might occupy his most intimate thoughts or longings. Apart from a few piles of clothes and shoes that cluttered the floor, more than a few empty beer cans that filled the wastepaper bin or sat redundantly on the table top, nothing suggested there was any sign of a man living here, that this was a private space in which a man could recreate part of his shore world on board.

Lhoon stood with his hands on his hips above the recumbent figure and waited. ‘You want to puke first?’

Matthew’s voice was muffled behind his arm. ‘Yeah.’

Lhoon waited some more, knowing that even the suggestion would spur his senior officer’s guts into action. A moment later Matthew raised himself up from the sofa, stumbled slowly through to the shower room and bent to his work over the sink. The noise made the second officer catch the back of his throat and he swallowed and looked away.

‘I wait or you done?’

‘Done.’

Matthew ran the tap and stuck his head under it, and after a moment of recovery walked through to join his colleague for the routine escort up to the bridge, and for the duration of the short walk Lhoon let Matthew walk in front, a guard escorting his prisoner to the gallows.

Apart from the fax machine behind Matthew, droning as the weather report rolled through, and the ghostly, muffled voices on the radio that he had turned down to a dream-like volume, the bridge of the ship was quiet.

Before him, the hold deck looked almost glamorous, illuminated as it was by pinpricks of white light, and framed by glimpses of the white ocean foam the stern was pushing aside.

Matthew ran a rough hand over his face and sat down heavily on a chrome stool that wouldn’t have been out of place in a New York bar. They were well clear of port now, and there was nothing to do for the next four hours except stare at the darkness ahead, and drink neat vodka from a china mug that declared ‘Swinging London’ on the side beneath a garish Union Jack.

He’d planned to be asleep again before the end of the watch, but that didn’t matter, since Renato would come and check on him every twenty minutes and do anything that needed doing. But nothing would. He’d pointed the tub for home and that was it.

This was the worst watch for him, the long hours of darkness, with nothing, no distractions, no human company, no chores or excuses to think, to keep him safe from his own black interior.

He’d tried reading at first, but his mind wandered after the first two paragraphs, his eyes scanning the meaningless words as other images replaced the ones conjured by the invariably bad authors, and with considerably more impact. So now he just sat and stared. And of course, drank.

Tonight the vodka bottle was behind the row of chilli pepper plants that Renato grew in plastic pots along the starboard bridge window. It was only habit that made him hide it. Skinner didn’t care and there was little need for deception, but it was an important part of the alcoholic’s ritual to conceal, and ritual was all he had left. He drained his mug, walked to the plants, retrieved the bottle and poured another big one.

Matthew fingered one of the swelling fruits and smiled at Renato’s dedication. A storeroom below groaning with fruit and vegetables, and yet the man lavished attention on these scrappy plants as though all their lives depended on it. The nurturing instinct. As strong in some men as it is in women. With the thought, a black ulcer threatened to burst in his heart and he turned quickly from the fruits, swallowing his vodka as he walked quickly back to the desk.

With a shaking hand he fumbled through the folder of paperwork. Something to do was what he needed. He’d pretend to be a first officer. At least until the demons receded. Read about the cargo. That would work. The part of him that was still alive had been intrigued that loose trash was being loaded. It was a cargo he’d never come across. Compacted metal, industrial waste, sure. But domestic loose trash from some city site? Never. It would be interesting to see where it came from and more importantly where it was going.