The Ancient

Matthew skimmed through the piles of paper recording every on-board banality from crew lists to duplicate galley receipts, but there was nothing. No bill of lading, no sheaves of inspection certificates from the port authorities, no formal company documents with tedious instructions and warnings.

He found some dog-eared cost and revenue sheets that had been used practically unchanged on the last three trips. They told the company, the shipping federation, the world, that the Lysicrates was going home empty as planned. The ship contained nothing but ballast water. He blinked down at the paper and then stupidly out the window to the silent deck.

Presumably Skinner hadn’t finished doing whatever he did so privately in his office with all that paper before entering it in the log and the document folder, but it was unusual, and unlike the captain’s usual form, very sloppy.

You could load anything from custard to cows at Callao if you greased the right palms, and from the eleven voyages he’d made so far with this company, Matthew had decided they were perhaps not amongst the most honourable of traders. Forever trying to dodge regulations they’d even lost a vessel five years ago with all hands, and had despicably argued about compensation to the families of the deceased for as long as they could, even though the insurance company had paid up in full. Shysters and crooks, and naturally the only ones who would employ someone like Cotton after his fall from grace, although Skinner, he admitted reluctantly to himself, had had more to do with his second chance than the avaricious gangsters who owned the ship. But if the company was pulling some kind of a fast one, what in God’s name were they planning to do with the trash when they got to Port Arthur? For a few moments the slow, drunken brain of Matthew Cotton thought about it. He let himself think like a captain again, think about the nature of loose trash, of how it would sit in the hold, how it might shift in weather. Gradually, as his brain cleared more thinking-space, he thought of methane gas building up like a bomb in the sealed holds, and the consequences of that when the hot South American sun hit the deck from dawn and started to bake it like a desert stone. A tiny sliver of rage started to build in his chest. Tiny but insistent. If he could die he’d be dead a thousand times by now. Dying was too desirable, too good for Matthew Cotton. It was a release he didn’t deserve. It wasn’t up to the slimy suited bastards in the Hong Kong offices of a shipping company to change that.

He glanced at the weather fax again, which he’d already registered indicated nothing but fine weather. Then he picked up the phone and called down to B-deck.

A deck cadet answered in Filipino.

‘Rapadas. Open all the hatch covers fifteen feet.’

The man didn’t even reply, but several minutes later two men walked lazily into the white light of the deck and started working the hydraulics that would wind open the huge metal doors, slapping each other on the shoulder and continuing some animated conversation as they worked their way along. For a moment Matthew almost felt like an officer in charge. Someone who’d taken a responsible and intelligent action to prevent disaster.

But the moment was brief. Reality hit him and reminded him he was nothing higher than pond scum. He sank down again and drained his mug. The holds wouldn’t blow. The ship and the crew would be safer now than they were twenty minutes ago.

Big fucking deal.

The sun would come up and go down. The earth would turn. Stars in space would die and be born. And nothing he ever did, good or bad for the rest of his life would make him anything other than a piece of shit. Swinging London tipped up and Matthew Cotton’s eyes closed. His free hand made a tight claw on his thigh.

5

The fantasies of most ancient cultures almost always included one of walking on water. From Christianity through Mayan domestic legend, even into modern obsessions with surface-bound sports, the defiant, burnished skin of the ocean presents a challenge to man that is considerably deeper than the mere domination of nature.

As the early morning sun gave the Pacific a pale cream solidity, Esther felt she could run straight off the deck and onto that glittering rugged surface without puncturing it. However, a dull but well-meaning officer on the journey down to Callao had regularly and unbidden furnished Esther with sea-going statistics, and the revelation that the sea along the coast of Peru concealed a trench that was over twenty thousand feet deep had induced in her an immediate vertigo as she thought of the blackness yawning beneath her feet. Gazing out now at the innocent shining surface, she felt that same mix of fear and thrill again at the ocean’s secret.

Maybe, she reasoned, that was why mankind always felt impelled to make instant contact with water the moment it was anywhere in his vicinity. The child on the beach who runs without fail to the sea, the adults who pull off their socks and shoes to paddle in the shallows, the fisherman who catches nothing but is satisfied with the contact of weighted line and water; all are reassuring themselves that what excites them about what they see, that beckoning seductive sheet of light, is as flimsy as net and as dangerous as fire.

If she could, Esther, too, would have made contact with a cool sea.

A swim after the punishing circuit she was pounding would have been delicious, but even if the boat were a pleasure yacht that drifted to let her bathe, she wouldn’t care to swim thinking of the sunless chasm that lay beneath her. A cramped, steamy shower would do and with only four more laps of the cargo deck to go, even that was pretty damned attractive.

She needed to get back in shape, and although the mountain treks had been hard, nothing in her field trip had left time for the kind of physical programme she liked to stick to back home. Fifty-one laps of the deck, twenty of them with a stitch ripping her side apart, only confirmed that she had serious work to do, and as she sprinted for the bow it was with a sinking heart that she realized she would have to stop and let the pain subside.

Her trainers squealed on the metal as she slowed down and jogged to the edge of the last hold, whose open hatch protruded about six or seven feet beyond the lip of its fixings. Esther put out a hand and leant heavily against the metal, her head bowed to her waist, sweat dripping onto the deck between her feet.

Less than a minute passed before her heart rate had slowed to near normal, and she straightened up rubbing at the side that was still tight and sore. Despite the eternal thrumming of the engine vibrating through her body that was so constant and rhythmic it ceased to exist for most sailors only hours into any new voyage, the serenity was exquisite. The breaking water around the hull swished erratically and the light wind that toyed in her hair was no more than a whisper.

She leaned back against the hatch and looked out over the sea. Although the route was hugging the west coast of Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, they were far too many miles from land to view it. The sun had an uncluttered stage upon which to rise and it was doing so with unparalleled magnificence.

This was a lucky time. Esther had always divided her days since childhood into lucky and unlucky times.

When things were bad, unlucky bad, she knew that by waiting, the lucky bits would present themselves, and however brief they might be, she had learned to grab them and hold them tight. She’d started it at the age of eight as she stood over her mother’s grave, Benny’s whisky breath filling her nostrils as he clung to her little shoulder as a means of steadying himself rather than of comforting her. Her grief had been too profound to articulate, but she had felt her father’s confused adult despair being transmitted to her through his curled fingers the way a plant carries chlorophyll, and as she had shaken free of his grasp she had looked around in desperation to see something beautiful, something distracting, something lucky.

A heavy-set woman in a pink organza hat was tending a grave beyond the untidy scrub in that cheap little Pennsylvanian graveyard, and as she bent a gust of wind blew it from her head and made her stumble after it in a way that was both grotesque and funny. Esther had looked around and noted that no one else had seen it but her. So that, she’d decided, had made it lucky. She could think of that instead of her Mom lying in the ground, and that would help get by the unlucky bit. It became habit, and here she was at the age of twenty-three still doing it in the most mundane of moments.

And yes, at this moment away from the decidedly ragged collection of shipmates, with the sun and the sea as her only companions, her passage home assured and her dissertation shaping up in her head with every mile, she had the right to feel lucky. Lucky, even though the trash in the hold was tainting the perfect scene a little now that she’d stopped, by randomly releasing its foul odour in small nauseating gusts.

Esther waved a hand over her face.

‘Shit.’

She turned and looked to the hatch as though a stern glance would halt its emissions, but since its metal surface was at least three or four feet above her head, the culprit – the mountain of waste – was impossible to see.

Esther inclined her head back out to sea, then looked slowly back again, curious. A sheen on the edge of the metal hatch had caught her eye, and she stepped back to examine it. There was a trail emanating from the lid of the hatch above her head, running over the edge and then continuing along the deck below, as though whatever had left it had dropped the seven or eight feet and continued its progress. She rubbed at it with a toe. It had been dried hard by the sun exactly like the trail of a slug, but with the marked difference of being at least three feet wide instead of the innocent half inch you would curse at in your glasshouse, and when her trainer made contact it broke off in wafer-thin flakes.

Esther bent and looked more closely at it. Under the hardened flakes of slime there were other things sticking to the deck, things that were still slightly moist, streaks of effluent maybe, a trace of oil or tar, but worst of all a brown-red smear that looked almost like blood. Still crouched, she followed the trail on the deck, her hand shading her eyes from the sun, until, squinting, she could just make it out disappearing over the edge of the deck about twenty feet short of the accommodation block.

Esther stood up and wiped her foot unconsciously on the edge of the metal hatch runner. She shook her head. The only explanation could be that someone had pulled an unpleasant portion of the trash from its pile, dragged it nearly seven holds further up the deck and then tipped it into the sea. She knew she shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but everything about this ship was making her long for the dull, reliable neat container ship she’d arrived on.

Most likely the trail was the residue of drunken behaviour, a bet, a forfeit or a prank, and the worst of it was that discipline was obviously so lax no one had bothered to come out and scrub away the evidence. This was a crew that needed its ass kicked.

The stitch healed, she bent forward and took two deep breaths, ready to finish the circuit. She straightened. For no reason other than that the unscrubbed trail of goo had irritated her, she had an overwhelming desire to peer into the hold to see exactly what they had been up to.

A quick glance up to the far-off windows of the bridge suggested that she was not about to be observed, and so with her hands on the guide rail of the hatch cover she hauled herself up to the edge of hold number two. There was a moment of feeling precarious, the action putting her higher than the ship’s taff rail, and she paused to steady herself. When she had adjusted to the height she walked carefully forward to the fifteen-foot slit between the open hatch doors and crouched down at the edge. The smell nearly knocked her backwards and she covered her nose and mouth with one hand, leaning heavily on the other.

Ten or twelve feet below her, the pile of irregular and unidentifiable waste was illuminated by a slim strip of daylight, while the rest of the load skulked in darkness beneath the ledges of drawn hatch covers. It was an ugly cargo, and looking down into it gave Esther the creeps. The sea breeze seemed chillier up here, and she hunched her shoulders against it as she scanned the top of the waste to try and understand what someone might have been pulling free from it.

From the dark starboard portion of the pile came a movement. Her eyes flicked to it immediately, her breath caught in readiness.

She focused hard on where she thought she saw the subtle peripheral shifting and waited for it to happen again.

Her leg was grabbed in a vice-like grip below the knee, and before she could cry out Esther was dragged backwards.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re at?’ It was a male voice.

Esther found herself on her back, her fists clenched ready to strike, blinking up at the figure silhouetted against the sky. Her panting breath slowed and she untensed her body enough to sit semi-erect and recognize the figure of Matthew Cotton.

‘My God. You near made me shit myself.’

‘Yeah?’ It was said with aggression, not apology.

He offered her a hand to get up. She ignored it and sat forward instead. Matthew pointed to the deck. ‘Get down. Right now.’

Esther looked at him sulkily and slowly stood, walked forward and lowered herself to the deck. Cotton dropped after her, dusting off his pants and never taking his eyes from her sullen face.

‘You any idea how stupid that was?’

‘Aw, come on.’

Matthew nodded vigorously as though she’d offered to start an alley fight. ‘Okay, smartass. Let’s just say we hit a swell there and you tipped in. You think you’d just land on it and step right out? Huh?’

Esther said nothing, but put her hands on her hips and stared out to sea.

But Matthew had no intention of stopping the lecture. ‘Year and a half back, an ABS who decided to take a jaywalk across an open hold full of grain while the hatches were still open in port, fell in. Okay? Crew thought he’d jumped ship, done a runner, when he didn’t show up for his watch. So they sailed, they thought, without him. Found his body at the bottom of the grain at the next port. Care to think about what drowning in raw, unhusked wheat must feel like? No? Well try thinking about how drowning in a big pile of shit might be for laughs, because believe me, honey, that’s what would have happened to you if you’d gone ass over tit.’

Esther looked at him. He was genuinely angry, breathing hard, his eyes lit with indignant fire. She held up restraining hands. ‘Yeah. Okay. Sorry.’

Matthew turned and looked out to sea himself now, as though trying to calm himself. ‘Man, you shouldn’t even be out here without a hard hat. It’s a bulk carrier, not the QE fuckin’ 2.’

Esther was getting annoyed. This, after all, was the drunk who could barely stand upright yesterday, and even though she was grateful he got her on board, he was hardly Captain Kirk.

‘Yeah, well it doesn’t look like “shipshape” means much out here anyhows.’

He snapped his glance back to her. ‘Meaning?’

She pointed down at the hardened slime trail beneath his feet. ‘I got curious as to what that was.’

Matthew looked down, and followed the trail with his eyes from hatch cover to ship’s rail.

She watched the slow wit of the perpetual drunk try to work it out and fail, and pity returned. ‘But I guess I was out of line. Sorry.’

Matthew was still staring at the trail. ‘Yeah.’ He said it absently, obviously still perplexed.

‘Can I finish my run?’

He turned back to her, his hand stroking the nape of his neck in thought. ‘Huh? Yeah. Go on. You heard me out.’

She held his gaze for a beat then turned and sprinted for the bow.

Matthew watched her absently for a second then turned and walked along the trail to where it left the deck and slipped beneath the rail. He leant over and stared down at the stained hull of the ship. There was nothing to see except the oily blue-black of an insanely deep ocean and the virgin white of its foam.

By the time Esther had come around again, he was gone, but the third and last circuit saw her nearly run into two cadets wandering on deck with buckets and mops.

Although she didn’t know why, Esther was pleased they were coming to clean it up. Very pleased.

The captain’s door was closed, which Renato knew signalled he was either in the shower or asleep. But it was already gone eight-thirty and neither possibility was very likely for a man of such regular and early rising habits as Lloyd Skinner. As he paused by the closed door and pondered what to do, he was joined by Pasqual the radio officer, clutching a piece of paper and yawning.

‘Taking a dump is he?’ said Pasqual in their native tongue, secure in the knowledge that even if the captain was on the other side of the door, the words would be meaningless. That, of course, was the great advantage of sailing with American top brass. At least usually it was. Although the captain had picked up a word or two of Filipino, enough to say please and thanks, the crew could largely talk amongst themselves in front of Skinner without the threat of being pulled up for verbal insubordination. Unless, of course, you were a rating and second officer Renato Lhoon heard you. Then you were in big trouble. Cotton however, required more caution. His Filipino was pretty strong for an American, as was his Spanish. But since Cotton was mostly drunk the crew could afford to relax when discussing him in his earshot. Anyway Cotton wasn’t here. They could say what they liked.

‘Yeah, well we all got to go sometime, Pasqual.’ Renato knocked lightly on the door.

‘Come.’

The captain’s voice revealed that he was indeed on the other side of the door, sounding, by Renato’s familiarity with the master’s quarters, as though he were merely seated at his couch and chart table.

The men entered, and Renato was rewarded by having his theory proved exactly right. The captain’s quarters consisted of an office that was joined by a closed door to his personal suite of rooms, no more than a larger version of the officers’ cabins with a slightly bigger shower room. In the office that the men entered, a large desk covered with papers was fronted by a seating arrangement of three cheap block-cushion sofas pushed together to make a C-shaped fortress of foam, surrounding a low table designed to be exactly the correct size to accommodate a standard navigational chart. Skinner was seated at the table, his hands cupping a knee, nothing on the table more sinister than a chart of the area they were currently sailing and a mug of coffee. He looked up at the men with the mild irritation of someone who has been disturbed.

‘Gentlemen?’ Skinner said shortly, as though they’d walked in on him naked.

The two men exchanged glances. ‘Eight thirty-four, captain.’

Skinner blinked at Lhoon, then looked down at his watch. ‘Ah. Right. Sit.’

The radio officer held out the paper. ‘Just delivering this, sir. Two messages from company for you, and one for purser.’

Skinner took the paper, and Renato sat down on the ungiving couch opposite his captain.

‘Thank you, Pasqual.’

Looking down at the paper without reading it, he spoke casually, absently avoiding eye contact with the man.

‘Eh, yes. Make a reply in a couple of hours. You can let me know when will be convenient for me to use the radio room alone. Confidential ship-to-shore.’ He scratched at his neck and added, ‘Nothing urgent.’

Pasqual nodded. ‘Sure. No problem.’

The radio officer left them, stifling a yawn again. He hadn’t slept well last night as a result of eight hours of fierce half-waking dreams and half-conscious anxieties, an unusual occurrence for him, and now it was taking its toll. No matter. After he’d got his morning watch out of the way, maybe he would slip back to the cabin and catch up. After all, the sea couldn’t be calmer and everything on board was normal to the point of tedium. He left the captain’s door open as he exited, the way shipboard etiquette said it should have been when he’d entered.

Renato coughed into a fist, then clasped his hands in front of him ready to deliver his routine daily report. ‘Quiet watch, captain. All’s well. Only action, First Officer Cotton opened hatch doors round eleven-thirty. Thinks there might be risk of methane. Weather looks like being okay to leave them for now.’

Skinner raised an eyebrow, then nodded. ‘Methane. Yes, well.’

‘Third officer on duty now, and he knows to keep an eye on weather fax to close them if it blows above force four.’

‘Good. Right.’

‘Anything for today, sir?’

Skinner looked casually at the radio officer’s communication again. ‘Eh. Maybe some routine inspection. Down in the engine rooms and in the cofferdams.’

‘I can organize that.’ Renato held out his hand for the paper.

Skinner looked up at him, and there was nothing absent or distracted about the piercing gaze he fixed on the man. It took his second officer by surprise.

‘That won’t be necessary, Renato. This is my duty.’

The man nodded, withdrew his hand self-consciously, then waited. The captain continued. ‘The bosun briefed for the day?’

‘Sure.’

Skinner held his eye, then said quietly and with great finality, ‘Thank you, Renato.’

Lhoon coughed again and stood up. ‘Thank you, captain.’

He left quietly, and before he had got even halfway to the lift, he heard the quiet but unmistakable metallic sound of Skinner’s door closing. Renato paused, thought, then dismissing the man’s eccentricities of the day, went about his business.

Esther was enjoying her breakfast. The eggs and bacon were good, the coffee hot, she felt revitalized after her shower, and unlike the awkwardness of last night, her dining companion this morning was a jolly and talkative chief engineer called Sohn. Through broken English and equally broken teeth he was telling her about his family which consisted entirely of women: six daughters and what sounded like a formidable wife, and how even the nightmare of an overheating engine room was a blessed escape from the heat of their nagging when he was ashore.

He was candid and funny, and even Matthew Cotton entering the mess room, bringing a nauseating faint stale whiff of alcohol with him as he sat and joined them, couldn’t dampen her high spirits.

Sohn nodded and grinned at Cotton as the lugubrious-looking first officer poured himself a coffee from the communal plastic flask on the table.

‘Feel good this morning, Mattu?’

‘Goddamn born again, Sohn,’ he replied without warmth and took a long swallow of coffee.

The engineer laughed and nodded again. ‘No one like night watch. Mattu get it every time. Ha ha.’

Esther smiled at the man’s jollity in the face of the second officer’s gloom. She crunched on some toast and smiled. ‘So you do eat then?’

Matthew looked at her. ‘The only damn thing Leonardo can cook.’

Given last night’s dinner Esther had to admit he had a point. Sohn pointed at Esther as though Matthew had never seen her before.

‘Esther army stoodent.’

‘Yeah?’

The engineer cheerfully ignored Cotton’s dismissive grunt and turned back to his considerably more charming companion.

‘You shoot guns and all?’

Esther looked down at her plate as though she were talking about something dirty. ‘Standard M16 A2. Nothing fancy. You get acquainted with your weapon at advance training camp.’

Sohn nodded enthusiastically, wanting more. Nothing came. Matthew sat back in his chair and looked at her.

‘Guess you got on well with Lloyd last night then, huh?’

Esther narrowed her eyes. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘He’s a Nam vet. Explosives. Used to defuse bombs, lay land mines.’