THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  So what if the ship was shitty, this was luck beyond her dreams. She knew it was irregular, probably illegal. Bulk carriers didn’t usually take paying passengers, only the bigger ships, the ones full of officers’ bored wives slowly drinking themselves to death on bleak industrial decks, armed with the civilized pretence that somehow every hour was cocktail hour. But if the drunken first officer and his malleable captain were happy to take her, she was ecstatic to accept. If it was against the law then, hell, it would be their heads on the block not hers.

  And look what she got for free. The owner’s cabin, with shower. A seventies homage to Formica, flowered curtains and hairy carpet tiles, a cell of privacy that gave her a whole four days before they docked in Texas to make sense of the hundreds of pages of scribbles she’d made in her tattered red notebook, and more importantly, translate the pile of Dictaphone tapes. She grabbed a thin towel stamped with some other ship’s name, rubbed at her hair and sat down heavily on the foam sofa. This was going to get her a first. A big fat, fuck-off-I-told-you-I-could-do-it degree, the kind that only the lucky rich kids walked away with, regardless of what was between their ears. Right now she felt luckier than hell. She laid the excuse for a towel over her face and lay back with a smile.

  Hold number three was still dripping from the high-pressure hoses that had bombarded its sides. Now it was ready to receive its cargo. The two massive iron doors were rolled back on rails to either side, and the water that dripped from the lip echoed as it fell thirty feet into the dark pit below.

  Two Filipino ABSS leaning on the edge of the hold regarded the black-red interior impassively.

  It was nothing more than an iron box, featureless except for a rusty spiral staircase winding its way up one wall, and scaling the other, a straight Australian ladder leading to the manhole that emerged on the deck. Soon both would be smothered under the hundreds of tonnes of loose trash that the crane was already spewing into holds one and two.

  “Fuck me, Efren. Where’d this shit come from?”

  The smaller of the two sailors looked round lazily at the voice, with just enough animation in his body to avoid the accusation of insubordination. He grinned, and sniffed the air as if it was full of wind-blown blossom.

  “Come from Lima. Big pile. People live on it.”

  Matthew Cotton felt like puking, helped of course by four double rum and Cokes, six shots of grappa and five beers; but mainly because the smell from the holds was so terrible.

  “Yeah? Well guess it ain’t a whole lot different to living in Queens.”

  Though he hadn’t the remotest idea what his senior officer was referring to, Efren Ramos stood on one leg, smiled through gapped teeth and nodded. Matthew could have sworn they were going back to Port Arthur empty, but of course the suits at Sonstar would rather piss on their own grandmothers than have one of their ships burn fuel without earning cash. If they were struggling for a decent load of ore then he guessed the trash made sense.

  Matthew didn’t give a shit. He was on his way back to his cabin to sleep this one off. Then he would get up in time for dinner and start work on a whole new stretch of drunkenness. That was what mattered. Keeping it topped up. Keeping it all nice and numb.

  He turned with a flick of the hand that meant “carry on” and walked unsteadily back to the accommodation block. The sun was getting low, but even so its heat was bothering him.

  He wanted the shade of a cabin with the drapes pulled and the darkness of sleep, where for a few short hours nothing and nobody could reach him.

  Darkness brought a sour breeze to the dock, and to the ship it brought a nightly invasion of mosquitoes that could not only locate every inch of exposed human skin, but even the fleshy parts of the countless rats that ran the length of their metal sea-going home.

  Of course there were no rats on the Lysicrates. Every official form and inspection sheet signed and dated testified to that, claiming proudly that the ship was free from infestation. Indeed, that was what the circular metal plates ringing the top of the ropes were for, to stop the vermin boarding ship.

  But there were rats. And on a ship this size, that meant there was plenty of room for them to carry on their daily, and right now, nightly, business.

  The MV Lysicrates was 280 metres long, weighed a dead tonnage of 158,537, had nine holds and a crew of twenty-eight, all Filipino except for two.

  Even in this bleak industrial Peruvian port, the three other ships that lay alongside her were doing so with considerably more dignity, for the Lysicrates transmitted an air of decay that was hard to prove in detail, but impossible to ignore in essence.

  It was the feeling that everything that was necessary to keeping her working had been done so only up to the legal limit and not an inch beyond.

  The paint was peeling only in places that didn’t matter, the deck was not littered with hazardous material that constituted an offence, but neither was it particularly clean, and the hull was dulled with variegated horizontal stripes of algae that clearly were not planned to be dealt with as a priority.

  Its depreciating appearance was not unusual in a working merchant fleet, particularly in this part of the world, but it was nevertheless an unsightly tub.

  She had been lying in Callao for twelve days, which pleased the lower-ranking crew who had been taking the train daily to Lima, returning with a variety of cheap and unpleasant purchases they imagined might curry favour with loved ones back home.

  But the turnaround time was unusual. The Lysicrates worked hard for her living. Of a fleet of ten ships, she was the eldest, and sailing as she was under a Monrovian flag of convenience, she was hardly the most prestigious. The dubious registration meant that the company could avoid practically every shipping regulation in the book, and by and large, it did. While she was still afloat, the ship’s task was to sail loaded, as often and as quickly as she could, so the fortnight’s holiday in port was not normally on the agenda. But no one was complaining. And no one seemed to mind that the captain had spent an unusual length of the time ashore. All anyone cared about was that the holds were filling up and it was time to go.

  Just as Leonardo Becko, the cook, was putting the last touches to a dinner of steak and fries, the door of the last hold of the Lysicrates was rolling closed with a rumble.

  That would mean it was only a matter of hours, and the crew were already milling around above and below deck, making the comfortable and familiar preparations to ensure the constant uncertainty of the sea would once more be under their control.

  As they did so, the cargo in hold two shifted its bulk as the strip of daylight that moulded its rotting undulations narrowed steadily with the closing door, and the two massive metal plates met, enfolding it in darkness.

  What air remained in the three to four foot gap between trash and steel seemed to sigh as the finality of the doors being secured subtly shifted the pressure. And then the broth of waste that was as solid as it was liquid was alone in the dark. Locked in. Silent. Content with its own decay.

  In the officers’ messroom, Captain Lloyd Skinner was already at his table, pouring himself a glass of water, when he caught sight of his female passenger walking past the open door.

  “Miss… eh…?”

  Her figure moved backwards into the door frame. Esther had changed into a cotton shirt and jeans, and with her deeply tanned flesh scrubbed she radiated a health that was out of place in the atmosphere of mundane industrial toil.

  “Hi? Mulholland. Esther Mulholland.”

  The man cleared his throat, and smiled. “This is where you eat.”

  She looked down the corridor, to the open door of the crew’s mess hall where she’d planned on eating, already accommodating five silent Filipinos, smoking and waiting patiently for their food. Esther returned the smile and walked into the room.

  There were three round tables set for dinner, empty, their glasses and cutlery polished and waiting for diners. The Starsky-and-Hutch interior designer had been at work here too, adding plasti
c pot plants to the garish patterned fabrics, affording the room the atmosphere of a sad waiting area in a run-down clinic.

  “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 wheat-floured 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 quali
fy, 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.