by Merle Kröger
Dead or suicide. Fuck it. And now I’m lying here with this boy, who is beautiful enough to die for, ready to die. All for nothing again.
Jo can’t talk about it. He can’t tell Gurkha Girl that he’s been fucking rich women for weeks to earn extra cash, that he can’t stand himself. But that’s the way it is. The ship’s pay is a joke. You can’t even get an apartment in a Manila slum for that. Raymond does perfume sales during the day, the drummer does the sound engineering for the other bands on the boat, and the pianist also plays for the ice show. Jo started with a part-time job in the casino, the last three hours on the blackjack table. The guy who was on before him, an American, wanted to give him half his shift. “Got something better to do.” Wink. And then: “Don’t miss out, mate!” Another wink. High five. Two hours later, Jo knew what he meant.
The black-haired chain-smoker on crutches, with diamonds in her ears and wads of dollars—she lost and smoked, lost and smoked, lost. Her voice was hoarse from the endless cigarettes, and she swore quietly to herself in a language he didn’t understand. Eyes hard as pebbles. At the end, there was a roll of dollar bills in front of him on the table. She was the first.
“I need some air!” Jo has to get away. He doesn’t want to fall in love with this girl. He wants to scrape money together, lots of money, and then finally record his album. His own songs are his only chance. He has to get out of here now.
“Stay as long as you want. So sorry.” And he’s out the door, without a single backward glance.
Barely an hour later, his body slices through the waves. Jo doesn’t die straightaway. He fights his way back up to the surface and sees the ship, full of lights, full of life, slowly growing smaller. Sees the first shimmer of dawn. And turns himself, quite calmly now, toward the wave that engulfs him.
Havarie (Collision)
Position: 37°20’N 0°49’W
Radius: 12 nautical miles
Begins: 1:53 P.M. CET
SPIRIT OF EUROPE | DECK 10
Léon Moret
Léon is asleep.
In his dream, he runs along Broadway, the ship’s nerve tract. Broadway: What cynical joker came up with that one? With none of the pomp and circumstance of the upper decks, here it’s all slogging and sweating. Supplies are heaved, trash is shunted, laundry is hauled along in sacks.
Léon’s looking for Mado. Faces blurred. The global working class runs as if chased, reporting for duty just in the nick of time. Nobody, not even your best friend, smiles at you. Facial muscles are off duty. The whole phony display of friendship is off the table down here, with the fear of the cameras on your tail. Here you see stress, tension, bags under the eyes. The first wrinkles. Léon gives a smile here and there, nods to someone. He usually still has something left in the tank after his lonely nights on the bridge. He could run around naked in the dark up there and it wouldn’t bother anyone. A streaking officer. Ha!
Léon walks and walks. Broadway never ends, on and on between the sickly yellow walls. Wasn’t Mado here just a moment ago? The smell grows more revolting. As if someone were slowly turning up a dial. Trash, vomit, piss, mold.
Smile. Nod. You’re an officer. Don’t let on about anything. People rush past. Gloomy faces, man. Heat. Stench.
Smile, Léon. Mado! Is it her? He speeds up, breaks into a run. Sure is! It’s Mado, in her uniform, her freshly sleeked hair forced into a perfect, round bun. Mado from the banlieues of Lyon. Here it doesn’t matter where you come from. We’re all equal. Léon from the Île d’Aix. Mado from Lyon. Léon is white; Mado, black.
We don’t have a problem with it.
Léon’s cabin is on Deck 10, Mado’s on Deck 1, just above the waterline. Where Léon comes from, there are not even cars, just oysters, wind, and sea. Where Mado comes from, there’re only the projects, and trash, and poisoned rivers—
A sharp jolt racks the boat.
Léon emerges from sleep like a drowning man. Shit, overslept. Darkness. This cabin is a curse and a blessing. No daylight. He has to sleep somehow.
The ship! What’s going on?
The engines are never supposed to stop, under any circumstances. He listens to the faint drone. The machines run day and night, nonstop since the Spirit of Europe was in the dry docks four years ago. Power supply. Rudder. Even in the harbors.
What’s happening? We’re not moving anymore.
Léon jumps up, switching on his tablet. He reaches for the trousers hanging over the chair, inspects them: no stains on the crotch (the last hours up there were bloody boring). Boots up VesselFinder Pro. They’re in the middle of the sea, twelve miles off Cartagena.
Button shirt. Léon blinks and stares at the small, colorful triangles, which have multiplied now that it’s daytime. Worse every year. He clicks through the ship names. Some you meet time and again, like old friends. Siobhan, a cargo ship. The anarchist from last night, lying in Cartagena, as if butter wouldn’t melt on its tongue. Carry on, nothing unusual. Shoes. Where are his fucking shoes? A glance in the mirror.
Léon, tired, disheveled. Léon, beach child. Green eyes. Green sea. Léon, child of the beach. Dinner in silence at the wooden table, with his father, Georges, grinding his jaw. Fanatical environmentalist. Geologist. He had developed a method for recycling old neon pipes into rare earth. The only sound is his older brother, Fabian, eating noisily.
Léon grimaces in front of the mirror. Smile, Léon.
Léon Moret. First officer.
Always on duty.
Countenance!
SPIRIT OF EUROPE | DECK B2
Lalita Masarangi
Quick, quick. She’s switched on all four monitors, but the program takes forever to load. Come on. Lalita takes another drag on her joint. Stay calm now, come on, baby. She stubs out the joint and sticks the butt in her pocket before grabbing the air freshener. OMG! Why doesn’t Nike get rose scent or something? Ocean breeze, of all things; everything stinks of ocean here anyway. What are we, fish? She feels the pot going to her head.
Footsteps outside the door.
It can’t be Nike. He’ll be on his inspection round for at least another thirty minutes. Suddenly she feels like the boat is slowing down. It can’t be, must be the dope. There’s no window in security headquarters. You don’t need one—that’s what the cameras are for. Lalita giggles. Wicked dope. Who knows what sort of stuff? She had taken the joint with her when she got up earlier. Her little revenge. How could Jo just disappear like that?
Jo, the bastard. She feels almost as shitty as when they turned her down in Nepal. Used. Lalita Masarangi, used Gurkha Girl, going cheap.
The program is finally up and running. Which camera first? Hey, approach it strategically. Camera on Deck 1, corridor starboard. She clicks through last night’s recordings.
Here we go, there we both are. God, I look dreadful in that dress. Never mind. We’ve already gone past—
What’s that? There’s a guy coming out of his cabin. Wearing only his underpants and a potbelly. Yuck, gross. Disappears again.
Click.
Click.
It didn’t feel that long, what we did inside—there he is. Jo, what on earth is the matter with you? You’re running down the corridor as if a monster were after you. Jo. She presses pause, just before he passes the camera. Tick. Tick. Tick. Zooms in with the joystick. Jo is beautiful, even in pixelated black and white.
Click.
Click.
Lalita knows how to click from one camera to another in order to track someone. She grew up with it, sitting on Dad’s lap. “Have a go, Princess.” Daddy’s girl.
Jo goes to the elevator. Click. Deck 3. No. Keep going. Click. Click. Click. Deck 4, 5, 6. Where’s he going? Hectically she fiddles with the mouse, feels her heart pounding. Where are you going, Jo? What made you run away from me like that? Stop, back. Deck 5. Promenade deck and entrance to the casino. There he is. Casino. Black. Access denied.
“Access to the cameras in the casino requires a special code.”
Oh
.
No.
Nike.
She hadn’t heard anything. Not a thing.
“For reasons of privacy.” Piercing. Lalita jumps up, but he is beside her in three strides and leans over the table. His aftershave makes her feel sick. “Who are you spying on?”
Her thoughts race. Find an excuse. You have to make something up quick before your father ends up hearing about this.
Lalita doesn’t look at Nike, as he takes the mouse out of her hand very gently. “Take a look, you little tramp.” With three clicks he takes them back to the hallway image again. Jo and Lalita. God, I look like shit. “Are you crazy, girl?” he almost whispers, his hand at her chin, still very gentle, very gentle. “Take a look. Take a good look. He’s sleeping off his trip somewhere, between two legs that are longer than yours.”
Lalita gags as shame, mixing with bile, shoots into her mouth.
Swallow.
Nike’s radio crackles. “Security chief to the bridge!”
She senses his impatience. He needs to bring this to an end. “We have an incident. I have to go up to the bridge, and you are to join your colleagues up on Deck 12 within the next five minutes. Patrol. Passengers are gathering starboard. A lot of them. Too many. Are you listening, girl? If just one of them gets the merest scratch, I will hold you personally responsible.”
The door slams shut behind him.
Lalita doesn’t move as the onboard loudspeaker crackles, Léon Moret’s voice intoning: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your first officer speaking. Some of you have probably noticed that we have stopped the engines. The reason is a stricken raft, alongside the vessel, starboard side. There is no cause for concern. The coast guard has…”
Lalita grabs her beret.
Deck 12.
Just a quick vomit first.
SPIRIT OF EUROPE | DECK 12
Seamus Clarke
Blue. Blue water, shot from above, no sky. Lightly rolling swell. The picture wobbles, while in the midst of the blue, a gray rubber raft dances on the waves. Many people are on it.
Too many.
Someone jostles his arm from the right, the side holding the camera. “Kelly lass, can you keep them away from me?” There’s too much ruddy pushing and shoving up here.
“How many, Seamus? Tell me how many there are.”
Oh, Kelly. I can’t get a good count with all this shaking going on. Careful, zoom back out.
The raft with the people in it is growing smaller or the blue is growing bigger, depending on your point of view. A tiny boat in a massive expanse of blue. Another rough jolt sends the sky racing into view, the line between sea and horizon blurred by haze.
Seamus tries to focus in tight, but the boat keeps slipping out of the center of the frame. He zooms further out.
First, he can’t make out the people anymore.
Then he can’t make out the boat
All that remains is a black speck in the blue.
Seamus’s focus gets lost. Where are we? His eye searches for something to catch on to, and his hand follows. Seamus pans to the right. Window fronts. The fitness studio. Then back to the left. People at the railing, silhouetted against the light. Downward: a crowd on Deck 4.
“Seamus!” Kelly tugs on his shirt. “Tell me, how many?!”
Lass, what do you want? I can’t count them. Everything’s shaking too much. Seamus lowers his camera for a moment.
Orientation: Where am I? Deck 12. A moment ago, everyone was sunning themselves on the loungers: Kelly, content with a Bloody Mary and her book, and Seamus, looking the other direction, with a view of the pool. The Upper Ten Thousand are enthroned straight across the way. Those with the suites are always nicely separated from the commoners, the ladies blinged out from head to toe. Today only the old woman with the wheelchair is there, without her companion. Hanging in the lounge chair like a wet rag, she looks a little lost and very alone. What is it they say? It’s not lonely at the top. There is a swimming pool.
What was happening again? Oh, right, the belly flop contest. Men doing belly flops. The fatter you were, the better your chances of winning. Did you ever see a finer collection of chubby British specimens? Seamus had raised his glass and toasted the winner, then suddenly: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your first officer speaking.”
The bridge. Something had to be…
Seamus had snatched up his camera quicker than his mind could process the situation, and as he did, they came from behind, pressing him and his wee lady against the railing, as if they were handing out freebies up front.
People today have no respect. He glances around for her. Kelly shrugs, shoving a pushy crone aside before lying back down. “Just let me know when something exciting happens.”
Seamus lifts the camera up to his eye. “Sure, lass, I won’t leave my post.” Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop staring at the raft out there. Seamus stays put, which is almost second nature to him. Comes with the job.
Seamus is the night watchman at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. It is a giant box of sorts, its own borough, built out of bricks, with new glass and steel additions inserted here and there. Its specialty: gunshot wounds and brain injuries. Yes, that is the legacy of the Troubles, after almost forty years of civil war. There is a market niche for everything in this world.
Each evening, Seamus knots his tie and pets his Jack Russell terrier named Jack—yes, that is his name. Did I ever claim to be bloody James Joyce? He then walks out of his single-family bungalow at the end of the cul-de-sac in Dunmurry. All around are houses just like his, arranged in a crescent, like the set for a peaceful suburban neighborhood in a bloody BBC series. Seamus knows each of the men and women who emerge from these houses every day: average people who walk through their neatly manicured front yards on their way to their reliable cars.
South Belfast, Catholic through and through.
The war is over. Yes, it is, but people don’t really change. They trust only their own. You don’t buy a house to the east or the north of the city unless you are tired of being alive. And who wants to live among people who refuse to accept that the future is not on their side anyway? Who hold tightly to their British flags, which have not meant anything in a very long time? The future belongs to the Republic of Ireland, to Europe, to whatever. Do you see the guy over there coming out of the pub, in a jogging suit with a fag hanging out of his mouth? He used to be a bigwig in the IRA.
Every evening, Seamus drives toward the northern part of the city, through the rain. Dusk in Belfast lasts twice as long as anywhere else in the world. A battered armored police car cruises by. At least the gunfire has stopped. Just to be safe, Seamus prays a quick thank-you to the Virgin Mary for the fact that the Troubles are over. If you ask him (or one of his five brothers), he will tell you: No doubt about it, we don’t belong to the hardliners. But don’t get me wrong, the conflict was necessary—otherwise, those of us here would still be dancing to their pipes, like my wee Jack.
It’s hard to imagine, but there were only farms and fields here after World War II. Our ancestors were housed down in the city, packed together like sardines in narrow, rented apartments. If you did not own property, you could not vote, so they made sure the Catholics could not own their own homes. It was as simple as that.
We Clarkes are a working-class family that finally got out of the slums and bought our own house in Turf Lodge in 1961. A new borough, Turf Lodge, ripped from the moors and lying in the shadow of Black Mountain. Lots of children, a wild herd. The street was our playground, steep enough for lethal soapbox races.
It was right over here, can’t you see it? The city had not grown all the way out here back then. No buses drove this far out; there were no stores. We kids had to walk to school, an hour every day in all kinds of weather. That is one way to keep people down, but not us. We set up our own school, then the church, then the leisure center, then the social club.
Seamus waves at a woman with a permanent and a pink wool scarf, as she flits
across the street with her umbrella. Nice old lady, right? She leads a funeral march every year, over at the graveyard. The British shot her son right here. And Mary, her oldest daughter, crazy girl, she lay up there on the roof holding a shotgun, loaded and cocked. She lives in Australia now. Mary, that is.
The windshield wipers are not making any headway against the rain. Seamus turns them up faster, and through the blurry glass, Kevin looks down at him from his mural. Hi, Kevin, my friend. You still wear your hair the way you did in the seventies. No one wears it like that anymore.
Kevin.
Get in.
From this point on, every day, Seamus always carries Kevin with him. He drives with Kevin to the Royal, toward the sea and past the other murals of the hunger strikers.
Good evening to you, too, Bobby Sands.
The Peace Wall divides the Catholic and the Protestant boroughs. Peace, well, you could call it that, I suppose. If you do not know your way around here, you will find yourself in point zero seconds stopped short in front of a wall topped with shards of glass. They recently started organizing bus trips for tourists: the Belfast Murals. After all, the entire city is full of them. We started it, then the loyalists copied us. Well, it is better than war.
Along with Seamus, Kevin gets out of the BMW, walks across the bridge from the parking deck to the clinic and through the warren of halls and corridors. Doors hum open automatically. Into the elevator. Ninth floor. One more hall. A windowless room full of monitors. His colleague leaves, cheerful now that his shift is over.
Seamus hangs up his jacket and sits down on the swivel chair. Come, Kevin, come here and take a look. Three hundred monitors, cameras everywhere in the Royal. People with head injuries often react erratically, are disoriented, grab at the clinic personnel. Seamus is supposed to anticipate such incidents—that is what he has been trained to do.
Don’t you see, Kevin, if only I had known how to do this back then.
I could’ve prevented it.