Dead Water

by Ings, Simon

Eric is by now the undisputed king of discards, of Liberty ships and Victory ships. His fleet has cost him virtually nothing, and with it he has changed the face of the earth. Armed with an IBM 704 and a simulation punched into a stack of perforated cards, Eric has tripled the profitability of ships sailing between Hawaii and Oakland. Year on year his tracking systems grow bigger, more capable, and more expensive. In a single year he spends about $400,000 on computers to keep track of the 30,000 shipping containers plying his Pacific routes.

  Eric Moyse’s container shipping is the saving of American forces in Vietnam. In 1968 the US Army is taking more than two weeks to unload a boat at Saigon and its cargo tracking is so poor that the wharves at Cam Ranh Bay are disappearing under the most bizarre surpluses. Hawaiian shorts. Crosses and candelabras. Eric Moyse’s newfangled containershipping operation ensures that US troops receive the right resources, on time, to prosecute the war. The line makes good money from the service, too. It used to be that ships supplying Vietnam returned home empty. Not any more: Eric Moyse has opened a trade route between Yokohama and the west coast of the USA and his ships return from Vietnam laden with Japanese textiles and televisions.

  Though the doctors give him the all-clear, and it takes him no more than a night’s observation in hospital before he’s dried off and on a plane back to New York, friends and observers generally agree that 1960 marks a watershed in Eric Moyse’s life. Gabalfa drowned and Cardiff Arms Park under four feet of slurry. He is never quite the same afterwards. People say the dark has taken him. Certainly, you can date the chunky sunglasses that are so much his visual signature from this date.

  Blinkered, taciturn and monstrous, his eyes hidden from the glare of a whiteout that exists, by now, almost entirely in his own mind, Eric writes out endless lists. Antwerp, Felixstowe, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Kobe, Rotterdam, Tilbury, Yokohama. He sketches maps, charts, diagrams. He writes letter after letter to Power Electronics International, Inc., proposing investment in ‘a gantry crane with one end of the bridge rigidly supported on one or more legs that run on a fixed rail’. He carves out territory after territory.

  While his competitors are digging deep, investing in a new generation of high-performance cargo ships, Eric Moyse has his managers trawl breaker’s yards for old oil tankers: big, slow ships, too wide for Suez, that steam around the world at walking pace. Every week, and on the hour, one of these rusting tubs disgorges your raw materials at the right quayside, on to the right trucks. What do you care how many months it’s been at sea? Eric has seen what his competitors have not seen: that speed is not essential for a container line.

  *

  Friday, 23 July 1971

  Eric has booked a table at the Dorchester in London’s Park lane to wish Havard, his adopted son, a happy twenty-fifth. The Greek-American shipping tycoon Ari Onassis is staying at the same hotel. The men don’t like each other much, but they can hardly ignore each other; not when they’re sat at neighbouring tables in the same gold-papered dining-room.

  Ari’s finding it as hard as anyone to wrap his head around Eric Moyse’s commercial reasoning. Jokes about Moyse’s ‘decrepit’ and ‘obsolete’ fleet have become a staple of the better business sheets. How can such a slow, antique fleet be winning so much business? Now is not the time to pursue the finer points of commerce. Better to simply tease the little man.

  Ari has not met Eric’s son Havard before but, like everybody else, he feels he knows him already. Havard has broken out on his own with a boutique that’s the rage of Soho. Richie Havens and Joan Baez were both seen wearing his threads at the Isle of Wight festival. Of course, Havard doesn’t make the clothes. According to the papers he spends most of his time off his face in a corner of Manor Studios. Havard’s playboy lifestyle distracts from a series of small, canny business decisions that have placed him, in his tender mid-twenties, at the heart of London’s burgeoning music, art and fashion scene. In jumper and jeans he looks out of place here; he also, very obviously, has the sense of entitlement to run roughshod over the dress codes of establishments far more exclusive than this one.

  Ari pushes his plate roughly towards the waiter. ‘This isn’t what I ordered.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Bring me the beluga.’

  ‘Sir, this is –’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  Tight-lipped, the waiter takes up the untouched plate and carries it back to the kitchen.

  Moyse stares at his foie gras, heart hammering with embarrassment.

  Havard merely laughs. Ari impresses him. His cheek, his wit, his bigness. At the same time, Havard’s bright eyes hold something more than humour. They carry something of his mother’s schizophrenic shimmer – as though his visual field were no more than a parade of glossy surfaces.

  The waiter brings Ari Onassis a fresh plate of caviar. The eggs are now appreciably bigger than before. Glossier, too. One can only hope the waiter spat on them.

  ‘The trouble with you,’ Ari says to Eric, ‘is you have unimaginable wealth, yet you do not demand the best. It’s indecent. It’s unfair. Me, I always demand the very best. It’s criminal, my friend, what little fun you get out of life.’

  What is Eric supposed to say to that? ‘I’ve had my moments’?

  Eric has got Havard a gift done up in plain brown paper. (An affectation: why couldn’t he just have bought gift-wrap like everyone else?) Ari reaches across the table and picks it up. ‘What’s this, then, a present?’

  Havard’s eyes glitter – when movement at a neighbouring table distracts him. Even Ari (turning the parcel over and over in his hands, barely resisting the impulse to open it) notices this: ‘If it was a girl you were ogling, I could understand.’

  Havard starts. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Does the gentleman owe you money?’

  ‘Nothing like that!’

  ‘Well? Out with it.’ Ari, who consumes everything, eats everything, tireless in his pursuit of everything.

  Havard says: ‘He’s Said bin Taimur. The Sultan of Oman. Or was. He lives here now, in the hotel. I’ve heard he keeps a parrot.’

  Ari puts the packet down again beside Moyse’s plate.

  ‘What is that, anyway?’ Havard says to Eric, aping Ari’s rudeness. He hasn’t Ari’s cheerfulness, or his scale. He sounds merely petulant. Spoiled.

  Moyse sighs. ‘For you.’ He winces as the boy tears the paper roughly off. It is an ugly object. A square of – well, by its colour, what would you say? Old upholstery? Rotten meat? Inside the pocket is a book, bound in the same vile red leather.

  ‘It belonged to Lothar Eling,’ Moyse says. ‘The man I found on Foyn. What was left of him.’ How to explain what this book signifies? The spin of oceans. The incommensurability of desire. The circulation of the blood. Last, and critically: dead water. ‘Your mother got him this notebook when she was a girl. A Christmas present. For his journey on board the Italia.’

  Ari, exasperated, drops his fork – tiny as a toothpick in his fist – on to his plate. It tings. ‘You got him a book ?’

  Havard says: ‘Oh, Ari, for heaven’s sake, this is history I’m holding. Lothar Eling invented weather modelling.’

  Eric stares at his son. Where did he pick up this knowledge? With a sinking of the heart, he remembers Peder Halstad. Peder would have taught young Havard this. Peder has been more of a father to the boy than Eric has ever been.

  ‘The weather?’ Ari sniffs and goes back to his food. What’s the weather to him? He and Eric and Erling Næss and all their generation have spent their lives ordering bigger and bigger vessels, to the point where storms cannot baulk their ships, cannot force a change in their courses, can hardly slow them down. They are beyond weather now.

  ‘Is this my mother’s handwriting?’

  Moyse looks:

  To Uncle Lothar

  Wishing you a Merry Christmas

  Vibeke

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s hers. That’s your mother’s hand.’

  This is the story Eric
tells his son: that he spent years looking for Vibeke, long after the war, and did not find her, and in his searching found Havard at last, her bastard child, abandoned in an orphanage outside Narvik. And in 1951, adopted him: all of this is true. After that the truth gets hard to bear. Cardiff, little Else, and the flood – these are private hurts. So Eric prevaricates. Elides. Finally, lies: ‘Hard as I looked, I never found your mother.’

  At the next table, Oman’s old Sultan rises stiffly from his seat, drops his napkin on to the table, and makes for the door. An old man of royal blood, his every action is elegant, parsimonious, cold. As he limps away, Ari Onassis mimes a respectful applause.

  After the meal Ari arranges to be driven to a club somewhere and Havard, grinning from ear to ear, follows in his wake. Eric traipses after them, the notebook tucked safely in his pocket. Havard, for all the interest he showed in it at first, has already forgotten it. ‘My mother’s hand’ indeed. ‘Thank you,’ Havard calls, waving from the back of the Bentley. ‘Thank you, Dad, for a great night!’

  Well, thinks Eric, waving back: sod you. He rests his hand against the square bulk in his pocket. You would only have lost it. You would have written your phone number in it and given it to some girl – and then where would we all be?

  Dead water. Ships that churn and churn and churn, for days, for years, forever. It’s clear enough that Havard’s not ready for this. Havard’s not ever going to be ready for this. The burden is Eric’s alone: he was a fool ever to imagine he could pass it on.

  When people talk about shipping they talk about goods. They talk about televisions and motorbikes and cars and toys and clothing and perfumes and whisky. They omit to mention screws, pigments, paints, moulded plastics, rolls of leather, chopped-glass matting, bales of cotton, chemicals, dyes, yeasts, spores, seeds, acids, glues. And no one even thinks about waste. The single biggest worldwide cargo by volume is waste paper, closely followed by rags and shoes, soft drinks cans, worn tyres, rebars, copper wire. Almost everything can be recycled or repurposed. Nuclear and clinical wastes. Residues and contaminants. Industrial byproducts. That these things move over the earth is a fact no one wants to confront, any more than they would want to handle the piss and puss their kidneys filter, minute by minute, from their blood.

  Eric looks up, hunting stars, but the sky’s blackness is as close and oppressive as the inside of one of his own shipping containers. The lights of the city obliterate the sky completely. He remembers the war, how blackouts let in the starlight, and on an impulse he crosses Park Lane and loses himself as best he can in the shadows of Hyde Park.

  It feels strange to be stepping outside the city that has for so long surrounded him. When was the last time he climbed a hill? Tasted snow? Set foot aboard a ship? How has a life once steeped in the blood and ice of the hunt and dripping in the oil wrung from humpbacks and blues, from living giants, how can this vital life have fallen off so far? He is over seventy years old. He should be rooting himself again in the earth to which he will all too soon return.

  He determines to recall his adventures and all the riches his parents’ fleet brought home. Whale oil to light the lamps in every seaboard town from Narvik to Nagasaki to Maine. That he squeezed the breast of a dead blue once, to taste its milk. That the milk of blue whales is a thick, greyish jelly. That it tastes better than it looks. He remembers, he slit open its belly and used a tin jug to gather a couple of pints of barely digested krill. Boiled, krill has the taste and texture of North Sea shrimp. As he walks he clenches his hands, drawing back the bolts on disused memory. Sperm whales die slowly. Once, a sperm whale they had thought dead suddenly came back to life on the factory deck, thrashing out. They finished it off with knives. Did these things really happen? The whole business seems alien now, even preposterous.

  The world is losing its colour, it is turning to paper, and it is his fault. He is convinced of this. With an IBM 704 and a stack of perforated cards he has cleared away the mess and confusion of the world’s cargo ports – this is true. But this revolution has acquired a life of its own. It has turned his ships to paper. They sail across paper oceans now, carrying paper goods. They lead – he leads – a paper life. How has he come to this? To have swapped his homeland for a flag of convenience, his years before the mast for an unending schedule of India Club lunches with Lloyd’s ‘names’?

  By the time he reaches the Serpentine, Eric knows he is going to be sick. Even here, in the midst of the park, he cannot see a single star. Where the path runs up against the water he kneels and reaches down and splashes bird-fouled water in his face. It feels gritty. He shivers and the shiver runs through him, back and forth, a furred and bright-eyed fever-creature. He thinks of Vibeke’s letters: her pet Pippi, chattering in terror.

  He vomits cleanly into the water. He waits for a second heave, for a third, but it does not come. He has evacuated himself with trademark efficiency.

  Something unfurls in the corner of his vision.

  A handkerchief.

  He rocks back on his haunches and takes it, half-blind, eyes streaming. He wipes his eyes, his mouth. His guts are a foreign territory: there is not much pain, but there is sensation. His normally senseless innards have a form: lapping corrugations, crafty left-hand spirals, tucks, folds, involutions.

  He looks up and around, dumbly proffering the ruined handkerchief.

  Said bin Taimur, deposed Sultan of Oman, raises a hand in polite refusal. Serious, unsmiling, Said’s face is at once severe and vulnerable.

  Moyse wonders what to do with the disgusting thing in his hand. He blows his nose on it. He gets to his feet and crams the soiled handkerchief into his trouser pocket. ‘Thank you.’

  The Sultan bows.

  Two old men by a lake. Shadows in a city-lit night. Two players who dominated a stage that is already being dismantled around them. They are both, in their way, significant figures, worth more than a footnote in the history of their time. They do not need to be introduced. Said offers Eric Moyse his arm. The gesture, the offer of human warmth, is almost too much for Eric. After so many years. Such cold. Eric brushes a hand over his face, hiding his tears, dashing them. He takes the old man’s arm. He feels the Sultan’s tremble, the spill in his walk: hard to say who is supporting whom. And how strange this is, this proximity, considering the kind of life the Sultan has led. Considering the divine right of kings.

  ‘You must go slower,’ the Sultan says.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Forgive me. I am lame.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Would you like to know why I am lame?’

  Moyse doesn’t know what to say to this.

  ‘I am lame because on the day I was deposed I contrived to shoot myself in the foot.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘This is an expression, of course. Shooting yourself in the foot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. Only with me it was not an expression. I actually shot myself in the foot. Bang.’ The Sultan shrugs. ‘It caused much hilarity at the time.’

  Eric’s own birthday comes just a couple of months later. He celebrates at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, watching Diana Ross and the Supremes. After the concert he retires to the penthouse suite, orders all light bulbs removed from the apartment, and behind bespoke blackout curtains that utterly extinguish the desert sun he writes a string of clumsy, blindhanded memos giving his staff explicit instructions not to look at him or speak to him unless they’re spoken to. For six months he subsists entirely on black tea, chocolate and pemmican: Arctic rations.

  Dead Water. A surplus arsenal, big enough to shake the world, orbiting unseen across five oceans. Think about it. Think about the distribution of risk. Eric does. Eric has to. Eric has to keep it all in mind. How many containers? How many cargoes? He commits nothing to paper. How many numbers, keywords, check digits? Absolute deniability. Absolute personal control.

  On 16 October 1975 hotel security men accompanied by local law enforcement officers and federal
agents order Havard’s staff aside and break into his apartment.

  It is empty.

  Eric Moyse’s disappearance inspires intermittent headlines, an article in the New Yorker by Bob Woodward, a conspiracy cult, several unsuccessful airport-book ‘exposés’ of the shipping industry, and an A-certificated Lew Grade thriller stirring Telly Savalas and Elliott Gould. Eventually the line abandons its staggeringly expensive global manhunt, Eric Moyse is presumed dead, and on 1 October 1976 his adopted son Havard is appointed president.

  Many of the firm’s old guard vanish at this point, pensioned off or internally exiled. (The line is a complex global entity, big enough to contain any number of elderly factions and lost causes.) Havard, succeeding to the board, appoints Peder Halstad as his personal adviser.

  The arrangement is short-lived. Peder, an old man, finds Havard’s Muscat headquarters unbearable. ‘You spend six months of the year glued to the air conditioner, the skies are white, the air tastes of iron filings, and you expect me to enjoy the weather!’

  ‘It’s sunshine, Peder,’ Havard insists. ‘Many people like it. Please. Stick it out for six months.’

  Peder does exactly that.

  The last straw comes when Havard takes him out of Muscat on a day’s snorkelling trip. On a rocky shelf beside a beach since swallowed by a Saudi hotel complex, Peder and Havard watch as turtles come to nibble the reef just below their feet. Peder’s golf club is full of talk about the coming economic miracle: how a city is springing like a phoenix from the poisoned creek in Dubai. Half Peder’s friends are planning to retire there, or at least to ‘somewhere in the sun’.

  ‘I tell them, they may as well stick their heads in the oven and turn the grill on. Honestly, rivers and greenery are not God’s curse.’

  ‘Spoken like a true Norseman.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Peder cracks another Mountain Dew and refills Havard’s cup. ‘The point is, I’ve well-wishers coming out of my ears. Judith looked after me so well over the years, people assume I need to be taken care of. In the sun.’