‘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.
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.
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