He stayed where he was, but lifted his head to greet her as she negotiated the skinny drawbridge of wood that was suspended over the moat of Pacific Ocean below. ‘They don’t speak English too good, those guys,’ he said with what he imagined was a boyish grin.
She stopped and rubbed at her scalp again. ‘You cleared it then?’
Matthew squinted, uncomprehending.
‘With the captain?’
He grinned, swaying slightly. ‘Aw, yeah. Sure. Sure I did.’
She looked doubtful, and the sudden childlike anxiety that crossed her face, the expression of a disappointed kid, touched a nerve in the deep drunken miasma that was enveloping Matthew Cotton. He breathed quickly and sharply through his nose and tried to focus, tried harder to clear his brain.
‘Straight up. He’s cool. You get the owner’s cabin. It’s cunningly marked “owner’s cabin” on D-deck. Through there, two floors up. Third on the right. Not locked.’
Her face lit with relief, then a more unpleasant emotion betrayed itself as her eyes strayed to the beer can in Matthew’s fist. Pity.
‘Listen. Thanks. I owe you.’
Matthew nodded, looking away to avoid her pitying eyes, and she walked towards the passenger block, the cups and pan clanking on her pack.
‘By the way.’
He didn’t look round. He didn’t want to hear any addendum right now. Nor look back into the eyes of an attractive young girl who was finding a drunken older man sad.
‘Matthew?’
She spoke his name so gently it broke his resolve and he turned.
‘Huh?’
‘I think you’ll find that grammatically, “little something” in Spanish, when you refer to an object with contempt, uses the diminutive to emphasize the colloquialism.’
The Lysicrates’ only passenger scanned the accommodation block and disappeared through the door from the poop deck.
Matthew watched the heavy metal lozenge long after it swung shut, then drained his beer, crushed the can and threw it into the water below.
Esther Mulholland liked to pee in the shower. When the water was perfect, the hot stream of urine that spiralled from leg to leg was without temperature. Visible, but not tangible, it joined her with the needles of water in a way that made her sigh with satisfaction. It had been so long since she had revelled in this ritual that the developed world thought so important, this rinsing of the body that separated them from the savages.
It felt like a return. She let the hot water batter her for at least ten minutes, opening her mouth to let it run in and out, then stepped from the tiny plastic tray into the hot cabin.
Esther put her hands on either side of the porthole and leant her forehead against the glass. The circular window looked out onto a serpentine collection of pipes, their paint peeling like a disease, and beyond them the port of Callao clanked and whined with industry.
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