A Wrinkle in the Skin

by John Christopher

  What did it amount to? A ship’s company finding themselves stranded on a drained seabed, taking refuge—in some weird mass psychosis perhaps—in scrubbing and tidying? Or doing it under the commands of a lunatic captain, a Bligh of the Breakdown? One was as unlikely as the other, and surely in any case a ships company, going however punctiliously about their duties, would leave some signs of their presence? But there was nothing, and no one. Their footsteps echoed in the corridors, and they opened doors into empty rooms.

  One of these was a galley. The table tops were scrubbed and bare, cooking utensils laid out in rows. They had not found the generators, but there was a separate hum of power from a huge refrigerator. Matthew opened it and saw that it held a couple of roast chickens, a ham, butter, maybe a dozen cans of beer. Hunger twisted his stomach as he looked at them. But they were intruders, and the officers and crew had to be somewhere. He closed the door, with reluctance.

  Billy, who had been looking round the galley on his own, called to him. “Mr. Cotter! Look here.”

  He had found and opened a cupboard. There were shelves inside, a kind of larder. And they stood in a neat symmetrical row on the second shelf, not perfectly formed, perhaps, but staggering in their mouth-watering beauty: three loaves of white crusty bread.

  On the shelf below there was a butter dish, jars of preserves and pickles, and a cheese board under a transparent cover. A wedge of Dutch, a hunk of blue that looked like Gorgonzola, a piece of crumbling Cheddar.

  Matthew saw the look on Billy’s face, and could not endure it. He took one of the loaves and said, “Get me a knife. There’s one over there will do.”

  “Can we?”

  But he was already on his way to get the knife. Matthew controlled an urge to tear at the crust with his teeth, and waited till the boy came back. Sawing at the bread, he said, “We’ll have to take a chance on their generosity. Anyway, I think I’d cut their throats if they said no. Here you are. Spread your own butter, and help yourself to whatever you want with it.”

  He had cut thick slices for both of them. Billy put strawberry jam on his. Matthew’s hand hovered before the various pieces of cheese. The Dutch was the biggest. He cut about half of it, noticed that he had left a stain of butter where he had cut, and cut another piece to remove the mark. Then he bit into the hunk of bread and crammed some of the cheese into his mouth with it. His teeth champed automatically and he found himself swallowing gobbets of food before he wanted to; hunger warred with the desire that this taste, this sensation, should go on forever.

  He jerked round as the door behind them opened. He was holding the piece of bread and found himself, like a guilty child, putting it behind his back.

  The man who had come into the galley smiled. “That’s O.K. You go right ahead. I guess you’re kinda hungry?”

  He spoke American English with a Mediterranean accent. Not Italian, Matthew thought. Greek? He looked as though he could be a Greek. He was a short fat swarthy man. He was wearing an immaculate white drill suit and a gold-braided peaked cap. He had shaved that day; although dark blue, his chin was smooth. There was more than a whiff of lotion.

  Matthew said, “We were hungry. Very hungry. And we haven’t seen bread since it happened.”

  The man made an expansive waving gesture of dismissal. “You don’t have to worry. I got lots of food, drink. You like a beer, maybe?” He went to the refrigerator and brought a can over. “And the boy? A Coke?” He smiled, showing white teeth and the glint of gold. “I guess you could drink a Coke, eh?” They thanked him but he shook his head. “I got plenty. My name’s Skiopos, Captain Skiopos. You can call me Nick.” Matthew introduced himself and Billy.

  Skiopos said, “So he’s not your son, then, the boy?” He flashed another smile. ‘“You just travelin’ around together?” Matthew told him something of what had happened. Skiopos listened, without seeming to pay much attention. He said finally, “It’s pretty bad on land, eh?”

  “As far as the Channel Islands are concerned, it is.” Matthew had finished his bread and cheese. He found himself looking at the loaf, and Skiopos said, “Go ahead. Cut yourself some more. I made too much bread last time. It needs eating.”

  Cutting it, Matthew said, “You’ve been here all the time, then? By yourself?”

  “They all went,” Skiopos said. “I told them they were crazy, but they went. I told them, anything that dries up the Channel, that makes a pretty big mess of everything. You won’t find no land of milk and honey out there, I told them. But they were shaken up, you know? What a night that was! A ship like this, tossing about like a matchstick. Someone pulled the plug out of the big bath. But we landed right way up and with only a bit of a shaking. An’ I told them—we’ve been lucky. But they wouldn’t listen. They took some food and headed north.”

  “How long ago?”

  Skiopos shrugged. “Who knows? The day after we stuck here. But I don’t keep no log no more. Who cares?”

  The bread and cheese tasted better all the time, if that were possible. And the sharp bite of beer in his throat added an ecstatic dimension. He said, “Lucky hardly seems the right word. You seem to have had scarcely any damage at all.”

  “Enough damage so that if the tide comes in again, she won’t float. But I reckon the tide’s gone out for good and all. Would you like to take a bath, you and the boy?”

  “Hot water?”

  “Sure, hot water! I wouldn’t ask you to take a cold tub. Plenty of soap, towels and all that. I got some bath oil if you want that, too.”

  He led them from the galley along a passage and up a companionway to another part of the ship. Opening a door, he showed Matthew a luxuriously appointed bathroom.

  “Here you are,” he said, “and one for the boy next door. I think maybe Til go and freshen up some, too—now I’ve got visitors. You ring the bell when you’re through, Matthew, and I’ll come and get you. You’ll maybe lose your way if I don’t show you.”

  Matthew ran the water and stepped into it as hot as his skin would bear. He gasped with the heat, and lay back, relaxing. On the other side of the bulkhead he could hear Billy splashing about. He felt hazy, concerned only with the immediate sensuous pleasure.

  Skiopos was back before they finished their baths. He called, “You had a good wash, Matthew? I brought some clothes I think maybe will fit you. Is it O.K. for me to come right in with them?”

  He looked even cleaner than before. He carried a neat pile of clothes, which he put down on a locker top.

  “I think these are round about your size,” he said. “I brought you pants, vest, socks, shirt, trousers. No shoes, but you don’t need shoes on board. And I brought some things for the boy. They’re too big, but I’ve got a scissors—we can cut them down, maybe.”

  Matthew got out of the bath and wrapped the towel round himself. He started to thank Skiopos, but was cut short.

  “I’ll go, take these to the boy. You’ll feel better after a bath, in clean clothes. Soon as you’re dressed, I’ll show you round.”

  It was a relief not to have to put his old clothes back on. They lay in a soiled heap on the floor. The clean linen smelled good, and was incredibly soft against his skin. When he had dressed, Matthew went through to see how Billy was getting on.

  Skiopos was dressing him, or rather, standing back and surveying him with benevolent interest. He said to Matthew, “He has a good body, but little.” Billy smiled uncertainly. “You are not a tailor, I guess, Matthew? Come then, we try again.” Billy, when Skiopos had finished, had a comical but clean look. The shirt and trousers were much too big for him, the latter being kept up by a pair of gaudy blue-and-gold braces. Skiopos patted him on the shoulder and ran his plump stubby fingers through the boy’s damp hair.

  “So, at least you look better than you did. Now I’ll show you something.”

  The room to which he led them had comfortable seats set out in rows. Skiopos went to the facing wall and pressed a button. A screen rolled down and Matthew realized this wa
s a ship’s cinema: There was a hole in the wall behind the seats, from which the film was presumably projected.

  “You sit down,” Skiopos said. “You make yourselves easy. I’ll fix everything.”

  Since they had come on board, events had had an unreal, dreamlike quality, but none to equal this. Matthew and Billy sat down, and Skiopos went out. A moment or two later his voice came to them through the hole in the wall. “All ready? Right! So we’ll get this show on the road.”

  The lights went off. There was blackness and, for a moment, the claustrophobic fear; but the screen came to life and the fear retreated. It was a cartoon, a Tom and Jerry. Looking sideways, Matthew saw Billy’s face, relaxed into lines of ordinary childish pleasure.

  Skiopos ran two more cartoons through and then stopped the projector and put the lights on in the room. He called to them through the aperture: “I guess we’ll have the intermission now. Stay where you are, folks. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ When he came, he carried a tray. He said, “As it’s the intermission, we have ice cream and candy. How about that, Billy? And you’ll have a cigarette, Matthew? Or a cigar?”

  He gave ice cream and a bar of chocolate to Billy, lit a cigarette for Matthew and a small cigar for himself. He sat with them and talked. Matthew listened to him, wondering whether he was mad or sane. He showed no sign of madness; he seemed to be entirely amiable and matter-of-fact. But the situation was crazy and his acceptance of their arrival too casual. He should have been more pleased to see a human face, or else resentful because they were using up his precious stores—because they were limited, and what would he do once they were gone?

  The pattern of past events became more clear as he talked. He had neither sought to persuade the ship’s company to stay with him nor paid any attention when they urged him to go as well. Left to himself, he had fiddled with the generator until he got it going. They had been on their way south from London, carrying water ballast in their tanks rather than oil, and he had managed to rig a connection to feed it into the cooling system. Mad or not, he was obviously a very capable little man. After that, he had set about cleaning up the ship, which he had done with the thoroughness Matthew had noticed. He cooked for himself on the big electric cooker which ran off the generator, played gramophone records, ran the dozen or so films through the projector over and over again.

  He said, “You know, I thought maybe I’d be kinda lonely? But when you’ve got voices to talk to you, faces … there’s one picture with Sinatra, Ava Gardner. They’re kinda like friends. You know?”

  Matthew was smoking the cigarette slowly, savoring it. He asked, “What about wireless?”

  “Radio? Aw, that’s dead.”

  “You can’t fix it?”

  Skiopos shrugged. “I don’t know too much about radio.”

  “If you could get it going—there might be stations broadcasting from somewhere that you could pick up.”

  Skiopos looked at him with bland lack of interest.

  “We know western Europe’s been largely knocked out, and I suppose something of the sort must have happened to America. But it may not have been quite as bad elsewhere— Russia, China, New Zealand.”

  “I don’t know a lot about radio,” Skiopos repeated.

  He did not, Matthew realized, want contact with the world outside. He was content to be the center of this small world. Then why had he been so friendly toward them? Perhaps because they had come to him and he could show them his powers and wonders.

  Matthew said, “What about oil?”

  “Oil? I got plenty of oil.”

  “How much?”

  Skiopos’ face became restless, and he looked away. He said insistently, “Plenty of oil, I tell you.”

  “But when it runs out—when the generator goes dead— what will you do then?”

  “I tell you, there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. You have to excuse me now, Matthew. I got to go and see to things. You go and walk about—amuse yourselves. I’ll see you around.”

  When they found Skiopos again, he was in the galley, cooking. He greeted them as cheerfully as before. “When I don’t have guests, I make do with a cold snack in the middle of the day, but I thought maybe you’d like something hot.”

  “Don’t bother about us,” Matthew said. “More bread and cheese will do fine.”

  But the smell was intoxicating: thick slices of gammon frying in oil.

  “Nothing special,” Skiopos said. “Just ham and tomatoes, a few fried potatoes. Give me another ten minutes, O.K.?

  While they ate, he told them something of his routine. He had an alarm clock to wake him at six-thirty. He got up then, bathed and shaved, and went along to the galley to make himself breakfast: coffee, toast and preserves. Then he inspected ship, did what cleaning up was necessary, and went on shore for his daily constitutional. He did this whatever the weather, and had been engaged in it at the time that Matthew found the ladder and came on board.

  In the early days of being on his own, he had worked in the afternoons as well, tidying up after the shock. Now this was unnecessary and he spent his afternoons by the pool or, in bad weather, with gramophone records and films. There was a ship’s library, but he was not, Matthew gathered, a reading man.

  On this particular afternoon he took Matthew and Billy on a tour of the ship. He was cheerful in manner, factual in description. It was as though they were official visitors, friends of a friend, and the tanker herself tied up in the Port of London, resting between voyages. He pointed out the damage she had suffered but spoke of it briskly; his voice carried the implication of ship-repairing gangs in the offing. They went up on the bridge, whose wings reached out on either side of the tower. They were well over a hundred feet above the seabed here, with the radar and signal mast high above them again. The tankers great length stretched away into the distance. The rain had stopped and visibility was better: They could see mile after mile of mud flats, shingle beds and rocks. A sight desolate enough, Matthew thought, to drive a man mad.

  Skiopos stared ahead, as though he could still see the furrowed gray acres of the Channel. He said, in a quiet voice, “She’s a beauty, huh?”

  Matthew said, “Very impressive.”

  “Sure. My first command.”

  “Was she?”

  “I’m thirty-eight,” Skiopos said. “On this line, you don’t have a command by the time you’re thirty-five, you maybe don’t get one ever. I knew one guy five years younger than me who was skippering a tanker. Then this one came up, this beauty. Commissioned less than eighteen months. The guy who had her got something wrong with his kidneys-I don’t know what, but bad enough to put him in hospital for months maybe. I was due leave. We get good leave, sometimes four, five months. They said did I want her, or would I rather take my leave. Isn’t that crazy? I said yes on the telephone, and then J drove into the office to make sure they’d heard me right. I was to take her down to the Gulf two days after that. I was still on my first watch when the wave hit.”

  “Tough luck.”

  Skiopos looked at him in an abstracted, slightly puzzled way. He looked away again, along the vast length of his ship. “She’s a beauty. Finest tanker in the line. Come on. I’ll show you the control room.”

  Billy was tired. The hard going had worn him out, and there had been the cold wet wretchedness of the previous night. Matthew mentioned this to Skiopos, and they got him to bed early after a supper of tinned fruit and hot chocolate and biscuits. Matthew settled him into one of the bunks. He lay back, dazed, sleepy and happy, in clean sheets, on a foam-rubber mattress. The rest would do him good. So would the food Skiopos was providing. Matthew thought about that. There was no long-term future here, but there was no reason why they shouldn’t stay for a time and recharge batteries.

  Skiopos insisted on preparing an elaborate meal for Matthew and himself. He served hors d’oeuvres first, with salami and sardines, pickled eggs, olives and potato salad. The main course was chicken in a fragrant sauce, on a bed of
saffron rice. He produced with this a bottle of retsina, chilled from the refrigerator. Afterwards they had coffee and brandy and cigars in the officers’ lounge. Matthew complimented his host on the meal. Skiopos accepted his praise with the casual absent air Matthew had noticed before. Matthew went on talking, about the past and the possibilities of the future, but Skiopos scarcely paid attention. He said suddenly, breaking across Matthews words, “You’d like I should run you a film maybe?”

  “It’s a bit late,” Matthew said. “You must be tired. I know I’m pretty tired.”

  “I always run a film at night, sometimes two.” He stood up from his easy chair. “We’ve got one with this English girl, Kathy Kirby. You like her, Matthew? Come on, I’ll run it for you. Bring a drink with you if you want.”

  It was more an order than a suggestion. Matthew poured himself another brandy and, after a moment’s hesitation, picked up the bottle as well. Skiopos had gone ahead without waiting, and Matthew followed him to the cinema. There were no preliminaries this time, no settling him into a seat. Skiopos went into the projection room without another word, started the film running and doused the lights. Then he came back into the room and sat down himself, leaving the projector running on its own.

  It was a British musical comedy and rather better than Matthew had expected—he had never been a keen cinemagoer and in recent years had almost completely abandoned the habit. But Skiopos’ reactions were more interesting than the film. He kept up a running commentary, but one directed to himself rather than the person sitting in the room with him. Nor was it entirely or exactly a commentary. What he was doing, Matthew realized, was talking to the film, to the characters in it. He made little jokes and roared with unself-conscious laughter at them—there was an impression that both joke and laughter had occurred before, that the whole thing was, in a sense, ritualistic.