THE ANCIENT

by Muriel Gray

  He frowned and walked slowly back to the instruments in the middle of the bridge. The telephone was silent. Still no word from the captain as to when they should resume normal speed. Skinner had come on the bridge at the beginning of Renato’s watch and made him hove to. They were doing no more than around seven knots, waiting, the captain said, to hear from the company about a possible back-track and change of route. That had been nearly three hours ago and the Lysicrates had barely moved.

  The second officer was becoming increasingly curious about the nature of the captain’s communications with the company.

  Not only had they altered course to come farther out from the regular shipping channel, taking them up the middle of the Milne Edwards trench, and not only was the cargo highly irregular, but now they were treading water, standing still while someone in Hong Kong decided where they should be heading. The Lysicrates had never had such a mess of a voyage. It was an ancient and unprestigious ship, but it was a creature of habit and had more or less run the same half dozen routes for its overlong life, and Lhoon had become used to the mundanity of it.

  But in a way it was perfect. The very irregularity of the voyage gave him more opportunity to escape his ties to Cotton. It would have to be more than just Skinner finding him drunk and asleep on watch. That had happened once before, the time in fact when Cotton had decided it would be worthwhile paying Renato a substantial portion of his wages to ensure it didn’t recur, and yet somehow it got forgiven and forgotten.

  No. Renato longed for Cotton to be caught in some public and unforgivable dereliction of duty, one than even the laissez faire attitude of the captain couldn’t find a way of overlooking. He hadn’t thought of what it might be yet, but as the captain’s orders became more peculiar, and this voyage looked like lasting longer than any of them anticipated, Renato Lhoon knew his opportunity to stop being Cotton’s safety net would come.

  He sniffed back some mucus and sat down on the chrome stool, with only the thrum of an idling engine through the floor and the hum of instrument panels as background noise, while he savoured, with all the time in the world before him, the delights of stepping over his drunken superior into a better future.

  “Lo tiraraon a los cerdos… con la miedra humana… pero el que constituye partes del hombre… les cuales el hombre mismo evade…”

  She stared at the Dictaphone with her mouth slightly open.

  “What the fuck?”

  Esther tutted and played it back again. This section of the tapes was driving her crazy. She remembered the chilly dawn when she recorded it, and remembered too that she had been paying the boy very little attention as he spoke, watching instead the elders of the tribe as they broke up their altar the moment the sun had risen safely over the barren line of mountains. The reason she recalled the recording so well was that the boy was more agitated than normal. He had sweated and shifted around, talking too fast for her, but had obviously wanted her full concentration. The irritation the boy had felt was quite plain here in his voice, a rising, darker quality in it indicating he was insisting on her attention and not receiving it.

  But now she came to translate it, the stuff made no sense at all. She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Was he referring in some way to the men taking down the altar? A legend? A tribal story? It made little sense, particularly when she hadn’t taken the time to ascertain its context. She glanced at her translation so far.

  “They threw him with the pigs… with the human shit… but he is made from the parts of man that man himself shuns…”

  There was a gap in the tape after this, presumably where the boy waited for a response and Esther provided nothing. The faint background noises of men talking, alpacas stirring the bells around their necks and the calling of alien birds was all that wallpapered behind the hissing silence. The boy spoke again.

  “Adoramas al sol, pero sabemos, asi como sabian nuestros antepasados, que adirar la oscuridad el sol vuelve a aparecer…”

  She glanced down at the notebook again to check her own interpretation.

  “We honour the sun, but we know as our forefathers did that only by also honouring the dark will the sun continue to return…”

  More silence. A sullen silence. She fast forwarded.

  “Esperamos… y ilamara…”

  It was here she must have given up watching the men and turned back to her indignant interviewee. She listened with mild embarrassment as her voice on the tape cleared its throat and asked in an indifferent, dreamy way, and in a very poor Spanish accent, “Hmmm? Who? You wait for who?”

  The boy’s voice grew so soft she could hardly make out the words. She listened once more, rewound then turned it up as loud as it would go.

  “Aquel que camina con el sol pero comanada a las tineblas.”

  She scribbled, rewound, and scribbled again, then looked hopelessly at the phrase. “He who walked in the sun but commands the shadows.”

  And then soft, softer than even before: “El… something… sin… something.”

  Rewind. She concentrated hard, ear to the tiny speaker.

  “El… cura… sin… iestrio.”

  Esther switched it off, put down the Dictaphone. She toyed with the pen and then in capital letters, though she was not sure why, she wrote the boy’s words in English and sat forward looking at them.

  “The dark priest.”

  The hammering at the cabin door made Esther drop the notebook. It bounced from a rapidly jerked-up knee and landed spine-down on the sofa like a dancer doing the splits.

  “Christ!”

  The hammering came again.

  She expelled a long breath, leapt up and hollered. “Yeah?”

  A muffled voice from the other side of the metal door. “Dinner. Bring you dinner.”

  Esther put a hand to her beating heart and slowly let a smile spread over her face. She had no idea she had been spooking herself so badly. It was her dinner. Of course it was her dinner. She smoothed down her sweatshirt, ran a hand through her hair and walked to open the cabin door.

  The boy’s smile had not become any less dazzling since the last time she saw him. He stood in the corridor brandishing a tray that boasted a glass of milk and a round steel lid covering a plate.

  “Hey, thanks,” said Esther, returning the smile and stretching out her arms to receive the tray.

  The assistant cook shook his head and gestured that he was going to bring it in, and she stood aside with a polite and grateful nod. He laid the tray down on the mean little fold-down shelf beneath the window, and as he did so Esther found herself unable to stop staring at the slim nape of his girlish neck and the sheen of sweat that moistened it.

  “Thanks,” she said again as he turned.

  The boy stood and beamed. “Pork. Very good.”

  The fact that she asked for fish seemed too ungrateful an observation to make. So she decided against it. After all, she was Jewish by birthright alone. Her maternal grandmother had been orthodox, but Esther’s mother not only married a Gentile, but neither she nor Esther had ever crossed the threshold of a synagogue in their brief lives together. Pork would be fine.

  “Great.”

  He nodded, still standing, showing absolutely no sign of wishing to leave. Esther wrestled with this for a moment. Were you required to tip if the crew brought you food? If so, how much? It didn’t seem right. She had felt from her encounter with the cook that her request was not all that unusual: it had the feel of a favour being granted rather than of ordering room service.

  “And milk,” he added, increasing his smile.

  “Milk. Yeah. Great.” She nodded back, and while smiling walked a few steps towards the door in rather an obvious movement that signalled she was going to see him out. It had little effect.

  “You drink milk back in Texas?”

  Esther looked at him, contemplating the level of gossip amongst the crew that would bring the information concerning her geographical origins to this boy she had never even noticed before. It ann
oyed her. She masked it.

  “Uh, sure. Everyone kinda drinks milk. You know, from time to time.”

  He nodded again. The sweat she had noticed on the nape of his neck was blooming on his face, neck and sharply-sculpted collarbones now. Becko’s kitchen must be close to hell in the middle of the day, she mused, if this was the effect it had on his staff even at a distance and in a cool night.

  “They got stores sell milk in that trailer park?”

  The annoyance abated, and in its place something chilly ran over Esther’s heart. How could he possibly know where she lived? She had told no one on the ship about her home. Her smile remained, but it wilted around the corners and her eyes narrowed. “Sorry?”

  “Mort sell it, maybe? You know when he come round for rent?”

  “I don’t… I…”

  She was stuttering, but the boy threw his head back and laughed like a child. He pointed at her as though she were in on some great gag they shared.

  “I bet that big dog he got not let anyone buy it, though. What he called again… Tyson?… you like see him try? Here Missy, you take milk… good price… woof woof… Tyson grab milk with those big teeth… ruff ruff, milk gone… ha ha.”

  He slapped his thigh in mirth as Esther’s mouth dried of saliva. Her smile had faded completely now, and when she found the power to speak her voice had an edge to it that was a million light years away from friendly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He wiped some more sweat from his brow, laughed some more and waved a big hand. “Make joke, make joke.”

  She watched him as he struggled to control his glee and let his eyes wander to the pile of work on her sofa.

  “Going good?”

  Esther made no response. She was on red alert, watching this boy in her room now with a feral caution that was increasing in intensity.

  He, however, was unfazed by her silence, and his grin remained wide. “You gonna have work hard get that by Professor Radcliffe, huh?”

  She nodded, keeping her eyes on his face, her body tense. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  He beamed back at her. “Yeah, ‘cos he not like you much, huh?”

  “I’d like you to leave.”

  The assistant cook nodded again and shrugged, still smiling. He walked across the room to the door and Esther instinctively moved back into a defensive position. He halted in front of her.

  “Not worry. Be okay,” he said with genuine friendliness.

  “Sure,” she placated, eyes steely.

  “We the same.” He patted his genitals.

  Esther registered the action without taking her eyes from his, her muscles readying for action. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded vigorously, and turned to leave. He stopped in the door frame. “Both virgins.”

  Before she could draw breath he had left, leaving behind only a faint odour of Becko’s stinking galley, the acidic metallic tang of sweat, and a pork dinner that was unlikely to be eaten.

  Ronaldo Valdez glared at his new cabin mate as he unpacked his belongings on the bunk. As a humble wiper he wouldn’t normally have enjoyed a cabin to himself, but since his usual constant companion, Benito, had been taken sick back in Port Arthur and stayed ashore, he’d been surprised how much he’d appreciated the solitude. Now this clown from the country, who did tricks in the mess with his cards and dice, was joining him. He wasn’t pleased. The bosun stood over Fen like a gaoler, watching him as he unpacked.

  Fen seemed perfectly normal to Felix, the usual mix of sullen subservience and disaffection most greasers adopted around their superior officers. It made him wonder if Tenghis’s report of insanity hadn’t merely been retaliation for some minor dispute, although Felix had heard the reports of Fen’s over-zealous Saanti reading in the crew mess hall, and he didn’t like the effect it had had amongst the men. But there was enough to worry about on board without the added complication of feuding ratings.

  Felix was already composing the address he would make to the lower-ranking crew members in the morning to try and get to the bottom of the skinned-rat mystery.

  “Don’t put that there,” barked Ronaldo as Fen reached over to lay a shoebox of possessions on the Formica folding table.

  Fen glared at him, and withdrew the box.

  “This is a two-man cabin, Valdez,” said the bosun, and motioned that Fen could do as he pleased.

  “I use that space every day,” whined the wiper.

  “Tough. Benito’ll be boarding again anyway at Port Arthur. You’d go blind with any more opportunity to pull your knob in private.”

  “Yeah, well Benito knows how to behave,” muttered Ronaldo under his breath.

  Felix glanced at Fen to see if a fight were brewing, but the man was oblivious to the unwelcoming demeanour of his new companion, squinting instead at the dark window and holding the box in his hands as though weighing up some problem.

  Chadin sighed and left them to it, bestowing a patriarchal warning glare to both men as he exited that he trusted would be properly interpreted.

  The wiper watched the cabin door close then turned and looked at Fen. “You snore, I’ll kick you right up your shit-hole.”

  Fen continued to ignore him, putting a finger gently to his mouth, still staring at the square of black glass, tapping at his lips as he thought. Slowly a gentle smile spread across his face. “East. Yes. East. Good. Very good.”

  Ronaldo scowled at him, lay down on his bunk and turned his back.

  He had no idea what he was looking for. Nor, for that matter, why. Matthew had given it his best shot in the privacy of his cabin, trying to put his uneasiness about the rats in the same numbed-down box as everything else, with the assistance of a bottle of export-strength gin. But even through the familiar padded cushion of quickly-consumed alcohol, the anxiety had niggled like a toothache. Now, like a fool, he was walking unsteadily along the white-lit cargo deck, holding a powerful spot flashlight in his fist.

  The figure of Renato Lhoon moved about through the glass of the bridge above him, but Cotton was undisturbed about being observed. In fact, for some curious reason, even on this bright familiar metal stage, he was rather glad of it.

  It would be fair to say that Matthew Cotton’s senses were not at their most finely tuned. He registered only very distantly the fact that the ship was barely moving, and it had taken him nearly three or four minutes of clumsy crashing around to find and fit the rechargeable batteries for the flashlight in the apparatus room at the end of the deck. But he had already made the decision to eschew the comfort of passing out on his sofa until Renato woke him, and here he was. Drink and its familiar befuddlement had mellowed only his co-ordination, not his curiosity.

  He wove his way along the yellow-painted pathway that led across the deck to hold number nine, and stopped at the lip of the open hatch. The holds on bulk carriers were always numbered from the bow backwards. Hold number one was right at the bow and the last, number nine, sat beneath the bridge at the foot of the accommodation block. There was a strange silence when the ship was hove to. A melancholy lapping sound from the sea, instead of the busy swishing noise it made as the ship normally pushed it out of the way, was the only break in the monotony of a distant and stifled engine.

  Matthew’s ears were already muffled by the night’s first stages of drunkenness but he felt the stillness as he walked, and found himself treading more lightly because of it.

  He stopped at the first hold, and with the concentration that all drunks employ in performing simple tasks, placed the flashlight carefully on the hatch door above him and hauled himself up.

  The fifteen-foot gap between hatch doors illuminated the refuse below, but Matthew knelt at the edge and probed under the iron lids with the spot. A rat scuttled from the intense beam, moving snake-like over the repulsive uneven surface until it disappeared, burying itself beneath some unidentifiable piece of human detritus. The smell was terrible. Matthew put a hand to his mouth and backed off before he puked.

 
; He crouched on his haunches for a moment to try to think. If someone were merely dragging refuse from the hold along the deck, there was another question that needed to be answered. Now that it had settled, the top layer of waste was at least nine or ten feet below the hatch opening, which meant that no one could reach it to remove it without some form of grabbing device. Certainly no one could drop down there onto the surface and live to tell the tale. But surely a man with equipment to scoop and retrieve waste from the holds, however bizarre that might seem, would certainly be spotted by whoever was on watch? A hot flush of shame washed over him as he realized that his watch would almost certainly prove the exception to that assumption. But the ludicrousness of the whole imagined operation made him dismiss it as fancy. There had to be some other explanation.

  He wiped at his nose in an unconscious and pointless effort to relieve his senses from the hot, thick reek, and stood up on the square metal hatch cover to continue his tour of the holds.

  There was a distant sound. He looked round slowly, listening to identify its source, and as it came again he turned his head to locate it. It was a remote noise, as far away as holds one or two at the very bow of the ship, and it was peculiar.

  He crouched down again and waited, holding his breath.

  A combination of scraping and scrabbling, it was a noise that only avoided sounding like the magnification of a rat’s progress behind a barrel because of a certain metallic quality.

  It stopped abruptly, almost as if it knew it had been heard, and after less than thirty seconds Matthew let his breath go in a long exhalation. Keeping his eyes on the rough location he’d guessed it had come from, he gripped the flashlight and gently dropped down from the hatch cover. He glanced back and above him briefly to see if Renato was still at the bridge window, but the glass was dark and he could see no one.

  Matthew Cotton ran his wrist over a dry mouth and weighed up his options. He could go back to his cabin where two-thirds of the gin bottle waited along with a bucket of ice and a carton of fresh orange. Or he could walk the length of the deck and find out what had made that noise.