by Knight, Ali
‘Kelsey’, Ricky had called her. Kelsey was her name. She had a flashing image of herself as a young girl in those Portakabin classrooms, the seagulls cawing and shrieking their mournful sound, the Bic with the chewed end in her small fingers, writing out her name. They say name is destiny. Christos never shut up about it, the importance of the Malamatos name. Reputation and name were the same to him, as if every action by anyone was to besmirch his family name, his legacy, the motherland, his honour and his reputation. She felt the bubbled skin on her stomach. Name had been an excuse for a lot of unspeakable behaviour. She loaded the gun and walked across the living room. She was leaving, with the children, right now. There was nothing Medea could do to stop her. Ricky had liberated her from the prison she had constructed around herself. Now it was a question of fighting.
She came down the stairs on silent feet to wake the children. She only saw the shadow of the man standing at the bottom when she was halfway down.
He stood looking up at her in the gloom, calm and assured. It was the man who had followed her to the lawyer’s office. ‘Why don’t you get some sleep, Mrs Malamatos? Christos is worried about your state of mind, he’s worried what you might do to yourself, so we’re here to look after you.’
Kelly looked down the corridor and saw one of the drivers who had come to take her away from Lindsey’s standing by the door. She was too late to escape. Christos was tightening the net, counting down the hours till the kids were sent away. She tried to remain calm and think through her options. She was exhausted; nothing could be done tonight so it was best to get some sleep.
‘We need your phone,’ the first man said. ‘And just so you know, Christos has changed the code on the lifts, so it’s better if you just relax and try and get some rest.’
She was trapped. Even Medea wouldn’t know the new code for the lift and the stair door. She handed her phone over and walked into the TV room, lay down by her children and fell instantly asleep.
50
Kelly woke up at seven squashed awkwardly into the sofa, the gun a painful imprint on her hip where it bulged in her pocket. The kids were asleep on the floor next to her. She got up and went into her bedroom, washed her face, drank some water.
She came out into the corridor to find Medea up. ‘So you’re back,’ began her mother-in-law. ‘You decided to grace us with your presence.’
‘Where’s Christos?’
‘He’s working flat out trying to find out what happened to his employee on that ship, and to minimise the bad publicity.’
‘Bad publicity? He should be here to explain to his children why he did that to our ceiling. He should be here to grovel at their feet and apologise for scaring the living daylights out of them.’
‘The ceiling will be repaired today. No one will ever know what happened here.’
‘You can’t keep it a secret.’ Their argument was interrupted by the sound of the children stirring in the TV room.
Kelly opened the door to see Florence stretching and kicking back her covers. ‘It’s funny waking up in here,’ she said. The change of routine was a novelty, and not for a good reason.
‘Did you sleep OK?’
Florence shrugged her shoulders, looking downcast. Yannis sat up and yawned. Kelly came in the room, bent down and gave them a long hug.
‘Why did Daddy do that to the pigeons?’ Florence’s voice was quiet.
Medea answered for her son. ‘He’s very stressed at the moment, what with the man falling off the Saracen. Though it doesn’t excuse what he did. He would never hurt you.’
But what about me, thought Kelly. She came out into the corridor and looked around. The two men who were in the flat last night were still there.
Kelly turned to Medea. ‘You know you can’t keep me a prisoner forever.’
Medea drew herself up, indignant. ‘Prisoner, what nonsense you spout. These people are here for your protection. We’re worried about you.’
‘I’ve seen what happens in this house in the middle of the night, who creeps about—’
‘You see? You’re getting delusions, and I’m worried.’
‘You defend a man who fires off a loaded gun around his children, simply because he’s your flesh and blood.’ She saw embarrassment flit across Medea’s face. ‘That’s right, I want you to feel your shame.’ Kelly saw one of the men at the end of the corridor begin to walk towards them.
‘Mum? What’s going on? I hate it when you argue, please …’ Florence was standing by the open door to the TV room, eyes brimming with tears.
Medea swung into action. ‘Come on kids, we’re going to do some painting, and help Kelly finish the masks for the Halloween party tomorrow. We’ll have a lovely day here at the flat just relaxing, all of us together. I’ll get all the stuff ready upstairs.’
Kelly wanted to laugh. Medea thought that a bit of playtime with the acrylics could paper over the compromises on show here.
She walked away into her bedroom again, trying to think. Ricky’s revelations had only reinforced to her the danger she was in from her husband. His mother, she knew now, would stand with him through anything, defend him on every point. She came to the window and stared out at the city teeming with life below her, at the millions of lives lived in varying degrees of chaos and danger. But today she didn’t feel separated from the city below her, she felt part of it, energised by it, not terrified. This morning, after the revelations of last night, she was a different person, someone who saw opportunity now.
She walked into the bathroom again, looked at her bottle of pills on the shelf, picked it up and dropped it into the bin. It was time to take responsibility, it was time to end this. First chance she got, she would escape, without the kids. One thing Ricky’s tale had taught her was that tyrants don’t get everything their own way. What she needed to do now was prepare for any chance she got. She felt the gun hard against her hip. And that meant at least getting some breakfast inside her.
51
The Wolf leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms together. His palms made a dry, scratchy sound audible over the deep rumble of the engines. ‘OK, here’s what we’re going to do. You need to come with me.’
She sat up straighter, ready to disagree. ‘I want to stay here. I was told to stay in here.’
‘That’s not possible any more. You’re a courier—’
‘How dare you accuse me of—’
‘Save it, no one’s interested. Details apart, you want to get paid, more than anything else, yes? This way you’ll get your money and more. Everyone’s happy.’
She looked at him and he looked back. She was churning through her options, beginning to realise she didn’t have many. After a moment she shrugged and struggled to her feet in the listing ship.
The storm was starting to abate, the sky that seemed to be sitting right on their heads began to lift imperceptibly as they powered northwards into the English Channel, the busiest shipping lane in the world, a great motorway of ships ploughing to their destinations. The mood on board was tense and grave; the President would be having many conversations with various agencies – coastguard, customs, police, writing reports, filling in logs, accounting for the unaccountable, trying to explain the unexplainable.
The crew was still searching the ship for the company man, checking he hadn’t got lodged somewhere, that the storm hadn’t shifted something and trapped him underneath it.
The Wolf found Jonas in the ship’s mess, looking nervous and morose. ‘You OK? It can unsettle a man, something like this.’
Jonas shrugged. One of the Poles finished his coffee and left the room.
‘Will we be delayed when we arrive?’
There he was, thought the Wolf, trying to anticipate what law enforcement would be there to greet this cursed ship when it charged into London. ‘Why, got something you’re keen to hide?’
‘No.’ He looked indignant and folded his arms over his chest.
‘Come with me.’ The Wolf walke
d out of the room, Jonas trailing behind, up the stairs to the accommodation area and stood outside Jonas’s cabin. ‘Open it.’
Jonas stood firm. ‘Why?’
‘Bring that rucksack you’ve got locked away in there.’ He saw Jonas’s eyes widen with fear. ‘Bring it out here, or I’m going to order a search of your cabin.’
Jonas licked his lips, trying to calculate the risk he was running in refusing. A moment later he decided he had no option and opened the door and picked up the rucksack.
‘And bring your coat.’
The Wolf led Jonas out a side door on the accommodation floor. The wind was still strong, blowing hard in their faces. Jonas shivered and pulled on his coat, his hood flapping hard against the back of his head. The rain had stopped, the grey sky beginning to be picked apart by small patches of blue.
‘How many years since you’ve been home?’ the Wolf asked as they began to walk along the side of the ship.
‘You tell me,’ he shot back.
The Wolf smiled. Jonas was turning into exactly the kind of guy he liked – but he wasn’t going to tell him that just yet. ‘I haven’t been home since you were trying to get your hand up the skirt of a girl in biology.’
‘I haven’t been home for five years.’
The Wolf nodded. ‘So how you planning to get yourself up and running again?’
‘I’ll look up a few old friends.’
‘Sell what’s in that bag …’ The Wolf stopped walking. ‘We need to turn back, go any further than here and they’ll see us from the bridge.’ Jonas said nothing. ‘You can work for me.’
Jonas snorted, but he was listening.
‘How much you got in that bag? Come on, there’s going to be a shitstorm when we dock, make no mistake. You’re running a risk. There’s nothing wrong in being bad, but you’ve got to be smart.’
Jonas was weighing up what he said.
‘Chuck it overboard.’
He looked horrified. ‘There’s nearly a grand’s worth of gear in there.’
‘I’ll pay you more if you do a job for me and you won’t even have to do anything illegal. Chuck it over.’
‘You don’t know what I had to do to get it.’
‘Not interested. Chuck it over.’ The two of them were staring at each other, tense, Jonas making calculations. ‘It’s not a choice.’
‘What are you offering me?’
‘More than you’d make in a year.’
‘A year in Bolivia or a year in—’
‘Quit quibbling. And it’s not a choice.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘Two or three days maximum. I need you to look after someone for me. You’ll be a chaperone, that’s all. Think of it as a triumphant return to the big smoke.’ They both looked off the side of the ship. A low grey smear was forming on the horizon, their first sight of home. ‘There she is. Fills your heart with joy to be back, does it?’ The Wolf’s fingers began to throb painfully, the waxy whiteness back again. ‘Act smart, Jonas. The risks you run always need to be less than the reward.’ The Wolf pulled out a bunch of hundred dollar bills and began counting them out. ‘A third now, a third in the middle, the rest in three days maximum.’
Jonas looked at the money, took the old rucksack off his shoulder and tossed it over the side. They both leaned over to watch it fall, swallowed up by the churning sea.
52
Even though Georgie had grown up near the river and had been doing this job for a year, watching the big ships come in was still an event. The small dot on the horizon that grew and formed detail and grew and grew more until the great towering beast was near enough to boom out its presence. The Saracen had ridden out a force 9 gale, but it had been a cursed voyage. Even in these days of muster drills, GPS and fully equipped lifeboats, they had still lost a man to the vastness of the ocean.
There was a blustery wind gusting off the Thames, the remains of the tropical storm out in the Atlantic that had tipped the man overboard. It was weather to make you agitated. Some of her hair slapped her in the face and irritated her eyes. She zipped up her cagoule and turned away. Mo and she were doing onboard checks before anyone was allowed off the ship. They boarded their small boat, dwarfed in size by the huge sides of the vessel before them. They crossed the hundred feet of open water, tied up the boat and got on board.
The captain met them, his face anxious and grey.
‘Not a good day at the office,’ Georgie said.
He swore under his breath. ‘Seventeen years I’ve been doing this job, never had a man overboard.’ Like a Tube driver with a suicidal commuter, it was what every captain dreaded.
‘Why was he on the ship?’ Mo asked.
‘He was coming back from a business trip to Brazil. I don’t know more than that. Malamatos employees travel for free, of course. He listened to the safety explanations, was there at the muster drill. Seemed calm, was sick, I think, but kept to his cabin most of the time. He was no problem. The crew’s gathering in the galley now.’
Georgie nodded. ‘We’ll talk to the passengers later. Lead the way please.’
The galley was a windowless room with stainless-steel surfaces and units. Numerous stainless-steel pans hung from hooks on a central hanger over a food preparation island. They clanged and bumped together like a discordant wind chime with the slight motion of the ship. Georgie and Mo said hello and began checking passports, matching everyone up.
‘When was the last time you saw the man who went over?’ Georgie asked a man with a Polish name, his birthplace listed as Gdansk.
He shrugged, big shoulders moving. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him. He kept to his cabin most of the time.’
She nodded, moving down the line, each man she crossed off bringing her closer to Mo, who was working from the other end.
‘He was sick a lot, complaining,’ the next man along, with an Irish passport, added.
‘When did you last see him?’
He shrugged. ‘Oh, Christ. Maybe Monday? It was a difficult crossing, the storm was big, we had a lot to do. Ask the Wolf, he’s a night walker, likes the danger of the open sea.’ He cocked his head at the man standing next to him in line.
Georgie glanced up at the man he referred to. He was tall and broad, leaning forward on the balls of his feet. She handed the Irishman back his documents and opened up the Wolf’s. ‘Clyde Bonnier. Born in Liverpool …’ She examined his passport carefully, glancing up at his face. He bared his teeth at her. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, I’m not in a good mood.’ She took a long look at his passport photo, then at the windburned face where a grin looked like it was about to explode across it, the dirty blond hair lightened from sun and salt.
‘How long have you been working for Malamatos Shipping?’
‘Four years.’
‘What did you do before?’
‘All sorts of things. We’ve all done something.’
‘Give me an example.’
‘I was a tree surgeon. Good with my hands.’ He splayed them for her as if he were being helpful, doing jazz hands.
She saw Mo look over. She glanced at his muscular forearms, product of a physical job. He stood right in front of her; she wondered if he was leaning in, butting in on her personal space. ‘Why’d you stop?’
‘Vibration white finger. It’s your body’s way of saying this is the end of the road.’
She looked at his strange, waxy-looking fingers. ‘You ever cut down any Brazilian rosewood?’
‘Of course. Plantations are where a lot of the—’
‘No – mature specimens. Amazonian forest trees.’
He looked at her for a long moment, wondering whether to frown. ‘The big fellas? Magnificent, they’d be. That’d be so much fun.’ He grinned at her, eager to play. ‘But that would be against the law.’
He was playing with her, trying to wind her up. She closed his passport and slapped it on his chest. ‘I hear you like walking around at night.’
‘I find it dif
ficult to keep still. Restless legs.’
‘Were you out in the storm?’
‘A force 9 in the Atlantic in the winter? Of course. Best fun to be had, that is.’
‘Did you see him out there at any point?’
‘It’s hard to see a hand in front of your face in weather. Real weather, I mean. Most people have never experienced it so can’t imagine what it’s like. You can drown in the spray, do you know that?’
‘So you didn’t see him?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I didn’t.’
‘Born in Liverpool. Where did you grow up?’
‘Me? I hardly know. Everywhere and nowhere. We’re the rootless bunch, the merchant fleet. Aren’t we, lads? Making it up as we go along.’ He turned back to her, staring hard. ‘Maybe you can relate to that.’
She looked away because the truth was she could. He seemed so familiar to her, with his bravado and his magnetism. She knew why and she was ashamed. He reminded her of her brothers: when their darting eyes finally rested on you, you could do nothing but glow in their momentary approval. She found it hard to resist the pull of the dangerous ones.
She moved to the next man in line. She felt the Wolf’s eyes sliding up and down her body as she turned away.
Half an hour later the captain was showing Georgie and Mo the cabin of the man who went overboard. ‘Here’s his passport, toothbrush and razor, his wallet.’ He gestured at the small pile of personal effects on the bed.
Georgie looked around the room, bigger than a prison cell, but not by much. A small desk, a chair, a TV. A gloomy light struggled to filter in through the two portholes but any view was blocked by the metal wall of a dark blue container not two feet from the window. She looked into the small bathroom. A cream-coloured shower tray, basin and toilet. She knelt down and looked under the bed and was greeted by a ball of dust.
