The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  The usual thing is for the captain to stand on the bridge, notify the harbour authorities of their departure and set the course, but Guðmundur isn’t actually on duty until eight o’clock tomorrow, when he relieves Jónas B Jónasson. By then he’ll have had at most three to four hours’ sleep. On a long tour, though, there’s more than enough time to make up for losing a bit of sleep.

  Guðmundur opens the drawer beneath his bed, which is built into the wall, and pulls out a doona and two pillows. Then he lies down with the folder, turns on the reading lamp above the bed, puts on his reading glasses, opens the folder and leafs absently through the papers. The ship pulls at its moorings and soon rocks him gently to sleep with the steady beat of the generators, the hum of the air-conditioning and the mournful song of the wind outside the salt-encrusted window.

  Around one-thirty there’s a knock on the door of the captain’s cabin and Guðmundur starts awake.

  ‘Gummi?’ says Big John through the closed door.

  ‘Just coming, mate!’ Guðmundur answers. He swings himself out of bed, puts aside his papers and glasses, stomps across the carpeted floor and opens the door.

  ‘You wanted to see me about something?’ Big John crosses his arms across the front of his red-checked shirt that smells of soot, sweat and oil, and which is unbuttoned halfway down his chest, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  ‘Yeah, I just wanted to check that everything was in order,’ says Guðmundur, rubbing his tired eyes. ‘Are all the tanks full?’

  ‘Everything’s in order,’ says John a bit brusquely.

  ‘You’ll start the engines when the time comes, won’t you?’

  ‘I’ll start the engines,’ John says with a nod and a scowl.

  ‘Good,’ says Guðmundur, looking sheepish. ‘I’d rather it wasn’t – you know …’

  ‘Don’t look at me!’ says John sharply. ‘It wasn’t me who hired the fucker.’

  ‘Yeah – no,’ mutters Guðmundur with a faint smile. ‘But you know how it is – they call the shots, the landlubbers.’

  ‘There’s a lot of shots they call, the landlubbers,’ John says, looking the captain in the eye. Guðmundur looks away, ashamed.

  The hull of the ship creaks as it scrapes against the quay in its long battle with the wind, the sea and the mooring lines.

  ‘It’s getting bloody windy out there.’ Guðmundur tips his head as if listening.

  ‘Was there something you wanted to tell me?’ John asks, letting his arms fall and sticking his huge hands in the pockets of his dark blue trousers.

  ‘I’ll phone down around two-thirty.’

  ‘Right,’ says Big John. He turns his broad back to the captain, who watches him clamber down the stairs before he closes his door.

  Something I want to tell him? What did he mean? He doesn’t know about the lay-offs, does he? What then?

  Guðmundur opens the drawer beneath the bed again, bends down, stretches his right arm and pulls out the shotgun that the company provides for these tours. It’s a five-shot Mossberg pump-action gun, twelve-gauge, coal black with a sight, interchangeable chokes and a shorter version of barrel. Up on the shelf in the wardrobe are two boxes of twenty heavy-shot magnum shells.

  Guðmundur loads the gun – five shells in the receiver and one in the chamber – puts on the safety catch and loads five more shells in a special clip on the left side of the gun. Then he places the weapon in the right corner of the wardrobe, vertically, with the barrel up, and arranges his uniform in front of it before closing the door.

  From a drawer in the table Guðmundur Berndsen takes a worn Bible, which he presses against his chest with his left hand as he crosses himself with his right. He bows his head, closes his eyes, closes his hands around the holy book and prays silently.

  Our Father …

  At 2:35 a.m. the phone rings in the control booth of the ship’s engine room.

  ‘Yes?’ says Big John, sitting on his worn chair in front of the engine controls.

  ‘Start the engine,’ says the captain on the phone. ‘Half an hour to departure.’

  ‘Start the engine,’ John repeats and hangs up. He stands up, puts on his earmuffs and opens the door to the engine room. The air in there is stale and smells of cleaning fluids and the noise from the two 700 horsepower generators is as maddening as an alarm clock in a metal bucket.

  John climbs backwards down the ladder to the ship’s main engine, a nine-cylinder four-stroke MAN B&W engine, a copper-coloured giant that turns over serenely, pulling the ship with a giant’s power. It is over two metres high and the chief engineer steps up onto a platform that reaches round the middle of it like scaffolding. He walks from piston to piston, forcing cooling water from the valves with an air gun and closing the lids of the pressure gauges that measure the combustion pressure and the heat of the exhaust.

  The ship has numerous tanks, including four huge fuel-oil tanks for the main engine, which burns eighteen tonnes a day; two gas tanks for the generators, which burn around one tonne a day; two forty-tonne water tanks; lubricant tanks, storage tanks and cisterns.

  Everything relating to engines and fuel is the responsibility of the chief engineer, as is the electricity and daily operation of the heat and steam equipment, as well as general maintenance and repair.

  On D-deck, the lower living quarters, Methúsalem opens a starboard cabin and gestures to Jón Karl to enter before him. Methúsalem opens the door wide and shoves a stopper on the door into a clamp on the wall.

  ‘There’s bedding under your bed,’ says Methúsalem, turning on the cabin light. ‘You can get linen and towels down in the laundry room, as well as toilet paper, soap and stuff.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Jón Karl, dropping his bag on the floor before sitting on the bed.

  ‘There are seasickness pills in the bathroom cabinet,’ Methúsalem says with a smirk.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Jón Karl again, nodding.

  ‘You can pop down and have coffee and cakes and such,’ says Methúsalem as he pulls the door off the clamp.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jón Karl nods once.

  ‘You start work tomorrow at nine. Deckhands work from nine to five. Bridge duty for the bosun and the two deckhands is in three three-hour watches, from twenty-one-hundred to midnight, midnight to three and from three to six, moving forward by one watch every twenty-four hours. Rúnar will tell you more about it. Any questions?’

  ‘No.’ Jón Karl rolls his eyes like a naughty schoolboy.

  ‘Okay then.’ Methúsalem closes the door behind him.

  Ási turns off the radio, throws the used coffee filter in the garbage and turns off the light. Then he picks up two plastic pails of newly made offal puddings in sour whey – one full of blood puddings, the other of liver sausage – and carries them down to the cold larder, to starboard on the upper deck.

  The cold larder is on the right in a short corridor lined with stainless steel. Opposite the cold larder is the dry-goods storeroom, and at the end of the corridor is a walk-in freezer.

  Ási puts down the pails, opens the cold larder by pulling on a long handle and walks in. On the shelves are 200 litre-cartons of milk, a hundred of buttermilk, ten litres of cream and 200 cartons of yoghurt; a case of butter and two of margarine; a hundred kilograms of eggs; ten litres of cod liver oil; twenty kilos of cheese spread; ten litres of mayonnaise; ten loaves of bread and twenty cakes; a shelf-metre of coffee and a case of tea; 100 litres of fruit juice and an equal amount of fizzy drinks; two cases of biscuits; sacks of potatoes, swedes, carrots, onions and other vegetables, and cases of fruit, as well as ten kinds of cold meats, dried fish, salt fish, a number of boiled meats and a barrel of salted lamb.

  The dry-goods storeroom contains flour, sugar, sacks of meal; milk and egg powder in ten-litre pails; several cases of cereal and dried fruits; many shelf-metres of tinned foods in huge tins; cooking oil by the litre, spices in jars, dried vegetables in sacks, soup stock, and vitamins. In the walk-in freezer there are over 300 kilogram
s of lamb, beef and pork; thirty chickens; two ox tongues and 400 kilos of fish; fifty loaves of bread, fifty cakes, various sausages in large packages and twenty kilos of ice-cream in four flavours.

  Ási closes the cold larder and taps all the heat, frost and humidity gauges, which show him that everything is as it should be in these important rooms. When he turns around he finds himself facing Stoker – Óli Johnsen, the second engineer, who is on his way up after fetching his bedding and towels from the laundry room, which is to starboard on the upper deck.

  Stoker is around fifty, short and dark. He has something approaching a hump on his back, his hands are reminiscent of a bird’s claws and there is a lot of dirt under his long, ugly nails. He nose is hooked and his teeth either yellow, brown or not there; his mouth has long been frozen in a sarcastic grimace; his beard is black, long and untrimmed, and over the years his staring eyes have turned into hellish lumps of coal.

  ‘Is it true what they say?’ asks Stoker, leering at Ási. ‘Is your old lady there in the freezer, chopped up and packed in burlap?’

  ‘You bet, pal!’ Ási answers, laughing. ‘And one of her thighs is what we’re having for Sunday dinner.’

  ‘Ha-ha, yep, I thought so, Ási, you bloody sadist,’ says Stoker merrily, trying to look straight into the eyes of Ási, who swiftly avoids those black holes. ‘I wouldn’t put it past you! This I know: you are destined for a seat at the head table down below.’

  ‘I’ll lend you some shampoo, mate, when you take a bath,’ says Ási in his light tenor voice, trotting light-footed up the steps ahead of the Stoker.

  Not all the crew are so slick at avoiding the traps set by the Stoker, this evil-smelling scoundrel who is never happier than when people get angry at him and who tries to get rid of evil through evil temper.

  Up in the bridge it’s dark except for the soft lights from the gauges in the instrument panel and the red light on the coffee pot on the starboard side.

  Guðmundur pours fresh coffee into a mug and strolls out to the starboard bridge wing, from where he has a view of the dimly lit quay.

  ‘Everyone’s on board!’ calls Sæli through the intercom.

  ‘Cast off the bowline,’ says the captain into the microphone attached to the lapel of his parka.

  ‘Cast off the bowline!’ echoes Sæli.

  Down in the engine room John has started the main engine that’s idling heavily, heating up.

  ‘Bowline ready!’

  ‘Cast off astern,’ says the captain into the microphone as he steers the ship’s bow away from the quay with the electrically powered bow engine.

  ‘Cast off astern!’ echoes Sæli.

  Guðmundur picks up the phone in the bridge and dials the engine room.

  ‘Stern ready!’

  ‘Slow ahead,’ says the captain on the phone.

  ‘Slow ahead,’ echoes the chief engineer.

  The propeller starts turning at the back of the ship and the captain steers its heavy bulk out into the fjord. Once he has the ship straightened out, he phones the engine room again.

  ‘Full steam ahead!’

  ‘Full steam ahead!’ the chief engineer repeats and then carries out the order.

  When the engine has reached its top revolutions and the ship is travelling at full speed, over thirteen knots, the captain reports their departure and destination to the harbour authorities.

  ‘Echo, Lima, Whiskey, Quebec, 2, calling coastal station.’ Guðmundur carefully enunciates the call sign for the Per se.

  ‘Echo, Lima, Whiskey, Quebec, 2,’ comes the reply. ‘Coastal station here, over.’

  ‘Leaving Grundartangi for Suriname,’ says Guðmundur. ‘Over.’

  ‘Leaving Grundartangi for Suriname,’ the coastal station repeats. ‘Over and out.’

  Guðmundur sits down in the captain’s chair and takes a sip of the black coffee. He has a faraway expression as he stares through the window, where the pitch-black of the ocean welcomes him with open arms.

  The ship makes its way out of the fjord, rises slowly on a heavy wave and then drops down at the front. The blow pulses back along the ship and all the way up to the bridge; the wave breaks and white foam splashes over the weather deck and pours out of the chutes on the sides.

  The ship rises and falls, the wave breaks and the blow pulses back along the ship.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Again and again, and forever again.

  VIII

  The Per se sails at full steam towards the south, with the dark blue of the Atlantic Ocean rough and unending in every direction, and black clouds, thunder and lightning in attendance. As the ship meets the heavy waves of the open sea it rises slowly then drops slowly but purposefully down at the front. The blow pulses back along the ship and all the way up to the bridge; the wave breaks and white foam splashes over the weather deck and pours in frothing rivulets out of the chutes on the sides.

  The ship rises and falls, the wave breaks and the blow pulses back along the ship.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Again and again, and forever again.

  In through a square ship’s window comes a flash of white, throwing a cold light on the fittings of a cabin on the starboard side of D-deck. Then everything goes black once again and thunder rumbles in the distance. The rain beats against the window, which is not completely closed and lets in the water through a narrow chink. Outside the howling wind competes with the so-called blowers on the boat deck – air intakes that suck oxygen into the engine room. Inside the cabin the air-conditioning system hums, pumping warm, oily-smelling air into the ship’s living spaces.

  Another flash of lightning and everything turns white. A staring, ghostly face floats in the air; there is dark and muttering thunder; the ship rises and falls, the wave breaks and the blow pulses back along the ship and through the bones of men. It echoes in the head of Jón Karl, who is tossing in his bed, writhing in pain and moving his swollen tongue around his parched mouth.

  He has a fever and he doesn’t know where he is. The only thing he knows is that his bed is floating somewhere out to sea. Sometimes it changes into a small boat or a bathtub. There is movement under his doona, but it is hard to discern the creature’s outline. Jón Karl lifts up the doona but the creature darts into a black hole. He is dizzy and his head, heavy as lead, falls onto the sweaty pillow as the doona slides off the bed and sinks down in the dark.

  There is no wind, the sky is clear and blue, and there is nothing to be heard except the gurgle of the sea. Jón Karl closes his eyes; he smells salt, wet wood and sunshine. Nothing happens until the ship bumps into a small buoy.

  He opens his eyes.

  The buoy rocks back and forth and the bed rotates gently. He can hear the squeak and rattle of rusty chains. The buoy is a goddess of destiny in the form of a handless skeleton with a black scarf over its head.

  ‘Five dead men …’ she says without opening her mouth. ‘Four of them on a ship.’

  Then she changes back to an ordinary buoy that gets smaller and smaller until it disappears, because Jón Karl’s ship is sailing further and further out on the endless sea.

  The waves grow higher and the boat grows smaller; he hears voices but doesn’t understand what they say. Then a fog arrives like a grey facecloth, the sun disappears and it gets cold, so cold. The bathtub overturns and Jón Karl falls backwards into the sea and sinks down into the dark blue silence. Someone grabs his feet, someone else grabs his hands and a third pushes as hard as he can on his chest. Hands of sand, men of stone, and the buoy watches. He can’t move, he can’t breathe, he is pushed down on something hard and dry. His mouth and eyes fill with dust, the pressure is so great that the flesh is torn from his bones, and his bones break and crumble like biscuits; gears turn at terrific speed and sparks fly in every direction like daggers of light.

  Jón Karl screams with all his might, kicks out, tears himself away from these deadly clutches and slams his right fist into the wall above his bed.

  He c
omes round, gasping, sits up in the sweat-soaked, bloody bed and stares at his trembling hand. The pain is nearly unbearable. The skin is torn off his knuckles and blood trickles down between his broken fingers. Or are they only cracked? He shuffles, naked, from his bed and staggers like a drunk man across the cabin and into the bathroom. He has a high fever, aching bones and a savage headache.

  Jón Karl runs water over his deathly white hand, rinsing away the black blood and flexing his stiff fingers under the cold stream until the pain is bearable. Then he tries to pee standing up but loses his balance and is knocked out when his head hits the bulkhead behind him.

  The ship rises and falls, the wave breaks and the blow pulses back along the ship.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Again and again, and forever again.

  Jón Karl sits naked on the couch in his cabin, staring at the cigarette he holds in his right hand. He is pale and bleary-eyed, his hair a sweaty clump, his muscles twitching and his shrunken stomach a cavity.

  Through the window come a greyish glimmer of light, the noise of the blowers on the boat deck and a cool breeze tasting of salt.

  Jón Karl has laid out the contents of his duffel bag on the coffee table: three pairs of socks, three pairs of underpants, two T-shirts, a hunting knife in its sheath, ten shells, useless passports, share certificates, bank books and ten packs of Prince cigarettes. He has 200 cigarettes but not a single match.

  The clothes he was wearing are in a pile on the floor. He steps with his bare feet onto the pile and feels the shape of the holstered handgun under one foot. Everything in its place.

  The only thing he’s lacking is a light. And maybe something to eat. The water in the sink in the bathroom is drinkable, but Jón Karl hasn’t had anything to eat for … a long time.

  His stomach contracts into a tight knot, sweat breaks out on his chest and back, and his heart pumps nutrient-low blood up into his dizzy head.