The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  ‘It’s not up to me to answer that!’ says Guðmundur, who is so angry he can hardly speak clearly. ‘You are the officer on watch.’

  ‘He said he was just going to the toilet,’ says Jónas, trying to think of some plausible story.

  ‘The radar is out,’ says Guðmundur, tying his bathrobe more tightly. ‘And the GPS went out just now.’

  ‘Huh? Yes, I was going to check that out, see. But it’s madness to try to get up there now. The weather’s insane and —’

  ‘Did you abandon the bridge?’ growls Guðmundur, taking a deep breath and blowing it out through flaring nostrils.

  ‘Yes, the radar went out and —’

  ‘You said the seaman had gone to the toilet!’ says Guðmundur, throwing up his hands. ‘And then you go exploring without letting anyone know. In this weather.’

  ‘Well, I, look —’

  ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’ Guðmundur barks, spraying a blend of coffee and saliva over the soaking-wet second mate.

  ‘Yes – no – look …’ mutters Jónas, scratching his wet head, but he has no idea what he should say, or what he shouldn’t say.

  ‘Jónas?’ Guðmundur walks right up to the officer, who is about to collapse from exhaustion, sleeplessness and general distress. ‘Is there something you …’

  Guðmundur stops in the middle of his question when somebody opens the door and enters the bridge.

  ‘Evening,’ says Jón Karl, slamming the door behind him. ‘What’s going on here?’

  Jónas says nothing but Guðmundur looks searchingly at the deckhand, who is both red and wet in the face, as if he has just come in from the storm.

  XVII

  04:22

  Jón Karl leaves the bridge and knocks on the door of the G-deck toilet, where he assumes Jónas is sitting on the throne.

  ‘I’m going down below for a moment!’

  Then he saunters down to F-deck, then E-deck, on down to D, then C and all the way down to the kitchen on B-deck. The stairs are steep and the treads are hard. Jón Karl is breathless and the pains in his stiff body come to life and send their silent distress signals to his head.

  In the kitchen a light is shining under a shelf and below that shelf is a plate of sandwiches that Ási has covered with plastic wrap. Jón Karl strips the wrap off the plate and eats three slices of brown bread with meat paste, washing them down with cold milk which he drinks straight from the carton. Then he returns the empty carton to the fridge and locks the fridge door. At sea all cupboards are locked to ensure they don’t open in high seas.

  ‘Hello there,’ says Jón Karl when he sees Skuggi’s black head peering from the officers’ mess. The look each other in the eye for a moment, then the dog turns and disappears into the darkened mess.

  In the corridor between the kitchen and the seamen’s mess is the ship’s medicine cabinet and beyond it a room with a hospital bed and a closed air-conditioning system in case someone needs to be quarantined. Jón Karl walks into the medicine cupboard, turns on the light and closes the door behind him. He finds some strong painkillers and swallows a fair number, then his attention is drawn to a special locker where they keep ampoules of morphine, syringes and needles. Jón Karl takes one ampoule, a syringe and a few needles, wraps them together in a bandage and closes up the whole thing with adhesive tape. Then he fishes a pack of cigarettes out of his right trouser pocket and dumps the four cigarettes left in the pack into a steel tray, sticks the taped parcel into the empty pack and shoves it back in his pocket.

  Jón Karl sticks two cigarettes behind his left ear, one between his lips and the last one behind his right ear. Then he turns off the light in the medicine cupboard and goes back out in the corridor. There he lights his cigarette, lets it dangle between his thick lips, blows the smoke out through his nose and thinks for a few moments before strolling down to A-deck to find himself clean bedclothes.

  It’s dark down there and confined; the air is stagnant and smells of soap and grease; the mats on the floor are slippery, and at the end of the corridor, to port, a faint lightbulb is blinking, as if it’s about to go out. Jón Karl steadies himself against the greasy wall and walks across to starboard, where the soap smell’s coming from. At the end of this corridor there’s a closed iron door marked ELECTRIC WORKSHOP, to the right of which is the entrance to the laundry room, where there’s a light on over the ironing machine.

  In the laundry room there are piles of clean bedding on long shelves above a pair of washing machines and another pair of dryers. Jón Karl selects some hardly used sheets, four snow-white towels – two large and two small – a number of facecloths, an extra sheet and another two towels to use as bath mats. Jón Karl leaves with his pile of linen under his left arm and goes back along the dim corridor, across to the stairs leading to B-deck. But there’s another staircase there too, which leads down to the engine room where the ship’s heart is beating, sending out its shuddering shockwaves and boiling breath.

  Jón Karl stops and looks down the stairs to the doorway of the engine room – a door with black handprints all over it and greasy smudges round the handle. A moment later he turns the handle and opens the door. The heat beats against him like a stifling breeze and there, in the depths of the ship, there is the usual stink of oil mixed with volatile cleaners, ammonia and galling poisonous fumes.

  And the noise is fearsome, almost demonic.

  First Jón Karl walks through a kind of storeroom where overalls, helmets and ear protectors hang on hooks, and bottles of detergent, buckets, scrubbing brushes and three pairs of well-worn wooden shoes rest on thick rubber mats. Two steps lead down from the storeroom into the engine room itself, an open space divided into two storeys by a metal-grid floor round the sides. In the open middle lies the gigantic main engine, like a stranded sperm whale that huffs and puffs and flaps its heavy flukes in the sand. Jón Karl walks out onto the metal floor, grips the railing with his right hand and looks down on the nine-cylinder engine with its 270 revolutions per minute, that consumes over seventeen tonnes of fuel a day and provides a constant 5300 horsepower day after day, week after week, tirelessly. Behind the engine is the dynamo, which produces electricity for their daily use, and then at the back of the ship is a huge propeller that drives it forward.

  The engine-room control booth is furthest in to starboard – a white, windowless box the size of a garage. Jón Karl inhales cigarette smoke, screws up his face against the noise from the dynamo and walks fast over to the control booth, opens the door, pops in and closes the door behind him.

  Silence! What a relief. Actually, it’s far from silent in there but the walls are insulated enough to put the noise that does come through in the category of heavenly peace compared to the apocalyptic symphony outside them.

  Jón Karl takes his cigarette out of his mouth, knocks the ash off and runs his eye over the contents of the control booth. It is oblong with a door at each end, and the long walls are covered from floor to ceiling with instruments. To his right the wall is hidden by some kind of fuse box where needles quiver in endless voltage meters, counters click and reels turn round and round while the left wall carries the actual operator control panel, which is no small affair. On its vertical face are dozens of meters, switches, warning lights, little screens and a device that keeps a record of all information as it comes from the sensors on the main engine. The horizontal part leans just a little forward, and on it there are open logs, a telephone, a microphone, more lights and switches, a d ead man’s alarm and, finally, the controls for the engine. There are long shelves of binders held in by the rod on the surface of the console; under it are drawers and cupboards, and in a chair in front of it sits Stoker, snoring, his feet and arms crossed and his head drooping towards his left shoulder.

  ‘Fucking pothead!’ says Jón Karl with a low laugh, then drops his cigarette on the floor and steps on it. He puts the bedding down on the console and takes a look at a newspaper cutting that someone has stuck between two meters. The pictu
re shows a few members of the Iceland–Palestine Association demonstrating outside Parliament House. Most are holding placards with hand-painted slogans; all of them are the epitome of earnest tediousness, and some have Arab scarves round their necks. Jón Karl looks over the stupid-looking faces and finally recognises one: it’s Big John, the guy who closed the cabin door up on E-deck when the bosun with the shotgun tried to back in through the door.

  ‘Fucking Commies!’ mutters Jón Karl and spits on the cutting before tearing it down, crumpling it up and throwing it on the floor.

  At the same moment the red light starts flashing on the dead man’s bell, so Stoker stops snoring, lifts his head and half opens his eyes. Then he turns his chair halfway round, pushes the button on the alarm with his right forefinger and goes back to sleep.

  ‘Hey! You!’ says Jón Karl, snapping his fingers in front of Stoker’s nose, but Stoker settles down in his chair and goes back to snoring.

  ‘I’ve never known … How’d he do that?’

  Jón Karl shakes his head and picks up his bedding, turns around and is about to go into the engine room, but hesitates when he sees the picture on his side of the door.

  It’s a centrefold from a Danish porn magazine, Miss September 2001. The girl’s name is Eva and she sits, open legged, on a chair by a window, her expression dreamy and sensuous. She wears white net stockings and a white lace bodysuit, see-through on the sides and with holes in front where her firm breasts push out. Her left hand rests on the left side of her groin, while the fingers of her right hand fool with a long string of white beads. Eva’s lips are painted red and there is a gleam of white teeth between them; her fair hair ripples over her shoulders; her blue-painted eyelids have a whorish look, and the crotch of her bodysuit is hitched up between her well-trimmed labia.

  ‘You’re coming with me, sweetheart,’ says Jón Karl, pulling down the picture, folding it and putting it in his right trouser pocket. Then he picks up his bedding once more, opens the door to the engine room and hurries past the dynamo, over the metal grid floor and into the storeroom at the back. But instead of turning right in the closet and going up the same staircase he came down, Jón Karl walks straight ahead through the oil-saturated gloom, through the storeroom and into the boiler room, where two diesel burners take turns maintaining the correct heat and pressure in a large boiler, whose job is to keep the ship’s living quarters warm and ensure that there’s always plenty of hot water. The heat in the boiler room is even greater than out in the engine room, The sweat pours off Jón Karl, who breathes quickly through his nose and turns in circles, looking for the exit. Innermost in the boiler room there’s a green light and that’s where Jón Karl finds a steep metal staircase leading in a half circle up out of this airless incinerator.

  At the top of the staircase is a narrow corridor full of darkness, but Jón Karl knows he’s reached the upper deck and he knows he’s on the starboard side of the ship, so all he has to do is feel his way across to the port side, where there must be some door to the light.

  And, sure enough …

  Jón Karl hasn’t been feeling his way for long when he sees a dim light above a sturdy door with three hasps. As this doorway is on his right in the corridor, it opens out, towards the bow of the ship, which doesn’t seem particularly logical to Jón Karl as he is sure he is very far forward on the deck. The door should be on the left and open onto the deck; for instance, into the corridor where the pantry is to port and the laundry room to starboard. And this is the only door in the corridor that ends there, which continues neither up nor down, forward nor back.

  ‘Fucking ridiculous!’ Jón Karl says, clamping his bedding under his left arm while he undoes the hasps with his right. The glass on the light above the door is both scratched and dirty, and the bulb under it is yellowish and pale, but in spite of the weak light Jón Karl manages to read what is painted in white on the red door: HOLD.

  ‘Hold what? Hold it?’ murmurs Jón Karl, making a final effort that tears open the third hasp. Going by the streaks of rust, the squeaking and the stiffness of the hasps, this door hasn’t been opened for a long time, and when Jón Karl finally manages to pull the heavy door into the corridor he is faced with a darkened emptiness, full of foul-smelling cold, and just as he lets go of the door the ship pitches, smashing into a heavy wave.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Jón Karl loses his balance, stubs his toe on the high threshold and falls forwards through the doorway in a kind of somersault. His left hand gropes and finds something hard and cold, while the bedding, towels and facecloths soar like ghosts through the dark and disappear into the damp depths.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he mutters. Jón Karl is hanging by one hand to some sort of railing and rubbing against a cold iron wall, surrounded by a dark and a terrifying void. He twists round and gets a grip on the metal with his right hand, then feels around with his feet and finds a notch or sill to step on. After feeling around some more and adjusting both his hands and his feet, he realises that he’s standing on a vertical ladder that curves from the bottom of the doorway, down along the wall and deep into the ship’s hold – a vast space as long, broad and deep as the ship itself, a rectangular tank full of cold and dark.

  Jón Karl climbs up the ladder, turns around and sits in the doorway with his feet on the top rung. He feel around his ears and finds one cigarette behind each, which means that only one was lost in those acrobatics.

  ‘Not bad,’ he says and lights the cigarette from behind his left ear. He blows out smoke, holds onto the doorframe with his left hand and silently stares into the empty hold. He can’t see them in the dark, but there are four hatches the size of football fields over the hold – he saw them from up on the bridge and if he didn’t know better he might think he was staring into genuine night, not enclosed darkness.

  Jón Karl sits there for a while, smoking serenely and looking neutrally at this rectangular eternity, this bottomless void, which is of course neither eternal nor bottomless, but it seems like that from where he’s sitting, and while it seems so it is so – it’s as simple as that.

  Deep under the darkness the engine counts its eternal beats and the ship rises and falls, rocks and rolls, on the expansive dance floor of the ocean, and the ship breathes, the ship moves and the ship generates long, drawn-out screeching and creaking, and in the empty hold the sounds turn to the voices of the condemned, who writhe about in perpetual torment, wail like the newly born, roar like distant monsters and produce soulless sobs that echo between the iron walls and turn into pathetic whimpers in the head of the man who sits stock still and listens to the threads of his own mental health snap like guitar strings being pulled apart by faceless fiends.

  The dark is simply dark, which is a black hole and a lifeless abyss, but suddenly there is a flash of brightness that blinds Jón Karl for just a moment. It lights up the pale face of his daughter, who makes an inhuman noise and looks helplessly into her father’s eyes, then disappears in an instant, like a spark, into the leaden blackness inside his head.

  ‘I hate this fucking ship,’ he says, shooting his lit cigarette into the void. Then he stands up, steps over the threshold, closes the heavy door and slams the hasps into place so violently that rust rains into the corridor.

  Jón Karl curses and walks back along the corridor, all the way to the ladder that leads down to the boiler room. But when he turns around to back down the ladder he finds himself staring into the gloom at the front end of the corridor, right by the bulkhead to starboard.

  There’s an open doorway right above the stairwell. He hadn’t noticed it before because it’s pitch black inside. Jón Karl decides to walk through the doorway and feels his way in the dark until he finds a light switch on the right-hand wall.

  He turns on the light and is faced with a little workroom with a table, chair and long shelves, with countless little plastic drawers full of small items and electrical bits. Jón Karl walks through the room and opens a door in the wall kitty-cornered
from the other doorway, and this brings him back to the corridor on the upper deck. To his left is the laundry room and, at the end of the corridor to starboard, the stairs leading up to B-deck, where a light is blinking as if about to go out.

  Jón Karl closes the door behind him and reads what’s painted on the door in white letters: ELECTRIC WORKSHOP. He fetches some more clean linen in the laundry room and makes his way up to D-deck and into his cabin, where he throws the bedding on the unmade bed and hangs the towels in the bathroom. The air in the cabin is stale and cloying; Jón Karl decides to open the window wide. To do this he has to loosen four big nuts and move an equal number of bolts out of the iron grip of the window, which opens into the cabin and lets in cool night air and cold raindrops, as well as the noise of the blowers.

  Jón Karl stands, stooped over, on his bed, sticks his head out the window and lets the wind and rain refresh him. A faint light comes from somewhere and he can vaguely see the propeller and bottom of a big, orange plastic lifeboat that sits in white davits right in front of the window, on a forty-five-degree incline back along the ship, bow down and stern up.

  ‘Amazing,’ he says and sniffs rainwater up his nose, then he pulls his head in and steps down off the bed, turns off the cabin light and strolls up to the bridge.

  Just before he turns the doorknob into the bridge, he hears a loud voice through the closed door.

  ‘Have you gone out of your mind?’

  Jón Karl smiles crookedly and lays his ear against the door, but the voices inside are both low and unclear, as if the men have suddenly regained their tempers.

  What’s going on in there?

  Jón Karl is too curious to eavesdrop like this if he can’t hear what’s being said.

  ‘Evening,’ he says, slamming the door behind him. ‘What’s going on here?’

  There are two men standing before him: Jónas and a middle-aged guy wearing a bathrobe.

  The light is dim in the bridge but the air is so charged it almost illuminates the entire area.