The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  The mate says nothing but the guy in the bathrobe looks searchingly at Jón Karl, who is both red and wet in the face, as if he has just come in from the storm – which, of course, he has, in a way.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asks the guy in the bathrobe, his voice low and frosty.

  ‘This is the captain,’ says Jónas, looking at Jón Karl with eyes that beg for cooperation, restraint and mercy. ‘I told him you —’

  ‘Jónas!’ says the captain, shutting Jónas up. ‘Let me speak to the man.’

  ‘Yes, I …’

  ‘Not another word!’ says the captain, turning to Jón Karl. ‘You were where?’

  ‘I was just getting my bedclothes,’ says Jón Karl with a smirk as he takes the cigarette from behind his ear and sticks it in his mouth. ‘But I knocked on the door of the toilet on my way down and told him to stop hanging about.’

  ‘Who was in the toilet?’

  ‘He was,’ says Jón Karl, lighting the cigarette which is almost too damp to burn and smells awful. ‘He’d been in the toilet for fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell me he’d been in the toilet?’ asks the captain, looking at Jónas, who turns bright red and gapes like a fish.

  ‘Yeah – no. No. Definitely not.’ Jónas falters and points at Jón Karl. ‘He was the one who left the bridge, you heard what he —’

  ‘Blah, blah,’ taunts Jón Karl, drawing on his cigarette until the sputtering ember conquers the wet tobacco.

  ‘It’s your responsibility,’ says Guðmundur, breathing into Jónas’s face.

  ‘Yes, I’m fully aware —’

  ‘Not another word!’ Guðmundur cuts the gloom with a sudden movement of his hand as he strides towards the door. ‘We’ll settle this in the morning.’

  Guðmundur slams the door behind him and at the same moment the ship pitches deeply until it finally collides with a rising wave.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  XVIII

  11:19

  When Jón Karl wakes up it’s nineteen minutes after eleven o’clock in the morning. He lies, fully dressed, on top of the still-folded bed linen and the wrinkled doona and stares at the ceiling, at the curtains that swing to and fro in the cold breeze, letting blue-white light into the dim cabin.

  He’s stiff and still tired, despite five hours’ sleep. If you can call it sleep. ‘Conscious unconsciousness’ is more like it.

  Christ but he’s sick of being on this ship! Sick of the ship itself. And the guys on board. Sick of this fucking mess. What’s he doing here? What was he thinking, to get on board this million-tonne washbowl?

  And what’s the matter with all these mates, engineers and whatever they’re all called? First they drag him onto the ship and dump him in this cabin, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Then this second mate comes and tells him everyone on board thinks he’s his brother-in-law and he’d better act as if that’s the case, since he’s on board in the first place. And this same mate pays him five million crowns to play that stupid role.

  Some guys creep around under cover of night carrying dismantled shotguns while others are smoking themselves silly and going on about ancient gods and the fate of humanity. The captain comes to the bridge wearing a bathrobe, just to find out who went to the toilet when, while the second mate confuses him and tries to blame Jón Karl for something he can’t even understand. As if he should care about the nursery-school rules in this floating sandbox! But when the fucking satellite phone doesn’t work – just when he finally remembers to phone home – then he does care. And it’s not just the phone that’s dead but also some bloody navigation stuff, and the ship’s radio. All because of some aerials that have been damaged because of something nobody can identify. And so forth!

  It’s bad enough for Jón Karl to be fucking stranded on board this ship with some guys he doesn’t know at all without these same guys being philosophically delusional, suspicious about the state of their own souls and those of everyone else on board, and sneaking about in the night and accusing each other of treachery, deceit and carelessness. Some of them have one of these faults, others all of them, and these are the guys who steer this ship, look after the engines and all that. And to make matters worse the ship doesn’t even work the way it’s supposed to – it’s out of touch with the rest of the world and off the radar, or the radar’s off of it, or something. All because of something that maybe happened while someone was in the toilet. Or was it when someone was not in the toilet? Doesn’t really matter.

  Or does it?

  Jón Karl is stuck with deranged men on board a ship that seems just as deranged as the men who are supposed to sail it.

  Could the second mate have been fucking with the communications equipment when he pretended to be in the toilet? So someone couldn’t … phone ashore? Hardly. Or so someone couldn’t phone the ship? Who? His wife? His brother-in-law? The police? He doesn’t want the police to be able to reach the ship because … he killed that brother-in-law of his!

  ‘I’ll kill that fucking Jónas!’ Jón Karl says darkly, sitting up in bed, but he stiffens and grimaces when the searing pain comes to life in the back of his head, his chest, his swollen hand and cracked collarbone. His acrobatics in the hold didn’t exactly speed his recovery.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Yeah, sure, he’s going to kill that Jónas – but maybe not today. Tomorrow. He’ll just kill him tomorrow.

  Or the next day.

  The day after tomorrow he’s going to kill Jónas and every single person on board and let this ship sail on its merry way. It’s bound to hit some fucking land sooner or later, and as soon as Jón Karl sees that fucking land he’ll just dive in and swim the final kilometre or so. The ship will run aground and he’ll be out of this prison. Basta.

  Why not?

  Anything’s better than spending a whole month with some salty sea-dogs who can keep neither the ship nor themselves in touch with the real world.

  Jón Karl stands up, sighing as he looks at the bed. He couldn’t be bothered to put a sheet on the mattress and clean linen on the doona and pillow before he went to sleep, and he can’t be bothered now, either.

  After having a piss and splashing his face with cold water, he grabs an unopened pack of cigarettes and wanders along the D-deck corridor and out onto the platform behind the wheelhouse. It’s still pretty cloudy and the wind hasn’t quite died down, but it’s stopped raining and it isn’t as cold as it has been. The deep blue of the sea churns behind the ship, which crests a high wave and, little by little, makes its way south, to where day and night are equally long and the mountainsides are covered with coca bushes.

  Jón Karl rocks to the heavy rhythm of the waves, opens his pack of cigarettes, flicks his finger against the bottom of it and then lights the cigarette that pops up. He blows smoke through his nose and stares at the sea, which is grey in the distance and black at the horizon, rising and falling like a mountain range in the head of some dreaming creator. A lonely albatross hovers in the sky above the ship and Jón Karl follows it with his eyes until it flies so high that it disappears into the dark grey of the clouds.

  ‘Lucky bugger,’ he says, glancing to the right, where he catches sight of part of a lifeboat. It’s pretty big and probably has room for all the crew. Underneath it there’s a propeller in a tube; near the top there’s a window for whoever’s steering. A boat like that is probably unsinkable, as long as it doesn’t break. Jón Karl walks under the boat, knocks on the bottom and tries to see how to free it from its davits, make it fall on its nose into the sea behind the ship. The boat seems to be fastened to an iron hook that locks into a cylindrical steel joist in the bottom, behind the propeller. All you’d need to do is jack the boat up until the joist came free of the hook, and you can probably only do that from inside the boat itself.

  Jón Karl walks to the back of the platform, leans over the railing and looks down along the lifeboat that’s hanging there, nearly vertical, thirty or forty metres above sea le
vel. No small drop, and there must be quite a blow when the boat slams onto the surface of the water. Suddenly he sees a man’s face down on B-deck. He’s leaning over the rail like Jón Karl, twisting round and staring up along the back of the wheelhouse. The man’s head is out over the rough sea and when he catches sight of Jón Karl he seems astonished.

  ‘WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?’ Jón Karl shouts down to the man, who is beardless, round cheeked, curly haired and cute in some weird way; he looks very pleasant, even from a distance and at such a strange angle.

  ‘COME GET YOURSELF SOME FISH ON A DISH, FRIEND!’ the man calls back, smiling over the whole of his childlike face before disappearing into B-deck.

  Jón Karl grins, throws his cigarette overboard and opens the door to the D-deck corridor. He’s hungry – so hungry his stomach is grumbling – but he also needs to take a shit. He goes into his cabin, turns on the light in the bathroom, pulls down his trousers and sits on the toilet. He’s always thought shitting in an aeroplane was bloody good, and shitting on board a ship is even better. The heavy up-and-down movements help the bowels to do their work and add interest to this otherwise monotonous activity. As if it were the ship itself that is shitting, not him.

  The ship takes a deep breath, climbs up to the crest of a wave and tenses its abdominal muscles, then it lets itself go down the side – one, two and …

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Jón Karl’s backside is pressed down onto the toilet seat; his anus opens and manages to rid itself of a hard turd the size of a bratwurst.

  ‘Way to go!’ Jón Karl says with a sigh. He pats his pockets and mentally reviews their contents. In the left is the sock with the shells, morphine and syringe while in the right is a pack of cigarettes, a five-million-crown cheque and the picture of Miss September.

  Jón Karl pats his trouser legs by his ankles, feeling for his gun and knife, and then considers that maybe he should leave the weapons in his cabin. But it’s probably safer to carry them. His next idea is to try out the morphine. No, that can wait for a while. Eat first. He wipes his bottom and flushes, washes his hands and looks himself in the eye in the mirror above the sink.

  He isn’t tired any more. Or not dead tired, at least. Now he’s got a healthy-looking gleam in his eye, blood in his hard muscles and self-confidence in his savage grin. Looking a lot better, champ. Got a bit of Satan in him, a kind of diabolical aura you can almost touch that pulses like an electric current, fascinating and frightening at the same time.

  ‘Who’s the king?’ Jón Karl says, winking at his own reflection. Then they both laugh at their own joke.

  The laugh bursts through flesh and bone, deforming the face in the mirror, like lightning that tears the rain clouds apart and lets the thunder through.

  Silence.

  Jón Karl stops his satanic smile, turns off the bathroom light and leaves the cabin.

  The stairwell is newly scrubbed and smells of soft soap and ammonia. Jón Karl leans on the railing and swings himself down the last few steps at each landing.

  The smell of fried fish and onion-butter wafts through the stairwell and makes his mouth water.

  XIX

  08:27

  Guðmundur sits in his chair in the bridge, staring fiercely out of the salt-caked windows. The weather has improved slightly – it’s stopped raining and calmed noticeably – but there are thick cloud banks ahead, heavy waves and strong ocean currents, none of which bodes well. Sailing in bad weather is both time consuming and dangerous, besides which it uses extra fuel to the tune of several tonnes a day.

  At the captain’s feet lies Skuggi, looking pensively up at his master.

  But Guðmundur is thinking neither of the weather nor the cost of extra fuel. He is more worried about being held up. Most of all, he resents not being able to phone home to Hrafnhildur.

  What’s she going to think if she doesn’t hear from him?

  The fact is that the ship is totally disconnected from the world and that is almost driving the captain round the bend. Never before in his long career as a seaman has Guðmundur Berndsen had the misfortune to lose all three at once: radar, satellite phone and radio. Anything can happen at sea – that’s true enough – but there’s something dubious about this particular malfunction. It’s simply too widespread to have come about without somebody noticing something. If lightning had struck the ship, for instance, everyone would have noticed.

  A blow, a flash, fire and then the electricity would have been out for a while – the engine could even have died. It would have been the same if something had hit the ship: a small plane, a big bird, flying debris. A collision like that would either have come to their attention or had limited impact. No – there are little warning bells ringing in the head of this experienced captain. Not only is the malfunction extensive, it could just as well be called specialised, since it only affects the ship’s ability to communicate. Coincidence? Imaginings?

  No, by Christ! Something is not as it should be.

  Guðmundur picks up the console phone and calls down to the engine room.

  ‘Hello, John here,’ Big John drawls.

  ‘This is the captain. We’ve got a bit of a problem and I’m going to have a little meeting up here at eleven.’

  Silence.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘We’ve lost the GPS, radar and radio phone. Can you come up at eleven, and bring Methúsalem with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Big John, raising his voice. ‘Who else will be there?’

  ‘I’m going to get Rúnar to have a look up on the roof later on. Then he’ll come to the meeting and report to us.’

  ‘Okay. See you at eleven, then.’

  Guðmundur puts down the phone and leans back in the chair. The sea has gone blue-black out at the horizon, the wind is picking up little by little and coal-black banks of cloud are drifting closer. If he’s going to send Rúnar up on the roof, he’d better do it sooner rather than later. He looks at his watch and sees it’s just past twenty to nine. The deckhands’ watch starts at nine and Rúnar usually stops by the bridge soon after to check the weather and have a cup of coffee. Guðmundur gets out of the chair and walks slowly to the port side.

  Better make fresh coffee before the bosun comes.

  08:45

  Big John pushes the dead man’s alarm before he leaves the engine room and stomps up to E-deck, where he knocks on the chief mate’s door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ asks Methúsalem, opening the door as far as the metal catch will allow.

  ‘It’s me,’ says Big John. Methúsalem closes the door so he can loosen the catch.

  ‘Come in,’ says Methúsalem, letting the chief engineer into the cabin.

  ‘I thought you were asleep,’ says John, fishing a chewed cigar out of a packet in his shirt pocket and then putting it back when he remembers the mate’s ban on smoking.

  ‘What do you want?’ Methúsalem is not only awake but newly bathed, freshly shaven, smelling of aftershave and hair cream, dressed in well-pressed trousers and an ironed shirt, with his hair carefully combed.

  ‘The Old Man just called. He says the GPS is out, and also the radar and radio.’

  ‘What in the world?’ says Methúsalem, his mouth falling open in wonder. ‘And what?’

  ‘He wants to meet us up in the bridge at eleven,’ says John with a shrug. ‘By that time Rúnar will have gone up on the roof and can presumably give us more information.’

  ‘Do you mean the ship is entirely out of touch?’

  ‘I expect so, yeah.’

  ‘There’s something suspicious about this!’ says Methúsalem, his eyes going cold. ‘Two days before we mean to stop the engines we lose all contact. Which means the Old Man can’t phone the company when the time comes to get them to abandon their plans to lay us all off.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks John anxiously.

  ‘They’ve discovered our plan,’ Methúsalem declares, taking a deep breath through distended nostrils. ‘This is
their way of disarming us, the fuckers!’

  ‘Are you saying the Old Man is lying about this? You can’t be saying he had those instruments disconnected. That’s just impossible!’

  ‘All’s fair in love and war,’ says Methúsalem, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Someone leaked our plan to the Old Man or the company and they’ve decided to play by our rules. But they’re not going to get away with it!’

  ‘Who could have talked?’ asks John doubtfully. ‘And besides, the Old Man’s sending Rúnar up to check it out. He’s one of us!’

  ‘What Rúnar will find up on the roof is cut wires,’ says Methúsalem calmly.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ asks John, knitting his brows. ‘You aren’t responsible for this, are you?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Methúsalem scowls. ‘What would I gain by having no communications? Nothing! But there are those who gain by it, and we both know who they are. Right? The only thing I’m not sure of is exactly who it was who cut the wires up on the roof. But they’ve been cut, believe me.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, I don’t know,’ mutters John. ‘Ummm, tell me, what time is it?’

  ‘The time, yeah …’ Methúsalem automatically looks at his left wrist, where there is no watch. ‘I’ve lost my fucking watch. I’ve looked everywhere! Can’t think what the hell I’ve done with it.’

  ‘I thought you never lost anything,’ says John, smiling inwardly.

  ‘I know, I just …’ Methúsalem sighs as he rubs his left wrist with his fingers.

  ‘I’ve got to get back down,’ says John, walking towards the door. ‘See you up there at eleven.’

  ‘Listen!’ Methúsalem stops rubbing his wrist. ‘We’re not going to let this put us off. We keep to our plan!’

  ‘And kill the engine?’ asks John, turning around with his left hand on the doorknob.

  ‘Yep,’ says Methúsalem, nodding. ‘And the sooner the better.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No buts!’ says Methúsalem, lifting his chin and hooking his arms together behind his back. ‘We create a document clearly stating our demands and the Old Man can sign it on behalf of the company. A document like that must be valid in the maritime court, if it comes to that.’