The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  Skuggi is under the table, waiting for Satan to sneak him a bone.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Sæli takes a sip of cold water and Guðmundur serves himself half a chicken breast.

  Silence.

  ‘If we don’t want to go insane then we’ve got to carry on no matter what. Organise each day from A to Z and make sure everyone has plenty to do, that everyone has tasks to complete and so on. That’s what life is like in prison – that’s how men survive there, one day at a time, year after year,’ says Satan, enthusiastically gulping down the bland food. ‘We’ll take shifts in the bridge. We’ve got to watch for ships and shoot up a flare if we see any ships. The engineer’ll look after the engine room. Sæli’ll see to keeping the ship tidy and I’ll do the cooking. There are several things that need to be fixed, like, we could have a go at repairing the communications equipment. I mean, we hardly need a scientific genius to reconnect the aerial for the radio, do we?’

  Silence.

  Sæli looks at the captain, who is poking at the yellowish chicken breast with his fork.

  ‘Do we?’ Satan repeats, wiping his mouth.

  ‘No,’ says Sæli. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  ‘Of course it’s worth a try!’ says Satan, taking a drink of water.

  Silence.

  ‘Is Jónas in the infirmary?’ asks Guðmundur.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Satan, nodding. ‘He’s lying there, the bastard.’

  ‘Unconscious?’ asks the captain.

  ‘He’s not opening his eyes,’ says Satan with a shrug. ‘He’s probably just ashamed of himself.’

  ‘Why did he take the boat?’ Sæli says. ‘I just don’t understand it!’

  ‘But where’s Óli?’ says the captain, looking up. ‘I haven’t seen him since —’

  ‘I checked in the engine room a while ago,’ says Satan, serving himself more cabbage. ‘He wasn’t there.’

  ‘Sæli, would you check whether he’s in his cabin?’ says the captain.

  ‘No problem,’ says Sæli, getting up.

  Sæli has no appetite anyway, so he’s sort of relieved to have an excuse to leave the table. The nauseating smell of the overcooked food accompanies him up to C-deck, and the climb doesn’t help. Still, anything’s better than sitting at the table in the mess looking at the colourless chicken floating in its own juices alongside the slimy cabbage.

  Up on D-deck he knocks twice before opening the door to the engineer’s cabin.

  ‘Are you there, Óli?’ asks Sæli, peering into the dark cabin where the close air smells of dirty socks, sweat and something that seems to be rotting. ‘Are you asleep, or dead, or …’

  Sæli holds his nose with his right hand and turns on the light switch with his left.

  No!

  He takes two steps back, eyes wide and glued to the horror that is displayed in the middle of the table, like some work of art. Then he retches and vomits all over the rug.

  XXXIII

  32°W 10°S

  ‘Do you know who it is?’ says Guðmundur, breathing through a handkerchief and looking at the thing in the engineer’s cabin.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Satan absentmindedly as he looks round the squalid cabin. ‘That’s the fifth pirate. I asked him to throw the body in the sea but he must have kept that as a souvenir.’

  Those empty eyes, that grotesque smile …

  On the table sits the pirate’s skull, still with hair on the back of its head and jaw muscles and flesh between its teeth, surrounded by half-burnt black candles.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says the captain, shaking his head.

  ‘You don’t need to understand anything. I’ll throw this in the sea in a minute,’ mutters Satan, walking over to the picture that hangs above the head of the bed. ‘That’s strange.’

  ‘What’s strange?’ says Guðmundur, looking at Satan, who is staring at the picture and the frame around it.

  ‘Nothing!’ says Satan with a shake of his head. ‘You just go on out. I’ll clear up in here.’

  ‘And are you going up to the bridge after?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll go up to the bridge.’ Satan takes the picture down off the wall. ‘You guys let me know when you find the engineer. If you find him.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll do that,’ says the captain and he hurries out of the smelly cabin.

  Strange!

  Satan turns the framed picture every which way but there’s no sign of its having been tampered with. All the joints are firm, the glass is in place and the back is covered with faded brown paper.

  But, then, how can it be that the pencil drawing is gone from the frame? What used to be a drawing of an octopus man wearing a suit is now nothing at all. Nothing but a sheet of cream-coloured paper, framed in thick matting and a carved wooden frame.

  31°W 11°S

  ‘We can’t find him anywhere,’ says Guðmundur when he comes up to the bridge to relieve Satan.

  ‘He has to be somewhere,’ says Satan, getting down from the captain’s chair.

  ‘Yeah. Is there hot coffee?’

  ‘There’s some sort of poison simmering there, yeah. Goodnight, old man.’

  Satan makes his way down the stairs and into his cabin on D-deck. He turns on the light in the bathroom, opens the cupboard above the sink and checks his supplies.

  Four packs of cigarettes and thirty-two paracetamol tablets.

  Fuck it!

  There’s nothing to do aboard this ship but drink coffee and smoke, and he’s had the devil of a headache ever since he got hit by those bullets.

  Satan turns on the cold water and washes down four paracetamol. Then he closes the cupboard door and examines his reflection in the mirror.

  The bandage is disgustingly dirty; his eyes are red from exhaustion and lack of sleep; his skin is suntanned and salt-burned, and his beard is getting pretty impressive after being neglected for two weeks.

  ‘Like a fucking pirate!’ Satan says with a leer but then his face starts twitching because he itches dreadfully under the sweaty bandage.

  This can’t go on – he simply has to peel that horror off his head.

  He takes off his shirt, finds scissors in a first aid kit and starts cutting the bandage away behind and in front of his left ear. Then he takes the whole bandage off his head, except for the bit that’s stuck to the wounds. His hair is not only stringy and dirty, it’s dark brown at the roots because the black dye is growing out. Satan cuts it all away, lock by lock and tangle by tangle, until there’s nothing left but a centimetre of hair in his natural colour.

  Before he pulls the last bit of bandage off the wounds, he wets it with warm water that softens the dried blood and loosens the hard cotton. He carefully pulls at the strips, which split off the half-healed wounds and bloody hair. His heartbeat rises, the veins in his head swell and sweat runs into his eyes. As soon as the final strip is free Satan holds a cold washcloth against the bleeding wounds. They are horizontal, one about two centimetres above the other. Once the bleeding has slowed he cuts the rest of the long hair away, cleans the cuts with disinfectant and ties a red bandanna around his head – he has to hide the wounds with something: they’re open to the bone. He had found this fine bandanna in a drawer in the chief engineer’s cabin.

  A red bandanna and a silver earring: he definitely resembles a pirate. A pirate in a Hollywood picture, that is.

  ‘Could be worse,’ he tells himself and lights a cigarette with shaking hands. The pain is as hellish as ever, but at least he’s rid of the itch.

  Too bad not to have more cigarettes – the thought of maybe running out of tobacco is not a good one.

  Those dead guys must have a few cartons hidden away, and Stoker must …

  ‘Stoker,’ mutters Satan, blowing out smoke through his nose. He’d forgotten about him, that he was lost. How can you get lost like that aboard a ship? Unless he fell in the sea? No – no way.

  The ship’s big, no doubt about it, but somehow not big enough for men to just …

 
; Suddenly he remembers one place nobody probably thought to look.

  The hold!

  He might have fallen into the hold. Far-fetched, yes, but he, himself, had fallen in through the door in the fucking corridor down there. Maybe such things didn’t happen to experienced sailors, but it would be stupid not to check it out.

  Satan puts his blue-check shirt back on without buttoning it. He lopes down to A-deck, where he crosses to starboard, through the electrical workshop and left along the corridor leading to the red doors with the white sign on them.

  HOLD

  The corridor is cold and dim; his heavy steps echo between the iron walls and Satan feels the hairs rising on the back of his neck. He’s keeping his cigarette in his mouth and squinting to avoid the bitter smoke.

  Ahead he can see the green light above the doors to the empty hold.

  No.

  The doors are locked, as he left them.

  ‘I guess I knew that,’ Satan says, grabbing the handle of one of the hasps – but it’s so stiff he can’t move it.

  31°W 11°S

  Guðmundur is sitting in the bridge staring out through one of the unbroken windowpanes.

  It’s night-time and the waning moon resembles a sickle, hanging in the distance above the black sea.

  The captain’s hands grip the chair’s arms, his eyes bulge and the lower part of his face – deathly pale and ghostly in the faint moonlight – twitches violently.

  After drinking untold cups of black coffee, he has heartburn and a bitter taste in his nose and mouth. The captain calmly looks to the right, towards the doorway to the starboard bridge wing, where the shotgun no longer leans against the cupboard inside the door. He threw it in the sea, along with the pirates’ machine guns, after he started tasting gunpowder on the tip of his tongue.

  The ship drifts south, drawing away from mainland South America at the rate of four to five kilometres an hour.

  Nothing awaits them except …

  Nothing awaits them.

  The idea of sticking the cold gun barrel in his mouth is getting less and less unpalatable. The imagined taste of gunpowder is actually not all that different from boiled coffee. The taste of the barrel itself is metallic and cold, with a trace of soot and oil. His teeth slide along the barrel, his eyes close, his fingers touch the cocked trigger and the end of the barrel pushes against his palate –

  ‘What!’

  The captain snaps out of a kind of waking dream, his fingers bury themselves in the leather of the chair’s arms, his legs twitch involuntarily and drops of cold sweat break out on his temples.

  32°W 51°S

  ‘DYNAMOES ON FULL POWER! DYNAMOES ON FULL POWER!’ roars the captain into the telephone, but nobody in the engine room answers.

  There is nobody in the engine room.

  Guðmundur Berndsen throws the telephone away and straps himself tightly to the leather chair.

  Outside the sea has got rough and the only thing the captain can do is drive the ship into the waves by using the electrically driven bow thruster.

  ‘Great God above!’

  The captain battles heroically against the forces of nature, which in this part of the world are associated with Cape Horn, Drake’s Passage and Antarctic winds. He is, of course, very fearful as to the fate of the ship and its crew, but while he struggles with these ancient enemies of all seafarers, his mind empties of all thought.

  A hero’s death is a good deal more acceptable than insanity, suicide or starvation.

  The waves break over the ship, which shudders all along its length. He can see virtually nothing through the windows, the wind screams like a siren, the bow cleaves the waves and the weather deck is more or less underwater.

  33°W 66°S

  The ship …

  The ship is still moving, damaged, rusty, weather-beaten yet afloat, though the hold is half full of water that has forced its way under the hatches. The only thing that has changed is that it no longer lists to starboard but has rolled over to port. The bow, in other words, no longer faces east but west. It’s left leaning now, not right leaning, which changes nothing because the ship is still drifting south, athwart the waves.

  Sæli is standing in the middle of the radar mast up on the roof of the wheelhouse, attempting to reconnect the aerials for the radio. He hooks his left arm around the frame of the mast and exposes the ends of the cut wires by cutting off their insulation with his pocketknife and scraping salt and residue off the copper. Then he tries to work out which wire is supposed to attach to which, twists them together and winds insulation tape around them.

  He’s wearing a thick parka and windproof trousers because the weather has been getting steadily colder over the past few days. His fingers are red and stiff with cold, but Sæli is so engrossed in his task that he hardly notices.

  However, when a black shadow falls on the roof of the wheelhouse he loses his concentration, looks up and –

  ‘CHRIST ALMIGHTY!’

  Sæli is so startled that he almost loses his balance, but a moment before the soles of his shoes slip off the slick metal he comes to this senses and throws his arms around the radar mast like a little child running to his mother’s embrace.

  What should he do? The shadow moves over the ship and suddenly the sun disappears behind –

  He has to warn the captain! He has to –

  Sæli moves along the mast, stretches out his right arm and uses the blade of the knife to force open the lid of a break-out box on the outside of the mast, just above his head.

  Which wire is …? And which ones are live?

  There is a blow to the ship as the bottom collides with –

  Boom, boom, boom …

  Hurry!

  He loosens two blue wires and two yellow ones, using the point of his knife as a screwdriver, then he switches the wires and screws them back on.

  Suddenly the foghorn wails.

  MBAHHHHHHH!!

  The noise is so deep and so loud that the mast vibrates like a gigantic brass instrument.

  Saturday, 1 December 2001

  Every day is like the day before, never-ending, empty and boring, and that’s how time is going to pass or stand still forever, right?

  Until the last of them succumbs to starvation or an accident, right?

  And then they would sail on and on and on as phantoms in a ghost ship until the curse was lifted from them, right?

  Until the curse was lifted from him, that is, right?

  As in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by that eighteenth-century Englishman Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  Right?

  Jónas is sitting on the edge of his bed in his starboard cabin on E-deck, staring at nothing, with his rosary between his fingers.

  The curse …

  No, he hadn’t killed an albatross, lucky bird of seafarers, like the sailor in the poem; rather, he struck his wife in the head with a hammer and buried her body on the beach before joining the ship.

  She who had been the mainstay of his life, if not the ship itself …

  The ship.

  What should he do? Nothing? Take his own life? Or wait for a sign from above?

  ‘The Lord is my shepherd, my strength, my light,’ he murmurs.

  My light …

  He is wearing nothing but a brown bathrobe; his hair is dirty and unkempt, and his eyes are cloudy and swollen after several days without sleep. His left wrist is bandaged. It’s still quite sore after his fall, but the broken bone has healed.

  But what does the condition of your body matter, when your soul is writhing in the fires of hell?

  ‘The fires of hell,’ mutters Jónas, blinking his tear-filled eyes. He rubs the black beads of the rosary, which are beginning to lose their colour, and watches it swing back and forth.

  Where is it all going to end? And when? Will the ship sink before they die of disease or hunger or will divine providence direct it …

  Boom, boom, boom …

  What was that?

 
Jónas straightens his back and listens.

  Silence.

  Is he imagining things or is it getting colder in –

  MBAHHHHHHH!!

  Jónas clenches the fingers of his right hand around the rosary and crawls on his knees onto the bed.

  The foghorn!

  He pulls the curtains aside and puts his ghostly face against the icy glass. What he sees is so dreadful and at the same time so beautiful that he doesn’t know whether to despair or rejoice.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispers the second mate, crossing himself with trembling fingers. ‘It’s happening!’

  The Almighty is watching him. Of course He’s watching him! He’s been called to meet Him …

  13:31

  The captain wakes in his chair when the bottom of the ship hits something.

  Boom, boom, boom …

  ‘What was that?’ Guðmundur Berndsen wonders aloud. He sits up straighter in the chair, shakes off the chill of his catnap and yawns as he rubs the sleep from his bloodshot eyes.

  Did the ship just …?

  MBAHHHHHHH!!

  When he hears the foghorn the captain comes to life with such a jolt that he almost loses that life at the same moment.

  His mind goes empty, his eyes bulge and his heart contracts into a hard knot.

  He looks out the salt-covered windows and sees white.

  ‘HOLY MARY!’

  The captain turns on the bow thruster, then he turns the ship to port and just barely manages to avoid a collision with an iceberg the size of an eight-storey building.

  13:45

  He has turned off the foghorn and climbed down from the radar mast.

  Silence.

  Sæli stands at the front of the wheelhouse roof and looks across the Weddell Sea, which is covered with broken ice as far as he can see. The ocean is dark blue and so cold it moves like syrup. There are a few dozen metres between the icebergs, but that space gets narrower as they get closer to Antarctica. The wind is picking up out of the north-west. There’s a whirlwind in the offing.