“Jesus Christ!” breathed Eddy. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”
Diane stared at her abbreviated fingers as if they no longer belonged to her – three stumps of bone cradled in purple meat, leaking blood. Her eyebrows were drawn down, shadowing her eyes. She turned her hand this way and that to examine it. Blood pattered down on to the blanket.
“Jesus, Diane…”
She spoke dreamily, revolted and fascinated at the same time.
“It’s for you, Eddy. For you.”
Eddy finally pulled himself together. He hurried over, tore a strip off the bedsheet and wound it around her hand. The three tips were lying on the bed, the skin grey and blotchy. The nails shone with varnish.
“Baby, it’s going to be fine. Be calm.”
“Oh, I’m fine, Eddy,” Diane said in a scary, dreamy voice. “Love doesn’t hurt.”
The makeshift bandage was soaked through already.
“Jesus, Diane, what am I meant to do?”
“We should eat the pieces, Eddy.”
“Don’t talk like that. That’s crazy talk. We should go and see the doctor, that’s what we should do. Jesus.”
He had forgotten she still had the knife until he felt the edge of the blade stinging his neck.
“We should eat them, Eddy,” she said and pressed the knife gently so that it nicked his skin.
“Put it away, darling. This is crazy talk. Put it away.”
“Do you love me, Eddy?”
“This is crazy talk, darling.”
The knife pressed deeper. There was a look in her eyes, wild, subtle, fearful. Eddy swallowed hard.
“Do you love me?”
“Of course I do. You know that. I tell you every night.”
“Boys lie, Eddy. I need proof. I need proof that you love me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“No, but that’s crazy bullshit, darling.”
He supposed he might be able to grab the knife off her, twist it out of her hands, but he would have to move quickly. The bitch was deadly.
With the thumb and forefinger of her bandaged hand, she took one of the fingertips and held it up to his mouth.
“You drank me last night, Eddy. I’ve got the scar to prove it.” She showed him the scabby line down her forearm. “Now eat me.”
Eddy remembered drinking that water and he thought it tasted funny, but you couldn’t tell with the water on the Hope. It always tasted slightly salty. He feared he knew what she had put in it.
“No,” he said.
She pushed the morsel against his lips, which he was compressing shut. He felt a warm trickle down from the knife to the neckline of his T-shirt. Sweat prickled in his hair. “I’ll cut your neck open all the way.”
“I’ll have that blade off you in a second flat.” He was mumbling in order to keep his mouth closed.
“Try it.”
Why did he always get the nutcases? She’d seemed OK when they met, normal, bit nervy, but he’d put that down to her being cherry.
“Eat. If you love me.”
The back of his throat felt woollen and as he inhaled through his nose he could smell the nail varnish.
“Stop this, darling. I love you. I love you. OK?”
Diane jabbed the knife hard. Eddy let out a yelp and she slipped the fingertip in.
Eddy retched and gagged, trying to reach out for Diane. On his tongue the cold pad of the fingertip was smooth and dry, ragged at one end, the nail hard like a beetle’s carapace, the blood sickly. It seemed enormous, filling his entire mouth, touching the roof, his teeth, the insides of his cheeks.
Keeping the knife at his neck, she held her palm over his mouth and pinched his nostrils with her finger and thumb. His inhalations became panicky, urgent. A whine came from the back of his throat. Tears were crushed out from under his eyelids.
Still holding his nose, Diane raised her hand and kissed Eddy on the lips.
“I love you, Eddy. Now swallow.”
He spat hard. The fingertip flew out and smacked into her forehead. Her eyes swelled with shock.
“BITCH! FUCKING BITCH!”
He slammed her arm away, wrenching her wrist so that the knife tumbled away. Snatching it up, he pointed it at her and spat and spat and spat.
“YOU CRAZY FUCKING BITCH!” he roared.
“Eddy, don’t talk like that. It’s only because I love you so much –”
“Shut your face! You’re deviant, that’s what you are.” He put his hand to his neck and found blood. “De-fucking-viant.”
“Eddy –”
“I’m going to kill you. You’ve got five seconds to get out or I’m going to kill you.”
“Eddy –”
“Four. Three.”
She scrambled off the bed and pulled open the door.
“Two. And take all this fucking shit with you!”
He flung a handful of her clothing after her. Most of it fell over the edge of the walkway.
“But I love you!”
“Don’t want to see you again. Ever.”
Everyone has tiffs, thought Diane miserably as she wandered along the walkway and nursed her wounded hand. And then they talk it over and they get back together again and it’s like it was before, only better, because they need to know what it’s like to hate each other so that they can love each other more. That’s what Eddy doesn’t understand. At the moment he can only hate me, but when he’s calmed down he’ll love me again. Better, even.
Her hand throbbed mercilessly, and she supposed she should take it to the doctor. She doubted Eddy cleaned his knife much so there would be all sorts of germs on it and she might get an infection if she wasn’t careful.
The deck was darkened, service lights providing fitful interruptions that didn’t seem to improve things much.
Diane wandered a bit more, then, feeling drowsy, she squatted down in the drifting warm air from a heating vent and tried to sleep.
Poor Eddy, she thought. Poor, poor Eddy. He was hers, heart and mind, body and soul. He just didn’t know it yet.
She woke the next morning, hungry and nauseated. Her hand was stinging badly now, and the bandage was wet through. The tide-marks of the bloodstains reminded her of rose petals.
She would wait until midday before heading back to the cabin. She might leave him a note. Sometimes it was easier to write things down. You couldn’t be misunderstood, and what you wrote could be examined and re-examined until it sank in properly. She decided that her and Eddy’s problem was lack of communication, and that it was her job to improve matters. A note would be a start.
She came across a stopper and got talking to him, as was her habit. He told her a story about the Rain Man, which she didn’t believe, but something about his own life she found really interesting, the bit about gutting and slicing the fish that had killed all those people! Stoppers had big imaginations, she knew from experience, but this one was unusual. She found herself wanting to believe him, even if she couldn’t. She wanted to believe about the gutted fish.
Finally she said goodbye and went to the cabin. She still had the key, and so she let herself in. It was a mess, and she set about tidying up right away. She was hampered a bit by her hand but she did a good job of washing the sheets, folding Eddy’s clothes and putting her own clothes back in the drawers, wiping up the bloodstains.
Sitting on the bed with her knees hugged up to her chest, she predicted how surprised and pleased Eddy would be to come back and see her. He’d say he was glad she’d come back, he thought he’d lost her for good, please forgive him, he loved her. She thrilled with the idea. He would go up to the greenhouses and buy her flowers, even though they were hideously expensive. He’d say money was no object and there were some things more important than money. Red roses. For her. I’m sorry, darling.
Diane found the tobacco tin and consoled herself with a couple of Eddy’s toenails. She then recovered the other tin, the one with his hair inside, from the pock
et of a pair of her jeans folded at the bottom of a drawer. The hairs were dark and stiff like wire. She had preserved them carefully, rescuing them from the pillow and the sheets and the plughole, separating them from her own, which she couldn’t see any reason to keep. There were straight ones from his head, and the slightly curly ones from his chest and armpits, and the very curly ones… She giggled to think where they had come from. She stroked a finger through the collection, stirred them round in a circle to reveal the dented metal underneath, held them up to the light one by one to see them glisten. If her mother and father could see her now, they would surely approve. When it came down to it, all they wanted was for her to be happy and here she was, deliriously so.
She gave the hairs names and invented little lives for them until Eddy returned.
Eddy was lying on the bed, stretched fully out and stripped naked. He was calm and, Diane thought, reconciled.
There were red roses all over the cabin, everywhere. She’d never suspected he loved her that much and he couldn’t possibly afford them, but the sight and the sentiment were breathtaking.
When he’d returned, there had been frenzied moments of passion. Diane’s love and pity had been powerful things, lending strength to her embrace and ecstatic fury to her caress. He had melted in her arms. He had fainted in the light of her love.
And then there was the stopper’s story…
Looking at him now, Diane, exhausted, satisfied, content, could only tell him again and again how much she loved him, and his reply did not need to be spoken, she trusted him that much.
Of course, it could never be the same again for her and Eddy. She’d been silly to think that. You only had to read his body language: the fingers of his ribcage thrusting up through the hole in his chest as if in prayer, the sagginess at the top of his scalp where the hair was dark and matted and folds of skin were torn back and points of bone gleamed through, the missing organs…
Diane wiped her mouth. He was hers now, body and soul, heart and mind.
DR MACAULAY’S CASEBOOK
Dr Chamberlain has read the last of Dr Macaulay’s casebooks twenty-eight times in almost as many months, and each time he closes the book he draws a deep breath and exhales slowly. There really does seem to be no cure.
It is late. The surgery is empty and Dr Chamberlain sits in his clinically clean office. The furniture is simple: two chairs (one comfortable, one less so) divided by a formidable desk. There are books, mainly Dr Macaulay’s casebooks, lined up along a shelf on the wall behind him.
Dr Chamberlain takes out Macaulay’s last casebook and reads, for the twenty-ninth time, words written three years ago…
Tuesday, Week 1,783
One doctor for one million patients. It’s patently absurd. They didn’t intend for there to be any health care on the Hope, or if they did, they simply didn’t anticipate the scale of the problem. The statistics thus far:
Cholera 897 deaths
Typhoid 325 deaths
Yellow Fever 107 deaths
Cancer-related 142 deaths
Sexually transmitted 83 deaths
Respiratory 760 deaths
Old age 2689 deaths
Unnatural causes 951 deaths
TOTAL: 5954 deaths
Nearly six thousand, not counting those which I have not attended or attested to.
I have seen death in myriad forms – lungs coughing up black phlegm, faces so riddled with cancer they resemble a relief map of the Black Mountains, whole deck areas devastated by plague.
But to see a baby born choking blue on its own umbilicus and lack the necessary skills and equipment to save it!
And I am only one man.
What was going through their minds when they launched this ship?
Wednesday, Week 1,783
I have reread yesterday’s entry. It was an unforgivable lapse, but I will not erase it. Besides, I was forgetting Marcus, who is coming along excellently. He has a natural aptitude for medicine and has learned almost everything I have to teach him. He will make an excellent assistant and, in time, my replacement.
The usual cases today. Minor ailments, wounds from fights and accidents, one serious case of dysentery. Two deaths. I am dispensing as much sympathy as I can, but I am running perilously short of it. Luckily, I am not running short of drugs. I think people would rather have the pill than a doctor. Pills are uncomplicated, don’t need to apologise, won’t break the bad news to you (while trying to soften the blow), are always there when you need them, don’t tire of you.
I stare through the window at grey seas, and I wish I was small, white, smooth and round. That way I could be with every patient all of the time. The palatable doctor.
Thursday, Week 1,783
Among many, two patients today who could most politely be called eccentrics.
The first swore the Hope was about to explode and we should all man the lifeboats. Such paranoid delusions are not uncommon, particularly under these exceptionally claustrophobic circumstances. I have reassured him as best I can and prescribed a mild sedative, which will reassure him better.
The second is more singular, an involved and complex psychological disturbance which I have chosen to study in some detail. I have asked him to return tomorrow.
I feel certain that you, Marcus, and your successors will learn more to your benefit from this case, if it proves to be as interesting as I suspect, than the endless list of trivial complaints and large-scale tragedies with which these casebooks have hitherto been filled.
Friday, Week 1,783
The gentleman concerned is a Mr Alexei Antonov.
The conversation that passed between us on our only formal consultation is set below, a transcript of a tape-recording I have made. The transcript may be cross-referenced with the original, Tape No. 157D.
Alexei Antonov speaks excellent English with only a trace of Russian inflection. He is intelligent and forthright, in his fifties, with hollow, red-lidded eyes but generally in fine physical health. A great Russian bear of a man, if that is not too much of a cliché. I do not believe he can easily be deluded, and similarly I do not believe he has set out to deceive me. It is the very lucidity with which he treats his madness that I find so intriguing.
I must note his obsessive habit of running his hand through his hair, which became increasingly marked as the conversation progressed, so much so that a few strands had accumulated in between his fingers by the end. In consequence of this habit, the hair on the top of his head has thinned considerably.
“Sit down, please, Mr Antonov.”
“Alexei, call me Alexei, Doctor.”
“Very good, Alexei. You don’t mind if I tape-record our conversation?”
“No.”
“Now tell me again what you told me yesterday. What is the nature of your complaint?”
“It is not me, Doctor. It is my wife. The ship is trying to kill her.”
“The ship?”
“The Hope.”
“How are these … attempted murders taking place?”
“Not murder.”
“Can you qualify that statement?”
“No.”
“What, then, is happening, Alexei?”
“This ship is alive, Doctor. She breathes, she thinks, her iron heart beats. Of course, we humans believe we are running her. We have a captain, a tidy man who steers our course and keeps law and order. He runs the ship, does he not? And we have a crew of stout sailors well-versed in the modern techniques of sailing. They act also as an unofficial police force. There are officers and petty officers and entertainment officers and engineers and janitors and chefs and the greenhouse-keepers and the food-store guards. They all run the ship, do they not? And the rest of us, the passengers, we live our days and scrabble to earn a living, to keep our heads above water, so to speak.
“But I truly do not think that the Captain or any of the crew run anything except the lives of thousands of humans.
“Imagine the ship as a dog with an infestati
on of fleas, and you will have some idea of my vision of the Hope.”
“I can see that. But it presupposes that the Hope is sentient, as you believe, and that we humans are parasites.”
“Correct. It is an apt metaphor, no?”
“No. The ship was built to carry humans. That was its sole purpose.”
“Is not a dog created in part to carry fleas? It provides them with a source of food and life, just as the meat of other animals provides the dog with a source of food and life. It is nature’s way.”
“How is this relevant to your wife?”
“Pray, let me continue. Finally, the dog decides it wishes to shake off the fleas. It has been irritated too long. Naturally the fleas are dying anyway but new ones are hatched to replace them. There are diseases, accidents, murders, which kill off some of the fleas, but they are replaced. An exponential increase. The numbers are swelling. The dog must take direct action. The dog must scratch.”
“Your wife?”
“Ah. About three weeks ago, we were promenading along the outer rim, watching a marvellous sunset, when the section of walkway upon which Pushka was standing collapsed, taking the railing with it. If we had not been walking arm in arm in our old-fashioned way, she would have plummeted straight down into the sea. As it was, we both nearly fell, but I managed to catch hold of the end of the railing. My wife was clutching my arm, hanging on for dear life. She did not scream.
“‘Pull me up, Alyosha,’ was all she said. And I did. I would rather both of us had fallen than let go of my Pushka. I hauled her over the edge of the broken walkway and held her in my arms. I think I had been more scared than she had.
“I took her home and went back to the spot. I knelt down and examined that walkway, and I saw no sign of rust, decay, any sort of corruption. The break was clean and straight, as if it had been cut neatly in half.
“I have not told my wife about these findings. At the time, I can tell you, I was considerably shaken. Half a bottle of vodka put an end to that, however. Ha, ha.
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