by Meg Mundell
Trying not to sound defensive, I admitted I hadn’t seen much of Cleary lately. He hadn’t shown up to our schoolroom gatherings yet. A pity, it’d do him good.
She thought. ‘Maybe it’s some kind of delayed reaction. The shock of almost losing his mum.’
‘Traumatic thing for any kid,’ I said. ‘And he’s smart – he’d have known what was at stake.’
Abruptly Billie changed tack, asked if I was close to any of the crew. It seemed an odd question, but I just said a breezy no. She gave me a searching look, and I made some inane remark about things improving soon, once we were taken ashore.
She shook her head grimly. ‘This country hates us.’ The public was baying for blood, she said: calling us ship rats, dirty scabs, human trash. Toxic cargo, foreign invaders. And it wasn’t just the howlers: the immigration minister had called us a walking death threat.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘You remember what that sailor said? That young guy you know, back in the sick room. When he was off his head, delirious.’
Yes. I remembered.
‘You didn’t hear this from me,’ said Billie. ‘But I just got some news. Forensics found viral traces in one of the water tanks.’
‘In the tanks?’ Devil water.
‘That sailor,’ she said. ‘He knows something. I think he knows who did this to us.’
~
In retrospect, my next move was reckless. Possessed by an urge to take action – to do something, however foolhardy or futile – I searched the ship for him. Came up against locked doors, crew-only sections. I didn’t ask for him by name, just hunted doggedly.
I found him on a small balcony off the fore saloon, perched on a milk crate, staring out towards the open sea. No mistaking him: handsome, even from behind.
He didn’t hear the door open behind him.
‘Stewart.’ My voice sounded oddly formal. ‘I need to speak to you.’
He turned his head, startled. Saw something in me: a warning.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said. Cool, unperturbed. A quick recovery.
I held the door wide, projected my voice back into the saloon: ‘You’d rather I said this in public? In front of everyone?’
Without a word he leant over and shoved the door shut. Then directed his stare back to the harbour. Trying for nonchalance, but less convincing by the minute.
Sunlight glanced off the sea in blinding flashes. In the distance yachts tacked back and forth. I felt a pang of self-pity, realised there was no comfort for me here.
I spoke. ‘Do you remember being sick? Thrashing around, asking for a priest?’
Stewart didn’t answer, gave no sign he’d heard me.
I pressed on. ‘You were talking to yourself, rambling. Off your head. You don’t remember?’
A twitch: a crack in his façade, a gap to push my words through.
‘We’re both lucky to be alive,’ I went on. ‘I was delirious too, for a while. But I remember what you said: There’s something in the water.’
He sprang to his feet, fists clenched. Kicked at the milk crate, putting a feeble barrier between us. An effort so pathetic I almost laughed.
‘So you know?’ I said. ‘You know who did this to us?’
He stood against the light, breathing hard, too thin in shorts and t-shirt, those remarkable looks chiselled down to gauntness. He hadn’t gained an ounce of weight back.
‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said, voice cracking. ‘Nothing, I swear.’
I knew he was lying. Any sympathy I’d felt for him was gone. Never had I been violent towards another person, but I was close now, and both of us knew it.
‘Tell me what you know,’ I said.
‘Don’t do this. You’ll make it worse.’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll go to the police.’
He was sweating. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said, almost pleading. ‘They offered me money – a lot of money. But I didn’t take it, I swear. I said no.’
A putrid smell wafted up from below, rotting fish or kelp, some rancid marine stink. And all at once I caught his fear.
‘Please,’ he said, urgent now. ‘They’re watching. They’ll come after you.’
I turned and left without another word. As the door slammed shut behind me I paused, still dazzled by the glare, my eyes adjusting to the gloom of the saloon.
Not two steps away from me stood a crewman, someone I vaguely recognised but could not name: tall and sloped, hard face, a black beard and deep-set eyes. He stared right at me, and there was something hostile in that look. Could he have overheard us?
I made for the exit, sought out the nearest wash cube, and scrubbed my hands, under my nails, between my fingers, until the skin was pink and raw. Then I headed to the schoolroom, locked the door behind me, necked three Calmex and lay trembling on the sofa, waiting for the drug to take effect, to wash away the terror.
~
Twelve hours later I woke to find the ship in chaos: crawling with soldiers, plastic barricades across the deck, police tape thrumming in the breeze. People clustered in small groups, casting anxious glances over shoulders, at each other, at the soldiers’ guns.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked a passing official, but he ignored me.
‘Body in the water,’ said a voice. I turned to see Delaney, my old truant officer, the one the kids called Santa.
‘What?’ Disoriented, my head still woolly from sleep. ‘What body?’
‘Young fella,’ he said. ‘One of the deckhands. Horrible. I can’t believe it.’
An awful possibility stirred: an idea starting to form. ‘What happened?’
Delaney looked shaken. ‘Poor kid was floating face-down in the shallow water with his skull bashed in. Terrible business.’
I was afraid to ask, fearful of the answer. ‘Who is it? What’s his name?’
‘Scottish lad,’ said the old sailor. ‘Nice boy. The one they called Scoot.’
13
CLEARY
From the doorway, he scanned the packed schoolroom: kids sitting on desks, crates, the floor. Popcorn scattered around, an air of cheerful chaos. In one corner a hologram mouse did stunts on a trapeze, while in the middle of the room a pile of Lego bricks was morphing into a lighthouse, children standing on chairs to click the next layer into place. Teach was assembling a cargo ship. He looked up smiling as Cleary and his ma came in.
At once Declan dragged him over to a table, pushed aside a pile of Christmas decorations and began commandeering an arsenal of coloured pens. A jar of glitter had spilt and stray sparkles glinted from the children’s faces.
Laid out before Cleary was a tempting stack of creamy white paper. His friend was urging him to get to work, but he was watching his mother’s mouth, trying to decipher what she and Teach were saying. He could only catch the odd word, not enough to make sense of.
Then his ma wove across the room, kissed his cheek and ruffled Declan’s hair. I’ll be right there, she signed. Have fun, sweetheart. Enjoy yourself.
She settled into a chair just outside the schoolroom, waved through the glass panel in the door and opened her magazine. Cleary watched her flick the pages. Then he chose a purple pen and ran a test line down the page. The inks were rich, but the paper held them fast, and he was soon lost in a world of shapes and colours: orchid, lawn-green, cornsilk, azure, thistledown, moccasin. Now and then he glanced up to check, saw her head bent over her magazine.
As he shaded the hull of a pirate ship, the girl opposite tapped his wrist and pointed to the door. His ma was waving through the glass: Just going to the jacks, she signed. Back soon.
Cleary unfurled a fresh sheet, but a prickling unease kept intruding on his thoughts. Declan scribbled demands for him to draw a rat, a triceratops, an astronaut, and he obliged with quick sketches, checking the door between pen strokes.
~
Later that afternoon, soldiers ordered them to line up for a scan. The queue was long, the air dense and muggy, a rolling bank of cloud massing darkly out to sea. Gulls wheeled around the masts in nervous circles. Bad weather was coming.
A man crumpled to the deck in front of them. Cleary’s ma knelt beside the fallen man and took his head in her lap. Grey-clad officials converged, scanners at the ready, but the man was already coming to; he waved them away, fanning himself, mimed struggling with the heat. Big of build but pared down now, with a rangy, sunken-cheeked appearance: one of the people who’d been sick. His face was familiar, but it took Cleary a moment to place it: the bald-headed man who’d harassed him at dinner all those months ago, upset his ma with nasty words. Now the man was weak and harmless, the sting gone out of him, giving his ma a grateful look, the two of them no longer enemies. The sickness had changed everything.
On the beach Cleary saw a pair of guard dogs romping across the sand, two German Shepherds tussling over a length of driftwood. The animals dashed and feinted, tails wagging, teeth snapping in mock ferocity. Glancing back, Cleary froze. His heart gave one solitary panicked thump. Looming over his ma was a tall bearded man with a stoop. The man was speaking to her, showing his teeth in a wolfish smile; she shaded her eyes and gazed up at him, listening.
The picture was so wrong, the shock of it so sharp, that at first Cleary did not register the vital detail.
Blackbeard was holding something in one hand: the shaft of a metal crowbar, black and heavy, the end hooked like a claw. He clasped he weapon aloft in a loose grip, pointing behind him, enacting this charade in plain sight. As if it was an innocent object, something you waved around to illustrate a point or indicate direction.
Nobody paying the slightest attention, except for one small child.
One swing of the man’s arm and his ma would fall to the deck, bleeding and broken.
Still talking, the weapon held high, Blackbeard looked straight at Cleary for a long moment, then turned back to his mother’s upturned face.
~
That night Cleary waited until his ma was fast asleep. He counted to five hundred in the dark, then touched her forehead lightly, checking for a response, any clue that she was not entirely under. Moving with great care, praying that the bed was not creaking, he slid out from beside her, wriggled into the narrow space beneath the opposite bed, and pulled the blanket down to form a curtain. Lay very still upon the dusty floor and tried to put his thoughts together.
What he’d seen today had forced him to think quickly. An ordinary weapon was no use against a man like that. Never mind that Cleary hadn’t told a soul what he knew – that didn’t seem to matter to the man. Blackbeard was getting closer, becoming bolder and more dangerous. It was only a matter of time before he carried out his threat: a finger drawn across a throat, a crowbar raised above his mother’s head, a bird impaled on a spike.
There was one person who could help, one person he could trust. Billie would know what to do.
He couldn’t put the danger into words. Could not risk spelling it out, an accusation he couldn’t take back, sentences that could fall into the wrong hands and be used against him – against both of them.
Cleary propped the torch into position; waited to be sure his ma was still asleep, watching flecks of dust drift through the cone of light. Then he retrieved his pens and set out the colours he would need: charcoal, navy, scarlet. Smoothed the paper flat, shut his eyes, and brought the picture to mind. Once the image was clear, he began to draw.
BILLIE
The summons to gather on the main deck blared out over the PA. Billie heard it from the nurses’ cabin, where she was composing a message home to Jamie and her parents, if only in her head.
Lackeys were setting out chairs on the main deck for the gathering crowd. Last night’s storm had scoured the ship clean, but the heat was already building, the air humming with an uneasy cocktail of anger, nerves and hope. Weeks of inertia and uncertainty had fuelled talk of full-scale protests, and the hunger strikers were weakening by the day.
By the rail she spotted Juliette, her back turned to the crowd, pressing a wad of tissue to her reddened eyes.
In this charged atmosphere, word of the young crewman’s death had detonated a new wave of anxieties. Suicide was one popular theory, but it held no weight with those who knew the gruesome facts: severe blunt-force trauma was rarely self-inflicted.
Minus one more: Scoot now dead. After they’d fought so hard to coax him through, to keep him alive. Gone, just like that. The life smashed out of him.
No news on who might have carried out this brutal act. No word from Mitch, the journalist, since his last message, those stark words glowing on the screen: forensics found viral traces in kiosk tank. Since its arrival, several days ago now, all her messages to him had gone unanswered.
Once you got past the horror, it made sense. Just one tank contaminated, then the kiosk swiftly sealed off, declared a crime scene. All attention diverted to the dead man discovered lying in a pool of his own blood. That first victim unplanned, an accidental witness to a split-second act; the tampering perhaps not obvious at first, but the culprit’s presence at the scene enough to rouse suspicion in the aftermath, in the carnage that was to come. A retrospective clue, a chance the killer couldn’t take. Davy Whelan and his memories swiftly dispatched. Meanwhile, the virus making its stealthy way from the water tank into the first human body, then leaping from person to person, unleashing havoc and destruction.
Now this: the young crewman from Aberdeen beaten to death and tossed away like garbage.
Robbie was waving her over, had saved her a seat: ‘Big boss is here. Must be about our lad.’
Up on the foredeck the incident commander surveyed the crowd, half-moons of sweat blooming in the armpits of his shirt. Flanked by soldiers, he sat behind a row of trestle tables – barricades, Billie couldn’t help thinking, in case this turned ugly. An expectant hush fell as the incident commander stood to speak.
‘I’m here to share some positive news,’ he began, his voice amped a touch too loud. ‘You will all be transferred to a secure location in a matter of days.’
Whoops swept through the crowd. Jubilation dissolved into chatter, then shushing as the commander held up a hand. He’d allowed himself no more than a tight smile.
‘The medical team has confirmed there is no further risk of infection. You’re going to be taken ashore.’ A murmur went up, hands were raised. The man patted the air, signalled for patience. ‘I will take questions. But first I’ve been instructed to brief you.’
He spoke without emotion. They’d soon be transported to a new facility at an undisclosed location. This geographic vagueness was for their own protection: there was intense media and public interest surrounding this whole unfortunate affair, and the government had legitimate concerns about both privacy and safety.
‘I must emphasise,’ he said over the growing hum of disquiet, ‘that we’re dealing with a heightened security situation. But please be assured you have the full support of the Australian government. Protections will be put in place.’
As of now, they were all subject to a legally binding confidentiality writ: no speaking to anyone, in any jurisdiction, about events occurring on this ship. A silence both indefinite and legally enforceable: no anonymous comments, no private revelations to friends or relatives. Not now, not ever. Zero disclosure, for their own protection.
‘Fucking gag order,’ muttered Robbie. ‘Can you believe this? Where’s that bampot captain?’
The rumble swelled to noise. The commander pressed on. He spoke
as if merely conveying information, as if he was a reluctant chess piece being moved by higher forces. There were several police investigations currently underway – into the viral outbreak, into the suspicious deaths of not one but two crew members. At this point none of the passengers or crew would be returning home. Nor would anyone commence work: their contracts were suspended until further notice. In the meantime, they’d all be housed at this secret location.
‘Which will be a much more spacious facility than we’ve been able to provide here on the ship,’ he added, raising his voice to be heard. He could not comment on the most recent death – that matter was now in the hands of local police – but could assure them that extra security personnel had been deployed. ‘Your safety is paramount,’ he said over the growing racket.
If not for the soldiers, Billie suspected a chair or two might be in danger of being hurled.
A passenger near the front rose to his feet. ‘You’re treating us like criminals,’ the man yelled. ‘I lost my sister on this fucking ship.’ He turned to face the crowd, pointed at the officials. ‘Look at these fucking arseholes up there! Treat us like scum, keep us in the dark. Why don’t we get a say in what happens to us?’
Soldiers leapt forward to grab the man’s arms and twisted them behind his back. He kept shouting as they manhandled him away, his face distorted by pain and indignation: ‘Fuck you people! You brought us here. We’re not criminals!’
Gov-reps ordered calm and threatened to close down the briefing. Further disruption would result in criminal action. That put a dampener on the noise, but the air remained charged. Question time, when it came, was limited to a few minutes. Answers were brief and scant on detail.
When the officials and soldiers left, the mood soon softened, conversation dropping to a hum. The fight’s gone out of them, Billie thought. They’re tired.
‘At least we’re escaping this death trap,’ said Robbie. ‘That’s worth a drink, wouldn’t you say?’
