The Ancient

‘No risk to me, honey. He can only say no.’

‘What rank are you?’

Matthew turned to her, a quite different look in his eye now, one that was difficult to read but undeniably harder than when he’d last looked at her. ‘First officer.’

Esther cleared her throat, embarrassed, though not quite sure why. ‘Right. Great.’

He looked back at the screen and Esther took the hint.

‘An hour then.’

He made no reply.

She hooked the pack over her shoulder and made for the door. ‘Thanks for the beer.’

‘Sure.’

The plywood door banged shut again and although there was still an inch left in his glass, Matthew Cotton gestured to the barman. It was important to think ahead. After all, he would have drained that inch before the bottle was uncorked.

3 (#u0822ac7f-3760-5911-9571-db132baf9de4)

As the giant crane swung on its arc, the sun shining between the criss-crossed metal girders strobed across the deck of the MV Lysicrates, and bugged the tits off its first officer.

Matthew Cotton blinked against it as he leant heavily on the ship’s taff rail and watched Esther’s predicament with amusement. He was leaning heavily because he was only a few drinks away from the oblivion he’d been chasing since noon, and he watched with amusement because her ire was becoming comical.

‘Give the greasy little sucker some cash,’ he mouthed at her, then took another deep swallow from a can of thin South American beer.

As if she’d heard him from the unlikely distance of fifty yards, she turned her head and squinted up at the ship, gesturing violently again at the vessel to the undernourished harbour security guard, who was no longer even looking at her. The guard flicked his hand dismissively in her direction as though warding off a fly, and shifted his weight from one bony leg to the other. She towered above this little man, and perhaps if he hadn’t sported an ancient gun in a battered leather holster by his hip, she would simply have elbowed him out of the way and walked on.

That option not open to a woman with an instinct for survival, she was vigorously pursuing the only other one, which was to shout.

In a moment Matthew would rescue her, but for now he was using the time just to look. There hadn’t been the time or space to examine her properly in the smoky little bar, but now he was in a position to study her without fear of spiky feminine reprisal.

She was too far off for him to take in close detail, but already he liked the suggestion of athleticism in her angry body, the way she was practically stamping her foot, and when she mashed an exasperated hand into her hair he imagined he could register its shine.

He smiled and wiped his mouth clean of the acrid beer foam; shifted a drinker’s phlegm from his throat.

‘Hey! Hector!’ His shout made the diminutive man look up lazily. Though he couldn’t make out her words, Matthew assumed she had been braying at the guard in English that merely increased in volume as understanding diminished. No matter what her circumstances were, and if he were honest he was so loaded now he could barely remember their conversation, she was just your average American back-packing kid. Shout down what you can’t control. He raked around for his best Spanish.

‘Let her aboard. She’s a passenger.’ He hesitated, then added for no reason other than mischief, ‘A little something for the crew.’

The guard scratched at his balls and did nothing. Matthew waited. He knew these people. To react to anything immediately was a sign of defeat. Esther waited too, her eyes narrowed to slits in Matthew’s direction.

The weary Peruvian hand motioned again, this time obliquely directing her towards the gangway, then the man squatted down and got busy picking his teeth, as though all along his objection had been that she was preventing him from performing this important task.

She took her time coming aboard, pulling on that enormous back-pack complete with tent, hanging tin mugs and water bottles, then walked slowly forward with the gait of someone used to carrying a large burden.

As she came closer Matthew noted the deep tan on the thighs that protruded from her patterned shorts, and the incongruously masculine muscles that made them move with grace under such weight.

He stayed where he was, but lifted his head to greet her as she negotiated the skinny drawbridge of wood that was suspended over the moat of Pacific Ocean below. ‘They don’t speak English too good, those guys,’ he said with what he imagined was a boyish grin.

She stopped and rubbed at her scalp again. ‘You cleared it then?’

Matthew squinted, uncomprehending.

‘With the captain?’

He grinned, swaying slightly. ‘Aw, yeah. Sure. Sure I did.’

She looked doubtful, and the sudden childlike anxiety that crossed her face, the expression of a disappointed kid, touched a nerve in the deep drunken miasma that was enveloping Matthew Cotton. He breathed quickly and sharply through his nose and tried to focus, tried harder to clear his brain.

‘Straight up. He’s cool. You get the owner’s cabin. It’s cunningly marked “owner’s cabin” on D-deck. Through there, two floors up. Third on the right. Not locked.’

Her face lit with relief, then a more unpleasant emotion betrayed itself as her eyes strayed to the beer can in Matthew’s fist. Pity.

‘Listen. Thanks. I owe you.’

Matthew nodded, looking away to avoid her pitying eyes, and she walked towards the passenger block, the cups and pan clanking on her pack.

‘By the way.’

He didn’t look round. He didn’t want to hear any addendum right now. Nor look back into the eyes of an attractive young girl who was finding a drunken older man sad.

‘Matthew?’

She spoke his name so gently it broke his resolve and he turned.

‘Huh?’

‘I think you’ll find that grammatically, “little something” in Spanish, when you refer to an object with contempt, uses the diminutive to emphasize the colloquialism.’

The Lysicrates’ only passenger scanned the accommodation block and disappeared through the door from the poop deck.

Matthew watched the heavy metal lozenge long after it swung shut, then drained his beer, crushed the can and threw it into the water below.

Esther Mulholland liked to pee in the shower. When the water was perfect, the hot stream of urine that spiralled from leg to leg was without temperature. Visible, but not tangible, it joined her with the needles of water in a way that made her sigh with satisfaction. It had been so long since she had revelled in this ritual that the developed world thought so important, this rinsing of the body that separated them from the savages.

It felt like a return. She let the hot water batter her for at least ten minutes, opening her mouth to let it run in and out, then stepped from the tiny plastic tray into the hot cabin.

Esther put her hands on either side of the porthole and leant her forehead against the glass. The circular window looked out onto a serpentine collection of pipes, their paint peeling like a disease, and beyond them the port of Callao clanked and whined with industry.

So what if the ship was shitty, this was luck beyond her dreams. She knew it was irregular, probably illegal. Bulk carriers didn’t usually take paying passengers, only the bigger ships, the ones full of officers’ bored wives slowly drinking themselves to death on bleak industrial decks, armed with the civilized pretence that somehow every hour was cocktail hour. But if the drunken first officer and his malleable captain were happy to take her, she was ecstatic to accept. If it was against the law then, hell, it would be their heads on the block not hers.

And look what she got for free. The owner’s cabin, with shower. A seventies homage to Formica, flowered curtains and hairy carpet tiles, a cell of privacy that gave her a whole four days before they docked in Texas to make sense of the hundreds of pages of scribbles she’d made in her tattered red notebook, and more importantly, translate the pile of Dictaphone tapes. She grabbed a thin towel stamped with some other ship’s name, rubbed at her hair and sat down heavily on the foam sofa. This was going to get her a first. A big fat, fuck-off-I-told-you-I-could-do-it degree, the kind that only the lucky rich kids walked away with, regardless of what was between their ears. Right now she felt luckier than hell. She laid the excuse for a towel over her face and lay back with a smile.

Hold number three was still dripping from the high-pressure hoses that had bombarded its sides. Now it was ready to receive its cargo. The two massive iron doors were rolled back on rails to either side, and the water that dripped from the lip echoed as it fell thirty feet into the dark pit below.

Two Filipino ABSs leaning on the edge of the hold regarded the black-red interior impassively.