MURIEL GRAY

The Ancient

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015

Copyright © Muriel Gray 2002, 2015

Cover photograph © Stewart Sutton/Getty Images; Shutterstock.com (sky, sea, mist)

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Muriel Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008158262

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780007404438

Version: 2015-10-29

For

Hamish, Hector, Rowan and

Angus James Barbour, with love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also By Muriel Gray

About the Publisher

1

In other circumstances, Eugenio might have given the rat a name. Rats, and the bold rats of this sun-baked slum more than most, were hard to capture. He might have kept it under a crate and thrown it pieces of food, simply to be its master, to control it, to confine it, the way his own life was determined by pinched-faced adults.

But this rat was to die. It was their sacrifice, and as such, it needed no name.

The creature writhed and thrashed in the soiled canvas bag that Eugenio held out from his body. His two companions watched, eyes big in anticipation, waiting for their leader, their priest, to guide them.

As the oldest at nine years of age, Eugenio felt the weight of that responsibility: he moulded his face into an expression of suitable solemnity as he kicked at a piece of hardboard in the rubbish.

‘Here.’

The two smaller boys glanced at him, then went to work, pulling the wood from the malodorous pile, farmers lifting a diseased crop from a toxic field. This slowly-shifting glacier of garbage was their home, their playground, their store cupboard. The fetor had long since ceased to make any impact on their senses, nor did the uniformity of its colour and texture, a mosaic of greys and primary hues, fill them with despair. They were the naturalized creatures of this place and the stained Nike T-shirts they wore ticked them with approval.

The board was extricated and positioned at the mute head-nodded directions of Eugenio the priest. He squinted at the sun to check its position and was satisfied.

Both boys knew what to do. The smaller took the awful thing, the thing none of them wanted to touch, from his plastic carrier bag and laid it carefully in the centre of this makeshift altar, while the other unsheathed the salvaged hunting knife.

Eugenio glanced at the doll, if anything so repugnant could be described as a doll. Its head was formed from the skull of rat, which had been stitched onto the leather body by means of a strap through the sockets, onto which two black orbs of cloudy stone had been glued to mimic eyes. Below it, tiny irregular tin teeth had been meticulously embedded into the yellowed bone, bestowing a manic grin upon the skull that was worse than the grimace of any corpse. It topped a grotesque torso, worn shiny leather that described a bulbous belly, gashed open and stitched back with the same loving craftsmanship as the head attachment. There was a cavity inside, open and ready to receive their sacrifice. It was ovoid like a recently-vacated womb, hardened and blackened from previous offerings, and the scabbed interior gave the slit womb an authenticity as though any baby’s exit had been a bloody and fatal one. But if the figure was meant to be female, then the horrifically-oversized leather penis that hung obscenely between its legs was a strange contradiction. The arms and legs were thin, reptile-like, too long for the squat body; but the worse aspect of their fragility were the long, serrated shards of metal, like broken claws, that completed each limb.

Eugenio began to feel nervous. If his aunt discovered that he had taken this figure from her few possessions she would make him suffer. Her rage was always contained and deadly, and he swallowed at the idea of what she might do. But she would not know. The ceremony would be over in minutes and if successful, would grant him the power that would make even her spite meaningless. His greatest fear was that it wouldn’t work. His knowledge was patchy, only a tiny portion of what his aunt and her clients discussed in their drugged ramblings. The rest he was going to invent. Somehow he felt sure that improvisation would suffice. The power of the ceremony after all, he had convinced himself, was in the intention, not the vocabulary.

Tiny as it was, it took all three of them to hold the rat down as Eugenio sliced through its filthy fur. It bared its teeth and piped its agony in a series of shrill screams that fascinated the boys as they worked. They heard rats fight all the time, but the piercing, high-pitched squeals that accompanied those scuffles, so high they operated on the very edge of human hearing, were quite unlike this. These protestations were guttural, having a power that defied the small lungs that expelled them, and secretly, Eugenio enjoyed the sound. He hated rats. They crawled on him at night, pissing on his blanket, boldly feeding on the scraps of food that were never cleaned from the hard-packed earthen floor of his family’s shack. Now here was fitting revenge.

Delicately Eugenio sliced out the beating heart and pincered the ludicrously tiny organ between thumb and forefinger, quickly transferring it to the leather slit, poking it into place with a bloody finger and wiping his hand unconsciously on the side of his shorts.

Three pairs of eyes darted between each other’s faces then closed in reverence.

Eugenio cleared his throat and began to speak with a curious mixture of the self-consciousness of a young boy, and the gravitas of a priest.

‘Fallen One – whether male or female, at any rate commander of heat and reproduction, being one who even with his spittle can work sorcery – where art thou?’

He opened his eyes and looked at the now-still heart in its leather nest, but the figure’s empty eye-sockets stared past him into space, oblivious to the gift in its belly. Eugenio closed his eyes again, this time screwing them tightly shut as though the effort would increase his potency.

‘I shall be seen by thee, and thou wilt know me. Would that thou were not hidden from this son of thine. Eat of this sacrificed heart, and also of the one still beating in the body of thy servant.’

He stopped. This was as much as he had memorized from his aunt. From now on the quality of the prayer would plummet. He would have to make it up. His saliva dried, both from the tension of what he desired to happen, and the terror of looking a fool in front of his companions.

‘I am … no one. You … thou … are eternity. We want you to come to us … and to give us power to … do many things.’

One of the boys opened his eyes and looked across at his leader. The change in tone had not gone unnoticed. Eyes still closed tightly, Eugenio continued undaunted.

‘Come to us now, as you have come to others before us. As you have come to the older ones before the Spanish came.’

He opened his eyes and saw that his entire congregation of two were now staring at him.

He stared back defiantly, then let his eyes drop to the useless, static doll, and the flat-furred husk of the rat, mottling the already-stained hardboard altar with its thick, poisonous blood.

A terrifying and powerful bellow broke the silence, and the three boys jumped in fright.

There was a brief moment of confusion, a moment in which they believed the Fallen One had answered them with that fearsome bestial noise, and then their inbred survival instincts processed the information and made them scatter like rats themselves. There was trouble approaching. But not of the supernatural kind. In seconds they had disappeared.

Their hurried departure knocked the altar at an angle, and the figure flopped over, slowly letting its tiny prize slither onto the wood and down into the trash.

The shout was repeated, but this time it was followed by a sharp laugh from another source. Scrabbling in the rubbish like a runner in sand dunes, a youth burst over the short horizon of plastic bottles, car tyres and old mattresses.

His face was contorted with fear, his mouth a black downward crescent of horror, as he stumbled across the unforgiving terrain like a drunk. Close behind came two men, running, but with less urgency, the broader of the two allowing a gun to dangle casually from his hand.

Anything could have tripped the runner; a piece of metal lying beneath the cartons and rotting vegetable matter; a rope tangled in the mesh of discarded chicken wire; a broken drawer from a chest protruding from the sea of trash like a dorsal fin. But it was actually the hardboard altar that snagged the pursued man’s foot, and sent him slapping into the undulating mush with a soft, revolting thud.

His assailants slowed then approached him with party smiles, while the fallen youth stayed face-down in the trash, shoulders heaving, hands closing on discarded newspapers and coffee grounds.

There was no dialogue, no conferring or taunting. The man with the gun in his hand swivelled his limp wrist and shot the youth through the back of the head.

It was a gun without the benefit of a silencer. The sharp crack reverberated shamelessly through the still afternoon. Both men looked around like lions after a kill. Not afraid, nor guilty, but bored, indifferent, blank.

No resident of this filthy colony would come to investigate. No policemen would gallop to a chase. In this landscape they were the law. They had the gun. The smaller of the two men bent down and fumbled in the dead youth’s jacket until he had retrieved the tightly-packed plastic envelope of white powder that had sentenced him to death.

Even then, there was no conversation, their companionship being the company of animals, dumb and cunning at the same time.

They turned to go, and as though some primitive electrical connection had been made in his brain to remind him of his last deed, the executioner turned back and spent one more bullet on the corpse.

This time the trajectory took it through the very top of the skull. He watched for a beat with satisfaction as the back of the head burst off and a dark black and grey mess oozed from the splintered head. Then he turned and followed his companion.

The leather doll lay on its side mere inches from the dead youth’s head, its impassive features regarding the remains of the human like a satisfied lover. Eugenio’s aunt would take her time in punishing the nephew who stole from her when she discovered that the doll had gone. It was old. Very old. She treasured it as nothing else, harbouring sick and atavistic fantasies about what it might do for her tragic life if she could unleash its rumoured power.

For Eugenio would not retrieve it.

Because as only the confused flies that had settled to sup on the viscous meal before them, and the blazing indifferent sun above witnessed, the impassive handstitched abomination began to shift slightly. Slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, its limbs began to be drawn down into the garbage. Not naturally, the way an object may shift and settle with gravity, but like prey caught by something unseen. In a matter of seconds the doll had drowned and was gone down into the trash – along with its still companion.

As the two figures, man and leather, sank beneath the fetid surface, it was only a matter of minutes before the burst video tapes and toilet paper, the mashed cloth and food remains, had joined once again to make a new skin over their secret and buried possession.

2

Just one short glimpse was all the dusty window afforded, but it was enough to confirm she was too late. Esther Mulholland wiped the glass with the flat of her hand, as if smearing more grime across the bus window would somehow make it not true. But it was true. The dock had revealed itself briefly between a low warehouse and some shanty huts and there, silhouetted against a glittering late-afternoon sea were four ships, none of them the one she had the ticket for.

She leant her head against the window and quickly removed it again as the bus dived into a pothole, shaking her bones and battering her forehead against the glass. The woman beside her, who had been nursing a fat, scabbed chicken on her lap for the entire journey, cackled and nodded a toothless grin at the bus in general as though it were somehow obeying her command. Esther had been watching her with fascination for the last five hours, amused as the wizened, squat old woman somehow anticipated the chicken before it shit, opening her legs at just the right time to let the startled beast squirt onto the floor beneath her.

The chicken, Esther reasoned in her most bored moments, must tense its muscles before taking a dump, allowing the woman who cupped it in her callused hands to feel its contortions and take action. But whereas this had been a charming diversion a hundred miles back in the stony monotony of the Peruvian countryside, now it was irritating her. The smell of the baking chicken shit on the floor and the musky reek of unwashed human flesh, which very much included her own, was making her stomach contents shift.

Unless that container ship was hiding, and it was unlikely that 150,000 tonnes of metal could achieve such a trick, then she was well and truly stranded.

It had sailed, and with it had gone her only means of getting home. It wasn’t like Esther to be irresponsible. The diversion to the temple in Lacouz had cost her only five days, and she had calculated she would make it up on the journey back from Cuzco. And she would have done, had it not been for the curious, infuriating thing that had happened in the shanty town where she’d camped overnight to wait for the bus.

Esther had become aware, quite gradually, that a small Peruvian man, a peasant from the plateau, judging by his dress, had been following her all day, staring. He was there outside the tiny store where she bought mineral water and biscuits for the bus journey. He was there when she packed up her tent, standing a short distance away, his gaze unflinching. And he was there, gazing from the other side of the dirt road, when she sat in the shade at the side of the road, her back against a cool stone wall, waiting for the one and only weekly bus to Callao. She was used to being stared at by people the further she had strayed from the cities, but this was different. He was not looking at her with that naked and childlike curiosity natives have for foreigners. His was the stare of someone who was waiting for something. She’d tried waving, acknowledging his presence, but he’d merely continued to look. Esther had been getting freaked by it, and was glad to be leaving the town. But as she sat against that wall, she’d decided to meet his eyes and stare him out. All she remembered now was that his eyes had been slits as he screwed them up against the sun, and yet as she stared at him, she still felt the intensity of their scrutiny. She had felt her own eyes growing heavy, and that was simply all she could recall. When she’d woken up, her head slumped forward on her chest, her neck agonizingly cramped, the man was gone, and more importantly, so was the bus.

Her fury at her idiocy was incandescent, but pointless. There had been nothing for it but to wait it out for another week. And so here she was, seven days late, but at least she’d got here.

The optimistic part of her had thought that maybe the ship would be late leaving, that maybe the kind of luck a girl her age took for granted would hold out. But quite clearly it hadn’t, and the truth was, she was stumped, stuck in the nightmarish industrial port of Callao with a non-refundable ticket for a ship that wouldn’t be back this way for over a month.

Her fellow passenger opened her legs to let the chicken shit again, and Esther closed her eyes. Options. As long as you were alive, breathing, talking and walking, there were always options. She held that thought, but on her own chicken-free lap her hands made fists as if they knew better.

The bar didn’t have a sign outside because it didn’t have a name. It was housed in a metal shed that had once served as the offices of a coal-shipping merchant. Then it might have had desks, angle-poise lamps, piles of documents, calendars on the walls, fax machines and wastepaper bins. Now it was simply a shed. Running parallel to one wall was a long L-shaped wooden board nailed to metal trestle legs that created a crude barrier between the clients and a poverty-stricken gantry of a few greasy bottles of spirits and crates of unrefrigerated beer. On the wall a small portable TV was attached to a metal bracket. Its flickering images fought against the broad shafts of sunlight that filtered from high slits of windows, light that was made solid by the thick fog of cigarette smoke. A coat-hanger aerial stuck on with duct tape accounted for the snowy, hissing reception of the Brazilian game-show that was being watched by the occupants of the shed. Esther had time to take in these figures before they registered her quiet entrance, and it did nothing to lift her spirits.

About a dozen men slumped forward from the hip across the wooden bar, their positions so similar they could have been members of some obscure formation team. Each held a cigarette in one hand, the other cradling a drink, and their heads were uniformly tilted up to stare at the glow of the TV. The barman’s position was in exactly the same aspect, but in mirror image. Even though his body was facing Esther, his head was twisted to watch the screen and he failed to notice her entering until the cheap double plywood door banged dramatically back on its hinges. But the pause had given her time to locate what she’d come in for, and without catching the man’s eye Esther strode as purposefully across the room as her massive back-pack would allow to the wall-mounted telephone. There was only a one-hour time difference in Texas. She pictured exactly what Mort would be doing right now as she waited for the Lily Tomlin-impersonating AT&T woman to connect her.

Of course he would let the phone ring as long he could. His chair would be on its back two legs, leant against the wall of the trailer where he could monitor the residents of Selby Rise Park from the long window above his desk, and keep a doting eye on his ugly mutt tethered to a stake by the door as it barked at friend and foe alike. He would have a cheroot between his rough lips and a bottle of beer in his fist, and there was nothing on this earth that would make him take a call collect from Peru or anywhere else.

‘No reply, caller.’

Esther scratched at the wall with a finger nail.

‘He always takes a long time to answer. Can you give it a few more rings?’

The operator made no reply and Esther was about to hang up, assuming the call was terminated, but a few seconds later she heard the connection being made. It was weird hearing Mort’s voice so far away, a voice that belonged in another world.

‘Yeah?’

‘AT&T. I have a call collect from Callao, Peru, from Esther Mulholland. Will you accept?’

‘What?’

‘I have a call collect …’

‘Yeah, yeah. I got the stingy bastard call collect bit, sweetheart. Where the fuck you say it’s from again?’

There was a pause as the operator pondered whether to hang up on the profane recipient or not, and then she said curtly, ‘Peru. South America.’

‘No shit!’

Esther heard him chuckle.

‘And it’s Benny Mulholland’s girl, you say? The one without the fuckin’ dimes?’

‘Will you accept the call?’

‘Huh? Like all of a fuckin’ sudden I’m an answerin’ service for her old man? Tell her to send a fuckin’ postcard.’

He hung up. The operator cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry, caller. The number will not accept.’

‘I gathered. Thanks.’

Esther put the phone down gently. She had absolutely no idea why she’d made that call. Even if a miracle had happened and Mort Lenholf had taken her call, what did she expect him to do? Benny would be blind drunk by now, asleep in the green armchair in front of a blaring TV. Mort could hammer on Benny’s trailer door as long and hard as he liked but she knew it would take a sledge hammer to the kneecap even to make him stir. And the thought of her dad being able to help out in a situation like this was equally ludicrous. Benny Mulholland had probably just enough cash left from his welfare cheque to get ratted every night until the next one was due.

He wasn’t exactly in a position to call American Express and have them wire his daughter a ticket home. She decided she had simply been homesick. Only for a moment, and only in a very abstract way, since home was ten types of shit and then ten more. But it had been an emotion profound enough to want to make contact, and now it left her feeling even more bereft than before. Despite having been to the most remote and inhospitable corners of Peru on everything from foot to mule, it was the first stirring of loneliness she’d felt in the whole three months of travelling.

Esther sighed and turned back into the room. The formation team of drinkers were now all looking her way. The men, although similar in posture, were varied in nationality. A handful were obviously Peruvian, their faces from the unchanged gene pool that could be seen quite clearly on thousand-year-old Inca, Aztec and Meso-American sculpture. Stevedores by the look of their coveralls, and not friendly.

There was a smattering of Filipinos and Chinese, some with epaulettes on stained nylon shirts that at least meant they were merchant crew and not dangerous. Only one face looked western, but it was such a familiar mess of mildly intoxicated self-pity mixed with latent anger that she looked away quickly in case she somehow ignited it. The barman was staring at her with naked hostility, but it was another kind of look in the assembled male company’s eyes that was making her uncomfortable. Esther wished she wasn’t wearing shorts. One of the Peruvians taking a very long look at her tanned, muscular legs said something that made his hunched companions snigger like schoolboys, and a flicker of indignant rage began to grow in Esther’s belly. It was important to leave, so she lifted her pack and made for the door.

‘He’s pissed off on account you didn’t buy a drink.’

It was an American voice coming from the western face. Esther stopped and faced him, but he had already turned to the TV again, his back to her.

‘Who is?’ asked Esther in a voice smaller than she would have liked.

‘Prince Rameses the third. Who d’you figure?’

Esther stared at the back of his head until her silence made him turn again. He spoke without taking the cigarette from his mouth so that it swayed like a conductor’s baton with every word.

‘The barman, honey, that’s who.’

‘I guessed they don’t serve women in here.’

He took the cigarette from his mouth, blew a cloud of smoke and squinted at her. ‘They don’t. Only liquor.’

Most of the men had joined this objectionable man in turning back to the TV, maybe thinking western man to western woman was a cultural bond too strong to break or maybe because they were simply bored with the task of making her uncomfortable.

Only a very drunk Filipino and a dull-eyed stevedore continued to stare. She was grateful for the shift in attention and it emboldened her.

‘Uh-huh? Well maybe you can explain to him it’s a shade up-market for me. Guess I’m not dressed smart enough.’

The man looked at her closely and this time it was with something approaching sympathy. Maybe he heard the slight break in her voice. Maybe he’d listened to her fruitless call home. Maybe neither of these. But it softened his face and the tiny glimmer of warmth in his bleary eyes relaxed a part of Esther that was gearing up for a fight.

‘Shame. Looks like you could use a drink.’

He said it softly, almost as though he were talking to himself, and since the tone lacked any kind of lascivious or suggestive undercurrent, the words being nothing more than an acutely accurate observation, Esther inexplicably felt a lump of emotion welling at the back of her throat.

For no apparent reason, she wanted to cry, and at the same time, yes, her mouth was already moistening at the realization that a beer would be just about the most welcome thing in the world right now. She gulped back her curiously unwelcome emotion.

‘They serve anything apart from paint stripper?’

The man smiled, then turned to the sullen barman and said something quietly. Reluctantly the man bent and Esther heard the unmistakable rubber thud of a concealed ice-box door being closed. A bottle of beer was placed on the wooden board, the cold glass misting in the heat.

Esther looked from the bottle to the American and back again, wrestling with the folly of continuing this uneasy relationship.

What was she afraid of? In the last three months she had travelled and slept under the stars with a band of near-silent alpaca shepherds, walked alone for weeks in the mountains, and resisted the advances of two nightmarish Australian archaeologists.

She had stood on the edge of the world, as awed and terrified by the green desert of jungle that stretched eastwards to seeming infinity as the Incas who had halted the progress of their empire at almost the same spot had been. A dipso American merchant seaman and a few ground-down working men were not going to cause her trouble, even if they wanted to, which judging by their renewed attention to the Brazilian game-show host now hooking his arm round what looked like a Vegas showgirl, was not high in their priorities.

She walked forward, touched the bottle lightly with her fingers and gave the barman a look that enquired how much she owed him.

‘On me,’ said her self-appointed host.

Before she could protest and pretend that she would consider it improper, the man behaved outstandingly properly and offered his right hand as though she were a visiting college inspector and he the principal.

‘Matthew Cotton. Enriched to hear my native tongue.’

Esther studied him for a beat then took the hand. ‘Esther Mulholland.’ She removed her hand and touched the bottle again. ‘Thanks.’

The beer was delicious. She took two long swallows, closing her eyes as the freezing, bitter liquid fizzed at the back of her dry throat.

‘They write up Pedro’s joint in some back-packers’ guide, or did you just get lost?’

Esther wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. ‘The guys at the dock gate said this was the only phone.’

Matthew Cotton nodded through another cloud of smoke. ‘Yeah. Guess it is.’

‘Nice,’ said Esther, gesturing to the room in general with her bottle.

‘It’s also the only bar.’

Esther took another swallow, watching him as he shrugged to qualify his statement. ‘You off a boat?’

Matthew nodded. ‘Lysicrates. That pile of shit they’re loading.’

‘Just a long shot, but has the Valiant Ellanda been in?’

Matthew looked up at her with mild surprise. ‘You some kind of cargo boat fanatic?’

‘Cargo boat passenger whose boat looks like having sailed.’

Matthew raised an interested eyebrow, then turned his glass round in a big hand as he thought. ‘Valiant Ellanda. Container ship. Right? Big mother.’

Esther nodded, enthusiastically.

‘Sailed last week.’

Esther nodded again weakly.

‘Then guess you got a little time to kill.’

‘I wish. Due back at college in ten days.’

‘They’ll live.’

Esther looked at the bar. ‘I’m military. Scholarship.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

Matthew was looking at her more closely now, continuing to study her face as he drained the last of some yellowish spirit that had filled his glass. Without even looking at the barman, he gestured with the empty vessel and it was filled nearly to the brim. Esther looked away, reminded of Benny and the tiny, unpleasant ritualistic mannerisms that all alcoholics shared.

‘What they do then, if you’re late? Shoot you?’

‘Put it this way: military students don’t get a lot of slack to dress up in tie-dye vests and wave placards. And you sure as hell don’t get to pick when you show up for semester.’

Matthew tipped the glass back and emptied half of it, baring his teeth in a snarl as the liquid drained down his throat.

‘Bummer,’ he croaked.

‘You got that right.’

Matthew turned his head back up to the TV and leaned forward on his elbows. Esther waited to see if the conversation would be continued and when it was clear that it would not, she drained the rest of her beer and made ready to go. She picked up her pack.

‘We sail for Texas. Two days’ time.’

He spoke as though talking to the game-show host.

‘Sorry?’

‘Port Arthur.’

Esther’s heart beat a little faster, then it slowed and sank.

‘My ticket’s non-refundable.’

‘Aw, bullshit. Most companies say that stuff. They’ll do a deal.’

Esther shook her head. ‘Not with this ticket. Even the cheapest cargo ship ticket is way out of my reach. I’m only here ’cause a geek I dated at college has a dad who works for the shipping company. Man, to think I put up with that guy’s bad breath and stinking taste in movies for at least two months to get that ticket.’

She paused and looked at the floor.

‘And just on account of wanting to see some shitty old temple they’ve only just half dug out the grit, I’ve blown it. Big time.’

Matthew was still looking at the screen, but he was smiling. ‘What’d he make you see?’

‘Waterworld, for one.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah.’

Matthew stared at the screen a little more, then looked at his wristwatch. ‘Gimme an hour then come by the boat. Captain’s pretty easy going.’

Esther put her pack down slowly. ‘For real?’

‘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

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.

It was nothing more than an iron box, featureless except for a rusty spiral staircase winding its way up one wall, and scaling the other, a straight Australian ladder leading to the manhole that emerged on the deck. Soon both would be smothered under the hundreds of tonnes of loose trash that the crane was already spewing into holds one and two.

‘Fuck me, Efren. Where’d this shit come from?’

The smaller of the two sailors looked round lazily at the voice, with just enough animation in his body to avoid the accusation of insubordination. He grinned, and sniffed the air as if it was full of wind-blown blossom.

‘Come from Lima. Big pile. People live on it.’

Matthew Cotton felt like puking, helped of course by four double rum and Cokes, six shots of grappa and five beers; but mainly because the smell from the holds was so terrible.

‘Yeah? Well guess it ain’t a whole lot different to living in Queens.’

Though he hadn’t the remotest idea what his senior officer was referring to, Efren Ramos stood on one leg, smiled through gapped teeth and nodded. Matthew could have sworn they were going back to Port Arthur empty, but of course the suits at Sonstar would rather piss on their own grandmothers than have one of their ships burn fuel without earning cash. If they were struggling for a decent load of ore then he guessed the trash made sense.

Matthew didn’t give a shit. He was on his way back to his cabin to sleep this one off. Then he would get up in time for dinner and start work on a whole new stretch of drunkenness. That was what mattered. Keeping it topped up. Keeping it all nice and numb.

He turned with a flick of the hand that meant ‘carry on’ and walked unsteadily back to the accommodation block. The sun was getting low, but even so its heat was bothering him.

He wanted the shade of a cabin with the drapes pulled and the darkness of sleep, where for a few short hours nothing and nobody could reach him.

Darkness brought a sour breeze to the dock, and to the ship it brought a nightly invasion of mosquitoes that could not only locate every inch of exposed human skin, but even the fleshy parts of the countless rats that ran the length of their metal sea-going home.

Of course there were no rats on the Lysicrates. Every official form and inspection sheet signed and dated testified to that, claiming proudly that the ship was free from infestation. Indeed, that was what the circular metal plates ringing the top of the ropes were for, to stop the vermin boarding ship.

But there were rats. And on a ship this size, that meant there was plenty of room for them to carry on their daily, and right now, nightly, business.

The MV Lysicrates was 280 metres long, weighed a dead tonnage of 158,537, had nine holds and a crew of twenty-eight, all Filipino except for two.

Even in this bleak industrial Peruvian port, the three other ships that lay alongside her were doing so with considerably more dignity, for the Lysicrates transmitted an air of decay that was hard to prove in detail, but impossible to ignore in essence.

It was the feeling that everything that was necessary to keeping her working had been done so only up to the legal limit and not an inch beyond.

The paint was peeling only in places that didn’t matter, the deck was not littered with hazardous material that constituted an offence, but neither was it particularly clean, and the hull was dulled with variegated horizontal stripes of algae that clearly were not planned to be dealt with as a priority.

Its depreciating appearance was not unusual in a working merchant fleet, particularly in this part of the world, but it was nevertheless an unsightly tub.

She had been lying in Callao for twelve days, which pleased the lower-ranking crew who had been taking the train daily to Lima, returning with a variety of cheap and unpleasant purchases they imagined might curry favour with loved ones back home.

But the turnaround time was unusual. The Lysicrates worked hard for her living. Of a fleet of ten ships, she was the eldest, and sailing as she was under a Monrovian flag of convenience, she was hardly the most prestigious. The dubious registration meant that the company could avoid practically every shipping regulation in the book, and by and large, it did. While she was still afloat, the ship’s task was to sail loaded, as often and as quickly as she could, so the fortnight’s holiday in port was not normally on the agenda. But no one was complaining. And no one seemed to mind that the captain had spent an unusual length of the time ashore. All anyone cared about was that the holds were filling up and it was time to go.

Just as Leonardo Becko, the cook, was putting the last touches to a dinner of steak and fries, the door of the last hold of the Lysicrates was rolling closed with a rumble.

That would mean it was only a matter of hours, and the crew were already milling around above and below deck, making the comfortable and familiar preparations to ensure the constant uncertainty of the sea would once more be under their control.

As they did so, the cargo in hold two shifted its bulk as the strip of daylight that moulded its rotting undulations narrowed steadily with the closing door, and the two massive metal plates met, enfolding it in darkness.

What air remained in the three to four foot gap between trash and steel seemed to sigh as the finality of the doors being secured subtly shifted the pressure. And then the broth of waste that was as solid as it was liquid was alone in the dark. Locked in. Silent. Content with its own decay.

In the officers’ messroom, Captain Lloyd Skinner was already at his table, pouring himself a glass of water, when he caught sight of his female passenger walking past the open door.

‘Miss … eh …?’

Her figure moved backwards into the door frame. Esther had changed into a cotton shirt and jeans, and with her deeply tanned flesh scrubbed she radiated a health that was out of place in the atmosphere of mundane industrial toil.

‘Hi? Mulholland. Esther Mulholland.’

The man cleared his throat, and smiled. ‘This is where you eat.’

She looked down the corridor, to the open door of the crew’s mess hall where she’d planned on eating, already accommodating five silent Filipinos, smoking and waiting patiently for their food. Esther returned the smile and walked into the room.

There were three round tables set for dinner, empty, their glasses and cutlery polished and waiting for diners. The Starsky-and-Hutch interior designer had been at work here too, adding plastic pot plants to the garish patterned fabrics, affording the room the atmosphere of a sad waiting area in a run-down clinic.

‘Captain?’ She held out her hand but didn’t sit down, waiting to be asked. This was a different deal from the voyage out here. She had no passenger rights that normally elevated the ticket holder to the status of officers, only the good will of this man she’d never met, and Esther had an instinct for making herself worthy of good will when she needed to.

The man had an abstracted expression, his attention elsewhere. ‘Eh, yes. Lloyd Skinner.’

He took her hand without rising, shook it limply, moved the book he had been reading to one side as though it were in her way, then motioned in general to the three ugly plastic padded chairs beside him like a reluctant furniture salesman.

Skinner, she reckoned, looked to be in his late forties, perhaps even early fifties, but in direct contrast to his soak of a first mate he was in such good shape it was hard to tell. Whereas Matthew Cotton was probably only scraping the ceiling of his thirties, his hair had greyed prematurely, and his face was lined, brutalized, the flesh sucked from the bones by abuse, leaving him with the mask of a much older man. Skinner glowed with health. Sandy hair topped an oval golden-brown face with distracted blue eyes and a mouth that was perhaps a little on the thin side. He was powerfully built, and the arms that emerged from his short-sleeved shirt indicated that his body hadn’t always been behind a desk.

Esther gave an internal sigh of relief that at least the man in charge of this decidedly shabby tub seemed to be halfway human. She sat down happily.

‘I really want to thank you, Captain Skinner. I mean, this is way past kindness and out the other side.’

The man coughed into his fist while looking beyond her at the open door, then at the plastic plants.

‘No problem. These, eh, tickets, are pretty flexible.’ He gestured vacantly into the air and continued. ‘Merchant ships change their schedules all the time.’

Esther’s heart started to barnacle with lead.

‘Didn’t your first officer mention mine was non-refundable?’

‘Oh, we’ll sort it.’

‘No. I mean really. It’s a grace-and-favour ticket.’

The captain looked at her properly for the first time, and there seemed to be something akin to alarm behind his eyes. ‘You have family in the shipping line?’

Esther thought about Gerald McKenzie. Thought about his clammy hands on her breasts and his awful breath in her ear. Thought about him guffawing in the darkness of the theatre at the pathetic overwrought antics of Jim Carrey, his wet mouth full of popcorn. She gulped back a combination of revulsion and shame at how she’d used him, and like so many boys before, hadn’t let him use her like he’d planned.

‘No. No. It’s a friend’s father. He works for Croydelle.’

Skinner ran a hand over his jaw and neck and looked away again. ‘Ah. Well … whatever.’

There was an awkward silence, while Esther waited for some kind of confirmation that indeed everything would be all right, but was rewarded only by Captain Skinner looking down and touching his book absently as though he wished very badly to go back to it. She cleared her throat.

‘So will that still be okay?’

‘Mm? Oh yes. Yes. I’m sure. Your ticket. You can, eh, see the purser with it.’

He smiled weakly, then looked to a figure hovering by the door to the galley, more to avoid the awkwardness of this conversation, thought Esther, than out of an eagerness to be served. The glance, however, bore fruit.

A man in a stained white waiter’s jacket approached the table, handed them both a menu encased in a thick red plastic folder like that of a cheap diner, then disappeared again. Skinner straightened his arms and regarded the menu as though it were the printed fare of a state banquet.

Esther looked at the intent on his face and quickly reviewed her first impression. She ought to have guessed that no ordinary captain would employ such a drunk for his first in command, but the level of this man’s dismissive distraction seemed out of character for a man in charge of a large ship and sizeable crew.

The captain on the Valiant Ellanda had been a straightforward industrial boss, friendly, but very much in charge, his officers a reasonable selection of men doing their jobs and enjoying the limited social life at the end of their watches. That journey had been uneventful, the company boring, but the atmosphere comforting. This was disquieting. Esther glanced down at the paperback on the table, desperate to start a conversation that would at least engage him before he changed his mind about her free passage. She expected a Wilbur Smith or worse, the standard fodder of bored sailors, but what she saw shocked her, immediately halting the small-talk possibilities her brain was already preparing. He was reading an English translation of the Koran.

Esther looked from the book to the man and back again.

‘Are you Muslim, Captain Skinner?’

He looked at her for a moment as though she were mad, then blinked down at the book placing the thick menu gently alongside it. ‘Hmm? Ah. Ha ha. Good gracious no.’ He lifted the volume and looked at it as if for the first time. ‘Just working my way through the religions of the world.’

A small Filipino man entered the room, nodded to them both, showing no surprise at all at Esther’s presence, then sat down at another table and took out a book of his own.

‘Really? Some task,’ said Esther, quite genuinely intrigued and not a little impressed. She tried to force his eye contact back to her again by touching the book lightly. ‘You’re interested in theology then?’

Captain Skinner looked over at the officer engrossed in his own less contentious volume, a Filipino translation of some ancient Tom Clancy, then gazed absently again at the plastic pot plant.

‘Interested in the uniform stupidity of mankind.’ He looked back round at Esther coolly. ‘No offence of course, Miss Mulholland. If you’re religious yourself.’

She shook her head slowly.

‘Not at all.’

‘Then you might take my point.’

‘It’s certainly one view of spirituality.’

He smiled benignly as though they had been discussing the weather, then folded his hands neatly on the menu in front of him.

As the three expectant diners sat in a tense silence the Filipino man at the next table was joined by one other, and as if on cue the waiter appeared again, handed them both menus and shuffled to the captain’s table to take orders.

Esther endured the first course – some green wheatfloured soup – in miserable silence, listening to the two other men talking softly in their own language, occasionally laughing and nodding, enjoying an easy companionship. When the leathery steaks came and it became clear that her fellow diner had no intention of speaking, she decided it was too much. She was going to try again.

‘So where you from then, Captain?’

Skinner looked up as if he’d just noticed her. ‘Denver originally. Florida now.’

Esther beamed. ‘Gee. That’s a change and a half.’

He returned her smile without warmth, but the prompt seemed to work. ‘And you?’

‘Scranton PA, originally. Texas now. So guess I’m not one to talk.’

‘Ah. Hence no southern drawl,’ he said without interest through a mouth of fries.

‘Why I do declare I can manage when I try,’ said Esther in her best Pam Ewing.

Skinner ignored the burlesque but looked at her with renewed interest. ‘And you do what exactly there?’

Esther moved her food around a little with the fork to mask embarrassment at her failed entertainment. ‘College. Last year majoring in anthropology. This was my dissertation field trip.’

Genuine curiosity, the first she had noticed since their meeting, lit behind Skinner’s eyes. ‘Interesting. What do you hope to do with such a thing when you graduate?’

‘Well it’s a military scholarship. So I guess during the seven years of active service I’ll owe them after I qualify, at least I’ll understand people and their diversities of culture before I kill them.’

Skinner looked at her for a moment in stunned silence, then he put his big hands down on the table, threw his head back and laughed.

Surprised, but delighted at the reaction to such a feeble joke, Esther watched his face then joined in his mirth.

‘I guess we’re a lot alike, Miss Mulholland.’

And that was the last thing he said to her before he finished the remainder of his meal in cheerful silence, leaving her alone at the table to contemplate exactly how that similarity might manifest itself.

4

No matter what time of day or night it was, the accommodation block of the Lysicrates always housed someone asleep. Different shifts and watches meant the crew made their own day and night, and there was an understanding about noise and privacy that was delicately observed in the way that people living at such close quarters are forced to do. There were currently four bodies lying in their respective cabins.

The first officer was unconscious on his foam sofa, a crushed beer can held to his chest like a teddy bear. The second engineer was fast asleep in a neatly-made bed dreaming of his wife, and the sixteen-year-old deck cadet, the youngest of the crew, was snoring loudly on his back in a top bunk after having masturbated over a not-particularly-explicit porn magazine the cook had brought him back from Lima.

But although it was his turn to sleep, and with only another legitimate hour and a half in which to do so, Fen Sahg, a greaser and fireman, was wide awake. He had turned his back on the cabin in an attempt to avoid looking at the gaudy idols and 3-D posters his cabin mate Tenghis had fixed to every surface he could morally call his own. Even though he was staring fixedly at the white painted metal of the cabin wall, the image of Tenghis’s plaster Virgin Mary, her head inclined in pity, her white arms outstretched as though for his soul alone, was burnt into the back of his eyes. He knew the man only did it to rile him. They were both Catholics by upbringing of course, but Tenghis had taken exception to what he called Fen’s ‘wicked pagan superstitions’, and believed it was his duty as a good Christian to bring him back into the fold. It was true he was superstitious, but only with good cause.

Tenghis’s fears were hypocritical, since Fen knew only too well that Tenghis himself could have his moments too. They had both worried when two voyages ago the chief engineer brought his wife on the ship. Surely every sailor knew it was unlucky to have a lone woman on board. Two or three officers’ wives, well maybe that was okay. But one alone? No. And look what had happened. The cook had nearly sliced his little finger clean off during that storm south of Panama. There was no doubt amongst the lower-ranking crew who had been responsible for that. No, superstition was not always baloney and old women’s fears. But as to his wicked paganism, Tenghis was wrong too. To amuse his fellow crew members, Fen often held Saanti readings in the mess hall or his cabin, the method of prediction and revelation being an obscure Asian mixture of Tarot and ouiji. The Saanti showed him the truth of things, and he would be a fool not to pay heed. That didn’t mean he too couldn’t be a good Christian, and Tenghis’s sulk after such an evening, which would sometimes last for days, punishing his cabin mate by saying his rosary loudly in bed at random times, was a gross insult. But tonight it was not Tenghis’s irritating piety that was making him wakeful. It was thinking about the Peruvian stevedores.

Gossip in any port spread quickly, and Fen usually liked to help it along if it was juicy enough. So when there was a rumour that the stevedores were unhappy about the cargo of trash being loaded onto the Lysicrates, Fen was the first to make himself amenable to the gang chief to try and find out why. The chief was a small suspicious man from the country and it took a lot to befriend him, but since the ship had been lying here for so long, longer than any other vessel usually did, Fen managed by persistence to make the man take him into his confidence.

It certainly was an unusual load. The Lysicrates normally carried coal, iron ore or gravel, and even on other bulk carriers he’d sailed with he had never come across the bulk shipping of uncompacted domestic waste before.

And apparently he was not the only one to find it irregular, since there had been some kind of negotiation being carried on between the company and the dock authorities, which had caused the trash to have been sitting in a vast rotting pile in the dock’s loading area for nearly a week while Captain Skinner sorted out a bill of lading.

The rumours had started after two days. There were complaints about rats and roaches of course, but when a prostitute that visited the docks on a nightly basis had gone missing after servicing two of her regulars in her temporary boudoir inside an empty container, talk started that it had something to do with the trash. Fen couldn’t quite get from the man what he thought the connection was, but some names had come up, curiously none of them Spanish, but of a tongue he didn’t recognize, and there was a whispered uneasiness amongst the men about something one of them had seen in the great and stinking pile.

In itself this was merely the normal superstitious nonsense of simple under-educated working men, of which Fen was one, but he was more intuitive than most, and could usually distinguish the nonsense from the genuine mystery. What was bothering him now was that as he had watched the trash being loaded from the vantage point of the deck, Fen could have sworn he had seen something.

Rats probably, he reasoned, but then in fifteen years at sea, years when he’d seen just about every trick the repulsive vermin could perform in everything from grain to cocoa bags, he’d never seen rats undulate under a pile of anything in quite the way this grab-load of refuse had moved. If it had been rats, then there had been a lot of them, and working together. Because the surface of the junk had pulsated in a way that made him break out in a sweat. The thought of the rodents, however logical an explanation, was not in itself a particularly comfortable one.

Beasts that size that could move with such ordered intent were not beasts he looked forward to sharing a voyage with. But if the movement was not caused by rats, then Fen wasn’t entirely sure how he felt. A hot sensation had overwhelmed him as he’d witnessed the swift but substantial movement, and the unpleasant notion had swept across him that it was moving, revealing itself, for his benefit only.

Fen’s only consolation was that he had been so horror-struck by the sensation that he had made himself watch the grab drop the pile from a height into hold number two, monitoring it carefully as it fell, and could see all the individual pieces that made up the pile clearly revealed. Nothing alive and writhing had made itself visible against the bleached South American sky. No heavy rats tumbled and squirmed in the air, and neither did anything else.

Still staring at the wall, he turned over in his mind whether that was a comfort or not. Maybe the truth was that he never really saw the movement in the first place, that the talk of the stevedores had primed him with nervous expectations that his superstitious mind obligingly furnished.

Or maybe it was a simple trick of the sunlight and the unpredictable movements of the huge crane.

Fen sighed and turned back over in his bunk to look reluctantly at Mary.

This was not going to be a lucky voyage. First the girl passenger Cotton had brought aboard, and now the worry about what he thought he had seen. If sleep evaded him much longer he would get up and consult the Saanti. Then he would know.

The holy Virgin glared at him reproachfully. He would stare at her fixedly for the remainder of his rest period, because regardless of what his logic wanted him to believe, in his heart he knew there had been something moving in that trash. And whatever it was, it was now on board.

Adjusting the hard hat which was tipping over his eyes, Captain Skinner finished his leisurely perambulation of the long cargo deck, one hand in his pocket and the other holding the thin paper on which the details of the cargo were scrawled. He could see the second officer and the bosun leaning together on the rail, smoking and watching the dock hands mill about aimlessly on the harbour edge below them as they waited for the Lysicrates to go, and he detoured his route to join them. Instantly the bosun stamped out his cigarette and adopted a posture of readiness. The second officer made an upward nod of greeting and continued to stare down at the harbour. Skinner leant beside the officer and smiled past the two men at the lights of the port.

‘Reckon that’s us, Felix.’

The bosun smiled, nodded and left. Renato Lhoon, the second officer, tapped some ash overboard and looked up at his captain.

‘Chief Officer Cotton?’ enquired Skinner into the night air.

‘In cabin.’

‘Ah.’

The two men watched a cat dart surreptitiously along the edge of a wooden shed, spurred faster by a piece of coal thrown by the bored stevedore waiting to untie the ship. Skinner looked at his wristwatch.

‘Fifteen minutes.’

He smiled again at nothing in particular then left Lhoon to figure out what was required. It didn’t take much figuring. The second officer sighed, flicked his cigarette over the edge, tucked an errant shirt-tail into his neat pants, and walked toward the door of the accommodation block.

The door opened onto C-deck, the living quarters of the crew’s lower rank, and to advertise the fact, the hand rail outside each cabin sported a motley selection of garments ranging from socks to grimy T-shirts airing in the hot corridor.

An elevator served the decks from the bridge down nine floors to the propeller shaft in the engine room, but Lhoon decided that to stand and wait for it to chug and shudder to his command from wherever it happened to be, would give every passing cadet and ABS the opportunity to bend his ear on some gripe or other, and frankly right now, with the task of waking Cotton before him, it was the last thing he needed. He climbed the metal stairs without enthusiasm two floors to the officers’ accommodation deck and walked slowly to the door of Cotton’s cabin. As usual he tried the handle first, and as usual it was locked.

He coughed into his fist, then used it to bang the door twice. There was no reply. He banged again.

‘Matthew? Come on.’

A groan from within gave strength to the next bout of hammering, which Lhoon kept up relentlessly until he heard the groggy voice again.

‘Fuck off.’

‘We go now, Matthew. Your watch.’

‘Sail the fucker yourself, Renato.’

Lhoon started to bang with both fists now, and kept it up until the metallic snick of the lock being thrown rewarded his efforts. The small man stopped his assault on the door, turned the handle and entered. The cabin was in darkness save for the orange-and-white light of the deck filtering through the thin porthole curtain, and he flicked the switch behind the cabin door.

The lights of Matthew Cotton’s cabin revealed that at least tonight Lhoon would not have to dress him. He was lying back on the sofa again, fully clad, his arms across his face as a shield against the sudden glare. As far as the officers’ cabins were concerned, Cotton’s was no different in design. One room with a seating area and coffee table, a bed riveted to the wall and a half-open door leading to a shower room with WC.

What marked his out as unusual would not be immediately apparent to a casual observer, but to any sailor it was glaringly obvious. Unlike every other cabin on board the ship Matthew Cotton’s was the only one that was completely devoid of family photos. Even the youngest cadets, barely out of school, and the filthy and objectionable donkeyman whose mother would find him hard to love, had photos, framed or otherwise, of sweethearts and family adorning every possible personal space of their quarters. Nothing in Cotton’s cabin revealed anything about who might occupy his most intimate thoughts or longings. Apart from a few piles of clothes and shoes that cluttered the floor, more than a few empty beer cans that filled the wastepaper bin or sat redundantly on the table top, nothing suggested there was any sign of a man living here, that this was a private space in which a man could recreate part of his shore world on board.

Lhoon stood with his hands on his hips above the recumbent figure and waited. ‘You want to puke first?’

Matthew’s voice was muffled behind his arm. ‘Yeah.’

Lhoon waited some more, knowing that even the suggestion would spur his senior officer’s guts into action. A moment later Matthew raised himself up from the sofa, stumbled slowly through to the shower room and bent to his work over the sink. The noise made the second officer catch the back of his throat and he swallowed and looked away.

‘I wait or you done?’

‘Done.’

Matthew ran the tap and stuck his head under it, and after a moment of recovery walked through to join his colleague for the routine escort up to the bridge, and for the duration of the short walk Lhoon let Matthew walk in front, a guard escorting his prisoner to the gallows.

Apart from the fax machine behind Matthew, droning as the weather report rolled through, and the ghostly, muffled voices on the radio that he had turned down to a dream-like volume, the bridge of the ship was quiet.

Before him, the hold deck looked almost glamorous, illuminated as it was by pinpricks of white light, and framed by glimpses of the white ocean foam the stern was pushing aside.

Matthew ran a rough hand over his face and sat down heavily on a chrome stool that wouldn’t have been out of place in a New York bar. They were well clear of port now, and there was nothing to do for the next four hours except stare at the darkness ahead, and drink neat vodka from a china mug that declared ‘Swinging London’ on the side beneath a garish Union Jack.

He’d planned to be asleep again before the end of the watch, but that didn’t matter, since Renato would come and check on him every twenty minutes and do anything that needed doing. But nothing would. He’d pointed the tub for home and that was it.

This was the worst watch for him, the long hours of darkness, with nothing, no distractions, no human company, no chores or excuses to think, to keep him safe from his own black interior.

He’d tried reading at first, but his mind wandered after the first two paragraphs, his eyes scanning the meaningless words as other images replaced the ones conjured by the invariably bad authors, and with considerably more impact. So now he just sat and stared. And of course, drank.

Tonight the vodka bottle was behind the row of chilli pepper plants that Renato grew in plastic pots along the starboard bridge window. It was only habit that made him hide it. Skinner didn’t care and there was little need for deception, but it was an important part of the alcoholic’s ritual to conceal, and ritual was all he had left. He drained his mug, walked to the plants, retrieved the bottle and poured another big one.

Matthew fingered one of the swelling fruits and smiled at Renato’s dedication. A storeroom below groaning with fruit and vegetables, and yet the man lavished attention on these scrappy plants as though all their lives depended on it. The nurturing instinct. As strong in some men as it is in women. With the thought, a black ulcer threatened to burst in his heart and he turned quickly from the fruits, swallowing his vodka as he walked quickly back to the desk.

With a shaking hand he fumbled through the folder of paperwork. Something to do was what he needed. He’d pretend to be a first officer. At least until the demons receded. Read about the cargo. That would work. The part of him that was still alive had been intrigued that loose trash was being loaded. It was a cargo he’d never come across. Compacted metal, industrial waste, sure. But domestic loose trash from some city site? Never. It would be interesting to see where it came from and more importantly where it was going.

Matthew skimmed through the piles of paper recording every on-board banality from crew lists to duplicate galley receipts, but there was nothing. No bill of lading, no sheaves of inspection certificates from the port authorities, no formal company documents with tedious instructions and warnings.

He found some dog-eared cost and revenue sheets that had been used practically unchanged on the last three trips. They told the company, the shipping federation, the world, that the Lysicrates was going home empty as planned. The ship contained nothing but ballast water. He blinked down at the paper and then stupidly out the window to the silent deck.

Presumably Skinner hadn’t finished doing whatever he did so privately in his office with all that paper before entering it in the log and the document folder, but it was unusual, and unlike the captain’s usual form, very sloppy.

You could load anything from custard to cows at Callao if you greased the right palms, and from the eleven voyages he’d made so far with this company, Matthew had decided they were perhaps not amongst the most honourable of traders. Forever trying to dodge regulations they’d even lost a vessel five years ago with all hands, and had despicably argued about compensation to the families of the deceased for as long as they could, even though the insurance company had paid up in full. Shysters and crooks, and naturally the only ones who would employ someone like Cotton after his fall from grace, although Skinner, he admitted reluctantly to himself, had had more to do with his second chance than the avaricious gangsters who owned the ship. But if the company was pulling some kind of a fast one, what in God’s name were they planning to do with the trash when they got to Port Arthur? For a few moments the slow, drunken brain of Matthew Cotton thought about it. He let himself think like a captain again, think about the nature of loose trash, of how it would sit in the hold, how it might shift in weather. Gradually, as his brain cleared more thinking-space, he thought of methane gas building up like a bomb in the sealed holds, and the consequences of that when the hot South American sun hit the deck from dawn and started to bake it like a desert stone. A tiny sliver of rage started to build in his chest. Tiny but insistent. If he could die he’d be dead a thousand times by now. Dying was too desirable, too good for Matthew Cotton. It was a release he didn’t deserve. It wasn’t up to the slimy suited bastards in the Hong Kong offices of a shipping company to change that.

He glanced at the weather fax again, which he’d already registered indicated nothing but fine weather. Then he picked up the phone and called down to B-deck.

A deck cadet answered in Filipino.

‘Rapadas. Open all the hatch covers fifteen feet.’

The man didn’t even reply, but several minutes later two men walked lazily into the white light of the deck and started working the hydraulics that would wind open the huge metal doors, slapping each other on the shoulder and continuing some animated conversation as they worked their way along. For a moment Matthew almost felt like an officer in charge. Someone who’d taken a responsible and intelligent action to prevent disaster.

But the moment was brief. Reality hit him and reminded him he was nothing higher than pond scum. He sank down again and drained his mug. The holds wouldn’t blow. The ship and the crew would be safer now than they were twenty minutes ago.

Big fucking deal.

The sun would come up and go down. The earth would turn. Stars in space would die and be born. And nothing he ever did, good or bad for the rest of his life would make him anything other than a piece of shit. Swinging London tipped up and Matthew Cotton’s eyes closed. His free hand made a tight claw on his thigh.

5

The fantasies of most ancient cultures almost always included one of walking on water. From Christianity through Mayan domestic legend, even into modern obsessions with surface-bound sports, the defiant, burnished skin of the ocean presents a challenge to man that is considerably deeper than the mere domination of nature.

As the early morning sun gave the Pacific a pale cream solidity, Esther felt she could run straight off the deck and onto that glittering rugged surface without puncturing it. However, a dull but well-meaning officer on the journey down to Callao had regularly and unbidden furnished Esther with sea-going statistics, and the revelation that the sea along the coast of Peru concealed a trench that was over twenty thousand feet deep had induced in her an immediate vertigo as she thought of the blackness yawning beneath her feet. Gazing out now at the innocent shining surface, she felt that same mix of fear and thrill again at the ocean’s secret.

Maybe, she reasoned, that was why mankind always felt impelled to make instant contact with water the moment it was anywhere in his vicinity. The child on the beach who runs without fail to the sea, the adults who pull off their socks and shoes to paddle in the shallows, the fisherman who catches nothing but is satisfied with the contact of weighted line and water; all are reassuring themselves that what excites them about what they see, that beckoning seductive sheet of light, is as flimsy as net and as dangerous as fire.

If she could, Esther, too, would have made contact with a cool sea.

A swim after the punishing circuit she was pounding would have been delicious, but even if the boat were a pleasure yacht that drifted to let her bathe, she wouldn’t care to swim thinking of the sunless chasm that lay beneath her. A cramped, steamy shower would do and with only four more laps of the cargo deck to go, even that was pretty damned attractive.

She needed to get back in shape, and although the mountain treks had been hard, nothing in her field trip had left time for the kind of physical programme she liked to stick to back home. Fifty-one laps of the deck, twenty of them with a stitch ripping her side apart, only confirmed that she had serious work to do, and as she sprinted for the bow it was with a sinking heart that she realized she would have to stop and let the pain subside.

Her trainers squealed on the metal as she slowed down and jogged to the edge of the last hold, whose open hatch protruded about six or seven feet beyond the lip of its fixings. Esther put out a hand and leant heavily against the metal, her head bowed to her waist, sweat dripping onto the deck between her feet.

Less than a minute passed before her heart rate had slowed to near normal, and she straightened up rubbing at the side that was still tight and sore. Despite the eternal thrumming of the engine vibrating through her body that was so constant and rhythmic it ceased to exist for most sailors only hours into any new voyage, the serenity was exquisite. The breaking water around the hull swished erratically and the light wind that toyed in her hair was no more than a whisper.

She leaned back against the hatch and looked out over the sea. Although the route was hugging the west coast of Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, they were far too many miles from land to view it. The sun had an uncluttered stage upon which to rise and it was doing so with unparalleled magnificence.

This was a lucky time. Esther had always divided her days since childhood into lucky and unlucky times.

When things were bad, unlucky bad, she knew that by waiting, the lucky bits would present themselves, and however brief they might be, she had learned to grab them and hold them tight. She’d started it at the age of eight as she stood over her mother’s grave, Benny’s whisky breath filling her nostrils as he clung to her little shoulder as a means of steadying himself rather than of comforting her. Her grief had been too profound to articulate, but she had felt her father’s confused adult despair being transmitted to her through his curled fingers the way a plant carries chlorophyll, and as she had shaken free of his grasp she had looked around in desperation to see something beautiful, something distracting, something lucky.

A heavy-set woman in a pink organza hat was tending a grave beyond the untidy scrub in that cheap little Pennsylvanian graveyard, and as she bent a gust of wind blew it from her head and made her stumble after it in a way that was both grotesque and funny. Esther had looked around and noted that no one else had seen it but her. So that, she’d decided, had made it lucky. She could think of that instead of her Mom lying in the ground, and that would help get by the unlucky bit. It became habit, and here she was at the age of twenty-three still doing it in the most mundane of moments.

And yes, at this moment away from the decidedly ragged collection of shipmates, with the sun and the sea as her only companions, her passage home assured and her dissertation shaping up in her head with every mile, she had the right to feel lucky. Lucky, even though the trash in the hold was tainting the perfect scene a little now that she’d stopped, by randomly releasing its foul odour in small nauseating gusts.

Esther waved a hand over her face.

‘Shit.’

She turned and looked to the hatch as though a stern glance would halt its emissions, but since its metal surface was at least three or four feet above her head, the culprit – the mountain of waste – was impossible to see.

Esther inclined her head back out to sea, then looked slowly back again, curious. A sheen on the edge of the metal hatch had caught her eye, and she stepped back to examine it. There was a trail emanating from the lid of the hatch above her head, running over the edge and then continuing along the deck below, as though whatever had left it had dropped the seven or eight feet and continued its progress. She rubbed at it with a toe. It had been dried hard by the sun exactly like the trail of a slug, but with the marked difference of being at least three feet wide instead of the innocent half inch you would curse at in your glasshouse, and when her trainer made contact it broke off in wafer-thin flakes.

Esther bent and looked more closely at it. Under the hardened flakes of slime there were other things sticking to the deck, things that were still slightly moist, streaks of effluent maybe, a trace of oil or tar, but worst of all a brown-red smear that looked almost like blood. Still crouched, she followed the trail on the deck, her hand shading her eyes from the sun, until, squinting, she could just make it out disappearing over the edge of the deck about twenty feet short of the accommodation block.

Esther stood up and wiped her foot unconsciously on the edge of the metal hatch runner. She shook her head. The only explanation could be that someone had pulled an unpleasant portion of the trash from its pile, dragged it nearly seven holds further up the deck and then tipped it into the sea. She knew she shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but everything about this ship was making her long for the dull, reliable neat container ship she’d arrived on.

Most likely the trail was the residue of drunken behaviour, a bet, a forfeit or a prank, and the worst of it was that discipline was obviously so lax no one had bothered to come out and scrub away the evidence. This was a crew that needed its ass kicked.

The stitch healed, she bent forward and took two deep breaths, ready to finish the circuit. She straightened. For no reason other than that the unscrubbed trail of goo had irritated her, she had an overwhelming desire to peer into the hold to see exactly what they had been up to.

A quick glance up to the far-off windows of the bridge suggested that she was not about to be observed, and so with her hands on the guide rail of the hatch cover she hauled herself up to the edge of hold number two. There was a moment of feeling precarious, the action putting her higher than the ship’s taff rail, and she paused to steady herself. When she had adjusted to the height she walked carefully forward to the fifteen-foot slit between the open hatch doors and crouched down at the edge. The smell nearly knocked her backwards and she covered her nose and mouth with one hand, leaning heavily on the other.

Ten or twelve feet below her, the pile of irregular and unidentifiable waste was illuminated by a slim strip of daylight, while the rest of the load skulked in darkness beneath the ledges of drawn hatch covers. It was an ugly cargo, and looking down into it gave Esther the creeps. The sea breeze seemed chillier up here, and she hunched her shoulders against it as she scanned the top of the waste to try and understand what someone might have been pulling free from it.

From the dark starboard portion of the pile came a movement. Her eyes flicked to it immediately, her breath caught in readiness.

She focused hard on where she thought she saw the subtle peripheral shifting and waited for it to happen again.

Her leg was grabbed in a vice-like grip below the knee, and before she could cry out Esther was dragged backwards.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re at?’ It was a male voice.

Esther found herself on her back, her fists clenched ready to strike, blinking up at the figure silhouetted against the sky. Her panting breath slowed and she untensed her body enough to sit semi-erect and recognize the figure of Matthew Cotton.

‘My God. You near made me shit myself.’

‘Yeah?’ It was said with aggression, not apology.

He offered her a hand to get up. She ignored it and sat forward instead. Matthew pointed to the deck. ‘Get down. Right now.’

Esther looked at him sulkily and slowly stood, walked forward and lowered herself to the deck. Cotton dropped after her, dusting off his pants and never taking his eyes from her sullen face.

‘You any idea how stupid that was?’

‘Aw, come on.’

Matthew nodded vigorously as though she’d offered to start an alley fight. ‘Okay, smartass. Let’s just say we hit a swell there and you tipped in. You think you’d just land on it and step right out? Huh?’

Esther said nothing, but put her hands on her hips and stared out to sea.

But Matthew had no intention of stopping the lecture. ‘Year and a half back, an ABS who decided to take a jaywalk across an open hold full of grain while the hatches were still open in port, fell in. Okay? Crew thought he’d jumped ship, done a runner, when he didn’t show up for his watch. So they sailed, they thought, without him. Found his body at the bottom of the grain at the next port. Care to think about what drowning in raw, unhusked wheat must feel like? No? Well try thinking about how drowning in a big pile of shit might be for laughs, because believe me, honey, that’s what would have happened to you if you’d gone ass over tit.’

Esther looked at him. He was genuinely angry, breathing hard, his eyes lit with indignant fire. She held up restraining hands. ‘Yeah. Okay. Sorry.’

Matthew turned and looked out to sea himself now, as though trying to calm himself. ‘Man, you shouldn’t even be out here without a hard hat. It’s a bulk carrier, not the QE fuckin’ 2.’

Esther was getting annoyed. This, after all, was the drunk who could barely stand upright yesterday, and even though she was grateful he got her on board, he was hardly Captain Kirk.

‘Yeah, well it doesn’t look like “shipshape” means much out here anyhows.’

He snapped his glance back to her. ‘Meaning?’

She pointed down at the hardened slime trail beneath his feet. ‘I got curious as to what that was.’

Matthew looked down, and followed the trail with his eyes from hatch cover to ship’s rail.

She watched the slow wit of the perpetual drunk try to work it out and fail, and pity returned. ‘But I guess I was out of line. Sorry.’

Matthew was still staring at the trail. ‘Yeah.’ He said it absently, obviously still perplexed.

‘Can I finish my run?’

He turned back to her, his hand stroking the nape of his neck in thought. ‘Huh? Yeah. Go on. You heard me out.’

She held his gaze for a beat then turned and sprinted for the bow.

Matthew watched her absently for a second then turned and walked along the trail to where it left the deck and slipped beneath the rail. He leant over and stared down at the stained hull of the ship. There was nothing to see except the oily blue-black of an insanely deep ocean and the virgin white of its foam.

By the time Esther had come around again, he was gone, but the third and last circuit saw her nearly run into two cadets wandering on deck with buckets and mops.

Although she didn’t know why, Esther was pleased they were coming to clean it up. Very pleased.

The captain’s door was closed, which Renato knew signalled he was either in the shower or asleep. But it was already gone eight-thirty and neither possibility was very likely for a man of such regular and early rising habits as Lloyd Skinner. As he paused by the closed door and pondered what to do, he was joined by Pasqual the radio officer, clutching a piece of paper and yawning.

‘Taking a dump is he?’ said Pasqual in their native tongue, secure in the knowledge that even if the captain was on the other side of the door, the words would be meaningless. That, of course, was the great advantage of sailing with American top brass. At least usually it was. Although the captain had picked up a word or two of Filipino, enough to say please and thanks, the crew could largely talk amongst themselves in front of Skinner without the threat of being pulled up for verbal insubordination. Unless, of course, you were a rating and second officer Renato Lhoon heard you. Then you were in big trouble. Cotton however, required more caution. His Filipino was pretty strong for an American, as was his Spanish. But since Cotton was mostly drunk the crew could afford to relax when discussing him in his earshot. Anyway Cotton wasn’t here. They could say what they liked.

‘Yeah, well we all got to go sometime, Pasqual.’ Renato knocked lightly on the door.

‘Come.’

The captain’s voice revealed that he was indeed on the other side of the door, sounding, by Renato’s familiarity with the master’s quarters, as though he were merely seated at his couch and chart table.

The men entered, and Renato was rewarded by having his theory proved exactly right. The captain’s quarters consisted of an office that was joined by a closed door to his personal suite of rooms, no more than a larger version of the officers’ cabins with a slightly bigger shower room. In the office that the men entered, a large desk covered with papers was fronted by a seating arrangement of three cheap block-cushion sofas pushed together to make a C-shaped fortress of foam, surrounding a low table designed to be exactly the correct size to accommodate a standard navigational chart. Skinner was seated at the table, his hands cupping a knee, nothing on the table more sinister than a chart of the area they were currently sailing and a mug of coffee. He looked up at the men with the mild irritation of someone who has been disturbed.

‘Gentlemen?’ Skinner said shortly, as though they’d walked in on him naked.

The two men exchanged glances. ‘Eight thirty-four, captain.’

Skinner blinked at Lhoon, then looked down at his watch. ‘Ah. Right. Sit.’

The radio officer held out the paper. ‘Just delivering this, sir. Two messages from company for you, and one for purser.’

Skinner took the paper, and Renato sat down on the ungiving couch opposite his captain.

‘Thank you, Pasqual.’

Looking down at the paper without reading it, he spoke casually, absently avoiding eye contact with the man.

‘Eh, yes. Make a reply in a couple of hours. You can let me know when will be convenient for me to use the radio room alone. Confidential ship-to-shore.’ He scratched at his neck and added, ‘Nothing urgent.’

Pasqual nodded. ‘Sure. No problem.’

The radio officer left them, stifling a yawn again. He hadn’t slept well last night as a result of eight hours of fierce half-waking dreams and half-conscious anxieties, an unusual occurrence for him, and now it was taking its toll. No matter. After he’d got his morning watch out of the way, maybe he would slip back to the cabin and catch up. After all, the sea couldn’t be calmer and everything on board was normal to the point of tedium. He left the captain’s door open as he exited, the way shipboard etiquette said it should have been when he’d entered.

Renato coughed into a fist, then clasped his hands in front of him ready to deliver his routine daily report. ‘Quiet watch, captain. All’s well. Only action, First Officer Cotton opened hatch doors round eleven-thirty. Thinks there might be risk of methane. Weather looks like being okay to leave them for now.’

Skinner raised an eyebrow, then nodded. ‘Methane. Yes, well.’

‘Third officer on duty now, and he knows to keep an eye on weather fax to close them if it blows above force four.’

‘Good. Right.’

‘Anything for today, sir?’

Skinner looked casually at the radio officer’s communication again. ‘Eh. Maybe some routine inspection. Down in the engine rooms and in the cofferdams.’

‘I can organize that.’ Renato held out his hand for the paper.

Skinner looked up at him, and there was nothing absent or distracted about the piercing gaze he fixed on the man. It took his second officer by surprise.

‘That won’t be necessary, Renato. This is my duty.’

The man nodded, withdrew his hand self-consciously, then waited. The captain continued. ‘The bosun briefed for the day?’

‘Sure.’

Skinner held his eye, then said quietly and with great finality, ‘Thank you, Renato.’

Lhoon coughed again and stood up. ‘Thank you, captain.’

He left quietly, and before he had got even halfway to the lift, he heard the quiet but unmistakable metallic sound of Skinner’s door closing. Renato paused, thought, then dismissing the man’s eccentricities of the day, went about his business.

Esther was enjoying her breakfast. The eggs and bacon were good, the coffee hot, she felt revitalized after her shower, and unlike the awkwardness of last night, her dining companion this morning was a jolly and talkative chief engineer called Sohn. Through broken English and equally broken teeth he was telling her about his family which consisted entirely of women: six daughters and what sounded like a formidable wife, and how even the nightmare of an overheating engine room was a blessed escape from the heat of their nagging when he was ashore.

He was candid and funny, and even Matthew Cotton entering the mess room, bringing a nauseating faint stale whiff of alcohol with him as he sat and joined them, couldn’t dampen her high spirits.

Sohn nodded and grinned at Cotton as the lugubrious-looking first officer poured himself a coffee from the communal plastic flask on the table.

‘Feel good this morning, Mattu?’

‘Goddamn born again, Sohn,’ he replied without warmth and took a long swallow of coffee.

The engineer laughed and nodded again. ‘No one like night watch. Mattu get it every time. Ha ha.’

Esther smiled at the man’s jollity in the face of the second officer’s gloom. She crunched on some toast and smiled. ‘So you do eat then?’

Matthew looked at her. ‘The only damn thing Leonardo can cook.’

Given last night’s dinner Esther had to admit he had a point. Sohn pointed at Esther as though Matthew had never seen her before.

‘Esther army stoodent.’

‘Yeah?’

The engineer cheerfully ignored Cotton’s dismissive grunt and turned back to his considerably more charming companion.

‘You shoot guns and all?’

Esther looked down at her plate as though she were talking about something dirty. ‘Standard M16 A2. Nothing fancy. You get acquainted with your weapon at advance training camp.’

Sohn nodded enthusiastically, wanting more. Nothing came. Matthew sat back in his chair and looked at her.

‘Guess you got on well with Lloyd last night then, huh?’

Esther narrowed her eyes. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘He’s a Nam vet. Explosives. Used to defuse bombs, lay land mines.’

She was interested. ‘Yeah? It didn’t come up.’

Matthew drained his cup and poured another. ‘Doesn’t talk about it. You blame him?’

Esther shook her head at nothing in particular.

‘Shit, it’s crazy when you think about guys Lloyd’s age, walking about looking like they spent a lifetime doing nothing more than mow a lawn and polish their Lincoln Continental, yet they’ve seen stuff that you and I only have nightmares about.’

Sohn tried to keep up with what she was saying, watching her with rapt attention now she was talking at regular speed to a fellow English speaker, instead of the slow deliberate words she’d been enunciating for him in the last half hour. He caught the gist.

‘Yeah. He nearly go down on the Eurydice too. That really mess him about, I think.’

Sohn pointed to his head to illustrate where exactly he thought the captain had been messed about.

‘What was that?’ enquired Esther of Cotton, knowing that Sohn’s explanation would be tortuous.

The same waiter as the previous night brought a plate across to Matthew and set it down. Obviously Cotton was a creature of habit. He picked up a fork and shovelled some scrambled egg into his mouth.

‘Carrier Skinner sailed about five years ago. Got called ashore for some personal reason halfway through the voyage, and handed the command over to another captain at Lagos. Damn thing disappeared without trace a day later out of port. No survivors. No salvage.’

Esther was genuinely horrified. ‘Jesus. That must have been rough. He would have known all those guys well?’

‘Sailed with the same crew for nearly two-and-a-half years. Like family.’

‘Did they find out what happened?’

Matthew shook his head. ‘Lloyd had to give evidence at the enquiry. He’d kept his own log after they’d left Luanda and for some reason had taken his notes ashore when he left for Florida.

‘Apparently he thought there’d been an irregularity he couldn’t prove with cargo stowage by the African stevedores, and on account of everything he was able and obliged to check having been in order, they had forced him to sail.

‘But he hadn’t been happy, so guess that’s why he took his copy of the log. Company loved him for that. With no wreck to examine, Lloyd’s evidence was the only thing that counted. His log proved everything had been done just right by the captain and I guess by Sonstar too. Meant the insurance crooks had to pay up in full.’

Esther’s estimation of the captain had risen again. No wonder the guy was reticent and distracted. It sounded like he’d had more than his share of shit. Sohn was nodding enthusiastically at this story.

‘They make a lot of money when ship go down like that.’

Matthew looked sour. ‘Yeah. They sure as hell ain’t got the reputation for charity.’

Esther ate in silence, thinking of the horror of being sucked down on a ship this size into the blackness of that trench below them, and her food lost its taste.

Sohn pushed his chair back and bowed cheerfully to Esther. ‘You want I show you my engine room later?’

Esther beamed. ‘Aw, neat. I’d love that.’

‘I on watch for four hours now. Any time.’

He bowed again and left. Esther was once again stranded with company she could well do without, and she watched Matthew eating in silence, much of her cheerfulness having exited the room with Sohn. Now might be a good time to set things straight, so she took the chance.

‘Listen, I’m real sorry I made you mad on the cargo deck.’

Matthew shrugged as he ate, then mutely nodded his forgiveness.

She continued. ‘Find out what that stuff was?’

He shook his head and shrugged again, completely uninterested, his mouth overful with hot food. Esther could see a repeat of last night’s one-sided conversation looming, and she wiped the sides of her mouth in readiness to go. No one could say she hadn’t given it her best shot.

Matthew looked up at her and intuitively caught the body language that meant she was getting ready to leave and, to Esther’s surprise, did something to halt it. He waved a fork. ‘So tell me. Why’d you choose the military?’

She looked at him to see if there was bitterness or sarcasm behind the question, and when she saw none, she answered. ‘I wanted a degree. It was the only way I could afford one.’

Matthew looked genuinely interested. He swallowed what he’d been chewing and gesticulated at her again with his fork as though he needed it to talk. ‘Yeah? What kinda service you need to put in for that? Three, four years?’

‘Seven.’

Matthew raised both eyebrows. ‘No shit? Hell, you must want that degree real bad.’

It was Esther’s turn to shrug.

Matthew took another swig of coffee, watching her over the rim of the cup. ‘Or maybe I’m getting it wrong here. Maybe you wanted to join up anyhow. Seen those commercials myself, the guys rappelling in California and cross-country skiing and shit? Makes me almost want to do it too.’

She scratched her neck and gave a light laugh. ‘Well, since you ask, funny thing is, sure, I thought it was just a way to buy me some academic time. Stuff I thought my whole life I wanted to do. Kind of always dreamt that it was education could let me escape. Know what I mean? But when I went to advance training camp? You know, I found I had an aptitude for it I never knew I had. Surprised the living shit out of me.’

‘Aptitude for what?’

She picked up her coffee cup and looked him square in the eye. ‘Combat.’

Matthew looked at her, smiled weakly, then returned to his breakfast.

She knew he didn’t believe her. He knew nothing about her, but she could practically read his thoughts.

He’d picture some white-collar home, see her playing at being a soldier, getting off on the masculinity of holding and firing a semi-automatic weapon. How could he know she’d been shooting guns since she was nine? Dogging off school with Henry-Adam Shenker to go to the wasteland of scrub willow a mile away from the trailer park, and shoot at everything that moved and everything that couldn’t with his big brother’s hand gun. The same gun that eventually helped put him and his other two drug-dealing, store-robbing siblings behind bars. And how could he know she’d spent her teens fighting with her fists and her teeth, against almost every kid at school that called her trailer-trash, or asked after her daddy with those shit-eating smug grins?

All that until the autumn term when Mr Sanderson took over as her grade teacher and discovered, like some lion tamer with the magic chair of academia and genuine concern for her, there was a brain in there, under that wild animal that tore and kicked and bit anything that got in her way.

Matthew Cotton couldn’t know any of that, and frankly she didn’t care. She was civilized now, a tamed creature that read philosophy and studied culture, and that was all that mattered. She would give her best to the US army, and then see what life held at the other end. But that was enough. It was Matthew’s turn for spilling the beans, she decided.

‘What about you?’

He stabbed some bacon. ‘What about me?’

‘Well where you from?’

‘Nowhere special.’

Esther pursed her mouth. She was a private person by habit, and it annoyed her to have shared even a tiny part of her life with him when he was plainly so reticent to do the same.

‘Oh pardon me. Did I say I came from anywhere special? Texas sure ain’t frigging Arcadia.’

‘You sail, you live on ships. There’s nowhere else.’

‘So I guess you were born and raised on a bulk carrier? Cool.’

He looked up and the pain behind his eyes made her regret her tone. He wiped his mouth. ‘I was born and raised in New York. I lived for a time in Atlanta. Now I don’t live any damn place. Okay?’

Esther held his gaze, embarrassed, then nodded.

‘Sure.’

He got back to his meal.

Esther waited until a decent amount of time had passed to let the dust settle from his inexplicable ire, then pushed back her chair and stood. ‘If I run tomorrow, I guess I’ll wear the hard hat.’

Matthew nodded down into his eggs. ‘You do that.’

She nodded back to the top of his head, cleared her throat and left. As she walked back up the corridor to her cabin, Esther let out the breath she’d been holding in for nearly a minute. A peal of laughter burst from the crew’s mess hall, and she rubbed at her hair with an exasperated hand. Right now, Esther Mulholland wished she’d majored in languages. Namely, Filipino. Life ahead for the next five days would have promise to be a lot more entertaining if she had.

Fen had been keeping out of the bosun’s way all morning, when he finally caught up with him on the main deck, crouching in front the accommodation block, staring at the long perspective of holds in front of him.

‘What the hell are you up to?’

Fen looked up at Felix Chadin from the bucket of unused water he was squatting beside and blinked. ‘Deck,’ he said, standing and waving a hand weakly at the surface as if he had just named it. ‘I was scrubbing the deck.’

‘For the whole of your watch?’

‘Eh, no. I was helping cook move some crates.’

Chadin crossed his arms. He was in a bad mood. Sleep had evaded him last night and he was grouchy.

‘Well isn’t it convenient that I find you just as your watch is over, particularly when the derrick cables need checking?’

‘I can check them. I don’t mind.’

Chadin looked at the man. It was not the answer he expected from a rating he suspected of skiving. It threw him.

‘No. Go on.’ He dismissed Fen with an imperial wave that was peculiarly Filipino, used liberally by foremen, mothers-in-law and dictators alike in their homeland.

‘I want to know exactly where you are on the next watch though,’ he called after the hastily-retreating figure. Fen disappeared into the block’s door, and Chadin looked down at the bucket. It was clear that the man had not been scrubbing at all, yet the eagerness with which he’d offered to extend his watch was confusing. Chadin looked up along the open holds and squinted against the low sun, then went to find someone else he could make suffer for his poor night’s rest.

Fen entered the crew’s mess room, went to the coffee machine and punched in his command. The whining machine pissed a spiralling stream of brown liquid into a plastic cup that was too flimsy to prevent it burning any inexperienced hand that attempted to hold it. He waited until it had finished its business, grabbed the cup by its thick rim, and went to join the four men, three of whom sat smoking, one sulking, at the Formica-covered table nearest the serving hatch.

‘Ah, now then, the very man,’ exclaimed Parren the storekeeper, slapping the table top. He pointed at the surly sixteen-year-old cadet, Hal, and laughed. The other two men laughed in a snickering kind of way, childish, but entirely unkind.

‘This little shit-eater wants to know if his girlfriend’s being faithful.’

Fen looked from face to face, then sipped carefully at the nasty coffee. ‘So?’

‘So you’re the guy to tell him.’

Fen scowled. ‘Yeah, well not today. Okay?’

Hal emerged from his sulk. ‘Aw come on, Fen. I’ll pay you.’

‘No.’

The boy snorted and picked up his own white plastic cup. ‘Yeah, well it’s a load of bullshit that stuff anyway. It doesn’t tell you anything you don’t know.’

Fen’s face darkened and he lowered the cup. The three older men looked at each other with eyebrows raised gleefully in anticipation of an explosion.

‘You want to be careful, kid. Stupider people than you have fallen foul of Saanti. The dumber you are the harder it is to take the truth.’

The boy made a face, pretending he was scared, then laughed. Parren leant forward, trying to break the iron rod of gaze that Fen had fixed on the boy. ‘Do it for us then, Fen. Come on. I wouldn’t mind asking a couple of things.’

Fen looked round slowly at the storekeeper and frowned.

‘Yeah,’ added the steward who sat slouched to Parren’s right. ‘Why not?’

Why not, indeed. Fen knew why not. Because when he had scattered the Saanti bone-dice last night and laid out the alphabet cards, reading them for himself instead of for someone else for the first time in fifteen years, they had terrified him. He would never normally cast those dice for himself. It had been the dream that had made him do it. The dream that had made him doubt what was real and what was not when he awoke in a sweat. But he had done it, and as it was with those he read for, he took what the dice told him very seriously. The reading always required the card-caster to read out the message that was being spelled for his eyes only, and sometimes Fen found that his voice adopted the tone of the person who was communicating, whether they were alive or dead. It had been uncanny at first, and almost everyone he read for imagined at first that he was faking it. Until, that is, someone they loved, or had lost forever, spoke through Fen’s mouth. Then they believed. They had no choice.

But last night … Fen shivered at the memory. Someone – no that wasn’t quite right – some thing, had spoken to him, or rather made him speak, and done so in a voice and a language that was both unintelligible and indescribably horrible. He had broken off the reading even before it had completed its first communication, his mouth fouled by the noise that had come from it, and now he was afraid that if he read again, it would come back.

But that had been in the night. He had been too tormented by his dreams to sleep well, no doubt fuelled by the schoolboy superstitions of ridiculous peasant stevedores. Now it was day, and he was sitting in the brightly-lit mess room that was familiar as his own skin, the faces of his long-time shipmates looking at him expectantly, waiting for some fun. If ever there was a time to exorcise the demons of the night with a playful and harmless reading, telling these men of their loved ones at home, then perhaps it was now. Cowardice was not compatible with being a Saanti-master. Fen licked his lips and wiped the sides of his sweaty shirt with his palms.

‘What kind of things?’ he asked Parren.

The men smiled, sensing entertainment.

‘Well, for one, I want to know if my boy working in Dubai will marry a good girl and give me grandsons.’

The man at the end of the table laughed and blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘I can tell you that Parren. I have it on good authority he’s choking on Arab cock right now.’

Parren made a mock-threatening swipe with the back of his hand, but he was smiling. He looked back at Fen. ‘So?’

Fen toyed with his cup, his gaze fixed on the brown circle of liquid, then slowly put his hand in his trouser pocket and brought out the pack and dice. The four men shifted in their seats with delight and sat forward in anticipation.

Fen held the pack and looked from face to face, then slowly began to shuffle the cards. They watched closely as he laid out a semi-circle of ancient and bizarrely-marked cards, each with letters of the alphabet inscribed over a lurid illustration. The three bone dice had occult symbols burnt into them, two of them inlaid intricately around the symbols with tiny slivers of gold, one with silver.

Fen realized his hand was trembling. He stopped and took another swallow of coffee. This was ridiculous. All the more determined now to shake this night terror off, he sped up, concentrating hard as he laid and arranged the cards.

This task complete, he gathered two of the three dice together in his hand and looked up. ‘Who’s first?’

Parren wiped his mouth with a hand then looked to the cadet. ‘Well I suppose it’s Hal whose losing most sleep.’

‘Yeah. Or his girlfriend,’ sniggered the carpenter.

Fen looked to the boy. ‘You answer only when I ask you a question. You touch none of the cards, but only this die when I tell you to. Understand?’

The boy smiled and nodded, looking round for approval. All eyes were on Fen, and the serving hatch filled as the two assistant cooks leaned forward happily on their elbows, well used to the show that the rating could put on.

Fen placed the single die in the centre of the semi-circle then shook the other two in his palm and cast them. They clattered onto the table top, rolled and came to rest in front of Parren.

‘What’s your name?’

Fen was looking at the cards, not the boy, but Hal knew to answer when he was poked in the ribs by a sharp finger.

‘Hal Sanin.’

‘What’s your question?’

Hal licked his lips. It felt more tense now, less of a game. Fen’s face was stern with concentration.

‘Em, will my … no, sorry.’ He took a breath and composed himself. ‘Is my girlfriend, Phaara, being faithful to me?’

Fen looked at the two cast dice. ‘And who do you ask? The wind, the sun, the water or the fire?’

Hal looked to the other men and gave a worried shrug. Parren shrugged back cheerfully and mouthed silently the word ‘water,’ for no other reason than to keep things going.

‘Eh, water.’

Fen stretched forward and put his little finger on the die in the semicircle of cards. He breathed in hard, then waited. The men waited, Parren throwing Hal a fatherly wink. Slowly, Fen’s finger began to move the die across the table top.

It bobbed and hesitated in front of the cards, then moved on, stopping and starting randomly before setting off again. And then his finger speeded up, sliding faster and faster until it was darting across the table top like some impossibly fleet insect captured between the laid-out cards. Most of the men had seen this many times, but they were still impressed. Even if it wasn’t supernatural, just Fen doing some long-practised party trick, it was still damned dextrous. All the time, Fen’s eyes darted with the die, reading the letters as it spelled them out, interpreting what the illustrated cards denoted, and waiting for the voice he had asked to come through.

Fen stopped. His eyes were closed but his head came up sharply.

‘Hal?’

It was a woman’s voice. No question. The stewards at the hatch nudged each other in glee. This was good.

Hal gulped. He looked around for support, but all eyes were fixed on Fen’s face. ‘Yes?’ he replied weakly.

‘You son of a sow.’

Hal gaped at Fen. There was no question it was his girlfriend’s voice, and if he were honest, her language too.

‘What?’

‘You dare accuse me of infidelity, you bastard?’

The boy was silent, his mouth working without words.

‘I’ll tell you about infidelity. What about my cousin? Yeah? That bring back anything? Tasik and Carlo’s wedding in Manila?’

Hal gawped stupidly at the cards then back up at Fen. He looked as though he might be sick.

‘You tried to have her in my brother’s car, didn’t you? Go on deny it. Right there while the dancing was starting. Fumbling at her bra like a kid.’

‘Stop. Stop it.’ The boy was nearly crying.

‘And you’re asking if I’m being unfaithful? I bought that dress specially for you, not for the wedding. Blue, because I know you like blue. And what do you do? You take Deni out to my brother’s car the moment I …’

Fen stopped suddenly and opened his eyes. There was silence except for Hal’s sharp hard breathing as he wrestled to compose himself like the man he wanted to be. Wrestled, in fact, to stop himself weeping with fear and shame.

Every face watched Fen intently, but his eyes, though open, were cloudy and unfocused. Then, slowly, Fen’s mouth contorted, and from it came noises that chilled the blood of everyone present. Guttural, throaty noises that sounded almost like words …

‘Caaahrdreeed. Cahrdreeed montwaandet.’

On the table, Fen’s finger started to move. It started slowly, then as before gathered speed, until it was flying from card to card. Sweat had started to bead on his temple.

The men watching stayed perfectly still, hardly breathing as though stalked by some invisible predator.

Spit started to foam at the corner of Fen’s mouth, his eyes rolled in their sockets, and the finger on the die stopped abruptly. The next sounds from his mouth came from the same ugly contorted lips, but this time they were delivered in a low, almost inaudible whisper, as though something were experimenting with his tongue. The words started indistinctly, becoming more articulate, more formed, as the volume increased. It was as if someone were practising speaking in an unfamiliar language, growing bolder as they became more coherent.

‘Yes. Yes. Scum. Scum. Oh filthy scum of scum. Listen, scum. Sons of scum. Fathers of scum. Husbands of shit. Brothers of barren spunk. Listen … listen to me. To meeeee …’

Parren broke his own spell of paralysis. This was too much. ‘Fen. Fen stop it.’

Fen appeared completely unable to comply.

‘Dung that drops from the dead. I am whole. You scum. Listen … listen …’

The die beneath Fen’s finger started to tremble as though sitting on a vibrating surface, and it continued to do so, even when it shook loose from his grip. The men watched it with horror, then Parren leapt to his feet and slapped Fen hard across the face with a blow that knocked him back in his chair.

Fen let out a shriek, and raised his arms across his face, but not, thought Parren later, to protect himself from the blow. The die ceased its tremulous progress across the table top, once again becoming an innocent and inanimate object, and the men looked at Fen with horror.

The cadet and the steward had also leapt to their feet, and two of them grabbed Fen under the arms and brought him back upright.

‘Get some water,’ Parren barked to the two cooks standing dumb-struck in the hatch.

Water was fetched and duly administered, but even an hour later, the time when the men should have been laughing and reflecting on what must have been nothing more than a ugly prank, neither Fen nor his audience had recovered sufficiently to laugh at anything.

6

It was a matter of priorities. She’d washed all three of her T-shirts, her entire collection of underwear, which wasn’t much and depressingly utilitarian, and even her trusty sandals, which had begun to smell like an old carcass. Now, they were all hanging like puritan bunting over the plastic frame of the shower cubicle, or on the rail that ran around the cabin, and it meant only one thing. It was time to do some work.

Esther sat down heavily on her sofa, crossed her bare legs beneath her and gathered the pile of paper, notepads, the Dictaphone and red, hardbound book that she’d carried halfway across Peru, onto her lap, sighing as she started to sift through the confused mess. She grazed until she found what she wanted, the cream of the crop, the thing that she believed was going to make this whole project.

She’d come up with the dissertation idea in a response to a particularly politically correct lecture from a lanky objectionable English professor on a book promotion tour, who had come all the way to their college to present his lecture, bearing the same title as his book: Democracy: The Natural State of Man. Esther didn’t know why, but she’d hated him the moment he’d smoothed his sad academic beard with long fingers, smiled smugly at the audience, and said, ‘What has politics got to do with anthropology, you must be asking yourselves?’

Esther was in fact sighing, asking herself why this man was patronizing them with his opening sentence.

By the time he got to, ‘You know, you take it for granted that if I offend you, horrify you, or bore you, you have the power and the freedom to leave. Democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Voting with your feet. It is more natural, more immovably inbuilt into the fabric of humanity, from Piltdown man to a Wall Street broker, than any other form of known social behaviour,’ she desperately wanted to prove him wrong merely for the sake of it.

He went on to argue that dictatorships, however benevolent, held back humanity and halted progress, and at question time Esther put up her hand.

‘What about the Roman Empire?’ she asked without aggression.

He smiled again, a father to a child. ‘Ah yes, Fascism.’

Before he could begin a prepared response about that particularly abhorrent form of human politics, she interrupted. ‘I mean, specifically, how did it hold back humanity and halt progress?’

He had raised his eyebrows. ‘How about slavery, genocide and corruption?’ He was looking forward to humiliating her. She could tell he made a living out of it.

‘How about social order and justice for the majority, engineering and military advances of a type that have survived even until now, creativity in the arts equal if not superior to anything we enjoy today?’

‘No, no, no …’ He tried to stop by her shaking his head with sympathy, but she was undeterred.

‘Oh yeah. And ice cream.’

The class burst out laughing. He laughed with them, but only with his mouth. His eyes were pinning her down, marking her out.

‘And Hitler? I trust you admired the fact the trains ran on time?’

‘Hitler was voted into power.’ She spoke the next word deliberately slowly to irritate him. ‘Democratically.’

She was starting to irritate him as much he annoyed her. She could tell.

‘I guess you must be a National Socialist, young lady.’ He smiled at his own joke.

‘I’m Jewish.’

His smile faded and he looked at her coldly, cleared his throat and gave his pat response to the rest of the class while Esther sat thinking. It wasn’t important to prove the point here. Of course she believed in the might of democracy. It had simply become interesting to her as a student to see if what the English jerk was saying was true or not, and more importantly, in the true naive spirit of the young, to try and ruin his experienced certainty.

That night she sat in the library and after three long hours chose the most successful ancient civilization she could find that was comparable to her own, and one that was not based on any form of democracy whatsoever. The Incas.

They were perfect. Haughty dictators who were so successful in building their empire that their people always had huge surpluses of food. They had plumbing they would be proud of in Idaho, irrigation engineering over thousands of miles that still defies modern understanding, and a hierarchy that by and large only slaughtered each other, leaving the man and woman in the well-paved streets unharmed. There was social welfare, free education and health care, little or no crime, and all with not a sniff of anything remotely approaching democracy.

Unfortunately there was also human sacrifice, but since church was not separate from state in the way it must always be in modern democracies, this would only help to further prove her point. So it was just what she needed. An enviable civilization destroyed not by its lack of democracy, but by an equally undemocratic horde of avaricious religious hypocrites from Europe. Now, thousands of years later, under the democratic rule of a bastardized Spanish civilization, was Peru more successful? No sirree. She was off, and her dissertation was born.

The paper she had created from the dross of notes and photos of temples and dig sites she’d had developed in Cuzcou included sketched diagrams and twenty-nine full pages of her writing. Because unbelievably she had chanced upon something she wasn’t expecting. Something that was so exciting she could hardly contain it. A three-week trip onto the high plateau with some shepherds she had befriended in a small village had led her to an extraordinary piece of living human archaeology, something she hoped she was the first to find, and when she wrote of it might just cause a stir.

The shepherds had told her of a small group of nomadic people, rarely seen, who moved and lived on the very edges of the eastern mountain range that divided the high Andean plateau from the Amazon jungle. What was remarkable about these people, apart from the fear they seemed to inspire in the otherwise hardy shepherds, was the fact that they were Incas. Esther had tried not to laugh. There were, of course, no Incas. All the research told her that in the days of the great empire there were in fact only forty thousand full-blooded nobles who called themselves by that name. The hundreds of thousands of people who lived peacefully under their rule were merely Inca subjects.

The pure-bred Incas were either slaughtered or interbred with the Spanish to create through countless generations the modern Peruvians. To suggest that some of the original royal Incas had survived thus far intact would be outrageous. But the normally reticent shepherds were adamant, insisting, as further proof, that these people were still sun-worshippers, that they had the power and dark practices of the ancient ones very much in their grasp. Not only that, but the shepherds spoke enigmatically, and Esther thought, somewhat fearfully, about the tribe being unusually active recently. One had said in a small anxious voice that some of them had been travelling to towns and cities, a thing previously unheard of.

She begged to know where they might be found and after days of pleading and haranguing, they had left her in a place where the tribe were sometimes seen. She was afraid at first, being left alone in such a desolate spot, but even more afraid when after three days she emerged from her tent in the early light of dawn to find a small group of men sitting silently outside, waiting for her to emerge.

She’d had an incredibly brief twelve days in their company, before they disappeared in the night, their tracks indicating they had moved off in a direction that was too obviously a route to the jungle for her taste. Everything she’d learned from them during their time together was from a peculiarly intense and very beautiful seventeen-year-boy in their midst who could speak a little halting Spanish. She had spent time cultivating him, flirting even, to make him sit with her and talk into her Dictaphone in very broken and difficult Spanish. But then Esther had a talent for making men want her without ever giving them what they expected might be theirs after time. He was no different. Just younger. He’d started haltingly, shyly, glancing at the older men who regarded him and Esther impassively as they sat together by her tent. But as the days progressed he began to take a great, almost obsessive interest in her, talking more animatedly and rapidly, leaving her confused and ignorant of the majority of what he was trying to tell her. He’d been so intense, sweating profusely as he spoke, even though they were camped on the freezing plateau. But at least she’d confirmed what the frightened shepherds had told her. The boy had been to Lima, an incredible journey from here. But his eyes shone when he spoke of it, even though the elders lowered their eyes when they heard the name of the city. Teenagers the world over, thought Esther. Here she was wanting him to tell her about the traditions and rituals of his tribe, and probably all he wanted to talk about would be discos and girls. He certainly became even more flushed and excited when she made him understand she was heading for Lima on the way back, and indeed after that, he rarely left her alone. But his Spanish was too rapid for her. No matter. She checked the tapes each time he finished, and whatever he said was all there.

All she would have to do was to take the time later to decipher and translate, no doubt kicking herself for not asking the right things when she had the chance.

She had also written everything down that the elders had said, in exactly the words they’d used, unfamiliar or not. It was not for her to interpret it until she could think straight later.

The diagrams she had were of the makeshift altar they would build and destroy each morning and she sat examining it, looking forward to comparing it with the ancient lay-outs of the temples she had visited endlessly throughout the rest of the trip. When she awoke one morning to find they had gone in the night, there had been a particularly intricate pattern scratched in the hardened dust directly outside her tent, and what interested her when she’d made a careful sketch of it, was that unlike the altars they built, there was nothing even remotely familiar about its twisting lines. She treasured that one above all.

Esther blessed the dull English professor with the beard. Through a routine academic exercise to try and discuss the effects of democracy on civilization, she might, quite incredibly, have run into what she firmly believed was an almost completely unknown tribe of people.

She had no one yet to share the thrill with, particularly on this ship of fools, but even if it was laughed out of college when she got back, right now she was as excited as if she’d struck gold.

She lay back, and with some difficulty started the long task of deciphering her own appalling handwriting.

Sohn was trying not to laugh. Lloyd Skinner was a big, powerful man, and from the engine room, the only hatch into the cofferdams between the cargo holds and the outer hull was one that was considerably smaller than him. The fourth engineer and a cadet had unscrewed it laboriously to give him access, but he was struggling to get in, especially with the big industrial torch and ridiculously formal flightcase he was carrying. ‘You need that in there?’ Sohn asked, pointing to the aluminium case.

Skinner looked back. ‘The only way to keep this damned paperwork together.’

The chief engineer grinned and shrugged. Skinner was a strange man. Anyone would have accompanied him if he’d ordered it, would have held the papers for him and offered their back as a makeshift table for any documents that needed ticked or filled in at site.

Indeed, Sohn would have been pleased to do it himself. He hadn’t been inside the cofferdams on this ship before, and he was always delighted to acquaint himself with the concealed architecture of any vessel he powered through the water. But Skinner was a loner, a perfectionist, an utter stickler for duty, and if any inspection needed to be done, he always wanted to do it by himself.

The curious thing was not only why the company would want this done now, while at sea, but why they wanted it done at all.

There was nothing in there. Just a long dark space, at least eight feet wide and as tall as the entire hull, running the length of the ship, both to port and starboard. They were supposed to be checked and flushed regularly at port, so that any problem would become rapidly obvious on the loadicator. But that took time and manpower, and Sonstar were not a company to waste either if it got in the way of making money. Skinner was to be admired for pursuing the official line when his bosses would almost certainly have turned a blind eye to its omission. And if he wanted to go wandering in the dark, fumbling with plans and treading on rats, then that was his business. It was Lloyd Skinner’s ship to command and he could do what he wanted.

The captain had already pushed through and was standing upright on the other side by the time Sohn formulated his last offer.

‘You want to take walkie-talkie? In case you fall or something?’

Skinner shook his head, but smiled weakly. ‘Thank you, Chief Engineer. No. I only need to check and see there’s no leakage from the holds. The bosun reported there might be a small lesion near the bow. It’ll only take half an hour at most. If I’m not back by Friday you can send in the dogs.’

He turned and walked away, his boots making a lonely echo on the virgin metal floor. As the circle of his torchlight retreated into the long dark tunnel of dripping metal, three heads peered after him, glad to be on the side of the hatch where the striplights burned bright and Radio Lima played Mariah Carey.

‘Shit fuck bastard and double fuck!’

Leonardo Becko looked round quickly and tutted with exasperation. The galley boy was hopping from foot to foot, his hand tucked protectively under his arm, his face contorted with pain. One glance down at the deep fat frier he’d been feeding told the cook all he needed to know.

‘You stupid fucking idiot. You drop the potatoes from a height, ooh, surprise surprise, they’re going to make a splash.’

The boy was hissing through bared teeth, immune for the moment to his boss’s taunts. Leonardo wiped his flour-covered hands on a filthy apron and walked across the galley floor.

‘Here. Let’s see it, you moron.’

Salvo Acambra took his hand from his armpit and looked at it. It was burned only very superficially, a thin red weal rising from the wrist to the thumb. Leonardo tutted again, this time with heavy sarcasm, shaking his head like a vaudeville doctor making a fatal diagnosis. ‘Have to come off, I think.’

Salvo scowled.

Leonardo gave him a harmless swipe over the head and turned away to get on with his pastry. ‘Take ten minutes, and make sure it’s only ten. You bloody moron.’

‘Yes, Chef,’ said the boy, brightening considerably. He moved quickly to the galley storeroom, and sat down on a crate. An examination of the weal told him it was indeed an injury of no consequence, and he smiled at the ten-minute break he’d earned as a bonus in the hot, busy hell that led up to lunch. He craned backwards and peered out into the galley to see where the cook was now. Becko’s head was turned the other way, and the boy quickly shut the storeroom door a fraction more with his foot, reached into his back pocket under his apron ties and took out a packet of cigarettes.

He glanced up to the porthole, then stood on the crate and opened the window. Leonardo Becko hated smoking in the galley, so he would have to be extra careful. He pushed his body against the bulkhead, stuck his head as far out of the porthole as the limited hinge would allow, lit up a cigarette and took a long, delicious drag. The sun beat down on his hot face, but the breeze from the sea blew away both his smoke and his sweat in a way that made him close his eyes in pleasure, enjoying the rare moment of solitude.

Salvo loved the ozone smell of the sea, the fresh, salty tang that it left on your skin and in your hair. It was the one great consolation for working in this hole of a ship. He took another long suck of nicotine and let himself dream of home.

The breeze was souring. He opened his eyes and took a deeper sniff, curious as to where this new smell was coming from. Instantly, his senses were assaulted by an almost solid intake of air that was fetid and foul beyond reason. He coughed back a throatful of vomit, fighting to control it and sent it back below where it belonged.

Tears in his eyes from the effort of this, he stepped down from the crate and looked around to see if the cause was coming from within. The air he breathed freshened again, full of the hot comfortable smells of cooking, steam and condensation. The rotting had most definitely come from outside.

He looked quizzically up at the porthole, and this time stepped more gingerly up on the crate and put his head out. Only four or five inches of the window would open on account of the safety catch, but he forced his face out through it, trying not to breathe deeply this time. To his left, the limited space let him see along the outer hull of the ship as far as the bow. It was harder to see to the right, or above, but he could also look down and just see the foam breaking below at the waterline. He sniffed more gently this time, and the same reek attacked his nostrils like acid. He coughed, waited until his eyes cleared of the tears, then strained to see.

There was movement. It was above him, faint, only on the very edge of his vision, and he felt it rather than saw it. Salvo contorted his head to twist up and see what it might have been, but the movement was unfeasible. He flicked through some possibilities of what might have moved on a smooth metal hull of a ship doing twenty knots. A seagull, maybe, caught in some peculiar way on something sharp? Or maybe a rope or cable come loose, dangling and scraping on the side. But what was making the smell? He tried one more tortuous move then gave up. Who cared what it was?

He flicked his precious cigarette from the porthole and shut the glass tight. The air inside the storeroom was like nectar after the stench from outside, and he sat back on the crate, his back against the wall, to enjoy his last few minutes of freedom, gazing dreamily at the square of brilliant sunlight being projected onto a pile of potato sacks on the wall opposite him.

Not much would send a galley boy back to his work early from a break he had been gifted by the chef, but two things happened simultaneously that did just that.

Behind him, through the very hull of the ship itself, he felt a manic scraping, the vibration of some horrible metallic scuttling. The sound rats would make if they were ten feet long and made of something other than flesh. And the square of light that bathed the potato sacks blackened quickly into shadow and lit again. The boy leapt to his feet and whirled around to the porthole. It framed a perfect blue sky and bathed him in nothing more than benign sunshine.

Leonardo was surprised to see Salvo back so quickly, but he was pleased to have the help.

‘Turn that bloody stock down. And get over here and finish these carrots.’

‘Yes, Chef,’ the boy said weakly and wiped his sweating upper lip with a burnt hand that he had quite forgotten.

Even the most expensive penthouse apartment in any of the world’s greatest cities would have a hard time competing with the view from the bridge of the Lysicrates. Dilapidated and shabby though it was, when the ship was in sail and the cargo deck below stretched like a pointing finger into the dark blue Pacific, it would be hard to stare down from the bridge’s angled windows with anything other than awe.

When Renato Lhoon entered, the third officer on watch was staring out ahead as one might expect, but not with awe at the might of the ocean and its domination by man. He had the look of a man who was half asleep.

‘Wakey wakey, Ernesto.’

The man turned round quickly and tried to look alert. He nodded to Lhoon then looked down at the screen of the echo sounder as though he were interested. His senior officer stood at his side and glanced down at the array of flickering instrument screens between them and the ocean panorama.

‘Set fair?’

Ernesto nodded and pointed to the curling weather fax on the console beside him, but Renato’s eye had already drifted to the GPS.

‘Have we altered course?’

‘Eh, yeah. Just to the co-ordinates that Officer Cotton decided.’ Ernesto gave an expansive sweep with one open hand over the instruments, imagining that might help explain things.

‘Let me see the log.’

The third officer handed it to him and he scanned last night’s entry. There was no mention of a navigational alteration. But then Cotton would forget to make an entry in his log if dinosaurs roamed onto the cargo deck and tore down the derricks with their teeth. Renato sighed with exasperation.

‘What was the alteration?’

Ernesto fumbled for a moment then told him. The ship had been re-routed five degrees west, and their course was taking them directly up the middle of the Milne Edwards Trench, the one that had so freaked Esther. It was not the usual shipping lane and although it was only a small detour, its purpose, in fine and settled weather, seemed meaningless.

Renato was not going to challenge his senior officer’s decision in front of a subordinate, and so he nodded as though he knew about it and had simply forgotten.

The man seemed relieved, took back the log, and turned again to feign interest in the echo sounder, which was presently showing a vertiginous depth of seventeen thousand feet.

Renato walked casually over to the starboard window and checked on his chilli pepper plants, then as quietly as he had entered, left to go and find Cotton.

‘Recreation Room’ was rather a grand term for a space that boasted only one bookcase with some dog-eared pot-boilers in various languages, and a pile of elderly magazines. But Matthew Cotton was not slumped back on one of the three foam sofas, a rum and Coke in his hand, because he was attracted by the possibilities of the reading material. The sideboard that ran the length of the wall was the officers’ makeshift bar, a trusting affair run by the catering staff, from which imbibers took what they wanted from the generous gantry and filled in their intake for later payment on the personalized sheets left for the purpose.

Matthew had long since given up entering his drinks on his dog-eared piece of paper measure by measure, and it was understood now that he would simply purchase his ration by the bottle.

The dent he had made on his current bottle of Bacardi was not inconsiderable, and his eyes were closed, his head leant against the hard foam as the effects of it started to make their mark.

‘Double watch again, Matthew. Eight till four.’

Cotton didn’t open his eyes. ‘Shit, have a drink, Renato. I know when my fuckin’ watch is.’

Renato Lhoon left the doorway where he’d been standing for some time, looking at his senior officer with contempt, and entered the room. ‘It’s two-thirty. I don’t need no drink.’

‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges,’ sniggered Matthew in a mock-Mexican accent, enjoying the unfunnyness of his joke alone, in the way only drunks can. When there was silence in response he opened his eyes and blinked around him to see where Renato Lhoon might be. He was standing over him, and Matthew lifted his head to focus on his face.

‘What?’

‘Thought we had a deal, Matthew.’

‘Huh?’

‘You gonna drink all watch, then you tell me what happens. I fill the log. That’s how it works. That’s how I save your skin.’

‘Yeah? What, you want me to thank you for it like every day?’

Renato crossed his arms. ‘I want you to tell me what you do on duty.’

Matthew shrugged in agreement. ‘So?’

‘You changed course last night. I told the captain everything this morning, like you know you should do and not me, but I don’t tell him that. Know why? ’Cause I don’t know, that’s why.’

Matthew sat up and blinked at Renato. The man was angry. Not like him. ‘What’s the big deal, Renato? So I forgot.’

‘What the captain going to say?’

Matthew took a swig of his drink and exhaled his words on the resulting expellation of air that followed his swallow. ‘Nothing, I shouldn’t reckon.’

Renato snorted. ‘Yeah? You alter course, don’t log it and you think he don’t mind?’

‘I know he won’t.’

‘Yeah? How come?’

Matthew lay back again and looked at Renato as if he were dumb. ‘Because the captain came to the bridge and changed it himself.’

A subtle alteration in Renato’s face made Matthew sit up slightly, ashamed momentarily of his slovenly appearance. For no reason that Matthew could comprehend, the second officer looked as though he had been betrayed.

Matthew cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, man. I just forgot to log it.’

Renato looked down at him for a moment, then walked across to the gantry and poured himself a Sprite. ‘What time?’

Matthew was now uncomfortable, staring at the man’s tense back as he drank his lemonade. ‘What time what?’

Renato turned to face him, his face now inscrutable. ‘What time did he come on the fucking bridge?’

This was not like Matthew’s friend and partner in crime, Renato Lhoon. This was the man who kept him in a job, who kept him on the very edge of the legality of his post, who made sure he got up, made certain he fulfilled his duties, made absolutely sure that First Officer Matthew Cotton didn’t plough the vessel into a tanker at three in the morning.

And in return Renato Lhoon got paid. He got paid well. Why now, was he getting so upset about such a tiny regular misdemeanour as forgetting to log? Matthew ran a hand over the back of his neck. ‘Uh, let me see. I reckon around two, maybe half past. I dunno.’

If only Matthew knew it, there were in fact two reasons that Lhoon was getting upset.

But then there was no way that he could have known, since Lhoon spent a great deal of time and energy concealing them both, but they were nevertheless at the forefront of his ire right now as he stood regarding the hopeless drunk who was one rank higher than he was in the important chain of command.

The first reason was probably the most important: Renato Lhoon hated Matthew Cotton. Hated him with the kind of passion that was bordering on animal. He hated the fact that this man had been given a job he was incapable of doing, that he was given a second chance and employed again after throwing away ten years of being a captain because of his decline into alcoholism in the last two, and that he took the job and paid Renato to keep him there in the full knowledge that he should be ashore, ashore for good.

It made him sick, dressing Cotton when he was naked and ranting, fulfilling his mundane duties for him when he was on watch, keeping the gossip of the crew at bay to prevent the withdrawal of co-operation, and most of all taking his money.

But the second reason was the captain. Lloyd Skinner was a decent man. So decent he had deliberately chosen this wreck of a human being to be his first officer when he could have chosen anyone he wanted. Anyone, for instance, like Lhoon.

Renato knew something had happened to Cotton ashore that had made him the way he was. He didn’t know what, but frankly, he didn’t give a shit. He’d never asked, and he didn’t care. Everyone had bad times, everyone had tragedies. This man had once been a respected captain and now he was a bum.

The sea demanded more of a man.

Lloyd Skinner should know that, and it irked him that if he did, in this case he turned an extremely blind eye. Renato’s relationship with the captain had always been good. They had, he thought, an understanding, an empathy, a rapport. Now, just lately, he felt Skinner was excluding him, and to exclude him in favour of this useless baggage was too much. He couldn’t give a flying fuck about a tiny change in course. What was upsetting him was that the captain had visited the bridge at a highly unusual time in the night, altered course for no reason that Lhoon could see, and most importantly, hadn’t mentioned it to him during the report of the watch he always gave on Cotton’s behalf in the morning.

Sure he was mad about it, but for now he would maintain his inscrutability. Because Renato Lhoon had plans.

He looked back at Matthew. ‘Half-past two? He say why he changed course?’

‘Search me. Maybe there was a tanker or shit. I didn’t see anything on the radar.’

Renato nodded, as though satisfied, then placed his can on the sideboard and walked to the door. Matthew watched him go, expecting more, but he disappeared from view without a parting word.

‘Hey!’ shouted Cotton to an empty door frame. ‘You forgot to write down your Sprite.’

The spaces between the cofferdams were open and stepping over them was possible with care and a little effort. The torchlight illuminated the long cathedral of buttressed iron that supported the main holds like some insane gothic fancy.

A lesser soul might have been tempted to turn and run with every creak and clank of shifting metal that reverberated along the endless corridor, but Lloyd Skinner was not a man to spook easily. He had been surprised, unpleasantly so, to discover that there were rats down here. He knew there were rats on board. He himself had falsified the inspection sheet to claim that there were not, but it was unsettling that they had penetrated into the part of the ship that should be sealed and secure. More than once, the beam had caught the ugly back of a scuttling grey beast, scrambling for safety over the iron spines of the tanks and splashing through the small puddles of sea water that still persisted even after flushing.

Skinner gave a moment’s thought to wonder where there might be a breach that allowed them access to this area from the main holds where he knew they lived, foraged and bred, then as quickly dismissed it and carried on.

He had turned the corner, away from the square of light that came from the engine room, and now he was in a world of total black, with only a cavernous echo to remind him of the scale of his largely invisible surroundings.

Back there, he knew, the engineers would be gossiping, pouring mugs full of the repulsive Filipino coffee they drank in unhealthy quantities, and looking curiously from time to time at the hole through which their captain had gone to do his duty to the company and international safety regulations. But in here, well below the line of the sea that pushed against the iron skin, eager to enter and fill those gaps with its heavy, salty, irresistible body, he was alone, unobserved.