Stefán Máni - The Ship

Coke.

He’d give everything he owns for a can of cold Coke.

‘I’m not asking much,’ says Methúsalem as he gets to his knees and opens the little fridge.

UHT-milk, UHT-milk, UHT-milk, an apple, an orange, UHT-milk, UHT-milk, more UHT-milk, and then something cold and hard at the back of the top shelf.

It’s a can!

‘Be Coke, be Coke!’ Methúsalem whispers, tasting the sour slime in his dry mouth as he feels with his fingers and gets a hold on the ice-cold can.

There. It’s coming, it’s coming!

‘Coke, Coke, dear, dear Coke.’

Methúsalem pulls the can into the bluish light in the doorway of the fridge.

But the can isn’t red – it is not red but green – fucking green ! Is it Sprite? Don’t be Sprite – no, it isn’t Sprite and it isn’t Fresca either…

‘Heineken,’ murmurs Methúsalem, staring at the frosty can rolling back and forth in his trembling hand.

For fuck’s sake!

Methúsalem Sigurðsson stands up, opens the can and takes a long, cold foamy sip.

Big John looks at the clock in the engine room and sees that it’s ten to twelve.

He’s off at midnight but he can’t be bothered to hang around for even a minute longer.

‘Fuck it,’ he says as he turns off the dead man’s alarm then gets out of his chair, puts on his earmuffs and walks out the door at the front of the control booth.

From there he walks directly to the stairs leading down to the floor in front of the main engine. He’ll walk once around the engine before he goes up to bed, give it a pat, tap the meters and listen for unexpected noises.

As he walks past the engine on the port side he is aware of movement up on the metal platform on the starboard side of the space, in front of the generators.

It’s the shadow of a man who’s sneaking along the wall.

‘Who’s there?’ John calls out, but his words are swallowed by the noise of the engines and the shadow disappears into the shadows behind the control booth.

That was a man, wasn’t it?

‘What the hell!’ says John, striding behind the machine and up the stairs that lead up to the iron platform.

Nobody has any business in the engine room except the two engineers, and if that is Stoker, John wants to know what he’s doing there outside his work time.

If it isn’t Stoker then the chief engineer really wants to know what that person is doing wandering around there, and at this time of night.

‘ Hello! ’ John calls out when he reaches the place where the shadow disappeared just ten, fifteen seconds ago, but there’s not a soul to be seen there on the platform between the storeroom and the control booth.

Had he been seeing things? Is the engine room haunted?

‘If there’s a ghost in here…’ John shouts, shaking his fist at nothing in particular, ‘then he’d better…’

John stops talking as he steps on something that crumbles under the coarse soles of his shoes. He takes a step back, bends down and sticks his right forefinger into white sand or powder that’s drifting down through the metal grid and disappearing into the oily dark below.

What’s this? Salt?

He smells the coarse, pale substance but it seems to have no smell. John decides to stick his tongue in it.

If it’s some kind of poison he’ll just spit it out and rinse his mouth.

‘I’ll be damned,’ the chief engineer mutters after carefully tasting the coarse grains. ‘Sugar!’

At two minutes before midnight Rúnar opens the door to his cabin on C-deck and steps into the corridor.

‘Who’s there?’ asks Big John, who is halfway up the stairs from C-deck to B-deck.

‘It’s me, Rúnar,’ he answers, closing the door behind him. ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘Did you see anyone going up?’ asks John as he reaches C-deck. He’s red faced, sweaty and out of breath.

‘No. Like who?’

‘Nobody,’ says John and he stops to catch his breath. ‘I thought I saw somebody down in the engine room. But I was probably just seeing things.’

‘Have you started seeing ghosts?’ asks Rúnar with a grin.

‘I expect so. Don’t we sailors all get more or less screwed up eventually?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ Rúnar shakes a cigarette out of its pack. ‘Are you on your way up?’

‘Yes and no. I’m on my way to bed, but I need clean linen.’

‘I’m on my way up to the bridge,’ say Rúnar, lighting his cigarette. ‘See you in the morning, then.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ John scratches his head. ‘Is Methúsalem on the watch?’

‘Yeah,’ says Rúnar, blowing smoke through his nose.

‘Yeah, right.’ John shrugs. ‘Just say hello from me, or something. Just keep an eye on him.’

‘Will do,’ says Rúnar, then he sets off up the stairs while John goes back down to A-deck to get clean bedding.

When Rúnar enters the bridge he sees no-one else up there – not Methúsalem nor anyone else.

‘HELLO!’ he calls.

Silence.

‘What’s all the noise?’ asks Methúsalem as he turns around in the captain’s chair with a huge grin on his face and his hands hanging limply from the arms of the chair.

He is so pale that his face is nearly incandescent in the dim light, and from a certain distance the Ray-Ban lenses look like black holes.

‘Christ but you startled me, man!’ says Rúnar with a snort. ‘I thought you were a phantom!’

‘A phantom?’ says Methúsalem, his grin disappearing.

‘What are you doing with those fucking glasses?’ asks Rúnar, knocking ash off his cigarette. ‘And what’s that running down your face?’

‘Eh? What?’ asks Methúsalem, wiping a milky substance off his forehead. ‘That’s just sweat. I’ve got some virus or something. My eyes sting.’

‘You weren’t down in the engine room just now, were you?’ asks Rúnar, hiding an impish grin by taking a drag on his smoke.

‘Me? Down in the engine room? No! Why?’ asks Methúsalem, his jaw hanging like that of a corpse before its ablution.

‘Because,’ says Rúnar, ‘John thought he’d seen a dead man down there.’

Sunday, 16 September

It is four minutes to 1 p.m. when Guðmundur opens the starboard bridge wing door and goes out into the storm, wearing a raincoat and a knitted cap. He squints through the salt spray, steadies himself with his left hand on the waist-high iron rail and feels his way along to the edge of the bridge wing with a half-century-old sextant under his right arm.

Guðmundur takes up a position farthest out on the bridge wing, spreads his legs to steady himself and leans against the iron railing while he aims the sextant. The sun’s rays have penetrated the cloud cover off and on during the last hour, and if the captain isn’t mistaken the sun is about to reach its zenith – which means noon, no matter what a man-made clock may say.

The ship dances crazily over the rough seas and Guðmundur finds it almost impossible to aim the sextant. He has to guess where the horizon divides itself from the threatening waves, and it’s impossible to see the sun at the moment, but the minute its rays find a path through the darkness the captain will try to read the height of this fire-breathing mother of all life.

Stiff fingers handle the precise and finely adjusted instrument, and middle-aged eyes try to maintain focus and concentration. Guðmundur Berndsen has only calculated the height of the sun with a sextant on one sea voyage since he passed the exam on its use, in beautiful weather on the balcony of the College of Navigation more than three decades ago, and he’s been trying to forget that voyage for thirty years.