Stefán Máni - The Ship

‘Come on, pal,’ says the captain and puts his arm around the seaman’s shoulders. ‘The day’s work is as good as finished. Let’s get a cup of coffee.’

16:01

Satan is lying on his back in the bed, masturbating while looking at the picture of the Danish girl that he stole from the engine room.

Then he closes his eyes and tries to think of Lilja, but Lilja won’t stay still in his head; she rushes around and changes, little by little, into the Danish girl in the picture.

‘Shit,’ mutters Satan. He opens his eyes and looks at the picture he is holding in his left hand. But then his eyes mist over and the Danish girl looks like his baby daughter.

17:21

Captain Guðmundur knocks lightly on the door before he opens it into the sick bay, where he expects to find Satan lying asleep or half conscious under a sweat-soaked doona. They had pulled him, blood soaked and unconscious, into the control room after the gunfire stopped, bandaged his wounds and pumped him full of morphine. The bullets had torn off his scalp above the left ear, leaving deep gashes and fractures in his skull.

‘Hello?’ says the captain and turns on the light. ‘Are you awake?’

No answer.

There’s no-one in the bed.

‘What the hell!’ mutters the captain, turns off the light and closes the door.

He looks into the mess and the galley, but finds no-one.

‘Are you looking for someone?’ asks Stoker on his way up the stairs from A-deck to B-deck. He is wearing clogs and filthy overalls, and wiping oil and soot off his fingers with a blackened rag.

‘Yes and no,’ says the captain, looking over Stoker’s shoulder and down to the floor of A-deck, where the engineer has put down a thick layer of sawdust over the spot where Big John breathed his last. ‘What’s the situation down in the engine?’

‘Okay – no change,’ says Stoker, sniffing. ‘I’m running the generators one at a time at full power and making sure there’s enough hot and cold water and stuff. As long as nobody fools with anything down there, life on board will go on as usual, for what it’s worth.’

‘Yes, right.’ The captain claps Stoker on the back. ‘Nobody will fool with anything, you can count on that!’

‘Nobody has any reason to go down there,’ says Stoker, scratching his beard with oily fingers. ‘Nobody but me.’

‘No – yes – you’re right,’ the captain says, nodding to the engineer. ‘I understand your point of view and trust you completely, Óli. Completely.’

‘That’s how it should be.’ Stoker strolls into the galley while the captain starts up the stairs.

On C-deck the doors to Ási’s and Rúnar’s cabins are closed and locked. Behind the doors are bloody rugs, darkness and silence. Of these, the silence is the worst. You can clean the blood out of the rug; you can get rid of the darkness by opening the curtains or turning on the light, but no matter how much the survivors talk or how loudly they scream when no-one hears them, the silence their dead comrades leave behind will follow them for the rest of the voyage – even for the rest of their lives.

Silence like a hole in their existence.

The captain goes up to D-deck and opens the door of Satan’s cabin. Nobody there.

Up on E-deck, Jónas and Methúsalem’s cabin doors are closed. Methúsalem is dead and nobody knows where Jónas is. It’s as if the earth has swallowed him – or the sea, more likely.

Guðmundur walks up to F-deck, the captain’s deck. There his foot strikes something brass coloured that skitters like a pebble across the floor, bounces off the wall on the starboard side and spins in the middle of the corridor. Guðmundur leans over and picks up this small cylindrical object, and he thinks he knows who dropped it there. On the stairs up to the bridge deck is a white sheet covered with footprints; it hides the blood from the pirate Satan shot dead.

The doorway into the bridge has no door in it. Inside, the floor is covered with white sheets from the threshold over to the controls. The sheets lie on top of each other but, even so, blood and brains have leaked through in a few places.

‘So here you are,’ says the captain as he enters the bridge, which still slants to starboard, as does the entire ship.

Satan is sitting in the captain’s chair with a coffee mug in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. He is dressed only in black jogging pants; he is barefoot and barechested. His head is wrapped in a bandage that covers his eyebrows and both ears, and which is bloody above the left ear. Dark hanks of hair hang from the top of his head and also, from under the bandage, down the back of his head and in front of his ears.

At his feet lies the ship’s dog, which looks up and whines softly when the captain enters the bridge.

‘Yep,’ says Satan, without turning the chair or looking over this shoulder. He’s looking out of the broken window, lost in thought, as if he were keeping track of everything without being interested in anything – worldly wise but pretty tired of life, like a helmsman or captain who has spent a lifetime sailing the seven seas.

The custom is for subordinates to get out of the captain’s chair when the captain enters the bridge – if not out of common courtesy, then out of unconditional respect for the man who alone is responsible for the ship and everyone on board, dead or alive. But Satan doesn’t show his superior even the minimum courtesy of looking in his direction, let alone greeting him like a civilised human being or offering him a seat in the chair that is intended for the highest-ranking man on board, or his stand-in on the bridge.

The captain’s temper flares up, but dissipates so fast that his blood hardly has time to heat his face. This is perhaps neither the time nor the place to vent his rage on anyone – least of all on a landlubber who knows neither the written nor unwritten rules of the sea. And besides, this lad is a friend in need, to put it mildly.

Guðmundur goes to the controls, lays his palms on the edge of the control board and pretends to be looking out the windows, but then turns his head casually to the left and surreptitiously examines the interloper.

Savage is the first word that occurs to the captain. He remembers having seen, in an old travel book, a picture of the village chief in some small South Seas island, a fat and meaty native who sat on a bamboo throne and looked over his meagre domain with eyes revealing both naive simplicity and fathomless cruelty. An amoral savage who had many wives and diddled his children when he wasn’t worshipping idols and eating his enemies.

For some reason, Satan reminds the captain of that native chieftain who, despite his foolish appearance, is so powerful and dangerous that no-one dares smile at him. Maybe that’s because of the way Satan sits in the chair : completely at ease, without seeming careless or open to attack, like a lion that sleeps with one eye open. Perhaps it’s the bare flesh: all that meat filling the chair, ready for love or attack. Or his eyes, those dim holes that –

‘Coffee’s hot,’ says Satan, rolling his head to the right and looking the captain straight in the eye. Guðmundur glances away, like a young girl at her confirmation who’s been caught staring at a virile boy.

‘Yeah, thanks, I guess I’ll…’ The captain trails off and walks behind the chair, over to the port side of the bridge.

‘Get me a refill while you’re at it,’ says Satan, holding out his empty coffee mug.