Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

For Samir’s first visit to one of those yards, he’d arrived at low tide and watched as a line of men and boys—too many boys—dragged heavy lengths of cable through the mud towards a row of beached liners. The mud that sucked at their legs and caked their skin was loaded with all sort of toxins—poisoned blood from the beached vessels dying on the mud flats—but all they wore for protection were shorts and T-shirts. It was exhausting even to watch. The cable would be used to heave pieces of ship inland, vast sections of steel excised from vessels that had once known the glory of the open water but now stood mired in mud. They had been tourist attractions once, even in their ruin; there was little else this region had to offer. Now each yard was fenced off. Some were even patrolled, or so Samir had been told, though he had seen no guards. Only signs that promised danger. Signs warning against trespass. Signs forbidding photos. Samir had looked at one of those signs and had taken a picture of it because it would have amused Kamala. She would have admonished him, laughing or shaking her head.

Samir shook his head now, watching the men at work. Danger, said the signs, and yet beyond the fences people worked. The rest of the world had strict health and safety regulations, Samir had no doubt. In Bangladesh, safety precautions ranged from optional to non-existent, and there would always be plenty of men in the local shanty towns desperate enough for the dangerous work that paid so little. If it meant they could feed themselves and their families then they’d face the physical hazards of injury and fatality, risk poisoning from a range of toxic materials Samir could only guess at. Ship-breaking was big business, and almost all of the local men worked in one yard or another. Children, too, like Abesh. They were cheaper. All of the ones Samir spoke to said they were fourteen years old, but most of them were lying; it was the minimum age for ship-breaking work. Children or not, they were no less aware of the dangers and difficulties. They wore the same slack expressions of exhaustion as the men. It was what they had for a uniform, along with their filthy T-shirts and grubby shorts and the mud they wore up their legs and arms. Some already had their own “Chittagong tattoos”. That’s what they called work-related scars. The shanty towns were filled with men carrying such marks. Many of them were missing fingers. Some were missing entire limbs, or were disfigured in other ways, bent and crippled. More than few carried the clean smooth scars of burnt skin. But still they worked the yards, and the children followed their example. They had little choice.

“Our bodies are made of steel,” one of boys had said, flexing his scrawny biceps. “Strong.”

One of the other boys had pointed to Samir’s face and said, “Tattoo,” for the scar that cut a line through his beard. When Samir tried to smile it twisted like a broken snake.

“Tattoo,” he agreed. It was work-related, so he supposed it counted.

A foreman of some kind, or someone who wanted to be, came over and yelled at the boys, his Bengali quick to emphasise the hurry. He clapped his hands once, and children who thought they were men rose to their feet to get back to work. They trudged through the mud towards a line of waiting vessels. Boys against giants , Samir thought. Every ship a Goliath waiting to fall.

“They’re very young,” Samir said.

The man looked at Samir. “You here to work?” He clearly didn’t think so, not the way Samir was dressed.

Samir nodded. “Yes.”

The man shook his head. Said, “There is nothing here for you.”

The ground reverberated beneath their feet at that moment and thunder roared, shaking the beach. The enormous noise of fallen metal as a huge section of ship collapsed down the shore. Many days of cutting through deck after deck after deck had cleaved a massive section from the main body and it crashed to the ground in a shower of sparks and sharp metal, slapping hard enough into the mud to reshape it. None of the boys walking away were startled by the noise, but Samir had ducked and the foreman had laughed at him. The thunder lingered in Samir’s feet and charged his legs with a quickening tingle.

“I’m here to work,” he said.

The man sighed his laughter to an end and shook his head again. “Follow me.”

A crowd of workers gathered down the beach at the section of fallen hull. The metal plate would be dragged across the mud to a waiting truck, dragged using chains and rollers and the flagging strength of malnourished men and boys. Thousands of pounds of metal moved by skinny people in tattered shorts and sandals. Sandals . Some of them even barefoot, risking tetanus at the very least. And there, clinging to the framework of what remained like fiery barnacles, were the cuttermen who sliced the ship into pieces. Samir saw how they leaned for hard to reach places, an assistant paired with each to hold not only the trailing hose of the acetylene torch but also the cutterman’s free hand as he suspended himself over a fatal drop.

Samir said a prayer for them, and as he concluded he saw the ship he had come for. It loomed over the other vessels from further down the beach, as if creeping slowly back out to sea. A hulk of steel, rusted red like some scabbed wound. The Karen May .

Brine and diesel. The smell of it seemed to cling to Samir’s skin even just sitting close to the ship. Abesh stood and leaned to clutch at one of the exposed struts of the Karen May and pulled them closer.

Samir tipped away what was left of his water and refilled his bottle from the sea. He fastened the lid tight and tucked it away in his bag as Abesh tied the boat secure.

Samir looked inside the exposed section of ship and saw only shadows and absences where once there was steel and substance. It was disorientating, so many missing walls and floors in this section of the ship, and each missing floor a missing ceiling. Samir leaned to look further in and up. There was a rectangle of sky above where a stairwell used to be. The sky was tinged orange, with hues of pink turning red, a fire suspended above him that shed little of its light into the ship.

“Tell me about your brother again,” Samir said as he eased himself into a standing position in the small boat. He’d made a list of those killed in various accidents over the last year in the ship-breaking yard, and of those he’d made a second list that he’d brought with him of those killed or otherwise lost on the Karen May . Abesh’s brother was on that list.

“Ibrahim?” Abesh asked. He was little more than a dusky shape in the shadows of the ship, a grubby baseball cap and thin limbs and, incongruous with Samir’s question, a bright smile. He made the sound of a blast, miming an explosion with his hands. Bravado , Samir thought. As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil , performed with a simple gesture and sound effect.

Abesh’s brother had been a cutterman, slicing up sections of the ship when his torch ignited a gas pocket. He was killed in the explosion. His assistant too. Abesh had seen it happen from the beach, he’d said. Saw them both thrown hard against metal and engulfed in sudden flames. He’d told the story like it was a film he’d seen. Like a story he’d heard from someone else and hadn’t been a part of himself. “It’s okay,” he’d said. “I have lots of brothers.”

He was looking into the ship now as if his brother might still be in there.

Perhaps he was.

“How old are you, Abesh?”

“Fourteen,” the boy said, and grinned.

Samir climbed from the boat into the remains of the far larger vessel they’d anchored themselves to. “I never had any brothers,” he said. “Just a sister. Kamala.”