Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“Iechyd da,” said Sidney, in Welsh, presumably.

“Egészségére,” Mick replied. It felt good to speak Hungarian. They clinked glasses and drank. Mick rolled the whiskey around his tongue.

“How is your crew?” Sidney asked. “How many do you have left?”

“Five or six, but they’ve gone off somewhere. I also have a few passengers helping out. Well, lately just one. There’s not much to do.”

“Yes. I’ve noticed her.” Sidney held his cigarette away from his face, pinched in a leisurely way between thumb and forefinger as he watched the burning end.

Mick nodded. “Christine. She’s okay.” He took out another cigarette and lit it. He felt his head fogging up, his eyelids heavy with sleepiness, the whiskey, the unexpected intimacy with this intimidating person.

“You’re shagging her, right?” Sidney said.

Mick looked at Sidney, surprised. “She’s married.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never shagged a passenger before.”

Mick looked at Sidney with equal disbelief. Fraternization, especially sexual affairs, between crew and passengers was strictly forbidden. Only the captain and officers got away with it on a regular basis.

“Have you ?” Mick asked, trying not to sound as shocked as he felt.

Sidney burst out laughing at this question, whose answer was evidently so obvious he couldn’t be bothered to answer it, which made Mick laugh too.

“Did you know,” Mick said, “that every Cabaret crewmember I’ve ever met is terrified of you?”

“Well, clearly not enough of them, or the fuckers wouldn’t have walked out on me.” Sidney took a nip of whiskey and sucked it through his teeth with a grimace of pleasure. “Though I guess it was coming eventually, the way they’re treated, poor bastards.”

Mick shrugged. “It’s the system. We all live with it. Didn’t you start out at the bottom and work your way up?”

“In a way,” said Sidney. “I was a merchant marine, before I retired to the soft life of cruise ships. I worked for Caledonian MacBrayne, the Scottish ferry company. A rough life in hard boats on cold and stormy seas. I worked winters as a hotel waiter. This is my retirement plan, a cushy job on cushy ships. Well, I’ve always hoped to die on a ship. It’s the only way to go.”

“I hope it’s not this one,” said Mick.

“Cheers to that,” said Sidney, filling their glasses again and downing his. He put his elbows on the table as if he were hunkering down in a dark little pub. “Actually, she’s a grand old beauty, the Queen Isabella. Reminds me of—” He paused, cocked an ear. “Hear that?”

Mick listened for a moment, heard nothing. “What am I supposed to be hearing?”

“A plane,” said Sidney. “It’s the airdrop.”

Down in their cabin, Christine put on her green bikini and waited by the open balcony door in the hot breeze, staring at the ocean longingly, while Valerie changed out of her black bikini into a black one-piece and stood looking at herself from various angles in the mirror, changed back into the bikini again, put on lipstick, wiped it off, draped herself in a gauzy sundress, and reapplied her lipstick.

They climbed down into the ship’s belly. As they went along the “B” deck corridor, Christine saw a light ahead and heard voices, muted, almost drowned out by a series of groans and clanks that seemed to come from the ship’s frame. The door to the engine room was propped open. Amid the blackened rows of steel pipes and tubing descending, ringed by catwalks and threaded with steel staircases, Christine saw several men huddled on a platform. They were wearing headlamps and holding tools, conferring in low voices near a wall panel of gauges and dials, the glass smeared black with char.

“Hello,” Valerie called down into the depths.

“Hello,” came a few voices. “Who’s there?”

“Passengers,” said Valerie.

Christine squinted in the glare of their headlamps. The man nearest her was old, tall, stooped over in a crouch, holding a wrench. She recognized Sasha, Miriam’s friend from the talent show. “Are you fixing the engines?” she asked.

“We’re banging our heads against the pipes,” came a voice from somewhere below.

“It keeps us busy,” said Sasha. “If we could just get the desalinator to run. We’re waiting for some parts to arrive.”

“Well, good luck,” said Christine.

As she followed Valerie along the corridor, the smell of old smoke began to dissipate. A stream of fresh air poured toward them. Christine saw daylight ahead, and soon they emerged into a long, narrow room lined with shelves and cabinets and lockers. At the far end, double doors were propped open, leading to stairs down to a small platform extending from the ship’s hull, hovering just above the surface of the ocean.

A small crowd of people were already there, looking down with excitement at the calm, still, light-dappled water. The air was soft with spray and haze.

“Look at this,” said Theodore to Christine. He gestured outward. “It’s our new swimming pool, the biggest in the world!”

He wore old-fashioned olive-green swim trunks that came almost down to his knees. His bare chest was hairy. So he was older than she’d thought, maybe even her own age. Many of the younger men had waxed, hairless chests and wore tight-fitting trunks, neon and bright. The women all wore stylish and no doubt expensive bikinis. Their bodies were soft and unmarked and well nourished, somehow unformed, even the ones obviously honed in the gym, without a shred of wildness or aggression. If they had been stranded in the woods with a signal instead of in the remote ocean, Christine thought, they would have gotten out their iPhones and searched for YouTube tutorials on how to start a fire, how to build shelter, which plants were safe to eat, how to catch a fish. And they would have survived just fine, no doubt.

“I’ve never swum in the middle of the ocean before,” said someone nearby, sounding nervous.

“Me neither. This is cool.”

Theodore was the first to jump in. He cannonballed, went under, and emerged with a roar, his fist raised in triumph. “It’s great!” he yelled at the people still standing on the dock.

Others gamely jumped in with shrieks and splashes.

“Oh Jesus,” said Valerie. “I’m dizzy just thinking about it.”

“Don’t think,” said Christine. “Once we’re in, we’ll be fine.” She held her breath and jumped. Underwater, with her eyes shut, she experienced a brief moment of horrified panic, thinking about how deep the water was below her, stretching miles down into the darkness. Then her head bobbed up and she took a breath, looked around at the sparkling surface of the rocking, gentle bath. She began to move her limbs with pleasure through the salty sunlit water, cool enough to tingle on her skin.

There was a splash beside her, and Valerie was in too, her hair streaming with seawater, her eyes soft without her glasses.

Christine frog-kicked around in a leisurely breaststroke. In the hazy brightness and hot light she saw bobbing human heads, and above, more people on the ship, crowding the upper decks, looking down at the swimmers. She passed a floating plastic bottle, probably thrown overboard from the Isabella. Then another. She thought of the invisible cloud of trillions of disintegrated plastic micro-bits interspersed throughout the water, inseparable from it, part of it, like smog infiltrating air. She had seen so many online news stories, TV shows, documentaries that cataloged and exposed humanity’s unstoppable destruction of the oceans with images of vast gyres of trash, miles-long oil slicks, bleached and dying coral reefs, seabird stomachs full of deadly plastic, whales and dolphins entangled in fishing nets, algae blooms. She had absorbed all this information with a sense of helpless, grief-sickened rage. It reminded her of reading horror novels as a teenager, unable to look away, sucked in, a stifled scream in the pit of her stomach, eyes shocked wide.