Tahmima Anam - The Bones of Grace

Grace became audible, her high whine tempered by the rush of water as she approached; then there was a pause for a long minute before the final push to shore, the grunt of the slowing engine, the scrape of metal against sand; and all the while Ali and the others had their hands up in the air as if they were summoning her from the sky; then she banked, parting the shoreline, suddenly immense, her heaviness exposed, tons and tons of steel without the sea to buoy her up. Against Grace ’s enormous hulk, we were tiny and frail. Ali muttered a prayer under his breath, then blew the air out of his cheeks, spreading the blessing.

We walked towards her. She was painted so bright we had to squint and shield our eyes. ‘See,’ Ali said, ‘I told you she was pristine.’ The workers gathered three, four deep around the hull. They looked afraid. ‘They’ve done this many times before,’ Ali had assured me. ‘They are experienced, and we will take all the necessary precautions.’ But standing before the ship now, the black trim wedged deep into the sand, so tall, did they wonder how they would ever take it apart? Fewer than fifty of them, with only the strength of their arms against the mass of the ship — a ship put together somewhere else, somewhere with machines and scaffolding and helmets and time-cards and minimum wage — yet it was their job to bring on her death. They would touch every inch of Grace ; her heaviness would imprint itself on their hands, and she might, in the course of things, despite their best intentions, take a life or two on her slow way out.

The workers clapped and cheered, sounds to make themselves bigger. After a few minutes a figure appeared on the lip of the deck. He scaled the rim and climbed over, looking as though he was about to throw himself overboard, but really placing his foot on a camouflaged ladder bolted to the side of the ship.

Ali pushed against the crowd, but the workers wouldn’t budge, taking in the prettiest, newest thing they had ever been asked to dismember. Ali told me that Grace had drifted for five days on the Atlantic after the previous captain had died aboard, setting himself on fire in the engine room. Two tugboats were sent to pull her to shore, and a week later she landed in Portsmouth. Then, after a few months, she set sail again, only to be struck by a virus. Grace had stood in the harbour for a month, her passengers quarantined while food and medicine were dropped by helicopter. The owner of the company, a Swede with a superstitious streak, had decided to cut his losses, and Grace was decommissioned, a footnote in the history of unlucky ships.

The captain was helped down by the many arms that reached for him, cushioning his landing. He wore a white uniform with blue-and-gold lapels, tight around his shoulders and thighs. He reached out and shook Ali’s hand. ‘Welcome, captain,’ Ali said.

‘Call me Jack,’ the captain replied, taking off his hat and smoothing down the fine mat of hair underneath, his forehead already streaked with a band of red. ‘Hot here, isn’t it?’

Gabriela rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not an Arctic expedition,’ she said.

The bottle popped. The rest of the crew descended, and Jack introduced a pair of Koreans, an engineer from India, and three Nepalese men who had boarded in Lisbon and been offered a free ride in exchange for cooking and cleaning.

‘So, madam, what do you think of her?’ Ali beamed. The others were already making their way up the beach towards the tent. Gabriela was walking with Jack, her headscarf lifted by the wind, revealing the copper swirl of her hair.

‘It’s hard to believe it will be gone soon.’ I said to Ali.

‘In four months, it will be nothing but scrap.’

I stopped, turned my eyes to Grace , imagining her in pieces, like the Splendour . ‘Is it true that she’s exactly as they left her?’

Ali reeled off the soon-to-be-destroyed virtues of the ship. ‘Casino, cinema, restaurants, swimming pool.’

‘What’s going to happen to all that stuff?’

‘Sold, madam. People coming from Dhaka tomorrow, they’re going to give us a price.’ He crossed his arms over his chest, a satisfied note in his voice. ‘Hotels are interested.’

For some reason, this made me very sad. I kept stopping and turning back.

‘Madam, this is the cycle,’ Ali continued. ‘One ship sets sail, another comes here.’ He looked over at me. ‘You are unhappy, madam.’ He considered me for a moment. ‘What about I take you for a personal tour, you would like that?’

I eyed the narrow ladder to the top. I had always been a little afraid of heights, and the thought of being alone with him on an abandoned ship did not appeal. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I will personally ensure your safety.’

‘I’m not the adventurous type,’ I said, repeating my own catchphrase of defeat.

We ate breakfast in the tent, sitting on wooden chairs at long, rectangular tables. The air was stale inside. Ali insisted I join him at the head table, which was decorated with a red-and-white tablecloth and a small bunch of roses, resembling a shabby version of my wedding. Gabriela was showing Jack how to eat with his fingers, rolling up his sleeves for him and explaining how important it was to get close to the food, to smell it on your hands. Ali opened a bottle of mineral water and filled my glass.

‘Is it true the ship is cursed?’ Gabriela asked Jack.

‘That’s what they say.’ He tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in his curry.

‘Bad luck is finished, now you are on Prosperity Beach,’ Ali said. Then, eager to change the subject, he told Jack that I had lived in America.

‘So what are you doing here?’ Jack asked.

‘We’re making a film,’ Gabriela said.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Hope nobody dies taking this thing down!’

Gabriela tapped his arm. ‘That’s a fucked-up thing to say.’

Ali took a bite of his bread. ‘Shipbreaking is important for Bangladesh. We need steel. Lot of construction everywhere.’ He pointed south, towards town.

‘Hey look, as far as I’m concerned, you got a giant recycling operation here,’ Jack said. He had finished eating. A waiter was summoned with a bowl of water and a small piece of soap.

‘Will you have sweet, sir?’ Ali said.

‘What?’

‘He means dessert,’ Gabriela said.

‘Oh, yeah. Great.’ The waiter returned with a bowl of rice pudding in a shallow clay dish. Jack looked around for a spoon.

‘Use your hands.’ Gabriela said, indicating to Jack that he should dip his fingers into the clay dish.

‘How about I take you both aboard, one last hurrah before she gets crushed?’

Gabriela’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’

‘Sure, why not? Ali, you game?’

‘Of course, I was telling madam Zubaida just now, we must go up.’

When I peered, at that moment, towards the horizon and saw Grace , how white and still and majestic she was, I felt a tug in my chest, and I knew that the breaking I was about to witness would involve giving something up, because I was used to imagining the lives of things that were long dead, and I would do the very same for Grace . I would imagine not only the lives that had been lived aboard, the trips and holidays, the food that was eaten, the icebergs escaped, barnacles studded to her underside, dolphins following in her wake, but the ship herself, her disappointment at having spent so little time afloat, her sadness at being consigned to the scrapyard, her pain at being taken apart. I felt all of this, and also, perhaps, I had a premonition that Grace would yield more treasures than I could know, that she was a mystery beyond my comprehension. I looked over at Gabriela and allowed her to accept the invitation, a part of me hoping I would maybe slip and fall down that metal ladder and into the warm, shallow water below.