Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

The floor of the container was plunging and tilting now, and the statues were straining at their ropes. We must have sailed beyond the harbour wall. Using my lighter to locate the door, I began to work the bolt up and down to loosen it. As the door opened, the noise level rose. Clanking, hissing, drumming. In front of me was a container identical to mine. No more than eighteen inches separated the two. The man in the overalls had advised me to stay hidden, but I couldn’t have got out, not even if I’d wanted to. I put my head into the narrow gap. Though the containers had been set down in rows, the distances between them varied, making a network of irregular corridors or aisles. A naked bulb in a wire cage protruded from the side-wall of the hull, but the light in the hold was dingy, thick and yellowish. It seemed to ooze from the bulb like some sort of discharge. I looked the other way. Another corridor, but crooked, cramped. The reek of diesel oil and rust and brine. It was a grim place, brutal as a dungeon. Needing to urinate, I aimed into the space between the two containers. When I had finished, I bolted the door and lay down on the folded blanket, then I covered myself with the second blanket and tried to doze.

The unrelenting din of the engines, the see-saw motion of the floor beneath me, the pitch-black and the cold … I would lie on my side until it froze, then I would turn over. I did this again and again. In the end I must have slept, though, or else I had one of those visions that sometimes grace the edge of sleep. I was crouching in the shade at the side of an old house, and the garden beyond was so drenched in sunlight that it looked ethereal, almost transparent. Then I was on my feet and running. Round the crumbling, rose-hung corner of the house I went, and out on to a lawn where grown-ups were sitting on the ground, legs folded under them, or standing about with glasses of wine. I ran headlong into my mother’s skirt, which had huge flowers all over it, and reaching up — she must have been kneeling now, or bending down — I put one of my hands to her face, and we looked into each other’s eyes, and she was nodding and smiling as if to say, There you are, I was just wondering , and then I heard the groan of metal being wrenched apart, and I turned quickly to see what it could be, only to lose my balance, fall, roll over … I woke in darkness, one elbow in a puddle. The container, I thought. I was in the container. But what was that awful sound I’d heard, and how had I come to be thrown across the floor? Had I been walking in my sleep? From somewhere high above came the sound of men shouting. Though I knew next to nothing about ships, the urgency and desperation in their voices didn’t exactly reassure me. The engines had stopped too, and I could hear a noise I couldn’t remember hearing earlier, a kind of rushing. I began to struggle with the rusty bolt. At last it slid sideways in its bracket, and the door banged open. Things had changed position since the last time I looked. The boat must have run aground, or hit something. Luckily, the container opposite me had shifted backwards a little, and I was able to drop down into a small, wedge-shaped gap. From there, I edged along one of the aisles, aware that if anything moved again I would be trapped or crushed. I had to walk uphill to reach the side of the hold. Glancing behind me, I saw water flooding greedily into the spaces between containers. I imagined for a moment that I heard voices pleading, but I could only think it was the sigh of machinery that had been shut down, the gasp and murmur of pistons cooling, and I turned and hurried towards the nearest flight of stairs.

I climbed through a metal doorway, almost as though I were emerging from a picture frame. The two men standing on the deck were grappling with each other, but when they sensed my presence they stopped and gaped at me, their heads twisted in my direction, their hands still clutching at each other’s throats. I glanced over the guard-rail at where the sea should have been. A dense white fog pressed in all around me.

One of the men broke free and took a step towards me. He was wearing a red baseball cap with the brim flipped back. ‘Who the fuck —’

‘Did we hit something?’ My voice sounded muffled, as if I were still inside the container.

The man in the baseball cap hurled himself at me with such power that he appeared to have been propelled. Taking fistfuls of my jacket in his raw hands, he began to shake me. ‘Who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?’

His lower lip had deep vertical cracks in it, and his breath smelled sour — a mix of fish and beer. Though he didn’t seem to be any taller than I was, he loomed above me, forcing me backwards and downwards, and for a moment I didn’t understand what had happened to my sense of perspective.

Then I realised that the deck itself was sloping.

‘Are we sinking?’ I said.

The man threw me away from him so fiercely that I staggered against the bulkhead. ‘Get a dinghy,’ he yelled at his colleague. ‘There’s got to be some kind of dinghy.’

The other man, freckled and ginger, with a pale mouth, stared at him for a few long seconds, and then yelled back. ‘I already — fucking — told you —’

I moved sideways to the rail. The sea had appeared just a few feet below, opaque and colourless, ominously still. As I stood with my hands on the rail, the boat creaked, and then a shudder passed through it, and I thought of the moment when a slaughtered animal drops to its knees, that sudden fatal heaviness, that somnolence …

Water swirled across my shoes.

Then I was beneath the surface, with no idea which way I was facing. I couldn’t see or breathe. There was a sound in my ears like someone turning over in a bed. I reached up with both hands, tugging at the water. I kicked and kicked. My foot struck something that seemed to give, and one of my shoes detached itself. I imagined it dropping away into the dark, the laces still tied in a neat bow. It looked unhurried, leisurely, almost weightless. A feather would have fallen faster. My shoulder knocked against a solid object, but I fought to get past it, upwards, always upwards. At last, when I no longer believed it possible, I burst out into a small round space. Whiteness enclosed me on all sides. Air wrapped itself around my skull like a cold rag.

‘Hello?’

I had shouted, but my voice was swallowed by the fog. There was no point calling out. I tried to think instead. It was already light. A new day. Even if it was only dawn, the ship would have been under way for fifteen hours. We should be somewhere off the coast of the Blue Quarter — but where exactly? Which direction was the land? And how long before I succumbed to fatigue or hypothermia?

Just as panic was rising through me, I was struck a firm blow on the side of my head, behind the ear. Crying out in shock as well as pain, I swung round in the water. Jesus was floating on his back beside me. His mournful eyes, his crown of thorns. His arms lifting vertically into the air, the tips of his fingers lost in fog. I began to laugh, then stifled it, not out of respect, but simply because it sounded inappropriate, even sinister, in the small dead patch of water we were sharing. I reached out for the statue and held on. It was larger than life, at least eight or nine feet long, and carved from solid wood. It would take my weight quite easily.

The first time I attempted to clamber on, the statue rolled in the water, and I fell back. This kept happening. The white paint they had used for the raiment was slippery as ice. In the end, sapped of nearly all my strength, I heaved myself across the legs and hung there, like a pannier slung over a mule. I was cold now, and my head ached, but at least most of me was out of the water. I waited a few minutes, then I clawed my way up on to the statue’s chest and sat facing the feet, the bearded chin behind me, the outstretched arms on either side.