The Ancient. Muriel Gray
dangerous as fire.
If she could, Esther, too, would have made contact with a cool sea.
A swim after the punishing circuit she was pounding would have been delicious, but even if the boat were a pleasure yacht that drifted to let her bathe, she wouldn’t care to swim thinking of the sunless chasm that lay beneath her. A cramped, steamy shower would do and with only four more laps of the cargo deck to go, even that was pretty damned attractive.
She needed to get back in shape, and although the mountain treks had been hard, nothing in her field trip had left time for the kind of physical programme she liked to stick to back home. Fifty-one laps of the deck, twenty of them with a stitch ripping her side apart, only confirmed that she had serious work to do, and as she sprinted for the bow it was with a sinking heart that she realized she would have to stop and let the pain subside.
Her trainers squealed on the metal as she slowed down and jogged to the edge of the last hold, whose open hatch protruded about six or seven feet beyond the lip of its fixings. Esther put out a hand and leant heavily against the metal, her head bowed to her waist, sweat dripping onto the deck between her feet.
Less than a minute passed before her heart rate had slowed to near normal, and she straightened up rubbing at the side that was still tight and sore. Despite the eternal thrumming of the engine vibrating through her body that was so constant and rhythmic it ceased to exist for most sailors only hours into any new voyage, the serenity was exquisite. The breaking water around the hull swished erratically and the light wind that toyed in her hair was no more than a whisper.
She leaned back against the hatch and looked out over the sea. Although the route was hugging the west coast of Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, they were far too many miles from land to view it. The sun had an uncluttered stage upon which to rise and it was doing so with unparalleled magnificence.
This was a lucky time. Esther had always divided her days since childhood into lucky and unlucky times.
When things were bad, unlucky bad, she knew that by waiting, the lucky bits would present themselves, and however brief they might be, she had learned to grab them and hold them tight. She’d started it at the age of eight as she stood over her mother’s grave, Benny’s whisky breath filling her nostrils as he clung to her little shoulder as a means of steadying himself rather than of comforting her. Her grief had been too profound to articulate, but she had felt her father’s confused adult despair being transmitted to her through his curled fingers the way a plant carries chlorophyll, and as she had shaken free of his grasp she had looked around in desperation to see something beautiful, something distracting, something lucky.
A heavy-set woman in a pink organza hat was tending a grave beyond the untidy scrub in that cheap little Pennsylvanian graveyard, and as she bent a gust of wind blew it from her head and made her stumble after it in a way that was both grotesque and funny. Esther had looked around and noted that no one else had seen it but her. So that, she’d decided, had made it lucky. She could think of that instead of her Mom lying in the ground, and that would help get by the unlucky bit. It became habit, and here she was at the age of twenty-three still doing it in the most mundane of moments.
And yes, at this moment away from the decidedly ragged collection of shipmates, with the sun and the sea as her only companions, her passage home assured and her dissertation shaping up in her head with every mile, she had the right to feel lucky. Lucky, even though the trash in the hold was tainting the perfect scene a little now that she’d stopped, by randomly releasing its foul odour in small nauseating gusts.
Esther waved a hand over her face.
‘Shit.’
She turned and looked to the hatch as though a stern glance would halt its emissions, but since its metal surface was at least three or four feet above her head, the culprit – the mountain of waste – was impossible to see.
Esther inclined her head back out to sea, then looked slowly back again, curious. A sheen on the edge of the metal hatch had caught her eye, and she stepped back to examine it. There was a trail emanating from the lid of the hatch above her head, running over the edge and then continuing along the deck below, as though whatever had left it had dropped the seven or eight feet and continued its progress. She rubbed at it with a toe. It had been dried hard by the sun exactly like the trail of a slug, but with the marked difference of being at least three feet wide instead of the innocent half inch you would curse at in your glasshouse, and when her trainer made contact it broke off in wafer-thin flakes.
Esther bent and looked more closely at it. Under the hardened flakes of slime there were other things sticking to the deck, things that were still slightly moist, streaks of effluent maybe, a trace of oil or tar, but worst of all a brown-red smear that looked almost like blood. Still crouched, she followed the trail on the deck, her hand shading her eyes from the sun, until, squinting, she could just make it out disappearing over the edge of the deck about twenty feet short of the accommodation block.
Esther stood up and wiped her foot unconsciously on the edge of the metal hatch runner. She shook her head. The only explanation could be that someone had pulled an unpleasant portion of the trash from its pile, dragged it nearly seven holds further up the deck and then tipped it into the sea. She knew she shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but everything about this ship was making her long for the dull, reliable neat container ship she’d arrived on.
Most likely the trail was the residue of drunken behaviour, a bet, a forfeit or a prank, and the worst of it was that discipline was obviously so lax no one had bothered to come out and scrub away the evidence. This was a crew that needed its ass kicked.
The stitch healed, she bent forward and took two deep breaths, ready to finish the circuit. She straightened. For no reason other than that the unscrubbed trail of goo had irritated her, she had an overwhelming desire to peer into the hold to see exactly what they had been up to.
A quick glance up to the far-off windows of the bridge suggested that she was not about to be observed, and so with her hands on the guide rail of the hatch cover she hauled herself up to the edge of hold number two. There was a moment of feeling precarious, the action putting her higher than the ship’s taff rail, and she paused to steady herself. When she had adjusted to the height she walked carefully forward to the fifteen-foot slit between the open hatch doors and crouched down at the edge. The smell nearly knocked her backwards and she covered her nose and mouth with one hand, leaning heavily on the other.
Ten or twelve feet below her, the pile of irregular and unidentifiable waste was illuminated by a slim strip of daylight, while the rest of the load skulked in darkness beneath the ledges of drawn hatch covers. It was an ugly cargo, and looking down into it gave Esther the creeps. The sea breeze seemed chillier up here, and she hunched her shoulders against it as she scanned the top of the waste to try and understand what someone might have been pulling free from it.
From the dark starboard portion of the pile came a movement. Her eyes flicked to it immediately, her breath caught in readiness.
She focused hard on where she thought she saw the subtle peripheral shifting and waited for it to happen again.
Her leg was grabbed in a vice-like grip below the knee, and before she could cry out Esther was dragged backwards.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re at?’ It was a male voice.
Esther found herself on her back, her fists clenched ready to strike, blinking up at the figure silhouetted against the sky. Her panting breath slowed and she untensed her body enough to sit semi-erect and recognize the figure of Matthew Cotton.
‘My God. You near made me shit myself.’
‘Yeah?’ It was said with aggression, not apology.
He offered her a hand to get up. She ignored it and sat forward instead. Matthew pointed to the deck. ‘Get down. Right now.’
Esther looked at him sulkily and slowly stood, walked forward and lowered herself to the deck. Cotton dropped after her, dusting off his pants and never taking his eyes from her sullen face.
‘You any idea how stupid that was?’