The Hope (3 page)

Sophie’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when she saw Mary closing the cabin door behind her carrying an armful of box that looked as if, could it be, could it be …
food
. Mary herself could barely speak with the confusion of ecstasy and terror she felt. At last she managed to say: “Adam, Sophie, put your coats on and go out and play.” Mark was too ill to do anything but sit and stare and rock on his haunches. “We’re going to have a banquet.”

Adam and Sophie had never moved so quickly in their lives. It occurred to them that the sooner they started playing, the sooner they might finish and come back for the
food.

Mary called after the two fast-disappearing children: “Be back in about an hour, but be careful. Don’t go too far and don’t talk to strangers!” She was delighted they were happy enough to pay no attention to her warnings. The thin man seemed just too distant to be a threat.

In fact, Adam and Sophie did not go far at all, only round the corner, where they sat in the rain and boasted who could eat the most food. Adam said he should have the lion’s share as he was the biggest and a boy but Sophie objected, saying that Mark deserved most because he was so ill. Adam thought girls were silly, always being nice to weak people, but eventually he agreed that Mark should have a tiny, incy-wincy bit more than everyone else. Under normal circumstances, this argument would have been an excuse for total war, but today, with food so close like a peace-keeping force, it was merely a brief territorial skirmish.

Mary went to Mark’s bunk and took his thin hand in her thin hand, and looking at him she had a brief, vague, chilling recollection of the thin man and of Billy saying, “Look at those fucking scars,” and she let the memory drop.

“See that box, Marky? We’ll eat tonight and you’ll be all better soon.”

Saliva dribbled from the corner of Mark’s mouth. Mary looked into his eyes for a moment (nobody home), squeezed his hand, smiled, kissed his knee, reached up, touched his hot cheeks and dabbed at the spittle with a fingertip.

She clambered into her raincoat and went round to Lil’s, two cabins down the walkway.

She knocked. After some time, Lil opened the door and her expression slid from pleasant to indifferent.

“Oh, Mary, it’s you. What can I do for you?”

Lil had a smear of blue under each eye and a smear of red over her lips. A man’s voice came from within: “Who is it, pussywillow?”

Pussywillow?

“I’ve got company,” she told Mary out of one side of her mouth so that the company would not know he was being referred to as company. “Can’t you come back later?”

“I want to borrow some things.”

“You’re always borrowing things, Mary. I never see them again.”

“Yes, you do,” said Mary, as reasonably as possible. “I gave you back your dish last month.”

“No, you didn’t.”

There was no point in arguing.

But hands slipping round that fat neck and crushing the life out, oh God don’t let it come to that
.

“Who is it?” asked Company. Mary could smell incense escaping out through the doorway around Lil.

Lil answered over her shoulder: “Nobody. I won’t be a minute, darling.” She fixed her eyes upon Mary, all pretensions to civility gone. “Will you go away if I lend you what you want?”

“Of course. Can I borrow a knife and a pestle and mortar … please?”

Lil tutted and disappeared into the cabin. Everyone knew how Lil got hold of nice curtains and things for the kitchen, and Mary decided she would rather become a stopper than stoop that low. Company loomed up half-dressed in the doorway and glanced at Mary, took her in with a sleepy nod, and returned into the darkness giving no other sign that he marked her existence. Lil came out with the utensils and plopped them into Mary’s hands.

“Bring them back tomorrow. Clean.”

The door clunked shut. Mary heard Lil say, “Useless bitch,” probably louder than she intended and heard Company laugh a lewd answer. She tried to forget it.

Back in her cabin, she ranged the tins out in precise positions on the table, laying the knife and pestle and mortar beside them. Her tin-opener no longer worked properly. She had to make a series of holes around the lid and cut herself twice in the process.

She put the circle of each lid in a neat pile to one side. Mouthwatering smells rose up to enchant her and her stomach grumbled, not unpleasantly. She solemnly slurped the contents of the ham tin out on to a dish. It was moulded in a foetus shape, plugged with aspic. Thin sauce seeped around it. The peas were the colour of seaweed, the carrots of a uniform size and orangeness.

She took the ham and sliced it into pinky-grey wafers, perfectly round. She placed four equal numbers of slices and tidy piles of peas and carrots on four plates (all but one cracked, a set
the Man
had given her years ago). The smell was unbearably tempting, heady.

Mary placed a setting on each side of the square table, a knife and a fork either side of each plate. Mark watched her without interest. His belly button, pushed out by his swollen abdomen, was as large as the tip of a thumb.

Mary began to prepare the raspberries. Their syrup was dark red.

She had just finished by the time Adam and Sophie charged in, out of breath and wet-haired. They stopped and stared at the table, then at Mary. She had washed herself and, following Lil’s example, had put on some make-up, the little she still had. Sophie said, “Mummy, you look pretty,” and it was so matter-of-fact and yet the most beautiful thing Mary had heard in her life. She leaned down and kissed Sophie and then Adam, who squirmed away and shrugged off his coat.

“Wash yourselves, you two. There’s still some of this week’s water left.” They ran to the basin.

Mary lifted Mark lightly off the top bunk and sat him at the table. He was weak and the feast in front of him seemed to dwarf him. Mary knew he would hardly eat a scrap. No matter.

Mary, Adam and Sophie sat down. Mary mumbled through a grace, then they set to.

Surely this was heaven. There were no words for their full mouths, no language for their tongues. The meal was a protracted moment outside time. Even the
Hope
’s turbines no longer turned for them. Perhaps the
Hope
was drifting on momentum alone, floating powerless on the waves and tides and currents of the unending ocean. Each cold-chewed mouthful sent her further along.

Mary slipped a few forkfuls past Mark’s lips and he swallowed dumbly. Was she imagining it or did his eyes look less glazed? Deep inside them, was there a flicker of life?

Too soon, all the plates were empty and licked clean.

Such bad manners!
thought Mary.

The service light outside the cabin came on, announcing nightfall, and Mary got up to draw the curtains across the portholes. She found a candle in a drawer, lit it and put out the electric lights. In its flickering she thought the children resembled angels with their hair tinged gold and the glow of a kind of bliss on their faces.

“What’s next? asked Adam.

“Raspberries. Special raspberries. Clear up the plates, Adam.” He did so, hoping it might earn him a portion larger than his sister’s, while Mary produced four bowls of raspberries swimming in syrup.

“Wait,” she said, “before you eat, I’m going to feed Mark.” Sophie gave a small “Hmph!” but obeyed, because waiting for food always made it taste better.

Mary pushed spoonfuls into Mark’s mouth until the syrup trickled thickly down his chin.

“All right, you can eat now, you two.”

For Adam and Sophie, there were seconds of mouth-cramming sweetness. Mary picked up her spoon and ate.

Later, when the children were tucked up and Mary had told them a story about a princess and a pea which she vaguely remembered
the Man
telling once, she said, “Goodnight. And mind you get to sleep straight away, or the Rain Man will get you,” at which Sophie squealed in delighted horror and Adam expressed his contempt for such childish nonsense. Mary sat in a chair and watched them and watched them, until tears of love sprang to her eyes.

After a couple of hours, Sophie woke complaining of a stomach ache and Mary hugged her on her lap, saying with a laugh: “You’ve eaten too much, little piggy.”

Sophie began to cry and this woke Adam. He too had a stomach ache. Mark slept so still his breathing was inaudible. Mary felt a twinge in her own stomach. The candle, burning low into a mesa of wax, guttered and made the shadows dance.

A few minutes later, Sophie was sick down the front of Mary’s dress, leaving a bitter red stain.

“It’s just the raspberries,” said Mary. She felt weak and warm and sick and loving. Mark was no longer breathing.

Sophie shat blood down Mary’s leg and died a few minutes later in her arms. Adam was whimpering.

It had come to this.

On the shelf was the mortar and in it there was a layer of dust like a pale green sand.

Mary’s guts contracted with the wrongness inside them. The candle went out and sudden darkness hid them all. Mary thought of
the Man
, how she had met him, how he had won her, how he had come to her one night, how she had loved the children he brought with him as if they were her own, how she had promised to be a mother to them, how he had promised to come back one evening and never did.

We’re coming,
thought Mary Shitshoes.
Wherever you are, we’re coming, all of us.

NO MAN’S LAND

Charlie doesn’t expect there to be an afterlife or a resurrection like the priest says. Of course, we both go to chapel once a week same as everyone else and the Reverend William Chartreuse (I don’t know about the name either, mate) preaches at us like this: “If you’re good, you go to heaven. If you’re bad, you go to hell.” But that’s too simple for Charlie. He says the Reverend William Chartreuse doesn’t understand that heaven and hell can both be found on the
Hope
if you look hard enough, and it makes no odds whether you’re good or whether you’re bad, because either way you can win or you can get crapped on in life. Charlie says that Chartreuse should come down to the engine room one day and then he’d learn about hell – not fire and brimstone and burning cauldrons of devil piss, but this giant room where few of the lights work and where there are two steel turbines, each larger than a blue whale and fed by oil pipes the size of a dinosaur’s dick. The engine room makes a sound louder than the roar of ten billion souls. If Chartreuse came down here and listened hard, from then on his sermons would scare the bowel movements out of the good folk upstairs.

But that’s only what Charlie says.

I didn’t use to agree with him on this because I’ve always been a bit sentimental about God and all that. I can’t help it, but when I think of heaven, I think of comfy rolls of clouds and beautiful people dressed in white singing alleluia.

“But for eternity?” Charlie always comes back. When I imagine Charlie, I see him folding tobacco into a skin with one hand as easy as if he’s been doing it since the womb and I hear him speaking with his American twang, so that’s how I imagine him saying, “But for eternity? That’s a heck of a long time, pal. The human brain wasn’t really designed to cope with thinking about eternity, but if I try, I try to think of a million years and then multiply that by another million and hope that comes close. I don’t know about you, pal, but as far as I’m concerned spending that long in the afterlife would be about as exciting as watching turtles mating. For ever. Slowly. I think all your heaven and hell stuff is so much crap, and romantic crap at that.” And then he grins like he knows something I don’t.

He does. I found this out the other day. He told me.

At the end of my shift, 20.00 hours, I usually go up to Charlie’s office. We call it his playroom because he sure as hell doesn’t do any work in there. He watches over us through double glazing. Although the view isn’t so good now it’s all covered with smoke-stains and oil and shit, but that means we can’t see in very well either, so what we get up to and what he gets up to remain our own business. Mostly.

Aaron was wiping down the pressure gauges, with his permanent pearly grin fixed to his face, nodding in time to a beat the rest of us couldn’t hear. He’s painted his ear-defenders black with bands of yellow, red and green across them. Mine are still regulation grey. I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned, dreadlocks bouncing. I gave him the quitting time signal and he returned a huge thumbs-up with his thumbs like half-cooked sausages. Some of the lads, like Aaron, I see after work and I’ve sunk a few and talked with them the way normal people talk (you know, mouth, verbal), but there are a few – Creaky Stan’s one, and Thompson, the older ones – whose characters are no more than nods, signs and grins to me. We understand each other perfectly but we don’t know each other at all. It’s funny.

I mean, I share a cabin with three other blokes and on the occasions our paths cross we’re quite civil to each other. We’ve never had a fight, anyway. One of them, Paolo by name, is OK really, but he’s just a kid and still into this stabbing and fighting lark. He’s better than that. He’ll grow out of it (assuming he
lives
to grow out of it). What I’m trying to say is that, if you pushed me hard, I’d have to admit my only real friend was Charlie, if by friend you mean someone who’ll tell you you’re being a dickhead when you’re being a dickhead but who’s not scared to congratulate you when you do something worth congratulation.

But that’s my business. As I was saying, I signed to Aaron that I was off to see Charlie (point up at the playroom) but I’d meet him later in the mess (energetic filling of mouth with imaginary food). Aaron grinned wider and gave another thumbs-up. He has hands like soup dishes.

Charlie’s playroom hangs from the roof of the engine room, about a hundred feet up, and you can reach it only by a rusted ladder, not safe. He likes it that way. I climbed up, banged on the hatch and waited. Sometimes he doesn’t hear but today he was quick off the mark and the hatch flew open. He signed for me to come in.

It was a relief to take the ear-defenders off. They begin to cut off the circulation to your ears after a while and it feels as if you’ve got two hot pancakes stuck either side of your head. The scream of the turbines is still there in the playroom but it’s bearable and you only have to talk a little above a shout. Ha! Just a little joke there.