This Thing of Darkness (76 page)

I say, ‘It’s not seismology.’

Ryan and Eddie discuss that. Eddie goes into a story I can’t quite follow about a seismology project they did for some oil company. ‘They did it properly. I mean, no offence, but this ship isn’t right for the job. Got the wrong hoists. No stabilisation. That control room, I mean, it’s basically a piece of shit. And working like this, in seas like this – I mean, it’s not right, is it? If you’ve got to use the wrong vessel, then wait till the weather’s not so crazy.’

I hand out teas, generously sugared. Paracetamol for the injured men.

But it’s Coxsey who notices first.

The bucking of the boat, the screaming of the metal, the thundering waters. It hasn’t changed. None of it. Not the rhythm, speed or pitch.

‘We’re not turning,’ he says. ‘We’re not going about.’

And that’s when the fear really starts. It’s not just me now, it’s everyone. The wrong ship, in the wrong sea, doing the wrong job, for a man that nobody knows and nobody likes and nobody trusts.

Then the door opens. Caff enters. Face white, or as white as that weathered face could ever go.

‘They’ve murdurred th’ cap’n. They’ve murdurred th’ fookin’ cap’n.’

61

They haven’t, in fact, murdered the fucking captain, but there has been a mutiny, all right. Calmly planned, efficiently executed.

I don’t know what happened up on the bridge, in that place of flying foam and screaming wind. What I do know is this. That Caff saw Honnold being dragged – face-bloodied, only part conscious – to his cabin.

That Buys and Connor have both sprouted guns. Semi-automatic pistols worn at the hip.

That we are now prisoners.

As Coxsey is sent up to take the bridge, the rest of us – barring only Wee Philly – are gathered in the dining room.

It’s Buys, not Connor, who addresses us.

‘We’ve spoken to Cork,’ he says. ‘They want us to watch the pair of you’ – he means Pearson and Ryan – ‘keep you away from anything too physical, but they say to rest up, look after yourselves, and you should be just fine.’

That said, with a last glittering eye on me. An eye of warning.

‘As for the reason we’re here. Our little assignment. Connor’s organisation has paid us well to do a job and we’re going to do it. You’ll all share in the income. You’ll all make more money than you would by dropping nets and pulling the guts out of fish.

‘And this job is urgent. Time-critical. We’ve not been lucky with the weather and we’ve lost some items from the control room. Those things are going to slow us down. And if we fannied about, taking good strong men to hospital, we’d miss the chance we have to do this job. Which means missing a hatful of cash. For all of you.’

Pearson: ‘Where’s the captain?’

Buys: ‘In his cabin. He fell on the companionway and hurt himself. He’ll be fine.’

Caff: ‘Whit’s this joab wur daein, anywae?’

Buys: ‘That doesn’t concern you. Just do as you’re told and you’ll get your money.’

Caff says something to that, but in an Orcadian so thick that none of us follow it.

The mood among the men is an angry acquiescence. Angry, because no one likes what’s happening here. Honnold was a respected captain, Buys neither particularly known nor particularly liked. Connor was outright unpopular, almost from the first.

But – those pistols. Those pistols and that promise of cash.

The men start bargaining. What work? How long? How much is a hatful of cash? When can Pearson and Ryan get medical help?

I’m part of the bargain too. A counter shuffled across the board in this game of evil consequences.

Pearson insists that I be allowed to go to the captain. Work my medical magic on him. Buys and Connor exchange nods. Buys escorts me, as Connor turns to the business of finding out just how much cash will buy off rebellion.

We clamber and slip down these skidding metal tunnels. Buys’s more practised legs have little difficulty with the shifts of angle, with the occasional sideways yaw, when we’ve been rammed by a rogue wave. I have to keep both hands on the handrail. Scuttling forwards when the slope is downward or approximately flat, then hanging on for dear life as the world inverts.

But we get there. To Honnold’s cabin.

Buys has his hand on the door handle. His other arm is full of medical stuff – the first aid box, towels, a flask of warm water.

I think he’s about to let us in, but he doesn’t, or not at once. Instead, he leans forward. Puts his mouth so close to my ear that I can feel his breath steamy on my skin.

‘I don’t trust you,’ he says. ‘Just so you know, I don’t fucking trust you.’

I remember that it was Buys who stood aside for me as I came down from the companionway after sabotaging the door of the control room. Remember that brooding stare following me as I walked away.

I say, ‘
You
don’t trust
me
? I’m not the one who half killed the fucking captain.’

I let my eye fall on the blood that smears the grip of Buys’s pistol. Put my finger out to the butt. Bring it away red.

Buys lets me touch the gun, but grabs my hand as it pulls away. Yanks my hand back over my wrist, till I gasp in pain. He holds me there, extending the moment, till he releases me with a final, vicious yank.

‘I. Don’t. Trust. You.’ His final breathy word in my ear.

That’s our beautiful moment over, I think, but if I were Buys, I’d be thinking the same thoughts. The Honnold-Pearson-Coxsey-MacHaffie team was fairly well-established on the
Isobel Baker
. There were only two newcomers. One, Buys himself, a guy placed there by Connor. The inside man.

The other, me.

Who replaces the existing guy at zero notice. Whose ‘references’ amount to one single phone call, made on a twilit deck. Who was the last person to leave the control room, the night the door failed. Who led the men into wanting a return to harbour.

A ship’s cook who can’t cook. A sailor with no sea legs. A little woman in a big man’s world.

Buys gives me a last, malevolent stare, then opens the door.

Honnold is there. Blood on his scalp and face. Bruises already inking his eye. One hand cuffed to an iron handrail.

I say, ‘I’ll need more water. And the razor.’

Settle down to work.

Cleaning the face and scalp of blood. Cutting away hair. Starting to shave around the wound.

Honnold sucks in when I hurt him, but remains steady. The truth is, the cuts all look worse than they really are. All headwounds bleed easily, but the injuries here are nothing compared with Pearson’s.

Buys returns with the extras. Watches as I work.

I put up with that for a while, then turn and say, ‘Yes?’

He shrugs. Leaves.

Honnold says, ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have taken the assignment in the first place.’

‘Why shouldn’t you? I assume they didn’t come to you and say, “We’re a bunch of semi-homicidal gangsters and we’re planning to club you unconscious and leave your men dangerously injured and without medical help.” If they did say that, then I’d have to agree you were a fuckwit.’

He grins. Lopsidedly. The left side of his face won’t be great for a while.

I carry on doing what I’m doing.

He says, ‘Who are you? I mean, really?’

‘I’m me. I’m a cook.’

He doesn’t say anything to that. I’m at the stage where I can squish one of the QuikClot dressings on his head. Get him bandaged up.

It’s overkill, really. The wounds just aren’t that awful. But it won’t hurt for Buys and Connor to think that Honnold is a mess.

I say, ‘The clamps in the galley are getting stuck. Is there a toolkit anywhere?’

Honnold stares at me. One eye as clear and blue as an arctic morning. The other purple and crushed and grapey and sore.

‘There are tools in the engine room. Caff can show you where.’

I nod. Finish. Pack up.

Honnold says, ‘And it
is
my fault. This is a fishing boat, and we didnae need any other type of work. You can tell the boys, I’m sorry.’

‘Tell ’em yourself.’

I don’t see why, just because I’m the ship’s skivvy, I should have to do every little thing.

I go.

Not sure what to do next. But if in doubt: work. I start to make sandwiches for lunch. Egg and sausage. Cheese. Ham and mustard.

The sea is all but impossible now.

The noise is the worst thing, I think. An indescribable howling. A noise that makes you realise that, every second of every minute, the boat is being assaulted by thousands of tons of water. A furious energy hurtling against the hull. And beyond that hull, only a green-black emptiness, a chilling cold.

Death’s howling army. An underworld populated by sea-monsters.

Coxsey, briefly swapping his duties on the bridge with Caff, so he can get a hot drink and a bathroom visit, pops into the galley to give me a status report. Winds of sixty miles an hour, and gusting higher. Waves well over thirty feet. Probably nearer forty. A ‘proper storm’. Force ten, a full gale.

I ask him if the ship will be all right.

‘This old girl? Yes, she’ll be fine.’ He shows me with his hands that if the ship keeps her nose into the wind, she’ll be able to ride the waves, no problem. If the man on the bridge dozes off, even for a few moments, and allows the ship to turn sideways on to the waves, ‘she’d be under in no time. And of course, when the big waves are cresting, you don’t want to get under the crest, in case the bows dig in. But we should be all right, as long as we don’t hit a killer wave, one of those once in a lifetime whoppers. But you never know. These waters throw up some big ’uns.’

He tells me that the largest waves ever recorded were found in the Rockall Trough, a few miles north of where we’re currently cruising. As ‘you’ll be fine’ speeches go, I feel that one was lacking a certain something.

I ask about the life-raft. If it could manage in these waters.

Coxsey laughs. ‘Bloody well hope so, love. I bloody well hope so.’

He gets his drink. Goes back to the bridge.

I go to find Caff coming down. Ask him about the toolkit.

He throws me a sharp look, but takes me down to the engine room to find it.

Caged ceiling lights. Red metal anti-slip floor. An engine, painted green and dirty cream, pounding away. The engine is huge. Perhaps not quite the width of an ordinary family car, but one and a half times as long. An auxiliary engine, a spare in case of failure. Cooling system. Pumps. Boilers. Electronics control panel.

None of it looks very high-tech. None of it
is
all that high-tech. But the only technology that matters in these waters is one of reliability. The screw has to keep turning. The pumps have to keep pounding.

Caff finds the toolkit. A dirty white metal box, stowed against the wall.

He opens it up.

I take out a hacksaw and a hammer.

Try to get the hacksaw blade out of the grip, but can’t figure out how to do it, so Caff does it for me.

Tape the blade to my leg with surgical tape. Same thing with the hammer.

Caff watches. Helps. Re-stows the toolkit when I’m done.

When we’re out of the engine room din, he says to me with a grin, ‘Whitna raffle wur geen and gottin wursels intae noo, eh? A right roo o’ shite.’

I don’t know what that means, but he sounds friendly and ‘roo o’ shite’ sounds accurate enough, so I nod in agreement.

Caff goes on to tell me that he, Coxsey and Pearson are more or less prisoners. They’re each to do four hours on the bridge. Four hours on, eight off. The spare men are to handle any maintenance and repair tasks necessary, and to assist Buys and Connor, if required to do so. Aside from that, ‘we’re tae bade in oor room, lik a pair o’ peedie buoys.’

Which means that, assuming Eddie and Ryan remain, however approximately, loyal to Connor, the only person with some freedom of movement is me.

Which is good, since my To Do list is already long and getting longer..

I shout, ‘Captain Honnold isn’t badly hurt. And this is his ship.’

‘Aye, shay is that. An’ the ither lads wid lik tae see th’ cap’n back.’

‘Well then,’ I say, with a let’s-not-stand-here-blethering shrug.

Caff punches my shoulder, not hard, and says, ‘Ye’r a guid peedie lassie. Th’ wurst damn cook a’m ever seen, but a guid lassie fur a’ that.’

We go back to the galley, via the refrigeration hold, so Caff can carry a food box up for me – cover for our trip.

Connor is there at the dining room door. Stance rolling with the ship. Left hand on the rail. Gun hand free.

He glares, but sees the box of food, and nods to let us pass. Sees Caff back to his bunkroom. Returns to watch me in the galley. Does nothing to help. Just watches me, flung between stove and countertops like a rat in a bucket.

I’m bruised everywhere, but that’s hardly the worst of it. The fear and the noise is worse. The way that all thought is torn apart. The fear of a big wave hitting hard.

Connor tells me to feed the men on the bridge first, then the control room, then Honnold, then the men in the bunkroom. Serve hot drinks in the same order after that. I nod.

He leaves.

I assemble a plateful of sandwiches, double wrap it in foil, and clamber up to the bridge.

I thought it was worse in the ship’s bowels, because I couldn’t see the waves about to strike, but it’s worse up here. Seeing the waves, their endlessness. A grey-black violence that never ends.

Buys and Coxsey take their food, without looking at me. The bridge doors are firmly shut. The glow of electronics underlights the two men’s faces. Buys steering. Coxsey reading the waves, offering course corrections with his hands as much as his voice. And I understand, from the two men’s concentration, just what a task is being performed up here. If one of these cresting waves, these forty footers, is allowed to break right over the bows, there’s a risk that the bows dig in, effectively braking the ship. If that happens, there’s a risk that the ship pivots round, propeller thrashing empty air, leaving the ship exposed broadside to the waves.

And we wouldn’t survive that. Even I, landlubber as I am, can see that.

I go down.

Another plate of sandwiches, painfully assembled. Another bruising journey upwards to the control room.

The door partly fixed, but not entirely. The room still sodden. Salt water curling around the metal floor, like a prey animal constantly seeking an exit.

Connor there. Eddie too, but not Wee Philly. Not yet.

Connor’s on his feet. Eddie’s seated, wearing a full harness, like the men on the bridge.

The monitors are turned on now. Images beamed up from the ROV two hundred metres beneath the waves. Images of the seabed. Dim grey and green and yellow. Artificially brightened by the ROV’s halogen lamps.

Rock, sea, sand.

Those things and a black cable, snaking left to right across the field of vision.

Those things, and a pronged grappling device extended from the ROV itself. A device which is even now being teased under the cable. Which will snap round it, gripping it firmly as soon as it gets purchase.

Connor – less practised at this – is darting Eddie sharp looks. Looks that say, ‘Do it now!’

Eddie shakes his head. Says, ‘You get no sense of depth on these things’ – he means the monitors. ‘You’ve got to get the grapple right under the line and out the other side.’