The Hope Read online

  “Kill it! Kill the motherfucker!” I shrieked, knowing Fred couldn’t hear me, knowing also he felt the same way.

  “And this is the weird part,” said Charlie.

  “The weird part?” I exclaimed.

  Fred and the thing weren’t moving, were just staring at each other. I saw Fred’s pus-splattered face and I saw an understanding in his eyes. They were sharing something, our boss and their general. They were facing off. What passed between them wasn’t for ordinary joes like Stan or Tommy or me, and it was a secret which I for one could live without ever learning and be happy.

  The moment ended and the thing dropped Falstaff’s earring and ear at Fred’s feet, the way a dog offers its master a bone, only Fred wasn’t its master (or it a dog). He bent to pick the earring up, found me looking at him, and left it where it was. His eyes were dead.

  The thing slithered along the pipe and up the wall, disappearing into the darkness. Fred signed for us to move on.

  The vibration of the turbines got deeper and louder and for once I was glad to feel it. Stan wasn’t getting any easier to carry and his attempts at walking were pathetic by now. He had lost blood, lots.

  A wedge of weak light appeared in the distance up ahead and it got bigger and brighter and I felt like I was waking up. We got to the hole and Fred slid into it, then we pushed Stan through. Tommy made me go next and he kept guard with his knife, but somehow we all knew the danger was over.

  We took Stan straight up to Dr Macaulay. He was a good doc, not like this new jerk, and we told him exactly what had happened. We were too rattled even to think of inventing a cover story. And he listened good and nodded and we made him swear never to tell anyone and he promised. He did the best he could with Stan and Stan knows he’s lucky to be walking at all.

  Then we went back down and got hold of a rivet gun, the one we’re supposed to use for repairs. I hesitated, signing to Fred that some of the others might be alive back there, but he shook his head slowly, avoiding meeting my eyes.

  We riveted the steel over that hole tighter than a nun’s pantyhose.

  “You think this is a pile of horseshit, don’t you?”

  “Do you want me to be honest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. That’s your privilege.” Charlie rolled one of his cigarettes in that slick-fingered way of his and struck a match. The whisky bottle was half empty or half full, depending on how you want to see it. I was floating in a pleasant haze.

  “Go and look at the hole,” he said, “far corner. You can’t miss it.”

  “Wouldn’t convince me.”

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “Well…”

  “OK,” he said, waving his cigarette at me, “perhaps I did make it up. But perhaps I didn’t.”

  I asked Stan about his leg later that night, and he said he’d broken it falling off a ladder and it had never healed right. But then, he could have been lying.

  Now then, I believe there are places where you don’t go, where only a wrong turn can take you, and I don’t cling to my religious idea of hell any more. Sometimes, when I see that sheet of steel pinned to the wall with melted wedges of rivet, I think about Charlie’s squidgy creatures and I laugh.

  But not too loudly. If those things exist behind there, they don’t want to be here just as much as we don’t want to be in there.

  Because before I left the playroom, Charlie said this: “When I grew old enough, Big Fred threw himself overboard. He was letting me take over, I guess, but maybe meeting that thing on the pipe had been too much for him. Too much like him. Maybe being boss isn’t such a great deal, huh?”

  Maybe.

  And maybe there is a secret better left riveted beyond my understanding.

  PERFECT CADENCE

  Punctually at six the orchestra struck up the lolloping oom-pa-pa of the waltz, the four violinists scraping out the melody for all it was worth. Dancers took to the floor on cue, as seagulls will take to a shoal of fish. The men were beautifully uncomfortable in tails and white tie (a white that had seen better days; now the colour of sea foam) and the women were uncomfortably beautiful in shot silk and faded crêpe-de-chine. The women crackled as they moved, the men’s shirtfronts creaked. They knew the old dances perfectly and each couple waltzed like a clockwork figurine, stiff, formal, elegant. They whirled in individual patterns, locked in a larger pattern of which none of them was wholly conscious, embraced as they were in a world stretching no further than the partner in their arms. They danced easily and swiftly. Stiff knee-joints were forgotten; twinges of lumbago were ignored; arthritic fingers found courage to clasp other fingers. The tune was impossibly sweet, almost sickly, a surfeit of major chords and perfect cadences. No harmonic was left unused.

  And above, the great crystal chandelier showered light to all corners of the ballroom and the chairs ranged along the sides reflected the light feebly in their gilt. On one sat a woman, unaccompanied. She had a thin, fine-boned face that wore old age with dignity. Triple rows of crescent-shaped wrinkles on either side of her mouth promised frequent smiles, as if she was about to offer you one any second now if you went up to her and asked her to dance. No, thank you, that smile would say with so much grace that you would find it hard to take offence or feel the paralysing embarrassment you thought only adolescents felt. No, thank you. I don’t dance. You might want to sit and talk instead, but the smile would turn down your offer just as politely. No, thank you. Might you simply sit beside her and watch the dance? It is so kind of you, but no, thank you. And you would go away feeling neither frustrated nor disappointed but somehow happier.

  They had left open the curtains at the far end of the ballroom, where an expanse of picture window showed the Hope’ssuperstructure, her funnels, her blackened spires like angular stalagmites, her ziggurats of deck piled high. At the bows, the setting sun was hovering above the sea, a billowing circle of fading orange cut out of the drab sky. The sun edged the towers and canyons of the ship, the homes and lives of a million souls, with gold. On clear days the Hope had a baroque beauty which was as deceptive as it was attractive.

  The woman of smiles took in the view through the sweeps and swirls of the dancers and the view pleased her.

  The dance came to an end and the dancers applauded politely before dispersing to the sides. Signor Bellini, the important conductor, took a bow and modestly requested the orchestra to stand and take theirs. Everyone allowed themselves a five-minute rest. Restrained chatter filled the ballroom.

  These displays of civility pleased the woman.

  Angel flew and sank. One moment she was riding a pillar of fire over a desert, her body singing with the achievement; the next she was watching herself plunging backward into an emerald sea, beams of sunlight darting down towards her in the depths.

  Angel laughed and cried. One moment she was starring in the funniest play ever written and the audience was hanging upon her every word, her every gesture, waiting for her to release the joy for themselves; the next she was at a funeral, banners black as ravens’ wings flapping from hats and sleeves.

  Angel lived and died. One moment she was a creature of light – time, the universe and eternity lived together in the nail of her little finger; the next she had wallowed in night, bottomless, colourless, lightless.

  She swam up into a room of brightness and fantastic figures brushed past her and around her, weaving hypnotic shapes.

  Each time the figures passed her by, they left fluorescent afterimages. She knew this place. She might know it if she saw it.

  The dreams switched off abruptly.

  It was morning. Dawn seeped sickly grey through the porthole. Push had gone without leaving any indication of where he might be found. Angel was sprawled over sheet and blanket, her body pale. The clock beside the bunk ticked with excruciating slowness as if moving its second hand was the greatest of efforts. Angel was cold with sweat. The shakes were starting and she dreaded the next few hours, hours
made of minutes made of seconds that passed like hours.

  From last night’s cocktail of reality and hallucination Angel remembered little except Push making her do something revolting to him and doing something painful to her body in return. She wanted badly for these to be hallucinations. But hadn’t he also called her Perfection and My Only Angel? Hadn’t he?

  The cabin was distant, the walls and ceiling holding themselves out of her reach, as if in disgust. Angel pulled the sheet clumsily over her and curled up in a clammy warmth. She began to shudder.

  The tune of the evening’s last dance was still humming in her head as she made her way out of the ballroom surrounded by a crowd of the dancers whose foreheads were shiny and required constant mopping with clean handkerchiefs. One of the younger men, in his forties with a touch of grey at the temples, held the door open for her (someone always did) and she rewarded him with a smile. His eyes never left her as she walked along the deck and there was nothing but admiration in them. She sensed him watching and perhaps she held herself a little better than usual. She left the dancers’ goodnights and kisses behind and crossed over a gangplank, pinching up her skirts with her right hand to keep the dirt off them.

  The sky was pinned with a handful of stars.

  As she reached her cabin, she had the same sensation of being watched. It was possible the man had followed her but it was also extremely unlikely. She felt no fear. Let them watch. Calmly she opened the cabin door, which was never locked.

  Through the window could be seen a small landscape of decks and then a strip of sea to the horizon, whitened by moonlight. Her old cat Lucius jumped down unsteadily from the bed and greeted her with a reproachful yowl as he wound around and about her ankles. She picked him up and nuzzled his purring body. Sitting down, she switched on a lamp shaped like a mermaid combing her hair, settled Lucius on her lap and took up a book recommended to her by the librarian, The Aspern Papers. These books saddened her, belonging to a world she would never revisit, and yet she adored their exquisite eloquence, for the librarian knew what she liked reading and without fail would choose something to put her in this laughing-sad, crying-happy mood. Although she was finding the Misses Bordereau a little peculiar for her tastes, Venice in decay captivated her.

  Lucius’s ears pricked up and his purr stopped abruptly. From being passive and pliable, he became all stiff bones and nerves.

  “Who is it?” the woman asked, either to the cat or to the presence that the cat had sensed.

  There was no knock. The door swung in to reveal a frail figure. Before the poor thing – not much more than a child – pitched forward on to the floor and she ran over to cradle it in her arms, the woman of smiles glimpsed blood.

  Angel spent the best part of the day in the same curled-up position on the bed, getting up occasionally to urinate or throw up in the basin. The crash had hit her heavily, probably because she had never dropped a whole six tabs before. She drifted in and out of conscious dreams, the premises of which were not of her making but the action of which she found she could control. People said what she wanted them to say, did what she wanted them to do, which was funny but nice. When each dream reached a sort of conclusion, she would wake up and curl up more tightly and go back to sleep and another dream. One was about Push and another was about her father. Neither of these was too bad but they were empty dreams, filled with bland ghosts and wandering no-hopers, something missing, cut out from their hearts. Angel felt sorry for them and, in so doing, for herself.

  Gradually the shakes eased off and her thoughts began to flock together. She was starving. She had not eaten since yesterday morning and it was now… She peered at the clock through sleep-crusted eyelids and saw it was 18.25. Nearly twenty-four hours had elapsed since she and Push had come back here. Time lost. She must make a move…

  But it was another hour before she managed to crawl into some clothes – jeans and one of Push’s shirts. She felt like shit, like a slosh of organs and jelly, like her skin was the only thing holding her together. Catching sight of herself in the mirror which swung from a hook over the basin she saw dark matted hair and yellowy eyes and pale lips and nothing remotely appealing or perfect or angelic. She tried to smile and her reflection grimaced back at her with uneven teeth. Pushing her feet into a pair of sandals, she left the cabin and made for the Recreation Area.

  There was quite a crowd at the Neptune’s Trident. All the people she expected to see hanging out were hanging out. Wild Billy was lounging by the door to the Trident, smoking a cigarette and wearing his joke sailor’s hat. Delia had a little girly on either arm – bewildered things – and had that familiar bollock-removing look on her face. Acid Cas was striking a bargain with someone Angel didn’t know. It was funny, but Cas always seemed to come off worst from these deals. From the doorway came pulses of light and sound, shadows of poses and postures thrown out, frozen in neon relief. As people queued to get in and pretended not to be queuing, Angel saw an aimlessness in everyone’s movements that was matched by the drizzle and indifferent air of the lower decks, as if one bred the other. She nodded to Billy as she went by, then jumped the queue and flirted her way past the doorman. She wasn’t a very good flirt but the doorman was in a good mood. Billy hadn’t been his usual self recently, which he passed off to everyone as the result of taking part in the scrap to end all scraps, but that did not explain the hunted look he had about him occasionally. However, he managed to leer at Angel and she knew he was watching her backside as she went into the Trident, so she swung it around a bit for his benefit.

  Inside, the light and sound took shape, becoming the rhythms and patterns of songs from records so old that the scratches often drowned the music with rusty squawks. It had got to the point where the squawks and needle jumps were an accepted part of the songs and the boogiers would scream with pleasure at each one. To Angel the words were nearly incomprehensible, the tunes more so. In her current state of shellshock it all made her head ache. The colours were unnecessarily bright. Faces swam at her from the press of people, some known, some strange, all mouthing things at each other. She pushed through to the bar. Eddy was on tonight. There were rings of sweat beneath his armpits as he handed out glasses full of varying mixtures concocted from the bottles on the table behind him. Few customers actually paid for their drinks. The bar operated on a unique barter system: you drank there, you were likely to be called up by Riot to do some “business” for him, which meant fight if you were a man and keep the fighters happy if you were a woman (except in Delia’s case). Places like the Trident operated all over the Hope. Eddy greeted her, “Hey Angel!”, then turned quickly to serve a customer.

  She waited until he was finished and then said, “Eddy?”

  “Not now, darling,” he replied, fishing below the counter for a cloth. “I’m rushed off my feet.”

  “Eddy, have you seen –?”

  “Paolo!” yelled Eddy, as if he hadn’t seen Paolo for weeks instead of minutes, and grasped his hand. “How are you, mate?”

  “Eddy, have you seen Push?” He was not listening. She hung on for a moment, realised that the ranks had been closed, and pushed herself away from the bar with a cry of disgust. Hunger – for food, for drugs – was becoming imperative. She noticed for the first time how hot it was in the Trident. The girders in the ceiling were dripping with perspiration, the air was rank. She squeezed her way to the dance floor and looked out over the sea of bobbing heads. She saw the porridge-head, Walter, making his way through the boogiers, on the prowl for boys most likely. People thought it was cool to have Walter around and gave him celebrity status because he was a little bit simple and a whole lot creepy, especially when he went on about God and Jesus and all that jazz.

  “Angel, you look like death!”

  If Angel could be said to have a friend, it was Gilette. Years ago, although not as long ago as she thought, the two of them had been inseparable. They had been nicknamed the Twins, neither remotely resembling the other but neither seeming comple
te without the other. As children, one dark, one blonde, they clattered along walkways and gangplanks, they traced the length and breadth of their deck area, they held secret meetings beneath the tarpaulin of the lifeboat on the outer rim (thrilled with the danger of being caught, a delicious flush of terror). The two of them took on the Hope – best of all took on the boys – and won. With every confidence they shared they grew wiser but not older and, when Angel watched her mother die, it was Gilette who held her and told her to cry. They ran and ran until they ran into puberty and then they tried to hold themselves together as the taunts came, chipping away at them maliciously. Didn’t they like boys? Were they scared of willies? What was wrong with them?

  In the end it was Gilette who took a boy along to one of their rendezvous. He was a spotted, greasy thing who swore a lot and kept cuddling Gilette and pawing her chest. Angel felt sick, not just at Ryan or Ron or whatever his stupid name was but at the casual ease with which Gilette had swept their childhood away. They did continue meeting but Gilette always managed to bring the conversation round to boys this, boys that. The strange things happening to Angel’s body at the time did not help, because it seemed to her that she was being twisted into swollen new shapes by the battle between Ought To and Want To, and that she was no longer her own mistress nor Gilette’s perfect lover.

  She still loved Gilette even now and envied the flamboyance with which she ensnared men and the flippancy which she shrugged them off, but she resented her too, blaming her (irrationally) for the loss of innocence. When she felt Gilette put a hand on her arm and saw Gilette’s face splashed with coloured light, she was torn between feeling she ought to cry and wanting to scratch her eyes out.