Dark Winter

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © 2012 by David Mark

The moral right of David Mark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 0 85738 920 6
ISBN 978 0 85738 918 3 (HB)
ISBN 978 0 85738 919 0 (TPB)

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
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To my grandparents – champion storytellers, one and all.

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

William Shakespeare,
The Merchant of Venice

The old man looks up, and for a moment it feels as though he is staring through the wrong end of a telescope. The reporter is forty years away.

‘Mr Stein?’

A warm, tender hand on his bony knee.

‘Can you share your memories of that moment?’

It takes a physical effort of will to drag himself into the present.

He blinks.

Tells himself, with an old man’s fear of losing his memories, to get it together.

You’re still here
, he tells himself.
Still living
.

‘Mr Stein? Fred?’

You’re alive
, he tells himself, again. The supertanker
Carla
. Seventy miles off the Icelandic coast. One last interview, here in the galley, with its stink of fried food and burned coffee, its diesel and sea-spray; the deep, bass-note hum of unwashed men and wet wool.

So many memories …

He blinks again. It’s becoming a habit.
There should be tears
, he thinks. Deserves tears, this.

He sees her properly. Sitting forward on the hard-backed chair like a jockey on a horse. Holding the microphone in front of his face like she’s a toddler who wants him to lick her lolly.

Closes his eyes and it hits him like a wave.

For an instant, he is a young man again, starting an eighteen-hour shift, pulling on a jumper stiff with fish guts and slime. He’s warming his hands on a mug of tea when he’s not spooning enough porridge into his gob to fill his belly. He’s hurting. Trying to convince himself his hands are his own. He’s hearing the skipper’s voice. The urgency of his cries. He’s swinging the hook. The hatchet. Chopping at the ice. Hacking it free in lumps that could stove your skull in if you weren’t quick on your feet. He’s feeling the ship begin to go …

‘The sound of the wind,’ he says, and in his coat pocket he feels his fingers make the sign of the cross, genuflecting on the smooth, silky surface of the packet of Benson and Hedges. It’s an old habit, the residue of a Catholic upbringing.

‘Can you describe it for us?’

‘It was like being in a house on a bare moor,’ he says, closing one eye. ‘The wind was coming from all sides. Howling. Roaring. Banging. It was like it was out to get us. I was vibrating with it. Like one of those tuning forks. I could feel the vibrations coming through the deck, and I was stood stock-still, frozen to the bloody spot.’

She nods to her cameraman, and motions to keep going. He’s good value for money, this nice old chap in his charity-shop
suit and Hull Kingston Rovers tie. Coping pretty well, considering. Handling the cold better than she is. Got better sea-legs, she’ll give him that. Better constitution, too. She’s barely kept a meal down since they hit this weather front, and it’s not helping that the only room on this supposed supertanker that’s big enough for her, the cameraman and the boom, is the greasy, food-spattered kitchen. Galley, she corrects herself, with a journalist’s particularity.

‘Go on, Mr Stein.’

‘If I’m honest, love, it was the boots,’ says the old man, looking away. ‘My mates’ boots. I could hear them on the deck. They were squeaking. They sounded all rubbery on the wood. I’d never heard it before. Eight years on the trawlers and I’d never heard the sound of footsteps. Not over the engines and the generators. Did that night, though. Wind dropped just long enough for me to hear them running. Kind of it, eh? Malicious bastard. It was like it was getting its breath back for the battering that was to come. And I was stood there, thinking: “I can hear their boots.” And forty years later, that’s what I remember. Their bloody boots. Can’t bear to hear it now. Won’t go out if it’s raining. I hear a boot squeak on a wet surface and I’m on my knees. Don’t even like thinking about them. That’s what I wasn’t sure about on this trip. It’s not the waves. Not the bloody weather. It’s the thought of hearing some welly boots on a wet deck and feeling like it never went away …’

The reporter is nodding now. Caroline. Thirty-odd. Big wooden earrings and hair like a nine-year-old boy. Nothing special to look at, but confident and bright as a button. Newsreader make-up. London accent and an expensive ring
or three on fingers that had been manicured at the start of the trip, but which are beginning to look a little chipped and patched-up now.

‘Then it started up again,’ he says. ‘It was like being in a tin shed and somebody beating on it with a cricket bat. Worse than that. Like being on a runway with a hundred planes taking off. Then the waves started rolling in on us. The spray was turning to ice when it hit the air, so it was like being stabbed with a million needles all at once. My face and hands were agony. I thought my ears were being pushed into my head. I was numb. I couldn’t stand up. Couldn’t take a step in the direction I wanted. Was just tumbling around on the deck, bumping and banging around. A bloody pinball, that’s what I were. Rolling about, waiting for it all to stop. I must have broken a few bones during all that but I don’t remember it hurting. It was like my senses couldn’t take it all in. So then it was just noise and cold. And this feeling that the air was tearing itself apart.’

She’s happy
, he thinks. Loving this. And he’s quite proud of himself too. It’s been forty years since he told this story without a pint in his hand, and the mug of tea he’s gripping in one plump, pink-marbled fist has been allowed to go cold without once reaching his lips.

‘So, when was the order given to abandon ship?’

‘It’s all very confused. It was so dark. The lights went off the second we hit the rocks. You ever seen snow and spray in the dark? It’s like being inside a busted TV. You can’t stand upright, neither. Don’t know which way’s up …’

He snatches a hand to his cheek. Catches a tear. He looks at it, sitting there accusingly on a broken, cracked knuckle.
He hasn’t seen his own tears in years. Not since the wife died. They’d snuck up on him then, too. After the funeral. After the wake. After they’d all gone home and he was clearing away the plates and chucking crusts and crisps in the bin. Tears had come like somebody had opened a sluice. Had fallen for so long that he was laughing by the end of it, amazed at himself, standing over the washing-up bowl and fancying he had a tap either side of his nose: emptying himself of the ocean he had given up for her.

‘Mr Stein …’

‘We’ll leave it there, love. Have a break, eh?’ His voice is still gravelly. Rolled in cigarettes and bitter. But he seems to be shaking, suddenly. Shaking inside his suit with its shiny sleeves and worn knees. Sweating, too.

Caroline seems about to protest. To tell him that this is why they’re here. That any display of emotion will help show the viewers how deeply this has affected him. But she shuts herself up when she realises that it would sound like she was telling a sixty-three-year-old man to cry like a baby for the cameras.

‘Tomorrow, love. After the whatsit.’

‘OK,’ she says, and indicates to her cameraman that he should stop filming. ‘You know what’s happening, yes?’

‘I’m sure you’ll keep me right.’

‘Well, the captain has agreed to give us an hour at the spot where you went down. We’ll be up against it, and the weather isn’t going to be anything special, but we’ll have time for the ceremony. Wrap up warm, eh? Like we said, there will be a simple wreath and a plaque. We’ll film you passing them over the side.’

‘All right, love,’ he says, and his voice doesn’t sound like his own. It’s a squeak. Like a rubber-soled boot on wet wood.

There’s a sudden tightness in his chest. He gives her the best grandfatherly smile he can muster, and says goodnight, ignoring the protests from his knees as he pushes himself out of the hard-backed chair and takes three lurching steps to the open door. He pulls himself into the narrow corridor and walks, quicker than he has in years, towards the deck. One of the crew is coming the other way. He nods a smile and starfishes himself against the wall to allow the older man to pass. He mutters something in Icelandic, and gives him a grin, but Fred can’t summon up the strength to remember a language he’s hardly spoken in decades, and the noise he makes as he passes the orange-overalled man is little more than a gargled cough.

He can’t breathe. There’s a pain in his arm and across his shoulders.

Coughing, gasping, he clatters out onto the deck like a fish spilling from a trawl, and with his eyes screwed up shut, takes great lungfuls of the icy, blustering air.

The deck is deserted. To his rear stands the man-made mountain of cargo containers that this super-container vessel will be dropping off in three days’ time. Towards the bow, he can see the little squares of yellow light emanating from the bridge. Halogen lamps cast circles of pale illumination on the rubbery green surface of the deck.

He stares at the waters. Wonders what his mates look like now. Whether their skeletons remain intact, or whether the motion of the sea has torn them apart and mixed them up.
He wonders whether Georgie Blanchard’s legs are tangled in with Archie Cartwright’s. The pair never got on.

He wonders what his own corpse should look like.

Drops his head as he considers how he has wasted forty stolen years.

He reaches into his pocket and takes out his cigarettes. It’s been years since he last had to strike a match in the face of a force 5, but he remembers the art of cupping the flame inside his palm and quickly drawing in a deep gulp of cigarette smoke. He leans with his back to the gunwale and looks around, trying to steady his thoughts. Looks at the ragged thumbnail of moon, scything down into a cushion of cloud. Looks at the white ripples on the black water as the cargo ship cuts through the deep waters.

Why you, Fred? Why did you make it back when they didn’t? Why—

Fred never finishes the thought. Never finishes the cigarette. Never gets to lay the wreath and drop the plaque, and say goodbye to eighteen crewmates who never made it back alive.

It feels for a moment as though the ship has run aground. He is thrown forward. Smashes into the gunwale with an impact that drives the air from his lungs and a single, splintered rib through the skin of his chest. Blood sprays from his lips as the strength leaves his legs. He slithers to his knees and then his belly as his hands slip on the wet deck. The shard of rib breaks off on impact with the ground and crimson agony explodes inside him, cutting through the dullness of his wits just long enough for him to open his eyes.

He tries to push himself up. To shout for help.

And then he is being scraped up in strong arms, like a flaking fillet of cod on a hot fish slice. For a moment, a solitary second, he is looking into his attacker’s eyes.

Then there is the feeling of flight. Of quick, graceless descent. Of rushing, cold air. Of wind in his ears, spray at his back.