The Hope (19 page)

The man was near fainting with the pain. While I worked on him they told me an alarming story. Again, you may look this up for the details if you wish, but as I remember…

The walls of the office are shifting slightly. It thinks I haven’t noticed, but I have. I haven’t much time.

As I remember, a dozen of the engineers went in search of the lair of the rats that had been infesting the engine room, intending to carry out a spot of extermination. Instead of rats, they encountered some inexplicable creatures with steel teeth. Only four of the men got out alive, and to my mind their terror was too overwhelming for them to have made the story up. I thought at the time that they had suffered a kind of mass hallucination. Really, their working conditions are appalling, and the racket of the engines is enough to drive anyone crazy. However, one singular aspect of the story has been borne out over the years. There are no rats on the
Hope
any more. In addition, I remarked in the entry that the awful creatures they found were acting in a manner similar to those of a living creature’s immune system. Antibodies. I was less experienced then and the remark was intended to be flippant, but I am not so sure now.

This room seems distorted, as if my corneas are distending. In the corners of my eyes I am seeing all sorts of shapes. They form and then pluck themselves away when I try to look at them directly. Even the pen and the casebook are unwilling to serve me.

I have no time left. There is only one cure, and it sits in the bottle in front of me.

I have taken all the pills. The light is dimmer now and my writing slurred.

Marcus, I have left you no option but to play the fool. You cannot save everyone. You cannot save anyone. The passengers must not be allowed to place their faith in you. You must not allow them any placebos.

The rats have deser

Dr Chamberlain closes the casebook, sits back and rubs a hand over his face.

He recalls finding Dr Macaulay the morning after the entry was written, face down on the desk, pen in hand, his lips with a bluish tinge which made Dr Chamberlain think of the times when, as a child, he had chewed on the end of his pen once too often. Dr Macaulay’s corpse was indecently rigid, not at peace even in death.

And earlier this evening, a young man was brought in clutching his face, streaks of blood running down his cheeks. Upon examination Dr Chamberlain found his eyelids had been torn off, by a jilted girlfriend, apparently. He had to sew up the eyelids without any anaesthetic. The young man’s friends held him down during the operation, but he still writhed throughout, and Dr Chamberlain could not do a particularly efficient job. He doubts the fellow will see again. He gave him a whole bottle of pills.

What kind of provocation could there be for such savagery? he asks himself. We
are
rats, biting in frustration at the trap that has snapped shut on us.

He stands up, crosses the room, switches out the lights. The deck is quiet. Putting on his jacket, he goes to the front door of the surgery and opens it. The sea wind gives him a cool shake of the hand. Outside someone is waiting for him in the dark to ask him a question: not “Doctor, how long have I got to live?”, nor “Doctor, what do you think it is?”, but: “Do you know?”

Dr Chamberlain examines the thin man’s mutilated chest and wants to ask some questions in return: “Did you do that yourself?” and “How could anyone inflict that much pain on himself?”

The scars are jagged and ragged. The implement that made them could not have been too sharp.

But he does not diagnose. Instead he accepts that there is a cure after all.

“No, I don’t,” says the doctor.

Hands reach.

THE LAST WALTZ

Signor Bellini woke to the sound of something going bump in the night. He turned over, mumbled something and was drowsing off to sleep again when he heard another bump. He sat up and listened hard. Maria snored lightly beside him. The sound came again, from the cabin above, and once more, and became a series of bumps.

“Not again!” he groaned, then shook his wife and received a thick snort in reply.

“Maria!”

She pushed his hand away.

“Maria, my little
lavabiancherìa,
the Montgomerys are at it again!”

The bumps had now been joined by a counter melody of squeaks, and then little bass thuds of the bedstead were introduced. Bellini pushed back the covers and lowered his feet to the floor, testing the temperature with his toes and wincing. Summoning up courage, he put down both his soles and let out a compressed whine of complaint.

Maria muttered something indistinguishable.

Overhead a duet of two voices, tenor and soprano, had begun in earnest. The words were unclear but the volume grew steadily from
piano
to
fortissimo
and the gist of the libretto emerged in moans and cries. Bellini in his striped pyjamas pulled on a patched pair of socks and gathered his dressing gown around him.

“Where are you going?” asked his wife without much interest. She spoke as if she were somewhere deep under water.

“I’m going upstairs to sort out this nonsense! Four nights in a row it has been. Four nights without a decent sleep. It is too much! I am going to complain.”

“At least wait until they are finished, dearest. It is only polite.”

“No, I will not wait! They wait for me, I tell you. They wait for me until I fall asleep, and then they start – bump, bump, bump – and so I will not wait for them. It is too much!”

He hurried into the main cabin and flung open the front door. Fingers of mist probed in. The cold tingled the hairs on his shins and shrivelled his testicles. Muttering, Bellini launched himself outside and stamped loudly along the walkway, hoping to wake as many of his neighbours as he could. Why should they be allowed to sleep and not he? He stamped up the nearest staircase and stamped along to the Montgomerys’ cabin. Their performance was audible even out here. The tempo had reached a furious
molto allegro.

Bellini banged on the door, unaware of synchronising his knocks to the Montgomerys’ rhythm. The performance stopped dead, as if the conductor had tapped his baton on the rostrum. There were hurried scurrying noises, urgent whispers, and finally a man’s voice: “Who the bloody hell is it?”

“Signor Bellini,” announced Signor Bellini importantly. “I have come to register a complaint.”

“Well, go and register it with the complaints officer.”

“It is not that sort of complaint,” said Bellini, raising his voice in order that everyone in the deck area might hear. “My wife has been disturbed four nights running by the sound of your activities. I would advise you in future to consider repairing the fittings of your bed and lowering the volume of your … utterances.”

“I think you could keep your utterances down a bit, too,” came the voice from inside. “Do you want to wake the whole deck?”

“I believe,” said Bellini, clearing his throat, “that you have already done that.”

“Look,” said the voice, coming now from just behind the door, “why don’t you piss off back to bed and mind your own business, OK fatty?”

Bellini sucked in a lungful of air and inflated his chest to epic proportions. His hands curled up into large, pudgy fists.

“I HAVE ASKED YOU POLITELY. NOW, WILL YOU SHUT UP OR DO I HAVE TO MAKE YOU SHUT UP?” Each word was a controlled explosion. Lights flicked on in nearby portholes, and muffled voices raised questions.

“All right, all right,
signor
. Keep your moustache on. We’ll try to hold it down to a whisper. Now bugger off.”

Bellini thought that at that moment, in his rage, he might be able to punch a hole through the door, and he drew back his hand to perform the function, but common sense caught up with him at last, and with it his whole body deflated to its original size. After a pause he spoke again, emphatically reasonable: “Thank you. Goodnight.”

He strode back along the walkway past curious faces staring at him through portholes and half-opened doors. He moulded his face into a beaming, satisfied, I’m-in-control kind of smile. It was only when he had got back to his cabin that he found his penis had been poking out through the front of his pyjama bottoms and dressing gown all along. Shamefully he redressed the oversight.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled off his socks, huffing with the effort of bending forward over his belly. He was rather proud of his girth, if the truth be known, because all the great opera singers were of a similar build. He himself did not have much of a singing voice, but he nevertheless entertained fantasies of himself in
Don Giovanni
or
Rigoletto
, pounding the air with his mighty vocal cords, taking a final sweaty bow, blowing kisses to a stunned and roaring audience, ducking the showers of flowers.

“Well, you certainly made your point, Gian,” sneered Maria. He looked over his shoulder at her.

“Still awake, my
balenetta
?”

“How could I sleep with you making that racket upstairs? It was worse than the Montgomerys. And next time, don’t use me as an excuse!”

“We must stand up for the rights of the individual, Maria.”

“What about their right to make love without you barging in?”

“But we must respect each other’s privacy! It is the only way to live.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” With that, Maria rolled over, presenting her dimpled, pockmarked back to her husband. Bellini raised his eyes to heaven and gave up a small prayer to the Blessed Virgin. Then he slid into bed and scrunched up the pillow beneath his head.

In the middle of a marvellous dream of standing ovations, the bumping started again and he shot upright.

“
Santa Madre di Dio!”
he cursed.

“Gian! You’ve woken me up again.”

“Not I,
carissima frizione
! The Montgomerys. I’m going to sort them out properly this time.”

With this he thumped his feet on to the floor and was reaching for his socks when Maria said: “Gian, I forbid you to go out.”

“But, Maria –”

“You go out, and I will not talk with you for a month.”

“But, Maria –”

“And that is not all I will not do with you for a month.”

“Maria –” But there was defeat in his voice. He hustled himself into bed and sighed and dragged the covers over and sighed again. The noise from above increased as he lay staring into the darkness, sighing loudly every so often, planning revenge.

It occurred to Signor Bellini that the best way to fight noise was with noise. For all his bluster, he was too shy to ask Maria if she would join him in a spot of sexual caterwauling and believed anyway that such behaviour could only bring shame to his respected name. Besides, it was not in Maria’s nature to make much noise during their weekly love-making. Sometimes he wondered if she took any pleasure from it at all, although it was really none of his business. All he knew was that he could not make such a demand of her.

Bellini was one of the few people on the upper decks who could be said to be gainfully employed. Most of them drifted around idling their time away, as passengers will, waiting for the voyage to be over. They ate in the dining-hall, they swam in the three open-air pools, they kept themselves beautiful, they took long constitutionals around the outer rim, they sat out on decks when there was any sun, they played games of deck quoits by day and games of sexual intrigue by night, they engaged in dull but polite conversation, they danced at Bellini’s ballroom. For them, boredom was not a way of life but a way of passing time. Some actually enjoyed being bored. Bellini, however, believed he offered them a means to alleviate this boredom. Indeed, his ballroom was well attended every night and he made a tidy profit from their subscriptions. He supplied the needs of public demand and reaped the benefits – renown, money, a pleasantly situated cabin.

In younger and slightly slimmer days he had hoped to set up an on-board operatic society with himself as director, producer, musical supervisor and star. He had scores of all the major Italian operas and set about transcribing them into individual parts. It was a Herculean labour, and it took him many weeks of ruling sets of staves across blank paper and filling them in with notes and words. He had never credited the expression about seeing spots before your eyes until then, when every evening as he was nodding off to sleep he would see breves, semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers and semiquavers floating beneath his eyelids in bilious, splenetic shades of green and blue. This he did not allow to hinder his work. The Bellini Repertory Company was too important a dream.

Finally, encumbered with reams of home-made orchestration and poor eyesight, he put the word about that he was seeking singers to join him in his project. He held an audition. Three people turned up, and one of them was Maria, out of marital obligation. The remaining two simply could not sing – the philistines! Bellini had to reject them out of hand and, much as it pained him, abandon the idea of an operatic society.

He then hit upon the idea of an orchestral society. Many of his acquaintances played some form of musical instrument with varying degrees of success. Perhaps he could band them together and provide the occasional diverting evening’s entertainment of classical favourites (particularly favoured would be the overtures to major Italian operas). He put the new word about and held another audition. This was somewhat better attended than the last, although there was a preponderance of trumpeters who seemed unable to perform at anything less than full blast. Bellini employed a rigorous selection process along the guidelines that if you could play you were in. As far as the trumpet section went, he chose the one man who knew how to play softly and another who had some idea that softly existed.

It was a source of some satisfaction to him that so many music lovers had chosen to bring their instruments on board and that he had provided them with a creative outlet.

“It is my duty,” he would say in an off-guard moment, “to use my talents to improve the lot of others on the
Hope
.”

During its fledgling rehearsals, the Bellini Orchestra only disagreed with its founder on one small matter – his choice of music. They decided democratically that they would much rather play waltzes and polkas and Charlestons. Democracy was as alien to Bellini as Wagner. He regarded it as a dangerous concept that denied the rights of individual superiority. In a fit of pique, he sacked the entire orchestra.