The Hope (6 page)

Of course, it was ten feet up, but Fred boosted me over the edge with ridiculous ease and threw the gun after. I picked it up and pointed the flashlight down the passage. I prayed there were none of those things along there, but God’s intercom wasn’t on. I saw at least half a dozen scuttling in my direction.

I pumped the gun as I’d seen Fred do, took aim and fired, but I knew sweet nothing about guns and I missed and damn near broke my wrist on the recoil. The beam arced up vertically and the gun leapt out of my hands. At the same time, Fred scrambled up and over, caught the gun, pumped, fired and pointed at the entrance with his free hand. I saw Tommy appearing, hauling himself over with his face looking like it was thinking about something else, nothing to do with the present. He groped for a handhold, with his body jackknifed over the rim, stomach to the floor of the passage. I saw a flash of light behind me and guessed that Fred had taken out another of the things. I reached for Tommy and pulled at his sleeve, and as he came over I saw Stan’s hands, one clutching his flashlight, a blinding circle.

Tommy and I did try to pull him up as quickly as possible but we were dazzled and when you’re as scared as we were no part of your body seems to work properly except your bladder. Sounds like I’m making excuses, doesn’t it? In that passage, dark everywhere, the floor wet with blood and water and God knows what, it was a miracle we got Stan out at all.

He was very calm about it. We pulled and at last he came up from out of the chamber. If we had been quicker, he might have been OK, who can say? But there was one of the things attached to the back of his leg, steel teeth sunk into his flesh and pulling one of his tendons free.

Tommy produced a bowie knife from his belt and took a slice off the thing’s back. He took two more chunks out of it before it let go and fell off.

We got to our feet and propped Stan between us. Fred took in the situation at a glance and set off ahead, gun poised. Nobody else was coming out of that chamber, it was obvious. No man, at least. All we could do was follow Big Fred, the man with the gun, and move as fast as possible.

And if I’d known at that point that Fred had run out of cartridges, I wouldn’t have gone a step further. Fred realised this, I think. At least, he never told us this tiny, unimportant fact – “Uh, sorry guys. No shells.” – until much later.

For minute after minute we limped on, with every step expecting to feel something fly at our backs or flop on to our heads and bite.

Fred stopped short. The flashlight was pointed dead in front of him.

There was the pipe with his oilcloth tied around it and on it squatted one of the things, the biggest one I’d seen yet, coiled over the pipe with its tail end hanging down and twitching and twisting. It was looking at us with all of its eyes, looking at Fred to be exact. From its teeth dangled a large gold earring, with the ear still attached.

“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.