This event was the only entertaining part of that day and it could not overcome Raf’s feeling of unease. He should not have come. He had no valid reason for these thoughts, which gripped him with a renewed strength in the darkness surrounded by the noise of the engines. When he was seven, a schoolfriend had come to ask him to play one afternoon. He rang the bell at the entrance, Raf looked down from the fifth floor and immediately agreed. On the way to the door of their flat, he was suddenly overcome by such tiredness that he could only just drag himself to bed and he fell onto it, falling asleep before his head even hit the pillow. His friend probably rang the bell a few more times, but Raf did not hear it. He was later woken by shouting and crying echoing down the corridor. In a daze, he got up to see what was going on. His friend had gone to the railway lines and climbed onto the roof of a train standing on a side track. The electric wires had sucked him up and fried him. After a few years of never thinking about the incident, two very vivid images came to him while he was alone under that deck. A father with a red-skinned son in his arms. And his friend in an open coffin, with face powder literally caked all over him. Which made him think of what had happened to open coffins, blessings and mourning since then? The whole class had gone to bless that boy, but when a few years later, at grammar school, a mountaineering schoolfriend died, condolences were sent by post and at the funeral there was just an urn with ashes which could have contained anything.
Raf shivered — on the way to a week’s holiday he was thinking such morbid thoughts.
He stepped over to a motorcycle parked nearby and looked at the shiny Japanese miracle. He allowed himself a short burst of envy. Only six months had passed since a girl he had been in love with had rejected him, saying she was only interested in men with motorbikes. Raf was well aware that a motorbike was one of those things that a man sometimes had to do without and that, anyway, it all depended on the season, but at the same time he also knew that that was just pure reasoning, which had nothing to do with the matters of the heart.
He sighed deeply and walked over to the raised bow door. He could see the sea splashing at the side and from time to time a few drops came inside. No dry land could be seen. Somewhere above, seagulls were circling. One of them dived quickly and grabbed something in the air before it fell into the sea.
Someone on the deck must be feeding the gulls. Raf smiled. He turned and walked the length of the ferry. There was only one vehicle left, a delivery van, which got off at every stop, unloaded and drove back on. The driver was asleep in his cabin and the noise of his hoarse snoring was escaping through the window in irregular intervals.
The same thing every day, thought Raf. What a job! He just managed to get round all the islands in his eight hours and that was it. In his old age he would be able to say that he had spent his life on the sea but his grandchildren would wonder why he was so pale.
Raf turned his head towards the high ceiling and slowly looked around the large room. When they had first set off, it looked as if it was suffocating with all the vehicles. And then, after each stop, there was less metal and technology and more room and peace and quiet. As if they were not just journeying away, but backwards in time too.
Raf went back up using the staircase opposite the one he had come down. Soon after the first turn in the stairs he tripped, nearly touching the metal with his nose but still managing somehow to steady himself. He sighed slowly:
“Jesus!” just like every other time he tripped.
He was getting fed up of his friends ridiculing his clumsiness and he was relieved that there were no witnesses this time.
Once back on deck, he was blinded by the sun and when he finally opened his eyes the first thing he saw was the motorbike owner. He was not wearing a helmet or a leather suit — he noticed those two identifiers only later, rolled and fastened to the rucksack and squashed under the bench — but had long blonde hair, a thick moustache and a tattoo of an eagle on his upper arm. He was sunbathing with his eyes closed but Raf was not fooled into believing he was asleep. Or was it that these muscular men, like Samo, slept in a special way, without relaxing their muscles?
He turned towards the bow and his (former) schoolfriends, who were still hidden by the middle part of the ferry and touched something soft with his left hand. Grease! Green grease on the ends of his fingers. They must have freshly greased the winch and judging by the large quantity of the stuff it was meant to last forever. Raf rubbed his fingers against the fence until they stopped sticking to one another. He looked at the traces of the stuff on the metal rail and realised he had set a trap which would sooner or later be sprung by someone. He did not have a tissue or a handkerchief. He made himself small and turned towards the stern. He was not in a hurry to return to his mates.
Maybe nobody would come upon the mess on the rail? The strangers on the ferry meant nothing and could do nothing to him.
A piece of bread flew in a large arc above his head. As it fell towards the waves a seagull caught it and swallowed it with what sounded like a very contented shriek. Raf looked up but could not see the bread-thrower. He did not even know that there was another deck. All he could see was the captain’s cabin, the aerials and the radar masts (or whatever those gadgets were called) on top of it, and two vibrating chimneys at the back.
He waited for another piece of bread, checked that the seagull’s response was as expected and then carried on towards the back of the ferry. It was less windy there, in fact it felt quite pleasantly sheltered behind the captain’s cabin. All the other passengers — a few families with small children — were gathered there, running after their brats and entertaining themselves by worrying about their little treasures falling into the sea.
There was no point in going to his friends to tell them about the sheltered spot. Max always had to sit at the very top like all people with an x or a y in their name, and Samo and Alfonz were just his hangers-on.
And so am I, even though I’m sulking at the opposite end of the ship, he said to himself. It was rarely so annoying to be right.
It was all very simple: school had finished and with it their four years together. Max had organised a farewell party, which he said was going to be super mega. He and Samo were always together anyway, so it was not hard to choose his first guest. Alfonz had money and home-made schnapps. Raf was included because of Max’s bad conscience. He had been copying from Raf in nearly every written test in the past few years and even though they were not friends — neither of them would call their relationship a friendship — Max succumbed to guilt and invited the boy who was almost solely responsible for his education. Raf could not quite remember exactly when it had all started. But he did remember that from the second year on he always had to first quickly answer his own questions and then go onto Max’s.
Maybe I do have just a little bit of a character left, thought Raf. If I were a complete slave I would have finished Max’s assignment first and then gone onto my own.
He smiled. He was getting used to these sarcastic little thoughts which had started coming to him sometime around the onset of puberty, at the end of junior school. The unpleasant feelings were gone now and he started to take in the clear blue sky in all its beauty again. Yes, the dark thoughts had started in that black hole in the middle of the ferry — a flash of a feeling, too fleeting to be registered, of being caught in a dark, narrow place — and the freshness of the early afternoon had blown them away.