‘Gran Scully says you’re not teaching me about Jesus.’
‘Oh?’
She thought of the picture of him on Gran’s mantelpiece. His old face, before the bung eye.
‘Tell me about Australia,’ he said, a bit excited. ‘How does it look now? Tell me about the Indian Ocean. Could you see Rottnest? Was it hot? Did you hear the sound of people’s voices? Did you forget much? Tell me about Gran.’
She knew the story about his eye. How the skipper Ivan Dimic made him kill every octopus that came aboard because they ate lobsters and cost him money. How they sucked the guts out of lobsters and left the shells. Even octopuses big as your thumbnail he had to kill and he hated it. Scully pretended to kill them. He whacked the deck and slipped them back over the side alive, but the skipper saw it. One day, out over the Shelf, Ivan Dimic came down off the flying bridge with an iron bar big as a horse’s dick. Got him across the arm. There was a fight, just like TV. Sharks in the water. All this time the winch was going, pulling a pot up from the very deep. It was deep as the Eiffel Tower out there. The deck going up and down. The rope winding and tangling with no one to coil it. Ivan Dimic cracked him one across the face with the bar, right across the eye. Nearly popped it out of his head. Imagine. And right then the pot comes up, hits the tipper, and Dimic is right in the way. Steel and wood, heavy as a man. Knocked him flat. Scully brought the boat in himself. His last day fishing. It was before she was born. Billie missed all the good stuff. Look at this eye, he used to say. For an octopus? So look at this face, she thought, feeling the shrinking tightness of her own skin. For a dog?
‘Billie?’
He was like the Hunchback, Scully. Not very pretty. Sometimes he wasn’t very smart. But his heart was good. She pressed against him, hearing that pure heart lunking along like a ship’s engine, and felt sleep coming again.
The deck vibrated beneath them. The lights of Greece faded to pinpricks and then oblivion. In sleeping bags all around, the murmurs trailed off into silence. Scully nursed his disappointment and hugged Billie to him as she slept. He thought of the woman she might make if this whole business didn’t bugger her up forever. She would be strong, funny, confident, wry, and yes, smart as all get-out. Just as she was now. People would be forced to take notice of her the way they always had. Now that he thought of it she was probably everything her mother dreamt of being. Was that it, then? Would that cause you to bolt? Jealousy, discouragement, some meanness of spirit? ‘People like you,’ she used to tell him. ‘You don’t get it, do you? You like your life just fine, you take whatever comes with a sick kind of gratitude. That’s where we’re different.’ He had to agree. He just didn’t get it.
It was plain cold out now, and Scully began to shudder. Without blankets it was hopeless out here. Time to find some corner below. He threaded the pack onto Billie as she slept, and he hefted her and the suitcase to pick his way across to the companionway. It was precarious going, but he came down into a coffee-smelling lounge where Germans and Italians chattered and smoked blearily. It was bright here, too bright for sleeping, so he looked for a nook somewhere along the maze of corridors, but down there it was only toilets and first-class cabins. He returned to the lounge and found an upholstered booth back by the stairs where a bit of fresh air blew in but where it was still warm. He was about to lay Billie down when he saw the watermelon dress.
‘There’s nowhere for her to sleep?’
Scully cursed to himself, smiled and shook his head. The woman from the kastro. She wore a denim jacket over her thin dress and held a bottle of Heineken in one hand.
‘Too cold up on deck,’ he said.
‘I knew you would be on this boat.’
Scully moved to lay the child across the seat, but the woman put a hand on his arm. He flinched and felt his face burn.
‘Please. I have a cabin. Let her sleep in there.’
‘Thanks a lot, but —’
‘Really, she’s tired and it’s so awful out here. It’s no trouble.’
‘She’ll sleep anywhere. She’s a robust kid.’
The woman in the watermelon dress looked at Billie and he followed her gaze. The child didn’t look so robust tonight. Her face was swollen and creased where her cheek had pressed into his jacket. Sleeping children, they have a hold on you.
‘Please.’ The woman was anxious, earnest. Her eyes were sad, pleading. She was somehow alarming to him, but it was true, the kid was stuffed.
‘Alright, thanks. That’d be great for her.’
‘Beautiful, beautiful. Here, this way. Let me take your case. You don’t bring much.’
Scully followed her down the first-class corridor. At her door he smelt smoke on her and some scent. She opened the door and cleared the bottom bunk of bra and panties and a crumpled Herald Tribune.
‘Here.’
Scully hesitated a moment before edging inside and laying Billie along the bunk. She opened her eyes a moment and looked at him wordlessly, and he simply smiled and she went back to sleep. Reaching for a blanket, the woman brushed hips with him, and he flinched again at the closeness of another body. She tucked the blanket around Billie and smiled. The air was cool in here and the ship’s movement reassuring.
‘Can I use your toilet a moment?’ he whispered.
‘Of course.’
He stood inside the neat little cubicle that smelled of antiseptic and corrosion. He took a leak and looked at himself in the mirror. Wild Man of Borneo. What was it he saw there — fatigue, disappointment, desperation? His face was harder than he remembered, more set, like those farmers he knew as a boy, the ones on a long losing streak, whose jaws never deviated into a smile. Men past caring, immovable, expecting the worst, ready to endure. No, he didn’t like that look.
The door opened.
‘Are you seasick?’
Scully shook his head.
‘Let’s get coffee.’
• • •
OUT IN THE LOUNGE a few of the Germans were drunk, some asleep, the Italians murmuring in a cluster and crackling Hallwag maps. Scully sat at the bar with a Turkish coffee and a shot of Metaxa.
‘It’s very nice of you,’ he said to the woman on the stool beside him.
‘It’s good to be nice sometimes.’
‘Where you headed?’
‘Oh, home. Berlin.’
‘I can’t place your accent.’
‘Liverpool.’
‘You must have been in Berlin a good while then.’
‘No. Five years. I studied for an accent.’
‘Well. Ringo meets Sergeant Schultz.’
‘I didn’t like how I sounded before.’
Scully shrugged. ‘You been on holiday?’
‘Oh, it began as one.’
‘Why come this way? You could have gone right up through northern Greece, Austria.’
‘Yugoslavia. I hate it. I’d rather go the long way.’
‘It is a bit like going through a sheep dip, isn’t it?’
‘You’re Australian.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And where is home?’
Scully shrugged. ‘Ireland, maybe.’
‘Australians are sentimental about Ireland.’
‘Not this one.’
‘You’re married.’
‘Yes,’ he said after an unpleasant pause. The ring flashed on his hand. ‘My wife’s… gone on ahead.’
‘Yes.’
He looked at the woman and saw her smile. There was something knowing in it, not quite a smirk.
The barman, a heavy Greek with a birthmark down his arm like an acid burn, called for last drinks before the bar closed, and Scully ordered another brandy.