He takes off his shoes, socks and jacket and goes into the bathroom, splashes his face with warm water, checks that there’s plenty of soap and paper in the shelves behind the mirror above the sink, sits on the toilet and pees while reminding himself to remember to fetch towels, a facecloth and bedding in the laundry room before he goes to bed.
The usual thing is for the captain to stand on the bridge, notify the harbour authorities of their departure and set the course, but Guðmundur isn’t actually on duty until eight o’clock tomorrow, when he relieves Jónas B Jónasson. By then he’ll have had at most three to four hours’ sleep. On a long tour, though, there’s more than enough time to make up for losing a bit of sleep.
Guðmundur opens the drawer beneath his bed, which is built into the wall, and pulls out a doona and two pillows. Then he lies down with the folder, turns on the reading lamp above the bed, puts on his reading glasses, opens the folder and leafs absently through the papers. The ship pulls at its moorings and soon rocks him gently to sleep with the steady beat of the generators, the hum of the air-conditioning and the mournful song of the wind outside the salt-encrusted window.
Around one-thirty there’s a knock on the door of the captain’s cabin and Guðmundur starts awake.
‘Gummi?’ says Big John through the closed door.
‘Just coming, mate!’ Guðmundur answers. He swings himself out of bed, puts aside his papers and glasses, stomps across the carpeted floor and opens the door.
‘You wanted to see me about something?’ Big John crosses his arms across the front of his red-checked shirt that smells of soot, sweat and oil, and which is unbuttoned halfway down his chest, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
‘Yeah, I just wanted to check that everything was in order,’ says Guðmundur, rubbing his tired eyes. ‘Are all the tanks full?’
‘Everything’s in order,’ says John a bit brusquely.
‘You’ll start the engines when the time comes, won’t you?’
‘I’ll start the engines,’ John says with a nod and a scowl.
‘Good,’ says Guðmundur, looking sheepish. ‘I’d rather it wasn’t – you know…’
‘Don’t look at me!’ says John sharply. ‘It wasn’t me who hired the fucker.’
‘Yeah – no,’ mutters Guðmundur with a faint smile. ‘But you know how it is – they call the shots, the landlubbers.’
‘There’s a lot of shots they call, the landlubbers,’ John says, looking the captain in the eye. Guðmundur looks away, ashamed.
The hull of the ship creaks as it scrapes against the quay in its long battle with the wind, the sea and the mooring lines.
‘It’s getting bloody windy out there.’ Guðmundur tips his head as if listening.
‘Was there something you wanted to tell me?’ John asks, letting his arms fall and sticking his huge hands in the pockets of his dark blue trousers.
‘I’ll phone down around two-thirty.’
‘Right,’ says Big John. He turns his broad back to the captain, who watches him clamber down the stairs before he closes his door.
Something I want to tell him? What did he mean? He doesn’t know about the lay-offs, does he? What then?
Guðmundur opens the drawer beneath the bed again, bends down, stretches his right arm and pulls out the shotgun that the company provides for these tours. It’s a five-shot Mossberg pump-action gun, twelve-gauge, coal black with a sight, interchangeable chokes and a shorter version of barrel. Up on the shelf in the wardrobe are two boxes of twenty heavy-shot magnum shells.
Guðmundur loads the gun – five shells in the receiver and one in the chamber – puts on the safety catch and loads five more shells in a special clip on the left side of the gun. Then he places the weapon in the right corner of the wardrobe, vertically, with the barrel up, and arranges his uniform in front of it before closing the door.
From a drawer in the table Guðmundur Berndsen takes a worn Bible, which he presses against his chest with his left hand as he crosses himself with his right. He bows his head, closes his eyes, closes his hands around the holy book and prays silently.
Our Father…
At 2:35 a.m. the phone rings in the control booth of the ship’s engine room.
‘Yes?’ says Big John, sitting on his worn chair in front of the engine controls.
‘Start the engine,’ says the captain on the phone. ‘Half an hour to departure.’
‘Start the engine,’ John repeats and hangs up. He stands up, puts on his earmuffs and opens the door to the engine room. The air in there is stale and smells of cleaning fluids and the noise from the two 700 horsepower generators is as maddening as an alarm clock in a metal bucket.
John climbs backwards down the ladder to the ship’s main engine, a nine-cylinder four-stroke MAN B&W engine, a copper-coloured giant that turns over serenely, pulling the ship with a giant’s power. It is over two metres high and the chief engineer steps up onto a platform that reaches round the middle of it like scaffolding. He walks from piston to piston, forcing cooling water from the valves with an air gun and closing the lids of the pressure gauges that measure the combustion pressure and the heat of the exhaust.
The ship has numerous tanks, including four huge fuel-oil tanks for the main engine, which burns eighteen tonnes a day; two gas tanks for the generators, which burn around one tonne a day; two forty-tonne water tanks; lubricant tanks, storage tanks and cisterns.
Everything relating to engines and fuel is the responsibility of the chief engineer, as is the electricity and daily operation of the heat and steam equipment, as well as general maintenance and repair.
On D-deck, the lower living quarters, Methúsalem opens a starboard cabin and gestures to Jón Karl to enter before him. Methúsalem opens the door wide and shoves a stopper on the door into a clamp on the wall.
‘There’s bedding under your bed,’ says Methúsalem, turning on the cabin light. ‘You can get linen and towels down in the laundry room, as well as toilet paper, soap and stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ says Jón Karl, dropping his bag on the floor before sitting on the bed.
‘There are seasickness pills in the bathroom cabinet,’ Methúsalem says with a smirk.
‘Yeah,’ says Jón Karl again, nodding.
‘You can pop down and have coffee and cakes and such,’ says Methúsalem as he pulls the door off the clamp.
‘Yeah.’ Jón Karl nods once.
‘You start work tomorrow at nine. Deckhands work from nine to five. Bridge duty for the bosun and the two deckhands is in three three-hour watches, from twenty-one-hundred to midnight, midnight to three and from three to six, moving forward by one watch every twenty-four hours. Rúnar will tell you more about it. Any questions?’
‘No.’ Jón Karl rolls his eyes like a naughty schoolboy.
‘Okay then.’ Methúsalem closes the door behind him.
Ási turns off the radio, throws the used coffee filter in the garbage and turns off the light. Then he picks up two plastic pails of newly made offal puddings in sour whey – one full of blood puddings, the other of liver sausage – and carries them down to the cold larder, to starboard on the upper deck.
The cold larder is on the right in a short corridor lined with stainless steel. Opposite the cold larder is the dry-goods storeroom, and at the end of the corridor is a walk-in freezer.