Jón Karl sticks two cigarettes behind his left ear, one between his lips and the last one behind his right ear. Then he turns off the light in the medicine cupboard and goes back out in the corridor. There he lights his cigarette, lets it dangle between his thick lips, blows the smoke out through his nose and thinks for a few moments before strolling down to A-deck to find himself clean bedclothes.
It’s dark down there and confined; the air is stagnant and smells of soap and grease; the mats on the floor are slippery, and at the end of the corridor, to port, a faint lightbulb is blinking, as if it’s about to go out. Jón Karl steadies himself against the greasy wall and walks across to starboard, where the soap smell’s coming from. At the end of this corridor there’s a closed iron door marked ELECTRIC WORKSHOP, to the right of which is the entrance to the laundry room, where there’s a light on over the ironing machine.
In the laundry room there are piles of clean bedding on long shelves above a pair of washing machines and another pair of dryers. Jón Karl selects some hardly used sheets, four snow-white towels – two large and two small – a number of facecloths, an extra sheet and another two towels to use as bath mats. Jón Karl leaves with his pile of linen under his left arm and goes back along the dim corridor, across to the stairs leading to B-deck. But there’s another staircase there too, which leads down to the engine room where the ship’s heart is beating, sending out its shuddering shockwaves and boiling breath.
Jón Karl stops and looks down the stairs to the doorway of the engine room – a door with black handprints all over it and greasy smudges round the handle. A moment later he turns the handle and opens the door. The heat beats against him like a stifling breeze and there, in the depths of the ship, there is the usual stink of oil mixed with volatile cleaners, ammonia and galling poisonous fumes.
And the noise is fearsome, almost demonic.
First Jón Karl walks through a kind of storeroom where overalls, helmets and ear protectors hang on hooks, and bottles of detergent, buckets, scrubbing brushes and three pairs of well-worn wooden shoes rest on thick rubber mats. Two steps lead down from the storeroom into the engine room itself, an open space divided into two storeys by a metal-grid floor round the sides. In the open middle lies the gigantic main engine, like a stranded sperm whale that huffs and puffs and flaps its heavy flukes in the sand. Jón Karl walks out onto the metal floor, grips the railing with his right hand and looks down on the nine-cylinder engine with its 270 revolutions per minute, that consumes over seventeen tonnes of fuel a day and provides a constant 5300 horsepower day after day, week after week, tirelessly. Behind the engine is the dynamo, which produces electricity for their daily use, and then at the back of the ship is a huge propeller that drives it forward.
The engine-room control booth is furthest in to starboard – a white, windowless box the size of a garage. Jón Karl inhales cigarette smoke, screws up his face against the noise from the dynamo and walks fast over to the control booth, opens the door, pops in and closes the door behind him.
Silence! What a relief. Actually, it’s far from silent in there but the walls are insulated enough to put the noise that does come through in the category of heavenly peace compared to the apocalyptic symphony outside them.
Jón Karl takes his cigarette out of his mouth, knocks the ash off and runs his eye over the contents of the control booth. It is oblong with a door at each end, and the long walls are covered from floor to ceiling with instruments. To his right the wall is hidden by some kind of fuse box where needles quiver in endless voltage meters, counters click and reels turn round and round while the left wall carries the actual operator control panel, which is no small affair. On its vertical face are dozens of meters, switches, warning lights, little screens and a device that keeps a record of all information as it comes from the sensors on the main engine. The horizontal part leans just a little forward, and on it there are open logs, a telephone, a microphone, more lights and switches, a d ead man’s alarm and, finally, the controls for the engine. There are long shelves of binders held in by the rod on the surface of the console; under it are drawers and cupboards, and in a chair in front of it sits Stoker, snoring, his feet and arms crossed and his head drooping towards his left shoulder.
‘Fucking pothead!’ says Jón Karl with a low laugh, then drops his cigarette on the floor and steps on it. He puts the bedding down on the console and takes a look at a newspaper cutting that someone has stuck between two meters. The picture shows a few members of the Iceland–Palestine Association demonstrating outside Parliament House. Most are holding placards with hand-painted slogans; all of them are the epitome of earnest tediousness, and some have Arab scarves round their necks. Jón Karl looks over the stupid-looking faces and finally recognises one: it’s Big John, the guy who closed the cabin door up on E-deck when the bosun with the shotgun tried to back in through the door.
‘Fucking Commies!’ mutters Jón Karl and spits on the cutting before tearing it down, crumpling it up and throwing it on the floor.
At the same moment the red light starts flashing on the dead man’s bell, so Stoker stops snoring, lifts his head and half opens his eyes. Then he turns his chair halfway round, pushes the button on the alarm with his right forefinger and goes back to sleep.
‘Hey! You!’ says Jón Karl, snapping his fingers in front of Stoker’s nose, but Stoker settles down in his chair and goes back to snoring.
‘I’ve never known… How’d he do that?’
Jón Karl shakes his head and picks up his bedding, turns around and is about to go into the engine room, but hesitates when he sees the picture on his side of the door.
It’s a centrefold from a Danish porn magazine, Miss September 2001. The girl’s name is Eva and she sits, open legged, on a chair by a window, her expression dreamy and sensuous. She wears white net stockings and a white lace bodysuit, see-through on the sides and with holes in front where her firm breasts push out. Her left hand rests on the left side of her groin, while the fingers of her right hand fool with a long string of white beads. Eva’s lips are painted red and there is a gleam of white teeth between them; her fair hair ripples over her shoulders; her blue-painted eyelids have a whorish look, and the crotch of her bodysuit is hitched up between her well-trimmed labia.
‘You’re coming with me, sweetheart,’ says Jón Karl, pulling down the picture, folding it and putting it in his right trouser pocket. Then he picks up his bedding once more, opens the door to the engine room and hurries past the dynamo, over the metal grid floor and into the storeroom at the back. But instead of turning right in the closet and going up the same staircase he came down, Jón Karl walks straight ahead through the oil-saturated gloom, through the storeroom and into the boiler room, where two diesel burners take turns maintaining the correct heat and pressure in a large boiler, whose job is to keep the ship’s living quarters warm and ensure that there’s always plenty of hot water. The heat in the boiler room is even greater than out in the engine room, The sweat pours off Jón Karl, who breathes quickly through his nose and turns in circles, looking for the exit. Innermost in the boiler room there’s a green light and that’s where Jón Karl finds a steep metal staircase leading in a half circle up out of this airless incinerator.