‘Jónas!’ says the captain, shutting Jónas up. ‘Let me speak to the man.’
‘Yes, I…’
‘Not another word!’ says the captain, turning to Jón Karl. ‘You were where?’
‘I was just getting my bedclothes,’ says Jón Karl with a smirk as he takes the cigarette from behind his ear and sticks it in his mouth. ‘But I knocked on the door of the toilet on my way down and told him to stop hanging about.’
‘Who was in the toilet?’
‘He was,’ says Jón Karl, lighting the cigarette which is almost too damp to burn and smells awful. ‘He’d been in the toilet for fifteen minutes or so.’
‘Didn’t you tell me he’d been in the toilet?’ asks the captain, looking at Jónas, who turns bright red and gapes like a fish.
‘Yeah – no. No. Definitely not.’ Jónas falters and points at Jón Karl. ‘He was the one who left the bridge, you heard what he—’
‘Blah, blah,’ taunts Jón Karl, drawing on his cigarette until the sputtering ember conquers the wet tobacco.
‘It’s your responsibility,’ says Guðmundur, breathing into Jónas’s face.
‘Yes, I’m fully aware—’
‘Not another word!’ Guðmundur cuts the gloom with a sudden movement of his hand as he strides towards the door. ‘We’ll settle this in the morning.’
Guðmundur slams the door behind him and at the same moment the ship pitches deeply until it finally collides with a rising wave.
Boom, boom, boom…
XVIII
11:19
When Jón Karl wakes up it’s nineteen minutes after eleven o’clock in the morning. He lies, fully dressed, on top of the still-folded bed linen and the wrinkled doona and stares at the ceiling, at the curtains that swing to and fro in the cold breeze, letting blue-white light into the dim cabin.
He’s stiff and still tired, despite five hours’ sleep. If you can call it sleep. ‘Conscious unconsciousness’ is more like it.
Christ but he’s sick of being on this ship! Sick of the ship itself. And the guys on board. Sick of this fucking mess. What’s he doing here? What was he thinking, to get on board this million-tonne washbowl?
And what’s the matter with all these mates, engineers and whatever they’re all called? First they drag him onto the ship and dump him in this cabin, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Then this second mate comes and tells him everyone on board thinks he’s his brother-in-law and he’d better act as if that’s the case, since he’s on board in the first place. And this same mate pays him five million crowns to play that stupid role.
Some guys creep around under cover of night carrying dismantled shotguns while others are smoking themselves silly and going on about ancient gods and the fate of humanity. The captain comes to the bridge wearing a bathrobe, just to find out who went to the toilet when, while the second mate confuses him and tries to blame Jón Karl for something he can’t even understand. As if he should care about the nursery-school rules in this floating sandbox! But when the fucking satellite phone doesn’t work – just when he finally remembers to phone home – then he does care. And it’s not just the phone that’s dead but also some bloody navigation stuff, and the ship’s radio. All because of some aerials that have been damaged because of something nobody can identify. And so forth!
It’s bad enough for Jón Karl to be fucking stranded on board this ship with some guys he doesn’t know at all without these same guys being philosophically delusional, suspicious about the state of their own souls and those of everyone else on board, and sneaking about in the night and accusing each other of treachery, deceit and carelessness. Some of them have one of these faults, others all of them, and these are the guys who steer this ship, look after the engines and all that. And to make matters worse the ship doesn’t even work the way it’s supposed to – it’s out of touch with the rest of the world and off the radar, or the radar’s off of it, or something. All because of something that maybe happened while someone was in the toilet. Or was it when someone was not in the toilet? Doesn’t really matter.
Or does it?
Jón Karl is stuck with deranged men on board a ship that seems just as deranged as the men who are supposed to sail it.
Could the second mate have been fucking with the communications equipment when he pretended to be in the toilet? So someone couldn’t… phone ashore? Hardly. Or so someone couldn’t phone the ship? Who? His wife? His brother-in-law? The police? He doesn’t want the police to be able to reach the ship because… he killed that brother-in-law of his!
‘I’ll kill that fucking Jónas!’ Jón Karl says darkly, sitting up in bed, but he stiffens and grimaces when the searing pain comes to life in the back of his head, his chest, his swollen hand and cracked collarbone. His acrobatics in the hold didn’t exactly speed his recovery.
‘Fuck!’
Yeah, sure, he’s going to kill that Jónas – but maybe not today. Tomorrow. He’ll just kill him tomorrow.
Or the next day.
The day after tomorrow he’s going to kill Jónas and every single person on board and let this ship sail on its merry way. It’s bound to hit some fucking land sooner or later, and as soon as Jón Karl sees that fucking land he’ll just dive in and swim the final kilometre or so. The ship will run aground and he’ll be out of this prison. Basta.
Why not?
Anything’s better than spending a whole month with some salty sea-dogs who can keep neither the ship nor themselves in touch with the real world.
Jón Karl stands up, sighing as he looks at the bed. He couldn’t be bothered to put a sheet on the mattress and clean linen on the doona and pillow before he went to sleep, and he can’t be bothered now, either.
After having a piss and splashing his face with cold water, he grabs an unopened pack of cigarettes and wanders along the D-deck corridor and out onto the platform behind the wheelhouse. It’s still pretty cloudy and the wind hasn’t quite died down, but it’s stopped raining and it isn’t as cold as it has been. The deep blue of the sea churns behind the ship, which crests a high wave and, little by little, makes its way south, to where day and night are equally long and the mountainsides are covered with coca bushes.
Jón Karl rocks to the heavy rhythm of the waves, opens his pack of cigarettes, flicks his finger against the bottom of it and then lights the cigarette that pops up. He blows smoke through his nose and stares at the sea, which is grey in the distance and black at the horizon, rising and falling like a mountain range in the head of some dreaming creator. A lonely albatross hovers in the sky above the ship and Jón Karl follows it with his eyes until it flies so high that it disappears into the dark grey of the clouds.
‘Lucky bugger,’ he says, glancing to the right, where he catches sight of part of a lifeboat. It’s pretty big and probably has room for all the crew. Underneath it there’s a propeller in a tube; near the top there’s a window for whoever’s steering. A boat like that is probably unsinkable, as long as it doesn’t break. Jón Karl walks under the boat, knocks on the bottom and tries to see how to free it from its davits, make it fall on its nose into the sea behind the ship. The boat seems to be fastened to an iron hook that locks into a cylindrical steel joist in the bottom, behind the propeller. All you’d need to do is jack the boat up until the joist came free of the hook, and you can probably only do that from inside the boat itself.
Jón Karl walks to the back of the platform, leans over the railing and looks down along the lifeboat that’s hanging there, nearly vertical, thirty or forty metres above sea level. No small drop, and there must be quite a blow when the boat slams onto the surface of the water. Suddenly he sees a man’s face down on B-deck. He’s leaning over the rail like Jón Karl, twisting round and staring up along the back of the wheelhouse. The man’s head is out over the rough sea and when he catches sight of Jón Karl he seems astonished.