Dead Water (2 page)
Authors: Simon Ings
The bhangi – A long, queasy passage about Chhaphandi’s sewage disposal system – Roopa finds the man who kidnapped us – He tells her who killed Mummy and Daddy – At the crucial moment, the green Honda disappears – It’s going to take us about fifteen chapters to put this right
‘Visitors as regular as birds’ – A love upstaged by ornithology – ‘Stay’ – The approach of war – Eric boards the Orange Horror – Imprisoned by the British – London’s larder is alight – Eric envisions the future of the shipping industry (with a little help from us)
Becalmed in Mumbai – An ocean crossing – The pirate from Chapter Four has found himself an honest job – The red notebook again – If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to Jakob Dunfjeld – A thousand German paratroopers march along Karl Johans gate – Vibeke in Lapland – She bears a son
Havard’s memories of his mother – An unlikely rescue – Life as Eric’s son and heir – Chicago, and another container – Cardiff, and another flood – Eric looks for Vibeke and finds the red notebook instead – Poor Eric, ‘Never really in love is my guess’
‘People say the dark has taken him’ – Dinner at the Dorch – A secret burden – Missing, presumed dead – Havard takes over Moyse Line – The shipping container from Chapter Three reprises its dramatic entrance – ‘A puzzle halfway solved’
The fairground – Rishi’s sister – Love counts for nothing round here – The dowry, and how Rishi gets free of it – ‘Contains flavours’ – He’s Yash’s creature now – The bodies of our mummy and daddy are disposed of, and the cow from Chapter Four ambles past
A perfect blank
David’s ‘surprise’ – Mistaken for pirates – Boxing Day in Phuket, ‘There are fish flopping about on the rocks’ – Two waves – Ester hunts for her father – Another container
Havard’s private island – The Line – ‘How much does she know?’ – Havard offers Ester a job in Dubai – The visitor – ‘You can help us to help him’
Roopa picks up Yash’s scent – Back to Chhaphandi – She visits the room Yash left dripping with blood – Another lead
Rishi in Mumbai – Piracy’s a paper game – ‘The coast is on fire’ – Roopa tracks him down – ‘You don’t fool me’
Oh yes he does – In Dubai the elevators only go up – Roopa and Ester swap bags – Roopa phones Moyse Line – a rendezvous in Musandam – Roopa meets David – ‘It’s going to be all right’
The
Ka-Bham
sails – Gangavaram, their first port of call – Captain Egaz Nageen explores his new command – His wife and son – ‘Sir, we have a companion’ – The ship is overrun – A stand-off – Chaos
Havard flies into London – An unreasonable demand – Dead Water is breached – Two incidental characters from Chapter Fourteen turn up near the MI6 building in fleecy track suits – ‘I’m afraid the crew will have to look out for themselves’
Egaz and his family are hostages – The pirates’ first mistake – Port and starboard – Light and dark – Transferring the cargo – ‘The sea valves are open!’
Conspiracy revealed – ‘I always said he was a cunt’ – Havard lets Ester go – Nageen breaks free – Rishi flees Mumbai – Or thinks he does – The last container – He cannot make out the back wall at all, it is so dark – But he can smell it – He can smell it all right – What he did to Mummy – What he did to Daddy – The stinking shreds of burning tyres
In which the world goes round and round, packed, palletized, boxed, numbered, turned to paper, turned to figures, turned to logic gates and light, to symbols we will never grasp and concepts that evaporate as soon as they are spoken – Why the weather will not die – Why the waters will not stop in their courses – Why the winds will not cease to blow – Why the heart will not cease to —
Friday, 25 May 1928: half past ten in the morning
Returning from its successful transit over the North Pole, at a point about seventy-five miles north of Spitsbergen, the airship
Italia
falls out of the sky. The gondola strikes the pack and cracks, scattering crew and equipment over the ice.
Incredibly, all but a couple of the spilled men climb to their feet, uninjured, and go running across the ice after their ship. It’s hopeless: the envelope, trailing the remains of the gondola’s roof, ropes, and canvas shreds and spars, begins to rise. A massive tear has opened in the airship’s outer skin, exposing twisted fabric guts. Faces lean out of the hole. Half the crew were sleeping in the envelope, in a crude bunk space next to the keel. Now the storm is bearing them away.
Arduino’s up there. The chief engineer. He knows he’s finished: marooned aboard an ungovernable balloon, plaything of a polar gale. He hurls supplies through the ragged gap where the companionway should be. Cargo rains down on to the ice: fuel, food, gear, whatever he can lay his hands on. Spanners. Pemmican. Oatmeal biscuits. Tobacco. Voltol oil. Arduino devotes his last moments to the welfare of those left on the ice.
The bag is carried up into the fog and disappears.
On the ice, the leader of the expedition, General Umberto Nobile, lies prone, his legs and right arm broken, drifting in and out of consciousness. The motor chief has a broken leg and a mechanic is dying amid the wreckage of the rear motor gondola. Lothar Eling, the ship’s Swedish meteorologist, lies bruised and winded under a wooden box he embraced a split second before the impact. Some minutes pass before he realizes what he has done. He lets out a shout.
The
Italia
’s field radio is intact.
A day later, the radio is operating. The aerial’s made of scraps of steel tubing, braced with scavenged lengths of control wire. There’s even a flag of sorts fluttering at its tip: scraps of cloth that add up to a crude Italian Tricolore.
Biagi, the radio operator, is not happy. The
Italia
’s support ship, the
Città di Milano
, lies at anchor in King’s Bay and the ship’s crew are making the most of its radio: a popular novelty. The first message Biagi picked up read ‘
infine il mio pollo caro ha fatto il suo uovo
’. Some sailor’s chick has laid her egg at last. The ship spends so much time transmitting sweet nothings to the girls back home, it’s impossible to get a message through. More infuriating still, the ship keeps sending out these meaningless reassurances: ‘Trust in us. Trust in us.’ ‘They keep telling us we’re near fucking Spitsbergen.’
Eling grunts acknowledgement; he’s not really listening. He writes in his notebook: an ugly thing, red leather. He is calculating how long their supplies will last.
Prunes.
Curry powder.
Jelly crystals.
Bags of coal.
Tripe.
Assuming three hundred grams of solid nourishment per man, their supplies will last less than a month. They may be able to supplement their diet. There are clear channels where they can fish. There’s also the chance that the airship came down within a few miles, along with the rest of their gear. Depending on how far and how fast it came down, there may even be other survivors. Every hour or so someone stumbles across another find.
A seal pick.
A small plankton net.
A barrel of kerosene crystals.
A Newman and Guardia quarter-plate hand-held camera.
(Eling itemizes everything.)
Spratt’s dog biscuits.
Seal oil.
A box of Brock’s flares.
Pants.
Now and again, he turns back the pages of his notebook, to read what’s written at its start:
To Uncle Lothar
Wishing you a Merry Christmas
Vibeke
Sometimes, when he thinks no one is looking, Eling traces the words with gloved fingers. He closes his eyes. He remembers.
Five months earlier: Christmas Eve, 1927
‘Merry Christmas, Uncle Lothar!’
Professor Jakob Dunfjeld’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vibeke, hands Lothar Eling a brown-paper package. Eling tugs the string and slips off the paper. The girl has got him a hideous red leather something. He turns it over and over. It is a pouch, cleverly stitched. Waterproof. Inside the pouch is a notebook covered in the same leather.
‘I’m sorry about the colour. It’s all they had.’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘For your expedition.’
‘Yes.’ Eling tries to swallow. ‘It is just what I need.’
The next day, Christmas Day, while the professor attacks his evermounting pile of correspondence, Eling accompanies Vibeke to the funicular that runs up the side of Mount Fløyen, biggest of the seven mountains ringing the city of Bergen on Norway’s south-west coast. Together they explore the peak, the parapet, the cafe and the heavy telescopes, trained on the city below. Ten years have passed since the great fire and the city still carries the scars.
‘You have a look,’ says Vibeke, stepping away from the telescope. Eling puts his eye to the heavy barrel. It’s trained on the harbour, seed of the disaster that has shaped his career. In July 1916 three men were stocktaking in a wharfside warehouse and one of their candles brushed against a bundle of tarred oakum, setting it alight. Neighbouring bundles caught light immediately. The men threw the bundles into the sea, where they floated, burning, and the wind drove sparks of flaming hemp back on to the jetty, setting it alight, and a gale sprang up, driving fragments of burning wood deep among the crowded alleys of the town.
