Dead Water (25 page)

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s hers. That’s your mother’s hand.’

This is the story Eric tells his son: that he spent years looking for Vibeke, long after the war, and did not find her, and in his searching found Havard at last, her bastard child, abandoned in an orphanage outside Narvik. And in 1951, adopted him: all of this is true. After that the truth gets hard to bear. Cardiff, little Else, and the flood – these are private hurts. So Eric prevaricates. Elides. Finally, lies: ‘Hard as I looked, I never found your mother.’

At the next table, Oman’s old Sultan rises stiffly from his seat, drops his napkin on to the table, and makes for the door. An old man of royal blood, his every action is elegant, parsimonious, cold. As he limps away, Ari Onassis mimes a respectful applause.

After the meal Ari arranges to be driven to a club somewhere and Havard, grinning from ear to ear, follows in his wake. Eric traipses after them, the notebook tucked safely in his pocket. Havard, for all the interest he showed in it at first, has already forgotten it. ‘My mother’s hand’ indeed. ‘Thank you,’ Havard calls, waving from the back of the Bentley. ‘Thank you, Dad, for a great night!’

Well, thinks Eric, waving back: sod you. He rests his hand against the square bulk in his pocket. You would only have lost it. You would have written your phone number in it and given it to some girl – and then where would we all be?

Dead water. Ships that churn and churn and churn, for days, for years, forever. It’s clear enough that Havard’s not ready for this. Havard’s not ever going to be ready for this. The burden is Eric’s alone: he was a fool ever to imagine he could pass it on.

When people talk about shipping they talk about goods. They talk about televisions and motorbikes and cars and toys and clothing and perfumes and whisky. They omit to mention screws, pigments, paints, moulded plastics, rolls of leather, chopped-glass matting, bales of cotton, chemicals, dyes, yeasts, spores, seeds, acids, glues. And no one even thinks about waste. The single biggest worldwide cargo by volume is waste paper, closely followed by rags and shoes, soft drinks cans, worn tyres, rebars, copper wire. Almost everything can be recycled or repurposed. Nuclear and clinical wastes. Residues and contaminants. Industrial byproducts. That these things move over the earth is a fact no one wants to confront, any more than they would want to handle the piss and puss their kidneys filter, minute by minute, from their blood.

Eric looks up, hunting stars, but the sky’s blackness is as close and oppressive as the inside of one of his own shipping containers. The lights of the city obliterate the sky completely. He remembers the war, how blackouts let in the starlight, and on an impulse he crosses Park Lane and loses himself as best he can in the shadows of Hyde Park.

It feels strange to be stepping outside the city that has for so long surrounded him. When was the last time he climbed a hill? Tasted snow? Set foot aboard a ship? How has a life once steeped in the blood and ice of the hunt and dripping in the oil wrung from humpbacks and blues, from living giants, how can this vital life have fallen off so far? He is over seventy years old. He should be rooting himself again in the earth to which he will all too soon return.

He determines to recall his adventures and all the riches his parents’ fleet brought home. Whale oil to light the lamps in every seaboard town from Narvik to Nagasaki to Maine. That he squeezed the breast of a dead blue once, to taste its milk. That the milk of blue whales is a thick, greyish jelly. That it tastes better than it looks. He remembers, he slit open its belly and used a tin jug to gather a couple of pints of barely digested krill. Boiled, krill has the taste and texture of North Sea shrimp. As he walks he clenches his hands, drawing back the bolts on disused memory. Sperm whales die slowly. Once, a sperm whale they had thought dead suddenly came back to life on the factory deck, thrashing out. They finished it off with knives. Did these things really happen? The whole business seems alien now, even preposterous.

The world is losing its colour, it is turning to paper, and it is his fault. He is convinced of this. With an IBM 704 and a stack of perforated cards he has cleared away the mess and confusion of the world’s cargo ports – this is true. But this revolution has acquired a life of its own. It has turned his ships to paper. They sail across paper oceans now, carrying paper goods. They lead – he leads – a paper life. How has he come to this? To have swapped his homeland for a flag of convenience, his years before the mast for an unending schedule of India Club lunches with Lloyd’s ‘names’?

By the time he reaches the Serpentine, Eric knows he is going to be sick. Even here, in the midst of the park, he cannot see a single star. Where the path runs up against the water he kneels and reaches down and splashes bird-fouled water in his face. It feels gritty. He shivers and the shiver runs through him, back and forth, a furred and bright-eyed fever-creature. He thinks of Vibeke’s letters: her pet Pippi, chattering in terror.

He vomits cleanly into the water. He waits for a second heave, for a third, but it does not come. He has evacuated himself with trademark efficiency.

Something unfurls in the corner of his vision.

A handkerchief.

He rocks back on his haunches and takes it, half-blind, eyes streaming. He wipes his eyes, his mouth. His guts are a foreign territory: there is not much pain, but there is sensation. His normally senseless innards have a form: lapping corrugations, crafty left-hand spirals, tucks, folds, involutions.

He looks up and around, dumbly proffering the ruined handkerchief.

Said bin Taimur, deposed Sultan of Oman, raises a hand in polite refusal. Serious, unsmiling, Said’s face is at once severe and vulnerable.

Moyse wonders what to do with the disgusting thing in his hand. He blows his nose on it. He gets to his feet and crams the soiled handkerchief into his trouser pocket. ‘Thank you.’

The Sultan bows.

Two old men by a lake. Shadows in a city-lit night. Two players who dominated a stage that is already being dismantled around them. They are both, in their way, significant figures, worth more than a footnote in the history of their time. They do not need to be introduced. Said offers Eric Moyse his arm. The gesture, the offer of human warmth, is almost too much for Eric. After so many years. Such cold. Eric brushes a hand over his face, hiding his tears, dashing them. He takes the old man’s arm. He feels the Sultan’s tremble, the spill in his walk: hard to say who is supporting whom. And how strange this is, this proximity, considering the kind of life the Sultan has led. Considering the divine right of kings.

‘You must go slower,’ the Sultan says.

‘I am sorry.’

‘Forgive me. I am lame.’

‘Of course.’

‘Would you like to know why I am lame?’

Moyse doesn’t know what to say to this.

‘I am lame because on the day I was deposed I contrived to shoot myself in the foot.’

‘You did?’

‘This is an expression, of course. Shooting yourself in the foot.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. Only with me it was not an expression. I actually shot myself in the foot. Bang.’ The Sultan shrugs. ‘It caused much hilarity at the time.’

Eric’s own birthday comes just a couple of months later. He celebrates at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, watching Diana Ross and the Supremes. After the concert he retires to the penthouse suite, orders all light bulbs removed from the apartment, and behind bespoke blackout curtains that utterly extinguish the desert sun he writes a string of clumsy, blindhanded memos giving his staff explicit instructions not to look at him or speak to him unless they’re spoken to. For six months he subsists entirely on black tea, chocolate and pemmican: Arctic rations.

Dead Water. A surplus arsenal, big enough to shake the world, orbiting unseen across five oceans. Think about it. Think about the distribution of risk. Eric does. Eric has to. Eric has to keep it all in mind. How many containers? How many cargoes? He commits nothing to paper. How many numbers, keywords, check digits? Absolute deniability. Absolute personal control.

On 16 October 1975 hotel security men accompanied by local law enforcement officers and federal agents order Havard’s staff aside and break into his apartment.

It is empty.

Eric Moyse’s disappearance inspires intermittent headlines, an article in the
New Yorker
by Bob Woodward, a conspiracy cult, several unsuccessful airport-book ‘exposés’ of the shipping industry, and an A-certificated Lew Grade thriller stirring Telly Savalas and Elliott Gould. Eventually the line abandons its staggeringly expensive global manhunt, Eric Moyse is presumed dead, and on 1 October 1976 his adopted son Havard is appointed president.

Many of the firm’s old guard vanish at this point, pensioned off or internally exiled. (The line is a complex global entity, big enough to contain any number of elderly factions and lost causes.) Havard, succeeding to the board, appoints Peder Halstad as his personal adviser.

The arrangement is short-lived. Peder, an old man, finds Havard’s Muscat headquarters unbearable. ‘You spend six months of the year glued to the air conditioner, the skies are white, the air tastes of iron filings, and you expect me to enjoy the weather!’

‘It’s sunshine, Peder,’ Havard insists. ‘Many people like it. Please. Stick it out for six months.’

Peder does exactly that.

The last straw comes when Havard takes him out of Muscat on a day’s snorkelling trip. On a rocky shelf beside a beach since swallowed by a Saudi hotel complex, Peder and Havard watch as turtles come to nibble the reef just below their feet. Peder’s golf club is full of talk about the coming economic miracle: how a city is springing like a phoenix from the poisoned creek in Dubai. Half Peder’s friends are planning to retire there, or at least to ‘somewhere in the sun’.

‘I tell them, they may as well stick their heads in the oven and turn the grill on. Honestly, rivers and greenery are not God’s curse.’

‘Spoken like a true Norseman.’

‘Thank you.’ Peder cracks another Mountain Dew and refills Havard’s cup. ‘The point is, I’ve well-wishers coming out of my ears. Judith looked after me so well over the years, people assume I need to be
taken care of
. In the
sun
.’

‘You can look after yourself.’

‘Damned right.’

‘The Great White Explorer.’

‘That’s me.’

‘The man who faced the Arctic alone.’

‘Well, until I got back to Cape North. After that I thumbed a lift.’ ‘Man against the elements.’

‘Man
naked
against the elements.’

‘Well,’ says Havard. ‘That’s an image I didn’t need.’

On the road behind them a coach pulls up. The doors open and out pours a seemingly endless stream of fat. It is hard at first to distinguish individual bodies. They are all exactly the same colour: the sterile greywhite of fridge-hardened lard. They are wearing bathing suits but folds of fat hide their clothing from sight. Every one of them is screaming. Not cheering. Not shouting. Screaming, and running for the sea. Havard goes over to talk to the driver and it turns out that these are tourists from Kiev.

‘Ukrainians on a package deal,’ Havard tells Peder, his old protector, laughing.

Peder shakes his head. ‘Let me go, son,’ he says. He has helped consolidate Havard and the Moyse Line within Oman’s power structure. He has secured the company exclusive export rights to its medium sour crude. But he cannot work a day longer with Havard’s oil man and ‘regional expert’, David Brooks

‘I wish this wasn’t such an issue for you,’ Havard frets.

‘It’s not an issue. The man’s a cunt. Oh, look at that.’ He points. The Ukrainians have got hold of a turtle. They have dragged it out of the surf. They are trying to ride it along the beach. Peder lays an old hand on Havard’s shoulder. ‘Please, son, if you love me. I am really too old for this shit.’

Loaded in Rafah, Egypt, transferred to Genoa, Italy, to a ship bound for Hamburg, then transferred to a ship bound for the Deep Water Facility at Belledune, Abhik and Kaneer carve their twofold djinn path around the earth, victorious and everywhere.