Divided Kingdom (28 page)

After a while I heard a man shouting instructions close by, his voice accompanied by a high-pitched electric whine, then a loud grinding sound came from below me and the entire container shifted to the left. I pocketed the lighter and sat down, wedging my back against the wall and bracing my heels against one of the ridges in the floor. The container instantly lifted off the ground. I assumed it was being transported from the warehouse to the quay. We stopped again, and I heard more shouting. There were various knocks and bangs on the roof, then the container was hoisted into the air where it
swung from side to side, tilting a little. I gripped the legs of the statue nearest to me and kept my feet braced against the metal ridge.

Though I did my best to prepare myself for the container's arrival in the hold, the sudden impact jarred my spine. I was aware too of the disparate pieces of bone that made up my skull; somehow I could feel all the joins. And the loading hadn't finished yet. Shortly afterwards, another container was lowered on to the roof above me with a brutal resounding clang. Now I knew that the containers were being stacked on top of each other, and that mine could well be on the bottom, I felt a flicker of claustrophobia. Once the ship was moving, it might be wise, I thought, to unbolt the door, if only to have an idea of how the cargo had been arranged.

In the meantime my thoughts turned to John Fernandez. Despite his contempt for me, which he had done nothing to conceal, and despite his habitual gruffness, I realised I was missing him. He was the person I felt closest to in all the world. I had tried to explain myself to him, and even though he hadn't really understood, let alone approved, he still knew more about me than anybody else I could think of. It was pathetic, perhaps – he would surely have thought so – but true nonetheless.

A loud rumbling began, and the wall behind me started to vibrate. The ship's engines. Soon we would be heading out to sea. I sat on the floor with one blanket folded under me, the other draped over my shoulders. Night wouldn't have fallen yet, but it was already cold. I opened the bag Fernandez had given me. Inside, I found a slice of pizza. I took a bite. Chorizo or pepperoni. I ate half of it and saved the rest. There was a banana too, a packet of biscuits and a Thermos flask. I unscrewed the flask and brought it to my nose. He had made me coffee. I poured myself a cup, then drank it straight down. I didn't care if Fernandez despised me. My gratitude still stood. He had chosen not to turn me away, though it would have been well within his rights to do so. Instead, he had offered me food and shelter, and we had talked without evasion, without pretence. It was hard to believe that I would never see him
again. I only hoped I hadn't compromised him in any way, him and his family.

The floor of the container was plunging and tilting now, and the statues were straining at their ropes. We must have sailed beyond the harbour wall. Using my lighter to locate the door, I began to work the bolt up and down to loosen it. As the door opened, the noise level rose. Clanking, hissing, drumming. In front of me was a container identical to mine. No more than eighteen inches separated the two. The man in the overalls had advised me to stay hidden, but I couldn't have got out, not even if I'd wanted to. I put my head into the narrow gap. Though the containers had been set down in rows, the distances between them varied, making a network of irregular corridors or aisles. A naked bulb in a wire cage protruded from the side-wall of the hull, but the light in the hold was dingy, thick and yellowish. It seemed to ooze from the bulb like some sort of discharge. I looked the other way. Another corridor, but crooked, cramped. The reek of diesel oil and rust and brine. It was a grim place, brutal as a dungeon. Needing to urinate, I aimed into the space between the two containers. When I had finished, I bolted the door and lay down on the folded blanket, then I covered myself with the second blanket and tried to doze.

The unrelenting din of the engines, the see-saw motion of the floor beneath me, the pitch-black and the cold … I would lie on my side until it froze, then I would turn over. I did this again and again. In the end I must have slept, though, or else I had one of those visions that sometimes grace the edge of sleep. I was crouching in the shade at the side of an old house, and the garden beyond was so drenched in sunlight that it looked ethereal, almost transparent. Then I was on my feet and running. Round the crumbling, rose-hung corner of the house I went, and out on to a lawn where grown-ups were sitting on the ground, legs folded under them, or standing about with glasses of wine. I ran headlong into my mother's skirt, which had huge flowers all over it, and reaching up – she must have been kneeling now, or bending down – I put one of my hands to her face, and we
looked into each other's eyes, and she was nodding and smiling as if to say,
There you are, I was just wondering
, and then I heard the groan of metal being wrenched apart, and I turned quickly to see what it could be, only to lose my balance, fall, roll over … I woke in darkness, one elbow in a puddle. The container, I thought. I was in the container. But what was that awful sound I'd heard, and how had I come to be thrown across the floor? Had I been walking in my sleep? From somewhere high above came the sound of men shouting. Though I knew next to nothing about ships, the urgency and desperation in their voices didn't exactly reassure me. The engines had stopped too, and I could hear a noise I couldn't remember hearing earlier, a kind of rushing. I began to struggle with the rusty bolt. At last it slid sideways in its bracket, and the door banged open. Things had changed position since the last time I looked. The boat must have run aground, or hit something. Luckily, the container opposite me had shifted backwards a little, and I was able to drop down into a small, wedge-shaped gap. From there, I edged along one of the aisles, aware that if anything moved again I would be trapped or crushed. I had to walk uphill to reach the side of the hold. Glancing behind me, I saw water flooding greedily into the spaces between containers. I imagined for a moment that I heard voices pleading, but I could only think it was the sigh of machinery that had been shut down, the gasp and murmur of pistons cooling, and I turned and hurried towards the nearest flight of stairs.

I climbed through a metal doorway, almost as though I were emerging from a picture frame. The two men standing on the deck were grappling with each other, but when they sensed my presence they stopped and gaped at me, their heads twisted in my direction, their hands still clutching at each other's throats. I glanced over the guard-rail at where the sea should have been. A dense white fog pressed in all around me.

One of the men broke free and took a step towards me. He was wearing a red baseball cap with the brim flipped back. ‘Who the
fuck –'

‘Did we hit something?' My voice sounded muffled, as if I were still inside the container.

The man in the baseball cap hurled himself at me with such power that he appeared to have been propelled. Taking fistfuls of my jacket in his raw hands, he began to shake me. ‘Who
are
you? What the
fuck
are you doing here?'

His lower lip had deep vertical cracks in it, and his breath smelled sour – a mix of fish and beer. Though he didn't seem to be any taller than I was, he loomed above me, forcing me backwards and downwards, and for a moment I didn't understand what had happened to my sense of perspective.

Then I realised that the deck itself was sloping.

‘Are we sinking?' I said.

The man threw me away from him so fiercely that I staggered against the bulkhead. ‘Get a dinghy,' he yelled at his colleague. ‘There's got to be some kind of dinghy.'

The other man, freckled and ginger, with a pale mouth, stared at him for a few long seconds, and then yelled back. ‘I already – fucking – told you –'

I moved sideways to the rail. The sea had appeared just a few feet below, opaque and colourless, ominously still. As I stood with my hands on the rail, the boat creaked, and then a shudder passed through it, and I thought of the moment when a slaughtered animal drops to its knees, that sudden fatal heaviness, that somnolence …

Water swirled across my shoes.

Then I was beneath the surface, with no idea which way I was facing. I couldn't see or breathe. There was a sound in my ears like someone turning over in a bed. I reached up with both hands, tugging at the water. I kicked and kicked. My foot struck something that seemed to give, and one of my shoes detached itself. I imagined it dropping away into the dark, the laces still tied in a neat bow. It looked unhurried, leisurely, almost weightless. A feather would have fallen faster. My shoulder knocked against a solid object, but I fought to get past it, upwards, always upwards. At last, when I no longer believed it possible, I burst out into a small round space. Whiteness
enclosed me on all sides. Air wrapped itself around my skull like a cold rag.

‘Hello?'

I had shouted, but my voice was swallowed by the fog. There was no point calling out. I tried to think instead. It was already light. A new day. Even if it was only dawn, the ship would have been under way for fifteen hours. We should be somewhere off the coast of the Blue Quarter – but where exactly? Which direction was the land? And how long before I succumbed to fatigue or hypothermia?

Just as panic was rising through me, I was struck a firm blow on the side of my head, behind the ear. Crying out in shock as well as pain, I swung round in the water. Jesus was floating on his back beside me. His mournful eyes, his crown of thorns. His arms lifting vertically into the air, the tips of his fingers lost in fog. I began to laugh, then stifled it, not out of respect, but simply because it sounded inappropriate, even sinister, in the small dead patch of water we were sharing. I reached out for the statue and held on. It was larger than life, at least eight or nine feet long, and carved from solid wood. It would take my weight quite easily.

The first time I attempted to clamber on, the statue rolled in the water, and I fell back. This kept happening. The white paint they had used for the raiment was slippery as ice. In the end, sapped of nearly all my strength, I heaved myself across the legs and hung there, like a pannier slung over a mule. I was cold now, and my head ached, but at least most of me was out of the water. I waited a few minutes, then I clawed my way up on to the statue's chest and sat facing the feet, the bearded chin behind me, the outstretched arms on either side.

Once, I thought I heard someone call out. I answered with a cry of my own, but there was no reply. The silence descended again, padded, claustrophobic.

Maybe I dozed off, my head resting on my knees, or maybe I blacked out, I couldn't have said. The next time I glanced up, though, the fog had cleared. I had expected bits of wreckage to be drifting about close by, but there was only the whiteness of
the sky and the greyness of the sea, heaving and empty, drab. I felt exposed. Defenceless. I swallowed once or twice, then gripped the statue's arms. What had become of those two men? Had they drowned? My narrative had blurred patches, jump-cuts, pieces missing. I rubbed at my eyes, then looked over my shoulder and saw a slab of muddy green on the horizon.

Land.

I began to try and steer the statue in that direction. I had to lie face-down and use my hands as paddles. I paddled hard, but when I lifted my head and squinted beyond the statue's toes it didn't seem as if I'd made much progress. Still, the exercise had stirred my blood, warming me a little.

Time passed. The sun burned with more conviction, showing through the cloud cover as a sharp-edged silver disc. Though I had stopped paddling, the wedge of land appeared to have grown in size. Either currents were ferrying me shorewards, or else I had latched on to an incoming tide. Staring at the land, where low cliffs were now visible, their brows fringed by wiry scrub, I coughed twice and nearly vomited. I was hungry – ravenous, in fact – but the remains of my provisions were in the container. I didn't even bother to go through my pockets, I knew they would yield nothing. I fell to paddling again, if only to distract myself.

As I floated a few yards out, I heard a bell tolling, the sombre notes resonating across the lazy, almost oily waters. Perhaps, after all, I had drowned, just like the other two. Perhaps I was arriving at my own funeral. I slid down off the statue and waded through the shallows to the beach. Using my last reserves of strength, I hauled the statue on to a steep bank of grey and orange pebbles, where it lay on its back, appealing to an utterly indifferent sky. The land felt unsteady beneath my feet. I sat down, forearms on my knees, and gazed at the waves from which I had been delivered. Something was rocking on the swell out there, something that gleamed in the dull light. The minutes passed, and it drew closer. At last I recognised the swollen golden belly. Jesus wasn't the only one to have escaped from the hold of that tramp steamer. Buddha had freed himself as well,
and he was making his own way, patient and unruffled, to the shore.

A crunching sound came from further up the beach, and I glanced over my shoulder. A man in dark-blue robes was striding towards me. His tall scarlet hat had the look of a bishop's mitre, and in his right hand he held a long stick or staff that curled at the top like a fern. A crowd of people followed in his wake – maybe as many as a hundred, maybe more.

I tried to stand, but all the power drained out of me. The sky lurched sideways. Darkness poured into the corners of my eyes. The man bent over me, bright colours flashing from his ring finger like shafts of sunlight glimpsed through trees.

Lying in bed with blankets drawn up to my chin, I was looking at a ceiling, delicately vaulted, white as chalk. The smoothness of the surface made it hard for me to focus, so I turned my head to the right. Set deep into the wall was a single window, its tiny panes framing a sky of blended grey and gold. There would be a garden out there, I thought, a place where one could read or dream. I turned my head the other way. The man from the beach was sitting on a chair beside the bed. He was clean-shaven, with high cheekbones, and his shorn black hair showed traces of silver. He was still wearing his blue robes, but his mitre was resting on his lap.