Loss of Separation (23 page)

After he'd gone I showered and changed my clothes, then went looking for dinner. The buffet-style service was pretty grim, but it was quiet and I was in and out quickly. I had a stroll around and found a bar. Just outside it was a children's activity area, comprising a ball pit and a small area where DVDs could be watched and pictures coloured in with the help of a kids' entertainer. But the entertainer was currently sitting on his own with his arms folded, staring into space. I was walking by the ball pit when a child emerged from it, making me jump. She smiled at me; her mouth filled with gaps. She might have been any age between five and ten; I had no idea. She scooped up one of the balls and threw it in my direction. It pinged off the plastic surround, but I flinched anyway. She laughed and dived back into the sea of plastic. I watched her making her own entertainment for a few minutes, trying to understand why I was so fascinated by this everyday display. But that was it. It
wasn't
everyday, not for me. Not for anyone living on my tiny curve of England. Watching this child juggle and jump and thrash around was like being at the zoo and stumbling upon a thylacine.

A prickle of threat. I was newly aware of my clothes, hot and vaguely uncomfortable. Sweat sprang up into the fissures of my scar tissue that weren't for ever sealed shut. I was being watched. Two adults - the child's parents, no doubt - were observing me observe their daughter with this mix of incredulity and pleasure etched on my ravaged features. I knew straight away what I must look like. I tried a smile that must have horrified them further and moved away to the bar where I spent a nervy hour winding down over a long beer waiting for the security guards to come and take me away for questioning.

There were occasional PA invitations to join Steve in the casino lounge, or Anna for Bingo or Dave and Dave for comedy. I forgot, for a little while, that I was sitting in a bar on a big boat. Eventually there was the suggestion of motion, the slightly queasy feel of movement beyond your control, a subtle pitch and yaw that I knew so well from flying, but that felt different, more unpleasant, in water. I went up to the bar at the uppermost deck - the ball pit was empty now, the kids' entertainer gone - and stared through the window as we departed from Hull. Quays and cranes and containers. Spotlights bleached the landing bays and turned the water into so many chips of white ice. You could see the deck from another window, glossy with rain, empty of people, all the way to the sleek, black control tower where I imagined a pilot sitting in a huge chair, steering this beast with a joystick the size of a matchstick. I suddenly missed that sense of control and power, the responsibility that comes with managing hundreds of people and millions of pounds worth of gear. After twenty minutes we reached wide water and the lights, having grown less powerful, stopped reaching out alongside us.

The lift doors opened and half a dozen women came into the bar dressed as though they were on their way to the Oscars ceremony. I decided it was time to turn in.

Somehow I found my way back to my room, despite a series of missteps. I opened the door with my flimsy paper keycard and shut away all the rough coffee and bad food and cheesy entertainment. I sat on the edge of my bed and pulled from my rucksack the copy of
Gray's Anatomy
I'd liberated from the bookshop yard. I felt my muscles and bones tense in anticipation about what they'd learn about their uneasy marriage this evening. I made myself a cup of tea and lay back on the bed. There were three other beds folded into the wall, waiting for a family that I would never produce. If I'd wanted children, how could I be a dad to them now? It was uncomfortable for me to rest this book on my knee, let alone eight or so pounds of squirming flesh. I was fit for nothing but a long wait for the grave.

The lachrymal are the smallest and most fragile bones of the face. They are situated at the front part of the inner wall of the orbit, and resemble somewhat in form, thinness, and size, a fingernail.

The bones of my face had been shattered that night. I hadn't been able to cry since, though I'd wished heartily for the chance. I rubbed my eyes now, trying to work out if the bumps and hard little edges around the orbit that I could feel through the skin were mis-matched burrs of bone, or whether they had always been there. I could imagine my fleshless skull looking all wrong, cracked and warped like a model made out of broken pieces of pottery. I thought of the edges of my eye sockets and how they were more like the sharp rings of hard little calcified mouths, like those of fish pecking and chewing at coral reefs. I thought of how Ruth looked at me with real hunger sometimes, and had done, even in the dark, the other night when we fucked, when she fucked
me,
on her bed.

I read about the Canal of Petit in the eye. I read about the sinuses of Valsalva in the heart. I read about changes in the vascular system at birth; how, at that first shriek and gasp of air, parts of the heart and lungs change, shut down, fire up.

I felt the tremor of horses in the sand. That doubling up of hooves. One strong, coming on hard, the other fainter, yet faster. A slant-rhyme. A fracturing echo. The words at the edge of the page threatened to lose their shape and become a black border that I would not be able to escape. I tried to tear my gaze away, but the text held me fast. The skeleton in the wardrobe uncurled its body, the bones crackling. It reached out its hand for me. The tiny skull full of a grin.

Something wet, with density, hit the porthole window, releasing me from the tyranny of the page. I glanced that way, but the angle was too narrow to confirm what it was. A shadow writhed on the carpet. I pushed myself upright. I was thinking of sharks and morays and the crazed, alien beasts found at unknowable fathoms. Whales the size of airports. Kraken. Sea serpents.

There was dark matter on the glass, some awful footprint left by a thing bleeding, it seemed. Something smashed behind me and I heard muffled laughter in the corridors. I checked my watch. It was coming on for two in the morning. I had been reading for four hours. Another smash from the corridors, coming closer. I heard raised voices. Kids on the piss who couldn't take their booze, giving in to anger. It all seemed to kick off outside my door. Volleys of rage. Incoherent threats and counter-threats. Women chipping in, shrill, goading. That hard-on people got for impending violence. The thrill of it, seconds away.

I heard a clear, female voice cut through the noise: 'There are children asleep. Cut it out. Take it elsewhere.'

That seemed to take the sting from the moment. More blather, hot air, posturing. But going away now, the testosterone dissipating, although not without a last roar of outrage from that rogue male. I left it a while before limping to the door and peering out. I heard a click as another door shut simultaneously, but I couldn't tell which one. Probably the woman who had shouted down the group of revellers.

Splinters of glass were strewn across the carpet; here and there an ugly ring of glittering teeth where the jagged base of a pint pot lay like a hunter's trap. I called out but there was nobody nearby. Not wanting to invite the wrath of my vigilante neighbour, I decided against calling out again and instead grabbed my key card and headed for the stairs. There was no staff in the cubby holes from where they conducted their operations. The upper deck was similarly silent. There was a cloud of oppressive odours though: dead alcoholic drinks, perfume that had turned sour on tired host skin; it was something like an assault.

The bar was empty, though far from clean. Empty glasses crowded the counter; spilled beer filmed the table-tops. It was so still, I could hear the splash of drips from the beer spigots landing in the overflow trays. I moved past the children's ball pit once more, pausing to stare into it. It appeared a weird construct now, without anybody to play in it. And it seemed inconceivable that those hundreds of coloured plastic balls should not begin to shiver, just prior to the emergence of some grinning head.

I was willing it to happen, tricking my eyes into thinking that it
was
happening, and I spooked myself. I moved on; I didn't want to see what might rise, what was buried. Too much time had passed.

I was dreaming, I thought, as I heard the cascade of plastic behind me, dry rain falling. Just a natural realignment of spheres, I thought. Just maths, working itself out.

I checked out the buffet. Nobody there. I glanced again out of the windows, in case we had somehow arrived and I had not been roused from sleep, but there was just the endless soft grey of the North Sea. The lifts were not answering my call. The doors at the top of the stairs were locked. I descended. Where the doors to the cars ought also to have been locked, one was swinging open. I went through into the hold. Exhaust ghosts. The gleam of cellulose. I thought I might find a yellow-jacketed staff member helping someone retrieve something from their car, but I could see nobody. There was the thrum of engines beyond these walls, and nothing else.

I was about to head back to my room, thinking that running away by going to sleep might fix things, when I heard a long, slow scratching noise, as of the tines of a fork being dragged along a plate. Only this was a harsher, more raw sound. Its edges were jagged and they caught on my nerves like a duff chord played on a badly tuned guitar. I saw my face reflected in a car window and it was all drawn back, my teeth gritted, eyes wide. If I'd been able, my ears would have been pricked, like a startled cat's.

The sound had come from aft and starboard. I heard something wet and fast; it was like the smack and slither of something - a crippled dog, maybe - that wasn't too concerned about rebounding and ricocheting off hard things in its desperation to be away. Or, I thought, checking behind me where the doors were, to be nearer.

I heard the sound of heavy tools dropped on hollow steel. I heard someone swear once: bleak and brutal. I heard a child cry. As if in response to this sound, above all others, the slither and smack repeated, more frantic this time. I wondered if someone had been assaulted down here, a serious assault; someone left for dead. A parent. That would explain the frantic movements at the sound of a crying child. He, or she, was trying to get back to their children, to protect them against whatever had done this to them.

But I knew that was all just hope on my part. I knew that what was making that noise was something to do with me. I'd brought something with me from the beach. I was introducing the infections within me to every corner I walked around.

I started edging back towards the stairs. I would go back to my room and sleep until we had docked. Don't leave the room. No need to leave the room.

I got to the door and slipped through, trying to ignore the way that my shadow moved, or that of the thing that was rising up behind me. I moved up the stairs as quickly as I was able and caught a whiff of the rising tide of oil and sea water and the filth and detritus that shivers at the bottom of the ocean. I saw bloodied children's handprints on the walls and gouges in the carpet formed by something that ought to exist nowhere other than between the covers of a book of fairy-tales.

I heard Jake's voice, stilted and stalled, beyond the battering of metal as something came closer, bouncing off the cars, heading straight for me. He was trying to tell me something, but the words wouldn't come, or the miles between us were too filled with interference to allow his message to ram home. I should not have made this journey. I knew it was fated to end in disappointment anyway. Me not finding Tamara. Me finding Tamara and being told gently, but firmly, to leave her alone. Things had changed, the world had turned, we were all new now.

I kept up with this as I climbed those stairs, convinced that my feet were pooling in cold fluid that was pouring up from the car park. Seawater. Blood. It didn't matter. It would consume me before I made it to my deck and then what was prowling around would be able to find me at its leisure.

The Craw,
I thought
. You know it's the Craw.
Finding out about it in that fusty little museum antechamber meant it had somehow cleaved itself to me. I had unlocked it yet chained it to me, perhaps in the reading of those terrible letters in their painful childish handwriting. Misery likes its own company. We were bonded, bound.

My fingers shivered with the piece of card at the slot of the lock. Finally I slid it in and was released. I did not look back as I shut the door. I had a drink and got into bed fully clothed. I slept, miraculously, but my dreams were filled with labyrinths and walls and something just on the other side of wherever I was, steam rising from it over the edges, swirling and curling into shapes too hideous for me to contemplate. At various moments throughout the night I was wakened, by what I couldn't understand. Screams continuing to rattle around the corridors but driven not by drunken revellers this time. Shattering glass, but nothing that held beer or wine. It sounded dense, splintered. I imagined people scared solid, scared to glass, pitching over and fracturing against the bulk of the thing that had petrified them. A path of cold, red shards. Jagged moments of horror: shock-widened eyes and open mouths trapped in pieces of mirror. Glass globes of hearts impacted open into segments along fault lines, like blood oranges peeled apart for sharing.

My forehead was peppered with sweat all night, despite my swiping it away, despite the temperature hovering around a mark that turned my breath white. At times I was convinced something stood on the other side of that flimsy door and was leaning against it, testing its strength, measuring its resistance. I heard it creak and groan. I thought I could see it bulging, minutely, inward, the gaps between the hinges fattening.