The Hope (2 page)

“But I need some money for the children. At least let me have credit.”

“No, Mary,” he said, making up his mind, “I’m afraid I can’t help you this afternoon. So sorry.” He assumed an air of implacability that wouldn’t take “Oh please” for an answer. Mary left the shop as quickly as she could, trying to hide her tears from the people in the queue. Her bottles chimed together in the bag.

She took the gangplank over to the middle area of P deck. The handrails left stripes of dirt on her palms. On either side she could see lines of washing extended across the gap, above and below. The rain was gradually making the whites grey and the greys black. On the other side of the gangplank she followed a route that avoided the most crowded areas until she came to a kind of concourse, a nexus of routes. The walls here were choked with growths of graffiti, for the most part illegible with the exception of a slogan lower than the rest, which ran “Small is beautiful”. There was an official sign on which Mary could make out the words:

RECREATION

SHOPPING

STAIRS TO UPPER DECKS

and in smaller, more discreet letters:

Waste Reception Centre

but she knew anyway where she was headed. She had last checked this particular rubbish tip a week ago and the pickings had been so slim that it hardly merited a repeat visit, but she was desperate. Who knows, there might have been a windfall – someone dead and their belongings chucked out to make room for a new tenant. Something Bart would be prepared to buy. Once upon a time, in another life, Mary would have been disgusted with the idea of having anything to do with the dead, but now? Well, her shitshoes were a dead man’s shoes and she did not mind stepping into them.

As she rounded the next corner, she saw
the Man
.

It was his posture, his gait, those were his clothes. He was hurrying away from her. Had he seen her? She had only glimpsed his back view. Was it really him?

She gave chase. She could forgive him, she could forgive him, if only things could be as they were before and the children could be happy and not hungry. Where was he? She was not going to lose him twice.

There! He had stopped, hunched over to tie up a shoelace. Her shoes clattered to a halt and he glanced round at her.

When she say that he was a stranger, she found she could say nothing. It was not that words failed her but that there were no words at all, nothing to create the words, just a numb shame. He had not been running away at all. He had not even seen her. Rain plastered wisps of hair to her face. He stared at her staring at him.

“Yes?” he challenged.

“I’m sorry… I thought…”

Stupid, stupid, stupid woman
, thought Mary.
You stupid woman.

“Can I help you?” he asked. His manner was uncharitable. Mary realised that he had a glass eye. It did not glitter like the real one, was not even the same colour, and this gave him a peculiarly intimidating appearance. His face was unbalanced, off-centre, and this made you assume he possessed a brain to match.

“I thought you were a friend.”

He drew himself up, as if she had given him an invisible signal.

“I
could
be your friend, you know.” He gave a lopsided grin.

“I thought you were someone I know. Knew…” Mary took a step back. “It was a mistake. I’m sorry. That’s all. A mistake.”

He took the flush in her face for coyness and his grin widened.

A sharp jab with a finger in his good eye and his light would go out for ever. Why not? Why not?

Abruptly Mary felt sick of his sycophantic, odd-eyed face and her instinct was to get out of there, away from him. Her legs agreed with her instinct and she spun away from him, every second expecting his hand to grab the hood of her raincoat and yank her towards that mouth and that eye and that other eye…

In a minute she had made it to the concourse where the sign hung and then she had no more energy to run, only to slump against the wall, her body sagging, her raincoat crumpling around her with the sound of old bones. If anyone passed by now, they would think she was a stopper. “Let them,” she mumbled to herself, just like a stopper.

The Man
was lost. That was how the story went. One morning he had set off to go to his job – purser? navigator? captain? – and he had not returned. It was as simple as that. The memory of his last peck on her cheek had stayed with her ever since, as if there was still a translucent oval of his saliva clinging to her skin. He had become a ghost who haunted her face as a kiss.

His departure had been followed quickly by her fall. No one knew where he was, no one cared, and soon no one would talk to her. She took the hint and found an empty cabin down on P deck where she hid the children. There was plenty of bitterness and guilt to feed on when the money and the food started running out. For no accountable reason, it was her fault. That, she supposed, was the way of the
Hope
.

But she loved the children. That was her way of combating everything the
Hope
threw at her. She loved them with a primitive, self-wounding love. Once
the Man
had told her, no doubt as a roundabout kind of compliment, about mothers of long, long ago (many centuries before the
Hope
) who cured their sick infants by bathing them three times in a bath of their own blood. The idea of the giving of healthy blood to an unhealthy child stuck in Mary’s mind, for she thought that the sharp and rusted misery of slicing open your own veins was a cure in itself – “I love you this much” – giving with no expectation of return. It was being God.

The Waste Reception Centre had once been a hole the size of a swimming pool, one of many on board, with a collapsible bottom leading down chutes as big as hallways to the recycling plant deep down in the hold, where what was good could be used again and what was bad could be spat out into the unending ocean. At least, that had been the plan. Inevitably, the system had broken down. Reusable material soon became less and less reusable (everything finite, everything finding its limit) and the chutes began to pack up, the piles of rubbish and filth swelling until they burst out of their pores. No one on the
Hope
could be bothered to pretend that one day the mess would be cleared up, although janitorial divisions came along every so often to rearrange the dirt and take away a couple of sackfuls for dumping overboard.

There was a joke (like most jokes on the
Hope
, not an especially funny one) that went: What comes once a year and isn’t a birthday? A janitor.

There was another joke, this one about the Captain, related to the one about the janitor, but more involved and somewhat disrespectful.

Mary’s windfall went like this. After a few minutes of investigation, wading ankle-deep in boxes, broken bottles, scraps of peel, books without covers, clouds of forlorn flies, turning over the blank faces of jigsaw pieces to discover the pattern and the picture underneath, she found a small cardboard carton. It was promisingly weighty. The seagulls that strutted over the tip squawked at her in frustration. Mary sat down where she had found the carton, willing herself not to get too excited yet, not yet, but all the same feeling loved and loving and humbled.

She broke a fingernail as she struggled with the lid of the carton. The staples popped and the flaps of the lid flew up like ugly petals. Inside tin circles gleamed at her. Hunched over, stinking, with the carton in her arms, Mary began to weep and giggle at the same time. There was ham, processed peas, carrots, raspberries… Mary did not dare wonder how anyone could have overlooked all this, because to do so placed a gift from God into a disappointingly human frame of reference. Someone had smiled on her, that was all, on vile, filthy, worthless her.

She headed back to the cabin struggling to resist the urge to skip like a schoolgirl. The seat of her raincoat was wet and smeared.

She thought of the children as she ran cradling this true happiness in her arms, and then she thought of
the Man
and the memory did not seem so crowded with shame and pain any longer. No surprise, then, that she had taken that stranger to be
the Man
, because
the Man
had become a distorted memory, an image beneath water, infuriated.

Mary had a charm against his evil eye – the carton. Yet a small voice whispered privately to her that nothing lasts for ever.

Certain areas of the
Hope
, almost inevitably on the lower decks, you simply did not enter unless you belonged there or you were clinically insane or both. Mary’s happiness was a white and blinding thing and it made her take a left when she should have taken a right. She ran a few steps before she realised her error. The walls were filthier here and the turbines louder, although there was no apparent reason why this should be. Gangplanks and walkways colluded overhead to shut out most of the sky, although the rain managed to insinuate itself and dribble down the walls in streams like thin, twitching veins. Long chains hung lazily down, measuring with their swinging the
Hope
’s massive lumbering through the waves. They clinked against each other. A nearby service light buzzed as if a fly was trapped behind its glass.

There were footsteps behind her. The carton felt heavy in her arms, the carrier-bag unnecessarily bulky, its plastic handles cutting into her hand. The turbines growled distantly and the chains clinked and the light buzzed.

“Hey, it’s a scarlet woman!”

“Ha, ha, that’s a good ’un!”

“What have we got there, miss? Looks heavy.”

“Carry it for you?”

How many of them were there? Two, three?

“Looks like food, boys. Looks like dinner.”

“With afters thrown in!”

The small voice inside her piped up again, suggesting that she deserved this for being too happy. She wished (and hated herself for wishing) that
the Man
had been here. If
the Man
had been there, he would have seen these creatures off with a punch to the jaw, a stiff uppercut, a blow to the stomach… “Take that, you ruffians!” And perhaps this was the reason he had abandoned her, to leave her splayed and vulnerable to life.

A hand grabbed her shoulders.

“Look at us, woman,” was hissed in her ear, a parody of intimacy. As she obeyed the instruction, a corkscrew seemed to twist and tighten in her belly.

“Ugly bitch, in’t she?”

“Smells too.”

The combined ages of all three could not have totalled over fifty. They had fashionably severe crewcuts and fashionably bulky epaulettes. One wore a sailor’s hat. Another, the eldest by about a year and probably the leader, had an earring shaped like an anchor and his earlobe was puffy and red around it. He took his hand off her shoulder.

“You’re so young,” she murmured.

“Young! Ha!” scorned the one with the hat.

“Old enough for you, dear,” said the eldest, grinning and nuzzling up to Mary. “Are you going to let me fuck you?”

“Go on, Popeye!”

“Shall I, lads?” said Popeye, playing up to his fan club.

“Fuck her brains out, mate.”

Something like poison welled up inside Mary from the part of her that was Shitshoes, rubbish-tip scavenger (or Waste Retrieval Expert, if you like), she who had been abandoned by
the Man
, and it spat itself out of her mouth: “You couldn’t fuck a porthole.”

She could hardly believe she had said it. Nor could they. Popeye’s face registered astonishment and when his mates started to jeer the astonishment turned to livid rage. He leaned forward and struck the side of her face with a half-clenched fist. She should have told him she was used to humiliation. Because his fist had not been fully clenched, it hurt him more that it hurt her. The force, however, sent her crashing against the wall. Droplets of rainwater pattered on her raincoat.

“Hit her again!”

“Shall I?”

“Yeah, hit her again! Go on!”

Mary had dropped neither carton nor bag. She was proud of herself for that. She mumbled, “You couldn’t fuck a porthole,” again. She was not too proud about that.

It had the desired effect. Popeye hit her once more, a couple of grunting punches to her hips which her raincoat managed to baffle. As there was no way out of this, no obvious salvation, Mary felt calm and resigned.

Hit me
, she thought,
but don’t steal my prize, my magic charm
.

Popeye aimed blows at her arms and back, kicked her calf a few times, but she clung to the tins of food and they were reassuringly solid.

“Kill the bitch!”

Mary loved the children.

“Fuck the bitch!”

She loved the children.

“Kill the bitch!”

Popeye came away panting and pressed himself against the opposite wall.

“Just catching my breath, lads,” he gasped, “then I’ll fuck her. We’ll all fuck her.”

“She doesn’t make a sound, does she?” said the one with the hat.

“She will, Billy. She’ll scream when I’m shafting her.”

They all laughed, even Mary, because she found something quite amusing in Popeye’s grotesque imagination. He pushed himself off the wall and cocked his head to one side and stuck out his ribcage.

“Want some more?”

Mary raised her face.

Someone asked, “Do you know?”, and she was aware of a thin figure somewhere in the corner of her vision. Someone else, one of the boys, breathed out a “Jesus Christ…” and the other voice asked, “Do you know?” again, the thin man’s voice, pitched somewhere between an ache and a shriek.

“Look at those fucking scars,” hissed Billy with the hat.

“Do you know?”

Mary, not understanding what was happening but sensing a shift in fear, seized the opportunity and ran. She heard Popeye behind her saying, “No, we don’t know,” most but not all of his cockiness gone, and this was followed by a swift and abrupt crack (head meets steel – guess which wins). She found Billy running with her but they were like animals before a forest fire, caring nothing about anything except the heat at their heels. From further away now came a yelp and another crack. Billy disappeared up a staircase connecting to the above deck, and Mary ran on alone.