The Hope (4 page)

“Payday early?” laughed Charlie.

“You know it, boss. I’ve come for my cut of that whisky you keep in that cupboard over there.”

“You mean this cupboard over here?” said Charlie, crossing behind his desk, which had nothing on top of it except for a Newton’s cradle. Its five tarnished balls (Charlie never cleans anything) were vibrating against each other to make a sound Charlie calls “steel cicadas”. Whatever a cicada is.

“That cupboard. Bottom shelf.”

Charlie produced two tumblers and a bottle, seal unbroken and covered in dust. I’d forgotten we’d finished one the day before. I don’t know where Charlie gets the new ones from and I don’t ask. Something about a gift horse, kiddies.

Charlie does the whole thing like a magician: empty bottle one day, full bottle the next. Out of nowhere, two tumblers. “Watch closely, ladies and gentleman. Flourish. Nothing up my sleeves. Two full tumblers. Ta-daa!”

The booze kicked in warm on my tongue and hot on my throat. I go through whole shifts looking forward to this moment and I don’t know why Charlie favours me above the others in this way, but I don’t ask either. The others don’t seem to resent it. They even hint that I’m being groomed to take over from Charlie when he retires, but I’ve never heard him mention anything about it. He’s older than me by about thirty years. I was born and bred on the
Hope
and I expect to die on the
Hope
, but Charlie, he embarked like all the old people, drawn (he says) by the promise of something better on the other side of the unending ocean, and he knows things and shares them with me, like he thinks I can’t live properly without knowing them too. He’s not stupid. Some people think we’re all stupid in the engine room. They think we have to be stupid to work here and they might be right, but it doesn’t make us subhuman. Just because we work with our hands doesn’t mean we think with our hands.

So I sat back in the squeaky foam padding of the chair and stared at my swilling whisky and waited for Charlie to speak first, because he always does. He swung his boots up on to the desktop and pretended to examine his laces, letting me unwind and letting us both appreciate the booze. His fingernails were squared and dirt-free.

Finally he spoke. “Do you know what horror is?”

“Being scared.”

“More than that.” It was a question.

“Being very scared.”

“Do you know what a pedant is?”

And we both laughed. Charlie begins like this every time, like a teacher who’s been preparing his lesson the night before. I managed to avoid school when I was younger, went straight down to the engine room aged twelve because nobody knew who my parents were and charity on the
Hope
doesn’t go too far or last too long. Mind you, Reverend Chartreuse offered me a job in the chapel but, though he’s a nice enough bloke, I preferred the idea of helping to run the ship herself, of being where it all happens, over handing out hymn books and putting on a white dress to light candles. Charlie continued: “Horror is being somewhere you don’t want to be with something that doesn’t want you there.” He looked at me straight, over the rim of his tumbler, over the deep-ridged soles of his boots.

“I’d call that being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You’d be right. But it’s because that something
wants
you in the wrong place at the wrong time so’s it can beat on you good. It wants you there because it wants to show you that it doesn’t want you there.”

He’d lost me and I said so.

“OK, pal,” he said, putting his feet on the floor, setting down his whisky and leaning forward, “I’ll put it another way. You know old Creaky Stan, right? You know he walks like he’s got a steel bar up his ass?” I smirked. That was how old Stan walked all right. “I’ll tell you a story about me and him and a few other guys you won’t have heard of. This was way back, soon after the
Hope
set sail and we were just getting into the swing of things, learning the ropes and discovering that no one runs the
Hope
– she just runs herself and minds her own business and all we do is check the gauges and oil the pumps and make sure the turbines keep turning…”

And Charlie’s story went like this.

Before your time there were rats down here, hundreds of the buggers, big ones as long as your forearm from tip to tail, bigger than the ones we used to have back in New England. They weren’t exactly dangerous but they didn’t make the job any easier. You’d reach up into the space above the vent levers and one of them would be waiting for you, maybe give you a bad bite if you weren’t wearing gloves, and then you’d need all kinda shots up your ass from Dr Macaulay. They hung around behind the air ducts and you’d see the scaly tail dangling down in front of your nose and it’d jump ten years’ growth out of you. One even got up here into the playroom, when Big Fred was running the show. He went crazy, completely bugshit, and throttled it with his bare hands. Came down the ladder with this dead rat in one hand to show us all. Worst was when you went into the storeroom and found a mother rat in a bucket and she had given birth to a brood or litter or whatever you call a bunch of baby rats. She’d hiss at you like she was made of snakes and there were all these pulpy pink things sucking at her tits and it took two of us armed with crowbars to batter the bitch to death. That’s mothers for you.

Did they have rat poison in the ship’s stores? Like fuck they did! No one had thought there would be rats on board their brand-new shining
Hope
. I’m not blaming anyone, but you wonder, don’t you, if the people who design these things have a brain or not? They should have asked someone like me. I’d have told them what they needed on a ship this size. Industrial-strength rat poison, that’s what I’d have said. Anyway, Fred went and got some cyanide off the black market, Bart’s or somewhere, and dusted all the corners and dark areas and we had to wear face masks for the next week just in case. We didn’t see the rats for a while and then they came back with a vengeance, more than before, bigger then before (unless my eyes were playing tricks on me), as if cyanide was the greatest thing rats could ever want to eat. Rats’ smoked salmon. We got a cat down here too, black one from the upper decks, some stray a rich person didn’t want, I guess. Black cats are supposed to bring good luck. Do you know how long it lasted? Three days. I came down for my shift one morning and Tommy – Thompson – showed me kitty in a box. Kitty had no head and no stomach.

As you can imaging, the situation was getting out of hand and we petitioned the Captain to do something. Fred sent him six messages and finally went and saw him, and the Captain said, “It’s your problem, you sort it out. And don’t let any of the passengers hear about it.” The fucking passengers!

Then something peculiar happened. One day, the rats just upped and went. You don’t notice things missing as easily as you notice things being where they shouldn’t be and so none of us picked up on this for a bit, but Tommy mentioned it to me one evening and I had to agree. Not a rat in sight. Vanish. Poof.

A week later, Stan came running past me, kinda all het up. You know how you get to sense people moving behind you when you can’t hear them? It’s like a whoosh in the back of your head. Well, I turned round and saw Stan shinning up the playroom ladder and hammering on the hatch, and Fred let him in and a moment later they both came out, Big Fred with his Mickey Mouse ear-defenders on. He looked like an asshole in those ear-defenders but it was his joke on us, you know, “I’m not such a total bastard after all, guys.” You know who Mickey Mouse is, don’t you? No? Never mind. Stan took Fred over to one corner. We were all watching now and, although they were quite a way away, I could see Stan pointing at something and Fred scratching his head and nodding and signing back to Stan that he would do something about it. Later that day Fred put up a notice saying there was going to be a powwow up in the playroom at the end of shift.

We all piled in. There wasn’t much space. In those days there must have been about forty of us, so it was standing-on-tiptoes-room only. Fred told us that Stan had found a rat-hole in one of the bulkheads. Came across it behind a floor cleaning unit he was supposed to be fixing. No one had used the unit for ages because there’s not much point in cleaning the floor here, is there? Just gets dirty again in five minutes. At least, that’s you guys’ excuse. And Stan had probably just been taking a nap anyway. So, somehow these rats had gnawed through a inch of steel. I didn’t believe it, no one believed it…
You
don’t believe it, I can see. That’s OK. Put the heebie-jeebies on me, let me tell you, when I thought of how many thousands of rats had spent how many thousands of hours grinding their teeth and claws down to stumps, then bleeding to death or starving to death, all in the name of the rat cause. Brrr. A hole two foot square.

And Fred asked for a team of volunteers to go into that hole and flush the buggers out once and for all. Exterminate them. I didn’t think anyone would be that stupid, but almost every man there stuck up his hand. We hated those rats. I was pretty green in those days and I wasn’t going to be left out, so I stuck up my hand too.

“Only a dozen of us’ll be going in there,” said Big Fred, and selected ten: Stand, Tommy, Ed, Falstaff, Benjamin (who was the biggest spade you ever saw, bigger even than Aaron), a few others, all sensible choices, except Fred looked at me and asked if I wanted to be number eleven. Well, I said yes, but I didn’t say it right away. I asked Fred if he was sure and he said yes, so then I said yes. The rest of the guys went back down and Fred told us volunteers to go and look for weapons – hammers, bars, that kind of thing – and each get a flashlight out of the storeroom. He leaned back behind him and took a shotgun and a box of cartridges out of this very cupboard here. A couple of the guys laughed because they’d suspected he kept one there but they’d never dared to find out for themselves.

“This is life insurance,” said Fred. “In case one of you boys thinks he can do my job better than me.” And he laughed and we laughed, but it wasn’t that funny.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s still here. Now, where was I?

Standing round that hole, feeling the shuddering of the turbines beneath our feet, you didn’t need to know sign language to tell we were shit-scared. Our faces were screaming it out loud and clear. The edges of the hole were shiny-bright scratches in metal and inside it was as dark as diesel. The light seemed to catch sight of those scratches and say to itself, “I’m not going any further.” Fred had taped his flashlight to the barrel of the shotgun and he poked it in and shone it around. I couldn’t help thinking the hole was way too big for a rat, they didn’t need it that big, it was big enough for a human to use…

Fred squeezed through on his belly, the flashlight beam waving in front of him. Benjamin followed and barely managed it. I said he was big, didn’t I? I lied. He was enormous. I was next. Fred had said he wanted me in front of him, supposedly because I was skinny and might be useful for getting into tricky places, but I think he wanted to keep an eye on me. I wasn’t making any secret of the fact that I was terrified, pants-brown terrified. Then again, I don’t think any one of us wasn’t. You can’t hate something enough not to be scared of it. I was carrying a shovel, its cutting edge sharp as a razor and clean as chrome, and I considered it the best weapon there was, after Fred’s shotgun. If you couldn’t cut the buggers in half with my shovel, you could flatten them.

The other guys slid through and we found we could stand up. In the light of the flashes there was this narrow passageway spread out in front of us, rising so high above us you couldn’t see the top. The sides were reinforced with bolted girders separating the engine room from the starboard gas tank. I’ve seen this on the ship’s specs. The gas tanks (fuel tanks, whatever you like to call them) take up the best part of the stern section, close to a billion gallons. There’s the engine room and the turbines sorta run through under the tanks out to the propellers. The passageway is in fact a safety precaution. If one of the tanks should decide to rupture, it gives us about an hour’s grace to get the fuck out of here before we drown in gas. It runs for the best part of a mile toward the stern. The turbines were even louder in there, kinda echoing in the confined space and getting through our ear-defenders and making our ears sing. I felt sorta dizzy. And while I was feeling dizzy, an odd thought struck me, kicked me when I was down, so to speak. Why, if so many rats had been at work on the hole, were there no remains, not one corpse? Had they cleaned up after themselves? It seemed unlikely.

Fred prodded me forwards. I had been elected to take point, about which I should have been proud, but I could only think it put me first in the firing line if anything went wrong. I don’t know why, but I was beginning to imagine the rats as an enemy army under a genius general who was steering us exactly where he wanted us. God knows, we should credit animals with more intelligence than we do. Remember when those whales attacked the ship last year? I didn’t see it myself but people who did said the things were actually throwing themselves against the sides and knocking themselves silly. People said, “How dumb can you get?”, but you put yourselves in the whales’ places. What if this huge iron and steel monster came flying over your home? I’d try to beat the crap out of it if I was them. The best defence is sheer terror, if you get my drift.

I mean, these rats had survived down here for several years with little or no food. I can’t believe they made it up to the mess or the dining-hall or the food stores or the greenhouses, but then again, who knows? Clearly they had something going for them, something that kept them organised and alive, something that ordered them to bite through solid steel until they died.

“I thought they were supposed to steal babies out of cabins when their mothers weren’t looking. Isn’t that the story?” I ventured. Charlie had filled my glass without me noticing and I was starting to feel comfortably numb.

“
Now
I wouldn’t put it past them,” he commented, “but before I went into that hole, I’d have peed myself laughing at you.”