The Race (29 page)

He seems very young to be so responsible, not much older than me. Like most of the male crew members he wears his hair long, secured at the nape of his neck with a piece of black cord. By contrast the three women working the engine room have their hair cut short. It is hot below decks. The Chief Engineer, Juuli Moyse, has her hair shaved so close to her skull that I can see globules of sweat glinting on her scalp like beads of glass. Juuli Moyse has a stern expression but I like her immediately. All her movements are sure and calm, as if the
Aurelia Claydon
were a nervous beast in need of gentle handling. I admire her confidence, the efficiency of her movements as her hands pass over the coils and ridges of the ship’s inner workings. I would swear she knows if all is well with the ship or not simply by touch.

Juuli Moyse lives and breathes the ship and in some strange way she is as much a physical part of it as the steam shaft or the rudder control. I smile at her, and as my reward I see her mouth curve upwards slightly at one corner.

After the engine room, Djibril takes us to see the galley, the stewards’ deck, the passenger sun deck, and the navigation room. The navigation room contains the charts database and the radio, which is fixed in a dura-cell housing to prevent electrical short-outs and also water damage. Off the navigation room is the switch room, with the control panel for the ship’s four great searchlights. Once we are in the Atlantic, the lights will be left on all night. Djibril explains that the fore and aft searchlights can penetrate the water to a depth of fifty metres. Officially, the searchlights are a protection against collision with other shipping. We all know what they are really for, though it’s seen as bad luck to mention it.

Apparently Atlantic whales, whose natural habitat is deep water, dislike bright sunlight. The searchlights are meant to discourage them. Whether this actually works is a matter of debate.

~*~

There are about a dozen foot passengers in all. My first instinct is to hold myself aloof from them. There seems little point in becoming close to anyone when I know that once the voyage is over I won’t see them again. Some of them will be gone even sooner – Dodie Taborow has already informed everyone that she will be leaving the ship at Brock Island, and several of the other passengers will be disembarking early also.

And yet, I feel a huge curiosity about them. The Croft was like a family, but we were always discouraged from forming friendships outside the programme. Most of what I know about the world comes from books. The idea of getting to know some other people is exciting and strange. I am used to being in crowds because of our trips into Asterwych, but when it comes to starting a conversation with a stranger I still feel shy. I know so little about anything, other than my work in the programme. I’m afraid of seeming stupid or naive. When I remind myself that everyone on board the ship is a stranger to all of the rest of us I find this makes me feel more confident.

We have the
Aurelia Claydon
in common at least. It is a start.

Dodie Taborow is from Lis, a district known as Jeunefille. Even if you were to take no notice of the clothes she wears – the shiny brown boots, the teal blue button-up jacket with the astrakhan collar – it is obvious from the way she speaks that she has money. I don’t hold this against her as I know Maud would, perhaps because I find her fascinating to look at. With her hands covered in rings and her faded glamour she’s like an aging film actress.

As we sit drinking our first cups of coffee in the saloon, Dodie Taborow informs me that she’s been recently widowed.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. She tells me that her husband’s name was Wilson, and that he worked as the shop manager of a large iron-smelting works in Corton. When Dodie Taborow asks me who I am and where I am going I tell her I am a teacher and that I’m on my way to take up a position as a languages assistant in the city of Kontessa. This is what I’ve been told I should say, and it seems to work. It is clear that Dodie Taborow is not interested in me so much as in my possible suitability as a confidante. She soon stops questioning me about my provenance and moves on to other, more interesting subjects.

“You’ve seen that poor girl,” she says, once she’s finished giving me the lowdown on Wilson’s coronary. “I think somebody said she was in a fire.”

I know the woman she is talking about. I noticed her earlier when Djibril was giving us our walkaround. The right side of her face looks normal, but the left side has been mostly destroyed. What is left resembles a battlefield – a jumble of pinkish ridges and corrugated scar tissue. Her left eye is gone, the distended flap of her eyelid has been sewn closed over the socket. It is hard to tell how old she is. She is wearing a blue boiler suit and her long dark hair is plaited in a single braid. When I first saw her I assumed she was part of the crew.

She is sitting by herself in a corner of the saloon, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

“What’s her name, do you know?” I ask Dodie Taborow. I think it’s the first time I have asked her a question, rather than the other way around. The sight of the girl’s disfigured face fills me with horror, yet there is something else too, something behind the fear that is almost wonderment. The girl has clearly suffered terribly, yet still she is able to sit here, to read the paper and drink her coffee and get on with her life. What truths does she know? What thoughts is she having? I wonder if someone who has suffered as she has would hate people who have not suffered, or be indifferent to them.

Is her calmness here in the saloon an act of heroism, or is it simply that she has no other choice? I notice the way Dodie Taborow stares at her, like a greedy magpie, and yet I sense she feels no pity. The girl is a subject for gossip, nothing more. What has happened to her has not happened to Dodie Taborow, and therefore does not properly exist. For Dodie Taborow there is not even a girl, not really, just the remains of a face, a thing of such extraordinary ugliness and wrongness it no longer belongs to the girl, but to the world, to be looked at and gawped over, like any other monstrosity.

I feel I have to know the woman’s name. If I know her name she will be someone, and not just something.

“I don’t know. Lin something, I think,” says Dodie Taborow.

Lin. I can see at once how the name would suit her. A firm upright, strongly supported, like a tough green branch.

I would like to talk to her but I have no idea how I might go about it. She seems so alone in her corner, but perhaps that’s what she wants. How can I know?

There are other passengers still in the saloon: a bearded middle aged man with horn-rimmed glasses, two elderly ladies who I think are sisters, their narrow limbs strangely attenuated, like the limbs of spiders. The sisters talk together quietly in what I presume must be the Thalian language and this by itself makes me curious about them. I have resolved to become fluent in Thalian, to use the two months of this sea voyage to master its basics. I have brought several books to help me in this purpose – a parallel text edition of Saffron Valparaiso’s
A Thalian Odyssey
and a field guide to the wildlife and birds of the Indic Basin – even though Kay has told me there will be no need.

“You’ll be living mainly inside the compound,” she said. “Everyone connected with the programme speaks Crimondn.”

She has assured me that the compound is enormous, almost the size of Asterwych and with as many citizens. The idea of living inside a compound disturbs me rather. Hearing the two sisters chatting companionably together, I realise I cannot think of anything I want less.

As well as the bearded man, there is another, younger man named Alec Maclane. He is stout, but good looking. He is wearing a fine cashmere waistcoat and gold cufflinks. He looks the kind who could easily afford a hopper flight, if he wanted it, and I wonder what he’s doing, going by sea.

Dodie Taborow leans close to whisper in my ear, confiding that Alec Maclane is rich but also unlucky.

Unlucky in love? I wonder. Unlucky at cards?

“He has a fatal disease,” Dodie says, then changes the subject. When later on that day I happen to see Maclane on deck I observe him closely, looking for signs of illness, but I see none. He has a curiously rolling gait, as if arthritis or rheumatism were causing him to favour one leg over the other, but other than that he seems perfectly healthy and I wonder if Dodie Taborow has been misinformed. Alec Maclane seems courteous and gentle and I rather like him. The other man, the bearded man, I do not like so much. There is something secretive about him. I haven’t found out his name yet and amazingly Dodie Taborow doesn’t know it either.

“He looks like a government man, don’t you think? A politico?” She purses her lips as she looks at him, but whether with distaste or in fascination it’s hard to tell.

“Let’s go on deck,” she says suddenly, and I agree at once. Djibril has already been in to tell us that the ship will be departing from port in half an hour. As we get up to leave, I notice the bearded man looking at me. I try to look away but it is too late – he catches my eye and I am forced to return his gaze.

There is a flicker of something between us, and for a moment I wonder if he is using an implant. For some reason the idea repulses me. I tug my thoughts away, with some difficulty.

It was like that with Kay, just sometimes. Each time it happened I found the experience similarly unpleasant, like catching her with her clothes off.

Is the bearded man some sort of spy?

I make up my mind to avoid him, as much as possible.

~*~

We are on our way. I stand at the rail for a long time, gazing back at Faslane as it shrinks and dwindles, becoming first a green-grey smudge on the horizon and then disappearing altogether. We are still in the mouth of the loch, not in the open sea at all yet, but I feel cast adrift from my old life already. I can feel Dodie Taborow regarding me with curiosity. I wish she would stop.

“Is this your first sea voyage?” she asks me. I say that it is. I realise she has been watching the receding coastline just as I have, and I wonder if this is a journey she had been intending to take with her husband Wilson, or if he was to have remained behind in any case, alive or dead.

“I love the sea,” she says. “I sometimes wish I could stay at sea forever. Life would be simpler that way.”

Her voice has taken on a wistful quality. I ask her why she is travelling to Brock Island. I wonder if the bluntness of my question might offend her, but if anything she seems pleased that I have brought up the subject.

“I have a son who lives on Brock,” she says. “Duncan.” She is silent for some time, and I begin to think I must have upset her after all. Then she lets out a sigh. Pale sunlight envelops her hands, sparking her rings. “Duncan and Wilson had a terrible row. They haven’t spoken for ten years. Duncan doesn’t even know his father’s dead yet. I’m going to Brock to break the news. I know he’ll be devastated.”

“Will he return with you to Crimond, do you think?”

She laughs, a short, brittle sound, like a twig snapping.

“Duncan will never leave Brock, not now,” she says. “He’s as stubborn as his father.” She turns her face into the wind. Her hair blows back from her forehead like a silver mane. Her profile is gaunt and somehow timeless and full of dignity, and to me at that moment she appears like a ship’s figurehead, or like an aging queen: faded but still full of vigour, still fighting her battles.

“Fathers and sons, who needs them?” she says. “I wish I’d had a daughter. Like you.” She touches my hand where it rests upon the rail. “You’re very young to be travelling so far alone, Maree. What do your parents have to say about that?”

“My parents are dead,” I reply. The words are out before I can examine them for flaws. It is surprising how thorny they sound when spoken aloud. “It’s all right,” I add quickly. “It happened ages ago. I was still a baby, really. I don’t remember them at all.” I can feel myself blushing. I feel embarrassed but I don’t know what about – it isn’t my fault that they are dead. Mostly I don’t want Dodie Taborow to feel sorry for me, and by a miracle she seems to understand that. We stand together in silence for a while, and then she asks me if I have anyone who will be meeting me when I get to Bonita.

“One of the other teachers from the school is being sent to pick me up,” I say to her. “There’s no need to worry.”

This at least is a truth of sorts. Kay has told me that someone from the programme will be waiting at the dockside to collect me. If by any chance this person is not there I am to go straight to the harbour office and they will put me in immediate contact with the compound’s administrators. There is indeed, as I have said to Dodie, nothing to worry about. I stand beside her at the rail, feeling the throb and hum of the ship’s engines passing into me through the soles of my feet. The sense of being in motion, of drawing away from one thing and heading towards another, is oddly restful. It occurs to me that even if my parents were still alive I might still be leaving them. It’s strange to think of that, like being given a secret glimpse of another world, and reminds me of an odd idea of Maud’s, about how the world we live in isn’t the real world, that the real world lies elsewhere, in a parallel dimension where the New War never happened and there are no such creatures as smartdogs. Maud said she’d read a story like that in a book somewhere, although she could never remember the title or the author and I privately suspected she had made it up herself. I found it amusing when she first told me about it but afterwards a shadow seemed to fall across me and I felt afraid. What if it were all true, after all? What if the person I knew as myself didn’t really exist? Suppose I’m just a template, a mirror-image of another girl in another world who even at this moment is begging me for her life back so she can stop having nightmares?

A foolish idea perhaps, but still a powerful one. I do not like to dwell on it.

“What did you mean, when you said you wished you could stay at sea forever?” I ask Dodie.

“Oh, just that when you’re at sea it’s so much easier to exist without the need for things. You exist and you observe, but that’s the sum of it. Life tends to simplify itself rather beautifully.” She spreads her arms out along the deck rail and gazes down into the water below. The sea is bluish grey, the colour of steel. I notice that some of the other passengers have come out on deck, the two tall sisters and a man in a purple blazer and Alec Maclane. The sisters are wearing identical blue mackintoshes, though there is no sign of rain.