When the Night Comes Read online

  It’s Soren.

  “What time is it?” I yell.

  He doesn’t answer, but I can see him now—his face, his hair all messed up. I touch my own hair, feel how it’s standing up at the back from sliding around my bunk.

  We go over again, pitch sharp. The fastenings on the curtains bust loose and let in this strange light. I’m looking down from my bunk into green and blue. Looking down into water right there through my porthole. My cabin underwater—cold and deep.

  “Christ,” Soren says as he slides down to the floor. He’s wearing his big jacket like he’s thinking of going outside, like he’s thinking about going out for a walk or something. He has a bottle in his hand.

  “Cheers!” he says loudly, and he leans up, swigs from the bottle. Nella comes back hard and everything’s the right way for a moment. I take advantage of the gravity, roll off the bunk. I find my trousers, my sweater, put them on quickly.

  A boot flings across the room, hits my leg. Something rolls around the floor—something hard. My travel clock. I grab it, shove it under my mattress. Coat hangers bang around inside the cupboard and we go over again. I brace against the bunk.

  Soren starts to laugh like a maniac. I think maybe he’s drunk. I try to help him to his feet but it’s hard to stand, hard to do anything. I let go of him. I drop to my knees, put my hands on the floor, and I start to laugh too. I give in.

  We make it out to the hall. We slide down the bulkhead and sit on the floor under the bright fluoro light. Soren winks at me, hands me the bottle. Whiskey. Canadian Club.

  “It’s my birthday,” he says.

  I look at him, at his face. I can’t tell if he’s joking.

  “Happy birthday,” I say.

  I wait for Nella to steady, put the bottle to my lips. I take a big gulp. It burns like crazy but soon I get the warmth, the glow. It creeps up my neck and face.

  “It’s really my birthday tomorrow,” he says, “but no sleep, so I say it’s my birthday now!” He puts his hand up in the air, pumps his fist. Victory.

  We pitch down.

  I slide backward up the bulkhead, spin away from him along the passage. I nearly spill the whiskey. I hear glass smash upstairs, furniture scrape and move. The cargo—God, the cargo stretching the chains, trying to break free one millimeter at a time. Did I secure everything right in the galley last night? I can’t remember. The fridges, the freezers, all the things that could become mush. Tomatoes, melons, all those eggs.

  I look down at my feet. I’m just wearing socks. One is blue and one is black. Close enough, I guess. I think about going up to check the galley, but there is nothing I can do really. Not now.

  None of it matters.

  We come back to the floor. Soren takes the bottle from my hand.

  “Let’s just sit here,” he says, like we were on the way somewhere else.

  I look at him, his face all shiny with alcohol. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me it was his birthday. I don’t know why he didn’t say. I wonder if I have anything that I can give him.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s just sit here.”

  Away from portholes underwater, away from flying objects not secured. Let’s just sit here down low, in the middle of our ship. Let’s stay here.

  Soren passes me the bottle again. I take a deep drink. I have catching up to do.

  The chain for the fire hose swings out, reaches for the opposite bulkhead. I watch it swing, watch it touch the bulkhead and scrape up against it. Sometimes the chain coils down when we go over for a long time, sometimes it snakes right down—a foot or more of chain resting there on the wall. I can’t take my eyes from it, the movement. This strange sideways gravity.

  From the rub marks on the bulkhead, I know that Nella has pitched much farther than this. Much farther. We are safe. The chain becomes our barometer, our comfort. The chain becomes our drinking game. When the chain rests on the bulkhead for more than five seconds we drink.

  We watch it swing.

  We count.

  We cheer.

  The warmth is all through me now. I’m in this bubble of warmth, of light. I’m in this bubble.

  Soren points at me, at my face. “You have to come in with me,” he says. He pokes my shoulder hard. “We’ll do food, bar food. Our music on the stereo. Our place!”

  He’s talking about his bar again. The one he always talks about. The one he is going to start in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen.

  People will come, you wait! Someone will turn all those warehouses into apartments. Students, couples, young people. They will all need a place to drink—I tell you!

  He’s pointing at me again. I can’t help but smile. I think about people living in the old slaughterhouses, cold and open and drafty, all bent with time and age. I can’t see it, but his enthusiasm is infectious.

  “Deal?” he says.

  “Okay,” I say, “deal.”

  We shake hands. His eyes only half-open now, not really focusing on anything. He’s twenty-one.

  I think how young that is. I think of all that is to come for him. I feel so happy for him, so excited for his time ahead. Time belongs to him.

  “Happy birthday,” I say again. I take the bottle and look at him, look in his eyes. “Skål,” I say. We are together. Comrades. Brothers-in-arms.

  The chain swings.

  The air-conditioning is churning round the smell of aftershave. Someone’s bottle must have smashed, one of the expeditioners, and the smell fills the lower decks, fills our passageway. It fills my lungs.

  Soren takes a mouthful of whiskey, but it comes spitting out, with laughter. With disgust.

  “God, aftershave really stinks,” he says. He wipes his mouth. “You have to make me a cake,” he hiccups.

  One of my eyes is twitching now. I hold my eyelid down with my fingers. He pokes my shoulder.

  “A cake,” he says again.

  “What kind?” I ask.

  “Ice cream,” he says after forever. After thinking hard.

  Out of all the cakes, he chooses something impossible. I think about the ingredients. I think about all the cakes I have made in my life. I can make any kind of cake but I’ve never made an ice-cream cake.

  My father used to send me a birthday cake every year. Every year, even though he was so far away, always at sea. Once it was an ice-cream cake with a penguin on it.

  A radioman. He could organize these things.

  “I only ever spent five birthdays with my father,” I say suddenly, out loud. I hold out my hand. Four fingers and a thumb. I look at them. They tingle, my fingers. The edges are blurry.

  Soren looks at me.

  “My father wasn’t a sailor,” he says, and he takes a gulp. “Pigs,” he says, and he bursts out laughing.

  I can hardly breathe I’m laughing so hard. I hear him say “pigs” again in a high-pitched voice, almost a squeal that can’t quite get out. We laugh together until there is nothing left.

  Nella pitches, we go up the bulkhead. Soren slides on his side and I lie on my back. The chain rests down, but neither of us can drink any more.

  And maybe it’s the talk of pigs, or the whiskey, but I’m suddenly hungry. Starving. I look at Soren. I can’t imagine him as a farmer. I can’t imagine him surrounded by pigs, and grass and wide-open land. But I can see him in his bar with all that industrial mess and chaos and music. I can see that. His dream is good.

  We make it up the steep stairs, pass Jens, the chief engineer, on the way. He nods at us, grease on his hands, on his jumpsuit. He looks done in. I go to ask him if he needs anything, but he waves me off, keeps on walking. I had almost forgotten that there were people up and working—up on the bridge and down in the engine room, the night crew keeping the rest of us safe. Keeping us going in the night, keeping watch in the storm. Heading south.

  The galley is in okay shape, knives and pans secure. A few plates smashed, a few cups. A thermos on the floor, rolling around. I pick it up, secure it in its spot.

 
Klaus locks up the store cupboards to keep out the hungry customers, but we know where the spare key is. I get it out, find the fresh black bread and butter.

  On the way down from home, when the mess boys went to fill up the big boiler, they found three frankfurters floating inside, boiled to bursting. A forgotten midnight snack. Klaus went crazy trying to find out who had done it. He said he could taste frankfurters in the coffee and in everything for weeks. Just the slight taste of them, no matter how much we scrubbed out the boiler. It drove him mad.

  I find the slow-cooked pork neck, the pickled cabbage. With mayonnaise and caperberries and pickled cucumber and cabbage, our pork sandwiches are good. We sit at the red booth and eat. We hold our plates, we hold the table. We brace when we pitch and rest when we don’t. We are on automatic, not even thinking about the storm, about the sounds of the water and wind and metal. And we don’t talk now. We eat until it’s all gone, until we are heavy and tired and satisfied.

  Soren looks at me, mayonnaise on his cheek. He puts his head down on the table, closes his eyes.

  “Should we go to bed?” he asks, his voice slurred.

  I look at the watch on his wrist. Almost 3 AM. I guess Leo will be up soon, but probably no one will make it to breakfast. It will be just sandwiches tomorrow. Sandwiches and coffee sent round. Light breakfast for the crew. Bread and cheese.

  I feel relief wash over me. It will be an easy day for us, too rough to cook. An easy day.

  Down in our passage, the fire chain still swings, but it’s not touching the bulkhead for very long now. Maybe sleep will be possible.

  “Good night, old man,” I say to Soren.

  He salutes, his eyes closed against the bright light. I watch him fall into his cabin. Happy birthday, I think.

  Tomorrow, I will tell everyone. Tomorrow, we will do something to celebrate.

  It’s only been a few months, but I feel like I have known him all my life. I can’t remember anything before this.

  Aalborg Harbor, Denmark

  3rd July 1986

  “Our home for the next nine months,” a voice says.

  I turn. Standing there next to me is a young man. A stranger. He is wearing the same uniform as me—a chief steward apprentice.

  “Soren,” he says. “My name is Soren,” and he shakes my hand. A strong shake, familiar somehow.

  “I’ve seen you around,” he says.

  I look at his face, at his blue, clear eyes. He is younger than me, maybe early twenties. I nod although I doubt he would ever have seen me. I don’t remember him.

  “How lucky,” he says. “I heard a lot about her and I knew instantly that I would very much like to be going.”

  He is looking up at the ship now, and so am I. She looks so big against the wharf, but she will feel small once we are out there on the ocean with all of us crammed inside.

  “Lucky. We are lucky,” he says. “Can you believe it?” And he slaps my arm, like a brother would, maybe, like an old friend, and I nod. “Yes,” I say, “it’s great.”

  He keeps on talking. He doesn’t seem to mind or even notice that I am silent. He just keeps on talking, blue eyes burning.

  “I have had three contracts with J. Lauritzen before this one. Two reefer ships and an oil rig in the North Sea. I came to some Mediterranean ports, Israel, lots of European ports, Central America and Chile. The oil rig was boring. Three weeks on, three weeks off. Twelve hours, day-in day-out, all the while going nowhere, so you can imagine how exciting that was!”

  I nod again and he goes on. He talks flat-out. He tells me that there have only ever been two chief stewards on this ship, a father and his son. He tells me he has a camera, a good one, and he is going to take photos of everything. Everything. Black-and-white, arty, classic.

  “Christ!” he says. “Antarctica.”

  Maybe I am glad of the company. Maybe it is just nice to have someone talk the way he does, on and on, so that I don’t have to think, or worry, or wonder what I should be doing with myself. I can just listen—I can just get carried away with the stories.

  I will be second cook and there will be nine long months working with this man, young and happy as he is. Against all my best intentions, I’m smiling now.

  I have this feeling everything in my life is about to change forever, that things will never be the same. I know it’s not too late to pull out, to go back to my island and get a job on a small fishing vessel, as I have done many times before. I can stay where I am, stay still. I don’t need to be sailing all the way to Antarctica. Maybe I don’t need to go.

  But when I look up, all I can see is the bright red of her hull, and there high on her bow is her name, painted in white. Words I have known all my life: Nella Dan.

  “Christ!” Soren says again, and he nudges me with his elbow. “We are lucky.”

  MID-TIDE

  Getting on the ferry was different every day. It depended on the tides. When the tide was high, the water lapped up on the concrete and tried to wet our feet, tried to grab our legs, and the ferry had to pull up right against the concrete because most of the jetty was underwater. It was hard to get on the ferry then, and Peter would pull us all on board, one by one.

  Sometimes we were late for school because it was rough and the crossing was slow. When it was really rough, when there were whitecaps and waves, we would play a game where you had to stand in the middle of the ferry with your feet together and your hands up in the air not touching anything. You had to try not to fall down. Whoever could stand like that for the longest time would win the game. I really liked that game—I liked the feeling of balancing high up on the water, of moving with it, like you were part of the ferry, like my body was part of its body, sailing on the cold water.

  When the tide was low, the ferry couldn’t pull right up along the wharf and had to stop at the very end of the jetty. It sat low in the water and we had to jump from the jetty down to the deck. Sometimes it was slippery. Sometimes it felt like a long way to jump—a leap of faith. My brother really hated that.

  The only time it was easy to get on the ferry was when it was mid-tide. When the tide was perfectly in the middle of low and high, when everything was balanced.

  Mid-tide made us all relax. When it was a mid-tide you knew it was going to be a good day. I would always hope for mid-tide, but it didn’t happen that often.

  The water was different every day and mid-tide came when you least expected it.

  A GIANT AT THE TABLE

  We were near the outskirts of the city and my brother wasn’t walking slowly like usual—his blue sneakers were right there, keeping up with my white ones. I kept my hand on the money in my pocket, on the twenty-dollar bill.

  It was so much money.

  Mum had never even asked for change or anything, and I didn’t know how much movie tickets cost, but I was sure that there would be some money left over for a drink or maybe something to share, like popcorn.

  I didn’t mind going with my brother. He was keeping up and I knew that he was probably smiling. I didn’t look across to see. I could just feel him there, and that was good.

  We saw a movie called Beat Street. My brother chose it and it was the best movie I had ever seen. It was full of music, full of dancing. There was only one scary bit when one of the main characters got electrocuted on the train tracks near the end. I had never seen a film where anyone died before. He left behind a young baby.

  He was a graffiti artist and he had painted some great work on the gray walls of the busted-up city in the movie. Somewhere in New York. Maybe the Bronx. A big city made of bare concrete.

  He made the city look better.

  After the movie, the walk back home wasn’t so long, it wasn’t tiring. We were carried along by the energy of the movie, the music, the freedom. At the old sweetshop on Hampden Road, we stopped and looked in the window at all the jars of flavored sweets. Jars and jars filled with bright pink and green apple drops, red-striped sticks of candy, soft yellow squares coated with powdere
d sugar. My mouth watered.

  My brother turned away from the window. He told me that he was going to start doing graffiti, not on walls or anything, just on paper.

  “Maybe in a notebook.”

  He was quiet then, until we were near our street.

  “I can’t draw very well,” he said and looked down at his sneakers. “But maybe I can do this and it doesn’t matter. Maybe I can just do it and no one can say it’s wrong.”

  I ran my hand along the fences as we walked, the picket fences, the brick walls. Bees hovered above a lavender bush, and there were roses a color I’d never seen before. Almost pink and almost violet but not quite either—just somewhere soft in between.

  “No one can say it’s wrong,” I said.

  When we got inside there was a giant in our house. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his chair pushed out so that his long legs could fit. Mum was sitting opposite him, her chair close to the table, her small yellow teacup in her hand with the matching yellow saucer in front of her.

  My brother and I stood by the door and Mum said, “This is Bo.”

  The man stood up. “Hello,” he said in a deep voice. “How was the movie?”

  My brother walked over to the table and sat down.

  “We saw Beat Street,” he said. “It was excellent.”

  There was a plate of biscuits on the table. Scotch finger. My brother was looking at them. I don’t know where they came from. We didn’t have any biscuits that morning.

  I put my hand in my pocket, felt the change that was there. I pulled it out. One bill and a few coins. I walked over and put it on the table near Mum. I could feel the man looking at me.

  “Say hello,” Mum said.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Isla,” the man said.

  I don’t know how he knew my name or how he knew Mum, but when he sat down again, I tried not to look at him, but I did look at him, at his face, and his eyes were gray-blue like the sea.

  THE WALNUT TREE

  Out in the garden, I showed Bo the walnut tree. He smoked a cigarette.