Magic Monotony

One thing follows another. I had just spent three weeks crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a cargo ship carrying 25 tonnes of potash from Hamburg to offload in Tampa, Florida, and then doubling back round the tip of Florida to take on kaolin miles up a wriggly inlet at Port Royal, near Savannah, Georgia. I watched or felt every yard of the 6000 or so miles we travelled at a stately average of fifteen miles an hour. My capacity for staring had developed beyond even my expectations. Conrad writes of ‘the magic monotony of existence between sky and water. Nothing is more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.’ I sat on a small deck, like a veranda, at the back of the ship, the MV Christiane, and watched the ocean like a vigilante as we passed over it, loath to miss a single wave or trick of the light retexturing the water, so that I had to drag my eyes down to the book on my lap, or force myself to go back to my cabin to work or sleep. Even at night, the rabble of stars demanded to be watched, and how could I ignore the effect of the fiercely shining moon, lighting up a brilliant pathway in the encircling blackness of the surrounding sea? Night-time on deck was special, like being awake in the early hours in a darkened hospital ward and seeing the night nurses sitting at dimly lit desks, or gliding silently about to check on sleeping patients. While I walked on deck, and the majority of the Croatian crew got their rest, one of the officers kept watch on the bridge, and an engineer attended to the gauges in the thudding depths of the ship’s engine room. That someone is awake and keeping watch in a pool of light when night is at its blackest is very comforting.

After a very short time, when you are travelling so far at such a snail’s pace, and with no urgent need (or in my case, any need at all) to get to where you are going, you become an aficionado of detail. I took on the task of witnessing the sea, as if someone, somewhere had to be constantly alert to its shifts and nuances, and here and now the job was mine. I kept an eye on the window when I brushed my teeth for fear of missing something. It was not a fear of missing dolphins leaping, or whales breaching, or a tornado five miles off withdrawing back into its cloud: though I did chance to see those events as I kept watch. It was a fear of missing all the nothing that was happening. The more ocean I watched, the more watching I needed to do, to make sure, perhaps, that it went on and on and that the horizon never got any closer. But simple witnessing is not easy, and I began to notice, with increasing irritation, my need to describe and define what I observed, when all I really wanted was for the sea simply to be the sea. I found myself constantly thinking of it in terms of something else, as if I were reading it for meaning, which was not what I thought I wanted to do at all. The sea was like shimmering mud, I heard myself think, glossy as lacquer, slate-grey, syrupy, heavy silk billowing in the breeze … it was like this, and then that. It’s true that it did change all the time, but the most remarkable thing about it was that it was always and only like itself, though I couldn’t manage to keep that thought firmly in my mind, which, being a human mind, was also like itself and probably couldn’t help it.

I devoted myself to keeping track of the smallest changes in the sea, or the weather, or the progress of the incessant painting of the ship by the crew in the futile effort to impede the attack on its metal and wood by the salt, wind and water. Twice a day or more I examined the charts for the current longitude and latitude to check our progress and our exact whereabouts in the middle of the entirely featureless ocean. I wasn’t bored, I was enthralled by the journeying, by the minutiae of the passage of miles and time. I watched our wake elongate behind us, like a snail’s trace, disturbing the sea’s own pattern into a visual account of where we had been in an environment that offered no other clue that we were making any progress at all. But always, in the distance behind the ship, the sea would close over the anomalous agitation, and return to its normal undifferentiated condition as far as the horizon. The frothy turbulence of the wake proved our movement, but the record of it was continually lost, rubbed out by the vast body of water that healed all the scars scored by whatever made its way through it.

There is never perfect solitude, I’ve learned.

‘Always you sit reading or looking at the sea, but you are not unhappy, not lonely,’ said the third engineer, as if he were asking me a question.

None of the crew could understand why the few passengers they carried would volunteer for such an existence. They were all quite clear that they were seamen by necessity. There were no jobs in post-war Croatia. Captain Bruno Kustera was a great-bellied man, entirely at the mercy of gravity. Everything about him tended downward: his belly, his chin, his jowls and the corners of his eyes and mouth. He made ruefulness his own. ‘Pirate stories made me a sea captain,’ he told me. ‘But now it’s routine. Just back and forth across the Atlantic. But what to do, there is no well-paid work at home. Always I go back and forth looking for work somewhere else. I would like to work in shipping, but on land. No one loves the sea. Do you know anyone in shipping circles in London?’

I didn’t. He shrugged.

‘You know, the Cold War was a wonderful thing. If you didn’t like one, you could believe in the other. Now, it’s all the same.’

He had been tending a pair of pigeons who came aboard for a well-earned rest, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. He made sure there was food and water for them on the bridge, and they lived quite contentedly up there for a couple of days, until a ship passing in the other direction, heading back to Europe, called time on their vacation and they left.

‘Why don’t you get a cat?’ I asked, when he shook his head sadly at the loss of the pigeons. ‘What about a ship’s cat?’

His big eyes drooped. ‘No, it is difficult. An animal has to be owned by one man. And also at sea you always find someone crazy. That one would torture the cat.’

Towards the end of the trip we waited in a flat desert of sun-blasted water for the local pilot to come and tow us up a creek through the torrid desolation of an alligator-infested swamp to the improbably named Port Royal in South Carolina. Captain Bruno joined me at the rail. There was nothing in sight but the utterly still greenish water, no wind, and the only sound, with the ship’s engines off, was a humming of the saturating heat. I had been marvelling silently that I had at last found myself truly up shit creek without a paddle.

‘This looks like the end of the universe,’ I murmured.

He smiled with mock appreciation at the emptiness on every side of us, and launched into a sardonic hymn to his existence.

‘Our bosses, they are experts at finding wonderful places for us to go. I expect you never dared to dream in your life that you would come to Port Royal. Nor did I. Port Royal’ – he put his fingers to his lips as if extolling an exquisite rare vintage – ‘these Americans. You will see what is there. Nothing. Nothing but the Last Chance Saloon. No, it is true. You will see it at the end of what they like to call the harbour. We are in a dream, or a nightmare. This is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Moranda. The lost land. You see, they have a very special kind of kaolin in Port Royal. We will take two holds back to Europe of Port Royal kaolin, and the six holds of the ordinary kind we loaded in Tampa. It is best not to get them mixed up. We are specialists in not getting our kaolin mixed up.’

‘You must be very proud,’ I laughed.

‘Oh, very proud,’ growled Captain Bruno, repeating it diminuendo as he turned and made his weighty sweat-soaked way back to the relative comfort of his cabin.

*   *   *

I had no trouble at all living with the melancholic irony of these men as I kept watch on the passing minutes and miles. They were, in spite of their dissatisfactions and landlubber dreams, real seamen, understanding and even appreciating the necessity for the tedium that meant they were making it safely to the next port. Freighters can be very old and are lost at sea, I was assured by a well-wisher before I left, at a rate of several a month. Apart from the officers, the crew dined together on a large wooden table on the lower deck at the back of the ship, joking, or being quiet, accepting the particular ways of each other, drinking moderately, because they knew their lives depended on working and living well together, and being alert. They cleaned and oiled the machinery, sanded and painted parts of the ship, replaced worn cables, and checked the emergency supplies on the lifeboats with attentive concentration. They worked because the work they were doing was essential. They spruced the ship, washed and ironed their clothes, scrubbed down the decks, kept everything stored and stashed, because orderliness was the only way to survive months at sea in a confined space with thirty or so other people. It was an education in institutional living. They fully understood the purpose of all this. The sea is dangerous; a ship full of potential for lethal accident. They took care of the ship and of each other. If there was a cat torturer among them, it was not obvious who it might be. Which, of course, doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.

About two hundred miles south of Bermuda, in the Sargasso Sea, in sweltering June (it was in the mid-30s Celsius by seven in the morning), I was woken at 5 a.m. by a terrible noise. The screaming of metal breaking up had something hellish about it, as if Neptune and all his sea imps were tearing the ship apart. There were sounds of shouting, men calling to each other, and trainers thumping along the corridor past my cabin. I wondered alarmed but sleepily if they were not shouting ‘Abandon ship’ in Croatian, but I’d had a heatwave headache the night before and taken a sleeping pill. I decided I’d rather go down with the ship than abandon it at such an hour. It turned out that the air-conditioning fan had catastrophically loosened, got out of line and one shaft had smashed irreparably. They did not, the chief engineer explained at breakfast, have a replacement fan on board. It was too hot for the loss of the air-conditioning system to be merely inconvenient. The day before I had been down to the engine room. It was like descending into my own headache, deep in the centre of the ship. The heat and airlessness were stunning, and the ubiquitous drumbeat deepened into a deafening roar down by the line of giant pistons pumping power to the massive screw that drove the propeller. It was not, however, entirely oppressive. The engine room was a fantastically clean, pale green cathedral as well as a fiery furnace; a vast space that soared up from the bowels of the ship to the open hatches, four decks above, through which the sky could be seen. In the middle of the day the engine room was reaching a temperature of 48 degrees Celsius. They would just have to make a new shaft for the fan.

‘Can you?’ I asked.

‘We’ll have to,’ he said.

The chief engineer and half a dozen crew members worked all day around a brazier on the lower deck, straightening the remains of the broken shaft and forging a new piece of metal to fit it. By the early evening they were setting it in place. The screaming began again almost as soon as they turned the air-conditioning plant on. They returned to the deck and the makeshift forge. I slept fitfully in the suffocating heat. The next morning I woke to a cool air-conditioned cabin. At breakfast I learned that they had worked all night, and the chief engineer, glowing with pride, waved sleepily as he went off to bed for the first time since five the previous morning. The crew radiated heroic achievement, wafting their hands triumphantly around the cool air in the corridors as I passed them. I applauded appreciatively. They bowed. It was, of course, a welcome challenge in the general tedium of caring for an ageing ship at sea. The energy of having solved a problem that had looked impossible gave the whole company an air of gaiety for several days. For a while they seemed quite contented with their seafaring lot. Even the lugubrious Captain Bruno (‘They are a good crew. They work hard. No, I do not tell them. I write to them when the trip is finished.’) expressed his appreciation at the job they had done by declaring a fishing fest the following evening after we had entered the Gulf of Mexico.

I woke from a late afternoon nap into an uncanny silence, and it was a moment before I realised the ship was still. The incessant throb of the engines had stopped (‘Ah, the music of the engine room,’ crooned Captain Bruno). It was like a death. Heart failure. When I looked down from the small deck by my cabin, I saw below me most of the men, twenty-five or so crew and officers, side by side along the rails at the back of the main deck, dangling lines into the sea, shouting and joking to each other. Marco, the bullet-headed second engineer, wearing a great yellow sun across his mammoth stomach and baggy shorts that ended in the middle of his calves, a brute in boy’s clothing, waved at me.

‘Come and fish.’

The deck itself, usually immaculate, always cleaned and washed down daily, was bloody carnage. Everywhere there were buckets and tubs full of small silvery fish, the ones on top writhing and flapping in the drowning air. The deck was alive with a plague of gasping fish that had used their last energies flopping themselves out of their containers to achieve no more than a solitary death, or been unhooked and flung down by the fishermen so that not a minute of fishing was wasted. The young cabin boy slithered around picking up the slippery arching creatures and throwing them into the buckets, before running off to find new containers for the great haul. Hundreds and hundreds of fish lay around, dead and dying, waiting for their turn to be gutted by the smiling, patient cook and his assistant. The cook sat on an upturned bucket and wielded his knife like a sushi chef, with just a thrust or two removing what had to be removed, throwing the bloody intricate waste down on the deck where his assistant eventually scooped the mounting pile of entrails into a bucket. Every now and then one of the men called out to him, and he stopped preparing the fish for long enough to cut more strips of the squid he had defrosted for bait. His task was impossible, there was no keeping up, but he smiled and worked on. The men were catching three or four fish on each line every few seconds, and the fish in these parts appeared to be suicidal.

‘You see,’ Marco said, seeing the look of horror on my face as I picked my way through the corpses. ‘They love to be caught. It is their destiny.’

Marco handed me his line – generously, because this was an informal competition between the men who trumpeted out their current score to each other. The out-and-out champs were Marco and the second mate, who fished unsmiling like a man possessed, pulling in his catch and casting again immediately in case any fish whose destiny it was to be caught by him was lost. Marco showed me how to throw the line out away from the side of the ship, and in a moment there was a tug and I yelped my ambivalence while Marco instructed me on the correct technique for pulling in the line. Three fish dangled and danced on the hooks. I was paralysed. I’d never fished before, and when Marco told me to manoeuvre the fish off the hooks I wailed my misery at being the cause of such misery. I was hopelessly squeamish about grasping the desperate, dying fish and having to wrench them off the hooks. Marco was disappointed. So was I. We both had higher hopes of me. Did I like fishing, Marco asked. Yes, I did, but I didn’t care for actually catching fish. Nevertheless the men all congratulated me at having pulled three fish out on my first try. I accepted being patronised as what I deserved and gave up my fishing lesson to sit on an upturned bucket amid the dying fish and watch the men relaxing and goading each other, just enough, not too much.

Only Marco appeared contented with his sea life. At home he had a wife, a cat and a son who is in the Croatian water polo first team. He seemed proud of all of them, especially the cat. And of the crew. Not a brute after all, almost a sentimentalist was Marco. ‘You see how well the men get on? They have fun now, but when there is problem, everyone serious. Everyone pay attention. I like this life. Peaceful.’ It seemed to be Marco’s job, with his Sun King outfit and his grunting comments, to make people laugh. ‘I never eat chicken,’ he bellowed at Franju the steward, dismissing the plate he was being offered at dinner (all the men disliked chicken; it was often all there was to eat during the war. It was the food of desperation). ‘They are too stupid. I don’t eat stupid things. Don’t eat egg, also. What more stupid than an egg? In a few hours it becomes a small chicken, then a few more hours, big chicken. That’s all.’ He shrugged dismissively. He ate fish though. Soon the barbecue was hot and the first fish were laid on it. Out of the sea and into the frying pan. About as delicious, these fish (‘What kind of fish are they?’ ‘They are fish.’), as anything I’d ever eaten. However squeamish I was about catching and killing them, I had no trouble eating these nameless creatures. Marco explained the difference between America and Croatia as he continued to pull fish out of the water and I watched.

‘In Croatia the food is fresh, the wine is domestic, the women good. In US the women are unloved, the flowers have no scent and the food is tasteless.’ His favourite film was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘The Indian,’ he said with a smile. ‘The Indian.’

As I said, a sentimentalist.

They had all been through the war with Serbia, but no one wanted to talk about it much. There was a small deep pool that was filled every morning with sea water. One day, I swam in it with one of the crew who had just come off duty. He was a quiet man, who I had noticed looking at me from time to time with a shy interest. We talked, treading water. He was in his forties. I asked him about the war. He winced.

‘I fought for three years, but what for? Now no money, no job, no food in Croatia. Tudjman,’ he shook his head in disgust. ‘I had to fight. I got woman and three children. But I don’t hate anyone. I went to school, and learned engineering, geography and history. Then I get a letter telling me I have to pick up a gun and kill people. I like people. Tito was good. Serbs and Croats lived together before the war. Will live together after the war. When Croatia was part of Yugoslavia we were not independent, but we had jobs. Can we talk about something else? Something we can smile about?’ We were silent for a bit.

‘You are beautiful. Would you like to drink tea when I come off duty at midnight?’

I declined. He nodded that it wasn’t a problem. He left the pool after a while and I lounged in the water with my back to him. Suddenly, he called out. I turned towards him. He was standing by the edge of the pool holding up one of his shoes, size 15, and one of mine, size 4. He smiled slightly. Nostalgically, perhaps. Sadly. Wistfully.

‘Look,’ he said.

Back in London before I left, a woman acquaintance had looked horrified when I told her about the trip I planned.

‘But aren’t you frightened about being on your own spending weeks and weeks isolated with so many men?’

They were after all men, and three weeks without a woman but with one in sight would, she supposed, turn them into ravening beasts. But the same rules for surviving in an enclosed community were applied to women as to living with each other and caring for the ship. They took care (as I did) not to disturb the balance of the group. There were surreptitious looks from some of the men, not those long aggressive stares that can become anything, or downright invitations, but glances I would sometimes catch that I had not been supposed to see, thoughtful, interested, but not to be acted on. And there was a kind of comradely flirting between Marco and myself that we both kept well below critical level. The invitation to take tea was slightly shocking in the careful atmosphere, but my refusal was taken as lightly as it was made. It even had a touch of old-fashioned romance about it. On other occasions when we met in the mess, my friend would tell me about his life, his hopes of setting up a small engineering factory, the music he liked. He smiled at me a lot, and bought me a beer from time to time. He would often be in the pool when I was swimming. And he asked me about myself and my life. It was clear that I could have chosen to intensify the contact if I wished, but I think he trusted me not to, at least until the end of the journey. There was a pleasing formality about my relations with the crew, as if we were all capable of living in earlier times, when these things were better ordered. It seemed we all knew how to maintain boundaries and not to let dangerous sex get in the way of good relations. It was more important that they got on with one another. Sex could wait until they arrived in Tampa, when the day before was spent washing and ironing their shore clothes, shaving off stubble, and in the first officer’s case, removing his wedding ring. The girls were waiting on the quay as the ship docked, waving and laughing, and the men lined the rails, as they had when they fished, discussing which girl they were going into town with.

‘When I am in Tampa, I am not married,’ the first officer said with a broad bright white toothy grin when another passenger, Roz, asked what had happened to his wedding ring at lunch before we docked.

‘And in Split, when you are in Tampa, is your wife also not married?’ I asked.

He smiled happily. ‘No. She is always married. She has two’ – he extended his arms sideways as if they were being buoyed up – ‘lifeboats … the two children to keep her good.’

After lunch, Roz and I agreed that he probably meant millstones.

*   *   *

Between the silence and delicately boundaried encounters with the crew, I read Conrad and concurred with him on the seafaring life. Magic monotony. Enticing. Enslaving. And disenchanting?

Travelling with no purpose is a purposeful business. I had put myself in the way of a long sea journey. The destination was of no concern to me. In fact, when I arranged the trip, the MV Christiane was scheduled to travel first to Rio de Janeiro and then up to Georgia. Only two days before I was due to leave, the plans were altered, the ship was leaving several days later and skipping the South American leg. Freight timetables are notoriously changeable, the profit margins are critical, companies will revise their schedules from one day to the next, sometimes in mid-journey. If you travel by freighter you’d better not have any definite plans or firmly fixed destination. I was sorry the South American stop had been cancelled, but only because it meant a shorter journey. I was prepared for a trip of six weeks or more before I arrived at Savannah, Georgia, after which I had made no firm plans except to purchase an open plane ticket back to the UK. A long sea voyage was the only point of the trip. Why? An exercise in sensory deprivation, I suppose. To find out what happened when one day followed another, one mile followed another and each was exactly the same as the last. What was a person left with, when there was no landscape except the curve of the horizon, and no anticipation in arriving somewhere you wish to be? How was it when the day by day went on, when only the routine demanded by the human needs of eating and sleeping distinguished you from your surroundings, whose single rhythm was the rising and setting of the sun? To be accurate, it wasn’t so much that I wondered about how it was, as that those were the conditions I wanted to be in. But still, in all that silence and lack of interference, wouldn’t there be something to listen to? I’m always supposing that if I can get things quiet enough I’ll hear something to my advantage. Like the fish on the hooks, I wriggle away from activity, companionship, wanting to launch myself into nothingness where I will find … what? The fish find themselves gasping on deck, out of their element, suffocating in the poisonous inimical air. Somehow, I’ve developed a notion that I am more than a fish. Doubtless that’s what the fish think, too. Get out of the water, get away from the circumstantial, and then we’ll see.

*   *   *

There is never perfect solitude, a person is a fool to set out in search of it. A fool, at any rate, if they are disappointed by not finding it.

There were two couples apart from me travelling as passengers. Fogey and Roz were in their seventies, returning home after taking a holiday from a farm in Arizona. She was neat as a button, a large easy-care American matron; Fogey was silent most of the time, though he was known to ask for the peanut butter sometimes when it was out of reach at breakfast. Neither was talkative, but they weren’t unfriendly. They were insular Americans, had taken a peek at Europe, but were uneasy at finding themselves in a strange world, in strange company. At breakfast, lunch and supper, we sat with the officers and after a decent interval of polite conversation – the weather, how they had slept, where we were – they slipped into silence.

The German couple, Stan and Dora, from Lake Constance, were also in their seventies, and they weren’t silent. They were travelling with their brand-new, super-equipped, bells-and-whistles mobile home lashed to the top deck. They were planning to spend a year travelling around the States. They talked without stopping, without thinking, it came to seem. They were determined to speak as much English as possible before they disembarked for their New World adventure. What they talked about and how their audience responded appeared irrelevant. They lived in a bubble of their own perceived needs, like children. They were also a neat pair. Spruce, rather. Stan and Dora were several sizes down from the American couple, with well-nurtured bodies and immaculately cut, short white hair. They were turned out for a cruise: she wore silk scarves with naval emblems on them, he wore studiedly casual slacks, well-ironed polo shirts sporting an anchor or a knot on the breast pocket, and rope-soled deck shoes. These two had no idea of how to coexist with strangers. They buzzed like flies across all the careful boundaries. It seemed to me that they stalked me, so that no matter which secluded corner I discovered for myself, they found me there sooner or later.

‘Ah, you are here.’

Dora babbled. She spoke entirely inconsequentially, staring at me as she talked with intensely blue, intensely vacant eyes. ‘I brush my teeth after every meal. We must all brush our teeth after every meal.’ ‘I love all kinds of potatoes. Boiled, roasted, fried, chipped…’ ‘You were not at breakfast. Where were you? I said to Stan, “Where is she?”’ ‘You are reading a book. I like to read books.’ ‘Ah, you cannot change the past.’ ‘My mother always said that Hitler would be bad for us.’ All of it was spoken in a monotone, with that staring look in her eyes, as if she were trying to recall and practise phrases she had worked up the evening before from her English book. Perhaps that’s exactly what it was, but her eyes were uncanny. Behind her glasses they dragged downwards at the outside corners, as blue and dead as standing pools. Nothing lit them up. She watched Stan, who liked to think he spoke better English than Dora, make his declarations about the world – ‘It is good’, ‘It is not good’ – with her unchanging cold fishy eyes, while the rest of her face expressed devoted interest. Stan talked as much as she, mostly with reminiscences of his travels around Europe thirty years ago. He told the Croatians everything he knew (and they certainly did) about Dubrovnik, and me everything he knew about London, as if he remained familiar with these places he hadn’t set foot in for a generation. At mealtimes he would complain about the state of Europe. Germany in particular. It was being overrun with ‘Arabs. Not trust Arabs.’ He rubbed his well-manicured fingers against each other. ‘Money. Only money. And now they live in our cities with their minarets and their wawawa.’

I left the table at that point, but Roz told me that he had continued unperturbed and gone on to complain of Berlin being overrun by Russians, to which the usually uncommunicative Fogey had quietly murmured, ‘Well, that makes a change.’

One morning Dora found me sitting on deck, reading, and after admonishing me for not eating fruit at breakfast (‘You must have fruit. Fruit is good for you.’) asked me my age.

‘Ah, you are one year older than my daughter. I could be your mother,’ she announced in a blue-eyed monotone. While this was chronologically possible, it was, aside from being inane, so historically and geographically inaccurate that I had to fight the gasp that rose in my throat. She then placed a firm hand on my right cheek, and bending down planted a brisk kiss on my other cheek. I froze through the maternal moment. Eventually, I managed a coldly polite and somewhat inappropriate ‘Thank you’. But the panic stayed with me. The next afternoon I was in the wash room, wondering why the hell I was ironing a shirt in the blistering heat of the day. Dora found me again.

‘Ah, you iron.’

I nodded my agreement, and sweat fell from my chin. She didn’t rate my technique.

‘No, no, you must open the buttons to iron correctly.’

She approached the ironing board with her hand outstretched ready to correct my sloppy ways. Reality began to slow down for me as she started to open the top button. I had to make a physical effort not to slap her hand out of the way.

‘NO.’ I actually bellowed at the harmless old woman as you might shout at a child to prevent yourself from lashing out. ‘Leave it alone. Don’t touch it. Do. Not. Touch. It.’

My face must have matched my warning tone. Dora started and then backed away. She was alarmed and quite baffled by my excessive reaction to her helpfulness. I didn’t care to discuss with her how much she couldn’t have been my mother.

‘Yes. It is your ironing. Yes,’ she soothed, leaving the room without turning her back on me. But her surprise was no greater than mine at the rage I’d expressed. My admiration for the crew’s capacity to live together increased greatly.

Dora and Stan’s blandness and blank insensitivity were monumental. They spoke regardless of who was listening or what anyone else was feeling or thinking. It was a rare, infantile quality that I should have relished having the chance to observe. But the brutality of not observing other people was too stark in these cloistered surroundings, and as it turned out, nothing that happened to other people had any real impact on them.

I appreciated the distant good manners of Roz and Fogey all the more as the days with the German couple passed. Fogey turned out to be a radio ham and had set up an aerial outside his cabin, and without my asking fixed one for me outside my window so I could catch the World Service. He spent most of his time listening in and talking to strangers on his short-wave while Roz sat and did crosswords. Roz had been widowed, and after two or three years had married her brother-in-law, Fogey. They seemed content together. We were three days away from Tampa when for the first time the two of them arrived late for breakfast, clearly distressed, looking grim and drained, although Roz, who sat next to me, was, as usual, carefully and neatly dressed.

‘Didn’t you sleep? Was it the heat?’ I asked, and then saw that it was more than that.

‘We had some bad news last night. Very bad news.’

At ten the previous evening Fogey had got a call on his radio from Arizona. Roz’s 48-year-old son, Fogey’s nephew and stepson, had died suddenly that morning, probably of a heart attack. Roz told me this in an undertone, her voice just making it to the end of the sentence and her eyes welling but managing to suppress the tears. There was nothing they could do but wait for the ship to get to Tampa and then fly to her son’s home in California for the funeral. The luxury of distance became an agony of time. The vastness of the Atlantic, the immutable sea-ness of the sea, the perpetual horizon that promised more and more of nothing, all of which I was so relishing, transformed in an instant from the mile after mile to the minute after minute that had to be lived through by a woman stuck in the middle of nowhere, cut off from where she urgently needed to be, suffering an unimaginable loss, among strangers. Now the sea was just an intolerable inhuman space to be covered before Roz could get back to her family for the funeral of her eldest son.

‘I’m sorry,’ Roz said with agonising politeness. ‘I’ll try not to be morbid for the rest of the journey.’

Fogey was silent as usual, slowly chewing his toast and peanut butter, until Stan asked if anyone knew where we were.

‘We’re in the Doldrums,’ Fogey said with geographical accuracy, and fell quiet again.

Stan and Dora were exercised that morning about filling in their US immigration forms, something about which annoyed them. Throughout breakfast they complained loudly about the US authorities and not being allowed to depart in a year’s time from any port that was convenient to them. They went on and on about American bureaucracy and how in Germany this sort of thing could never happen. And on and on, inviting the whole table to share in their exceptional troubles. Nothing about Roz’s demeanour, or my reaction to her news, silenced them. Later on deck I told Dora what had happened.

‘Aha, I felt there was some sadness at breakfast. But how annoying is the immigration. Yes, it’s a bad thing when a child is dead before the mother is dead. Well, that is life.’ Her eyes as blank as ever. I had the impression that she was still quoting from her phrase book.

Roz told me before they left that while all the crew had offered their sympathy in words or with a silent handshake, Dora and Stan had said nothing to her about the death of her son. But Dora, about whom I felt so unreasonably angry, who, I have to say, I actually hated, was right about life. That was life. There had been another death during the journey.

Udi had been dying for several months before I left for Hamburg to join the MV Christiane. We were quite recent friends, although I’d known him for several years. I would see him at the table of mutual friends; once or twice I went to dinner parties at his house. But out of the blue, so it seemed to me, from time to time, he would phone to tell me he liked something I’d written and why. I received his compliments awkwardly. I was reserved. Udi was not. He had a flair, an insistence even, for friendship which made me nervous. Once or twice he called simply to say that he liked me. That excruciated me because I had no idea how to respond to such a statement. As when Dora kissed me, I could only manage a polite thank-you. Udi was fully married to and in love with his wife, but he was innately a seducer of people. His flirtation wasn’t a demand for an actual sexual relationship, but part of a general campaign: a refusal to allow anyone he decided he wanted as a friend to escape into reticence. His forthright offers of friendship were, as I said, uncomfortable for me, but they were appealing too. He made liking someone and wanting them in his life seem easy, whereas it was what I found most uncannily difficult. I’ve rarely made relationships of any kind with anyone who didn’t make more effort than I, who didn’t in some way or other, insist. It’s a safety feature of my psyche. I am paralysed by the idea of being said no to. If there are compulsive seducers in this world, there are also compulsive seductees. On the scale of things I wouldn’t take an emotional risk for, friendship comes higher than a sexual relationship. It is more mysterious, more dangerous to me than a sexual affair, which I can easily relegate to a game and walk away from with a shrug. I am perhaps a child of the sixties. Or something. Sex can be serious, but it doesn’t have to be. Friendship feels like a much weightier matter, but something I haven’t ever quite got the knack of. Whenever I have most felt the dizzying deranging vertigo of betrayal (or of betraying), it has been in the context of friendship.

Ten months before my sea journey Udi and Judy came to my birthday party, all dressed up, bearing gifts and celebration smiles, and found me flopped in an ancient T-shirt and threadbare jeans on my sofa in front of the TV.

‘Are we early?’

‘By a week.’

We went to the local Indian, overdressed and underdressed; all of us delighted somehow by the discomfort of their mistake and the disruption of my idle solitude. The friendship started properly that evening. A week later, Judy came to the actual party alone. Udi wasn’t feeling well. He was going to see the doctor in the morning. It was cancer. An investigative operation discovered a large tumour in his stomach. He checked with doctor friends and with anything he could find on the internet on his particular cancer and the stage it had reached, and concluded that he would certainly die of it, but had perhaps another three to five years. He was fifty-six. First thing back from hospital, he bought a Harley.

His wife took the emotional brunt of his death sentence. With his friends, Udi discussed the matter. We talked, he and I, about his absolute conviction that the end was the end. The terror of that, and the comfort, too. There was nothing to fear but nothingness; all the sadness was about the abrupt end of life, the interruption of his marriage, the awful fact of not being able to watch his youngest son grow up, the effect on his family. But the blankness of after the end came up often between us. He was unwavering about the reality of his dying and in refusing to fantasise about anything beyond it. Perhaps – almost certainly – his acceptance was not as complete as it seemed. It was as if he was trying on its reality for size, adjusting himself to its monumental dimensions. Our conversations were quiet testings of feelings of what was, or was not, to come, for him sooner, for me later to one degree or other. I found myself thinking a good deal about the condition of not yet having been born. Hardly a condition, but a state of non-existence which we had all already not-experienced. The nonsense of language reaching towards the void it was not equipped for, developed as it was by the living for the living, made us laugh.

‘So you’ve already not been. How was it for you?’ I asked.

‘It didn’t bother me at the time.’

Of course, there was time in that non-existence, or there would be. The beginning would come. The other nonexistence abolished time for ever. But the more I thought about it, the more I tried to use the time before my birth as an idea to make death more tolerable, the angrier I became at having been excluded from the events that occurred in history, which is what we call the period before our personal arrival on the planet. I felt the same kind of panic and personal betrayal at having not been born for all that time, as I experienced at the idea of the world going on without me after I died. I hated the idea of those who would be part of my life getting on with their lives before I arrived, just as I didn’t much care to think about people getting on with things, individuals, or great social and political forces, after I have died. I felt the rage of the not-yet-born along with the rage of the dying at being extinguished. We may try to console ourselves that death is not the end of the world, but it’s the fact that it isn’t the end of the world that is so blindingly difficult to cope with. I didn’t do much more than mention these thoughts to Udi, whose perspective on the subject was at that moment more practical than mine.

Within a couple of months, Udi was back in hospital. This time things looked worse. He reduced his estimate of surviving three to five years down to maybe a couple of years. Udi’s life expectation drained dramatically away over the next few weeks. His time grew less with each new medical intervention. Eventually, after an operation intended to give him some respite, he was told that there was nothing to be done except pain management, and that he had only a matter of weeks to live. He had never ridden the Harley. Now he had grown too weak to hold it upright. He sold it back to the dealer. The dealer was upset about Udi.

‘I’m gutted,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ Udi replied.

During the final weeks, Udi held court at home. A kind of permanent party began, as his hundreds of friends came to be with Udi before he died. Judy had to organise a timetable to accommodate them all, so that there wouldn’t be too many people at once, and there was time also for his family to be with him alone. It was the most explicit dying I’ve ever come across, a wake with the subject the living host. In hospital they had to give him a side room because of the number of his visitors. At home, Udi received us on his sofa, manipulating his morphine machine to keep pain at bay, allowing us to provide a lap for his sore legs, demanding that we massage his feet, and continuing his life-enhancing seduction of the world. He was smoking again, having given it up when he got ill, and given up giving up when he was pronounced terminal. ‘So shoot me,’ he responded in hospital when a nurse in the day-room told him he was in a non-smoking ward.

I last saw him the day before I left on my freighter trip. He had left hospital. We sat at the kitchen table, drank coffee and smoked. I could see him tiring after an hour, but I found I couldn’t make myself get up from the chair. I had never said goodbye to anyone before, never a goodbye that was so consciously, so absolutely final. I had no idea how it was to be done. My difficulties in ending a friendship were as great as in beginning one. I didn’t know how to approach Udi’s person and kiss him and then leave the room, the house, knowing that I would never see him again because he would die before I returned. It was outrageous, something that neither my mind, nor my muscles could take in. Monstrous. It was another half an hour of sitting as if we had all the time in the world before I managed to stand and walk to the end of the table. I bent down and kissed him.

‘I know you’re sure there’s going to be nothing, and I expect you’re right, but just in case it turns out that there is … feel free to haunt me if you find you can,’ I said.

I meant it. I didn’t want to lose this man, this friend who made it so easy to be a friend, to oblivion. He had made a place for himself in my memory, but I didn’t want to lose my place in his. Death is always about the loss of self, even when it’s someone else’s death.

*   *   *

After three weeks we landed at the commercial dock in Tampa. It would take three days to offload the potash. Roz and Fogey left to fly to their son’s funeral. The crew, spruced and eager, took off into town with the waiting girls on the dock to buy American bicycles for their children and cruise the bars. I walked unsteadily after so long at sea across the blank tarmac to a small wooden building on the other side of the dock where the stevedores drank coffee and played pool, and where there was a public phone. A small, salmon-pink cartoon cloud frothed by over my head. Flamingos, I realised, more astonished by that than by a salmon-pink cloud. Exotic, vividly coloured, weirdly ornate flowers grew in the bed in front of the unassuming building, and a US flag flapped lazily on a pole beside the door. Mack trucks, shiny leviathans, polished lovingly by their keepers, were parked, like horses tied up while their riders drank in the saloon, waiting to pick up goods. Telegraph wires sang high-pitched and tuneless in the bathwater-hot air. Behind the door of the building as I approached it, I heard Stan shouting, screaming actually, in German. Then the door flew open and he came storming out, followed by Dora. He was wiping his arms across the air in front of him in a repeated gesture of annihilation. Seeing me approach, he changed to English.

‘They are no good. America is no good. In Germany the phones work. In America nothing works. No good. No good.’

He was an infant having a tantrum. The phone used cards which the waiting girls on the dock sold to the crew, so that they could phone home before their night on the town. Stan couldn’t get his to work and so the phone system was defective, the card a scam, America already a broken dream. I offered to help with using the card, but he wasn’t going to try again. There was no point. It was all no good. Dora followed behind, her eyes icily inexpressive, as he stamped back to the ship.

My phone card worked fine. I called Edinburgh to speak to my daughter at university, for the first time in the best part of a month. She sounded pleased to hear from me, everything was OK. That lurking anxiety fell away. Then I called Udi’s number. Judy answered. Where was I calling from? How had the journey been? Was it what I’d hoped for? It’s still an event to phone someone from far away after a period of silence. Then – how had we evaded it for so many moments? – how is Udi?

‘Oh, Jenny. Udi died a week ago.’

It was no surprise. I echoed her sigh with ‘Oh, Judy’. I probably said I was so sorry. Neither of us spoke as if something unexpected had happened. Judy told me how the end had been. He had been in a hospice for ten days, holding court as usual. Judy said it seemed impossible that he was going to die. But he deteriorated over the final two days until he slipped into a coma and died in the early hours with Judy and his two older daughters sitting at his bedside. The funeral was in a couple of days.

I left the stevedore’s building and returned to the ship. I spent the rest of the day out on deck, watching the bird life through binoculars, and the men craning the potash out of the holds on to moving belts that dumped it via a hopper into the warehouse. If I thought at all, it was about how my nothing happening for weeks and weeks on an ocean-going freighter had not been so uneventful after all. Not for others. Not for me. Well, that is life. Around five, as evening was setting in, I went in to the galley to make a cup of tea. I put on the water heater and stared out of the window waiting for the water to boil. Explosively, as if I’d received a blow in my lower spine, I doubled over and tears started to flow. Udi’s death, the reality of his not being in the world any more, hit me, kicked in, quite literally it felt. By the time I got back to my cabin the tears were streaming down my face, and once the door was shut and I was private, I began to sob. Mostly I cried for myself, for the loss of Udi as a friend. I was wracked with sadness, bereft, quite unable to stop crying. It went on for an hour or so, and then there was a knock at the door. I wiped my eyes, though not very effectively, and opened the door. The third engineer, whose cabin was next to mine, stood in the hallway looking worried.

‘Are you ill?’

I explained that I had just heard that a friend of mine had died. He looked sympathetic, and said he was sorry. I said that I’d known he was going to die, but still, hearing that it had actually happened …

‘Yes. It is always terrible. Were you very close?’

‘He was a friend.’

He nodded seriously. ‘I am going in to the city for the evening. There is a cab coming. You come too. We will go to a bar and have a drink and see America.’

I thanked him, but said I thought I would stay on board and have a quiet evening, I wasn’t feeling very much like socialising. My friend’s smiling face took on dark, worried expression, and he shook his head.

‘It is not good to be alone when you are sad. You must make an effort. Come out for a drink. Enjoy yourself.’

No, I said, thanking him for his concern, I was all right, but I wanted to be on my own and quiet this evening.

‘It is bad to be alone. You must not be sad and cry. Yes, your friend is dead, that is a shame, but you are alive. You must live. Life goes on. You should come out and enjoy life.’

He spoke insistently, almost angrily, it was more now than just going into the city with me. I said as definitely and finally as I could manage without offending that I appreciated what he was saying, but that I would be staying on board. He shook his head one final time against mourning what was lost rather than grasping what still remained. I wanted to remember, he didn’t. He had his reasons, I’ve no doubt.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I must get ready.’

The following day I called my friend John in Phoenix, Arizona, who I’d met on a previous trip to Antarctica. We’d kept in touch by email.

‘Come and stay,’ he said.

I had another couple of days aboard the Christiane, before I disembarked in Savannah, and no definite plans.

‘Let us know what flight you’re coming in on. We’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘No, I don’t think I’ll fly. I’ll take a train.’

I hadn’t thought about it before I said it, but it seemed I wasn’t finished with watching the miles go by.

I returned to the Christiane, my cabin and my bunk, happy to feel again the gentle uncertainty of a watery existence. There was just a day or two left before I was permanently back on dry land. I idled the rest of the afternoon away recalling a message I once, long ago, left for myself and had only recently picked up.

I am nine years old, in bed, in the dark, in my bedroom. The detail of the room is perfectly clear. I am lying on my back. I have a greeny-gold quilted satin eiderdown covering me. I have just calculated that I will be fifty years old in the year 1997. Hard as I try, ‘fifty’ and ‘1997’ don’t mean a thing to me, aside from being the answer to an arithmetic question I set myself. I try it differently. ‘I will be fifty in 1997.’ 1997 doesn’t matter, it just complicates the thought I am trying to grasp. ‘I will be fifty.’ The statement is absurd. I am nine. ‘I will be ten’ makes sense. ‘I will be thirteen’ has a dreamlike maturity about it. ‘I will be fifty’ is simply a paraphrase for another senseless statement I make to myself at night: ‘I will be dead one day.’ Or, ‘One day I won’t be.’ I have a great determination to feel the sentence as a reality, but it always escapes me. ‘I will be dead’ comes with a picture of a dead body on a bed. But it’s mine, my bed, and a nine-year-old body. When I make a picture of the body as old, it becomes someone else. I can’t imagine myself old, or dead. I can’t imagine myself dying. Either the effort or the failure to do so makes me feel panicky.

Being fifty is not being dead, but it is being old, inconceivably old, for me at nine, that is. I know other people are fifty, and I will be fifty if I don’t die beforehand. But the best I can do is to imagine someone who is not me, though not someone I know, being fifty. She looks like an old lady: the way old ladies currently looked. She looks like someone else. I can’t connect me thinking about her with the fact that I will be her in forty-one years’ time. She has lived through and known forty-one years to which I have no access. I can’t believe I will become her, although I know, factually, that I must. I can’t dress myself in her clothes or flesh and know what it feels like being her as I know what it feels like being me. This is immensely frustrating. I do the next best thing: I send a message out into the future, etching into my brain cells a memo to the other person, who will be me grown to be fifty, to remember this moment, this very moment, this actual second when I am nine, in bed, in the dark in my room, trying to imagine being fifty.

In my cabin moored at the dock in Tampa, Florida, I have been fifty for the past year, and I am recalling the nine-year-old who tried to imagine me. I mean that I am recalling her trying to imagine me, at that moment, in bed, in the dark in her room, some forty-one years ago. It is easier for me to acknowledge and know her than the other way around, for all that I have learned about the unreliability of memory, because I have lived the missing forty-one years that she could know nothing about. There is a track back for me. The vividness of her making a note to remember the moment in the future when she is fifty is startling. But it is not a simple, direct link. I have the moment, but the person I connect with is someone whose future I know. I do not know the nine-year-old as she was then, at all; the one who had not yet experienced the life I led between her and me. I can’t imagine her as a reality, in her striving to understand what kind of fifty-year-old woman she would be, because she doesn’t exist any more except as a pinpoint in time. But she now has an indelible relation to me looking back through time, that I could not have for her aiming forward. There is a sense of vertigo, something quite dizzying about having arrived at the unimaginable point she reached out towards, at recalling her message and being in a position – but not able – to answer her question: here I am, it’s like this.

It’s not just the nine-year-old’s illusive reality that prevents me from responding, it is also my own present inability, aged fifty, to imagine what it is like to be fifty. I know no better than she. I’ve heard a lot about it, read plenty, seen numbers of fifty-year-olds, both depicted and in real life, but that seems to be no help at all. This isn’t surprising. The fifty I seek to understand in order to answer her question is the same fifty I wondered about as a child, and it turns out to have nothing much to do with having lived for fifty years or more. I don’t know what it means to be fifty. I have no idea what to say to my nine-year-old self who thought that she would know what fifty was like once she had reached it. And I suppose the other question she asked herself, the one about the reality of death, will also remain a question, even though I etch into my brain cells a memo for the time of my dying to remember me now, this moment, as I lie in my cabin in the dock in Tampa, wondering how it will be.