Dead Water (24 page)

‘I’m Eric. Hello.’ It is too late for reassurances. All he can do is make way for her. She runs lightly out of the room.

He hears the kitchen door come open and Vibeke’s voice, muffled by distance. Confronting mother and daughter together is more than he can handle. Let them discuss him for a minute, if they want to. Let Vibeke find him in here, what does it matter? Anything to get away from that kitchen, that yellow melamine, that bloody tea.

He explores the room. On the desk, between the piles of bird-watching pamphlets, he sees something. A cherry-red something. Hideous. He picks it up. He turns it over in his hands. Red leather.

It is Lothar Eling’s notebook. He opens it.

Perturbations will disrupt even an ideal, frictionless fluid, if it is effectively unbounded. So the weather will not die.

By some of Eling’s sketches, the professor has added a line or two in the margins. There is other writing too. Cartoon snakes with dizzy eyes. Vibeke’s girl has been laying crayon over Eling’s testament, his dying words. How could Vibeke let her daughter do that?

Beside the notebook is its case: a stiff, once waterproof wallet, stained now, scribbled over with felt-tip pens and flecked with shards of rub-on transfer. Head of cat. Leg of cartoon dog. Eric crams the notebook into its case and pockets it.

Vibeke and the girl, Else, are waiting for him in the kitchen. They are staring out of the kitchen window. He comes up beside them and he sees what they see, which is to say, nothing: a vast, still, grey pool. The Taff has burst its banks. Water, heavy with silt and coal dust from Taff Merthyr and Trelewis Drift, has overrun the convolutions of road, park and playground. Isolated by the rising flood waters, already the children’s play apparatus has lost its landward familiarity and acquired the eerie mantle of abandoned dockyard machinery.

‘It’s going to come in the house!’ Vibeke runs into the living room. Her daughter follows. Eric stares out of the window at the swelling gutters, the film of dirt winding fingers through the weedy lawn under the window. He is trying to get the sense of this, the scale, but he is a stranger here, he does not know the lay of the land, all he can see is the corner of the child’s playground, the edge of a street, a few feet of lawn...

‘Else, mind out the way!’

‘But Mummy, I want to help!’

They are in the front room. Vibeke is plucking maps and books up off the floor. She’s stuffing papers at random on top of books ranged along high shelves. She pauses, staring at the shelves. ‘They’ll never hold,’ she says. ‘When the wall gets wet the shelves will never hold. Christ.’ It’s only a prefab after all: panels of plaster held together by prayer.

Still, Eric can’t muster anything like Vibeke’s sense of urgency and a grotesque suspicion springs to mind: what if this sudden flurry and panic is just something she
does
? What if flood drill is part of her domestic routine? He knows nothing about Vibeke. She has, after all, for years been counted among the mad.

‘Oh, God.’

What if this is just something she does? Every time a drain gets blocked, or leaves jam a gutter, or a main bursts...

At his feet he notices a spreading stain. He is seized with infantile horror – a visceral shame at the disobedient body. The stain spreads and spreads, between his legs and into the room, towards the frantic woman and her child. He turns, and the hall is wet, black with smuts. Something – a sort of fur – is growing up through the pile of the hall carpet. It is wet, but it is not water. It is more mineral than that. It has a colour and a sheen. It is the solid earth gone fluid around him. It prowls around his legs and tucks itself under a decrepit divan piled with toys, picture books and crumpled washing. ‘Vibeke.’

A smell fills the room: loose stools and rancid food. The vomit of Gabalfa’s sewers.

Her hand to her mouth, Vibeke gazes around the room, her eyes wide and helpless. Else, taking her cue from her mother, starts to cry. What can they do? It will all be destroyed. It is inevitable. The dolls in the kitchen are already drowning in the black slurry pouring in through the back door. The flood is over the soles of Eric’s shoes, now. A fresh cold seeps between his toes.

Eric crosses to the desk. He lifts the lace curtain and looks out.

The streets are running with water. If it is water. Black water. Wavelets criss-cross each other, sheets drawn up over a bed. ‘Dead water.’ He remembers this. ‘The propeller churns, but the boat doesn’t move.’ Children are running about. Splashing. Men and women wade through the street in wellington boots, carrying suitcases, carrier bags, nothing at all. He looks from house to house. He’d thought these structures follies, rosy-spectacled half-gestures. These houses are not childish. They are the product of an unspeakable and very adult realism. Their shabbiness is not an accident. It is integral. It is
meant
. Bodies, atom-flashed against these plywood walls will leave no prints, for the walls will fall away as fast as the bodies evaporate. These buildings have been made to serve present need, because the present is all there is –

‘Eric!’

He looks at Vibeke, her elfin face thickened and coarsened by time. Her eyes, once mischievous, are merely schizophrenic now. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

What would she have him do? Canute the waves?

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing!’

Eric Moyse’s merchant fleet served the Allies well during the war. His office preserves letters of thanks from the British Treasury, the US Maritime Commission. But Eric, while serviceable, has always had his sights set on the greater prize. Boxes and boxes and boxes in boxes. Whoever won that war won the world – but it was Eric’s world they inherited. A world in a can.

Eric spent the larger part of the war behind a desk in Roosevelt Street, New York, with a view of the tumbledown East River pier. In those days the congested Brooklyn waterfront was lined with piers, transit sheds, multi-storey factories, all of them just a stone’s throw from the water. Now the factories of Brooklyn are empty and all the clever money has moved south to deep water, new cranes, new railheads in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Eric is by now the undisputed king of discards, of Liberty ships and Victory ships. His fleet has cost him virtually nothing, and with it he has changed the face of the earth. Armed with an IBM 704 and a simulation punched into a stack of perforated cards, Eric has tripled the profitability of ships sailing between Hawaii and Oakland. Year on year his tracking systems grow bigger, more capable, and more expensive. In a single year he spends about $400,000 on computers to keep track of the 30,000 shipping containers plying his Pacific routes.

Eric Moyse’s container shipping is the saving of American forces in Vietnam. In 1968 the US Army is taking more than two weeks to unload a boat at Saigon and its cargo tracking is so poor that the wharves at Cam Ranh Bay are disappearing under the most bizarre surpluses. Hawaiian shorts. Crosses and candelabras. Eric Moyse’s newfangled containershipping operation ensures that US troops receive the right resources, on time, to prosecute the war. The line makes good money from the service, too. It used to be that ships supplying Vietnam returned home empty. Not any more: Eric Moyse has opened a trade route between Yokohama and the west coast of the USA and his ships return from Vietnam laden with Japanese textiles and televisions.

Though the doctors give him the all-clear, and it takes him no more than a night’s observation in hospital before he’s dried off and on a plane back to New York, friends and observers generally agree that 1960 marks a watershed in Eric Moyse’s life. Gabalfa drowned and Cardiff Arms Park under four feet of slurry. He is never quite the same afterwards. People say the dark has taken him. Certainly, you can date the chunky sunglasses that are so much his visual signature from this date.

Blinkered, taciturn and monstrous, his eyes hidden from the glare of a whiteout that exists, by now, almost entirely in his own mind, Eric writes out endless lists. Antwerp, Felixstowe, Hamburg, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, Kobe, Rotterdam, Tilbury, Yokohama. He sketches maps, charts, diagrams. He writes letter after letter to Power Electronics International, Inc., proposing investment in ‘a gantry crane with one end of the bridge rigidly supported on one or more legs that run on a fixed rail’. He carves out territory after territory.

While his competitors are digging deep, investing in a new generation of high-performance cargo ships, Eric Moyse has his managers trawl breaker’s yards for old oil tankers: big, slow ships, too wide for Suez, that steam around the world at walking pace. Every week, and on the hour, one of these rusting tubs disgorges your raw materials at the right quayside, on to the right trucks. What do you care how many months it’s been at sea? Eric has seen what his competitors have not seen: that speed is not essential for a container line.

*

Friday, 23 July 1971

Eric has booked a table at the Dorchester in London’s Park lane to wish Havard, his adopted son, a happy twenty-fifth. The Greek-American shipping tycoon Ari Onassis is staying at the same hotel. The men don’t like each other much, but they can hardly ignore each other; not when they’re sat at neighbouring tables in the same gold-papered dining-room.

Ari’s finding it as hard as anyone to wrap his head around Eric Moyse’s commercial reasoning. Jokes about Moyse’s ‘decrepit’ and ‘obsolete’ fleet have become a staple of the better business sheets. How can such a slow, antique fleet be winning so much business? Now is not the time to pursue the finer points of commerce. Better to simply tease the little man.

Ari has not met Eric’s son Havard before but, like everybody else, he feels he knows him already. Havard has broken out on his own with a boutique that’s the rage of Soho. Richie Havens and Joan Baez were both seen wearing his threads at the Isle of Wight festival. Of course, Havard doesn’t make the clothes. According to the papers he spends most of his time off his face in a corner of Manor Studios. Havard’s playboy lifestyle distracts from a series of small, canny business decisions that have placed him, in his tender mid-twenties, at the heart of London’s burgeoning music, art and fashion scene. In jumper and jeans he looks out of place here; he also, very obviously, has the sense of entitlement to run roughshod over the dress codes of establishments far more exclusive than this one.

Ari pushes his plate roughly towards the waiter. ‘This isn’t what I ordered.’

‘Sir?’

‘Bring me the beluga.’

‘Sir, this is –’

‘No, it isn’t.’

Tight-lipped, the waiter takes up the untouched plate and carries it back to the kitchen.

Moyse stares at his foie gras, heart hammering with embarrassment.

Havard merely laughs. Ari impresses him. His cheek, his wit, his bigness. At the same time, Havard’s bright eyes hold something more than humour. They carry something of his mother’s schizophrenic shimmer – as though his visual field were no more than a parade of glossy surfaces.

The waiter brings Ari Onassis a fresh plate of caviar. The eggs are now appreciably bigger than before. Glossier, too. One can only hope the waiter spat on them.

‘The trouble with you,’ Ari says to Eric, ‘is you have unimaginable wealth, yet you do not demand the best. It’s indecent. It’s unfair. Me, I always demand the very best. It’s criminal, my friend, what little fun you get out of life.’

What is Eric supposed to say to that? ‘I’ve had my moments’?

Eric has got Havard a gift done up in plain brown paper. (An affectation: why couldn’t he just have bought gift-wrap like everyone else?) Ari reaches across the table and picks it up. ‘What’s this, then, a present?’

Havard’s eyes glitter – when movement at a neighbouring table distracts him. Even Ari (turning the parcel over and over in his hands, barely resisting the impulse to open it) notices this: ‘If it was a girl you were ogling, I could understand.’

Havard starts. ‘Sorry.’

‘Does the gentleman owe you money?’

‘Nothing like that!’

‘Well? Out with it.’ Ari, who consumes everything, eats everything, tireless in his pursuit of everything.

Havard says: ‘He’s Said bin Taimur. The Sultan of Oman. Or was. He lives here now, in the hotel. I’ve heard he keeps a parrot.’

Ari puts the packet down again beside Moyse’s plate.

‘What is that, anyway?’ Havard says to Eric, aping Ari’s rudeness. He hasn’t Ari’s cheerfulness, or his scale. He sounds merely petulant. Spoiled.

Moyse sighs. ‘For you.’ He winces as the boy tears the paper roughly off. It is an ugly object. A square of – well, by its colour, what would you say? Old upholstery? Rotten meat? Inside the pocket is a book, bound in the same vile red leather.

‘It belonged to Lothar Eling,’ Moyse says. ‘The man I found on Foyn. What was left of him.’ How to explain what this book signifies? The spin of oceans. The incommensurability of desire. The circulation of the blood. Last, and critically: dead water. ‘Your mother got him this notebook when she was a girl. A Christmas present. For his journey on board the
Italia
.’

Ari, exasperated, drops his fork – tiny as a toothpick in his fist – on to his plate. It tings. ‘You got him a
book
?’

Havard says: ‘Oh, Ari, for heaven’s sake, this is
history
I’m holding. Lothar Eling invented weather modelling.’

Eric stares at his son. Where did he pick up this knowledge? With a sinking of the heart, he remembers Peder Halstad. Peder would have taught young Havard this. Peder has been more of a father to the boy than Eric has ever been.

‘The weather?’ Ari sniffs and goes back to his food. What’s the weather to him? He and Eric and Erling Næss and all their generation have spent their lives ordering bigger and bigger vessels, to the point where storms cannot baulk their ships, cannot force a change in their courses, can hardly slow them down. They are beyond weather now.

‘Is this my mother’s handwriting?’

Moyse looks: