Sea State

“Let’s take to the high seas,” he says. “We’ll float for a bit and see where we land.”

He bangs his fist on the hull.

“Big, right? Like I said. She can take a beating.”

The galley stinks of sour milk. She has to shoulder the cabin door to budge it. The bed is lumpy. She has a strong sense that someone died here. They take stock. He likes the word “provisions.” She makes lists of what needs doing, he ties things down with messy but effective knots. On the day they leave, he steps aboard with the bird perched on his shoulder.

“I still don’t see why you won’t let the neighbours take care of it.”

“I be a crusty seadog and I needs me a bird!”

The bird hops off his shoulder and pokes around the deck. The motor heaves into life and they cast off. He cries “Full steam ahead!” as they putter out of port, the sky spitting at them.

They take turns at the wheel. He was hoping for a proper one, with varnished wood and carved spokes and gleaming brass, but it’s just a steering wheel. He blares the horn when they pass other ships. He finds a manky sailor’s cap, he wishes he had a pipe. She wobbles around the deck, pelted by the rain, trying to find where the sea ends and the sky begins, eyeing the gulls as they battle with the rain.

They play cards and board games, bet chores and favours in bed. He fiddles with the radio, an ancient, bulky monster, all clunky dials and the names of cities lit by a sickly green light. He listens to the shipping forecast and shows her the difference between moderate and rough, between rough and very rough.

She’s dreaming up a sea shanty about his mother.

“You know the front of the boat. Do you say it bow like know or bow like cow?”

“Cow.”

“Good.”

Think I saw a whale today. Not sure. Everything is grey. It hasn’t stopped raining since we started.

The bird is perched on top of the wardrobe in the cabin, picking at its feathers. The waves are getting up. There’s a giant swell. Her stomach turns.

“Just wait until you get your sea legs,” he says. “You’ll be grand.”

“Does it always take this long?”

“I gots me a soft-bellied landlubber of a shipmate!”

She bends over, thinks, This is how I’ll be until I die, a woman puking into a bucket on a boat in the middle of the ocean. The bird swivels its head at her and burbles.

They’ve had the bird since forever. He’s always insisted it was for both of them.

“It’ll be great company.”

“A dog is great company.”

The cage at home was enormous and ornate. It was draped in a velvet curtain, which he lifted at night to peek at the sleeping bird. He gave it treats of juicy worms and maggots he kept in a jar. He had it microchipped, inspected its feathers for lice. He stood in the garden, head tilted to the sky, watching it circle or flit from branch to lamppost to balcony.

We brought the weather with us. Been bucketing down for ages now. Forget what the sun looks like. But saw a whale! Definitely this time. Absolutely massive thing.

They’re lying in bed. The bird is on the sill, watching the rain snake down the window.

“When do you think it’ll stop?” she asks. “It’s been weeks.”

He looks out at the murk. “Soon. It has to.”

“It’s not normal, is it? This long, I mean.”

“Yeah, but it has to stop sometime.”

“Does it?”

The bird turns to look at them, bristles its feathers.

They hug the coastline until the coastline disappears. They see fewer ships. They can barely see anything. She clings to the wheel, the wipers frantically whipping back and forth. It sounds like the boat’s being ripped to shreds. Moving around has become a horrible risk. Yesterday she was thrown off the toilet and her head was slammed into the door. He goes below to check on the engine and the pumps. He’s gone ages. When he comes back up, he has the bird cradled in his arms and wrapped in a towel. He holds it close and rubs its head and makes soothing noises.

The radio is a din of panic and regret. The wind drops but the deluge continues. It eases to a steady thrumming, white noise they no longer notice until one day she notices that she can’t hear anything at all. When they come up, the light is too much for them. The heat is something fierce. They fumble around, squinting and blinking, hugging the rail. Their faces are washed out, their eyes sunken. The sky is cloudless. They have no idea where sea and sky meet, are surrounded by a seamless expanse of blue.

He pores over old maps and shipping charts with a compass and ruler, making little notes. She looks at them, frowns.

“We’re nowhere near there.”

“God knows the state of the currents now. We could wind up there yet.”

She looks out the porthole. The horizon is tilting back and forth. She grips the table.

They cast lines off the side. When they first came up, they’d been almost down to the last of the rations. She’d split the bird food three ways and ignored the bird’s hurt, baffled gawp. Now they plunder the ocean. She catches a fish like nobody’s seen, a gigantic, lumpen, stodgy thing with freakish eyes and teeth so sharp they cut her just to look at them. It takes the two of them to haul it in. He is in awe.

“A leviathan, risen from the depths! The currents, like I said. Everything’s where it shouldn’t be.”

The fish tastes thin, coppery. He feeds the bird carefully sliced pieces that it slivers down its throat.

Every day he stares at the flag, noting any tiny flutter. He’s looking for meaning in the few clouds in the sky. He tells her he saw a cirrocumulus. He tells her this is important, something about air pressure. He talks about hydrothermal vents in the seabed and undersea volcanoes creating tiny atolls in the Pacific. Every night at the same time he crouches by the radio and listens to its hisses and whines, head cocked, headphones askew, like a prophet searching for a sign. She looks at the names of cities etched on the glass of the dial. Hamburg. Helsinki. Prague. Warsaw . . . Budapest. Something bright flares behind her eyes. A bridge dusted in snow. The mournful sound of a violin. Hazel eyes and a crooked smile. A silken hand on her hip. She thinks, I met a lovely man in Budapest once.

They sometimes come across bodies serenely floating in the water like blissful tourists in a resort swimming pool. The corpses are bloated and rotting, and some have been got at by sharks, pieces of flesh hanging off them. She looks at their clothes and guesses at what a life could be. A man in an expensive-looking dark suit, bright tie and matching pocket square. Lawyer? Banker? She sees a woman in a flowy summer dress and remembers she had one just like it. They lean over the rail and rummage through pockets. He finds a driving license.

“How do you say this name?”

“Does it matter?”

The engine has a hacking fit. He pulls it apart and foosters with it for two days before finally declaring it banjaxed. The batteries die soon after. The glimmer from the radio dims. They light candles. The bird lifts its wings and monstrous shadows engulf the cabin. The toilet backs up. She pumps it by hand and a stream of piss and shit oozes into the ocean.

He tries to use the stars to guide them.

“There’s Orion’s Belt. And that’s Sirius,” he says. “The dog star,” he adds helpfully.

“I know,” she says.

After an hour of looking at the sky in puzzlement, he admits he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing.

They drift into a patch of debris so big that from a distance she thought they’d found land. It takes two days to pass through. The bird hops around, pecking at plastic. The world’s been coughed up. They sift through tyres, bottles, brushes, footballs, sponges, clothes. They salvage what they can use. A net for fishing. Toothbrushes. She’s hoping there’ll be some fruit, their gums are a mess. A bar of soap would be a blessing. He fills a barrel and sets it alight for a smoke signal. The plume is thick and rises high and reeks.

“You’re burning plastic?”

“Do you know where the nearest recycling centre is?”

The calendar says it’s March. That sounds right, more or less. Can no longer remember what March feels like.

She tethers the dinghy to the boat, floats away from him and bobs in the ocean’s insistent swell for hours. She clambers into the water. It’s like getting into a lukewarm bath. The sky’s been rinsed. The air fizzles. She’s getting used to the feel of the world. That sunset on the day they came up, a giant ball of fire being swallowed by the ocean. They sat on the deck, scuttered from the last of the booze, and watched the rotting carcass of an elephant float past. She pictured the plains of the Serengeti miles below, a heap of dead elephants and zebras and gazelles gorged on by tiny fish.

The blade glints sharpish when she slices open the belly of a fish. She likes the knife’s heft, the carved bone handle. She cooks over a makeshift grill on the deck. She hasn’t got sick of eating fish, but some nights she dreams of a steak so tender and juicy she wakes up in a mess of sweat and longing. Her skin is a riot of sores and peeling flesh. She picks at her ribs, runs her fingers over florid bruises. She doesn’t look in the mirror anymore. He paces the deck, muttering and tutting at the sky. The bird sits on his shoulder and makes mournful gurgling noises, nibbling at his beard. It never leaves him. He speaks to it in a low voice, and when she comes up, he goes quiet and gapes at her.

A whale comes up for air. She is stared at for many minutes by a colossal, deep blue eye. For several days the whale visits. It’s huge. It always blisters the surface near them, but not so close as to rock the boat. It’s careful with them that way. She thinks it must be old: skin mottled, scarred, banged up. One flipper looks like it’s been chewed. They don’t see the whale for weeks, then she spots it floating on its side, fluke and flipper stiffly upward, its great eye clouded. There is a deep, gurgly, blundering roar, then in one vomitous rush that churns and crimsons the ocean, the whale’s insides empty out: its stomach, its lungs, its guts, its mighty heart.

I can’t remember how it is to stand on dry land. All I have is this constant rocking under my feet, the horizon forever up and down, the soft slap of the water against the hull.

He has the bird in the crook of his arm, and he’s whispering to it and nuzzling its head. He throws up his hands and feathers glisten in the sunlight and the surface of the ocean is dazzling. The bird flies around the boat several times, perches on the flagpole, then seems to sense he wants it to fly farther. It moves its head several times, then flits off. They watch it go until it’s a dot in the sky.

Three days pass. Without the bird, he’s bereft. He clutches the rail and peers at the sky, mumbling. He asks if it was a mistake to send out the bird. She doesn’t answer. He doesn’t join her down below. She’s woken by the sound of sobbing. He’s at the rail, his back to her, his bony shoulders heaving, a puddle of piss at his feet. When he hears her, he flinches. She tells him to get some rest. He shuffles across the deck and takes faltering steps down into the hold.

She’s gutting a fish, her hands slick with blood, when she feels a tiny quake in the air. The bird collapses on the deck. It’s in bits. It judders, gives her a slick yellowy mess of a stare. She picks it up, holds it close to her. Its heart is quivering. She glances below, hears him snoring. He won’t give up. He’ll send it west next time. Or south. It doesn’t matter. She’s sure the bird will return bedraggled and heartsore, its beak empty again.

She snaps the bird’s neck in one swift movement, holds it for a moment, then lays it gently in the water. She watches it float away until she can’t see it anymore. She turns, glances at the knife, and goes back down below.