Knot tying, though painful, is relatively relaxing compared to my other tasks. I pressure hose the deck twice a day. I scrub it top to bottom, and tidy all the gear away, carrying heavy machinery and tanks of petrol. I clean all the windows, wiping away salt and grime from both sides of every glass surface. I clean inside, too, vacuuming cabin floors, mopping and scrubbing the kitchen, wiping down every surface and making sure there isn’t a drop of sitting water anywhere, especially in the freezer area. Sitting water is a boat’s nemesis. It causes rust. It makes things stop working.
The first few days after departing were spent unpacking and correctly storing supplies. There is food enough for an army aboard, as it needs to last us months. Yesterday I started learning about the nets. The Saghani is a purse seine, with nets 1.5 kilometers long, so the crew spends a great deal of time maintaining these nets, their weights, cables, and the enormous power block, which I think is a mechanized pulley system and rears into the sky like the claw of a crane. I have yet to see any of it in action, because we’ve been navigating our way through perilous waters in search of a school of herring that may not exist. The nets have “corks” along one edge, which are bright yellow floating devices, and these have to be coiled into a circular pattern so they don’t tangle. This, too, cuts open the blisters on my fingers, but I coiled and coiled for eight hours, practicing so that when the nets are actually in use I’ll be able to do this quickly and economically. After that I went back to cleaning what was already clean.
I think they’re trying to break me.
The crew doesn’t want me here. They were bewildered when they heard the new plan, the new path. They’re frightened of sailing waters they don’t know, that their skipper doesn’t know. They resent me for it.
But what they don’t suspect is that I love every second of the backbreaking, laborious eighteen-hour days. I have never been so exhausted in my life, and it’s perfect. It means I sleep.
* * *
The Saghani powers slowly through thick ice off the coast of Greenland, splintering it into huge chunks that will be expelled from our path. The sound is like nothing I have ever heard. Great cracks rend the sky, huge whooshes, and always the persistent rumble of sea and engine combined.
I pull my windbreaker tighter about me; even with three thermals underneath I’m still cold, but it feels good. Freezing wind bites at my cheeks and lips, drying them, cracking them. I am being allowed a rare break from my duties to witness the passage. Up in the bridge stands Ennis, carefully navigating his vessel through the dangerous ice. I can see him through persistently salt-rimed glass and under an angry gray sky, just the thick dark beard. In fluorescent orange Samuel stands beside him, reading the gauges. The others make a steady route from stern to bow, monitoring the ship’s passage and watching for chunks big enough to cause damage to the hull. They shout in a language that seems foreign to me, as everything they say on board does. Things like abeam and forepeak and belay.
The terns haven’t left Greenland yet. I’ve been watching the little red dots on my laptop obsessively, knowing it will be soon. Until they do we are staying in the Saghani’s normal waters, hoping for luck.
Ennis decides the route we take; he is the one who finds the fish, and so the livelihood of his crew depends entirely on his ability to scour this enormous ocean. I haven’t spoken to him since I came aboard. I rarely see him, except at a distance behind the helm. He doesn’t eat with us. Basil said this is normal—he’s likely up there studying charts and weather reports and sonar tracking devices, the weight of his responsibility lying heavy upon him.
“He’s in the heart of the hunt,” Anik told me on my first day, as though I should have known this. “It makes him separate. Other.”
“He’s just making sure we don’t all die, and thank the Lord for that,” Samuel muttered, lighting two cigarettes at once and passing the second to Anik.
This is how I am learning about the captain of the Saghani—from afar, in the snippets his crew members offer up. He has skipper’s quarters, whereas the rest of us share a cabin between two, the rooms all adjoining the small mess room and galley. I’ve been placed in Léa’s cabin, and she’s unused to having a roommate, to say the least. She doesn’t speak to me, except to bark orders, and the cabin is barely big enough for both bunks. The only reason its tiny size has been endurable so far is because I’ve been too tired to lie awake in the heavy dark and imagine I am in a coffin.
“Franny, outta the way!” Dae shouts as he thunders past. I jump clear in time to hear him holler, “Berg at two degrees port!”
I peer over the railing to see what he’s talking about. There’s an iceberg jutting out of the layer of flat ice surrounding it, and we are angled directly for it. Presumably its shape means the bulk of it extends much deeper into the sea, whereas the rest of the ice sits mostly atop the water. The icebreakers can’t cut through a berg. It doesn’t look big enough to do proper damage but I suppose that’s what everyone on board the Titanic thought. And given the noises being made by the crew, I’d say we’re in trouble.
“Brace for impact!”
Basil wrenches me into his chest, pressing us roughly to the deck. The juddering impact sends us sprawling, and my shoulder connects heavily with the wall. I wince as the boat corrects itself once more. If Basil hadn’t grabbed me I might have been flung overboard. He’s already bolting off down the ship. I struggle to my feet and keep a firm hold of the railing. We’re past the iceberg and angled away—we must have clipped the edge of it. I can see ice-free ocean up ahead and my hammering heart doesn’t know whether to speed up or slow down.
It’s not that I want us to sink or anything, but that was exciting.
“Clear!” Ennis booms from his balcony once we’re out of the ice.
“Aye, Skip!” Léa calls.
“Nicely done!” Mal shouts.
Ennis heads down the stairs and I watch him stride to the point of impact, throwing a heavy rope ladder over the side. I lean over to watch him climb down and check the damage to the hull, completely at ease on that rope. Water sprays his body, but he only climbs lower, reaching to touch the long scrape and judge its depth. When he’s satisfied he swings up and over, landing with a heavy squelch of boots. “Cosmetic,” he tells the waiting crew, who let out a stream of relieved curses.
“You all right, love?” he asks me, the first words he’s spoken to me since the night we met.
“Look at her face,” Mal says, and as they all clock my expression, whatever it is, they crack up laughing. Even Léa is chuckling, though Anik only rolls his eyes.
Ennis smiles as he passes me, clapping me on the shoulder. “It’s got ahold of you now.”
* * *
“Hey, Franny, wake up.”
No.
“Come on.”
Someone is dragging me from my bed. It can’t be dawn already. I blink blearily and see Dae.
“What are you doing? Let me sleep.”
“Dinner’s on.”
“I’m too tired.”
“You’ll never survive if you don’t eat.”
I can see he’s not going to be deterred so I haul myself to my feet and stumble into the mess. Malachai makes room for me to slide in next to him at the corner table. The booth seats are a sticky, peeling brown leather and when all seven of us are wedged in it’s a tight fit. A small brick of a television is mounted on the wall above us and we all crane our necks to watch one of the four DVDs they have on board—tonight’s screening is Die Hard, which they can all, without exaggeration, recite word for word. I rest my head on the back of the seat and let myself nod off.