“What the hell are you doing in there?” Dae shouts at one point, wrenching me from my doze.
“What time is it?” I ask groggily.
“One a.m.!” Dae shouts, not for my benefit.
“Patience!” Basil’s voice comes from the adjoining galley.
“Can’t I please just go to bed?” I ask.
Mal and Dae find my sleep-addled state highly amusing.
“Not coping too well, princess?” Léa asks me coldly.
I sink lower in my seat and ignore them all.
Samuel sits heavily, placing a shot glass in front of me. “This’ll help, lass.”
I don’t have it in me to argue, so I do the shot. It burns so outrageously that I spit half of it over the table and cough until my eyes water. Which makes them all laugh even more. I eye Samuel suspiciously. “Was that revenge?”
He grins. “I am a peaceful man. An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
Samuel pours shots for the others.
“I hate the stuff, too,” Malachai sympathizes as he lifts his to his lips.
“Good luck,” I mutter.
Someone gasps. “Putain de crétin!” Léa snarls.
“What?”
“Don’t say good luck, moron!”
“Why not?”
“It’s bad luck.”
They’re all staring at me. I spread my hands. “Well, how was I meant to know?”
“You don’t know shit,” Léa spits.
“So tell me.”
“First lesson,” Samuel announces.
“Don’t ever step onto the boat with your left foot first,” Léa says with a horrified shudder.
“Don’t leave port on a Friday,” says Dae.
“Don’t open a tin upside down,” says Samuel.
“No bananas,” Léa says. “Or whistling.”
“No women on board,” says Basil as he emerges from the galley with a plate in each hand. He winks at Léa as he says it. “Don’t worry, we live dangerously on the Saghani.”
Samuel and Dae stare at the plates they’ve been delivered. And rightly so. There is a small, slender S-shaped curl of spaghetti, artfully painted with delicate swirls of red and yellow sauces and finished off with shards of what looks like parmesan, wedged perfectly between the pasta so they stand aloft. To be honest I’m surprised there’s much fresh food at all, but we’ve only just begun the journey—according to Dae the menu will go steadily downhill over time.
“What…” Mal can’t even finish. He appears to be swallowing the urge to scream, or possibly having a stroke.
“What’s this meant to be then?” Samuel demands.
“Spag Bol,” Basil says as he returns with more plates. “You said you wanted something normal so here you bloody go.”
“But … how?”
“It’s deconstructed.”
“Well … can it please be reconstructed?”
I can’t help it. I cover my mouth and laugh.
Dae manages to grab all the leftover bits and pieces and heap our plates with a normal-sized serving, while Basil grumbles about overeating in the American populace. I’m handed a bowl with plain spaghetti because they know by now that I’m vegetarian. “Not even fish?” Basil demanded when he found out.
“Not even fish.” This piece of information was met with a great deal of suspicion.
After dinner I do the washing up and wipe down the kitchen, and then, because the food has woken me up a bit, I pour myself a few fingers of whiskey to quiet the noise in my head, and go up onto the main deck to smoke.
We’ve left the midnight sun behind. Night has found us.
I wander to the bow so I can watch the endless stretch of black sea. It’s calm now, mostly, and quiet but for the engine’s rumble and the ocean’s shhhhh. We glide along at a cracking pace, headed south. I light a cigarette, knowing that when I start I can’t stop, and that I’ll likely stand here and smoke an entire packet, one after the other in an effort to survive the night. The poison of the smoke feels good in my lungs; it feels damaging.
“Ennis says this is the only true wild left.”
Samuel appears beside me.
I gaze at the dark expanse of it and know what he means. I’m glad now that Dae woke me—I haven’t had a moment to think since I boarded a week ago.
“Do you think your wife will forgive you for being away longer?” I ask.
“Sure. Not so likely to forgive you, though.”
I’m unsure what to say. I could apologize, but I’m not sorry.
“So she doesn’t like you leaving?”
“No.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar.”
I smile. “Byron.”
“Bless you, dear, I do love the Irish.” He pauses and grins. “And by God I love to fish.”
But why? I want to ask. Why?
I can understand wanting to be at sea. Of course I can. I have loved the sea all my life. But fishing? Maybe it’s not exactly the fishing these people love, but the freedom, the adventure, the danger. The respect I have for them wants to believe that.
“I could do without the coming and going, though, and the months away. You know what I’d really like?” Samuel asks.
“What would you like?”
“I’d like to take my reel down to the beach on my little stretch of land and spend all my hours with a line in, drinking wine and reading poetry.”
“Any in particular?”
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
I search my memory, and take a stab. “Is that Keats?”
“You get bonus points for that one.”
“It sounds perfect. Why don’t you?”
“I have a lot of children to feed.”
I consider this. It’s not the pathless woods or the lonely shore that guides him from his home, then, but necessity.
“Does he find much anymore?” I ask.
Samuel shrugs, uncomfortable. “He used to. Everyone wanted to work for Ennis Malone. Herring aplenty. Now it’s no easy task. The turning o’ the world, right there. Things grow dire.” He looks at me. “Don’t have time to be chasing birds all over the world.”
I don’t repeat myself: I’ve already told them the birds will lead them to fish. They don’t believe me. They believe in superstition, and in routine. They believe in knowing the oceans you sail.
“Today with that berg—that was nothing,” Samuel says. “It’ll get much worse as we reach the Gulf Stream.”
“Why’s that?”
“It connects with the Labrador Current, which’ll give us a lift south. They’re two of the great currents of the world, moving in opposite directions.” He takes a drag of his cigarette, the butt glowing red in the dark. “When you reach that spot, where they brush against each other…” Samuel shakes his head. “You can’t count on much. It’s a beast of an ocean, the Atlantic. Ennis told me once that he’s sailed it for most of his life and he still knows next to nothing about it.”