FICTION
EMMA ROBERTSON
SLIPSTREAM
This is my view, the one that makes it all worthwhile. The inky blackness above and below, dotted only with occasional white horses that enable the eye to differentiate between sea and sky. The moon is visible from the starboard side tonight, ripe and waxy; that cheeky moon, always popping up where you least expect it. Yet here on the stern, but for the tell-tale stream of the wake, the night is black and endless and it comforts me.
I am not a seafarer; I don’t know charts and maps and stars. I can’t tell my latitudes from my longitudes. I am maintenance crew and not even a skilled one at that. It’s my first season and so far I’ve been initiated into the hierarchy of ship life by being tasked with the most mundane of domestic duties, such as polishing the handrails of the grand staircase in the ship’s atrium. Or, as tonight, to mop and buff the promenade deck ready for the early morning exercisers, who like to jog sedately at sunrise.
Three times around the deck equals one mile, so the sign says.
It was necessity and opportunity that brought me so far from home, away from my wife and my beautiful babies, rather than a love of the sea. The privilege of owning, for even a few minutes, this tranquil pre-dawn seascape, is what motivates me to stay.
For the first few weeks I lay rigid in the bottom bunk, hoping that the stranger above me couldn’t sense my silent tears escaping, until I was assigned to night shifts and discovered this secret view that was all mine. Let the younger men take the early shifts and drink these precious hours away in the crew bar; I am happy to have this vista all to myself.
The ship, like me, does most of its hard work overnight. Passengers wake up in a new country and shuffle ashore after an abundant breakfast, ready for the day’s slow-paced adventures.
They come on as passengers and go off as cargo, so the crew joke goes. Even at this hour you can bet that somewhere onboard ruddy-cheeked bon vivants will be availing themselves of delectable delights their bodies neither need nor particularly want; the point is that they are there. Rich food and fine wines are available around the clock. The extravagance still shocks me, three months in, so stark is the difference between this world and my world.
I nod farewell to my view and take my cleaning materials around to the port side.
Two officers are looking over the rail and I follow suit. They are preparing to embark the pilot to guide us into our next destination; I know this because we sail the same itinerary each week and this port is notoriously tricky. This job is as much a routine as standing face-to-armpit on a subway or rickshaw-to-rickshaw in traffic; it’s just that my commute is rather more serene.
The light is starting to break on the horizon. The Caribbean is waking, just as Asia will be falling asleep. I may never get used to keeping different time to my family but I know that it won’t be forever. And in the meantime, I will look out into my darkness each night and imagine them thinking of me too, as they prepare for sleep, and to dream of the future.
I am not a seafarer; I don’t know charts and maps and stars. I can’t tell my latitudes from my longitudes. I am maintenance crew and not even a skilled one at that. It’s my first season and so far I’ve been initiated into the hierarchy of ship life by being tasked with the most mundane of domestic duties, such as polishing the handrails of the grand staircase in the ship’s atrium. Or, as tonight, to mop and buff the promenade deck ready for the early morning exercisers, who like to jog sedately at sunrise.
Three times around the deck equals one mile, so the sign says.
It was necessity and opportunity that brought me so far from home, away from my wife and my beautiful babies, rather than a love of the sea. The privilege of owning, for even a few minutes, this tranquil pre-dawn seascape, is what motivates me to stay.
For the first few weeks I lay rigid in the bottom bunk, hoping that the stranger above me couldn’t sense my silent tears escaping, until I was assigned to night shifts and discovered this secret view that was all mine. Let the younger men take the early shifts and drink these precious hours away in the crew bar; I am happy to have this vista all to myself.
The ship, like me, does most of its hard work overnight. Passengers wake up in a new country and shuffle ashore after an abundant breakfast, ready for the day’s slow-paced adventures.
They come on as passengers and go off as cargo, so the crew joke goes. Even at this hour you can bet that somewhere onboard ruddy-cheeked bon vivants will be availing themselves of delectable delights their bodies neither need nor particularly want; the point is that they are there. Rich food and fine wines are available around the clock. The extravagance still shocks me, three months in, so stark is the difference between this world and my world.
I nod farewell to my view and take my cleaning materials around to the port side.
Two officers are looking over the rail and I follow suit. They are preparing to embark the pilot to guide us into our next destination; I know this because we sail the same itinerary each week and this port is notoriously tricky. This job is as much a routine as standing face-to-armpit on a subway or rickshaw-to-rickshaw in traffic; it’s just that my commute is rather more serene.
The light is starting to break on the horizon. The Caribbean is waking, just as Asia will be falling asleep. I may never get used to keeping different time to my family but I know that it won’t be forever. And in the meantime, I will look out into my darkness each night and imagine them thinking of me too, as they prepare for sleep, and to dream of the future.
Emma Robertson is an emerging fiction writer whose first short story will be published in Wrong Way Go Back (Pure Slush anthology) in Autumn 2020. She is a performing arts tutor who lives with her husband in London, UK and has several nonfiction articles previously published in dance industry magazines.
