Migrations(10)
GARDA STATION, GALWAY FOUR YEARS AGO
The floor is cheap linoleum, and very cold. I lost my shoes somewhere, before walking three miles through the snow carrying a bag of football uniforms. I can’t remember how I lost them. I told the police, and they put me in this room to wait, and they have not returned to tell me.
But I know.
I pass the minutes and then hours by reciting passages of Tóibín in my head, remembering them as well as I can and trying to find comfort in his story of a woman who loved the sea, only it becomes too hard to try for prose, so I reach instead for poetry, for Mary Oliver and her wild geese and her animal bodies loving what they love, and even that is difficult. The effort of compartmentalizing is a steady scraping away at my mind. The long snaking curl of an orange being peeled in one skillful piece: that is my brain. What about Byron, the heart will break—no, maybe Shelley, what are all these kissings worth—no, Poe, then, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling— The door opens and saves me from myself. I am trembling all over and there is a puddle of vomit beside my chair that I don’t remember supplying. The detective is a little older than I am, impeccably groomed, her blond hair tied into a neat twist, charcoal suit cut to fit all the right lines of her and shoes that make that clop clop sound that always reminds me of a horse. I notice these details with strange precision. She sees the mess and manages not to grimace as she sends for someone to deal with it, and then she sits opposite me.
“I’m Detective Lara Roberts. And you’re Franny Stone.”
I swallow. “Franny Lynch.”
“Of course, sorry. Franny Lynch. I remember you from school. You were a couple of years below me. Always in and out, never staying put. Until you moved away for good. Back to Australia, wasn’t it?”
I stare at her numbly.
A man arrives with a mop and bucket and we wait while he painstakingly cleans the vomit. He leaves with his tools and then returns a couple of minutes later with a cup of hot tea for me. I grip it with my frozen hands but don’t drink—I think it might make me throw up again.
When Detective Roberts still won’t speak, I clear my throat. “So?”
I see it then: the horror she has been working to hide from me. It slides over her eyes like a veil.
“They’re dead, Franny.”
But I already know that.
3
The Saghani, NORTH ATLANTIC SEA MIGRATION SEASON
My hands have started bleeding to the touch. I spend six hours of each day tying ropes in knots. I am to do this until I can tie all ten of the most common sailing knots blindfolded or in my sleep. I have to know each one intimately, and I have to know which knot is used for which task. I was sure I knew all of this days ago, but Anik has made me continue tying anyway. The blisters formed first, and then they burst and the blood came free, and each night they begin to scab over, just a little, and each morning the scabs are worked off and they bleed again. I am leaving a smear of myself on everything I touch.
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.