The dreamboat
A speck in a vast expanse of blue was all that the ship seemed to be to the albatross flying high above, riding thermals thrown up by the waves below. As the cursed bird approached the boat the sailor ensconced in the crows nest threw up a cry to challenge the howling wind. On the deck below faces all turned skyward, watching as the bird sailed by, shaming the vessel with it’s floating on the air. Among the faces was a grubby man who seemed to be looking beyond the bird in the sky. As the sailors lost interest and dispersed he stood, staring into the sky while the clatter and noise of shipboard life resumed. With a mighty sigh he turned his eyes back to the planks and scrubbed the wood with a look of grim resignation on his face. Every now and again he would cast his eyes over the side, watching the waves travel by. He wondered that it was the only way to tell that the boat was moving even though he knew that the sea must end somewhere. It seemed each morning as though no progress had been made, and each day the sun spun in the sky and he saw the wind whip the sails, and still nothing happened. He watched, carefully so as not to attract attention, the sailors who ran around the ship, minding the sails and ropes with such care that he could only assume that they knew that they were moving, no matter about the evidence of their eyes.
His scrubbing slowed, and he looked over the side for longer intervals each time. His mind travelled back over the trackless oceans he had travelled, to the place that he had left and the place he was never going to get back to. In his mind his dreams were real, and he was once again happy.
‘Runt! Move yerself, there’s work to be done.’ He sighed again; there was always work to be done. Work was all there was to be done. Every day he looked long at the swinging light above his hammock, and every day he cursed the day he had taken leave of his homeland and his senses by enlisting on what had been promised to be a voyage of discovery. All he had discovered was that waiting to get somewhere was no excuse to leave a place. A place, and a person. Kneeling on the wooden boards he clasped a hand at the ring-stone tied on a strap of leather around his neck. A wave thundered into the side of the boat and water soaked his back to the skin. The biting wind leapt on him directly, and he shivered, bowing his dripping head under the weight of more than the world could throw at him.
He was lying in his bunk at night, every night he did the same and there was little to discern one night from the last. He lay, curled up like a baby and he gritted his jaw and let his mind escape the place he was trapped in. It fled, as always, to the other mind in the world he could trust. For a few seconds, in the middle of the ocean thousands of miles from anywhere or anyone, he felt as though he was once more at home. The warm feeling of home, when gone, left a gaping hole, and every night he opened his eyes and the lamp above his bed was blurry.
Every day he rose, swapped banter with the other sailors, did the work that was required of him, and always, always without exception, he wanted to look over the side, beyond the horizon. As the waves rolled past so did his life, and he knew that every day spent on the ship was a day further from what mattered to him. Looking at the captain of the vessel, a large bearded man by the name of Jonsson, he knew that the man was happy on his ship. The way he held the rail, the way he walked over the broken planks, the way he looked with pride into the face of a gale and ordered full sail. These things made sense to him, and it was like that for many of the sailors. Some had the same respect for the ship that Jonsson had, although if he was the father they were the uncles. Some had managed to develop hobbies to while away the hours of trundling across the vast planet, and the fruits of each mans labours was displayed above, below or around his hammock. Some men seemed to sleep in a graveyard of dead men’s fingers, scrimshandered with tiny carvings of the devil and the deep blue sea. The cook, named Pullock, kept a small bush which he was proud to point out to anyone who wished to listen again, he had grown from a seed he had found on a desert coast three years before. The only thing about the bush that interested the man was how the cook would cook if he lost it. For his part, the man cared for nothing aboard his floating prison. Neither the ropes nor the sails raised his admiration, being nothing more than a collection of threads. He had no time for a hobby, and would have been disappointed had anything taken his imagination. A good for nothing scrub was what Jonsson had called him after a few days at sea, but it was already a few days too long to turn back and dump the man back on the dock. This misfortune galled both the captain, who didn’t want a man who had so little idea what he was walking on to work on his ship, and the man himself, to whom the captain was a misguided fool whose only pleasure would sink without a trace if it hit a rock at night.
He was no doubt a good for nothing scrub. He knew it. It was a downfall that he couldn’t care about the ship or where the ship was going. He knew from bitter experience to keep his opinions to himself. He sometimes sagged in his hammock, his heart falling through the loosely threaded hemp to the deepest, darkest coldest areas of the sea. Down below the world, where no light shone, he was slowly crushed to oblivion by the pressure of the sea.
Looking at the horizon was his only respite. Looking beyond the tiny world he was trapped in, further out than many a man. He saw ship far in the distance, and was jealous of those who sailed in her. No land was sighted for months on end, but when it was his heart leapt and fell once more, as he remembered it was land on the far side of a planet from the land he wished he were walking on. He looked at the horizons with fear in his eyes. He knew that every inch from the bow to the far line was too long. Many a time had had been spied by the lookout standing in the stern, looking intently over the rail at the churning wake below. The man on high watched with empty eyes. He didn’t care if the runt leapt over the side. Good riddance, he thought.
Each night the candle blurred more and more, and each day it seemed as through the boat had moved even less. The man slowly wasted away from the world, no longer swapping even a greeting with the other sailors who had all long since assumed he was crazy and only now spoke to him to ask what lay in the mind of a fish. He wandered the deck like a madman, whispering to himself about time and length. In time, a long time, the lookout uttered a cry that made every man in the ship look up. Land Ho was the cry, and Southampton was greying the horizon. The runt sat in the bow, rocking slowly with the action of the boat, watching as the grey grew smoke, and houses and a dock. He was an oasis of calm amid the cries of sailors leaping ashore. He wandered, humming to himself, from the boat, and his feet felt odd as they passed from the wood on which they had trodden for three years to the dockside of a place he had dreamt of every day during those three years. He wandered through the streets, looking around for something familiar, something that matched his mind map. He knew where to go, and after a second that dragged longer than a year at sea, the door was opened and with a relieved smile he was home again, and the madness of restriction on board ship was a fading memory. On the dockside, Captain Jonsson paced up and down, stamping his feet and looking ever out to sea. He unconsciously stroked the wood of the ship as he passed. On each round he got slower until he was standing by the gangplank, looking out to sea with white knuckles gripping the rail. As the sun sank he went back aboard and bedded in his slightly rocking hammock.
