The Hope Read Free

from him, every second expecting his hand to grab the hood of her raincoat and yank her towards that mouth and that eye and that other eye…
    In a minute she had made it to the concourse where the sign hung and then she had no more energy to run, only to slump against the wall, her body sagging, her raincoat crumpling around her with the sound of old bones. If anyone passed by now, they would think she was a stopper. “Let them,” she mumbled to herself, just like a stopper.
    The Man was lost. That was how the story went. One morning he had set off to go to his job – purser? navigator? captain? – and he had not returned. It was as simple as that. The memory of his last peck on her cheek had stayed with her ever since, as if there was still a translucent oval of his saliva clinging to her skin. He had become a ghost who haunted her face as a kiss.
    His departure had been followed quickly by her fall. No one knew where he was, no one cared, and soon no one would talk to her. She took the hint and found an empty cabin down on P deck where she hid the children. There was plenty of bitterness and guilt to feed on when the money and the food started running out. For no accountable reason, it was her fault. That, she supposed, was the way of the Hope .
    But she loved the children. That was her way of combating everything the Hope threw at her. She loved them with a primitive, self-wounding love. Once the Man had told her, no doubt as a roundabout kind of compliment, about mothers of long, long ago (many centuries before the Hope ) who cured their sick infants by bathing them three times in a bath of their own blood. The idea of the giving of healthy blood to an unhealthy child stuck in Mary’s mind, for she thought that the sharp and rusted misery of slicing open your own veins was a cure in itself – “I love you this much” – giving with no expectation of return. It was being God.
     
    The Waste Reception Centre had once been a hole the size of a swimming pool, one of many on board, with a collapsible bottom leading down chutes as big as hallways to the recycling plant deep down in the hold, where what was good could be used again and what was bad could be spat out into the unending ocean. At least, that had been the plan. Inevitably, the system had broken down. Reusable material soon became less and less reusable (everything finite, everything finding its limit) and the chutes began to pack up, the piles of rubbish and filth swelling until they burst out of their pores. No one on the Hope could be bothered to pretend that one day the mess would be cleared up, although janitorial divisions came along every so often to rearrange the dirt and take away a couple of sackfuls for dumping overboard.
    There was a joke (like most jokes on the Hope , not an especially funny one) that went: What comes once a year and isn’t a birthday? A janitor.
    There was another joke, this one about the Captain, related to the one about the janitor, but more involved and somewhat disrespectful.
    Mary’s windfall went like this. After a few minutes of investigation, wading ankle-deep in boxes, broken bottles, scraps of peel, books without covers, clouds of forlorn flies, turning over the blank faces of jigsaw pieces to discover the pattern and the picture underneath, she found a small cardboard carton. It was promisingly weighty. The seagulls that strutted over the tip squawked at her in frustration. Mary sat down where she had found the carton, willing herself not to get too excited yet, not yet, but all the same feeling loved and loving and humbled.
    She broke a fingernail as she struggled with the lid of the carton. The staples popped and the flaps of the lid flew up like ugly petals. Inside tin circles gleamed at her. Hunched over, stinking, with the carton in her arms, Mary began to weep and giggle at the same time. There was ham, processed peas, carrots, raspberries… Mary did not dare wonder how anyone could have overlooked all this,