The Hope Read Free Page A

because to do so placed a gift from God into a disappointingly human frame of reference. Someone had smiled on her, that was all, on vile, filthy, worthless her.
    She headed back to the cabin struggling to resist the urge to skip like a schoolgirl. The seat of her raincoat was wet and smeared.
    She thought of the children as she ran cradling this true happiness in her arms, and then she thought of the Man and the memory did not seem so crowded with shame and pain any longer. No surprise, then, that she had taken that stranger to be the Man , because the Man had become a distorted memory, an image beneath water, infuriated.
    Mary had a charm against his evil eye – the carton. Yet a small voice whispered privately to her that nothing lasts for ever.
    Certain areas of the Hope , almost inevitably on the lower decks, you simply did not enter unless you belonged there or you were clinically insane or both. Mary’s happiness was a white and blinding thing and it made her take a left when she should have taken a right. She ran a few steps before she realised her error. The walls were filthier here and the turbines louder, although there was no apparent reason why this should be. Gangplanks and walkways colluded overhead to shut out most of the sky, although the rain managed to insinuate itself and dribble down the walls in streams like thin, twitching veins. Long chains hung lazily down, measuring with their swinging the Hope ’s massive lumbering through the waves. They clinked against each other. A nearby service light buzzed as if a fly was trapped behind its glass.
    There were footsteps behind her. The carton felt heavy in her arms, the carrier-bag unnecessarily bulky, its plastic handles cutting into her hand. The turbines growled distantly and the chains clinked and the light buzzed.
    “Hey, it’s a scarlet woman!”
    “Ha, ha, that’s a good ’un!”
    “What have we got there, miss? Looks heavy.”
    “Carry it for you?”
    How many of them were there? Two, three?
    “Looks like food, boys. Looks like dinner.”
    “With afters thrown in!”
    The small voice inside her piped up again, suggesting that she deserved this for being too happy. She wished (and hated herself for wishing) that the Man had been here. If the Man had been there, he would have seen these creatures off with a punch to the jaw, a stiff uppercut, a blow to the stomach… “Take that, you ruffians!” And perhaps this was the reason he had abandoned her, to leave her splayed and vulnerable to life.
    A hand grabbed her shoulders.
    “Look at us, woman,” was hissed in her ear, a parody of intimacy. As she obeyed the instruction, a corkscrew seemed to twist and tighten in her belly.
    “Ugly bitch, in’t she?”
    “Smells too.”
    The combined ages of all three could not have totalled over fifty. They had fashionably severe crewcuts and fashionably bulky epaulettes. One wore a sailor’s hat. Another, the eldest by about a year and probably the leader, had an earring shaped like an anchor and his earlobe was puffy and red around it. He took his hand off her shoulder.
    “You’re so young,” she murmured.
    “Young! Ha!” scorned the one with the hat.
    “Old enough for you, dear,” said the eldest, grinning and nuzzling up to Mary. “Are you going to let me fuck you?”
    “Go on, Popeye!”
    “Shall I, lads?” said Popeye, playing up to his fan club.
    “Fuck her brains out, mate.”
    Something like poison welled up inside Mary from the part of her that was Shitshoes, rubbish-tip scavenger (or Waste Retrieval Expert, if you like), she who had been abandoned by the Man , and it spat itself out of her mouth: “You couldn’t fuck a porthole.”
    She could hardly believe she had said it. Nor could they. Popeye’s face registered astonishment and when his mates started to jeer the astonishment turned to livid rage. He leaned forward and struck the side of her face with a half-clenched fist. She should have told him she was used to