The Odyssey Read online

  Mia came up behind me and stepped into the line. Everything about Mia was very small, her neat little head and haircut, her short, sallow limbs. She slipped easily into narrow spaces, no need to ask anyone to make room. I thought it gave her a warped perspective on the world. I manoeuvred myself in behind her. The woman behind me shuffled begrudgingly back and I was able to stand up straight. I waited for my breathing to steady. Mia turned to acknowledge me.

  Everything all right? she asked wearily, as though everything was obviously not all right, and it was frustrating this was so often the case.

  Yeah fine, I said. Bit tired because I got up early.

  What did you do that for? she replied.

  I went for a run.

  Good for you, she said. Then, after a little while, rolled her eyes.

  We neared the buffet. Quarters of cabbage were lined up like soft and translucent tortoises. Neat sleeves of ham, pink and curled. A tray of silver fish, white eyes fixed on nothing, jewelled with sea salt and herbs. I briefly wondered what five years of days-old food was doing to my insides.

  I’m going to have the fish, I said. Ezra told me it was good.

  Of course he did, Mia replied. Ezra loves salt.

  He does. He is probably going to die soon.

  Mia turned to face me, holding a pair of silver tongs. Don’t say that, she said. What would you say that for?

  The queue moved us along as I tried not to feel childish and embarrassed. We peered over the large trays of food to see what else was on offer. Smoked feta and almonds. Fennel with pear and dill. Quinoa and bee pollen. Yorkshire puddings and bone broth. The recipes always sounded delicious but everything just tasted of monosodium glutamate, either singed or unpleasantly wilted, from hours beneath the hot buffet lamps.

  You should have the broth, Mia said. Make sure you have a bowl of the broth.

  I looked at her hesitantly. Amino acids, she said, flatly.

  When we reached the front of the queue I collected a small white bowl and obediently filled it with broth. I went to get one for Mia but she quickly placed her hand on my wrist and shook her head.

  You should be regularly eating bone. But I don’t really need to.

  I continued filling my tray. I took some of the feta, a little cabbage, a single Yorkshire pudding. Mia filled her entire plate with creamed spinach.

  It’s what I fancied, she said, shrugging.

  We took a seat in the back corner, our usual spot, sat across from each other. I started drinking my soup. In the background I could hear some music, either the Police or Prince. I couldn’t remember the last time I had listened to music I myself had chosen. I wondered what I might choose if given the chance. Perhaps it would be the Police. Or Prince.

  This running? she said. Is it part of the programme? It doesn’t sound like it’s part of the programme.

  It’s not, I replied. But it sort of is. I’m trying to get ready.

  I tore into my Yorkshire pudding. It felt more like fabric than food. Like something you could sleep in.

  I feel like I would be ready, she said. Like if I was on the programme, I would already be ready.

  Did you apply? I asked.

  I’m not ambitious, she retorted. People are always saying I’m ambitious but it’s not really the case.

  This was something Mia liked to say about herself. She once told me people were always mistaking her desire to be the very best at whatever job she was doing for ambition. She told me most people fundamentally didn’t understand ambition and what it meant, but she did, and it was not for her. I watched her across the table, straight-backed, eating spinach in measured spoonfuls. She looked fresh-faced and healthy. A stock photo of a woman answering the phone. I wondered, if this was not ambition then what was?

  So you didn’t apply, then?

  Of course I applied. She set down her spoon. I always apply.

  I looked around the crew mess. On one side was the canteen with the service counter and the metal vats of food. At the end of that was a little drinks service. There were other things too, a gong and a large beanbag beneath it. A boxed Japanese rock garden and smooth wooden rake. There was a basketball hoop and several balls. There was a broken loom.

  People are always getting me wrong, Mia repeated.

  She stood up and walked across the room, returning with a glass of wine and a plastic cup of squash. She placed the squash in front of me. Iridescent and perfumed.

  People say I am extroverted because I’m very confident and I like attention and praise. But actually, I am quite introverted.

  I watched Mia sip her wine, imagined the flush feeling of being reset. I held the squash to my mouth, coating my lips in chemicals and sugar.

  So what happened? she said. The ceremony? It was this morning?

  It was weird. I had some mochi then he told me I should be the best me I could be.

  And?

  And then we drank tea which tasted like soy sauce.

  Mia rolled her eyes for the fourth or perhaps fifth time that evening. I’m sure that’s just your unrefined Western palate, she said. She moved spinach around her plate, gulped more wine. You know that’s good advice. You should be keeping a note of all of the advice he gives you.

  I am, I said.

  Sometimes I worry about how seriously you take your future, she replied. You and Ezra. You’re like a pair of walking clouds. It probably would have been better for all of us if I was the one doing this.

  Perhaps.

  You’re extremely lucky, she continued. This thing with Keith. You’ve been given this amazing opportunity and it’s basically just fallen into your lap.

  Well, not exactly.

  More or less, Mia said.

  She scraped the lip of her spoon around the circumference of her plate, consolidating the remaining specks of spinach. Do you want to play some basketball?

  We took our trays to the refuse area, scraped them down, then rinsed them off with water. We topped our glasses up and made towards the basketball hoop. Standing beneath it, Mia grabbed my wrist.

  I love you, she announced. You know I love you, right?

  I love you too, Mia, I replied. Of course I do.

  Well, good, she said. I’ve just been thinking, it’s really important we start saying it more. We should say it every time we see each other. We should say I love you. Now you go.

  OK, I said. I love you.

  Good, she said, unblinking. Well done.

  I retrieved a basketball from the stand and threw it towards the hoop but it didn’t even hit the rim. It rolled towards us and Mia picked it up, focused her gaze on the hoop and threw. The ball fell neatly through the centre of the ring without touching the sides. She didn’t look surprised or victorious. She looked like a person confirming information they already knew.

  Ezra’s cabin was bigger than mine though it felt much smaller because of the lack of a window. Mia had the largest cabin of us all, though she shared with three room-mates, all women, none of whom she had anything nice to say about. Still, she elected to stay with them even though she had been given the option of a solo cabin many, many times.

  I had the smallest but I didn’t mind. It had a window, a tiny porthole, a round and unending vista of the ocean, so it always felt expansive and cool. There was something animal and safe-feeling about it. It was very different from how I used to feel in my flat, the one I shared with my husband. It was a flat that felt more like a house, spread out as it was across three levels. High ceilings and floorboards. Pantry behind the kitchen. My cabin contained just two rooms and felt more natural for it. My bedroom had a single bed, underneath it a sliding cupboard, then a slim white wardrobe, small desk, mushroom-shaped desk lamp. My bathroom had a chemical toilet with a showerhead situated directly over it. A drain slightly to the side and then a basin. If I stood at the right spot I could touch every wall of my cabin without moving my feet, including the ceiling and floor.

  It only occasionally felt claustrophobic and in those mom
ents I had been known to attempt to open the porthole, once with a felt-tip pen and a caulking mallet, another time with a snail fork lifted from a shift. I’d get Ezra to help me. I’d wedge the tip of the felt-tip pen or the prongs of the fork into the gap between the window and the wall while Ezra smacked down on it with the mallet. The felt-tip pen splintered apart in my hand, the snail fork bent to one side and the caulking mallet left a dent in the metal frame, but of course it didn’t open. Though I liked to think it might have.

  I’d been in this cabin for three years and on the WA for five. Each year we were given the option of taking our leave on shore or remaining on ship. If we elected to holiday on shore we would lose our allocated cabin, but if we took our leave on ship we were guaranteed to keep it for another year. I didn’t want to risk losing my cabin. Also I had nowhere else to go.

  When I planned to spend any stretch of time in my cabin, which is mostly what I planned, I was comforted by imagining the scope of my options as the image-cropping tool on my tablet, narrowing in on a single subject. My options were, realistically, watch or read something, stare out of the porthole, or have a nap. It made me feel like a child picking a toy from a very small toy box. Even if I started doing something else, eventually I’d wind up staring out of the porthole.

  I was both entirely sick and not at all sick of looking at the sea. It remained familiar and surprising at the same time, something bodily, like illness or a sneeze. I found it soothingly obliterating, like listening to white noise on the Tube home from work. I particularly liked watching when the sea was rough and the waves slapped against the glass like carbonated tentacles. I never minded it being rocky. I liked the feeling of being violently urged to sleep. Feeling my body move from side to side like a metronome. I’d lose track of the time, come to realizing I was an hour further advanced into being alive. It was like crossing a chore from a list. Done!

  Another thing that was consistently pleasing about watching the sea from my cabin was the crisp feeling of being completely and irrefutably dry. I liked to hold my hand up to my face to confirm its aridity. I had to maintain my cabin at quite a low temperature to ensure I did not perspire. I would have kept showers to a minimum too, if a daily shower were not mandatory, but all kinds of grooming and cleansing were mandatory on the WA. I had to brush my hair, pluck my eyebrows. I had to wear sparse, elegant make-up. I suppose none of these things were unusual.

  What was unusual was that I didn’t have any of my own clothes. On rotations I was issued a uniform according to whatever job I was doing. When I wasn’t working I wore the WA leisure-time tracksuit, a soft hooded top and elasticated trousers. To sleep I wore powder-blue cropped bottoms and button-down shirts. Only on land did I feel compelled to dress myself, usually just buying something from the first shop I saw, then throwing it away when I was done. I quite enjoyed not being burdened by possessions, my identity unmoored from an assembly of material.

  Before the WA my sense of self was so tentative that a pair of jeans I’d forgotten to belt or a shirt I didn’t like my arms in could make me feel scattered and anxious. Not one person but several, warring it out underneath my skin. I wasted hours matching skirts to blouses, finding long-sleeved T-shirts to wear beneath pinafores. I had a whole drawer just for earrings, a wardrobe just for coats. On the WA it felt good to slip on my communications suit or my catering tunic or my healthcare assistant scrubs and lean into the texture of my day. Sometimes I’d watch the passengers of the ship and the sheer variety of colour in their clothes made me feel like my eyes were too slowly adjusting from darkness to light. Retiring my wardrobe had been one of the great liberations of the WA, of which there were many.

  Before the start of a shift I’d set my alarm an hour earlier than I needed to. A friend once told me the reason you struggle to get out of bed in the morning is because all the particles of dust from the air have come to rest on top of your body while you sleep. When you wake up you are blanketed by a thick, invisible weight. I thought about that a lot as I lay in bed in the mornings, trying to force myself to sit up. I imagined the particles as a heavy duvet of dead skin and salt air, and it felt good to know there was a reason it was so hard.

  Once up I’d make myself a cup of coffee, which I could do without having to leave my bed. I could do a lot of stuff without having to leave my bed. I’d reach over to switch on my small kettle, stir instant coffee into long-life milk. If it was daytime I would sit back and drink it looking out at the sea. If it was night-time I would watch my own reflection. Scythes of colour and light smudged across the blackened window. Thin droplets of seawater clinging to the other side. I liked the pink-faced feeling of having just woken up, dreams spilling into waking life, a day moon bobbing in the sky. I’d spend only a little time getting ready and I’d shower only because I had to. I brushed and dried my hair and if I had a little time left over I lay back down on my bed and tried very hard not to lurch back into sleep. I set a second alarm for when I had to leave my cabin.

  Each rotation lasted an indeterminate length of time, sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a couple of years. We were eligible for all jobs on ship, with the exception of work that required heavy specialization. Chief engineer or on-board surgeon or head chef were not part of the rotations. Before I was a customer service assistant, I was an IT administrator. Before that I was an environmental officer. Before that I was a croupier. Before that I was an able seaman. Before that I was a cocktail waitress. Before that I was a librarian. Before that I was a portrait photographer. I wasn’t good at any of these jobs, none of us were, but that wasn’t the point. We were good at pretending.

  I had one week left before I rotated over to become a manicurist. We were expected to prepare for our next rotation during the current one. We usually did this while on duty. In the gift shop, I often propped my tablet on top of the cash register during slow periods, one eye on a tutorial, the other on the shop floor. Otherwise I sloped off and pretended to tidy the changing rooms and just sat in there.

  Each job had its own guidebook, accessible via our tablets, which we were required to take everywhere, and each guidebook contained a selection of one-pagers and diagrams and frequently asked questions and short video tutorials to get us ready. Within the guide there were core modules and there were optional ones. We had the opportunity, here, to make our jobs our own. And it was always worth doing a few optional modules. They were the fun ones.

  The fresh-flower training was one of them. It was a two-hour module. It included content on the temperature and quality of the water in the vase, how to arrange the flowers, and how to maintain them over a longer period of time. Flowers thrive in clean, warm water. Warm water dissolves air bubbles which may have formed in the stems and allows for more efficient absorption. It also allows any added flower food to dissolve more quickly. The stems should be cut one inch from the bottom, at a relatively sharp angle, to increase the surface area through which the flower can take in water.

  Before arranging the flowers you have to order them by quantity. If you have more hydrangeas than any other flower then you will be placing those in the vase first. Then you add the next most abundant type of flower, and so on. Criss-crossing the stems will create a sense of volume in the middle of the bouquet. To maintain your bouquet you can add sugar water, vinegar or more warm water. You can also remove any petals that look dead or dying. You should periodically mist them.

  The training contained a combination of light botany and interior decor. On completion, I was qualified to arrange flowers on any deck of the ship. I was not, however, qualified to arrange occasion or event flowers. But I told myself I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

  Not long after my induction into the programme, I received notice of another appointment with Keith. It was to be held in his office like the last time. It was requested that I wear non-uniform clothing so Keith would have a better idea of the raw material he was dealing with. I borrowed a fitted black dress and a pair of kitten heels from Mia, momentarily w
ondering why she had them, suspecting it was not the right moment to ask.

  The morning of the meeting I sat down to look at my face in the mirror, cataloguing the problems that needed solving. Often, looking at my face gave me a strong sense of rage, not necessarily directed at my face itself, but an abstract, unfocused rage, where my face just happened to be the thing it was pointing towards. But I didn’t feel anger as I readied myself for the programme, rather I felt a calm kind of curiosity. I tried seeing myself through Keith’s eyes to make a judgement as he might. I was wearing simple make-up, thin channels of eyeliner and a pale lipstick. I looked around my cabin, trying to see other things through his eyes, the face creams lined up in order of use, the pile of unwashed underwear in the corner. I wondered whether Keith might look at himself in a mirror trying to see through my eyes. Whether anyone would.

  I arrived at his office a little early, again, and was once more seated in the waiting room. There was another decanter of water, this time with mint leaves wilted at the bottom. The mochi was chocolate and shaped like little mice. I took the glass of water but declined the mochi. I sipped carefully so that I would have some left when Keith called me in. He would see me with the glass still half-full, witness my restraint, and think fondly of me as the kind of person that doesn’t just devour a thing wherever they find it. I looked around the room, faces familiar from the last meeting. Madeleine and Kai both working hard not to look at me or each other. The man with the mole, biting his nails. I pictured the other waiting rooms I had sat in, instinctively suspicious of the people sitting around me. I had heard not everyone sees the programme all the way through. Some people are less inclined to hand large parts of themselves over, to something, to anything, I suppose.

  I became suddenly conscious of my empty glass and, worse, a strand of mint leaf stuck between my teeth. I had not been paying attention and now there was no way of sluicing mint from my mouth without a drink. I imagined Keith opening his office door to invite me in, finding me maniacally helping myself to a second glass of water. And I couldn’t risk mining my teeth with my fingernails, hunched over like a feeding animal. Instead, I acquiesced to the reality of the mint leaf remaining in situ, a pin loosened from a hand grenade but held more or less in place. I did not feel relaxed any more.