No children waited for Mistress Mickle on the other side of her journey, nor husband, nor (at the moment) paramour, and that was fine. She liked sex and she liked privacy, and she’d reached her mid-thirties before realizing life could offer her both. The time that living with another person took up! The small talk! The politeness! Life alone was banal, too, but at least the banality wasn’t narrated.
It was bad for you to say aloud the minor grievances of the day, the rude bank teller and the gum on the bottom of your shoe. It was terrible to alter your diet to what another person liked or didn’t: The last man she’d lived with had hated capers. And so she’d given up capers, until she gave up the man. His name was Philip. He was a theater director who had made fun of her accent, the way she dropped ts in the middle of English expressions and words: Bee’root. Wai’rose. Whi’bait. Qui’right.
All her life she’d felt foreign; landing abroad, she was relieved to assume it as an official diagnosis.
This was a day crossing, but she’d taken an outside cabin, one with a double bed and a single bed and a surprisingly large bathroom with a toilet, shower, sink, and three thick, white towels, more than Jonas had to his name. (What had happened to him, that he lived like that? Shit happens, Jonas would say. Life happens, Micah would say, while you’re making other plans.) A free minibar. She ate both chocolates and the bag of potato chips while the boat was still in port. The strange elation of the previous evening was still in her: she felt calmer than she had in ages. The Irishwoman was pregnant. Their family would continue after all! Aunty Mickle! Still stoned, she thought, though she wasn’t sure that was true, and she lay down on the single bed, because it was on the right side of the cabin, and the homing device in Mistress Mickle’s brain always went right: on busses, on trains, in restaurants. There was a little wall-mounted television; she tuned it to the closed-circuit cameras in the belowdecks kennels. Empty. Empty. Empty. The channel suited her.
Ordinarily she wanted to watch television but couldn’t bear to watch. She might see, for instance, an actor in a movie whom she’d met fifteen years ago on a soap: Now how did he get that break? She might see young, talentless, gleaming people. It appalled her, the jealousy of her middle age, though it flared up only occasionally, a trick knee. Lumbago, whatever lumbago was. Spiritual arthritis. As a young woman she was (she believed) mostly generous, entirely sane, and the acting jobs she got, the soaps and reenactment shows and cartoon voice-overs, had seemed like good fortune. Now everything was a conspiracy, mean and purposeful, designed to hurt her, and while she knew there were people who saw her in the piebald, pirate-y Mistress Mickle costume on Barnaby Grudge and were filled with jealousy themselves, this knowledge didn’t comfort her: indeed, when she stopped to contemplate it, she felt demeaned.
Knock it off, she told herself. New year. She plumped the pillow. It was a real pillow. It was a good ship. She checked her heart. Beating.
No dogs, still.
She never quite fell asleep, but she observed, as though from a distance, obscure, outlandish thoughts as they alighted: Would Jonas take the Irishwoman’s bed, or would he keep obediently to his mat beneath the kitchen table? Why beneath the table? Oh, to avoid being stepped on. A baby in a hat might crawl by, too—now, what did that mean? she asked herself in an Irish accent. The sea grew rough: every now and then a wave lifted the boat up and set it down with a minor clunk, and the back room of her brain thought, Ah, the plane has landed.
She sat up after thinking this for the third time. Not plane, boat. The television showed its series of empty kennels. It looked like a prison break: I don’t know, Sarge, the cells were all full half an hour ago.
Between the beds a large, lozenge-shaped window. A porthole. A window that would allow nobody to spy on you. She regarded the polished green sea cut through with unpolished white foam. She heard an ululating child run down the corridor outside: toddler Doppler effect. Other than that, the cabin was the most complete privacy one could imagine while still surrounded by hundreds of people, and superb. There was nothing she didn’t like. How to fully enjoy it? She had an urge to transgress, to drink the pygmy minibar red wine, then the white, then the two cans of Heineken, to strip and press her nakedness against the porthole.
Who would know? Some unseen sailor with a telescope. Satellites. Aliens. Nobody. Fish.
She didn’t drink anymore. Hours to go before Harwich. She needed to get out.
The public areas were on deck nine. She’d been on shitty ferries, but this was a nice one. Coffee bars, wine bars, a cafeteria, even a fancy restaurant with a three-course prix fixe menu. Most of the passengers (there weren’t many) seemed to be Middle Eastern Muslims, the women in chadors and head scarves, a pair of tiny girls hidden in floor-length dresses, the men in blue jeans. Of course, thought Mistress Mickle: everyone else was too hungover on New Year’s Day to chance a ferry. You had to be from a nondrinking people to survive. Or naval: she had navy on both sides of the family; she never got sick. Still, the roughness of the sea was a low-level prank beneath her feet: three steps fine, and then the deck rose up quick. At the far end of the cafeteria a white-haired man pulled a
