Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine Read Online Free

barge being ancient but without history, built in the olden days of sound hulls, Unguentine was all the time repairing its fixtures decrepit with over-use, the steam-engine whose bearings always over-heated, the cracked propeller shaft whose wooden splints flew off at regular intervals, the rudder which jammed only in calm seas and usually late in the afternoon. He would emerge from the engine-room covered in black grease except for the red patches of blood where he had nicked and scraped himself on hands and feet, and his flowing white beard protected with a bandana, but with a smile visible: he had done it again, repaired some crucial part with only a slight loss of speed. The engine-room could be a cozy place in the middle of whatever winter we might have happened to choose in an escape from an excess of summer, the warmest spot when the galley stove was off, where we could huddle alongside the tall and gleaming steam-engine, arms entwined, swaying back and forth to its syncopations, its throbbings, sighs, groans, squeaks, hisses, all night, until a cloudy dawn. Then with a yawn, above deck. Calisthenics in the fog. The long day’s work forever expanding the gardens, covering every inch of deck and roof with pots of shrubs and flowers, with the barrels, cans and buckets salvaged from sea-currents, with soil we composted and mulched ourselves, watered with our own water distilled from the sea. Unguentine was happy; I was radiant. I adopted at times his method of communication by notes, though to the bolus of paper spurting from the bathroom tap, to the lamination suddenly unyielding to teeth and tongue while eating a sandwich, I would always reply in my manner, directly, to the point, with only a moderate delay, by leaving a note tacked to the pilot-house door in plain view. He never seemed affronted by that, at least. One such dialogue took four days to complete. My glowing message: ‘I never want to see land again!!’ Time passed, dawns and dusks. At last his reply: ‘You never will, my dear.’
    I didn’t know what to think. At first it seemed he might be answering one of my earlier messages, but of those I could remember none fitted the reply. Or he was simply wrong. I knew there must be land nearby; with his navigations, I knew he must be flirting with coasts just beyond the line of sight. Had not a flock of heavy land-birds descended upon our greenery suddenly one midnight, refusing to depart except under a full blast of our sprinkler system? They left behind some broken branches, white stains, innumerable red feathers, a speckled egg or two. Casually I spied on Unguentine as he pored over his maps and charts in the pilot-house, but saw nothing unusual in his addition of a reef here, his erasure of a strand there, the shift of an island a degree this way or that, corresponding no doubt to the kneading and agitating action of the sea. There were times I swore to hear the throb of the motors of a distant ship, the rush of a jet plane like a sheet being torn in half, times when I knew Unguentine had nothing to do with these sounds, for he was in the habit of amusing me, or so he hoped, by imitating all manner of urban noises, the traffic of cars, buses, trains, distant sirens and bells, the patter of footsteps on a crowded street, carnivals, pounding surf, applause, the swarming murmur of some genteel gathering. He could drive me to tears doing that, standing on a ladder and pruning a limb, his back towards me, blowing all those noises out of his mouth. I could tell it was him. His whiskers always quivered. ‘Will you shut up?’ I’d shriek from the far end of the barge. Glad therefore I was when he took to spending whole days towards the bottom of the sea in that diving-bell of his, and I was left alone, could rush upstairs from the galley as many times as I wanted to, to see what sound that was. But there was nothing to see, nothing but the rafts of seeming trash Unguentine was bringing up from below. Fat