the man with the moustache

There is something about ferries I have always found strangely calming.

I recently boarded a bright red one that has crossed the Baltic back and forth for decades.

Before we had properly left Helsinki, its little parallel world had already formed. A small, brightly lit human bubble on the black autumn sea.

I heard German, Hindi, Swedish. Finnish dialects. English spoken in a number of ways.

Near my cabin, a group of Swedish women had their door open while preparing for the evening.
There was a bathrobe.
A hairdryer.

Ace of Base was playing.
It’s a Beautiful Life.

It seemed difficult to argue.

○

My cabin was on deck six.

Instead of the usual maritime images, there were ducks on the wall.

The picture looked like something somebody’s great-grandmother had made, never quite found a wall for, and eventually placed in the attic — before it somehow found its way onto a ferry between Finland and Sweden.

I liked it immediately.

The bathroom had a colour I couldn’t identify.
Peach, perhaps. Except not really peach.

A colour that seemed to have been chosen because nobody could object strongly enough to it.

○

Older ferries have a vibration.
Not exactly a sound. More physical than that.
A kind of white noise you feel through the floor and the bed.

After a while, something covers it.

That Friday evening there was plenty.

Finnish and German classics in karaoke. Fields of Gold.
Macarena by the house band.
By 11 p.m. I had heard something close to the history of modern popular music, performed with wildly varying levels of accuracy and considerable feeling.

Then I went to bed.

○

At around three in the morning, voices in the corridor woke me.
A group of Indian passengers were trying to find their cabin.

Numbers were discussed.
Someone walked past and then walked back again.

The ducks remained where they were.

Underneath it all,
the ship vibrated.

Lying there in the dark, I remembered another three in the morning.

○

More than twenty years earlier, I had spent a summer working as a journalist.

One assignment involved spending 24 hours on a ferry and going almost everywhere passengers normally didn’t.

The kitchen.
The bridge.
A little brig.
Back corridors.

Places with fluorescent lighting and signs not meant for passengers.

Some of the staff were delighted that somebody wanted to know what they did.
Others became very concerned that we understood them correctly — and that they looked good.

The first officer was especially careful with my questions and the photographer’s angles.

Later, his mother asked for copies.

○

At three in the morning, just before the shift changed, we were allowed into the engine room.

I remember the heat.
Oil.
Steel.
Machinery.
Engines the size of small houses.
Men in overalls.

Pictures of women in bikinis on the locker doors.
And yet the room had a faint
Tom of Finland quality to it.

The man I interviewed had a moustache.

I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember what I asked him either.
He answered everything I asked.
He just didn’t seem particularly concerned with giving the right impression.

Somewhere above him, hundreds of people were sleeping, drinking, singing, falling in love, hoping to fall in love, arguing, eating shrimp, buying perfume and selecting wine gums.

Down there,
he knew the engines.

That seemed to be enough.

○

Twenty-something years later, Stockholm appeared in the morning.
People emerged with bags and coats.
Phones came back to life. The corridors filled.

I left the ducks behind and went to a concert in an arena the singer later compared to a giant testicle.

Fair enough.

Somewhere below us, another shift was ending.

Of everyone I met on that ferry all those years ago, the man with the moustache may be the one I remember most clearly.

He had seemed the least interested
in being remembered.

○

There is so much happening upstairs.

And underneath it all,
engines doing what engines do.

Most of the time, something covers them.

But when the Indian passengers have finally found their cabin,
the corridor goes quiet
and there is nothing else to listen to,
you can feel the steady vibration
through the floor and the bed.

For some reason, that is the part that
seems to remain.