Anchor Watch

We were five days at anchor off Singapore when the captain rang down to my cabin and asked if I would bring the generator logs up myself.

I had been Chief Engineer of the Kestrel Bay for twenty months by then, and he had never once asked for a log in person. The logs went up to the bridge in a folder with the Second Engineer’s initials on it, and came back with the captain’s signature, and that was the whole of our correspondence. So I put the phone down and stood there in my cabin in my socks for a minute, and then I did what a clever man does when his master wants a word at ten at night. I had a shower.

My name is Gethin Rees, I am fifty-one and I come from Barry, and I got my ticket the hard way on the Cardiff coasters, which is how I ended up with a belly I stopped apologising for at forty. My wife left me in 2009 for a man who sold conservatories, and I have never said that out loud on this ship. I did not need to. Captain Stavros Daskalakis had a way of looking at me across the wardroom table that said he already knew.

The five days had been slow. The agent’s launch came out once a day with fresh bread and the same news, that the berth at Jurong was delayed, that the vessel ahead was discharging slower than expected, that we should be patient. The crew got through it with football on the mess-room television and a great deal of sleeping. I got through it with maintenance, because an engineer at anchor, with the main engine stopped but kept ready to move at short notice, is a man who is finally allowed to open up the auxiliaries. That day I had done the purifier and the fuel pumps and had a long argument with number three generator’s governor, and I came up to dinner with oil to the elbows and a satisfaction I did not mention to anybody.

Dinner in the wardroom had been the usual. The Chief Officer, a Croatian called Marko, talked about his daughter’s exams, and the Second Mate yawned, and Captain Daskalakis sat at the head of the table cutting his chicken into very small pieces. He asked me whether the governor was behaving. I said it was. He said good. He looked at my hands, as he sometimes did, with the black ground into the creases, and then he looked at his plate. Twenty months of that. I know more about the back of that man’s neck than I know about my own.

In the shower I rehearsed things to say. I had nothing. I stood under the water with my forehead against the tiles, one hand rubbing my beard, which has gone white at the chin and nowhere else, and thought, he has asked for a log. He has asked for a log, and I am a grown man of fifty-one standing here with my heart going like a bilge pump over a folder.

The anchorage that night was a field of lights. Hundreds of ships were waiting for berths, lit up like a town, and every few minutes one of them blew a horn at another. The main engine was stopped but still warm. At sea the engine is such a big noise you stop hearing it, but at anchor you hear everything else: a generator humming through the deck plates, the chain grumbling in the hawse pipe when the ship swung on the tide, a man’s footsteps along the alleyway. I put on a clean boiler suit, took the folder, went up three decks with my pulse in my ears, and knocked on the captain’s door, and he said, “Come.”

He was out of his uniform. That was the first thing. He stood at the desk with his feet bare, in a white undershirt and old cotton trousers, and I had to look up at him, six foot three of a man built like a harbour wall, fifty-eight years old and not even trying to hide the stomach under the shirt or the silver hair curling over its neckline. A glass of something brown stood at his elbow and a second glass beside it. In twenty months I had never seen the captain’s feet.

“Chief,” he said.

“Captain.” I held up the folder. “The logs.”

“Put them on the desk.”

I did, and he didn’t look at them. He came around the desk and pushed the door shut behind me, quietly. He did not touch the key.

---

“I am going to say something,” said Stavros, “and I want you to hear all of it before you answer.”

“Go on.”

“I have been your master for twenty months and I have never in that time said one word to you which was not about the ship.” His English was careful and slow, with the Greek under it like a keel. “I have wanted to at every watch and every dinner. The day in Rotterdam when you came up the gangway wet from the rain and shook yourself like a dog on my deck, I went into my cabin and I stood against the door. I am too old to pretend this is something else.”

My mouth had gone dry. “Stavros.”

“Wait. Please.” He held up one big hand on a forearm like a mooring line. “I am your Master. You are my Chief. If you want that to be all we are, you say so, and tomorrow I am still your captain and you are still my chief, and nothing is different, and no one will hear a word. I swear it on my mother. You can walk out of this cabin and it never happened. Your reports and your next contract are the same either way. If you stay, I want it because you want it. You hear me? Not because I have the bigger cabin.”

I looked at him. I thought about twenty months of looking, all the times I had read the same line of the engine log four times because he was in the doorway. I thought about my own two hands. I could not feel them.

“Stavros,” I said. “I would have been up here a year ago if I had thought you’d have me. I stood outside this door in Fremantle for ten minutes with a bottle of wine and went away again. I am not walking out.” I turned the key in the door myself. “Nobody owes anybody anything for tonight, and my logs will say what the engines say, same as always. Off watch, you’re Stavros, and I’m Gethin, and on watch we’re what we are. Now I want you to say the rest.”

“The rest?”

“What you want to do to me.”

His eyes shut. When he opened them they were black and wet. “Ela,” he said, very softly. “Come here.”

I went. He cupped my face in hands as rough as rope, and kissed me, and his mouth tasted of brandy and salt. It was a slow kiss, careful, and I felt his whole body shaking against mine. I put my arms round his back and held on to the thick warmth of him, the heavy breathing chest, and I made a noise I’d stopped hearing in myself in 2009.

“Tell me,” he said into my mouth. “What do you want?”

“A cwtch, to start with.” I was laughing and my voice was cracking. “That’s a cuddle. And then I want you to lay me down and do everything you’ve been standing against that door thinking about.”

“Everything?”

“Take your time. Nobody wants me in the engine room before seven.”

He let out something half laugh and half groan, and his arms came round me and lifted me bodily onto my toes. “Gethin,” he said, and my name in his mouth sounded like a prayer he had practised.

---

The captain’s sleeping cabin was through a curtain at the back of the day room, and the bed was bolted to the deck and narrower than a man his size had any right to need. The porthole was open a hand’s width, and through it came the lights of the anchorage and the smell of diesel and warm sea.

We undressed each other slowly, because neither of us trusted our hands. He unzipped my boiler suit to the waist, pulled my vest over my head, and put his palms flat on my chest, and I felt him feel how hard my heart was going. He lowered his face and kissed the white hair on my breastbone, then lower, and my breath went. I got his undershirt over his head and there he was, vast and silver, with a belly I wanted to put my face in, and chest hair gone thick and white as sheep’s wool. I ran both hands through it and heard him exhale.

“You are beautiful,” he said, looking at me. “You know this? You have a body like a good engine. Built to last.”

“I’m fat, mun.”

“You are strong, and soft, and I have wanted to put my mouth on you for twenty months.” His hands pushed the boiler suit down and my pants with it. “Sit. Please.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. He dropped to his knees on the deck plates with a grunt, and the sight of the Master of the Kestrel Bay kneeling at my feet nearly finished me before he’d touched me. His big hand closed around my cock. It was hard already, thick and heavy in his fist, the head wet.

“Panagia mou,” he whispered. “All this time you hide this in a boiler suit.”

“I’ll show it to you any time you ask.”

“I am asking now.”

He took me down.

It was hot and wet and slow, like everything he did. He closed his lips round the head, pushed his tongue into the slit, and sank down, taking more of me with every pass, and a sound ripped out of my chest that I hoped nobody on the bridge could hear. I grabbed at his hair, thick and silver, and he groaned and the vibration went through my entire body.

“Stavros— Jesus, Mary. Stavros. That’s lush. That’s—tamping lush, God, don’t stop.”

He did not stop. He sucked until my thighs shook and my hips started to push and his hands slid round to grip my backside, kneading, pulling me deeper. His other hand worked down between my legs and played along the seam of me, behind my balls, and I jolted on the bed. When I looked down he was watching me, his eyes steady and hungry, his big mouth stretched round my cock. I pulled him off with a hand in his hair.

“Stop. Stop. If you do that another minute it’ll be over.”

“Then I stop.” He sat back, dragging a wrist across his mouth, and the look on his face, pleased and shameless, was a thing I’m going to keep until I die. “Now you tell me what you want next.”

“In me.” The words fell out. “All of it. I haven’t had anybody in me in a very long time. I’m out of practice.”

“Then we go slow.” He stood up, joints cracking, kicked off his own trousers, and crossed to a locker above the desk. “I am the Master. I hold the key to the medical chest, and I took two things from it this afternoon. A tube of sterile lubricating jelly, which is water-based and meant for catheters, and condoms, in date. I did not know if I would need them. I hoped.” He turned round. “We use both, if you agree.”

“I agree. Both.”

“Good.” He came back with them, and put them on the shelf by the bunk, and stood looking down at me. “Will you lie on your stomach, agapi mou? I want to be over you.”

---

I lay face down on the bunk, and he slid a pillow under my hips. The sheet was cool and smelled of him, laundry soap and cigarettes, and I turned my head sideways on the second pillow and watched him through my lashes. He knelt on the bunk behind me and laid one big palm low on my back, a big warm weight, and stroked it slowly down.

“Tell me if you want to stop,” he said. “Any time.”

“I will. Get on with it.”

I felt the cool jelly first, a slick finger circling, and the tenderness of it made my throat close. He was a man who had spent thirty years at sea handling ships over seven hundred feet long with pilots shouting in his ear, and he touched me as if I might break. One finger went in slowly, and I felt the sting and then the give, and I pushed back onto it.

“Good,” he said, low. “You open for me. Another.”

I’d forgotten it. I had actually forgotten the feeling, that stretched, full, trembling feeling like standing at the edge of something high, and it came back all at once. When the third finger found the place inside me and pressed, I cried out into the pillow, a long wobbling sound. He stopped at once.

“Hurt?”

“No. God, no. Do that again.”

He did it again. “Here?”

“There, there, that’s the one. Stavros, I’m going to come if you keep doing that.”

“You will wait.” His voice had roughened. “I want you holding on. I want to be in you before you come, and then you may come as much as you want.”

“You’re a tyrant.”

“I am a Greek captain. Of course I am a tyrant.” But he was laughing, a shaky, ragged laugh, and I heard foil tear behind me, and then the slick of the jelly on himself. “Gethin. Over your shoulder, please.”

I looked over my shoulder. He knelt there huge in the lamplight, his cock thick and curving up against his belly, and he put a hand on my hip and looked into my face.

“I am going to put it in. If at any moment you say stop, I stop. You understand? On this bed there is no rank.”

“I understand.” My voice shook. “Do it. Please.”

He pressed the head against me, and pushed, and I opened round him.

It burned, and it went on filling me, a little more with every breath, his hand steady on my hip and his breath whistling through his teeth. I buried my face in the pillow and breathed, and he waited with the head just inside, shaking. Then I pushed back, and the rest of him came in, and his whole weight settled over my back.

“All of it,” he said into my ear. His voice was a whisper, deep and cracked. “Gethin, I am all the way in you.”

“I know.” I could hardly speak. “I can feel all of it. There’s a lot of you.”

“You are shaking, my Chief.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“I will be careful.” He slid his arms up beside mine, and his big hands covered mine on the sheet above my head and his fingers laced between them. He was lying full length over me, a warm weight pressing me into the mattress, his chest hair against my back, his breath hot on my neck. “I am not going to be careful for long.”

He began to move.

Slowly, in long deliberate strokes that drew him nearly out and slid him back in, deep and steady as a slow engine turning over. Each time he came home the head dragged across the place inside me and my toes curled in the sheets. His fingers tightened in mine. His mouth was against my ear and he kept up a low murmur the whole time, in English and Greek, and I could not tell which was which.

“This is what I thought about, in Rotterdam, in Fremantle, alone in this bed with the ship moving. You under me like this. Your back, and the sounds you make.” His hips snapped forward and I cried out. “Yes. Like that. I want to hear every sound my Chief can make, and I am glad nobody else can.”

“Stavros, fuck, you’re so deep. You’re so deep in me.”

“Hot as the engine room, my Chief,” he said into my shoulder, “and tighter for it. I will never get my work done again.”

“Mine.” A low groan. “Say it. Please. I have not asked for anything in twenty years.”

“Yours,” I gasped. “All yours. Fuck me, you stubborn Greek bastard, I’ve been yours since Rotterdam.”

He gave a grunt like a winch taking load and began to drive into me with more weight, still slow, still deep, each thrust rocking the heavy bunk against its bolts. Sweat dripped from him onto my back. My cock was trapped under me and the friction of the sheet with each stroke was killing me. I pushed back to meet him, rolling my hips, and his hands tightened on mine until it hurt, and I loved it.

“Give me your weight, Stavros. Pin me down. I want to feel it at every watch tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow you will sit on the bridge, still feeling me, and think of nothing else.” His voice was ragged. “I will watch you try to sign the log.”

“Gethin. Gethin. I cannot hold much longer.”

“Don’t hold. Let go in me, Stavros.”

“With you. I want with you.” His right hand left mine and slid under my hips and closed round my cock, slick and rough and sure. “Now. Come now. I have you.”

That broke me. I came with a howl into the pillow, my whole body locking round his, spilling over his fist in long hot waves that would not stop, and I heard him groan my name and push once more to the root and shudder, his hips jerking against me, his left hand still laced in mine. For a long moment the whole ship held still around us.

Then it moved again. A generator changed note two decks down. The chain grumbled in the hawse pipe. Somewhere out in the dark a horn blew twice, long and low.

---

It was gone one in the morning when I got my breath back. We lay on our sides in the narrow bunk, a cwtch in the old Welsh style, with his belly warm against my back and his arm over my chest and his mouth resting on the nape of my neck. The porthole showed the lights of the anchorage. I could hear him breathing and feel his heartbeat slowing against my spine.

“I should go down and look in on the engine room,” I said.

“You should.” He did not move.

“I’ve the generators to check. And there’s the purifier, and Ramil’s got a cold, and—”

“Go.” But his arm tightened round me, and he kissed between my shoulder blades, and said into my skin, “And come back. When you are finished. If you want.”

“I’ll want.”

“You are sure?”

I rolled over, in the cramped space, and looked at him. Fifty-eight years old and the Master of an eighty-thousand-tonne ship, with sleep creases in his face and his hair standing up and tears running into the grey stubble. I wiped them off with my thumb.

“Stavros. Off watch, I’m yours. On watch, I’ll call you Captain and mean it. That works for me if it works for you.”

“It works,” he said hoarsely. “It works very well.”

I dressed in the dark. At the door I turned round, and he was lying with one arm across his eyes, and the other hand lifted, palm open, a small formal gesture, a salute to the sea.

I went down the stairs in my socks with my boots in my hand.

Ramil was at the control desk when I got to the engine room, with a mug of tea and a box of tissues and a stack of the night’s readings. He looked up, and looked at me for a long moment with the polite blank face of somebody who has served under a lot of chiefs.

“Chief,” he said. “Your boiler suit is on inside out.”

“So it is.”

“I will not say anything, Chief.”

“Thank you, Ramil.”

I turned it the right way round in the changing room behind the workshop, and went on with the round. I read the temperatures on number two generator twice, because the first time I wasn’t looking. Overhead, through all that steel, the ship swung gently to her anchor on the turning tide, and for the first time in twenty months I did not mind how long the anchorage kept us.