A Birthday that I did not mention

I did not tell anyone on this ship that today is my birthday. I did not put it on any form. I did not mention it to Doreen in Savannah, I did not mention it to Marco when he brought coffee, and I certainly did not mention it to Priya, who would have filed it somewhere and used it against me at a time of her choosing.

She found out anyway.

Dinner

I came down to the mess at 18:00 as instructed, on the assumption it was another evening of Elena's excellent and slightly aggressive cooking. The room was fuller than usual. Kev was there, out of the engine room, which almost never happens. Tiny had put on a shirt with all of its buttons. The bosun was leaning against the doorframe looking pleased with himself in a way that made me immediately suspicious.

Elena came out of the galley carrying a plate. On the plate was a key lime pie. Not a slice. An entire pie, in the sense that it was a complete and self contained pie, correctly assembled with a graham crust and a proper pale green filling. It was also, unmistakably, sized for one person. A single portion pie. A pie with the diameter of a saucer and the seriousness of a full cake. There was a candle in the middle of it.

Priya was standing behind Elena with her arms folded and an expression I have decided, on reflection, was enjoying itself.

"Happy birthday," Elena said, and put the plate down in front of me.

The entire mess sang. All of it. In several accents. Priya did not sing. Priya watched. She watched the whole way through, over the rim of a mug, with the small, contained smile of a person who has arranged a thing precisely and is now observing whether the thing lands.

It landed.

The pie

I have no idea how Elena made a key lime pie in the middle of the Atlantic. I did not ask. I have a working theory, which is that a container somewhere on the forward stacks now has a slightly rearranged inventory and a note in a manifest that will be explained to a customs officer in Rotterdam by someone more senior than me. I have decided that if I do not know this, I have not participated in it, and I am therefore free to eat the pie.

I ate the pie.

It was excellent. Sharp, cold, correctly set, exactly the amount of sweet. Elena watched me eat it the way a person watches an inspector taste their work. When I finished, she nodded once, took the plate, and went back into the galley without a word.

Priya waited until the mess had begun to clear and then walked past me and said, quietly, "you should have mentioned it." I said I had not mentioned it on purpose. She said, "I know." And that was the end of the conversation, in the technical sense.

The library

The other news of the last few days is that I have run out of books. All three of the ones I brought are finished, including the one I had been lying about since 2019, which turned out to be worth the wait and also somewhat less clever than I had been claiming. This was a small crisis until Tiny, in passing, mentioned "the library."

The library is a shelf. It is bolted to a bulkhead in a corridor between the mess and the laundry. It is entirely unlabelled, has no cataloguing system anyone will admit to, and contains, at last count, one hundred and forty something books in six languages, a full set of tide tables from 2014, a paperback of Moby Dick with a bookmark two thirds of the way through that I suspect has been there for years, and a copy of a John le Carré I have already read but am prepared to read again.

I have taken the le Carré and left, in exchange, one of my three, on the correct understanding that this is how the shelf remains a shelf.

The wifi confession

There is one more thing I have been avoiding writing about, because I was enjoying the story I had been telling myself. The story was that I was crossing the Atlantic in monastic disconnection, filing these dispatches by whatever means, and that this was part of the point.

The truth is that this ship has Starlink. The company installed it, I am told, for operational reasons: weather routing, engine telemetry, remote diagnostics, all extremely sensible. The side effect is that the wifi on board is, embarrassingly, better than the wifi in my apartment in Atlanta. The crew are on WhatsApp calls at all hours. Marco was FaceTiming his mother in Manila this morning while polishing a rail. Tiny has a running video chat with what I am fairly sure is a rugby team in Wellington.

My iPhone is in the drawer of the desk in my cabin, switched off. I have not turned it on. I am aware, at all times, that I could. I have chosen to pretend that this is not the case, and I would appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of pretending along with me.

Tonight

The pie is gone. The candle is in a jar in the galley, presumably to be used again on the next unsuspecting person. Priya is on the bridge, because Priya is always on the bridge. Elena is doing whatever Elena does after dinner, which I have learned not to investigate. I am in my cabin, with a le Carré, a mug of Elena approved English breakfast tea, and the entirely unwarranted feeling that I have been, for one evening, part of the crew rather than a piece of cargo they are being kind to.

The iPhone is still in the drawer. It is still off. I am going to bed.