Scrabble at Midnight

The Scrabble Championship of the Pacific resumed last night. It has two competitors and a governing body consisting of one of the competitors. I will let you guess which.

Priya had the middle watch. The middle watch runs from midnight until four, and is, in my experience, when she is at her most relaxed and her most ruthless, which on Priya look identical. She had mentioned at dinner, entirely casually, that the board was "available" if anyone happened to be awake. I happened to be awake. I happened to set an alarm in order to be awake.

Rules of engagement

Scrabble on the bridge at night is played under red light, so that nobody's night vision is spoiled. Red light makes every tile look the same colour as every other tile and every face look like it is plotting something. Hers, at least, generally is.

The board sits on the corner of the chart table. Play stops whenever anything on the radar, the radio, or the horizon requires attention, which last night happened four times. Each time she got up, walked to the windows, looked into the dark for a while, adjusted something, came back, sat down, and played a word worth thirty points as if she had been thinking about nothing else. I am beginning to suspect she was.

I brought the biscuit tin, as is now customary. She has begun to use the tin lid as a scorepad, which I find a bit much.

The game

She opened with JINX. I said that was a bad omen. She said it was a good omen for her.

I replied with TEA, because I had three tiles and no ideas, and she laughed so suddenly that she had to put her hand over her mouth. Apparently this was "very on brand".

The middle of the game was a long, quiet, attritional affair in which I clung to her score like a man clinging to a lashing rod in a gale. She played QUAY, which I thought was showing off. I played BRASS, which I thought was poetic. She played OBOE on a triple word score and I sulked about it for two turns.

Then, at around two in the morning, she played FLIRT.

She played it without comment, across the bottom of the board, on nothing in particular, for a score of nine. Nine. Priya does not play words worth nine. She looked at me across the chart table under the red light with an expression that would have been entirely innocent on a person who was not Priya.

I did the only thing a man in my position could do. I studied my rack very carefully and pretended I had not noticed anything.

The finish

It was close at the end. Very close. I had the Z and nowhere to put it. She had, I discovered later, an S she was saving for an emergency.

And then I saw it. I put down BISCUIT, all seven tiles, across a double word score, and the fifty point bonus took me past her by four.

Silence on the bridge. Somewhere far below, the engine hummed. Out ahead, the dark Pacific went about its business.

"Challenge," she said.

"It is a word."

"It is your word. That is different."

We consulted the dictionary, which lives in the drawer under the chart table next to the tide tables and a box of spare pencils. BISCUIT was, I am delighted to report, a word. I had won. My first win in what is, by her count, a series of eleven.

She took it well. That is, she took a biscuit from the tin, ate it slowly while looking at me, and said, "The board was rigged by the Pacific."

"How?"

"It gave you an extra day. You have had more practice than me."

I said that was the date line, not the Pacific. She said they were the same organisation. Then she said I owed her a biscuit for every point I had won by, which is four, and that she would collect them on her own schedule.

Walking home

I went back down at about three. The corridors at that hour are empty and very bright and very quiet, and they hum. I was humming too. I think I had been humming since BISCUIT.

At the door to my cabin Container was waiting outside, which is new. She looked up at me with something like reproach, as if I had kept her up, and walked in ahead of me, and was on the pillow before I had my shoes off.

I lay there for a while, not sleeping. FLIRT, for nine. On nothing. I have been turning it over all day, and I have come to the firm conclusion that it was simply the only word she could make.

I am a very good liar to myself. It is one of my core skills.