The Face on the Pillow

I would like to report a pattern, because I think it has now become one.

For several weeks Container has slept on my bunk. This in itself is no longer news. She arrives at some point after I have turned the light off, by a route I have still not identified, and settles somewhere on the blanket with the confidence of a tenant who has read the lease more carefully than I have.

What has changed is the position. It no longer matters where she begins the night. She may start at the foot of the bed. She may start on my chair. On Monday she started, as far as I could tell, on top of the wardrobe. And yet every morning, without exception, I open my eyes and find her face roughly four inches from mine, looking at me with an expression of calm, patient interest, as if she has been there for hours waiting to see what I would do next.

This morning I tested it. I went to sleep on my left side, facing the wall, leaving her no room at all on that side of the pillow. I woke at ten past six facing the wall. Container was between me and the wall. I do not know how. There is not a cat's width of space there. There is barely a paperback's width. She regarded me, blinked once, and went back to sleep, which I took to mean the experiment had concluded and I had lost.

A shadow by day as well

It is not only the nights. She now follows me nearly everywhere I am allowed to go. To breakfast, where she sits under my chair and receives nothing, officially. Along the walkway on my morning walk, where she keeps a steady pace two steps behind and stops whenever I stop. To the library, where she occupies whichever book I had intended to read.

She does not make a sound. She does not ask for anything. She simply attends, like a very small, very silent member of a security detail who has been told I am important and has not been told why.

Elena watched her follow me into the mess and said, "She has decided." I asked what she had decided. Elena shrugged and said that was not for us to know.

Dawn on the bridge

I was up early anyway, so I took the tin up to the bridge. Priya was on watch and pretended not to look at the tin until I opened it, at which point she stopped pretending. We had coffee, tea, and two of the Korean butter biscuits, which are holding up remarkably well.

Container arrived about five minutes after I did and sat beside my feet, facing the windows, as if she too were keeping a lookout.

"You have a shadow," said Priya.

"I am aware."

"She is better company than you are before seven," she said, and took a third biscuit without asking. I let it pass. It seemed the sort of morning for generosity.

We are well out now, past the halfway mark on the chart between Japan and the date line. The sea is long and slow and grey blue, and the days are beginning to take on the pleasant sameness that I have come to look forward to.

I will try the right side tonight. I fully expect to wake up looking at a cat.