The Galley

The galley was the warmest room on the ship. Polly had been there before, at the edges, watching, but never on a working morning. Today she went in deliberately.

Esteban had been the cook on the Pressure Drop for nine months. Before that he had cooked on a tuna boat out of Manta, and before that in a hotel in Quito. He was a small, square man with a quiet voice and forearms tattooed with octopuses. He did not seem to mind Polly perching on the edge of his prep counter.

"There is no market out here," he said, without being asked. "We provision in Guam. Fresh produce for the first three days. Then what we can keep cold. Then what we can keep in cans."

The freezer room was the size of a phone box. He showed her: a side of pork, vacuum-sealed and labeled with the date of departure. Frozen broccoli in clear bags. Six bricks of butter. A whole tuna, glassy-eyed and stiff. Past the freezer, the dry stores: rice in plastic bins the size of dustbins, lentils, pasta, sacks of flour for the bread he made every morning.

The crew, he explained, was twenty-seven people. Each one was working hard, sleep-deprived, and tense in their own way. Esteban's job was not so much to feed them as to anchor them. Three meals a day, at the same time every day, regardless of weather or schedule. "If everything else is uncertain, the food is certain," he said. "You feel the ship rock. You do not feel hungry surprise."

Polly watched him work. He was making something he called arroz con coco, rice cooked in coconut milk with a little salt, a recipe from the Ecuadorian coast. He toasted the rice in the dry pot first, the grains turning faintly amber. He poured in coconut milk and water and covered the pot. He set a timer for twenty-five minutes. Then he stood and watched the timer for a few seconds, as if he could not quite trust himself to wait.

"And the deepest dive?" Polly asked. She had heard the crew talking about it: a dive past 10,000 metres scheduled for the next day. The pilot would be on rations during the descent and the return.

Esteban smiled. "Sandwich. Cheese, ham. Apple. Bottle of water. Six hours each way. Nothing fancy down there. You eat a sandwich at the bottom of the world, you have a story for the rest of your life."

The rice timer ticked on. A pan of oil began to heat for the eggs. The bread he had baked at four in the morning sat under a clean cloth on the windowsill. Polly's red head turned in slow appreciation. She had not yet eaten breakfast.

He noticed. He cut a slice of mango from a bowl on the counter and set it beside her. She did not say thank you in any language he would have understood. She ate it. He went back to the rice.