Excerpt from ‘the sea isn’t a place’.1.3
Sprawling over the table with arrested pen, I glance out the window, and in the frame of my vision I see what I think are stars flying upwards between the teakwood jambs on a black sky. The whole lot take flight together and disappear, leaving only a blackness flecked with white flashes, for it is the sea as black as the sky and speckled with foam afar; the stars that had flown to the perceived roll come back on the return swing of this ship, rushing downwards in their glittering multitude, not of fiery points, but enlarged to tiny discs brilliant with clear wet sheen.
I watch these stars for another moment, my throat tightens; I write “21h00 swell increasing. Heart labouring and taking water on her decks. Battened down the coolies for the night. Barometer falling.” I pause, and press the pen, “nothing whatever will come of it.”
But I resolutely close my entry “every appearance of a typhoon coming on.”
