Go on, go on, go on, Moonface was urging, not that I needed any encouragement.

‘Let me go,’ I said.

Uncle Tad hesitated before offering the two-shilling pieces, three in a row on his outstretched hand. I took one and began my life as a seafarer, because there was really no other choice for me. When I left my own home a month earlier to live with my uncles closer to the city, my mother told me that if there were no jobs and no money I was to come back.

I wasn’t ready to return.

Even though we were in debt to shopkeepers, it wasn’t for the sake of money that she thought I should go. The land provided for us. But my mother encouraged me to leave because something had to be done about sorrow.

My first job was to bring the meals from the galley and keep the mess room clean. Later, as junior trimmer, I learned to shovel coal, providing it where needed and shifting it from here to there to keep our ship on an even keel. Later I became a furnace man, stripped to the waist, belt turned to the back so that the iron buckle wouldn’t heat up and burn a buckle-shaped hole from belly button to backbone. But SS Otaki was one of the last of the coal burners. The work I did later, in the engine rooms of other fine ships, was easy by comparison.

Chapter 2

Aki

Having grown to the height and width of a door, I’m easy enough, once seen, for the eye of a ghost – or any eye – to recognise again. Haunting me it was, this eye. Of someone not a ghost. But what more was to be done for this sick and creeping creature, dead enough to be a ghost anyway?

Along the decks and up I went to where I knew the eye was on me. Again I left a cup and parcel and waited.

Nothing.

No shadow.

No movement other than that of the ship itself, tilling the great waters of the wonderful Pacific, bringing me ever closer to my home shores.

I waited for over an hour, fearing that the poor thing had been lost overboard or simply expired, then as I returned to the boards a twist up ahead caught my eye. It was a breath, a straw, a blur, a soundless echo.

Turning from a dark recess the figment tumbled, a cup of mine hooked on a long, pale finger. It fell into a scrap of light, which swept away and back again from a scrag of rocking moon. Falling with a clatter. Yes, a clatter, for this was nothing but a bag of rattly bones.

‘No ghose, you,’ I said as I stepped towards him and leaned down.