‘The fool,’ my grandmother said, when I told her what had happened and after I’d played a section of the recording to her. ‘Anyone would think he couldn’t speak English.’ She rattled her baking trays, swiping at them with a cloth. ‘Him and his language, what’s he trying to prove?’ She shoved the trays onto the rack above the oven. ‘All right, leave it to me, I’ll write it up for you. Tonight. In good English.’ She emphasised this last sentence. It wasn’t until she made the offer that I realised my grandmother was conversant in this other language too. ‘As though I’ve nothing better to do,’ she mumbled. ‘Next time, if there’s going to be a next time, tell him to speak English.’

I bit my tongue. There was going to be a next time. I’d already arranged this, but who was I, a twenty-one-year-old stranger, to tell such an impressive man not to speak his own language.

In what follows, the first lines were spoken in English. The rest is my grandmother’s translation from Māori into English. I think Grandmother must have worked on it throughout the night as it was all ready for me, in neat, handwritten pages, by next morning.

Chapter 1

Aki

Every night while I walk the decks of my tub,

I’m seeing a ghose.

No, no. I gotta say that again.

Every night while I walk the decks of my tub

a ghose is seeing me.

At first I thought it might be Moonface come to light, reminding me he was my companion on our journeys to see the world. Silly thing, I thought. I hadn’t forgotten him. He’s the one I talk to in the lonely hours, out of habit. As long as I am alive he will be.

But it wasn’t Moonface.

That first time it was just a glimpse I had of that ghost seeing me when some slant of light – brief torchlight perhaps, or a strip from a slit of open-and-shut door, or a roll of the ship – slipped a sliver of moon onto that dark side where I walked.

Anyway, an iris, sitting whole and lit in the outer half of an eye corner, and a section of high, luminous cheekbone is what I saw. But I kept on walking, stepping it out on the dark decks after night-watch and several hours of making steam, ourselves steaming and intoxicated on steel moving against steel, hot pipes, grease and oil enclosed in an airless, shuddering and lurching cavern.

Blood needs air, and when coming out into it, the first salt and gluttonous skulling is like throwing back highballs one after another, becoming so heady and drunken that a man could pitch to the boards with the weight of it.