I descended the stairs and the stench hit me.

Someone had lit a lamp in the gloom so that I could see my father lay crooked in his cot, an arm draped over the side, fingers pointed towards an overturned glass on the floor. His face, the beginnings of a scrappy beard, was crusted with vomit. It had congealed on him, the fluid staining the pillow under his head.

The stink was of vomit, but more powerfully liquor. Where had he found it? Where, for God’s sake, had he been hiding it?

I cried out for Dr Gideon: he came running from behind the partly closed door of the captain’s cabin.

‘Oh dear,’ he muttered. ‘Oh dear. Get me water. He will need to drink water. And you must’—he forced open one of my father’s eyes and peered in—‘must ensure he can breathe.’ The doctor shuffled him across the cot so that his head draped downwards, and without a word of warning, smacked him forcefully across the back of the head. A gout of fresh vomit splattered on the floor. There was blood in it.

‘Don’t!’ I cried.

‘…his own good.’ He struck another blow, the impact sending my father’s lank hair flying.

‘Please stop!’

I dived under the path of the third blow and clutched my father’s head, weeping, smoothing his hair. I was covered in muck and did not give it a thought. I felt such sorrow, such grief for him that a thousand of these humiliations could not quench it. I looked up at the doctor and he gazed back at me—at me and my father—his face weirdly calm.

‘Very good, then. Very good, my dear. I will let you handle it your way,’ he said. My dear. His voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘I will fetch the water, perhaps.’ He left the bunkroom and returned with the bucket and a length of towel, and allowed me to attend to my father without further intervention.

I washed and towelled and combed his hair once again. Once again, I pulled the sheets off his bed and I took them out on the deck in the darkness and sloshed water over them and scrubbed them and rinsed them and hung them over the boom to dry and once again I remade his bed with clean sheets, working carefully around his unconscious form. While I had the sheets off the cot, I lifted the entire board that supported the bed so that I could look underneath for the hidden stash. There was nothing there: an empty cavity, devoid even of rat droppings.

Once again I made sure to put a glass of water by his bed to ease the tearing thirst that would attack him when he woke, and I kissed his tormented brow. Once again, he would remember none of this in the morning.