He nods and wipes away a tear. ‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I appreciate your concern. I won’t take any more of your food. But I have to get on now.’

67

Antonio

5 February 2022, 14:00

The Caribbean

I’ve never seen the macerator before. I don’t know anything about it, I don’t know how it works and until today, I didn’t even know that it existed. I’d never thought about what happens to the food waste on the ship. Lola told me where it was – she’s had a lot of time on her hands lately and has apparently been spending some of it looking at plans of the ship.

The macerator is a huge, terrifying-looking stainless-steel machine with a hopper-style thing on top. The room it’s in, which is on an even lower deck than the crew area, is cavernous and full of metal pipes. It’s totally silent bar the squeak of the trolley as I push it across the floor, and my footsteps, the sound of which seems to ricochet around the room as if I was wearing tap shoes rather than trainers.

I step onto the metal platform with the trolley at ground level and press a button. There is a low rumble as the machine fires up which echoes round the room. I press another, smaller button with an ‘up’ arrow on and the platform slowly starts to rise. It judders to a stop at the top when the floor is at the same level as the top of the hopper. I roll Stuart out of the trolley and onto the platform. Moving the trolley out of the way, I give Stuart a shove and he topples into the machine. There is a grinding sound and this time I can’t keep the vomit down as Stuart is turned into fish food which will be spat out into the ocean. I throw the DNA results I snatched from his surgery in with him, though I know it’s nothing but a short stopgap – I’m sure the results must be somewhere on his computer too. I’m not a religious man, but I can’t help but pray silently for forgiveness as I wipe my mouth with my sleeve, swipe my tears away and press the down arrow to get me back to ground level.

I wait at the bottom for a couple of minutes before switching off the machine to make sure it’s finished whatever it needed to do. I try not to think about what I’ve just done, but it’s impossible. It’s hard to believe I will ever feel normal again. Surely the image of Stuart in the mortuary drawer will be there every time I close my eyes. And I’m convinced I’m never going to be able to forget the sound of his bones crunching in this awful machine.