The Dark Winter

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The old man looks up, and for a moment it feels as though he is staring through the wrong end of a telescope. The reporter is forty years away.

‘Mr Stein?’

A warm, tender hand on his bony knee.

‘Can you share your memories of that moment?’

It takes a physical effort of will to drag himself into the present.

He blinks.

Tells himself, with an old man’s fear of losing his memories, to get it together.

You’re still here, he tells himself. Still living.

‘Mr Stein? Fred?’

You’re alive, he tells himself, again. The supertanker Carla. Seventy miles off the Icelandic coast. One last interview, here in the galley, with its stink of fried food and burned coffee, its diesel and sea-spray; the deep, bass-note hum of unwashed men and wet wool.

So many memories …

He blinks again. It’s becoming a habit. There should be tears, he thinks. Deserves tears, this.

He sees her properly. Sitting forward on the hardbacked chair like a jockey on a horse. Holding the microphone in front of his face like she’s a toddler who wants him to lick her lolly.

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