The fitted sheet won't sit right. I've done this corner a thousand times, tuck under, fold up, tuck under, and tonight my hands keep losing the shape of it because my phone's going off in my apron pocket. It's my sister, again, wanting to know what the consultant actually said versus what Mam is telling people he said.
I get the near corner done. The far corner comes up wrong, a loose triangle, and I don't fix it because cabin 14 is never checked. Booking's under E. Voss. One passenger, no meals, every single crossing since I started three years ago, and nobody ever gets on board to use it. I make it up anyway because that's the rule, occupied or not, and I go.
Second time that week. We do two round trips some days, ferry doesn't care what day it is. I'm folding the same sheet and my sister's texted a photo of the scan printout, which she shouldn't have, which I can't make sense of anyway, grey static with a circle drawn on in biro. My far corner comes up wrong again, same loose triangle, and this time when I go to fix it there's a dip in the mattress under my hand. Not big. The size of a hip, maybe, like someone's been sitting there a minute and got up. I press it flat with my palm and it comes back up slow, the way memory foam does, except the crew bunks got that stuff two refits ago and cabin 14 still has the old sprung mattress from before I started. I check the label under the sheet. It's the old kind. It shouldn't hold a shape at all.
Third crossing, I've stopped answering the phone. Mam's had the second scan and my sister wants to talk it through and I don't have it in me on a Tuesday night with forty cabins to turn round before Dublin. Cabin 14, same as always, sheet, corner, and my hand goes to smooth the dip before I've even looked, because I already know it'll be there.
It is. Bigger this time. Shoulder-shaped now, and there's a second dip below it, smaller, the size of a forearm resting along the mattress edge the way you'd rest one if you were lying on your side facing the wall. I do the far corner. Wrong again, same triangle, no matter how I pull the sheet, like the mattress underneath has stopped being flat enough to hold a square corner at all. My sister's dog got put down in March and she still texts me photos of the empty dog bed sometimes, I don't know why, and I think of that for a second, standing there with the sheet in my hands.
I straighten up and my phone goes again in my pocket and I let it. The porthole's fogged from the engine heat below, the way it always does mid-crossing, and there's a mark in the condensation at the bottom of the glass, low down, about the height a head would reach if it were resting on the pillow and turned to look out at the water. Five fingers pressed flat against it from the inside, drawn down slow through the fog until they thinned to nothing near the sill.
The bed's still made up wrong behind me, the far corner loose, waiting for somebody to lie back down into the shape it's already learned how to hold.
"Late evening outlook from a cabin on the ferry to Oslo" by teebreuq is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.