Ship's wheel and anchor on the upper back

Up top, old Tobias Quill has both hands clamped on the spokes of the great oak wheel, the brass rim dull with salt. The wind has backed round to the north-east and the sea stands up in grey ridges. Somebody must lash the wheel to the binnacle before she rounds on her own and takes the rudder with her. You are the only soul aboard who can splice three-strand without thinking, so you kneel on the wet planking and begin.

Forty minutes later your fingers are split and the hemp is stiff with blood, and the anchor hanging off the bow has started knocking against the hull in long dull strokes. Quill says nothing. He only tips his head at the compass rose fixed under the glass, its four long points aimed north, south, east and west like the arms of a man who has decided where he is going. You think of the anchor that never came up at Valparaiso, cut loose by a captain too proud to wait for the tide, and how the rope kept coiling into the dark long after the flukes had gone.

When the sun finally breaks grey behind the clouds, Quill lets go of the spokes and the wheel holds true under its lashings. You sit on the galley step with the blackened heel of the loaf in your lap, and you decide that a ship only keeps her course because somebody keeps tying the same knot again.