Speaking of eggs, we moved from freezer to fridge to gaze at 230 boxes of them, which made a total of 575 dozen eggs. This looked like a lot but I calculated that it added up to only just over one egg per person; hence Charles’s eagerness to offer reassurance. ‘These are not the only eggs. Most the eggs are frozen. These here are just back-up.’ Good to know.
En route to one of the store rooms, we passed another chill box which was actually the morgue. ‘Ain’t nobody in there at the moment,’ he said. ‘And if there was there’d be a guard outside.’ That was good to know too.
As we entered the store room Charles warned that it was in a seriously depleted condition. At the beginning of the deployment stuff would have been piled so high we would not be able to see over the stacks. Now, near the end of deployment which, he hoped, would clean the place out, they were rarely more than four feet high.
First thing we saw was a low-level expanse of popcorn (‘they just love popcorn round here’). Beyond the popcorn were six-pound tins (like big pots of paint) of Country Sausage Gravy, Great Northern Beans, Victory Garden Pork and Beans, Popeye Leaf Spinach, Heinz Dill Kosher Sandwich Slices . . .
Like a mother whose son has turned up unexpectedly Charles kept stressing that levels were this low because we only had forty-five days at sea left, that, relatively speaking, there was almost nothing to eat.
Before moving into the bakery we donned little paper Nehru hats. The bakers, from New York, Texas, Chicago and California, were lined up to meet us. They bake eight thousand cakes a week, not counting the ones made for special ceremonies in port (epic cakes iced in the colours of the American flag and the flag of the host country). Our visit was not ceremonial exactly but they had prepared some samples for us. I love cake, cake is my popcorn, and I was glad to be able to tuck in as though it were the snapper, not me, who was always picking at his food like some high-achieving anorexic. It was incredibly hot in here—hot, as Philip Larkin remarked in a different context, as a bakery.
‘You’re not troubled by the heat in here?’ I said.
‘Uh-uh,’ said one of the bakers. ‘Sometimes it gets pretty hot.’
‘This is not hot?’
‘This a really cool day.’
The visit was as near as I was ever likely to come to being a touring politician or a member of the royal family. I actually found I’d adopted the physical stance of the monarch-in-the-age-of-democracy (standing with my hands behind my back) and the corresponding mental infirmity: nodding my head as though this brief exchange of pleasantries was just about the most demanding form of communication imaginable.
From the bakery we moved into one of the real kitchens: the heart (attack) of the whole feeding operation where Charles resumed his narrative of singular endeavour: ‘I aim to prepare maybe four thousand . . . ’, ‘When I’ve eaten twenty-five hundred pounds of . . . ’ I’d got it into my head that this was not just a figure of speech, and now found it impossible to shake off the image of the genial and willing Charles scarfing his way through piles of meat, potatoes and vegetables, gorging his body beyond its performance envelope, a Sisyphus scrambling up a mountain of food, a calorie-intensive reincarnation of the Ancient Mariner. In its way it was a far more impressive feat of solo perseverance than even the pilots could achieve.
All around were boiling vats as round and deep as kettle drums. A lot of meat was being prepared, plastic bags stuffed full of barbecue chopped pork.
‘Hmm, smells good,’ I said, instinctively remembering that nine times out of ten the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels. The truth was that the smell was a sustained and nauseated appeal on behalf of the Meat-Is-Murder Coalition or the Transnational Vegan Alliance. But what can you expect when you’re in the middle of the ocean with five thousand hungry bellies to stuff, most of them needing plenty of calories to fuel their workouts at the gym?
Our tour concluded with a look at another store room. Notwithstanding Charles’s warning about the paucity of supplies, the acute lack of any sense of shortage gave rise to a form of mental indigestion. It was reassuring looking at these tins, seeing them stacked, knowing one would not—I would not—be sampling their contents. But what a disappointment if the carrier sank and treasure hunters of the future discovered not the sunken gold and jewels of galleons from the days of the Spanish Armada but thousands of cans of gravy and kosher sandwich slices: the lost city of Atlantis re-imagined as a cut-price hypermarket that had slipped beneath the waves.
6
For the duration of my stay the carrier remained a three-dimensional maze of walkways, stairs and hatches but at some point we always ended up back in the hangar bay—the second most interesting place on the boat (after the flight deck). We passed through there straight after our tour of the kitchen and would do so later the same day, after dark, when it was illuminated by a pale yellow light (less visible from a distance). Now the Arabian sun was peeking through the open expanse of the elevator bay, eager to get a glimpse of whatever was going on in this outpost of industrial America.
Like a buffalo brought down by a lion who then summons the rest of her pride to tuck in, an F-18 was being pecked, prodded and taken apart by a gang of mechanics and engineers. They swarmed over it, drawing metallic entrails from the fuselage, digging into its cockpit and burrowing away in the bowels of the engine. They did this with the utmost care, many of them wearing the soft suede or chamois over-shoes I’d noticed earlier—the heavy industrial equivalent of carpet slippers—to prevent damage to the plane’s delicate skin. The concern was reciprocated: little padded pouches were tied to the sharp edges of the plane’s fins and wings so that heads were not gashed as people hurried by.
A brown-shirted woman was perched on the wing, cross-legged as if at a festival of future archaeology, concentrating closely on the all-important part she was unscrewing. Having taken the component out of the wing she was now coating it with some kind of grease, glue, anti-freeze, lube or whatever. I apologize for the discrepancy between the precision of the task and the imprecision of my description of that task. I have never liked anything that involves engines, oil or fiddly intricate work even though it is, in a way, in my blood. My dad served his apprenticeship and worked at Gloster Aircraft Company, where one of the first operational jet fighters, the Gloster Meteor, was built. Some days he and his workmates would eat lunch outside, munching their bread-rationed sandwiches, watching planes take off and fly around the shirey skies. (My parents were much on my mind while I was on the boat; my mum had died four months before I came on board; my dad would die, quite suddenly, three weeks after I got back.)
A couple of planes away a fuel cell bladder was being replaced. It looked like a cross between a black python and a massively deflated paddling pool. The work was being overseen by a civilian who, like almost all the civilians on the boat, was ex-military (a Vietnam vet from helicopters, search and rescue). If you met him in the street you would guess straightaway that he had been in the military: a directness, a strength (physical, yes, but also of purpose and identity), an instinct for straight talking that is manifest even when (especially when) silent. A young woman was curled up yoga-ishly on the wing of this plane too, replacing something. The fact that she was wearing a cranial and an oil-smeared brown jersey made her eyes even more luminous. I was glad to have an excuse to talk with her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, as you do when your fingers are oily. It wasn’t exactly a gender-reversal thing going on, but the essential choreography of the scene was being acted out in garages throughout the world: a woman being told what’s wrong with her car, in terms barely comprehensible, by a swarthy grease monkey confident of his knowledge and not embarrassed about the oil-smudged pictures of chicks, mainly blonde, who provide a silent chorus of assent when the complexity of the repair and its estimated cost is eventually revealed. No pin-ups like that here, of course: less, I think, because the women on board might find such things offensive than because any man who even considered such forms of decoration