BLUE WATER

[EXTRACTS]

"Maybe he knows." Chen, elbows on his knees, opens out the brochure to a spotless 4x4 climbing a bank of mud. "Maybe he knows I am rich already."

Kara, takes the test drive invite, passes it to the floor. "He wasn't going to give you one - you held out your hand so he had to, he was going to give it to him." She points to a black man in a bright green, broadly tartaned, safari suit, hair drawn into five stubby sticky-up plaits. He is looking at jeans in the closed Calvin Klein window while his wife and three children, well stuffed at TGI Fridays, amble off and turn up the Thames inlaid in the mall pavement.

At the 4x4 stand the salesman taps his ballpoint through a list of new addresses, while his assistants begin to pack up. A girl in a blue t-shirt sweeps Chen's invitation into a can on the end of a stick. He watches her walk away to capture a Crunchie wrapper. "Maybe I've won the Lottery."

"You don't play a lottery."

"Every week my mother buys me a ticket, every week."

"When did you last talk with your mother?"

Chen rubs his cheek with the side of his thumb, he hasn't been shaving every day recently, bristle is still a novelty.

The shoppers walking Bluewater's mall triangle have gone home. Workmen pull tiles from the floor to access electricity and tool noise. Tomorrow's salespeople arrive to erect their own stands. The intense rodent-like cleaners with their brushes and long cans give way to the whir and buff of heavy slow machines. The light is harsher, like sun cloud after a storm.

Erik, is sitting between Kara and Chen although as often happens he is elsewhere, remembering his father, an architect, reluctantly rubbing little letterset people on to his finished elevations. Erik is thinking: All day this place has been under the herd, the feet, the noise constant as water, the shops' front: logos, brands, goods. Now, shutters down, nothing can be bought. A kind of peace.

Erik says, "I am a carrier but I don't love the goods I carry, I guess what I think I love - thought I loved - is the movement itself."

Kara and Chen wait, as they always do when Erik speaks like this, his jaw long right down to his chin, but he rarely elucidates or explains where he has been. When he gets up, they follow him and walk some more.

*

Above the sails hung in Bluewater's Thames Mall, clouds break up the sun into rays and glare. Kara, Erik and Chen came up the real Thames, a ship full of trucks, trucks full of cargo, like an old fish recipe - a freighter stuffed with freighters stuffed with freight. They berthed to lawyers and their ship was impounded against unpaid harbour fees, tax, fuel bills - moored with emails and writs.

Smoking on the foredeck, watching cars and lorries run like rain drops off the spine of the Dartford Bridge, Chen the Engineer and Kara the Navigator, listen to Erik the Quartermaster's list, Maersk, Hapag Lloyd, Eddie Stobart, Gefco, Safeway, Ziegler, Christian Salvesen, Fiolet, BOC, Yaka, Reusman, Eurocold, Balkenende, Giraud, Unipart, Omega Express, Parcel Force, Asda, Norfolk Line, Coolchain, John Lewis at Bluewater.

Only with the ship stopped, did they find themselves a threesome, wandering past a group of strikers and their brazier at the gate, along the shorefront of lorry parks, then among the steel distribution sheds and brick 'road' hotels. Two weeks back they walked through the drizzle, along the dual carriageway, over the green hill and the quarry's lip to the stickleback roof of Bluewater surfacing with rocks in an ocean of cars. They come most days now, to get away from the beached ship, the coastline of hard towns and closed dormitory villages.

Inside Bluewater, there is no weather. They take the piss out of Erik for always carrying too much stuff, Kara makes him list it.

"Coat, my bag, comb, book, … camera -"

"Have you got a film?"

"No."

"Go on."

"Papers. Tobacco. Pouch. Does that count as one thing 'cause the tobacco's in the-"

"Go on."

"More papers. Mobile. Leatherman." He thinks about, but does not mention the small plastic album of photographs of his daughter, a jiffy bag of German cartoon badges he will one day send her. "Shipping News."

"How old?"

"Three … four months, I'll read it, I will read it." Erik gives up remembering and looks in the bag. "Pencil. Bottle of water. Plasters. All this … fluff."

Erik is always too hot in Bluewater.

*

Kara and Chen play a game Erik can't get his head round. They spot shoppers' faces for features of people they have known - recall the feature, the name, the place and one other thing about the person. It is a serious game, the match has to be exact. They don't cheat.

Outside Aigle, Chen: "Round brown eyes one a little lazy: Theresa, Alcantara, I was nineteen, wouldn't let me touch her, sucked me off on her sister's bed."

By Blooming Marvellous, Kara: "See, his brows don't quite meet but look like they should? Hans, Oslo, college, used to put his thumb on a chart like he was making a print."

Through the window of Café Aqua, Chen: "Hair up, over her ear, cats ears, see them point? Selma, Rotterdam, round white tits, like," he holds up his hands in loose claws, "Her tits always the same whichever way up she was."

Passing, D'Or Designer Jewellry, Kara: "Mole on his lip, you know I was fixated by the mole on his lip, we talked a couple of hours maybe, he was an agent, cars, moleskin freckles, in a shaaben, Davide, long blue legs. Dakar." They pass him again by Dorothy Perkins. Chen nods to his lip and the man pats his wallet pocket and ducks into a walk that is definitely away.

"Come on Erik."

"Erik come on."

Eventually Erik, by Eisenegger Kinder: "Her nose, she took me home from a railway station, a tap dripped in her flat."

"Name!"

"An orange curtain through to the stove."

"Name."

"Where?"

"The tap dripped all night."

"Where!"

"Her husband was away watching football."

"Name!"

"Erika. Home."

"You're making that up."

Chen often tells Erik that when he meets a woman he has slept with, it is her hands that fascinate him. "Their fingers always seem much longer, stronger, a surprise how …" each time searching for the same word "… how … articulate, as if you never knew then, when you were with them." He sometimes stands near counters to watch the salesgirls wrap.

*

Chen is convinced the hands he watches wrap are hands he has seen wrapping in another shop. Salesgirls as well as shoppers move round the mall triangle.

A completely bald red headed man bowls out of Famously Yours, Kara: "Ritchie, Hull, he had a dome here, euro size, like they'd chopped off his unicorn horn, had Dollar notes, every pocket stuffed with Pounds. Francs, still tender then. Marks. I sneaked some while he peed, closing time he gave us all handfuls."

A shy girl scratching her cheek among a pack waiting round the window of Gap, Chen: "You see her mouth, hung open, Bremerhaven, Katya, couldn't find her sides, inside like a cave." He pushes his tongue into his cheek.

In Habitat Chen takes nine tall thin fragile glasses to the checkout to be wrapped by eight ringless fingers and two ringed thumbs. The shopgirl rolls and tucks blue tissue paper, wraps the tissue in thick cream sheets then places each package gently down into the stiff brown paper bag. When she pushes it over the counter, Chen pretends to have lost his wallet and leaves.

Although his face is round, outside Zara, Chen turns into a pointer dog. Despite having both feet on the ground one leg seems slightly lifted, cocked.

Kara and Erik wait for him to move. He tilts his head. They wait for him to talk. He bites his dry lip. They look along his eye-line and can not see what has fixed him among the people holding up dresses and shirts to themselves, flicking along the rails, jumbling jumpers on the shelves. Chen trots into the shop. They lose sight of him. An hour later they sit on the rocks in the Thames Mall, presuming Chen has found perfect wrapping.