"No," Solveig said. "You know the number. You do not know what it is." She put her hands flat on the table. "With guests on board, I am awake at six. I am awake until the last guest goes to bed. Sometimes this is midnight. Sometimes it is two. Then I am awake at six. The boys on deck, it is worse. They do the wash-down at six, before the guests are up, so the boat is perfect. They drive the tender all day. They do the water toys. They do the wash-down again in the evening. Then if the guests want to go ashore at eleven o'clock at night, somebody drives the tender to the dinghy dock and waits."
"For how long?"
"For since July," Solveig said.
Lachlan said, "Tell her about the sheets."
Solveig looked at him, and then at Octavia, and then she said, "The rest-hour sheets. Every week, we fill in. Every week, the captain collects. And every week, the captain tells us, these are not correct, you must have made a mistake, you could not have worked so long. And he gives them back to us and we fill them in again." She paused. "Not because he is a bad man. Because he says if they see the real ones, the office will have to do something, and the owner will be angry, and the owner will get a new captain, and the new captain will get new crew. And we will be on the beach in Newport in October with no job and no reference. He says, hang on until the Caribbean, then the office has to give us more people. Hang on."
"And you hung on."
"We hung on."
Octavia looked at Lachlan. "Friday."
The big Australian rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them away his eyes were wet, and he did not seem to care who saw it.
"Friday I'd been up since five," he said. "Wash-down, then the toys, then I drove the boys round to Castle Hill and back, then over to Jamestown, then round Brenton Point, then the toys again, then the evening wash-down. The guests came back about seven and said they wanted the tender to take them in to Thames Street for dinner. So Hamish drove them in at half seven and waited at the dock. They didn't come out till gone half ten. Hamish brought them back about quarter to eleven." He swallowed. "By then I'd been on my feet eighteen hours. I'd fallen asleep sitting on the forward bitts with my radio in my lap. The skipper found me there. He told me to go to bed. I said no, the tender's got to go up tonight, we're leaving Monday and tomorrow's the guests' last day and they'll want the boat clean, not a crane job happening on the foredeck. He said, go to bed, Lachie, I'll do it. I said the skipper doesn't drive the crane. He said the skipper drives what he bloody likes. And he sent me below. And I went." He looked straight at Octavia. "I went. I should never have gone."