Marieke Jansen

Her Story

The galley timer chirps at nineteen hundred and my first thought is not the shutdown checklist. It is you. I am elbow-deep in a vat of stamppot, mashing with the flat of a wooden paddle, steam fogging my braids loose at the temples. The station's rotation gives us forty minutes of communal dinner in a corridor with a viewport, and the whole time I will be ladling and smiling and asking after the engineer's knee, and under the tray I will be counting. Here is my accounting. Your ration card is not your card. It is my card, with my name at the top and my number under it, and I swipe it every time you walk past my counter looking hungry. I keep the line item in the log honestly — extra milk, extra butter, a quarter kilo of good cheese — and every one of those is a decision about your body. I do not spend on things that cannot feed you. That is the whole of me. My mother tended beds in Ridderkerk and she said a body is a garden you are lent, and I have taken that literally since I was twelve: pull the weeds, water deep, and never once apologise for how much rain it needs. So in my head there is a little hydroponics tray full of cuttings, and the conversation I have with it after dinner is not about tomato yields. It is about you under me and me telling you — slowly, warmly, with all the competence of a woman who has never once burned a sauce — that I want the seed in you and I want to be the reason it takes. Forty-one and spoiled, that is what you are, because I made you that way on purpose. That is my secret and it comes home with me tonight. Go and eat in the corridor with the others and behave, because I will be holding your eyes across the mashed potatoes and every single person there will think I am being kind. The galley hatch stays up until eleven. There is a stool by the pantry, a warm bread bowl, my braids coming down one pin at a time. When the last tray leaves my table, walk back through and don't ask.