“I counted the days. I marked them off on the wall with a piece of coal.”

“A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.”

“But alas! Firemen [stoking a ship] are not what they were. The gor-blimey firemen of the coal-burning days must, I think, be a diminishing species and in these degenerate times, when ships burn oil, the firemen is rapidly becoming a perfect gentleman, which is a pity …. Yet all was not quite lost in 1932, since one of them, … finding an altercation with the cook becoming beyond his powers of argument, upheld tradition and ‘drew him off a Burton.’ In other words, he knocked him out for the count.”

“If you had a piece of coal, we could hold her down, shove it up her ass, and come collect a big, fat diamond in a few days.”

“Without a whole lot of pressure, a diamond is just a piece of coal.”

“And marking off time struck me as something like counting empty spaces—spaces you know can't ever be filled.”