Liner

by James Barlow

  Despite his claim that what he needed was a ‘widow with a cough’ Tornetta observed that women and even girls of fourteen were indifferent to Squibb. He had nothing they wanted; they were not likely to be obliged to him, and it amused Tornetta to see them snub him, stare blankly at his jokes, even turn their backs on him outright if he stopped to try to insert himself into a conversation going on on deck. Only older people had a little pity and passed the time of day. He was kept waiting by the purser’s girls and didn’t even get the smiles Tornetta did.

  Women in fact looked at Tornetta. Even tall long-limbed Australian kids of nineteen identified some aggressive and interesting property he had. He stared frankly at their faces and long legs and not always did they flinch or look resentful.

  A little of his anxiety had left him now that they’d sailed from Sydney. His situation began to have remoteness. Soon he would look around for things of possible interest.

  He wanted to be alone, but it was impossible. There were hundreds of people, most of them talkative.

  He sat in the Forward Bar, by the bar itself rather than noticeably alone at a table, and in seconds a young woman sat by him. Tornetta was a man who understood animal instincts and he knew before she even spoke that this one was almost throbbing with sexual appetite. He met her eyes in the mirror and was astonished. She was very young and beautiful and burning hot. Not a call girl or prostitute or chick on drugs, just a young woman shifting about slightly on her stool she was so bothered by body appetite. Lust stirred him and overcame the anxiety of the last few days.

  ‘There’s a rumour that we’re stopping at Adelaide,’ he said. She laughed. Her fingers crawled up and down her glass. It was beer she was drinking. ‘I can take or leave Adelaide,’ she said.

  She had an English voice. ‘You’re a Pom,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, don’t remind me. Did you ever get to Surrey?’

  ‘I got as far as Oxford once.’

  ‘Not bad. Where are you doing now?’

  ‘San Francisco. And you?’

  ‘Canada, I think. But I’m getting off at San Francisco too.’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ he suggested.

  ‘Too damn small,’ she countered bitterly.

  ‘Why ‘Canada, I think?’ Don’t you know yet?’

  ‘It depends,’ she qualified.

  An idea came to him. ‘Are you looking for work?’ He could find her plenty of work, dancing, or on her back, or stripping . . .

  She looked in the mirror and protested, ‘Oh, hell,’ and leaned toward Tornetta. ‘Please help me,’ she whispered earnestly. ‘Pretend to be my husband. I’ve enemies on board. I’ll pay,’ she claimed oddly.

  A man said, ‘Ah, there you are, Pauline. I thought you said –’

  But the girl slid off her stool and said coldly, ‘We were just going.’

  Her ‘we’ included Tornetta. ‘Come on, we’re late,’ he contributed.

  He was fully aware that the girl, Pauline, was talking nonsense. She had simply got herself involved too soon with the wrong man and had now dumped him. Tornetta would be the right man. She was hungry for physical coupling. He would give it to her. She was, he knew in pleasurable anticipation, the sort who needed pain as well. He would make her writhe and sigh first, then twist her arms, perhaps thrash her. He planned her future in the five hundred strides to her cabin: violent, secret pleasure for him during this voyage and then, just when he’d tired of her she would become remunerative, an employee . . .

  It turned out differently. In her cabin she rejected him for a long time, kept looking at her watch. Then, suddenly, she gave him five dollars, began to strip and very soon they were copulating in the unsatisfactory area of the bunk.

  A key scratched the cabin door as Tornetta reached climax. He couldn’t stop.

  It might have been a man, even a husband, but was not. Behind him Tornetta heard a woman’s voice protest in hurt more than shock: ‘Oh, Pauline, how could you?’ and he identified the situation at once. This Pauline was a nut case, her friend was a butch. And this white-hot performance, for which he had been paid, was to wound and anger the butch.

  Pauline suggested breathlessly, ‘Go away, Reidy. You shouldn’t have come back just yet.’

  Reidy said, suitably annoyed, ‘You bloody crazy whore, I hate your filthy guts.’ She went out and slammed the cabin door.

  Pauline yawned.

  ‘Thanks. You can go now if you want to.’

  ‘Not just yet,’ said Tornetta. ‘I haven’t had my money’s worth,’

  And he began to hurt her.

  Tornetta went down to dinner. It was easy to go ahead of Squibb, because Squibb had many things to do. For a ‘joker’ he was a very earnest man. He took many pills – to avoid enteritis, to cure constipation, to anticipate and eliminate seasickness. In a stifling hot cabin in which the air-conditioning was so poor it might be said to have failed, Squibb had many rituals involving his body. But the shower bath and deodorants on his feet were in vain, and he filled the cabin with the all-too-human smells and Tornetta with loathing.

  There were in the cabin the mutual, unavoidable smells of sweat, undershirts, socks and soap, and there were hairs in the washbasin.

  And despite his bonhomie Squibb was petulant and complaintive. ‘I’d like the lights off,’ he’d said last night. ‘It is after midnight.’ And the night before it had been ‘I wish you didn’t smoke in the cabin. There’s a great risk of fire on a ship, you know. And there’s little enough air in here at night . . . ’

  To both these objections Tornetta had restrained himself and merely suggested, ‘Change your cabin, then.’ This was more than a hint and would have been enough to drive anyone else to the Purser’s Office, but Squibb merely blinked, virtuous and offended, but immovable, and whined: ‘I paid for my half of this cabin. It’s a good one and I’ve every right to be here.’

  The dining room was on Metaxas Deck, one deck above Tornetta’s cabin on A Deck. Opposite its entrances were the Purser’s Office, a few shops, a barber and the telephone centre. As Torrente came now into this area it was crowded, not with people going in to dinner – although some were – but with angry passengers.

  They were having a noisy argument with the chief purser. Demetropoulos was a moderately tall man, slim, with a waistline accentuated by a tightened belt. He was a man of about forty with an interesting head. It had a classical skull-like shape, with large deep-set eyes. He had thick black eyebrows and black hair which might have been polished. It was quite impossible to anger him or even amuse him. He did have a slight smile at times – although it was not there now – but it was detached, nothing to do with his interlocutor. In fact detachment was the key characteristic of Demetropoulos. Some passengers claimed that he was obtuse, others that he was impenetrably stupid and unable to speak any English except when he was seducing a woman. He had another characteristic, which was to look slightly above and well beyond any anxious or (more frequently) angry passenger, as if a great man’s mind was surrendering part of its capabilities to this trivial nonsense of the passenger, but the bulk of the machinery was still cogitating the great matters which had been interrupted.

  The offended passengers had not found themselves a very impressive spokesman. His name was Pybus and he was supposed to be a barrister, but this seemed impossible, for he was gross, red-faced with drinking, he swore, and in the Antipodean manner wore thick gray trousers up to his middle chest, supported by a thick leather belt.

  He was shouting at the chief purser.

  The two girls of the purser’s staff, one Kristina, the other a blonde German girl, stared blankly ahead. They had become accustomed to these public arguments on the last two voyages.

  Pybus was shouting, ‘We’ve paid our fares and the captain is obliged to fulfil his half of the contract. It says specifi
cally that we were to stay in Sydney twenty-seven hours – and how long did we stay? Seven hours. I’m from New Zealand I wanted to have a good look at Sydney –’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ supported the other passengers.

  ‘And now you tell us we’ll only be in Fremantle and Perth three hours. It says in the literature sent by your company twelve to sixteen hours. I didn’t come on this bloody ship to stare at the sea. I came –’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ chorused the passengers again.

  Demetropoulos said, quite loud but not with anger: ‘We have a schedule –’

  ‘Alter the bloody schedule!’ bellowed Pybus.

  ‘We were delayed by a storm,’ the chief purse argued.

  ‘There’s always a storm in the Bight. You ought to know that.’

  The crowd applauded.

  Pybus said loudly, with vulgar virtue, ‘I’ve been very frank with you and these other people and we want equal frankness. We want to know –’

  Demetropoulos reminded them all: ‘We gave you a bonus port, several hours in Adelaide.’

  ‘You only called there for your own purposes,’ bellowed Pybus. ‘You loaded up with automobiles.’

  The chief purser said imperturbably, ‘There are many places to call at. We must maintain our schedule – we shall do so for your sake and our own, for other passengers await this ship, and berthing is dependent on the tides. All this is arranged. If you will allow us to leave Fremantle on schedule we shall regain the lost time.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ disputed Pybus, but weaker, losing now, the other passengers restless and desirous of going in to eat, ‘but it will be dark when we reach Fremantle.’

  ‘Tours of the city lights of Perth have been arranged,’ Demetropoulos told him, still imperturbable – they’d bought their tickets: the company had won on that day. ‘All previous tours have been cancelled and passengers who do not wish to see Perth by night can have their money refunded.’

  ‘It’s not good enough,’ Squibb said into Tornetta’s ear.

  But it was good. It was the way Tornetta wanted things to be. He had sweated in fear in his cabin as the long hours had crawled by in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The less time the Areopagus spent in Fremantle, and the sooner it sailed for Bali, the better. For even now ‘they’ might have suspicions, and earnest vehement persons could at this moment be crossing Australia in jet planes to ask questions. And if corruption existed one way on this ship it would exist the other, and who knew what form of unpleasantness might materialize. Tornetta might be asked to leave the ship. Passengers might join the ship for the sole purpose of seeing what could be done about Mr. Tornetta in Cabin A145. Cables might be sent to Sydney: yes, the man here answers the descriptions given, the photograph carried, and he has an air of great alarm about him. What are your instructions? So the sooner the Areopagus left Australia the better . . . His body and whole nervous system was in sympathy with the chief purser and he hoped that the captain would not be influenced by any report of this disturbance. Go, his mind cried. For God’s sake, go, move, escape . . .

  In the dining room he poured himself a glass of water, but it was not strong enough. He sent the wine waiter for a bottle of beer.

  The wine waiter brought the beer and was about to pour it into Tornetta’s glass when he saw that this was half full of water. He poured the water back into the jug and filled Tornetta’s glass with the beer.

  ‘That’s a dirty thing to do,’ complained Squibb, and Tornetta’s nerves screamed as the two old ladies joined his protest: ‘Yes, very unhygienic.’ People at other tables stared as the waiter puzzled, nevertheless gratified the whims of these peculiar Australians and fetched ‘another’ jug of water. In fact he merely topped up the water already in the jug, but the old ladies and Squibb weren’t to know that. They did not care to drink water that had been in contact with Tornetta’s mouth, but in his anxiety he was not quick enough to appreciate that . . .

  The next afternoon the entire ship had lifeboat drill. This was painfully slow and the passengers stood in lines along the Parade Deck facing the crew, not just seamen and stewards, but cooks, engineers, telephone operators, nurses and the members of the cabaret and ship’s orchestra. Half an hour passed with jokes thrown about and the Greek crew examining the passengers with as much curiosity as they were themselves scrutinized. Very few Australians felt anything but cheerfully and cynically critical of the crew. It was assumed, unkindly, that the Greeks would panic in a disaster that lifeboats would tip over or be dropped upside down.

  Captain Vafiadis, the staff captain and first officer walked by, seemingly confirming this cynicism, for they were merely concerned with posture and appearance, it seemed. They had scarcely dismissed the drill when half a dozen small Greek engineers recommenced lugging oxygen cylinders about. They lit their oxyacetylene welders with supreme recklessness from the lighted ends of their cigarettes. Tarpaulin was laid on deck under a lifeboat and hammering and burning began, with the obvious purpose of freeing the particular lifeboat from its embolism of corrosion and paint. This work went on for two hours and was left for the day, still unfinished.#

  Two days out from Fremantle Tornetta tried to open his cabin door but couldn’t. He had the wrong key, that of cabin A93, the one which he’d stolen. He had almost forgotten about it.

  Tornetta considered his position. He had taken money from the pockets of Zito and Attolico after crippling them with the scalding soup. He had sold his car. He had taken every cent he owned out of the bank and from his own safe, and had left without paying his strippers. All this had amounted to $4,000, but the air fare to Canberra and Hobart and the ticket on the Areopagus to Genoa (he was disembarking at San Francisco but had in caution booked to Italy) had absorbed nearly $1,500. The balance of $2,500 was a good sum to start with in San Francisco, but Tornetta needed a lot more if he was going to run a business, buy an automobile, bribe people, wear fine clothes, indulge women . . .

  It seemed logical to him that he should use the key to enter the cabin and steal. There was no objection in his moral stance why a number of other passengers should not be fleeced during the voyage. He worked up a grievance rapidly to justify it. He had lost a good business; he had in his first years in Australia been called a ‘dago.’ There had been many insults since.

  Cabin A93 was only a hundred feet from his own A145, a little too near for his liking. On the other hand it was easy to be legitimately in the area, coming and going. He watched the area until he had identified its two occupants. He was relieved that there were only two: the permutation of meals, changing of clothes, loading of cameras, washing, resting and so on of four persons would have made it dangerous to enter the cabin. But two people, that was a lot easier.

  They were man and wife in their sixties, and Tornetta now began very carefully to watch not the cabin but them.

  It was not difficult to learn their habits, but these tended to be protective without intention. Tornetta didn’t dare go too near their cabin in the morning, for the stewards were active, and between eleven and midday the captain sometimes inspected that deck, or, if he didn’t they themselves came back singly and stayed a whole quarter of an hour. In the afternoon they slept in the cabin until four.

  Between four and half past in the afternoon seemed a good time to Tornetta, for they never missed the cup of tea and cakes served in the dining room at that time. He would attempt it tomorrow . . .

  That evening there was the first of several cocktail parties given by the captain. This one was given the label ‘The Captain’s Carnival Party,’ Tornetta went in order that he might see if Mr. and Mrs Bewglass – the passengers in A93 – were there, in which case he’d leave the party and go to their cabin.

  The party was held in the Aegean Lounge, a large comfortable lounge with elegant pillars, a good floor for dancing and a raised platform at its forward end
for the band – not the men of the ship’s orchestra but a quartet of bearded youths who were part of the cabaret. The cabaret was also performed in this lounge, which was amidships on the Parade Deck.

  Tornetta managed to avoid Squibb by going early, but even so he was not as early as most.

  A long queue stretched into the lounge from its forward entrance, the aft doors being closed. The passengers had tarted themselves up out of proportion to the ship and the captain, in Tornetta’s view. The men wore dark suits, stiff collars, regimental and college ties, but it was the women who had really decided to make an impression, whether on the captain or his officers or each other even Tornetta didn’t feel certain about. They wore hostess gowns, beaded, lame and gold dresses, silks and satins, some covered with lace. The weather was now about subtropical but many had fur stoles around their necks. They almost clanked with ornamentation, paste necklaces and silver bangles and fingers loaded with the weight of rings like expensive knuckle-dusters. Their faces were different from what they had been at lunch time, creamed and rouged until they were like actresses between acts, and the hair framing the overpainted faces had received hours of attention since lunch time and was now swept up, tinted blue or pink, and decorated with flowers or bows. In vain, as far as Tornetta was concerned. He infinitely preferred their daughters, scrubbed now, but long-legged in mini dresses, superb physical specimens of the next Australia.

  Tornetta found himself standing by Mr. Pybus. There was no one with Pybus; evidently he was not married. He was very drunk now, and examining him, Tornetta saw that Pybus was gross and sweating under the eyes. He breathed with difficulty.