Liner

by James Barlow

  Light came on suddenly, feeble and flickering, but enough to enable her to see the fantastic spectacle of scores of people, many still in fancy dress, carrying treasures – a camera or small case, a child. Many wore their life jackets, incorrectly fastened.

  They were unashamed, even under scrutiny in the light, fighting to get out onto the Parade Deck where a hurricane wind awaited them.

  The ship, strangely enough, seemed less secure now that things could be seen. It had a list of about ten degrees, scarcely noticed in the tumultuous pitching, yawing and heaving.

  Someone shouted, ‘Get back! Where the hell are you going?’ and she identified the voice as that of the Australian second officer, Mollon.

  ‘They said the starboard side,’ a man snarled.

  ‘This the port.’

  ‘Out of the way,’ roared the man. Marion had never seen him before. ‘They’re lowering the boats! We’ll be drowned like rats.’

  Mollon knocked this man cold with his fist. ‘Now, listen!’ he began, but the crowd swept past him.

  Marion knew what he wanted to say – that if boats were being lowered it was to save some of the crew of that other burning ship.

  She was pushed out onto a wet deck, and was instantly saturated, while a wind as solid as water knocked her over. A bell rang somewhere, and the public address system was operating, but out here it was a struggle to stay on the deck, not to let the terrible wind simply blow her away into the sea.

  An oxygen cylinder rolled along the Parade Deck, knocking people over like ninepins, breaking limbs as it went. It ran into a pack of passengers who were fighting to get into a lifeboat. Greek stewards and sailors, in the boat, were pushing off these frenzied people and shouting about the other ship. A woman cried, ‘Save my baby! Take him with you! He’s got no life jacket!’ And she dropped the baby into the arms of a sailor as the lifeboat descended. The man didn’t know the baby was dropping. It bounced off him and fell into the sea. The woman gave an immense groan and ran wildly down the tilting Parade Deck.

  Mollon was now standing near another lifeboat and punching passengers – men, Marion saw in shame – and shouting. ‘They’re not deserting you. For Christ’s sake, there’s a ship on fire. Can’t you see it?’

  But they couldn’t because both halves of the Seattle Doll had now sunk. And they didn’t hear him anyway.

  Marion was terrified, most of all of the wind. It hit her like a solid thing, roared across her mouth and into her eyes and inhibited her arms and legs. She was sure now that Mike and the kids wouldn’t be here, and fought wind and gravity and berserk passengers to get back. A child’s life jacket, whipped away by the wind, slapped her cruelly across the face. People were hanging onto the rails, hysterical, afraid to let go. A man was endeavouring to pull a woman – presumably his wife – from the rails, but she clung to the metal with bitterness and insistence, and even blows wouldn’t shift her. He was an old man weeping and with a rasping breath, and the next lurch of the Areopagus took him away, to be smashed against rails aft and lost overboard. The woman, who was howling like a dog, lost strength, and the wind took her, too, and sent her helplessly sliding down the deck, breaking limbs.

  A child was sliding past Marion, like wet rubbish, and Marion, clinging herself, caught it by the hair with one hand.

  The crowd were threatening to throw Mollon overboard if he didn’t allow them into the next lifeboat. Stewards battered with oars at hands, smashing the fingers that threatened this boat. It wouldn’t function anyway – the davits were corroded – and so a senseless fight went on until another boat appeared, swung outward as the Areopagus heeled, and forced the passengers by the rail to scatter. A few were knocked senseless. Mollon was shouting, ‘Go into the lounge. You are in danger here.’

  A few women collapsed on deck and wept hysterically.

  Marion clung to the child, who howled. ‘It’s all right, kid,’ she bellowed into its ear. ‘I’ll take you back to your cabin.’

  She had forgotten about Mike. It was now a wrestling match between her and the elements and crazed passengers to get back into the lounge on the Parade Deck. She could see sparks and flames, which were coming from the aft funnel, and she breathed burning paint and smoke and was stung by hot ash. She had lost her sad perspective of the world – of Mike’s tragedy and Stella’s sullen dirty secrets. This was the limit of the earth – to crawl along a deck and fight the strength of a typhoon as it pressed on a door. The irony of travelling on a cruise, good money spent, was wasted on her for the moment. They could laugh later, if they survived.

  The child, she saw now, was Phoebe, daughter of the woman from Darwin. Marion found this grimly funny, although she didn’t understand why. She held the child in an iron grip: she was aware that it could be very satisfying to save that woman’s child. Where was Mrs Smart Aleck in this pandemonium?

  Twenty persons were struggling to get out onto the open deck. The pressure of them at least held the door open onto the interior of the Parade Deck. They were terrible to see, pitiful old men and women stampeding, and nothing waited for them out here except a greater terror of naked wind and water, injury, death, pneumonia at the very least, if shock didn’t kill them anyway . . .

  But she made no attempt to stop them, merely battered against the weight of them while the door was open (for her wrists hadn’t the power to open it: she had a job doing it on a day when there was a mere breeze).

  She fell inside, with the child, sprawling, and the first sensation, because of the absence of wind and sea, was of warmth.

  She was at a junction when an elevator functioned (but not now) and the library met the Aegean Lounge. There was chaos. A hundred photographs and dozens of notices pinned to a notice board had been blown about like confetti at a spring wedding, and littered the deck. Broken glass, chairs, ashtrays, violins even, and a cart had rolled or slid around, smashed themselves, and still careered about. Curtains had collapsed into floods of water and pools of seasickness.

  She dragged the kid into the lounge, where several hundred people lay on the deck, or sat supporting themselves.

  The chief purser, Demetropoulos, was one of the few people standing. Besieged by a bitter, frightened and anxious group of passengers, he was nevertheless aloof and immaculate. He was beautifully clean still in tropical white – just a rim of dirt along the collar where, perhaps, he ran a finger in exasperation; not even his shoes were splashed. His eyes were still directed just above his interlocutors, in fact beyond all this chaotic dreadful scene in the lounge – water and people vomiting and crying and arguing, and some motionless in injury or rigid in panic – and there was a slight expression of distaste on his face as if this sort of thing was all that could be expected from passengers. Australians, indeed! He was saying to his interlocutors with repugnance, as if they had already demanded a refund, ‘There is no question of abandoning the ship. What on earth for? We shall be in Guam in less than three days.’

  They were frustrated by his calm, amounting, it seemed to them, to indifference. There was a terrible storm, a fire was ranging, they’d heard a bang, some cabins were flooded, people had been hurt, and there was rumour of another ship involved . . . They wanted qualified reassurance, not the deadpan phraseology of brochures.

  Marion collapsed on the lounge carpet and leaned against an armchair, holding onto the child. They were both soaking wet. Marion was out of breath and her heart wouldn’t calm down . . . There was turmoil all around, the agitation of a crowd which didn’t know what was going on. There was not a steward in sight. No one except Demetropoulos.

  Someone began to sing.

  Edgar sat at a piano while Ricky and one of the dancers clung onto the thing as it slid a little, held taut by thick rope, but with a few inches of slack. ‘The bloody thing won’t keep still,’ shouted Edgar.

  The Australian and New Zealan
d passengers took up the singing. Ricky chose the songs and Edgar played the piano. The dancer just smiled.

  Ricky sand ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ and there was laughter. Then, hesitantly, they all sang a Maori song called ‘Now Is The Hour.’

  It was an appalling chorus – old breathless quavering voices – but Marion (who did not sing) was touched, and she wept, understanding some rough quality specifically antipodean.

  The metallic voice interrupted with a rasp over the speakers (a few people cheered bitterly): ‘May I have your attention, please?’

  Edgar bellowed, ‘My God, are they still here?’

  The passengers snickered, but were silent, desperately anxious for sense and order – and hope.

  ‘This is the first officer. The situation is serious, but has improved. We have had a minor collision with another vessel. The damage has been assessed and there is no cause for alarm, only for care. Some boats have been lowered, but these are to help the other ship. Before the collision there was a fire in the hairdressing salon on Metaxas Deck. There was also minor flooding as a result of the collision. A few people have been hurt. I am now reopening the watertight and fireproof doors on all decks so that passengers may return to their cabins if they wish and anyone needing medical attention should proceed to the surgery on A Deck forward on the starboard side. I am sorry you are having an unpleasant time and I ask for your calm. The storm may continue for some hours yet, but it will not get worse. Thank you.’

  ‘Come on, kid,’ urged Marion. ‘Let’s go find your mum.’

  A few other passengers struggled to their feet, but most remained where they were, to scared to move. They weren’t quite convinced by the first officer, and waited, anxious not to be trapped down below.

  It took five minutes to go down the four decks. A Deck on the port side was flooded, and there was the smell of smoke. Stewards were struggling at the junction of an athwartships corridor and someone was screaming and evidently thrashing about. Marion saw an old man, in pyjamas soaked in blood, who was being helped, and her heart accelerated in the worst fear yet. A collision. ‘A minor collision,’ the first officer’s voice had told her. But it had caused enough structural damage to put the electricity out. She had been thrown. A ship burning. Somewhere metal had smashed into metal. Here, fifty feet from her own cabin, was a victim. Oh, my God, she thought, conscious now of the possibilities . . .

  The stewards were, she realized, going from cabin to cabin now that the watertight doors had been re-opened (temporarily? She wondered), looking for the injured. This was where they expected to find them. The blood-covered old man, groaning, had the forecast of reality for her.

  There was shouting going on in the cabin she first sought. Marion knocked but went in anyway.

  The woman from Darwin and her husband stared at Marion. The cabin was in a state of chaos. Two kids were weeping.

  Marion said, shakily, ‘Here’s your kid. She was on deck.’

  Silence. The woman had been weeping. Marion saw. She was human after all. The woman from the Northern Territories said, and her voice was unsteady, too, ‘I got to admit, Pom, that you’re a useful woman to have aboard.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Marion, as Phoebe ran to her mother, howling.

  ‘What’s it like up there?’ the woman asked.

  ‘A bit noisy. Something of a wind. Some people didn’t like it and wanted to go ashore.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ acknowledged the woman.

  It was the most satisfying moment in several years, but Marion was in a hurry, couldn’t savour it. The buffalo hunter, as taciturn as ever, nodded his approval, and Marion withdrew.

  She ran, as the ship dipped, her fingers touching the rail lightly, and she prayed aloud, ‘Oh, my dear God, spare my family . . . ’

  Stewards were dragging out someone with red hair. The girl, Diane, smashed in the stomach, and screaming. And a small bundle on the linoleum of that cabin was the little old lady who knew the world was coming to an end soon. She had died without panic, knowing that God was justified in tearing the earth and sea apart . . .

  Ambros and a steward officer were struggling with the door of the Burstons’ cabin, but it wouldn’t open more than an inch or two. They talked in Greek with terrible urgency to each other.

  They sensed rather than heard Marion, and Ambros turned a sad peasant face to her. ‘Ah, missus!’ he cried, in relief at her survival. But his eyes were full of sorrow for her, and what she must find beyond the door at which she now tore with her fingers.

  Mike was lying there, fulminating, ready to get up and strike Stella, but allowing anger to ebb away, and feeling sorrow that it had come to this bitter relationship – when the two ships struck each other.

  Thousands of tons of steel collided yards away from where he was lying in apprehension of the storm. The noise of impact was so total he was deafened, even fear was overcome. He had no idea for whole seconds what it was. Rocks, we’ve hit rocks, his mind deduced, and the steel sides of the ships, scraping each other, in no way modified this conclusion.

  And then Patricia’s bunk collapsed quite slowly onto him in total darkness, a burden of a couple of hundred pounds, and the screaming began.

  It was, he identified, Stella.

  Patricia cried, too, in pure terror, just above him, and the child, Bumble woke in her cot – which had been hurled five feet, although he was not to know that in darkness – but Stella’s scream was special. It had the acoustic agony of the child under the station wagon’s wheels. He was the sonometer which could measure in exact degree that noise and the pain it represented.

  There was, however, a difference.

  He was not responsible this time.

  Certainly it reduced him to jelly and fear, but seconds beyond that he was burning with the special love he had had for Stella until a few days ago –

  I’d give everything I have – my health, my money, my car, everything in the world . . .

  But not my child.

  ‘You can’t ask that.’

  He couldn’t move.

  For a moment he had the horror of serious injury, but in fact splintered wood lay on him, and above him Patricia’s legs tattooed as fast as her frenzied nerves could work them.

  The baby howled in the fear of darkness and noise.

  For the noise did not stop. A wind funnelled through metal somewhere – he didn’t for a long time appreciate that it roared through a fractured hull – with a shriek that dulled the working of the senses. It had a force that was brutal, seemed solid, and which knocked the breath out of Mike. And it carried with it the fury of the sea – cold violent spray.

  Patricia shouted, coherent in this immiscibility, ‘Dad, I’m frightened. Oh, Dad, where are you?’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he called out, an absurd instruction, but he didn’t want her to fall or stumble into broken wood or metal. ‘Cover yourself up.’

  He fought to get the great burden off his ribs, and panic accumulated as he found that he couldn’t.

  Stella’s screaming went on, terrible to hear, awesome that she should know such words, plead so terribly, an appalling appeal to a crazy God she had betrayed.

  He shouted, ‘Stella! Stop that! Stop it! Save your breath. We’re coming.’

  I’ve got to get to her.

  Where the hell is everybody?

  They all let me down. Nobody’ll come. They’ll all fail . . . Ah!

  He remembered that this had been his forecast and verdict a few weeks ago, his contempt for the second-rate passengers and vanities of the crew. Now he didn’t want them to fail. They must not fail. I mustn’t fail, he though in anguish. Not this time.

  Stella was groaning now, had already lost the strength to scream. Soon she’d be so cold from wind and water and loss of blood she’d die.
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  He levered with his knees an all the strength of his hands, and the bulk of wood above him shifted an inch or two.

  If only there was light.

  ‘Patricia!’ he called.

  ‘Dad, I’m frightened. Oh, Dad, are we going to die?’

  ‘No,’ he assured her. ‘Listen. Get down.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. There’s no ladder. I can’t see.’

  ‘Climb down.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He waited a while and then said, ‘Put your hand over the side of your bunk.’

  His left hand sought hers. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Here,’ Patricia said uselessly. ‘Where’s Mummy? She’ll die. Why doesn’t she come back?’

  Mike didn’t know, didn’t dare to analyze . . . He was glad that Marion had not been in her bunk underneath Stella’s. She might have been screaming, too. But perhaps, where she was, it was worse. He had to get out and find her . . .

  His hand found Patricia’s arm, just by the elbow. With shock he found that there was a trickle of blood on it. He wanted to ask about this, to comfort her, but desisted, and instead told her. ‘Your fingers must be only a few inches from the deck. Climb down, Patricia.’

  ‘I can’t. Why should I? I’m scare.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ he snarled, flaring into impatience.

  But this made her howl in self pity and terror, and he was abject: he knew that he had no right to expect a small girl to understand this . . .

  ‘I’m sorry, kid. But I can’t move out of here until you do.’

  She slid past him, fingers clawing anxiously as though she was a hundred feet in the air.

  ‘There’s water,’ she shrieked at him. ‘We’re sinking.’