Here Come the Girls

by Milly Johnson

  ‘I thought we’d have a dressing-up session today,’ Gwen said. ‘I find it helps when your hips jingle. So, take a scarf, ladies, and tie it around yourself like this.’ She demonstrated how to put it on and broke into a hip wiggle. The coins rippled beautifully. The room was suddenly full of jangling metal sounds. It was amazing how the addition of a simple scarf moved their efforts up a notch.

  Roz had beads of sweat on her brow at the end of the session. And her thigh muscles told of a good workout. There wouldn’t be a class the next day because they were landing at their first port – Malaga. She wondered if Manus had tried to ring her or sent her a text. She went back to her cabin after class and switched on her mobile phone only to find that he hadn’t.

  Frankie bumped into Olive looking at books in Market Avenue.

  ‘Buy yourself a sexy blockbuster,’ said Frankie, coming up behind her and making her jump. ‘Find out what you’ve been missing.’

  ‘Oh don’t,’ said Olive.

  ‘Have you been for anything to eat yet?’ Frankie picked up the bonkbuster that she had been encouraging Olive to buy. She hadn’t been a great reader until she had to give up her job and ended up with too much time on her hands.

  ‘I’ve only just got up,’ Olive confessed guiltily. ‘I can’t believe it. How could I have slept so long? I haven’t done anything except sit around and eat and drink.’

  ‘It’s called relaxing, Olive. Your body is telling you it needs to chill.’

  ‘Talking of chill, it’s a bit nippy outside, isn’t it? I thought it would be warmer than this. We must be well past France by now.’

  ‘Dunno where we are,’ said Frankie. ‘Fancy going for some nosebag?’

  ‘If I must,’ smiled Olive. ‘Although I think I’m still digesting my meal from last night.’

  They went up to the Buttery where brunch was being served on one half, and lunch on the other. A man in brown shorts walked past with enough food on his plate to stuff a Blue Whale and a portion of cheesecake on the side to finish it off, and trotting at his heels was his missus, with an equally loaded tray.

  ‘A full English and cake?’ Olive was nearly sick at the thought of eating all that food at once.

  Frankie tutted. ‘I’m sure some people are determined to eat their whole body weight in one sitting because it’s “free”.’

  ‘How can you say that after those evenings we used to have in the “all you can eat for a fiver” Chinese buffet?’ laughed Olive. ‘I’ve never seen anyone shift more egg fried rice than you.’

  ‘Oops, I’d forgotten about that,’ giggled Frankie.

  They plumped for baked potatoes with salad, which were delicious. Then, as Frankie got two coffees from the machine she spotted Vaughan leaving and felt a pleasant little tremor wriggle through her when he smiled and waved. She had just started to imagine him bare-chested in shorts when Olive nudged her.

  ‘Look, those greedy buggers have gone back up and are getting yet another tray full of food.’

  ‘They must be the Tray Twins,’ smirked Frankie.

  ‘Ronnie and Reggie,’ Olive laughed back. Then she waved at Ven and Roz as she spotted them wandering through the Buttery.

  ‘Been dancing?’ asked Frankie.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Roz, not quite managing to keep the clipped tone out of her voice.

  ‘Guess what, I found out who Dorothy is,’ said Frankie, and went on to tell them the tale. Even Roz had a smile at that.

  ‘Fancy a swim this after noon?’ asked Ven. ‘In the . . .’ she referred to her pocket map of the ship ‘. . . Topaz pool?’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit chilly for a swim?’ asked Olive.

  ‘Maybe it would be in the open-air pools, but that’s the one with the big glass roof over it. Apparently when it gets hotter they pull it back.’

  ‘Not for me,’ said Roz. ‘Because I’m going to do something I haven’t done in ages.’

  ‘What’s that then?’ replied Ven. ‘Have a potato?’ Roz’s fixation with the Atkins diet was a standing joke amongst them.

  ‘No, I’m going to have a nap,’ announced Roz. ‘Like a pensioner. I think it must be the sea air, but I am absolutely pooped.’

  ‘I’ll come swimming with you, Ven,’ announced Frankie.

  ‘Can I borrow a cossy?’ asked Olive.

  ‘No, you can’t. You’ll have to go skinny-dipping,’ said Ven. ‘Course you can. Come down to my cabin and pick one out.’

  By the time Olive had chosen a costume from Ven’s huge wardrobe of clothes, Roz was already asleep, snoring softly on top of her newly made bed, courtesy of Jesus. Frankie had gone straight to the Topaz pool on deck fifteen but couldn’t find three sunbeds all together. There were quite a few around the lip of the pool with towels spread over them in a ‘reserving’ gesture. Frankie was annoyed and told the others as much when they arrived.

  ‘I’ve been here twenty minutes and no one has been to those sunbeds. I reckon the cheeky beggars come down first thing, chuck a towel on and then don’t bother to come back. Anyway, I’m giving it ten more minutes then I’m going to shift some and we’re moving onto them. They tell you not to reserve chairs like that in the ship’s newspaper thingy. It’s just selfish.’

  True to her word, after ten minutes precisely Frankie strode over to three sunbeds, scrunched up the towels that were covering them and rudely deposited them in the nearby towel bin. ‘Come on, Olive, Ven!’

  ‘Do you think we should, really?’ Olive hovered nervously by.

  ‘Sit down, you coward!’ Frankie ordered.

  Blimey, she hadn’t been as forthright as this for a while, thought Olive. It was strangely nice to see a bit of fire back in Frankie’s belly. She spread her own towel over the bed, lay back and looked at the glass ceiling above the pool. She could see that the sun had broken through the cloud, which was a good sign. And the clouds that remained in the sky were feathery and white and not grey and dumpling-thick any more. She was just closing her eyes when a waiter arrived with three tall fizzing flutes.

  ‘I took the liberty of ordering you a Champagne Cocktail,’ said Frankie in a pseudo-posh voice.

  ‘Drinking champagne at this hour?’ said Olive, taking a delighted sip and relaxing back. She calculated that, had she been at home now, she would be doing Mr Tidy’s upstairs. What a misnomer that was – Mr Tidy. He was a scruffy blighter, especially in the bathroom. She thought of scrubbing his toilet week after week and how he seemed unable to grasp the concept of peeing into the pan. And he always made her feel as if she was exacting monies by menace when he paid her from the little girly purse which he held up to his chest. He never opened it very far in case the moths made a bid for freedom. But today Olive Hardcastle was not scrubbing at stains on his Armitage Shanks, she was here, sipping champagne at half past one in the afternoon and doing bugger all but that and breathe. She dreaded to think what Mr Tidy’s bog would be like after nearly three weeks of not seeing any Toilet Duck.

  ‘Cream tea in two hours,’ said Ven, making them laugh.

  ‘You are the third Tray Twin, you pig,’ giggled Frankie, then had to fill Ven in on the gluttony she and Olive had witnessed in the Buttery. She adjusted her breasts inside her costume and caught the teenage lad a couple of beds down giving them a surreptitious look. She grinned.

  ‘I’m going for a dip,’ she said, stepping down the ladder at the side of the pool into the warm water.

  ‘No sly weeing,’ said Ven. ‘Remember where you are.’

  ‘As if,’ tutted Frankie. Her shoulders sank beneath the water and she gasped with delight. If this wasn’t bliss, what was? She did a couple of lengths, skirting round a little girl with armbands on. How lucky was she, going on a cruise ship at that young age? She was a lovely child, with dark curls and thick black eyelashes, just like Frankie had been when she was a baby. Like her baby might have been if she’d ever had one. Frankie ducked her head under the water to shock away thoughts like that.

  ‘We were just saying it�
��s semi-formal dress code tonight,’ said Olive, when Frankie climbed out of the pool and flopped on her sunbed.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Not as dressy-uppy as formal but more dressy-uppy than smart casual,’ Olive replied.

  ‘Surprisingly, that makes sense,’ smiled Frankie. ‘What’s the after-dinner entertainment?’

  Olive referred to her Mermaidia Today. ‘It’s the theatre company doing a celebration of Motown music in Broadway. Or we could go and see a film in the cinema or watch a cabaret double act. Or go to the casino, or—’

  ‘Flaming heck,’ said Frankie. ‘And there was me thinking I might be bored rigid cooped up on a ship for two and a half weeks. No brainer: Broadway for me again. I love Motown.’

  A good half-hour passed before a shadow fell across Frankie’s face and a man’s irritated voice stirred her from a light doze.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find these three are our sunloungers.’

  Frankie stretched and opened up her eyes to see a stunningly good-looking couple: a leggy pouty woman and the man who Ven thought was an actor from the telly. But all Frankie saw now was a couple of cheeky bleeders. And why had he reserved three beds when there were only two of them? So he wouldn’t have the inconvenience of a mere mortal lying next to him perhaps?

  ‘Nope, I don’t think they are yours,’ Frankie said, like a calm, confident John Wayne squaring up to an irate Jack Palance.

  Had Olive been a snail, she would have retreated as far into her shell as it was possible to go. Ven’s eyes just opened so wide that her eyeballs were in danger of popping out.

  The woman, in very short shorts, a bikini top that barely covered her nipples and a fully made-up face, stood behind her man, hand on slim hip making annoyed supportive faces.

  ‘I remember quite specifically which sunbeds were ours, thank you!’ The man stabbed his finger at the sunbeds. It was a very refined finger too. Long and arty with a weighty gold ring on it. But then it did belong to a very attractive rest of him – thick black hair sleeked back, a young Sean Connery-type face, rugged arms leading from a vest that showed his chest area was very well defined. Deffo a six-pack in existence under the material too.

  Frankie felt that stirring again inside her that had visited earlier when she first saw the earmarked unoccupied sunbeds. She felt possessed by the spirit of a confrontational imp – an echo of the old gutsy self that she had lost somewhere in the past few years.

  ‘You can’t stick a towel on a sunbed and walk off for hours, love,’ she told him. ‘There are over three thousand people on this boat and we all have an equal right to them.’

  ‘Do you know who . . .’ the man began, but the woman pulled him away before he started spitting feathers everywhere. Frankie watched him muttering angrily to her as they left, he blowing off steam like a giant’s kettle, she patting his shoulder to calm him down.

  ‘Who the hell was that knob?’ said Frankie.

  ‘That, I believe,’ said Ven with a voice shaking like an opera singer on a vibrating plate, ‘was Dom Donaldson.’

  Chapter 28

  ‘. . . And can you believe Frankie told Dom Donaldson off – the Dom Donaldson!’ Olive was telling Roz in the Vista as they waited for the waiter to bring their pre-dinner cocktails.

  ‘Not in so many words,’ said Frankie. ‘I didn’t swear. I just told him he didn’t have any right to reserve a sunbed and not use it. And I’m sure he was just about to say those words which immediately mark anyone out as a total cock: “Do you know who I am?”’ She wondered what she would have said to him if he had.

  They had commandeered four chairs around a table by the window. The sun was lowering into the sea, feathery clouds bobbing in a sky that seemed to be growing bluer by the hour.

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have said that,’ Ven defended her hero. ‘Maybe he didn’t realise how things work on a ship.’

  ‘Absolutely, Ven. And maybe he’s half-German,’ said Frankie with smiling sarcasm. ‘It wouldn’t be his fault then. Just his natural impulse coming out to chuck towels on loungers.’

  ‘You’ll never win,’ said Olive to Frankie. ‘Dom Donaldson can do no wrong in Venice Smith’s eyes.’

  ‘His girlfriend looks very like Angelina Jolie, don’t you think?’ said Ven.

  ‘Tangerina Orange Jelly, more like,’ sniffed Frankie. ‘She’s about as much like old Angie as I am. Where the hell did they get those tans? They look like the colour of my fence.’

  ‘Oh, shut up talking about them and look at that view. What a gorgeous evening.’ Olive was wearing her new floral sundress and matching shrug and feeling not at all out of place amongst the other passengers.

  Suddenly Dom Donaldson was forgotten as a tall hunk of a man in a pristine white uniform walked through the lounge and said, ‘Good evening,’ to everyone he passed. Ven’s eyes rounded.

  ‘Who. Is. That?’ she said, her jaw dropping to deck six. ‘Now he is my idea of what the Captain should look like.’

  ‘Could you say that just a bit louder?’ said Frankie. ‘Only they didn’t quite hear you in Hong Kong.’

  ‘They don’t pick the Captains on their looks, you know,’ tutted Roz.

  ‘Well, they should,’ said Ven. ‘I would if I worked for Figurehead.’

  ‘I think I have to agree with you on this one, Ven. He’s a bit gorgeous,’ said Frankie, as Ven continued to study the officer who had set her all a-tremble. Tall with short, salt and pepper hair, very sexy light-grey eyes and a Robin Hood’s bow for a mouth. She put him slightly older than them – early-mid forties – the age where men either became full fruit or withered on the vine. This man was, in the words of St John Hite: a tang-tastic zingy partnership of chilled class and yummy body.

  ‘And sadly so out of my league it’s untrue,’ sighed Ven, getting ready to sign her name on the chitty for the three Tequila Sunrises and a Chocolate Banana cocktail.

  Half an hour later, as the four ladies approached the dinner-table, they noticed there were weighted balloons floating over the middle of it.

  ‘Ooh, is this something to do with your competition people?’ Roz asked.

  ‘No, can’t be,’ replied Ven, before adding quickly, ‘at least, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Evening, all,’ said Eric and Irene, also spotting the balloons. ‘Someone got a birthday?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Ven. ‘Not this week, anyway.’

  The mystery was solved a few minutes later when Royston and Stella joined them. They’d ignored the dress code and were in full formal ensemble. The reason for that would become clear in Royston’s first breath.

  ‘It’s our anniversary,’ he explained. ‘We were thinking about going to Cruz but we changed our minds.’

  ‘Cruz, what’s that?’ said Ven.

  ‘It’s the celebrity chef restaurant on the seventeenth floor,’ Eric jumped in, always at his happiest when imparting ship info. ‘You know, Raul Cruz has given his name to it. You pay a small supplement to eat there but it’s apparently superb. I do believe he’s on board too.’

  Wow, thought Roz. So it definitely was him she had seen at Southampton.

  ‘But we thought it might be nicer to spend the big day itself with some company,’ said Royston. ‘It would be a bit boring with just the pair of us at a table.’

  ‘Oy, cheeky.’ Stella nudged him sharply.

  ‘Wish we’d known, we’d have got you a card,’ said Ven.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Royston and laughed. ‘You can buy us a present in Spain instead.’

  ‘So you’re going to be serenaded then,’ Eric nodded. ‘I don’t know, whatever ship you go on, whatever waiters you have, it always sounds the same.’

  ‘Bloody awful,’ grinned Royston.

  Must be some in-joke, thought the girls. They hadn’t a clue what Eric and Royston were talking about.

  ‘Did you book any trips, ladies?’ asked Royston, after giving Aldrin, who Royston had now renamed ‘Buzz
’, his order for venison.

  ‘Blimey, we forgot,’ said Ven. ‘We were too busy doing absolutely nothing.’

  ‘Do we have to pay to get off the ship?’ asked Roz.

  ‘No,’ Eric told her. ‘You just check out with your cruise card. Depending on how far the towns are away from the port, there will be a complimentary shuttle bus to take you in. Irene and I don’t tend to bother going on the organised trips these days. We’ve been on most of them and prefer to do our own thing.’

  ‘We’re off to Marbella,’ said Royston. ‘We’ve got friends who have a villa there and they’re doing a lobster lunch for us.’

  ‘Lovely, Marbella,’ said Eric. ‘Terribly expensive though. Anyway, we’re only going to stretch our legs on land for an hour. We’ve been to Malaga several times now so there’s nothing much we want to see. When everyone gets off, the ship is lovely and quiet. We’ll get the pool to ourselves.’

  He turned to the girls then. ‘You really ought to look at the trips though, brilliant for first-time cruisers. Some of them are a bit pricey but there’s a lovely one at Cephalonia. Melissani – a once-underground lake. Beautiful.’

  Olive felt her cheeks heat up as if Eric could see the picture inside her head of herself in a boat drifting on the lake. With Atho Petrakis. And what they did in that boat.

  ‘And what did you do today?’ Eric asked Stella. ‘Did you get ashore?’ He chortled to himself as seven out of the eight people on that table wondered how many more times he would make his silly joke during the holiday.

  ‘Actually I went to bingo and won twenty-three pounds on the very first house,’ said Stella.

  ‘There’s bingo as well?’ asked Ven.

  ‘Every day, twice a day, but I just go to the four o’clock one in Flamenco. It’s just a bit of fun, although it does get very serious at the end of the cruise if the snowball hasn’t been won.’

  She looked too posh for bingo, thought Ven, imagining those perfectly manicured hands holding a bingo dabber.