She got there eventually: eventually she did. But in very slightly more than a vague sort of a way, it annoyed Marianne that she had had to resort to asking the way. Just as she was sure that the bright white light of morning was about to stunningly confront her, she had found herself stranded among a brassy clutch of still-shut-down boutiques, their windows stacked with such as sequined and strappy evening gowns (and your eyes could be knocked out by any colour you cared for) each of them sheathed in clear and heavy plastic and draped with a succession of toning pochettes, most of which were easily capable of swallowing up a dispenser of artificial sweeteners, and just maybe one’s tablets (because you can, you know, amid the whirl of, oh – just all the gaiety, simply forget to take maybe the heart one, or else the little triangular pink one that aids digestion – and goodness knows if you do, there’s a price to pay: up all night and jittery, very).
‘I’m looking,’ said Marianne to a stocky but still rather soigneée smiling woman, who was clearly having trouble with the louvred shutters on her bijou jeweller’s shop, ‘looking for the, um – sea …’
The woman nodded brightly. ‘It’s outside,’ she said. ‘It’s just outside.’
Marianne smiled uncertainly – not quite sure which of them had bagged outright the prize for being the most demonstrably stupid, here. She wandered away, hoping either to just find the door, God’s sake, or else run into someone who could with confidence guide her there (and it would be nice if I’m not standing right bang beside it when this does actually happen, if ever it will). She paused a while to ferret out that little map thing (I just know I’m on the right floor – deck – so how hard can this be?). Two youngish American girls had idled along, and they sat down nearby (think they’re American – their lips look quite like it).
‘So, on and on, you know?’ went one of them, wearily. (Yeh – American.)
Their eyes looked pouchy – make-up impacted, mascara now more like a grievous stain: I don’t think, thought Marianne, they’ve yet made it to bed.
‘Guys can be a real, like – downer?’ the other assured her with sympathy, lightly touching her wrist. ‘You bet they can. It’s real hard to luck out.’
‘But just like on and on and on, you know? Like it’s always – Aw, c’mon, let me come into your cabin, come on babe – come on come on – let’s get with your cabin, huh? And I’m like I told you, John – my mother would worry. Why can’t guys get that?’
‘They’re, like – guys, right?’
‘I guess. But why can’t they just stop already?’
‘Yeh right. Dream on, lady. So, like – what?’
‘Huh? Oh shit – in the end we go to his cabin, yeh? The way I figure it, let his mother do the worrying, right?’
Marianne wandered away in what just must be the direction. Oh look – this man will know, he’ll be bound to. Got that lovely white shirt on with those black and gold, what are they, on-the-shoulder type things. Terribly smart. And he could be quite senior, too – must be about Dad’s age, which I really rather like.
‘Yes, miss – absolutely. This door here – just here, yes?’
Marianne simpered at him her dopey gratitude. Yes of course – this door right here: the one I’m standing right in front of. Great. So let’s just pull – is it push? Terribly stiff. Ah, it’s pull – God it’s a weight … and oh God! Oh God – that first hit of the bright cold sparkle of all this outside world! The sea is all flecked – no, not flecked: covered with silver spangles, and the air is too much – just too much for my lungs to handle. And the sky – that light blue sky, with all those thin and wispy whitish veins – it’s all around and over me. It feels so great: I’m glad to be here.
Marianne wrapped around her a PVC mac that had been slithering around all over her arm throughout the endless journey (and how many times was I thinking Oh God I so wish I hadn’t brought the thing? Pleased I did now, though: she was right, that woman last night, whoever she was – you really do need it, no matter how bright the sun. She can keep the headscarf idea, though – I just love this wind, cuffing my face, dragging back all my hair by its roots, and making it stream).
My eyes are practically closed – these softly screaming, serious breezes and the dazzle of the sun are seeing to that – and as I put everything I’ve got into walking the walk, it is as if some big and gentle outstretched palm is not quite insistently squashing me back, relenting only if I pout and doggedly persist. The deck is much broader than I thought it would be – and the rail, oh God: the rail that is all that keeps me from thousands of miles of ocean (lapping and flirtatious, now, it sort of seems – winking constantly) is so low and gappy and stuck quite regularly with red and white roped-up lifebelts. I’m not quite sure I dare look down. There’s a bench just a little further on – slatted sort of backless bench thing. If I can make it there, I’ll sit – sit awhile, yes. Five or so more struggled paces and yes, I’m here now – so I’ll sit, like I said. Just sit for a bit. From here I can reach out and touch one of these really quite jaunty, I suppose they are, lifebelts (SS TRANSYLVANIA, it says on them – and yes I know that’s where I am, what I’m on, but it’s still quite a shock, somehow, to be told, like that). I’m leaning forward and peering down, now. It’s then you get the speed. The water rushes by, and fans away into milk-white furrows to the side. Above my head (I’ve only just noticed) there’s a lifeboat suspended: there are lots of them (enough?) strung the length of the deck. Think I’ll, yes – think I’ll walk again. Maybe work my way right up to the front.
Getting more used to it, now – the noise and the lash of the wind, all this spotlit sparkle – and I’m actually feeling quite suddenly hot. If I take off this coat, though, I think it will just roar and take flight; and if I just unbutton it, I just know it’ll take right off with me inside it. Oh look … Couple. There’s a couple, man and woman, right down there and coming this way. They’ve got Burberrys on and some sort of funny hats, can’t quite see, and their arms are tightly linked. Togetherness, do we think? Or a cling-on safety measure? Maybe there could be here the underlying shadow of something more beastly – something on the lines of ‘I’m telling you, mate – if I’m blown to kingdom come by the next great buffet, then you, my love, rest quite assured, are bloody coming with me!’ No – I doubt that. How unkind. Even to think it.
And now they’re near enough for me to see that they’re grinning broadly, the both of them. Or maybe here is only a grimace (their mouths are caught in the teeth of a gale?). No, it’s smiling, pretty sure, because they’re nodding now, the two of them, because yes of course, we’re all friends here – well aren’t we? Yes we are, yes we are: that’s the rule (all in the same boat). So I’ve got to call up and muster a good many of my features, now – change them all around until they form into a well-known phrase or saying that will speak unto any nation (because they could be from anywhere) that here is greeting – simple yet electric – and here is too the handclasp of oneness.
Our mutual and lunatic contortions of complicity have collided like rubber-tipped lances at the business end of a friendly joust (I heard the clash of amiability) and soon they are behind me and I plod on forward and now I can tell you that what they actually had on their heads were his-and-hers deerstalkers (one Black Watch, the other the red thing) and the flaps were down and over their ears, the connecting ribbons lost to sight among scarves and chins and things like that. Was any of that actually good, I wonder? What do you think? The lance and jousting thing? Lunatic contortions? It’s difficult to know, isn’t it, with this whole imagery thing. But I really would like to read English at Uni, if ever I’m up to it. Be a writer, one day. Because I really love reading: just love it.
Now what’s this? Oh hey – that’s not fair – it’s a barrier, a dead end, a great full stop. ‘No passengers allowed beyond this point at any time’. Well hell. How are you supposed to do all these healthy circuits of the deck, then, if you can’t actually, you know – walk round the thing? Oh God. Better turn back, t
hen. God oh God! Now the wind is really slicing me and I’m suddenly freezing, if I’m honest. Maybe I’ll go back in. If I meet those raincoated loonies coming all the way back at me, then I’ll go in for sure (can’t do that grin all over again). If, of course, I can find the door …
Can’t. Can’t see any doors at all (so here we go again). And the Siamese twins seem to have blown away altogether – so let’s just see what happens at the back of the thing, shall we? God, it is, you know – it’s simply endless, this ship. Which is, I know, a tragic way, really, of trying to describe it: not endless, is it? (well no, not – I’m actually standing right at the end now, so very much not, then). But what else, really, can you say? Very big? Doesn’t hit the mark at all. But I’ll have to be getting it across somehow because Mum and Dad are never going to be doing all this for themselves, are they? As soon as she even smelled the suspicion of wind, Mum would be clutching her hair and just gone (or else giving way to a nervous breakdown); and Dad would just sniff it all briefly and say Hm, very nice, Marianne – very, uh – fresh: now what say we all go back in and have ourselves a little drink, hey? And Rollo? Oh please …
It seems to broaden out quite suddenly, when you get to the back (which it doesn’t, obviously – but it really does appear to) and there are now all sorts of other decks, mini decks, a bit fanned out above and below you. Loads of lounger-type deck chair things all lined up down there – and a maybe little tennis court, could be (there’s a net there, anyway). Actually, despite all the vastness, everything here seems terribly weeny, rather surprisingly. I mean – look at that swimming pool: bit pathetic. Not really much bigger than the hot tubs alongside. One of which has a – urgh – very bald man in it, bobbing up and down like a hardly boiling egg. Who of course is now smiling up at me, and soon he is raising a hand from amid the pulsating bubbles.
‘Don’t mind Harry!’ calls out a woman, who Marianne had not even noticed standing alongside. ‘It’s only Harry. Don’t mind him.’
Marianne slapped back on her usual half-baked smile; am I meant, then, in some way to know this Harry? Am I? Know all about him?
‘Do you think,’ the woman went on – her voice made slow by the bending of the wind, and also maybe by the weight of thought that was backing it up, ‘that the water – the water in the swimming pool, yes? Do you think it’s fresh water, could it be? Or sea water? What do you think?’
Marianne glanced at the pale blue pool, its surface fluttered into fillets.
‘I, uh – I don’t know. I hadn’t really, er – thought …’
The woman nodded with emphasis, as if to state Well I have.
‘Sea, fairly sure. Yes – it must be sea water, if you look at it closely. Can’t you see? All the waves …?’
Marianne stared at the ground, and nodded. Then she made a sort of pointing yet twitchy and frankly farewell movement with all of the fingers on one of her hands (the message being loosely that she was in fact, you see, an agent working undercover for the British Secret Service and if my tail sees me talking to you then the entire operation will be blown asunder and both our lives could well be at grave risk and I have only just now glimpsed M over there, lurking by the quoits, so you will understand if I just slide away?).
Marianne was relieved, now, to be quite alone again and standing at the rearmost point of the liner – actually holding on to the jutting-out flag pole (why no flag? Huh? Tell me that. Should be a Union Jack there, shouldn’t there? So why not? Why isn’t there? Huh?). But just look at this. Look at those massive and churned-up vees of foam we’re leaving behind in our wake. What I’m doing now is, I’m focusing on one just-formed white and chopped-up eddy, and I’m keeping my eyes on that little one and that one only … and God, in just the space of eight, nine, ten … twelve seconds, now, and it’s practically hitting the horizon.
I think, you know, that if anyone ever went over the side … then one of those lifebelts would be just too little, three miles late.
*
And scattered across the sun-dappled baize of this taller than usual and big square table were what appeared to be just thousands of bits of jigsaw. Marianne plucked up a few, quite idly – most of the perimeter was already done – and with just one interesting reddish and white piece carefully pinioned between her thumb and forefinger, her hand hovered vaguely in circles through the air, sometimes shifting more angularly like an arbitrary gearstick, maybe trusting to magnetics to haul this thing down and let it just click with no small satisfaction into quite the right spot. (Hopeless at jigsaws, always was – even when I used to pick out all the straight-sided bits, I could never seem to fit them together). And the process wasn’t helped by her having to whip off her glasses at the approach of just anyone (hadn’t been back to the cabin, not yet, to deal with all the contact stuff), this new blindness rendering the whole scene before her yet again as no more than a small and fuzzy lawn – and don’t, please, get her on to all the old house thing again – now romantically marred by a frittering of leaves.
‘Why,’ she had asked of a trim and eager steward, just a few moments earlier, ‘is this jigsaw here, actually?’
And, she might have added, so oddly positioned – sort of half into a broad corridor, and hard by the smoking section of the I think it’s called Piano Bar.
‘Bit of a tradition,’ smiled the steward.
Ah yes, thought Marianne – everything, just everything on board surely seems to be that: I’m not convinced that anyone in authority – and certainly not the regulars – could actually cope with anything occurring for the very first time.
‘There’s a sort of challenge,’ the steward went on (he had offered her tea – drop of coffee, maybe? – and although Marianne had politely declined, he still seemed to have all the time in the world for her), ‘to – you know – get it finished off by the time we dock in New York. There are no prizes, or anything. People just fit in the odd piece as they’re passing, like.’
Marianne nodded at length her complete understanding (one feels, I don’t know – in some way compelled to point up, magnify, practically illuminate one’s every remark and gesture) while doubting that that really was the way it went. From what she’d observed even during the short time she’d been loitering there – waiting for what, exactly? Dad and Mum and Rollo to one by one emerge and show their faces? Not really: but something, I’m waiting for something, feels like – it had been plain to her that practically everyone passing gave this table not even a glance. They had in mind a nice set of chairs clustered around maybe one of those little round tables, there (not in the glare of the sun, but not too far out of it either), and possibly an early morning little snack – would that be nice? To round off breakfast with, before they could idly contemplate just maybe a spot of elevenses, during which their minds and conversation could stray in the direction of lunch. But the few who did stop: oh my God – those two Japanese, there, and that extraordinarily large and blond and I think rather cruel-looking man (his face is set – so terribly serious) – their eyes were darting from piece to perimeter to box and back again, and occasionally a triumphant hand would swoop down from on high like a hawk in silence – and as the piece snapped unerringly home, there spread slowly across the face of the huge and unforgiving blond man a sneer of repletion, as if he had once and for all settled the hash of his implacable enemy; the Japanese would whoop briefly like seven-year-olds having been newly awarded an extra half-holiday, before all masks were resumed and the game in earnest began again.
The puzzle depicted – and Marianne could only note this and wonder – an Alpine scene: snow-capped mountains and plunging valleys, hugging into warm-lit coves, clusters of picturesque chalets that reminded Marianne of a musical box she had had so very briefly, oh just years ago (the fruit, as it happens, of yet another bumper conker-swapping jag, though this thing too, which played – don’t ask – Come Back to Sorrento, soon – at the say-so of Nicole – went the way of the Parker propelling pencil). Marianne hadn’t really minded, t
hough – it was her royal blue velveteen jewel box she had loved, with the little pirouetty ballerina, all her prettiness and outstretched grace mirrored and twinkling as she slowly and only just a bit jerkily revolved in not quite time to some weird and plinky noise, which every single time had tenderly wrapped up Marianne in successive layers of softness, and delivered her somewhere safe and elsewhere (a place she badly needed to be).
Had enough of this. Maybe I’ll go and chuck a bucket of water over that horrible brother of mine: even if it doesn’t wake him up, it’d be quite fun to do. Oh … oh look who it is! Oh no – isn’t him, is it? Maybe just sneak on my glasses (no one seems to be looking). Yup – is him. Why’s he just hanging around like that? He’s a very dark horse, this Tom, I think – much more interesting than he seems, and so so sad. I can probably understand why people might just dismiss him as some sort of a nutter (well I did, didn’t I? At first I did, before we’d properly spoken) but I really think that sort of thing happens far too much, nowadays. Everything – everyone’s judged on appearances: if I can’t relate – if you’re not wearing the right labels – then as far as I’m concerned you’re either invisible or some old lunatic: either way of no concern. That’s the attitude today. And it’s wrong, I think: very.
There’s a woman, leaning against the window and staring out to sea. Tom is behind her, just a couple of feet away, hardly more, and he’s looking – what? Hesitant? Yes – I would say hesitant (but he always does, Tom, doesn’t he? Look that). Still he’s just standing there, one finger to his lips. But now he seems to have come to a decision – he’s making his move.
S.O.S. Page 17
