Cruisin'

by Brian Caswell

  She wanted to talk about the similarities between Dostoevski and Dickens, and he thought they were mid-fielders for the Newcastle Jets. She wanted to discuss history and politics, but he thought that Gandhi was that new off spinner in the Indian one-day cricket side.

  I don't know why she went out with him in the first place – except that he looked a bit like Björn from ABBA.

  Even bookworms have their shallow side.

  Suzi's dad doesn't look a bit like Björn – or anyone else – from ABBA (which is a mark in his favour, as far as I'm concerned), but he does like to read.

  Almost as much as his daughter.

  I guess reading's a bit like a virus. If your parent has it, then you're pretty much likely to catch it if you hang around them long enough – which, when you're a kid, you're more or less forced to do. And sometimes, the dose you get is more severe.

  I asked Suzi what made her ask – about her dad having the hots for my mum, I mean.

  'I haven't noticed anything,' I said.

  To which she replied, 'Naturally ...'

  I guess my expression must have let her know that I knew she was using 'girlspeak' – which is the language females use instinctively when they want to sound patronising, but need an escape clause (just in case the non-female they are addressing recognises what they're doing and reacts – by actually asking, if he's really brave, or by simply looking confused, which is my favoured approach).

  The thing is, I've lived my whole life with a single mother and an aunt whose feminist leanings resemble a palm tree in a hurricane, so I'm unnaturally well attuned (for a guy) to the mysteries of girlspeak – in fact, now that I come to think about it, that's probably the source of my dreaded sarcasm reflex.

  Anyway, as soon as Suzi muttered, 'Naturally ...' she realised I was onto her, so she started backtracking.

  'What I mean,' she began (using the classic girlspeak backtracking line), 'is that you're a boy. And boys never notice things like that.'

  'Like what?' I asked.

  'Like the way he was rubbing the sunblock into your mother's shoulders.'

  The sunblock? Well, that explained everything ...

  I felt like one of the roomful of suspects in an Agatha Christie movie, sitting there like a stooge while Poirot puts together all the bits of meaningless ... stuff, and reaches the 'obvious' conclusion that anyone could have worked out (if they were a Belgian super-sleuth with a brain the size of a small planet).

  But I wasn't about to go down without a fight.

  'She nearly died of sunstroke yesterday,' I said, trying desperately to work out where Suzi was going with all this. 'He's probably just being polite.'

  She rolled her eyes. Clearly, she was searching for a way to communicate something which boys, as a race, find impossible to grasp.

  If I'd been a girl, she wouldn't have had to mention it at all – I'd have been all over it. But I wasn't a girl, so she had to work through it with all the patience of a primary school teacher trying to explain relativity theory to a kid who hasn't learned to tie his shoelaces yet.

  'I didn't say the fact that he was rubbing the sunblock into your mother's shoulders. I said the way he was rubbing the sunblock into your mother's shoulders ...'

  I knew I should have been making the connections, but I also knew that the expression on my face was probably somewhere between bewilderment and the look that Andy Faatui manages whenever he finds himself in Mr Matthews' Maths class.

  'Look,' she said, changing her approach without losing her cool – something I found really impressive, under the circumstances, 'try rubbing some sunblock on my shoulders.'

  I find that the trick, when you're totally out of your depth, is to focus on something really concrete, so that there's something you can make sense out of. With this in mind, I looked around for the bottle of sunblock – which, it turned out, wasn't actually there.

  'Why do you need sunblock?' I asked, trying to regain the high ground in a conversation which was rapidly turning into intellectual quicksand. 'You're wearing a jacket and jeans.'

  A deep breath, and she went on – as if it was taking every ounce of control she could muster not to check my knuckles for calluses from being dragged along the ground.

  'I know,' she said, 'but you can pretend, can't you? You know, role-play? Imagine you have a bottle of sunblock and that I'm not wearing a jacket.'

  Suddenly, she put on her helpless-female voice – which is her least convincing persona, because one thing Suzi Quintello isn't, is helpless. 'Jules, this sun is so hot, could you rub some cream on my shoulders? Please?'

  This I could handle. I began kneading her shoulders, rubbing the imaginary cream into the imaginary skin, with all the imaginary skill of a physiotherapist.

  'Okay,' she said, 'keep going, but now imagine that you're rubbing it into Jenna Hamilton's shoulders.'

  Suddenly, it all made complete sense.

  I stopped rubbing, and Suzi looked up at me in triumph.

  'Your dad,' I said, 'is so busted ...'

  It's amazing what you notice once your attention has been drawn to something.

  Like the fact that my mother suddenly started 'dressing for dinner'.

  I don't mean that before 'the sunblock incident' she was in the habit of entering the formal dining room with nothing on, but there's a difference between going to dinner – which was what we did on the first week of the cruise – and dressing for dinner – which is what we did after the ship sailed out of Bora Bora on the second leg of its journey.

  You'll notice I said 'we' and not 'she'. That's another thing you learn if you live your life surrounded by females – there is no 'she', there's only 'we'.

  If my mother – or Aunt Pru, for that matter – thinks it's a good idea to do something, then it automatically means that it's a good idea for everybody to do it, and this automatically includes me – and, of course, Adrian.

  Mind you, Adrian doesn't worry too much about it, because unless it has to do with acting, dancing, stagecraft or doing the splits at totally inappropriate moments, Adrian doesn't really care one way or the other.

  I wish I had his focus.

  But then again, given that it makes you a social outcast – whose totally innocent cousin has to field jokes about even being related to you – maybe I'm glad I don't.

  Anyway, dressing for dinner involves actually making an effort to shower the day's dirt from your body, slip into something 'more appropriate', do your make-up (Mum, not me – or Aunt Pru), and 'Make sure you get there on time!'

  While we're on the whole make-up thing: predictably, Aunt Pru thinks that all make-up products (as well as high heels, push-up bras and mini-skirts) are a plot of the 'oppressive male-chauvinist elite', who 'prey on women's insecurities, in an effort to reduce them to sex-objects' – and besides, they're tested on animals (the make-up products, I mean, not the high heels, the bras or the mini-skirts).

  I'm not entirely sure, but I think if they were tested on men instead, she might have less of an issue with the whole idea of make-up.

  I'm not entirely sure how Adrian stands on the subject of wearing make-up at dinner. After all, even if you're sweating in the desert, halfway up Uluru, and you're only going to be a tiny white speck in the background of a Qantas commercial, if you're professional about the whole thing, you'll still make sure that your make-up is properly applied so your skin doesn't shine in the sun and ruin the shot. So, who knows, perhaps that kind of dedication can spill over to other areas ...

  Of course, none of this would have meant a lot to me, if Suzi hadn't pointed out – Poirot-style – what was now totally obvious.

  Then came the other give away – which was that suddenly Dr Quintello made arrangements to swap tables at dinner. ('So that the kids can eat together – seeing as how they've become such good friends, and seem to be getting on so well.')

  Actually, it wasn't a bit difficult for Suzi's dad to arrange the swap. You see, Sandro, Raff and Marko, who had originally been as
signed to our dinner table, were more than willing to help out and move.

  Partly because (in spite of the fact that their idea of a fashion statement was open-necked shirts and rapper-style bling) they were pretty cool guys, but mainly because on the first night out, Marko had made the mistake of mentioning that when they'd booked the cruise, it was under the illusion that there would be lots of 'hot chicks' on board – and that it would be one long 'partay'.

  Which, to my psycho aunt, meant that they were perverts and shallow, 'typical' males, who deserved to be put in their place every time they dared to offer an opinion – even if it was only about the quality of the barramundi.

  Needless to say, half the time, they chose to eat at one of the snack bars and avoid dinner completely, and when they did brave the Wrath of Khan, they often raced through the meal with the excuse that they had 'something to do'.

  Aunt Pru, of course, assumed that 'something to do' meant going up to the Lido Deck and ogling the joggers.

  I was going to point out that:

  a) there wasn't exactly a whole lot of action going on on the jogging track at dinnertime, and

  b) that the Spandex Brigade weren't likely to appeal to a trio of twenty-somethings who'd booked onto the Love Boat and accidentally ended up on Voyage of the Damned. Which is, when you think about it, a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio winning his ticket to America in a poker game, only to end up on Titanic – though, of course, he did get to hook up with a hot chick (assuming you regard Kate Winslet as a hot chick) before freezing to death in the zero-degree waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

  But I decided not to point it out.

  No prizes for guessing why.

  Actually, the fact that there were few opportunities to 'partay' on board The Polynesian Queen turned out to be a huge bonus for Sandro, Raff and Marko.

  You see, because they had nothing else to do with their time, they went to the small casino on A-Deck, where they discovered that Raff had a previously undiscovered talent for blackjack. So they pooled their money and agreed to split any winnings – which was a good move, because by the time the ship got back to Tahiti a few days later, they had won enough money to pay for tickets on a three-week under-thirties 'cruise of a lifetime' to the Caribbean.

  (Unfortunately, I believe it was the one that was on the news recently, because they had an outbreak of cholera on board and finally hit a reef off Antigua, stranding Sandro, Raff, Marko and the other thousand-odd passengers for three days, before they were taken off and flown home for medical care.)

  So, there we were, eating our dinner together, pretending that there was nothing more to it than the fact that Suzi and I were good friends and that our parents liked to talk – about the books they'd read, and about 'the obvious differences in the philosophical positions of Camus and Sartre'.

  If that last half-sentence made absolutely no sense to you, take a ticket and join the queue. Half the time, Suzi and I just looked at each other, like, Who are these people? Aliens?

  It was as if they were speaking some weird language that used most of the same words and phrases as English, but made absolutely no sense to anyone who wasn't into hardback books and highbrow philosophy.

  Listening to them, I felt like a Britney Spears fan at a classical music convention, waiting desperately for a chorus I could sing along to.

  I asked Suzi if she thought we should pull the typical jealous teenager stunt of trying to break them up, but it was more a ploy to see how she felt about it than it was a serious suggestion.

  After all, there's an old saying that applies to most families – even ones that are the square root of 'ideal'. It goes like this:

  If she's happy, we're happy ...

  And she was definitely happy.

  Suzi said she was fine with the idea – for now – but she reserved the right to change her mind, if things got too serious.

  Which I thought was very ... female of her.

  8

  The Phantom of E-Deck

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SUZI

  From the point of view of a 'fledgling writer' (which was what Ms Bernhardt, my English teacher, insisted on calling me after she found out that one of her students had actually – of her own accord – taken the trouble to enrol in a writers workshop), the cruise was proving much more interesting than I'd expected it to be.

  There were turning out to be more 'situations' on board than you'd find on a six-thirty soap.

  For a start, there was the Jules/Barry Barnes situation (which, for obvious reasons, was never too far from our minds), and then, of course, there was the 'thing' between my dad and Jules' mum. But there was also the Jules/Jenna Hamilton situation (which wasn't, technically, a 'situation' at all, seeing as how we were ten days into a fourteen-day cruise, and he hadn't even raised the nerve to ask her what time it was – let alone actually engage her in conversation), and, for me, that provided an interesting set of contrasts.

  Jules was spending the whole time trying as hard as he could to avoid one person, while trying just as hard to arrange to 'accidentally' find himself in the same room/leisure area/pool as the other one – without:

  a) looking too much like a 'pervert stalker' (his aunt's words, not mine), and

  b) exposing himself too much to the danger of being discovered by the one person he was trying so hard to avoid.

  This delicate situation was made doubly difficult by the fact that since our adventure on Bora Bora, Bone-Boy had made it his single-minded focus to find Jules alone and 'teach him a lesson'.

  The fact that Barry Barnes would use the words 'teach' and 'lesson' in the same sentence, when they must both have been pretty alien concepts to him, showed just how serious he was about achieving it.

  What appealed to me, though, was the irony of the fact that while Jules was having so much trouble finding anything to say to the bikini goddess of D-Deck, the only thing our parents were having trouble doing was, well ... shutting up.

  It was almost embarrassing, but I hadn't seen my dad this happy in a lot of years, so I decided I could put up with it – at least until the novelty of finding someone who shared so much in common with him had worn off, and they started acting something like normal people.

  The thing that made life really frustrating for Jules, though, was that at some point Barry Barnes must have made a connection between a couple of the twenty or so brain cells that rattled around inside the cavernous interior of his skull, and realised that all he had to do to find Jules was to follow Jenna.

  Of course, maybe I'm giving him way too much credit. Maybe he started following Jenna for the same reason that Jules did, and the fact that he kept running into Jules was just an inevitable consequence.

  When I say 'running into Jules', of course, it's just a figure of speech. A better description might be 'running after Jules', because that was invariably what happened.

  He would spot Jules hiding behind a pot plant or sneaking a look around a doorway, and he'd start running – to catch him and deliver on his promise.

  Luckily, Jules is a pretty good runner, and he always managed to get away – just.

  Except once, when he was trying to escape across one of the Lido Deck leisure areas, and slipped on a moving shuffleboard disc, falling flat on his back and winding himself.

  The old man who had shoved the offending disc into his path (not through malice, but because it was his last shot, and he was concentrating hard on beating the old woman who had creamed him in the two previous games) looked daggers down at Jules, who was lying on the floor, gasping like a landed fish. I thought he was going to launch into one of those 'kids of today' speeches, but then he realised two things simultaneously:

  a) the slip had actually moved his disc into a winning position, and

  b) this particular 'kid of today' might actually have hurt himself.

  Luckily, the old man needn't have worried. Although he was gasping, Jules wasn't actually damaged in any major way. He'd just figured out that if he lay there in full v
iew of the over-eighties Olympic shuffleboard team, Barry Barnes, who had skidded to a halt a few metres away, couldn't actually deliver on his promise to 'teach him a lesson'.

  The theory was that if he could drag that situation out for about two minutes, Bone-Brain would forget why he was standing there, and wander off to find some food to eat, or some small child to torture – or was that the other way round?

  Either way, the theory was wrong, of course. It actually took two minutes and forty-one seconds.

  When he was gone, Jules made a spectacular recovery and headed off to our cabin to report the event to me. Which was a waste of time (seeing as how I'd watched the whole incident from the jogging track just above the shuffleboard court). Just when I was about to shout out to him, however, Sandro, Raff and Marko emerged from one of the nearby doorways, celebrating loudly because Raff had just scored four blackjacks in a row and won them a motza, so my greeting was drowned out, and Jules disappeared, heading in the general direction of A-Deck.

  Just a note for sports-lovers: like most high points in the sporting world, the old shuffleboarder's moment of triumph was short-lived.

  The shuffleboard refereeing committee – which happened to consist of the old woman's bridge team and an old man who was so profoundly deaf that he couldn't understand what they were asking, so he just nodded when everyone else did – ruled unanimously that a teenager stumbling into the middle of the game at a crucial moment did not constitute a natural hazard, as the old man futilely claimed.

  They made him take the shot again, and this time, he underestimated his own strength (which was enhanced by the anger and frustration of coming so close to winning, only to have the victory cruelly and unfairly ripped away from his grasp). The disc went sailing harmlessly past everything, and he lost the end – and the match – by two shots.

  As a writer, though, the one who really interested me was Adrian.

  I mean, we hardly ever saw him. Apart from dinner and the occasional swim in the pool, he seemed to have found a way of disappearing that would have made Houdini proud.