Sail Away

by Celia Imrie

  ‘We’ll start by shaking our feet. Then our hands.’

  When she looked back at the window seat, both Jason and the young man were gone.

  ‘Right … now I’ll need you to shake your heads till your faces are relaxed.’

  While the class did this, with Suzy joining in to show them, she tried to snap her mind away from Jason and the money scam.

  ‘Tomorrow, when we know one another a little better, I am going to start work on getting into character – becoming someone else. But for today we’re going to do some things regarding basic stagecraft.’

  Suzy moved forward into the middle of the gaggle of people and raised her arms.

  ‘OK! Now let’s split into two groups. Everyone to my left go and sit behind me. The others remain on the stage.’

  The passengers dithered about until they were sorted into two groups. Suzy recognised Amanda, who had sat near her a few nights ago when the ship was leaving Genoa.

  ‘Now. All of you sitting will be the audience.’

  The sitting people let out a suppressed groan.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn next. But this exercise is about being seen, something which you would have to learn both onstage and especially onscreen. I want everyone onstage to mill around until I call “stop!”. Then you will freeze, but be aware of whether the audience has a clear view of your face. If they don’t, use whatever method you can to put yourself in a better position. You’ll only have one second to do this. It might mean taking a step forward, or kneeling or leaning. And you’ll have to sense instinctively what your fellows are doing. OK. Here we go!’

  She turned and addressed the audience group. ‘You’ll have to watch out to make sure you can see everyone. Eagle eyes, please.’

  She sat among the class.

  ‘This should be fun!’ She winked in the direction of Amanda, who was part of the observers’ team. ‘Eyes peeled, everyone! Now, actors – move around. Let’s see how easily you can adjust to keep yourselves from being hidden from the audience.’

  *

  After the class was over Amanda went up to the cafeteria for a coffee and a bun. It had been great fun, and she had laughed a lot. She was so stirred up by taking part in a group activity, something she had not done for years, that she had decided, once she was back in London and settled in, to sign up for evening classes, in order to keep her hand in, mix with strangers, do something different. It was all too easy to fall into a lonely life and fester in your solitude.

  In the other section of the café she could see Tyger, sitting with the handsome young gentleman dancer from the ballroom. She wanted to call them gigolos, but that seemed too loaded a word for men who were simply paid to give lone women a chance on the dance floor. Liliane was with them. They were all laughing.

  Amanda felt stupid as she realised she experienced a tiny tinge of jealousy. That man was her own personal private dance partner – hands off!

  Cradling her coffee cup, Amanda sat back in her little alcove and looked out, watching the waves rippling and sparkling as far as the bright horizon. Up here in the café you could see for ever – miles and miles of nothing but water. No birds, no other ships, just glittering sea, crowned with sky.

  As she watched the wake spread out, creating new waves, which crashed into the teal-coloured swell, she noticed the spume riffling, forming something on the surface which looked like a wide span of lace, spread over the water in ever-increasing circles. It resembled a huge mystical doily.

  Behind her there was a sudden commotion: people standing, rushing to the window, murmuring with excitement.

  ‘Dolphins!’ cried a young woman nearby, as she collected her children and thrust them towards the window. ‘Look! Look, children! Dolphins!’

  Amanda, with the best seat in the house, remained where she was, as people gathered around her table, leaning forward, battling for space with their tablets and iPhones pressed against the glass, trying to get a glimpse of the creatures as they leaped from the water, forming wonderful patterns of black semicircles, diving in and out of the blue.

  Amanda wanted to knock all their wretched camera equipment on to the floor.

  She marvelled at their stupidity as they missed the actual moments happening – while focusing and fiddling about behind a lens, and blocking the windows from people who just wanted to see.

  ‘J’aime beaucoup les dauphins,’ said Liliane, moving forward, gripping Tyger’s shoulders. ‘Ravissantes!’

  ‘La plus captivante créature de la mer,’ replied Jason.

  ‘Hey, you guys,’ said Tyger, shaking away Liliane’s hands. ‘Stop speaking in code.’

  Liliane and Jason exchanged a wince, at the same moment that the dolphins took a unanimous dive and disappeared again beneath the surface.

  Now that the spectacle was over the gaggle of people and their phones and tablets dispersed.

  Amanda saw that Tyger was holding an ice-cream cornet.

  ‘How lovely,’ she said. ‘Ice cream.’

  ‘Over there.’ He pointed to the corner near the tea bar. ‘You can serve yourself all day and all night, if you like.’ He took a long lick. ‘Did you know that onboard this ship the customers devour eight thousand gallons of ice cream a week? Eight thousand! That’s enough ice cream to fill a 24-foot swimming pool!’

  Amanda had no reply to this, and Tyger moved off, leaving her sitting alone again with a half-drunk cup of cold coffee and the crumbs of her fruit bun. She would have loved to have gone and got an ice-cream cone but she felt suddenly tired, depressed and lumpen.

  She decided to return to her stateroom and have half an hour on the laptop catching up with events at home.

  Her cabin was fresh and recently cleaned.

  She briefly checked the Daily Programme. If she ate an early lunch, something salad-ish, there was a film on this afternoon which she remembered loving when it first came out. She had forgotten the salient point of the plot but recalled that it was about a French Resistance heroine and an orphaned boy, in France before D-day. She marked it.

  While the laptop software opened up Amanda stood on the balcony looking out at the row of lifeboats hanging, sturdy and orange, from their davits just below her cabin. She wondered what they would be like on the inside. Then decided that she didn’t really want to know, as there would only be one reason she’d ever get a chance to see – if the ship sank – and she certainly didn’t want that to happen! She noticed that some lifeboats had windows and looked like quite pleasant boats on which you might take a trip, while others had only a few slits for light. If the worst ever came to the worst she hoped that she would be in one with windows. The very thought of bouncing about on giant waves in one of those orange windowless pods made her feel quite seasick.

  She came back inside, signed into her internet account and picked up her emails. She was halfway through reading one from Mark when she remembered that she should quickly cut off the pay-connection, rather than waste the precious minutes simply checking her inbox.

  Mark’s letter depressed her. Not content with his wife throwing him out of their home, he had been now chucked out of his new girlfriend’s place. He had spent the night on Patricia’s sofa. It had been a nightmare, he said. The girlfriend, Jasmine, had been a nutter, he told her, and he was glad to have escaped her poisonous claws, but Patricia’s kids were running wild, almost encouraged by some teenage girl who Patricia had got through an agency.

  Amanda felt a surge of guilt. If she had stayed in London … But, as there was simply nothing she could do to wind back the clock, she read on, trying not to take on the implied blame.

  Mark was now down to begging all his friends for a place to stay, but ‘their grasping wives don’t like me’, he explained. He now feared that he would end up wandering, night by night, ‘like a needy whore’. Amanda couldn’t help feeling that Mark could easily make everything better simply by being a little bit less selfish, by thinking of women as human beings and by trying to patch things u
p with his wife.

  But then she remembered how she herself had felt after Nigel left her and knew that those spousal wounds weren’t quite so easy to heal. Ingrid was probably deeply injured emotionally, but at the same time happy to see the back of him and his sexist diatribes.

  The next email was from the storage company with a receipt for yet another wasted week’s storage.

  Then a message from the solicitors, asking if she had a firm date for when she would pick up the key.

  Oh damn. When you were away from home, and out of phone contact, it was so pressurising when the real world kept on nagging at you like this.

  She kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed.

  When she awoke it was lunchtime.

  She hastily washed her face and put on a bit of make-up then strode along to the restaurant. She had decided that she would definitely go to see the movie, so she only had time to have one course and hoped it might not be in the tiresome company of Chris.

  *

  After the morning session was over, Suzy found herself surrounded by a few of the quieter members of the class, who, one by one, wanted to bombard her with questions. ‘My niece wants to be an actress, could you give her some advice?’; ‘When we did the emotional exercise I disagree with you over the meaning of the term winsome …’; ‘Could you tell me the names of the best drama schools?’; ‘I just wanted to tell you about my aunt who was an actress for a while. She had a regular part in Crossroads, but gave up the business to have a baby. Do you think I should encourage her to get back into the profession?’

  In comparison with this tricky string of questions the class itself had been a doddle. Suzy had to walk on eggshells, particularly as she realised that none of these people really wanted to hear an honest answer; they wanted her to make their dreams come true.

  And the world of showbiz really was not like that. It was hard, lonely and filled with disappointment.

  It may have been only noon when she had done, an hour after the official end of her class, but Suzy felt in need of a stiff drink. She went back to the cabin, showered again then slipped into some smarter clothes rather than the deliberate sporty workshop-style look she had gone for earlier.

  She decided against visiting the posh restaurant for lunch and went down to the pub instead and tucked into fish and chips, while the others sitting around her took part in a quiz.

  The players all laughed aloud. The quizmaster had announced that the correct answer to his question ‘How many lifeboats are aboard the Blue Mermaid?’ was twenty-two, not, as someone had written, 35,750,000.

  ‘We thought you said lightbulbs!’ cried the team leader, getting another laugh from the room.

  Suzy wished she knew where Jason was, and why he had popped into her class. Perhaps he had wanted to talk to her, but realised he was too late as the session had already begun.

  En route to her own cabin she had knocked on his door, but there was no reply.

  He might be in there, hiding, but Suzy somehow doubted that.

  If Jason was guilty, he was playing a brazen, wide-open game.

  After lunch she wandered to the theatre end of the ship. All the time she scanned for Jason but on a ship this size there was little hope of bumping into him. She had read yesterday that the onboard population was the size of a small town, like Cricklade or Jedburgh, and that the Blue Mermaid’s surface area was three acres, which was then multiplied by fifteen decks. If you were seriously searching for someone who lived in Cricklade you wouldn’t just stroll randomly around the town, would you? Wandering about looking for Jason wasn’t worth thinking about.

  She was tired and didn’t feel like talking to anyone, but didn’t want to go back to her cabin and waste her time while she was on this wonderful ship.

  She saw a sign saying ‘No Entry – Rehearsal in Progress’. She slipped past it and stood at the back of the shadowy theatre watching the troupe of show dancers rehearsing in the stage’s working lights. She loved to sit alone in the dark, watching other entertainers practising their craft. This lot certainly had some complex routines to learn, and the troupe leader was very strict. The sequence she watched was spectacular.

  While the troupe was going over one of the many costume changes, Suzy slipped out of the auditorium and took the corridor leading behind it.

  A poster displayed on a digital screen announced the afternoon performance of a film entitled The Dangerous Season. This was the first time Suzy had realised there was a cinema onboard. She wasn’t sure whether or not the film had started but who cared? If it was already on when she went in, it would feel like the old days, when she was a kid with her parents, at those news theatres, or even the real cinema. Whenever you arrived you’d go in and, if you’d missed the beginning, you’d stay on after the end and the titles had scrolled past, then watch the opening scenes. It sounded mad now, but in those days no one seemed to mind.

  She pulled open the door, and realised from the shimmering light within that the film had indeed already started. She shuffled into the small room.

  There were plenty of empty seats so she took a place on an aisle, near the back.

  Onscreen a battle scene was in progress. It appeared to be Second World War, Normandy, with British and American soldiers fighting Nazis in the dusty remnants of a typical French village. So far, she didn’t think she had seen this movie before, but in her head all war films blended into one.

  While bombs exploded and machine-gun fire rattled onscreen, Suzy’s mind returned again to the troubled subject of Jason and the stolen money.

  She shook her head, furious that she could not even for a moment escape her own thoughts. She tried once more to concentrate on the film. After all there was nothing she could do about Jason until they were face to face.

  The screen scene changed to the shattered fragments of a bar, where a woman, covered in dirt and pieces of plaster, sheltered behind the counter. A massive explosion, a direct hit, shook the building behind her, blowing the wall away, revealing what remained of a wooden staircase, suspended in daylight.

  The actress playing the woman was familiar, but for the moment Suzy couldn’t place her.

  ‘Damnation!’ said the woman, crawling out into the rubble-strewn bar. Suzy immediately recognised the distinctive voice of April McNaughten, an Oscar-winning, much-loved British actress now mainly based in Hollywood.

  April McNaughten? Hadn’t she been in Zurich, playing The King and I at the same time as The Importance cast were there? There were posters everywhere and Suzy remembered that, out of the blue, Jason had changed the subject to talk about April’s show when she was trying to quiz him about the inexplicable events of the night before their own show was cancelled.

  Damn!

  Here she was thinking about Jason again.

  She directed her attention once more to the movie.

  As the dust settled on the bombed-out building, the under-stairs cupboard door creaked open. April McNaughten crept forward, perceiving a small child, white with ash and debris, crouching inside. Keeping a lookout, April reached out to touch the child, offering her hand, but he recoiled. Stealing towards him on her haunches, April grabbed the boy and hauled him from the cupboard. Once outside she cradled him in her arms. Moments later the entire house collapsed.

  Suzy laughed to herself. These war films!

  The scene changed to a copse by a river, where April washed the child and shared bread with him. Once the dust and grime was cleared away from his face and hair, the little boy was beautiful, with his dark hair and cheeky smile. His sparse dialogue was in English, spoken with a French accent. April’s character spoke back to him in perfect English.

  Suzy was puzzled, as always, with these mainly English-speaking films where every now and then people spoke different languages and accents. Was April’s character really an English member of the French Resistance? After all, the Nazis in this film were speaking in German, with English subtitles, and the boy had a heavy French lilt. Or was everyone, exc
ept the Nazis, supposed to be French?

  Whichever, the French child was a very good little actor, although he didn’t have much to say.

  He had a natural presence.

  He reminded her of Jason.

  Suzy began to think she was becoming obsessed with Jason.

  She was seeing him in everything.

  By the end of the film, in a dramatic scene where the child escaped, running through a cornfield, while April sacrificed herself to keep the Nazis from reaching the fleeing boy, Suzy had become so convinced that the child in the film really was a very young Jason that, even though the house lights came up before the titles rolled, she waited behind to check the cast list.

  The rest of the audience was up, pushing along the aisles, heading for the exits.

  ‘Hello!’ Amanda stood in the row in front of Suzy. ‘That was great, wasn’t it?’

  Suzy didn’t want to be rude, but Amanda was blocking the screen. She tried to twist her body away so that she could talk and read at the same time, but to no avail. Short of shoving the woman out of the way, she could not see the cast list.

  ‘I really enjoyed the class this morning,’ Amanda continued. ‘Very inspiring. I shall be coming again. Thank you.’

  Suzy gave her a wide smile, and a feeble thank you, wishing Amanda would shove off. But by the time she had moved away, the cast list was down to best boys, foley artists and dolly grips. After these rolled up there would be no more actor credits.

  Suzy came out of the cinema and decided on taking a circuit of the deck before heading back to the cabin. She was craving fresh air and a little exercise. She hoped too that if she moved around in the public areas she might bump into Jason.

  She ran up the stairs to the boat deck, then pushed through the double doors leading outside. She jogged along, under the lifeboats, stopping occasionally to grip the rails and survey the navy-blue horizon. The wide breadth of water was scattered with rolling white peaks. The wind was moderate, making Suzy’s hair flutter about, whipping against her cheek. She turned and ran. As she speeded up to a trot she took deep breaths. She wished she had gone to her cabin first and put on a jacket, but the cold would make her run faster, so she persevered. When she had done one lap she went inside to the café to pick up a hot cup of tea to help thaw her out.