S.O.S. Page 2

  And then you leave. As soon as you wake up, you drink some of the wine I chose and uncorked and left there to breathe: it must be exhausted by now. Sometimes you don’t even pour it into a glass. Would you, could you think of doing that anywhere else but here? Could you? At a party? In one of your horrible pubs? God – at home, would you? When you’re with your family and your bloody wife? Just pick up a bottle of burgundy and upend it to your lips and down your throat? No. I don’t think so. But you do with me. And maybe because here, with me, is the only time you can really let go: be yourself? Because I couldn’t really say – can’t, no, in all honesty recall, how on earth you behave when you’re out. Because never – and I don’t care what you say, David – never, ever do you take me anywhere: nowhere at all. Oh yes: you’re going to mention, aren’t you, those three days away – aren’t you, David? Those precious and distant three days away, when your bloody kids and your bloody wife were staying with, who was it? Her mother? Not her mother? Anyway – staying somewhere with someone, doesn’t matter. And you took me away to that little hotel just outside of Oxford – and yes, David, it was bliss. Yes it was – it was divine, totally – but it was, oh God oh God, so very long ago, David: so very long ago. And even then you stole from me the final afternoon because you had to get back – go back home, you said, so that you could prepare. Prepare, I remember going (and already, although you hadn’t even left me, I was missing you terribly). Prepare, I said – prepare for what, in God’s name? And at first you would not say – and then, in time and eventually, you slowly told me. You had to rumple up and thump down upon the marital bed (because she, your bloody wife, would never expect you to have made it) and also you had to pour away four, maybe five big bottles of Evian (because she, your bloody wife, knew that you would have drunk that much at least to slake your permanent alcoholic dehydration – and of course you would never have thought of buying more). Pans had to be greased, plates and cups and glasses sullied and smeared and stacked up in piles by the sink. And then later you told me you had twice choked up the lavatory, feeding it sheet after sheet of virgin Andrex (the empty roll destined to garnish the bags of household rubbish that somehow had to be cobbled together, and of course just left there to rot); on the second occasion the plunger, you said, just wasn’t up to coping and so you had to call out an emergency plumber and that, you told me – to my face and deadpan – was forty-five quid down the drain.

  So why do I want you? Why do I want you so terribly much? Why is it that I want you to leave your bloody wife and come and stay with me? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know I want, need – someone to take care of me: a man of my own. And do I think this can ever happen? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  *

  ‘David!’

  Jesus Jesus.

  ‘David! Now this, now, is the absolute limit – !’

  ‘I’m getting up I’m getting up I’m getting up – look, I’m getting – see? I’m up I’m up I’m up.’

  Nicole’s fists were thumped into her hips: nice hips, oh yes – still quite trim, Nicole, as David saw with such mixed feelings.

  ‘You disgust me,’ she said – and quietly, which was rather scary, actually.

  David nodded, when she’d gone. Disgust her, yes: he knew he did, he knew it, and he more or less understood why.

  Felt a bit better once he’d splashed his face and fooled around with a toothbrush; gave up flossing – made him gag (and that blue-green Listerine he couldn’t help but swallow). This linen shirt feels nice, he was thinking now – and then he thought Oh by Christ yes: the other reason (how could I have forgotten?) I don’t want to go: what the doctor said. The other day.

  ‘Think on balance we ought to take a closer little look, Mister Arm. Could be nothing at all to worry about, but …’

  ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh. How soon do you think we ought to, um …?’

  ‘Well – no crashing hurry, of course, but I don’t really think we ought to leave it that long. Just a probe – see what’s going on, yes?’

  ‘Mm. Right. It’s just that I’m going away … short while …’

  ‘No problem at all, Mister Arm. Don’t let it spoil your holiday. Where going? Somewhere nice? You don’t have BUPA, do you? Something of that order?’

  ‘Used to, but I … No. Don’t.’

  ‘It’s just that we don’t want to hang around too long, do we? Want to have it done privately?’

  Well, thought David – I don’t want a fucking audience.

  ‘Will it, um …?’

  ‘Cost much? Well – these things do, of course …’

  David nodded: yes they do. These things, and others.

  Still. Back to the present: never mind all that now. That’s in the ‘Pending Dread’ box. Slip on the blazer, that’s what to do. Ah – wallet is on the side, here: that is good. Sod all in it, mind, but one thing at a time, hey? Wait up – what’s all this on the dressing table? A tenner, a fiver, and one, two, three pounds and what? Forty pence or so. Hm. I think that’s what old what’s-his-face beat me down to for the jacket. (My head, you know, is just beginning to cloud.)

  Marianne didn’t quite look at him as he ventured down the stairs – but then she just couldn’t resist:

  ‘Hello, Daddy!’ she sang to him. ‘Happy holiday!’

  ‘Oh!’ scoffed Rollo. ‘So you did actually make it home then, did you, eventually?’

  ‘Quiet, Rollo,’ said Nicole, though sounding really quite encouraging. ‘Now is everyone sure they’ve got everything, yes? I’ll keep all the passports together with the tickets so we know where we are. Rollo, do you have to wear that awful MiniDisc thing all the time?’

  Marianne sidled over to David and rubbed her shoulder up against his.

  ‘It’s going to be great,’ she whispered.

  David looked down at the light in her sweet, bright eyes.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know it is.’

  The cab-driver and Rollo were loading up the cases, and David looked back inside into the now dead hall. No point checking everything’s off – Nicole will have seen to all that. His eye fell upon a wooden wine crate lodged under the table, now chock-full of all their wellingtons. Ah yes – the petit chateau, the cru bourgeois: one of his more recent attempts to wean himself away from the all-engulfing wings of the Famous Grouse. This will drink well until 2008, the wine bloke had told him – a judgement that had proved to be quite wide of the mark on account he’d necked the lot in the space of a weekend.

  I wonder, thought David (on this morning of all mornings) as he clanged shut the front door (‘Here,’ said Nicole, jostling him aside, ‘let me make sure the deadlocks are done’) … I wonder, on the ship, whether I’ll be sick or not. And how, more generally, the thing will go. This Trip of a Lifetime. Or, in rounder terms, quite in which way and how thoroughly I’ll fuck it all up.

  *

  ‘Bloody hell – just look at you, Stewart. What’s wrong? Never seen you look so down,’ sort of laughed Jilly, holding out a mug.

  ‘Ah Jilly,’ sighed Stewart.

  He had now just about lifted up his eyes, this is true, but his head still hung low from the scaffold of his fingers. One hand now detached itself, leaving dimpled white puckers on a seemingly quite cooked and very closely-razored cheek. It pointedly picked up papers from his small cramped desk wedged into a corner of the small cramped berth that was all the unseeing fools on high had seen fit to allocate to the administration of, oh – only every single vestige of round-the-clock entertainment that was so huge a part of the dazzling and ever upbeat deal offered to all our cherished passengers, and sucked up greedily by practically the lot of them. The stiffened fingers released their hold on the papers – pink, blue, green and flimsy – and one by one they fluttered back down where they would (some slipped over the edge to the floor, and there they can bloody well stay).

  ‘They think – you know what they think, Jilly? They think it’s easy. Everyone does. Not just the bosses but t
he passengers – oh God they do, I can see it every trip. They look at me and they think, God – what a wanker. Free trip, they think. They think – ’

  ‘What are you talking about, Stewart? They love you, the passengers – they all do, all the time.’

  ‘Love me? Love me? Oh God, Jilly, don’t be so bloody ridiculous. They’re simply – well-disposed, is all they are. One of these crossings, everyone likes everyone, don’t they? All part of getting your money’s worth. And that’s our job.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Stewart. Leave this coffee here, will I? Never seen you like this.’

  Stewart was making some sort of hissing sound through his teeth as he leant back heavily in his chair, which creaked beneath him. His plaited fingers were forming a hammock for the back of his head, and now the low, bright white and riveted ceiling seemed to have claimed his attention.

  ‘No, Jilly, no – the reason, mm … why you have never before seen me ‘like this’, as you so kindly put it, is I think because you have never maybe encountered me before we set sail. After … ah! Different thing. Different me. Of course I’m not like this then. We set sail – I, as it were, take off. Follow? What I’m for. I tell you this, though, Jilly.’ He leant forward now with energy and started jabbing at her a brown and tapered finger. ‘There’s only one job harder, more gruelling – shall I tell you? On this bloody ship, there’s just one job that’s tougher than Cruise Director. Know what it is? No? Guesses?’

  Jilly just stood there and slapped on her simpleton look. She could be guessing all night, wouldn’t matter: Stewart was going to tell her, wasn’t he? Just you try and stop him.

  ‘Captain, you think? The Master?’ Stewart suggested airily, as if plucking idle possibilities from out of the blue beyond his porthole. ‘No no. Piece of cake. Chief Engineer? Born to it: no prob. Or maybe you think it’s chambermaids who have drawn the short straw on this transatlantic miracle of ours, do you? Wrong – all wrong. Chambermaids, well – no picnic, I grant you – but if they weren’t chambermaiding on board they’d only be doing it somewhere else, wouldn’t they? And at least the food they get’s OK. No – tell you, shall I? The only job worse – ’

  ‘Coffee’s getting cold, Stewart.’

  ‘The only thing, job worse – don’t want coffee, sick of coffee, been drinking the bloody stuff all night – the only job worse than Cruise Director is, yes – hole in one: Assistant Cruise Director: that’s the bloody bastard.’

  Jilly nodded, and sort of grinned a bit.

  ‘Uh-huh. You, in other words.’

  Stewart nodded too, and God so grimly.

  ‘No other words for it, are there? Me, yes me – me, in a bloody nutshell. Don’t ever get to organise anything from the start, oh no – commissioning and hiring and booking are deemed, oh Christ – way beyond me. I just have to see it all happens – and God help me if there’s a hitch or a clash or some other bloody cock-up because then it’s all down to Stewart, isn’t it? My bloody fault then, isn’t it? Ay?’

  Jilly was shifting uneasily. This was becoming rather, what? Unsettling? Bit. Over the, you know – top, kind of? Kind of, yeh. But mainly dull, the way people’s griping always is (like – boring?).

  ‘Stewart …’ she regretted, raising her eyebrows and backing towards the door (her feet instinctively detecting the step and deftly overcoming it) ‘ … things to do, yeh? Sailing in less than three hours, now …’

  ‘Mm. Don’t I know it. Two hours and fifty-eight minutes, if we’re searching for accuracy. Which means that everything that isn’t on board for the next six days’ and nights’ entertainment, well – anything I’ve forgotten, we’ve all just had it, haven’t we?’

  ‘I’ll leave you to get on with it. Poor Stewart.’

  And she quickly decided Right – now or never (and she hopped it). Yeh – poor Stewart, I suppose, thought Jilly, walking the vast and deserted length of the covered Upper Deck, the thick new carpet smelling more thick and new and quite a bit sick-makingly carpety with each hushed-up step (still, though: bit of a wanker).

  Stewart went back to filleting his stacks of duplicated paper, and exhaling with force, he flicked back on his PowerBook while scratching quite wildly at his scalp, and it wasn’t even itchy. Have to see Margo for a wash and highlights, very soon. Half an hour. Got to be spruce: got to be ready to meet and greet.

  ‘And,’ he suddenly boomed out into the empty office. ‘If I do … if I do actually, oh Christ – get it right, who gets all the bloody praise? The Assistant Cruise Director? I should bleeding cocoa: bloody no.’

  No indeed: too right. Any form of credit is very much the fiefdom of the actual bloody Cruise Director, who never even shows his fucking face. Too busy schmoozing with the bloody Press – happens every trip. Telling you – every single trip, this is how it goes. PR boys lay on a party of journalists, whereupon His Highness the Cruise Director settles down to killing himself over all their crap jokes and even crappier anecdotes and then floats them on their own and alternative Atlantic comprised wholly of alcohol – as meanwhile the Assistant bloody Cruise Director, well …that particular poor bugger, he’s left to just bloody buckle down and get on with the work in hand. Yes indeed: the work in hand.

  Stewart swivelled around and was confronted again by the life-size coloured cut-outs of Marilyn Monroe – skirt up round her hips and admonishing him with just one finger and a pout – a slyly smiling and whip-thin Jimmy Dean, and who was that bastard from Gone With The Thing? And there’s Elvis. Love Elvis. Wish I was Elvis, dead or not. Yes – so they’re here, anyway, ready for the Viva America Ball on what night was it? Got it here on my trusty wallchart … Wednesday, yeh. Red, white and blue balloons and buckets of popcorn: mercy. Gable, isn’t it? Clark Gable. Not a patch on Elvis. And Marilyn – still looking at me, she is, with that wotsname sort of thing in her eye. Doesn’t do it for me, not one bit. Can’t actually see what everyone raves about, with Marilyn, really. Or any of them, in truth. I maybe ought to, you know – where women are concerned – a bit sort of force myself, possibly. All part of the job, after all: part of what I’m bloody paid to do.

  *

  ‘Stowed all the doings, Nobby?’

  The stationary train sighed just then, shrugged and stuttered forward once to thump and clatteringly connect with the buffers in front, as ringing chains were hooked and secured. Aggie was straddling the tinny footplates between two carriages – legs well astride, deck shoes planted firmly – and each time she leant forward to check on how well her husband was coping with luggage, the thick glass door hissed open. This made her feel guilty (silly, I know, she acknowledged while blushing) in some rather God how embarrassing, stupid kind of a way – and also horribly self-conscious because each time, you see, she and the door did this, all the other passengers (each of them at various stages of being ready for the off: fooling with magazines, contending with children, fiddling with mobiles, or heaving aloft macs and haversacks) glanced up and towards her, all faces simultaneously registering this mixture of expectancy and a vague irritation and then – seeing that all that had arrived was that bloody woman’s head again – briskly reverting their attention to getting things sorted. Which boiled down to the truth that Aggie Simson always and immediately retreated with a true sense of shame and a rapidly hurtled two-tone glance of apology and plea for forgiveness before her Nobby’s answer could have even a ghost’s chance of reaching her (she could see him straining with the big case – the one they got cheap in America last time – face all mauve and seemingly miming, but the words quite lost, you see, through the now-shut thickness of the door). So maybe just pop her head round one more time (please don’t hate me – I know, I know that after all these trips down all the years I’m really not so hot at this, but I just must make sure – please understand – that all is well with Nobby, and he’s not in danger of straining himself anywhere, you know – important. I needn’t worry, really – not in truth: I’m actually a bit of a silly goose, just like he says I am. Nobby is a tro
uper – he knows the ropes, all right: always plain sailing with Nobby. Someone once asked me where on earth I’d be without him, and I still can’t begin to imagine: Nobby’s my life – Nobby’s my guiding light).