Day Four (6 page)

Maria glowered as if she considered Althea personally responsible for engineering the passenger’s ill health. One day, Althea promised herself, she would bring this
puta
to her knees. She would make her eat dirt and squirm. ‘I will see to it. Which stateroom?’

‘V27. It’s the fly-in – Mrs del Ray. I’ve already been to the medical centre and told them. May I go, please?’ Security must be checking that all the cards were in place by now, and Trining would blame her for the fact that her station hadn’t been checked.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that Trining was sick?’ Maria said in a dangerously soft voice.

Fuck-darned Trining
. Althea was damned if she was going to cover for her this time. ‘I thought Trining would have told you immediately.’

‘She says you agreed to cover her station today.’

Althea put on her best innocent mask. ‘She did?’

Maria raised the twin pencil lines of her eyebrows. They never matched – one was always drawn on higher than the other, and they clashed with her white-blond hair.
Learn to use a mirror, puta
. ‘We are lucky there have been no complaints. She says she has not even begun the evening turn-down.’

‘I’m so sorry, Maria. There must have been some confusion.’

‘Paulo has checked that Trining’s staterooms are empty, but I need you to ensure he has been thorough.’

‘Will Security not do this?’

‘You are questioning me?’

‘No, Maria.’

‘After you have done that, you must go to your muster station and wait for further instructions.’

‘Yes, Maria. Thank you, Maria.’

How she hated to grovel, but she needed a good review if there was any chance of being promoted into a supervisor’s position. Not that there was much hope of that on this ship. The paisano system would come into effect – Maria would only give breaks to other Romanians. That was ship life. Sometimes it worked in your favour, sometimes it didn’t. And it didn’t matter that English was her first language. Her nationality counted against her. Someone had to do the dirty work. It had taken her over two years to work her way up from a staff steward (and the cones could be disgusting, but they were nothing compared to some of the officers) and secure the coveted station on the VIP deck.

She pushed through the service door that led to the lower decks, catching another whiff of the smoky odour. She hated this section of stairwell – there were thirteen steps up to each landing, and she counted them aloud to banish the curse. She knew it was ridiculous, but she couldn’t entirely shed her childhood superstitions – she still turned her plate whenever someone left the mess table.

As she opened the door onto Trining’s station, a blur of movement at the far end of the darkened corridor caught her eye. Someone was running towards her – a small figure. The light here was far worse than on her floor, but it looked like a child – a boy. How could that be? She’d been on cruises with spoilt American kids, running around like they owned the ship, the parents screaming at the staff every time one of the little snots got injured or lost, but the New Year’s cruises were for over-eighteens only. The emergency lights flickered, plunging her momentarily into darkness, before hissing on again. The child, fair-skinned, dark-haired and barefoot – was now twenty metres from where she was standing. ‘Hoy!’ she shouted, wincing as the lights snapped out again. She fought the urge to dive back into the service corridor. The lights blinked on – brighter this time – but the child . . . the child was gone.

She crossed herself automatically, jumping as a tall figure rounded the corner at the end of the corridor. She breathed easier as she made out the white shirt and black trousers of one of the security personnel. Had she imagined the child? Was her mind playing tricks? She was running on less than four hours sleep a night, so it was possible.

The guard stalked towards her. One of the Indian mafia, his face made up of hard angles. He towered over her.

‘Did you see a guest down here?’ she asked him, amazed at how calm she sounded.

He stared at her blankly. ‘No.’ He indicated the red cards slotted into the slots. ‘Have you finished?’

‘It’s not my station.’

‘Then why are you here?’ His hand strayed to the radio at his belt. ‘All crew must report to their muster stations now.’

‘I know. My supervisor asked me to check that everything was in order.’

‘And is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ She didn’t want to tell him what she’d seen, in case it
had
been her imagination. But the child – if there even was a child – must have disappeared inside one of the neighbouring cabins, although she was certain she hadn’t heard the crump of a door opening and closing. ‘Do you mind if I recheck some of the staterooms? The steward who was sent to do it is new.’ Good. A lie, but it sounded reasonable. She waited for the guard to argue, but he merely continued to stare at her – perhaps he’d read something in her face – then waved a hand as if to say ‘go on’.

There were three staterooms that the boy could possibly have slipped inside when the lights went out. She opened the first, ducked into the bathroom, and then scanned the main area, opening the wardrobe to ensure that the child wasn’t hiding in there. There was no sign of him, but the room was a mess, the sheets scrambled into a ball, the bin overflowing with empty Coors cans. It was clear Trining hadn’t bothered to service her station at all that morning, and it was likely Paulo had just knocked on the cabin doors and then carded them without investigating properly. Trining must have God and all his angels on her side – it was a miracle no one had complained.

She glanced at the guard as she tried the next room, but he was fiddling with his radio. The second she opened the door, the acidic stench of vomit rolled out at her. She hesitated, then propped the door against its magnet and stepped inside. The bathroom was empty, and the rest of the space appeared to be unoccupied. She looked around for the source of the bad smell, aware that now she could also detect another odour: urine. It was faint, but unmistakable.

She crept around the edge of the dishevelled bed. The duvet was lumped between the wall and the side of the mattress, and poking out from the end of it, a pair of feet, the soles dirty and grey. She cried out and stepped back, bashing against the vanity unit and sending a make-up bag falling to the floor.

The guard was inside the room in seconds, scrunching up his nose. ‘What is it?’

‘Come here,’ she whispered. ‘Look.’

She watched the guard’s face carefully as he took in the scene. He recoiled, and fumbled for his radio. ‘Control, come in. Control.’ A hiss and a crackle. He banged it on his hand.

Althea couldn’t drag her eyes away from those feet. They belonged to a woman, and she found herself thinking about something her
lola
used to say when she was a child: that the shoes of the dead must be removed as soon as possible so that they are not weighted down on their journey to heaven. Barely aware she was doing so, she reached out to remove the duvet, but the guard placed a hand on her arm. His palm felt hot enough to burn her skin. ‘Wait.’ The guard climbed onto the bed, moved across it, and gently lifted the duvet covering the woman’s head, revealing a scribble of straw-coloured hair. He leaned down to check for a pulse, then replaced the coverlet exactly as it was.

‘Is she dead?’ Althea whispered.

‘Yes.’

They stood in silence for several seconds. The guard cleared his throat. ‘I must go outside to see if I can get a better signal. Do not touch anything.’ He softened his voice: ‘Will you be fine to stay here by yourself?’

She nodded.

‘Again, please do not touch anything.’ He hurried out, leaving her alone with the body. The hairs on the back of her neck danced. Althea closed her eyes, crossed herself again, and for the first time in many months, she prayed.

The Suicide Sisters

Helen reckoned there were some benefits to being among the few over-sixties on board; she and Elise had been allocated sun-loungers, while everyone else at their muster station had to make do with the floor. She was comfortable enough, but she could do without the racket. Next to where she and Elise were sitting, a group of men and women were flirting aggressively with one another, vying to be the centre of attention. The loudest of the bunch, a thirtyish man with the build of a rugby player and a pair of angels’ wings attached to his hairy back, was griping that the bar service had been suspended: ‘It’s why you go on a fucking cruise, innit?’ he droned on. ‘To have a drink and a laugh. And if the ship’s going to do a Titanic, then I wanna be as pissed up as possible.’ Nearby, an American couple, who resembled giant grumpy toads, were loudly complaining to whoever would listen that they would never sail Foveros again. She’d seen them once or twice in the dining room, ordering every entrée on the menu; they’d never once thanked their waiter.

And then there was Jaco, the ship’s one-man marimba/rock/reggae band (or whatever was required), who was wrapping up an off-key acoustic rendition of ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’. He’d arrived twenty minutes ago, presumably sent by Damien to distract them from ideas of mutiny while they waited to be dismissed from the muster station. He didn’t appear to be fazed that no one paid him the slightest bit of attention. In fact, being universally ignored appeared to be part of his job description as far as Helen could make out. She’d seen him all over the ship, hosting the Michael Jackson tribute evening, or lurking in the background during karaoke. She caught Elise’s eye and they both gave him a small round of applause. As if to punish them for their generosity, he launched into a clumsy version of ‘Jail House Rock’.

‘It’s a shame musicians are no longer required to go down with the ship,’ Helen said crisply, and Elise laughed.

The crew allocated to their muster station – a plump Australian woman with flinty eyes and a Filipino man with cheekbones like a supermodel’s – had long since given up telling passengers not to film the proceedings on their mobile phones, and were now chatting amongst themselves, occasionally offering bored platitudes to the passengers who harassed them for information. No doubt the people waving their iPhones around were hoping to sell the footage to one of the networks if the ship did indeed ‘do a
Titanic
’. Which was unlikely. If
The Beautiful Dreamer
was going to go down, Helen was sure it would have done so by now. She and Elise had been in the dining room deciding on their starters when the ship had shuddered to a stop and the lights died. There had been a few seconds of stunned silence, a single high-pitched scream, and then, in a clatter of dropped cutlery and raised voices, their fellow diners rushed – almost as one – for the exits. She and Elise had stayed seated and calmly finished their obscenely expensive champagne cocktails while the other passengers streamed past their table, rudely shoving the equally bewildered waiting staff out of their path. Few people appeared to heed the cruise director’s pleas to return to their cabins; most fled straight to the Lido deck where the lifeboats were situated. But now, a couple of hours since they’d all been instructed to head to their muster stations, that initial panic had turned into boredom and irritation.

‘Time?’ Elise asked.

‘Ten minutes past eleven.’

‘That late, huh?’

They shared a sigh.

‘We can’t do it now that the ship has stopped moving,’ Helen said, stating the obvious. ‘They’ll just fish us out again.’

‘You think they’d bother?’

‘If someone saw us, it’s conceivable.’ They’d scoped out where to do it on the first day of the cruise – the Tranquillity deck, aft of the ship. The main party was scheduled to take place on the Lido deck, and they’d agreed that no one would notice two old women slipping over the railings at midnight. Only it didn’t look like there was going to be a party after all.

‘There’s always the sleeping tablets,’ Elise said.

‘Too risky.’ But it wasn’t just that. Helen had set her heart on doing it like they’d planned. A watery grave. She’d done her research, and she knew that drowning wasn’t painless – far from it – but the sleeping tablets would help, and it meant that no one would have to deal with the memory of coming across their bodies. If they did it right, they’d simply disappear without a trace.

‘Well, it ain’t over till it’s over,’ Elise said.

Helen closed her eyes and tried to drown out the background noise. Now that their plan was scuppered, she needed to take stock. She’d assumed that as the hours slipped away, the enormity of what they were planning would eventually hit home. It hadn’t. She was well aware that her attitude to ending her life was psychologically abnormal, and she still felt a trace of the giddiness – not happiness exactly, but close – that had infected her since she’d made the decision five months ago.

It had been Elise’s idea to do it on a cruise. Helen had never been on one before, and she was drawn to the idea of spending her last days on a luxurious vessel with Egyptian cotton sheets and five-star meals. It would be her version of Blanche Dubois, who longed to die after eating a poisoned grape while holding the hand of a handsome ship’s doctor. But it wasn’t to be. Elise had booked them on a Foveros cruise – she had happy memories of cruising with the company in the eighties – and for someone as Internet savvy as Elise,
The Beautiful Dreamer
’s vast number of one-star reviews on CandidCruisers.com had somehow passed her by. Helen had been appalled when she’d read some of them – one passenger had discovered urine leaking from the bathroom tap. But she’d thought: what did it matter? How bad could it be?