Liner

by James Barlow

‘You poor girl, of course it has. Sensitive people suffer most. In a motor accident, I suppose?’

  Marion said quickly – it wasn’t so difficult after all – ‘Sort of . . . A child was injured.’

  She waited, looked into the older eyes in the kind, leathery, unknowing face, waited for the condemnation and the form it would take: the deterioration of the posture of admiration into shock, the change of expression and the polite excuses to get away – ‘I think the library must be open now’ – ‘There’s my friend looking for me; do excuse me – ‘The shop’s open now’ – ‘My cabin’ – ‘Coffee’.

  But the lady was undisturbed, lost none of her charm and sympathy.

  ‘My dear, how terrible for you.’

  ‘It was getting on his nerves so we had to do something. We decided on a cruise home.’

  Tears trickled down Marion’s face. She felt a fool, but relieved, unburdened, the other was so understanding. But she couldn’t dare to tell the rest, the worst of it.

  ‘They really are very bad drivers,’ the lady observed. She sighed. ‘Do you know, my son-in-law has had three minor accidents in two months.’

  Marion realized in enormous shock that what she had told the other woman had had no impact. The woman wasn’t likely to be shocked because she had no feelings at all. Her sympathy and charm we related entirely to the time of day and inquisitiveness and what she wanted. This was just a little chat with someone before the eleven o’clock bouillon, lunch, a game of cards, the ship’s daily tote. Getting to meet people.

  ‘Mike was drunk,’ she said with contempt.

  There was a woman whom Marion grew to dislike. She was about thirty and not unattractive. As the days increased to tropical heat this woman was seen more frequently. She strode the Parade Deck in a mauve two-piece swimsuit which seemed phosphorescent and herself coruscated a sour quick wit. She came from the Northern Territories and Marion never learned her name, always referring to her as ‘that woman from Darwin.’

  When she strutted the Parade Deck the woman oscillated her buttocks in a manner pleasing to the old men who watched for this kind of display, but the swagger was not an indication of sexiness. It wasn’t quite ostentation either, but rather a manifestation of self-assurance. For the young woman had after watching and experiencing these last few days found that it was possible for her to achieve a kind of prominence, become a passenger of significance. Many of the others, she could see, were small beer, or were wowsers, or shy, or not to be involved. But she came into an environment where she could in effect make an impact and throw her weight about. It hadn’t quite gone to her head, but simply given opportunity for her to enjoy herself in an extrovert manner. Thus, if there was a noise to be made, she would help to make it. If there was fun, she wanted to be there. If in the evening cabaret Edgar shouted, ‘Are we all happy?’ she shouted, ‘Yes.’ If anyone was asked to make a fool of themselves, she was a volunteer.

  Her husband was reputed to be a buffalo hunter, vulgarly rich. He was a small man with a sun-scorched skin who remained rather quiet.

  They had three children, and the woman from Darwin neglected them in favour of her own pleasures. She was not secretive about it, but just left them on deck or by a pool while she entered some deck competition, played bingo or had a try in a beauty competition. This was what attracted Marion’s attention and caused the dislike. But whole days went by and the two never spoke, although they looked at each other in analysis a dozen times a day, conscious of something antagonistic. There was no reason to suppose they would clash openly in a crowd of nearly six hundred, except that they both had cabins on A Deck.

  They first bandied words in the ironing room of that room of that deck. The Areopagus had no washing machines for passengers, although there was a ship’s laundry. But this was expensive and in many cases the stewards starched everything as stiff as cardboard. So Marion did a bit of washing in the cabin now and again and ironed in the ironing room fifty feet forward.

  The woman from Darwin was in another two-piece swimsuit. This one was navy blue, but seemed iridescent as she moved her buttocks about. She was barefoot. Marion, perhaps illogically, found it vulgar that the woman should be ironing so attired. The woman’s flesh was burning under the sun and Marion fancied she could smell flesh and sweat.

  Marion said nothing, but the woman acknowledged ‘Hi.’ Marion began her ironing and did it in a silence which was condemnatory: those small kids left on decks or seen wandering around, sticky-mouthed, wretched and tearful, pale from insufficient sleep . . .

  After a while the iron Marion was using blew with a bang and blue sparks.

  ‘Aren’t you gonna fix it?’ the woman from Darwin asked.

  ‘I don’t know how,’ Marion admitted, startled, and could have bitten her tongue off for giving an advantage to this brash younger woman, who promptly took it.

  ‘You Poms are all the same,’ she suggested, not quite maliciously but flatly, stating what was for her a truth. ‘Or are you scared of getting an electrical shock?’

  This was offensive enough, and Marion countered, red in the face, ‘It should be fixed properly, not Australian style.’

  The young woman had an acid tongue, but before she could use it the iron she was using also blew in the same manner.

  ‘Never a dull moment,’ she commented cheerfully.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Marion said coldly.

  The woman flashed back: ‘I’ll bet you couldn’t even fix a puncture.’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ Marion said ‘My husband never buys cheap second-hand cars.’

  ‘You stuck-up bastard!’ the younger woman shouted loudly. ‘My husband makes twenty thousand dollars a year. He has seventy men under him –’

  But Marion was gone, and although she heard this, the woman from the Northern Territories couldn’t be sure that she had, so the skirmishing was Marion’s victory. But Marion knew that she had been lucky, for the most noticeable characteristic of the swaggering young woman was that she was tough.

  She told Mike about it.

  ‘Oh, that tart,’ he said sympathetically. ‘I’ve seen her parading her arse around. I’d thought about putting my boot to it.’

  The woman’s husband was a small wiry man with blond hair which accentuated his scorched pink skin. It was difficult to imagine him confronting a buffalo.

  Mike saw him on deck the next morning. He was strolling very slowly, at Bumble’s pace, passing time, and he saw the hunter participating in a quoits competition. Some old men who knew the man called to him facetiously now and again. At times the man from Darwin slapped his arms around his chest like someone in a snowstorm. The gesture irritated Mike, for it was intended to show these old men that the man was used to higher temperatures that this. Why doesn’t he put on a pullover, Mike thought sourly, if he’s so cold? Mike had been to Alice Springs and Darwin and certainly they’d been hot, but scarcely hotter than this day and assuredly not so humid. Like his wife the man was a show-off, although he had a curious technique of being one without dialogue. He rarely spoke and not at all if it was possible to convey the same meaning with a gesture.

  Mike walked slowly by, almost shuffling, Bumble’s pace was so slow. It took five minutes to get to the other end of the Parade Deck.

  Here two sailors and an officer were considering the immovability of a davit and lifeboat despite their work with oxyacetylene welders and hammers.

  They continued at it until there was slight movement from the davit.

  ‘Not very encouraging for us!’ remarked an old man to Mike. ‘Have you noticed the bottom of that lifeboat?’

  Mike had not. He looked at it and saw that white paint covered some kind of repair.

  ‘The bottom’s rotted away and they’ve replaced it,’ the old man suggested, and this seemed to be so.

  Mi
ke said, ‘It won’t make any difference since they can’t launch it anyway!’

  A child was coming along the deck, bedraggled and weeping. It was one of the three kids of the couple from Darwin. There was no sign of the mother.

  The three sailors had finished their work here and looped a bit of rope around the oxygen cylinder and dragged it toward steps ascending to the Sun Deck.

  A few people moved apprehensively in wider circles to be out of the way, and they were wise to do so. For halfway up to the Sun Deck the cylinder escaped from its loop and clattered down to the Parade Deck.

  Mike’s reactions were slow, or so he thought. He picked Bumble up and moved a few feet hastily.

  The cylinder hit the deck and rolled about wildly. It went around in a crazy circle and Mike saw that it was going to hit the weeping child.

  He ran to her, lifted her up bodily (she howled in protest), and jumped in the air as the cylinder rolled up to him. He cleared it and then landed clumsily so that both little girls were planted hurriedly on the deck.

  The cylinder rolled on down the Parade Deck toward the game, with the Greek sailors chasing it. The little girl followed it, and ran to her father, who ignored her, concentrating on his game.

  The old men laughed as the sailors caught the cylinder and took it away. Mike turned and strolled on with Bumble. ‘Want a lemonade?’ he asked.

  Mike went down in the elevator to get changed for the captain’s Carnival Party. There were thunderstorms on two horizons and the humidity was stifling. The elevator was packed with at least three persons more than it was intended to carry and was a sweatshop in itself. The boy who operated it presumably had to breathe this stale wet air all day.

  There was silence in the elevator except for the information given to the boy as to which deck each passenger wished to descend to, and most of them stared with condemnation at a rather tall Greek man of about thirty.

  He was a member of the ship’s orchestra, in fact he was the man who played the piano and whom Mike had seen once being pawed by the red-haired girl, Diane. He was obviously cheap and vain, and had the seedy facial texture of one who stays too long in a stale atmosphere and does not get enough sleep, and possibly one who has too much sexual intercourse.

  He stood in the very small elevator, a couple of square yards packed with eight people, and examined himself in the long cracked mirror which surfaced one side the elevator. Then he produced a comb and ran it frequently through his shiny black hair, either oblivious of or indifferent to the silent disapproval of others.

  When he shoved his way through the other passengers someone said, ‘Pretty, isn’t he?’

  In the cabin Marion and Stella were struggling into dresses and stockings and high-heeled shoes. Marion had worn this dress several times already and Mike knew it was a minor humiliation before women who were changing dresses all the time. He said so. Marion disputed, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ but he felt he had failed her again. It was an irony of their family destiny that though they’d come to Australia among other reasons to make money, having to some extent made it, they’d had to sell house, car, fridge and what money had bought, for a loss, and to pay two thousand dollars for this journey. So they returned to England as they had come, with little money.

  In the Aegean Lounge Mike and Marion stood awkwardly, not experienced in cocktail parties, while Stella and Diane drifted away to talk to the comedians of the cabaret.

  Mike, uncomfortable in a dark suit on this tropical thundery evening, stood talking to the radio officer of the Areopagus. This officer was a Turk, about fifty, who seemed neglected. He was a considerate man and willing to converse with Mike, but it was hard going. A small fat woman, who wore big glasses so that she looked like an owl, also stood there, a reject, of no interest to anyone.

  This woman brought the conversation around to the subject of pain, for she had a headache. She refused a drink and Mike wondered why she’d come to a cocktail party at all. He sipped from a small glass himself, but had no idea what it was he swallowed. Whatever it was, it had no effect, took away no sorrow, promoted no joy.

  ‘It was tea,’ the woman explained earnestly, as they swayed very slightly at the knees and on the balls of the feet. ‘Tea makes me ill at once. And chocolate. That gives me an instant headache. But all I have to do is find a barley sugar or castor sugar.’

  ‘That is very strange,’ said the radio officer. ‘For I have spoken to many passengers who have what you call migraine, and this they all say, that chocolate is the beginning.’

  Marion came up to Mike from somewhere and whispered fiercely, ‘You might have kept an eye on those two. Stella’s drinking. She’s had a beer.’

  ‘It’s hot, kid. A beer won’t hurt her.’

  ‘Mike, she isn’t even sixteen yet.’

  ‘She’s a big girl. Kids are big these days.’

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

  ‘What else is there to say? She couldn’t stand around here and have nothing.’

  ‘You don’t care.’

  ‘Please, Marion, don’t make such a thing of it.’

  ‘You spoil her.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You take her side; she knows she can insult me and get away with it. She just told me to get burned.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Oh, really, Mike.’

  Marion moved away and Mike felt wretched and frustrated.

  The radio officer was saying. ‘Pains in the back. All the time. I love Australia. You know why? Because my ship called in the port of Tasmania, what you call it? Hobart. And there I took this, what you call apple vinegar –’

  ‘Cider,’ prompted the woman.

  ‘Cider, ah, yes. I take it every day. Two years. No pain. Funny.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mike.

  He went over to where Stella and Diane stood rocking with amusement at one of the comedians.

  ‘It’s just like playing to a morgue!’ this young man said, and brayed with laughter himself.

  Mike said, ‘Take it easy, kid. What’s that you’re swilling down?’

  ‘Oh, Dad, don’t be a wowser. Mum came round with a face like a thunderstorm. She’s gonna murder me!’

  ‘Let me drink it,’ suggested Mike.

  The comedian was saying. ‘The first lot are such a ghastly audience we regard them as a rehearsal for the second,’ and Mike was conscious that Diane was viewing him surreptiously, with interest, a woman’s interest. It was a little disconcerting, or had he a mind too ready to jump to that kind of conclusion? The beer mixed with whatever it was he’d had before and Mike glowed a little. He looked frankly at Diane and with a truck driver’s experience of people identified her as a hot little slut. It alarmed him.

  He cautioned, ‘No more boozing, Stella. Stick to heavy water’ and got a laugh from the two girls. He heard Diane say, ‘He’s all right’ as he moved away.

  Demetropoulos, the chief purser, was holding the attention of a few people. Mike circulated and joined them, the drink giving him confidence. Someone asked Demetropoulos, ‘Don’t you get fed up with this sort of thing?’ and Demetropoulos, the vague smile still there, and his eyes examining that something above their heads which never ceased to amuse him, said woodenly, ‘No. I enjoy it, and it is my job.’

  A small frail woman, old but with humour in her creased face, touched Mike’s arm.

  ‘Aren’t you Stella’s father?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl, you know.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘She listens to Dr. de Haan on the radio. He’s interesting, Dr de Haan, except that he feels there’s hope. This is not so, although prayer shouldn’t be abandoned. I’m not saying that. But we feel – indeed, we know, for
isn’t it obvious from the signs? – that the end is not far away.’

  ‘The end of what?’ Mike asked with humour.

  ‘Everything, of course. We deserve it. We were warned. The Scriptures give warning in chapter and verse – divorce, adultery, wars, decadence, men attired as women as they were during Rome’s decadence, it’s all there.’

  ‘So you came on a cruise?’ Mike suggested frivolously.

  ‘Not to escape the end.’

  ‘And what about the Africans and Asians?’ Mike asked. He was slightly drunk, no longer a pariah who accepted the status.

  ‘Ignorance is an excuse,’ agreed the old woman promptly. ‘And there’s always mercy. I’m not saying God despises us, although that would be understandable . . . I came because the doctor said a complete change. My son and a grandchild were killed just before this trip. In Canada. I hadn’t seen them for three years. He was doing well. A lovely boy. I went to pieces so I had to get away. You won’t laugh at me, will you, Mr. Burston, for being upset when I know it’s all going to end soon anyway?’

  ‘No,’ said Mike. ‘I won’t laugh.’

  And his mind’s eye was behind the wheel, hour after hour. There were corrugations in the road, absolutely unavoidable, whatever the throttle adjustment. Kangaroos leaped from one side of the road and loped off back into the bush.

  Dead animals on the roadside had appalled him at first. Cattle, sheep, kangaroos, wallabies, even horses and strangely a litter of magpies. Some had been hit by vehicles, others by drought. Mike recalled the large circle of the bones of many cattle bleached white. And buzzards circling over an animal which had stood in a dry stream, motionless in confusion, his ribs sticking out like scaffolding and his skin draped loosely.

  And, all over the outback, the carcasses of old cars, disintegrating, some burned out, some upside down, having gone off the road, some on their sides; all had been stripped long since of useful spares. Three times he had come upon sedans burning, apparently spontaneous