True Stories

by Helen Garner

  The tannoy crackles and a male voice announces, ‘All wisitors and pipple not sailing on the wessel, pliss goink ashore now. Mikhail Sholokhov now under sailing orders. Sankyou and good luck.’ Mass dash to the rail. With mighty, bone-shattering siren blasts, Mikhail Sholokhov eases away from the streamer-less wharf and slides under the bridge, past the Opera House, and down the harbour towards the Heads. ‘I’ve never been on the ocean before,’ I confess to a girl next to me. ‘I went on a nine-day cruise once, to Fiji,’ she tells me. ‘I was sick the whole time, but I loved it.’ My patch is making my head spin. I retreat to my cabin and lie on the bunk till dinner.

  The signal for the meal comes over the tannoy: a sweet and breathy tinkling, as of metal chimes being gently stroked by a brush. How charming! I put on lipstick and step out formally. All along the passageways to the dining room someone has wedged, at strategic intervals between handrail and wall, dozens of crisp white sickbags.

  The dining room is severely chilled. People are rubbing their goose-pimpled arms and hunching their shoulders. Two people are already seated at my designated table: Gwen and Shirley, quiet women with short grey hair, no make-up, self-effacing manners. I ask them questions but they are too polite or shy to question me. They are old friends, geographically parted twenty years ago by their marriages, who have kept in touch and occasionally take a holiday together. Each of them runs a small business in a country town. We sit in strained silence till through the door rocks our number four, Lorraine from Lithgow, a machinist. Lorraine is barely five feet tall, a chunky, friendly little dame of fifty-two, with a fresh perm that suits her and a broad grin that keeps breaking into excited laughter. In a carrying voice with wildly rising terminals, she begins, almost before we have exchanged names, to pour out an account of her life situation, not shrinking from the most gruelling detail.

  ‘When I first met my ex-husband, he had virtually no possessions? All he had was a car radio and a tin o’ buttons? Which he wanted me to sew on his shirts? He was drunk at our wedding and I don’t think he’s been sober since?’ Thrilled by her openness and her natural storyteller’s turn of phrase, I lean forward for more; but the faces of Gwen and Shirley go blank with embarrassment. They cover their eyes and press back into their chairs. Lorraine rattles on. She lays out her illnesses, the moment of realisation that her husband had no intention of looking after her when she had disabling surgery, her decision to shake him off: ‘So I got a divorce? I fought the department for ten months? I never told them a single lie? And they gave me a pension? He still lives in the house—it belongs to both of us? But we lead completely separate lives?’ She scans the room. ‘My boyfriend wouldn’t like this atmosphere at all? All this drinkin’?’

  Lorraine takes a breath, but is cut short by a card thrust at her by a Russian waitress, a girl with a pale, grey-shadowed face who denies us even the briefest eye-contact, and grunts, ‘Menu pliss,’ through clenched teeth. The food, when it comes, is a shock: meat cooked to death and coated in a glutinous sauce, with vegetables from hell. Shirley, Gwen and I pick daintily at the edges of our plates, but Lorraine is determined to enjoy herself and tucks in with a will. Between mouthfuls she continues her life saga. She is a born raver, with an almost poetic instinct for timing and rhythm: ‘And so, thinkin’ my own thoughts, I rolled over and went back to sleep?’ I could listen all night, but she is dying to join in the evening’s activities in the saloon: cocktails, a disco, a cabaret, not to mention the casino. Gwen and Shirley keep their eyes on their plates. Lorraine stares at us, puzzled. The meal ends and she dashes off. We three party-poopers scurry away to our cabins. I pass the door of the long, narrow casino. People in shorts are crowding round tables and drinking out of cans. The air is blue with cigarette smoke. I keep walking.

  Saturday 7 a.m. A dozen habitual early risers mill about on the aft deck waiting for the dismal Lido Bar to open and sell them a polystyrene cup of tea or coffee. Two women at a white plastic table call me to join them: Norma and Lorna from Hurstville. ‘We’re merry widows!’ they declare. They both have faces whose natural expressions seem to be smiles.

  We sit looking out at the churning grey water, sipping disgusting tea with long-life milk and chatting pleasantly about the relative merits of burial and cremation.

  ‘Do you reckon this ship’s actually moving?’ says Norma.

  ‘It must be,’ I say. ‘Isn’t that a wake?’

  ‘But the shape of the shore doesn’t seem to be changing at all,’ says Lorna. ‘See that hill? It’s been in the same spot for fifteen minutes. Maybe it’s not a wake. Maybe it’s just stuff they’re throwing overboard.’

  At breakfast, Gwen is pale and quiet. She has felt ill all night. Shirley, however, is rested, and speaks admiringly of John Laws. Lorraine bops in, bright as a button and ready to rave. Last night at the disco, she reports, a man she liked the look of asked her to dance: ‘If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to stay there, by myself?’ Later on, in the casino, another man ‘won some money and insisted on giving me half of it? I dunno why—I hadn’t put any in, or anything? In the music saloon we had games. You had to pass an orange under your chin to somebody else, or a balloon between your knees—it was great! Why didn’t youse go?’

  Gwen, paler by the minute, sinks further back in her chair. Shirley’s face loses expression. ‘We were tired,’ I say gamely. ‘We went to bed early.’

  ‘Why’dya come on the cruise,’ says Lorraine challengingly, ‘if you’re not gonna join in and have fun?’ We drop our eyes to the table and fiddle with the cutlery.

  A sort of food is slung at us by grim-faced girls and we try to eat it. Shirley tells us the story, while Gwen sits quietly with a gentle smile, of Gwen’s husband, ‘a lovely man who died of a heart attack at forty’; Gwen has chosen not to remarry. Lorraine listens with eager attention, chin in hand, her generous mouth relaxed. She heaves a sigh. ‘Life’s cruel,’ she says. ‘It takes the good ones, and the vagabonds and the no-hopers just keep on going? No harm comes to them? Life is cruel.’

  Mid-morning. Sun puts a glaze on the thick white paint that covers every visible surface. The pool on the afterdeck has been filled and in its green water frolic half a dozen middle-aged Russian passengers. As couples, the Russians are very relaxed. They flirt mildly with each other. A woman will kiss her husband in conversation; he in turn will place his hand casually on the curve of his wife’s shoulder or hip—a sexually tinged affection very pleasant to see. These women are expert in a form of feminine self-presentation rarely seen in modern Australia: they bleach their hair till it screams, draw Cleopatra-lines on their lids with seventies liquid eye-make-up, triss about in flirty pleated skirts and wedgie sandals. They are aware of their femininity and know how to use it: one senses a force in them that is held in reserve. By comparison, the Australian women and men on board show little social ease with each other. Many men ignore their wives, and the women beside them adopt a slightly masculine demeanour, becoming more raucous, standing in mannish ways, walking with wide-swinging arms, sportively. It’s as if we Australian women obeyed an unconscious compulsion to be counted as honorary blokes.

  Despite the glorious weather (we are ploughing happily north through a sparkling ocean, always within sight of land), a crowd gathers in the music saloon for ‘a morning at the races’. Volunteers are requested to bend over and tow, between their legs, little wooden horses on long strings across the dance floor. Rodney the MC, who, Lorraine whispers to me, resembles an ex-boyfriend of hers whom she wishes she had married, carries on a gross patter about fillies and geldings. When not enough fillies step forward, a smart alec calls out hoarsely, ‘What about a trans-sexual?’ No answer. He adds in a slightly less confident voice, ‘What about a faggot?’ Everyone ignores him.

  I back number five, a tall strong young fellow radiant with good cheer. His horse wins, but he is taken outside ‘to test for drugs’. The female MC returns with a brimming schooner of straw-coloured liquid. ‘A you-rine test!’ cries R
odney, raising the glass to his nose. The audience gasps. He opens his mouth and takes a deep swig. The crowd howls with delight. ‘It’s clean!’ he declares. I have won three bucks.

  Out by the Lido Bar, a bunch of boozers behind me are making loud comments about the girls in the pool. ‘What’s that thing they do,’ says one, ‘bikini line?’ ‘Bikini wax!’ roars his mate. They bellow with laughter. I glance over my shoulder. To my surprise they are all in their sixties and seventies. One of them is actually on a walking stick.

  Over lunch, rudely served and barely edible, Lorraine flashes to us, covertly, the business card of Stefan, the man who asked her to dance last night at the disco. ‘Do you think he might be Polish?’ she says, musing over his polysyllabic surname. Lorraine has been befriended by the extended family of Stefan’s neighbours with whom he is travelling. She seems a bit fluttery, but relieved of the anxiety of drifting around unattached.

  I wake from a nap at four, to find that grey has closed in, and that the ship has turned round and is heading south. From inside my metal cupboard I hear a tiny tinny rustling: it’s the coathangers whispering among themselves as the sea starts to heave. I stagger up to the saloon. Bingo time. Hundreds of people hunch over tables with their heads down, like children taking dictation. They whistle feebly for ‘legs eleven’, and to applaud a win they tap their biros on the tabletops: everyone knows the rules.

  Walking has become difficult. One minute I feel weightless, the next my legs are made of lead and insist on diagonal movement. I go out on to the afterdeck and lean over the rail. No birds, no fish. I feel dopey from my anti-seasick patch. A man tells me he is sure the patches are ‘banned in England’. I would care more if the water in the pool had not begun to tilt on tremendous angles. A poor little green-faced girl is being carried round the ship by her father. She droops off his shoulder, gripping a sickbag, her eyes dull with nausea.

  Apart from me, the only solo traveller now is a man in his forties who mooches about smoking Drum and leaning on the rail. He is weather and work-beaten, very thin in his distressed denims; he has a thick moustache to the jawbone, and a dramatic limp. Earlier I have seen him in shorts. One of his legs has had half the thigh muscle gouged off it, as if he had been mauled by a beast. Now, two women spot him as he passes their table at the Lido Bar. They murmur about him with their heads close together. He remains oblivious, breathing smoke and staring out to sea.

  At the captain’s cocktail party that evening, these two women, neighbours from Bonnyrigg, invite me to sit at their table. They are an unlikely pair. Wiry Bev looks dykey, with very short hair and a hunted, glowering face, but this threatening demeanour turns out to be a mask for severe shyness. ‘I’ve been bringin’ up kids for seven years,’ she tells me. ‘I’ve forgotten how to be sociable. So she’s teachin’ me how to get on better with people.’ She jerks a thumb at Carola, who beams at her pupil with proud affection. Carola, in a tight black dress showing cleavage, has a lazy, sexy, cigaretty voice; her bleached hair is scraped up into a silver scrunchy and falls in locks round her sun-roughened cheeks. Her lipstick is shiny mauve, and her kohl-rimmed eyes, bright with a wild good humour and a readiness to laugh, rove constantly round the packed saloon.

  Trays of vodka are brought round by the crabby Russian waitresses. Carola’s eyes meet mine, in the cross-class mutual recognition of two clapped-out party girls. We seize a glass each and raise them to one another in a toast. Bev and a young bank manager she has befriended (he wears a red bow tie and she tells me later, solemnly, that he is ‘a perfect gentleman’) sip at their vodka gingerly, with wrinkled top lips and squinched-up eyes. ‘Throw it back!’ cries Carola, demonstrating.

  ‘Eewww,’ go Bev and the bankman, sipping away.

  A huge Australian behind Carola hands me his full shot glass, his mouth curling in contempt for any drink other than beer. I drain it. Carola seizes two more from a passing tray. A Russian band, Kalinka, is playing away dutifully on a small stage. ‘What’s the thing that front bloke’s playing?’ says Carola. ‘He’s cute.’

  ‘Looks like a saxophone,’ I say. ‘It’s got a bend in it.’

  ‘Hyuk hyuk,’ says Carola. ‘Wonder what else’s got a bend in it?’ Bev turns away from the bankman to hide her laughter.

  The lone man with the moustache strolls into the saloon. Carola seizes Bev’s arm and hisses, ‘There’s Ray.’

  ‘Why does he limp?’ I ask. ‘Was it a shark attack?’

  ‘Nuh. Motorbike,’ says Carola. ‘He shouted me drinks last night at the disco. He come down to my cabin door with me at 2 a.m. But I sent him away. I go, “You can’t come in. Me girlfriend’s asleep.” He goes, “I’ve got a cabin.” I go, “Yeah, and how many people asleep in it?” “Four.” “Yeah right.” ’

  Ray turns from shaking hands with the captain and heads in our direction. Carola is beaming up at him, tossing back her hair, but he walks straight past without even a glance at her. Her smile fades. ‘He’s probably got the shits with me,’ she murmurs, ’cause I wouldn’t let him in.’ She downs another vodka, gives me a crooked grin and says with a shrug, ‘Pity. He’s a real good kisser. Real nice. Gentle.’

  Dinner is dried-out slabs of unrecognisable protein, platters of tired old lettuce. People are beginning to lose patience with the Russian service. Looks of mutinous solidarity flash between the tables, behind the backs of the flouncing, scowling waitresses. But Lorraine refuses to criticise anything. She ploughs through three courses, smiling as she chews, and casts reproachful glances at us three ungrateful whingers, who by this time are living on soup and fruit.

  Bored and irritable, we let Lorraine drag us back to the saloon, to see the ‘Russian welcome show’. The band Kalinka strikes up a folk song, the lights dim and, before our jaded eyes, six glorious Russian maidens float through the door and on to the dance floor. They are wearing long cream frocks with loose sleeves, and above their shining foreheads tower strange, ethereal bishops’ mitres, made of palest, dewiest gossamer lace and tied to their heads with sashes. Their beauty draws from us a collective gasp. A man blurts out, ‘It’s the waitresses!’ Another shouts, ‘And they’re smiling!’ A roar of applause goes up.

  Each holding a lace hanky in her fingertips, the women perform a graceful dance. They sweep grandly, but their feet in white strapped shoes are tiptoeing like mad under the long skirts which brush the floor. We are amazed by the formal sweetness of their expressions. Their smiles are fixed, but there is a soft spark in their eyes and their faces are luminous. One girl mis-steps and is shoved back into place by her partners; they can’t help laughing, which brings another cry of joy from the rapt audience. They are joined by handsome young men, some with flashing gold teeth, and launch into a stamping peasant dance that brings the house down.

  This marvel is followed by ‘one of our very experienced cookers’, a stout woman in a long red dress, who seizes the mike like a pro and belts out, in a horribly loud and unmodulated voice, a song about ‘a brave captain’. The vibe drops. I sneak on to the deck.

  The night is soft with a starless, velvety blackness. I turn this way and that, disoriented, and suddenly, between our ship and the open sea, I notice a small, dense, brilliant mass of light. It surges up in the air, then drops again, then rises. For a mad second I think it’s a tiny model ship somehow attached to the radio mast of the Mikhail Sholokhov—then I realise we are rolling so voluptuously that the horizon on which the other ship lies is constantly changing position. The ship is like a dazzling brooch, spiked now here, now there, always rising and falling.

  Sunday, after a rough night, dawns bright and calm. The sick creep out, blinking and peering about them like souls who doubt their release from purgatory. ‘I was stood up last night!’ announces Lorraine stoically as she pulls out her breakfast chair. Stefan, it seems, retired to his cabin early and refused to come out. ‘We all went down there to try and get him to come up—it was them worryin’ about him, not me chasin’ him—but he was just too sick.’ Stefan
, meanwhile, is installed at his friends’ table, tearing into a cooked breakfast. Lorraine keeps glancing at him uncertainly. The light has gone out of her face, a little.

  Last night’s mythical Russian princesses have turned back into sullen slaveys, despising those they serve. Lorraine points out that at every meal, when we first take our seats, the teacup handles are pointing to the left instead of to the right. She begins to perceive a meaning in this—‘or could it be feng shui?’ She wonders aloud whether there might be ‘stigma attached to working on this boat: maybe they’ve been naughty? Maybe it’s like our community service?’

  ‘You mean,’ I say, impressed, ‘that this is some sort of floating gulag?’ We stare at the waitresses. We would like to be friendly, but they go on steadfastly ignoring us. Somehow this is painful. We feel rejected and rather glum.

  But out on deck, it’s a perfect day. The ship is a clean and brilliant white, the sea swarms with shattered fragments of light. Wherever I look there are pleasing shapes, patterns, blocks of white and crimson and dark green against a blue sky. Flags flutter hard, expressing themselves in a language I don’t understand. This is how cruising is meant to be. For a couple of hours, tranquillity descends on our ship. All the deckchairs are in use. People stay still, basking, drinking, smiling, talking in soft voices.

  Poor Bev, though, is horribly seasick. Carola takes her to the Russian doctor, who charges her fifteen bucks for a hit of Stematil. She huddles in a protected corner of the deck, rugged up in her brand-new, creaking, black leather jacket. Her face is pale green, her forehead beaded with sweat. I squat beside her and try to get her mind off her nausea by asking her whether she is enjoying the book she has with her (the only non-airport book I’ve seen on board), For the Term of His Natural Life.

  ‘To be frank, no,’ she says. ‘It’s too fancy. “The grass was green, the sky was blue, the ocean something or other.” I don’t care about that. I want to know facts.’ She smokes fiercely, while she lays out for me her political theories: a GST, instant closing-off of all immigration, then a price freeze, then a wage freeze. I have no views on these topics and my attention keeps drifting away to the dazzling ocean. ‘You’re a writer. What do you think?’ says Bev sternly. ‘This affects you.’ She keeps her eyes on me, but I feel her interest in me leaking away.