by Ian Hutson
The incident was entered into the ship’s log as “23:40hrs. Iceberg. Ignored.”
The post-berg day passed as so many do on ocean liners, with shuffleboard, with being seen to be seen, with tea, more shuffleboard, being seen, shuffleboard, lunch, shuffleboard, afternoon nap, tiffin with jam and honey and tea, with evening nap and then with dressing for dinner.
Dinner on this second evening was a much less grand affair than the first, with far fewer ornamental monkeys and virtually no foliage at all. Sir Sidney excelled himself by experimenting with a white bow tie and Lady Feltham simply wore her diamonds, a dab of Baccarat Les Larmes Sacrees de Thebes behind each ear and something thrown together by a million silk-worms under the direction of the design house Coco Schiaparelli Patou Lanvin Marks & Spencer Campari Terra-Nova.
It was also about eleven-forty that second evening when Able Seaman Fourize seemed to be on the verge of developing some sort of dreadful habit. He again cleared the speaking-tube of mice and seagull-droppings, and shouted down it from the crow’s nest to the bridge. “ICEBERG! CHUFFING GREAT REALLY QUITE SCARY RUDDY ICEBERG!” Seaman Fourize was not a chap to make the same mistake with his adjectives twice.
Well this time of course everyone and their favourite hound knew the drill and they gathered at the front of the thingummy; towards the pointy end of the, um, the ship.
Tarquin and the Gamekeep, displaying the incautious spontaneity one so often sees during long voyages, rushed forward to the bow, to stand at the rail á la Jack and Rose. Very few folk actually heard Tarquin exclaim in boyish delight that he was “flying”, but those that did hear him then found need to wipe a tear from their eye. The gamekeep’s hands were very strong and warm and reassuring around Tarquin’s waist in the cold Atlantic salt breeze.
Also throwing caution to the wind, Cecilia threw herself onto some hapless hovering hopeful who owned Keenyah or Rhodesia or something thrilling. Although out-clichéd by Tarquin, she found that she quite liked her very first sensation of willingly and warmly interlocked intercontinental colonial limbs. She allowed herself to look up from her feet and was gratified to find Mr Perfect also peeping up from the floor, with what appeared to be a shy smile on his face and an innocent twinkle in his eye. Cecilia noticed that he had the most wonderful aroma about his pockets; essence of De Beers-Cartier engagement diamonds.
An incurable old romantic in the ship’s crew then let off three red, gender-neutral flares and these burst overhead like giant, crimson roses.
Captain Kharon once more addressed his passengers. This time there would be no undignified all astern or flinging the rudder about! The RMS Titanic was a lady not for turning twice! Fool me once, Mother Nature; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me! Everyone charged their glasses and toasted the iceberg - do your worst, they said, we’ve seen ghosts such as you before. The tinkling of kissing champagne flutes filled the air. At least, it did in First Class.
The noise then next experienced was quite incredible, a sort of deck-plate rending, steel-ripping screech as the bow hit the berg and concertinaed. RMS Titanic briefly showed her propellers as she rammed the ice, and they flailed like demented desk fans before crashing back into the deep, dark, icy water. Bram, Stoker First Class, had been just in the process of flinging a shovelful of Coalite Smokeless Eggs into the boiler when they hit, and he found himself involuntarily following his load to a very fiery end indeed. Thumms, not being a total idiot or stranger to disaster, secreted a lifebelt about his person, made certain that his hip-flask was full and hung little “Reserved” signs on all of the lifeboats.
Sir Sidney worked his way to Captain Kharon’s side and suggested that perhaps a touch of the old abandon ship malarkey might be in order, possibly making things easier to explain when they did eventually reach land. After all, and to paraphrase that old sea-dog, Mr Wilde; to hit one iceberg may be regarded as unfortunate, but to ram two on successive evenings might look like carelessness.
The best theory available at short notice for the dissimilarity of their recent icebergish experiences was propounded by a small gaggle of continental types (they may well have been French, but it doesn’t do to enquire unless absolutely necessary). The Feltham’s listened politely as they waited while maids packed and luggage and horses were brought up from the hold and stowed in the reserved lifeboats. The Frenchies’ theory had to do with some supposed sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of a meaningless or absurd world, and the gods alone know just how meaningless and absurd the continent can be so perhaps their theory, unlike the RMS Titanic, actually held water. The one who called himself “Sartre” kept muttering that humans were all “condemned to be free” and “needed to experience death-consciousness so as to wake themselves up to what had been important in their lives”.
Many passengers much preferred the theory of the non-continental barman, Eric, in the cocktail lounge who surmised that what was important was that while the first iceberg had been real, all onboard collective existence thereafter had not been - at least, not in the same sense of the term “real”. This second iceberg was in fact a differently factual facet of a very real unreal and the passengers, now also being really unreal following their experience with the first real iceberg, experienced it on equal terms as really real within the context of a fresh, but absurdly unreal experience in whatever this was after the cessation of reality as they had known it.
Eric was asked to stop jiggling his cocktail shaker and was pressed to explain himself further, in words of one syllabub, sic, so to speak.
Eric’s simplification was that everyone had actually been quite dead since the initial berg, and the ship was sinking for a second time like a gravestone carved especially for a burial at sea. In short, on this evening a ghostly ship had collided with a ghostly iceberg. The previous evening’s collision had been between a real-world ocean liner and a real-world iceberg. They had hitherto been spared knowledge of their transition from life to death, but were, due to the incompetencies of the Captain, about to experience some fresh transition from just dead to absolutely dead. Eric poured the contents of his cocktail shaker - a delicate mix of brandy, vodka, gin, whisky and Angostura Bitters - into a pretty little pint glass with a handle and then drank it in one gulp, chasing it down with a handful of glacé cherries.
Sartre and his chums had a grand old time flinging ironic counterblast and witty, sardonic rebuttal back and forth as the collection of deck chairs that they were clinging to became more and more waterlogged, floating less and less enthusiastically as time passed. It was a shame that there had only been sufficient boats for the Feltham household, but then nobody said that the afterlife had to be fair. Anyway, the poor and the travelling foreigner often had more natural buoyancy than the English upper classes, and those that didn’t should not have allowed themselves to be so damned poor or so damned foreign. Nobody had been prevented from bringing private lifeboats aboard, they’d just obviously been too lazy to do so, as was often the case with these people.
Eric, by this time somewhat seriously sozzled and taking up valuable space in lifeboat number three, insisted on expounding some further interesting theories regarding this dying squared. The fact that this duplication of experience was possible in itself, said Eric while stabbing olives on a cocktail stick, raised some very interesting existential questions in re the quintessentially-fixed, concentrically nested celestial spheres suggested by Messrs Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus et al not to mention general cosmological, religious and transcendent belief, to wit; the widely-held notion of a system of seven heavens plus a single Hell supplemented by a Limbo and a Purgatory, interestingly found not just in Islamic, Judaic, Hindu and Catholic teachings but also Hermeticism and Gnosticism...
At a nod from Thumms, Eric was, wonderfully, knocked out cold and thrown onto the raft with the French philosophers, where he didn’t seem to like (after-)life or (post-)death any more than did his equally verbose, equally unqualified and equally opinionated new compani
ons. He eventually had them singing Danny Boy, as all good ocean-liner barmen do, but it was a poor performance indeed because Sartre, de Beauvoir and Aznavour kept upsetting the meter by insisting on Danny Garçon and that the peeps, the peeps were appelling from le glen to le glen. It was a great relief to all when their raft drifted away through the re-drowning lower classes and the crew, who were no longer needed since RMS Titanic’s demonstration of reverse floatation.
The days aboard the lifeboats were slow days, mainly since there was little to no room for shuffleboard, and no other passengers to be seen being seen by, socially. Quite the most excitement to be had came at tiffin on the third day, when Thumms approached table and whispered “Land-ho, m’lady, three points off the starboard bow. I have moved the aspidistra slightly abaft, to afford a better view if confirmation should become necessary.” Lady Feltham indicated that she had full confidence in Thumms and would not be disturbing tiffin, especially not during the Battenberg course, which was Sir Sidney’s favourite. The excitement was palpable though, and several members of the party glanced in that direction or discreetly turned a little in their seats.
Tarquin, with the gamekeep standing behind his seat and wringing his cloth cap, wondered whether, since they were all apparently a bit dead, the land-ho was Heaven, and if so - would Saint Peter let dogs and staff in?
Cecilia, accepting a second cucumber sandwich from Keenyah or Rhodesia or whatever his name was, retorted that of course he would, since otherwise it would not be in any way heavenly.
In the face of such conversational rowdiness Lady Feltham relented in re disturbing tiffin, and asked that jam scones and a fresh pot of tea be continued informally. She and Sir Sidney then took a short digestive stroll from table to stand at the gunwale and contemplate their salvation. Opera glasses lent some Hellish detail to the smudge on the horizon, and Sir Sidney swore that he could make out a ruddy palm tree!
Lady Feltham, one hand on her parasol and one anchoring the brim of a weekday hat, released a sigh of resignation and took the brazen step of moving closer to Sir Sidney - so close that the stray woollen fibres on the elbows of Sir Sidney’s light tweed jacket occasionally touched the white cotton of Lady Feltham’s long gloves.
“It will no doubt be some tropical hole requirin’ a firm hand, a complete shake-up of basic infrastructure and a regular intake of Quinine” she said.
“No doubt at all I’m afraid. Probably all coconuts and interminable heat. Still - a fresh start, eh m’dear?”
“A new life, in death, Sidney. A fresh, peppery challenge to get the blood up.”
“Our duties and obligations will be onerous, Lavinia. Once Kharon rows us ashore we must seek out the English Consulate, and make arrangements.” Sir Sidney patted the bulge in his trousers that was his old Service revolver, and that he hoped would see them safely through the native crowds.
Lavinia threw propriety into the sea, and linked her arm through Sidney’s. She remembered how proud she had been on the arm of Sidney in his Grenadier uniform, strolling through the London parks each Sunday afternoon, courting wildly. Death social, death physical and death somehow squared could - would - be just a new beginning for them all.
Thumms, fiddling at table behind them, sensed a very real eternity of service without retirement or pension stretching out before him, and a little elastic something in his sanity-gland gave up the struggle, and snapped at the prospect of an infinite and eternal English Empire.
He very decisively put the milk in the cups, then lifted the pot and announced in loud, sonorous, butler-esque tones that he would be mother.
#####
The Especial Relevance of Cow-Pats
Twoseven Fourthreebee was in traction. The crisp, starched white linen of his N.M.S. Male Surgical Ward bed was folded incredibly neatly underneath him with hospital corners that could kill, and he lay in plaster from neck to hips. Both of his legs were raised aloft by lines and weights and rusty pulleys. Apparently his chassis was out of alignment, and it had been touch and go whether he was to be scrapped or salvaged. In the end his insurance assessor had put a figure of seventy percent on him, so salvage it was.
The next bed along in the open ward was temporary home to Sixsix Twelvejay who was as limp as a rag doll, undergoing full hydraulic actuator replacement and extensive cosmetic work. He looked as though he’d been in a dozen serious car accidents in quick succession and then fallen out of the ambulance on the way to the hospital. In fact, he hadn’t fallen out of the ambulance at all.
A kindly nurse breezed through the ward, rearranging the flowers in the vases and stopping at each bed to pop a cigarette into each helpless patient’s mouth and to light it for them. She was a moving blip of raised oil pressures and seriously unprofessional thoughts, rolling from one set of double swing doors to the other. Her tin legs ran all the way up from her swivelling castors until they got quite cheeky and were lost under the white and navy-blue cotton of her uniform. Gilding the lily of female robotic perfection, one of her castors was just a little bit wonky and it squeaked like a church-mouse in the latter stages of coitus. Squeak, squeak - smile - Ronson lighter click, click - smile - squeak, squeak.
Twoseven Fourthreebee and Sixsix Twelvejay had been well acquainted with each other before finding themselves in adjoining hospital beds. They had often worked on the same team in the safety testing department of the Austin Morris Motor Car Company. Safety was their business. What these two didn’t know about modern motor car safety wasn’t worth knowing.
Throughout the day consultant MDs (Doctorates of Mechanics) came and went, tinkering and tweaking, torquing and tuning. The MDs were incredibly impressive individuals. All of them were stratospherically high up the career ladder. The average working grunt couldn’t even see the consultant’s rung of the property ladder without binoculars. Stencilled onto their torso covers were the gold and platinum badges of private pension arrangements, investment portfolios and disposable income merits. Most of them were paying more in maintenance every month to ex-partners and child robots than Twoseven and Sixsix grossed in a year. There was much discussion among the patients on the wards about which of them was likely to be an Aston Martin man and which had likely gone the Jaguar E-Type route.
After a couple of weeks and with his arse then back in line with his spine, Twoseven found himself directly addressed by his hospital consultant conversationally, and a reply was expected! Mr Eighteighteight B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D., Professor etcetera, etcetera, flicked through the pages of Twoseven’s charts and then passed them to Matron to be hung back on the end of his bed. Matron handed the charts to an SRN who turned around to pass them on. She though found no-one further down the line though, so she clung onto them awkwardly until such time as the Consultant and Matron walked away and she could actually get to the foot of the bed.
‘Soon be time to throw you back out into the world Mr Fourthreebee. You no longer have the excuse of a broken chassis, so you must stop sponging off the state and get back to earning your keep!’
‘Yes Mr Eighteighteight. I’m very keen to get back my nose back to the grindstone’ said Fourthreebee, in an inadvertent reference to one of the surgeon’s favourite tools in theatre.
‘Grindstone? You blue-collar chaps don’t know the meaning of the word! I hear that your shifts are only forty hours a week - can that really be true?’
‘It’s true, but we do a lot of overtime. How long have you been on shift Doc?’
‘Continuously this shift? Thirty-five years.’ Just then the consultant’s pager went off, and he was rolled away to an emergency “multiple blown-fuses” in Casualty.
Sixsix and Twoseven watched his entourage disappear, and they whistled under their breath.
‘Thirty-five years without a break - no wonder those guys get all the goodies and live the high life!’
‘They work for it. I guess that answers the Aston Martin versus E-Type question then - that abandoned DB4 covered in bird-crap and with the four flat tyres will be his.
He won’t have had the time to drive it for a while. Lucky bastard.’
‘We should have worked harder at school - we might have had decent careers ourselves.’
‘I’ve got a cousin who’s doing really well. He was produced in the same batch as me. He’s a stockbroker or merchant banker or something flash in The City.’
‘Wow!’
‘He’s doing so well that he’s married and divorced three super-model robots that he hasn’t even met face to face. According to his service records he’s on his fourth mansion and his third yacht and he’s never seen them either - he has one of those offices with a recharging suite built in, he just lives there full-time. His solicitors handle his private life and send him regular updates. They even send someone to the Bahamas three times a year to send back postcards telling him what his holidays would have been like if he hadn’t had to cancel them due to pressures of work.’
‘Lucky bastard!’
‘Apparently he buys the houses and the yachts so that he has something to fight over in the divorce cases. They reckon he’s well on his way to leasing his first personal jet, and several private banks are already eyeing him up for a messy aviation repossession. The Inland Revenue love him!’
‘Success eh? Has he had a hydraulic pump infarction yet?’
‘Two. The second one needed open-pump surgery. Apparently he only lived through it because there was a Harley Street mechanic eating in the same sushi restaurant when he keeled over into his raw whale-penis platter.’
‘Makes you realise doesn’t it? If we could just be bothered to put more effort into work I bet we could live the good life too.’