Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Adam

  ‘We’re he-re!’

  A sing-song voice. Intruding on my sleep. Tugging me awake.

  ‘Sir? We are here.’

  Closer to me now, near my ear. Accented English.

  ‘Sir? It’s time to go.’

  A hand on my left arm, gently shaking me.

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Sorry for waking you, sir,’ the Blue Wave rep said with a wide, unnaturally white smile. She was young, eighteen or so, with dark, tightly curled brown hair. Potentially Spanish. ‘But we have arrived at the terminal. Welcome to Barcelona.’

  She pronounced it Barthalona.

  Definitely Spanish, then.

  I began the process of freeing my limbs from the tiny space between the end of my seat and the back of the one in front. The Blue Wave shuttle from the airport was actually a fleet of spectacularly cramped mini-buses, made worse by my choice of window seat. I’d taken it so I could turn my body away from the other passengers, plug in my headphones so I wouldn’t have to listen to their excited chatter and pretend to be asleep.

  Then actually be, because I hadn’t slept much in the last forty-eight hours.

  Everyone else was already off the bus and moving towards the terminal building, the children running ahead while the parents called after them.

  Around me, the port was a hive of activity. Buses coming and going. Luggage stacked on the same little trucks you see at the airport. People swarming everywhere. Blue Wave reps, identified by their deep-blue T-shirts and aggressive friendliness, smiling and waving clipboards around. All views of the sea blocked by the enormous terminal building, a glass-and-exposed-pipe design that had probably been considered Space Age in the Eighties but now seemed clumsy and obsolete. A giant sign outside its doors threatened that my Blue Wave adventure starts right now!

  I headed that way, squinting in the midday sun. I had sunglasses in my backpack but didn’t put them on in case he wouldn’t recognise me.

  My entire knowledge of what Peter Brazier looked like came from the photos I’d seen posted online alongside stories about Estelle. In each one he was posed happily next to her, smiling at her or holding her or kissing her or doing a combination of those things. He was about a foot taller than his wife, broad-shouldered and invariably tanned, with the strong jaw and dimpled chin of an American named Brad who can make sound financial investments and chop wood with the same hair-flipping ease.

  Together, he and Estelle looked like a Ralph Lauren ad campaign, all teeth and style and effortless beauty. There was a shine to them. They looked as if they’d been polished to a high gloss.

  This was the image I’d brought to Barcelona with me, but now, seeing him waiting for me outside the terminal doors, I realised that the Peter in all those pictures was the one from his Before.

  Estelle had disappeared a year ago. Since then the man had got thin. Too thin. He was just skin and bones now, no muscle mass. The line of his jaw jutted out above a narrow, bird-like neck. His cheekbones seemed to have been pushed up and out. He’d let his hair grow and become unruly, curling around his ears and neck, still light brown mostly but running grey in parts. Peter was unshaven, sporting a beard of patchy stubble that gave the impression that he’d just rolled out of bed, and that ‘bed’ might have been a sheet of cardboard under a bridge. His linen pants and black T-shirt were wrinkled and loose, misshapen, and the T-shirt had white crescents of old deodorant under the arms. His eyes were dull, the skin beneath them tones of grey and purple.

  The guy was a wreck.

  But then, maybe I would be too if I’d been feeling for the past year the way I’d been feeling for the past seven days.

  Seven days.

  This time last week I’d been at the airport waiting for Sarah, almost to the hour. On one hand, it seemed unfathomable that I had been living in a world from which Sarah was missing for that long. On the other, I couldn’t believe this nightmare was barely a week old.

  ‘Adam!’ he called out, recognising me. He waved.

  ‘Peter. Hi.’

  We shook hands. He grasped mine tightly, pumped it twice.

  We looked at each other until I laughed nervously.

  ‘I don’t really know what to say.’

  ‘Best not say much for the moment,’ Peter said. ‘Not until after we’re aboard.’

  ‘Right.’

  The terminal’s automatic glass doors slid open for us and a blast of cool air rushed out.

  Peter went in first. I followed closely behind him.

  Inside it was very much like an airport: a huge, hangar-like space thronged with people. A white, jagged design cut across a navy carpet in diagonal rows, underneath the feet of hundreds of cruise-goers shuffling along inside a maze of blue ropes, waiting their turn at one of the many check-in desks. Anticipation charged the air and the noise of excited chatter filled it.

  Peter stopped, nodded at something up ahead. ‘There it is.’

  I thought he was talking about the queue to board until I lifted my head.

  The far wall of the terminal, the one that faced the water, was made entirely of panes of glass. White-coloured glass, my brain thought for a second, until my focus shifted and I realised what I was looking at. The panes were clear; what was white was what was behind them.

  Something gargantuan, something taller and wider than the terminal building itself, a gleaming monster that blocked out both sea and sky, that couldn’t even be contained inside hundreds of window panes.

  The Celebrate.

  It – she, I should say – was parked – docked – alongside the terminal building, which now that I thought about it made sense. We would simply check in here and walk aboard, just like that.

  This is really going to happen. I’m going to get on the Celebrate.

  Or try to, anyway. Peter had concerns that one or both of our names could be flagged. I’d made the booking – two cabins, one under Peter’s name and one under my own – without encountering any problems, but it might be a different story trying to physically board the boat. He’d explained that that was partly why he’d never attempted to board the ship before. The other reason was the fact that he’d cleaned out his bank account petitioning Blue Wave in court for access to CCTV and then, after that failed, filing a civil suit.

  Either way, our tickets were non-refundable. My credit card was effectively melted down now.

  We flashed our tickets to a security guard manning the start of a line for Customs and Immigration, then showed our passports to Spanish border guards.

  We barely spoke to each other while we waited. There was only one thing we wanted to talk to each other about, and when we did it we couldn’t risk being overheard.

  Afterwards, we shuffled to a check-in counter where our passports were scanned and our photos taken by a tiny camera mounted on the desk. I could feel Peter tensing beside me as the agent activated our Swipeout cards, but she said nothing to us except for an ­automatic-sounding, ‘You’re all set. You’ll be Boarding Area C.’ Then she handed me a blue plastic wallet and told us to enjoy our cruise.

  The wallet had a Blue Wave logo on it, but it was different to the one on Sarah’s note. They were rebranding, I remembered the receptionist saying back at the Blue Wave office. The tickets had the waves so this logo, on the wallet – an outline of a boat – must be the one they were replacing.

  Up ahead, passengers were posing in front of a backdrop of the Celebrate at sea while a professional photographer hopped around them, shouting instructions and snapping his lens. When he was done, relevant Swipeout cards were scanned into a handheld machine by the photographer’s overly enthusiastic Blue Wave T-shirt-­wearing assistant who squealed the same line every thirty seconds, like one of those dolls with a pull-string on their back. ‘Don’t forget to stop at The Photo Shop on the Oceanic Deck where prints start at just €9.99!’<
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  ‘We should do it,’ Peter said. ‘Everyone does. We don’t want to stand out.’

  So the two of us stood in front of a picture of the ship where, as far as we knew, the women we loved had last been seen alive, and smiled wide for the camera.

  After that there was one more security check where our Swipeout cards were compared to our photo IDs, and our bags scanned. Then escalators carried us up onto the terminal’s mezzanine level.

  Now we were alongside the first row of the Celebrate’s portholes. The crowd, excited, moved faster here. We followed them outside, back into the warm Spanish sun and fresh sea breeze and—

  There she was, her whole side in full view now, towering above us as high as a skyscraper and as wide as a city block.

  I saw balconies and orange lifeboats and blue and white bunting. At her highest point: a massive yellow funnel that rose up into the cloudless sky and disappeared into the white-hot glare of the sun. The word ‘celebrate’ was stencilled on her hull, in blue lettering broken up to look like crashing waves.

  We made slow progress to the gangplank and then across it, through an opening in the side of the ship close to the waterline. The queue was more unruly here. Kids jostled with each other for pos­ition, a baby was crying loudly somewhere and the woman behind me kept clipping my ankles with the front wheels of her baby’s ­complicated-looking pram.

  It was almost a relief to step into the hole in the side of the boat.

  Almost.

  We emerged into a spacious area that looked like the lobby of a luxury hotel: a patterned carpet, low-lighting, overstuffed armchairs strewn about in a way that appeared casual but was undoubtedly considered, planned to the very last inch. A pair of ornate, polished wooden stairs curled up and out of the space, a huge watercolour of the Celebrate hanging on its landing.

  Paired with the plush furnishings, the smell of seawater drifting in from the open hatch was decidedly disconcerting.

  A line of Blue Wave crew members were there to greet us, dressed in the standard blue polo-shirt and beige chino combination. I’d looked at each of their faces in turn. Folded in my pocket was a printout of the profile page Cusack had found for Ethan Eckhart on a website for cruise ship workers. I’d stared at the tiny headshot on it for hours.

  Ethan didn’t look at all like I’d expected. In my imagination Sarah had fallen for an underwear model, the kind of chiselled, unattainable perfection sported by the men who grace the cover of glossy style magazines, achieved only by days spent in the gym and hours in front of the mirror and, before any of that could even begin, the winning of the genetics lottery. That’s why she’d fallen for him, because he’d looked that way, because he’d been something so other, so different. Better. She hadn’t been able to resist him because he’d been irresistible.

  That’s what I’d been telling myself, anyway.

  In reality, Ethan was perfectly ordinary. Dark hair cut close to the scalp, not unattractive but not particularly attractive either (as far as I could tell), wearing a half-smile on thin lips. It was a professional’s headshot. He was wearing a suit jacket, a white shirt and plain tie. He had nothing in the way of identifying marks, no stand-out feature. No eyewear, no facial hair, no piercings or visible tattoos. Whenever I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up a description of him that would be of use to a police sketch-artist or the operator of an Identikit machine, I could think of nothing more specific than blue eyes, brown hair, white skin.

  Still, I felt confident I’d recognise him if I met him in the flesh, but none of these guys looked anything like him.

  When it was our turn, Peter and I found ourselves facing a young guy of maybe twenty, twenty-one. He stepped towards us, smiling widely, holding a small tablet computer with a key-card device attached to its side. His nametag told us his name was Danny and that his favourite Blue Wave destination was Istanbul.

  ‘Welcome aboard the Celebrate!’ He sounded English. ‘Are you excited to experience our Mediterranean Dream?’

  In a moment that would have been amusing otherwise, Peter and I found ourselves only able to respond with blank looks.

  ‘Well . . . That’s great,’ Danny said. ‘I just need to see your Swipeout cards, sirs, please.’

  Peter handed over his card while I rummaged in the plastic wallet for mine. I’d stupidly put it back in there after the last security check, thinking there would be no more.

  Danny slid them both through his little machine, waited until it beeped. He looked up at us, then down at the machine again. Satisfied, he handed back our cards. Peter reached out and took both of them while I struggled to get the plastic wallet to snap closed again.

  ‘Mr Dunne and Mr Brazier, you are so welcome aboard,’ Danny said. ‘You will be staying in two of our Deluxe Junior Suites up on Atlantic Deck. 801 and 803.’ He pointed with two fingers to a bank of elevators to his left. ‘Take the C elevators up to eight, turn right out of them and follow signs. We’re serving a buffet lunch in the main dining room on the Oceanic Deck – that’s thirteen – and we start our Sailaway Party at six o’clock sharp on Pacific. That’s the very top. If you’re waiting on luggage, we hope to have it on board very shortly, but if you need anything in the meantime the Central Park shopping mall on the Promenade Deck is open. There’s also a comfort pack in your cabin, along with more information about the ship and this afternoon’s muster drill. Do you have any questions?’

  We both shook our head.

  Danny nodded at the Swipeout cards in Peter’s hand. ‘Just so you know, those are both charging back to the same account but they don’t open both cabin doors, so if you mix them up you might find yourself locked out. Replacements can only be issued with photo ID. Do let the crew know if you have any questions and, again, welcome aboard the Celebrate!’

  ‘What the hell is a Sailaway Party?’ I asked Peter as soon as we stepped inside the elevator.

  ‘It’s when the ship sets sail. Everyone goes up on deck to watch dry land disappear.’

  He pressed the button for ATLANTIC.

  As the doors slid closed, he turned to face me.

  ‘Adam, are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Fine.’

  Peter was staring at me. Studying me.

  ‘I know it’s weird,’ he said. ‘It’s hard not to think Did she see this? Was she in this elevator? Where’s her boarding photo now?’

  I’d actually found it easy not to think those things, until just now.

  ‘On the phone,’ I said, ‘you told me there were things you wanted to wait and tell me in person?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll be able to talk soon. I just think it’s safer to wait until we know there’s no one around to overhear. Crew, especially.’

  ‘We can talk in one of the cabins.’

  ‘The walls are thin, and the balconies share partitions. I think an open deck might be the best option.’

  ‘They’re rebranding,’ I said, holding up the plastic wallet. ‘Some stuff has the old logo, some the new.’

  The elevator stopped.

  ‘Atlantic Deck,’ an androgynous voice pronounced.

  The doors slid open on a narrow, brightly lit corridor. Its walls were white and one long, wavy blue line had been painted at waist-height the whole way along it, as far as the eye could see. There was a faint smell of seawater layered with something floral and sickly sweet, like air freshener.

  We stepped out and turned right, walked as far as the door marked 801. The door of 803 was right beside it.

  ‘You’re 803,’ Peter said, handing me one of the cards. ‘Shall I knock on your door in, say’ – he looked at his watch – ‘twenty minutes or so? We’ll find a place to talk then.’

  I said that was fine.

  ‘And you might want to use your phone while you can. I don’t think it’ll work once we’re sailing.’

  ‘Okay.’

 
; ‘We’re going to find him, Adam.’

  Peter was staring at me again. His gaze was intense. I shifted my weight, uncomfortable in it.

  ‘Yeah,’ was all I said.

  But what are we going to do then?

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ Peter said, and disappeared into 801.

  I unlocked 803 with my Swipeout. A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign was hanging from the inside handle. I opened the door again to hang it outside.

  My cabin was narrow but long, and larger than I’d been expecting. Everything was blue, yellow or white – or covered in a pattern that incorporated all three – and spotlessly clean. With my back to the door, the bathroom was to my immediate right. On my left was a narrow wardrobe. Walking further into the room, I found a two-seater couch upholstered in Blue Wave blue pushed up against one wall, facing a built-in desk with a mirror and flat-screen TV. A little round tray on the desktop had a small bottle of champagne and two glasses on it, with a spray of blue and yellow ribbon curls tied around the bottle’s neck. Every flat surface had a little railing or a raised edge, presumably to stop things crashing to the floor should we hit stormy seas. There was a double bed, with just enough space between its end and the opposing wall to allow access to a pair of sliding-glass doors, which themselves offered access to the balcony.

  Was this the kind of cabin Sarah and Ethan shared? Had they enjoyed a glass of champagne and watched the sunset on a balcony just like the one out there? Had they lain together on a bed like this? Had sex in it?

  What had happened then?

  I grabbed the remote control from the bedside table and turned on the TV. It was set to some kind of Blue Wave info-channel. Scenes from the Celebrate were playing in slow-fades, set to gentle elevator music.

  Text at the bottom of the screen read Welcome aboard, PETER!

  I looked down at the Swipeout card, thrown on the bed, and frowned. It said DUNNE, but then I think they both did. Peter must have just mixed them up and taken the cabin assigned to my name instead of his own, and handed me the key that opened the one assigned to him. But it didn’t matter; they were both the same.