Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Another passenger recognised her from YouTube and started waving manically at her from the other end of the bar. Megan smiled back at them sweetly.

  Falsely, I realised now that I’d spent a bit of time with her.

  ‘This is the worst bit,’ she said to us, slipping off her stool. ‘I’ll just go say hi and come back. If it goes past sixty seconds, come save me.’

  I watched her go, following the fall of blonde hair down to the back of her neck, the outline of her dark bra visible beneath her white T-shirt, the swathe of skin exposed in the space between her top and her jeans—

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I muttered.

  Peter looked at me. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Listen—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘You can’t control thoughts. It happens.’

  ‘Well, I’m—’

  I’d almost said I’m with someone. But I wasn’t. But then, I wasn’t single either. What was I, exactly?

  In love with a girl who is gone.

  The pain came in a wave, a physical force. I could feel it, trying to tip me over. Trying to pull me under. Trying to drown me.

  I saw Megan turn to start heading back towards us.

  ‘I’ll be back in a sec,’ I mumbled, standing up.

  I crossed the bar and pushed through the swinging door marked Gents. I leaned over one of the sinks, took a few deep breaths. Lifted my head to look at my face in the mirror.

  I was fighting loneliness, I realised. That’s what was going on. It was something that had never occurred to me before when I’d heard stories about people losing loved ones to tragedy or crime. I understood the horror of not knowing what had happened, yes, and the horror of knowing exactly what had happened, which in some cases could be just as awful if not worse. I knew what people were talking about when they used terms like grief-stricken and bereft and heartbroken. But it had never occurred to me until I was in it myself that there, on top of all those feelings, lay plain old generic loneliness, because the one you love isn’t there. It’s a manageable feeling with an end date when that person is coming back, but a drowning depth of pain and hopelessness when they are not. It might be interminable. I couldn’t even say if it would ever end, or even fade. How could I even face the future like this? What if I always felt this way? How could anyone learn to live with this?

  The door to the Gents swung open and Peter walked in. Stumbled in, rather. His forehead was shiny with sweat.

  ‘Adam,’ he said breathlessly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He bent over one of the sinks and splashed water on his face. ‘I feel a bit . . . off or something.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I need to tell you what happened today. Megan says she’s a friend on the crew who can maybe get a printout of the key-card activity on the lock on the cabin door last night. And I got a better picture of Ethan and I emailed it to Becky, asking her if she recognises him, if she can remember him from when she was on the ship.’

  Peter straightened back up.

  ‘Estelle’s Becky?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You emailed Becky,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Yeah. Is . . . Was that okay?’

  There it was again: the hardening of his features, the shadow that crossed his face whenever her name came up.

  Only this time he didn’t bother to hide it.

  ‘She doesn’t like me,’ he said, ‘and I don’t like her. She’s barely spoken to me since Estelle disappeared. Personally, I think it was because she couldn’t stomach the guilt of knowing that she was why Estelle had disappeared. Her and that stupid bloody hen party.’ He stopped, bit his lip. ‘Adam, I think I might be about to throw up.’

  He pushed past me into a stall, kicking the door shut behind him. A moment later, vomiting noises filled the air.

  I waited a polite amount of time before asking if he was okay.

  Through the door: ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘Megan today, she might have caught me looking up a story about Sanne Vrijs. I went to an Internet cafe and apparently she was in there already, and she snuck up on me and saw the screen. I made up a story about the door being open last night and me worrying about cruise ship crimes, and I think she bought it, but we should tread carefully there.’

  The stall door opened and a greyer, sweatier Peter walked out.

  ‘Why were you looking up Sanne Vrijs?’

  ‘I thought maybe I could find out for sure about the note.’

  Peter’s eyes rolled back in his head.

  ‘Peter?’

  He fell, slumped back against the sinks. I caught him just before he started towards the floor, gripping him on the upper arms.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘I think I should go to bed,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I’ll take you. Here, throw your arm around my shoulders.’

  ‘I feel . . . faint.’

  ‘That’s okay. Come on.’

  ‘The . . . drinks . . . maybe . . .

  ‘Can you try to stand?’

  ‘You should . . . talk . . .’ He stumbled. I helped right him again. ‘Ask about . . .’ His words descended into incoherence.

  Holding Peter up, I kicked the door of the Gents open with a foot.

  And found myself face-to-face with Megan.

  Her right hand was in a fist and raised in mid-air, as if she’d just been about to knock.

  ‘I thought you guys had abandoned...’ She looked from me to Peter, then back to me. ‘Fuck. Is he okay?’

  ‘Not really. He’s been sick. I need to get him back to his cabin.’

  Megan quickly went to Peter’s other side, lifted his arm and ducked underneath it, helping to hold him up.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Come on. I’ll help you.’

  We were in the elevator when I felt the headache coming on.

  I opened Peter’s cabin’s door with my ‘wrong’ Swipeout card. The inside looked exactly like mine but with everything turned the other way around, a mirror image.

  We got him on the bed and then, with gentle coaxing, persuaded him to lie down. Megan pulled his shoes off while I got the spare blanket from the wardrobe to cover him with.

  When I pulled it down, a white envelope came with it, the kind you get greeting cards in.

  I’d seen it before. It was the envelope in which Peter kept Estelle’s passport and note. I retrieved it, laid it carefully on his desk. Bending over to do that turned up the dial on the pain at the base of my skull.

  ‘Nice,’ Megan said. Now that Peter was safely on the bed, she was taking a minute to look around the cabin. ‘A deluxe exterior. Sea-facing balcony. Treating yourselves, are you? Is yours the same?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m right next door. These were all that was left. We booked last minute.’

  ‘There were no interiors?’ Megan raised an eyebrow. ‘When did you book?’

  ‘Ah, a couple of weeks ago,’ I said, realising that I shouldn’t have said anything about that. The more detail I provided, the harder it was to keep our stories straight.

  I looked down at Peter, who’d rolled onto his side away from me. His breathing was deep and regular.

  ‘Do you think he’ll be okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, sure. It’s probably just something he ate. You might want to leave him something to throw up into though.’

  I pulled the plastic wastepaper basket from under the dressing table and set it down by the side of the bed.

  ‘And water,’ Megan said. ‘Does he have any bottled stuff?’

  ‘Can’t you drink from the tap?’

  She made a face. ‘Let’s just say I wouldn’t recommend it.’

  ‘I have a bottle in my room, I think.’

  I expected that I’d go and
get the water and come back, but Megan followed me out into the corridor and then into 803.

  I’d bought a four-pack of small mineral water bottles earlier in the day. It was sitting by the bed, unopened. I started tearing at the plastic wrap but it felt like a far more difficult task than usual, as if my fingers had suddenly grown thick and fat and the connection between them and my brain was only intermittent.

  ‘Hey!’ Megan said. ‘I thought you said this was your first cruise.’

  ‘It is.’

  I managed to free one bottle. I started work on another.

  ‘Well, there must’ve been a mix-up then,’ Megan was saying. ‘Only return guests get the bottle of champagne . . .’

  Her voice sounded odd to me. Distant, somehow, as if she was walking away. But when I looked she was in the same spot, only a couple of feet from me.

  ‘Did you talk to your friend?’ I asked. ‘About the lock activity?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. It was you.’

  ‘What?’

  I sat down on the bed and opened one of the bottles, before chugging half the water back.

  ‘I couldn’t get anything printed out because apparently there’s a log for that kind of thing, but my friend had a quick look on the system. He said that the door was opened at 5:30 – or around then – and it was opened with your key-card.’

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ I spluttered. ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you.’

  A beating pain was inside my skull that, when I closed my eyes, only grew more intense in the darkness.

  ‘Adam, are you okay?’ Megan crossed the floor and sat on the bed beside me. There was only a scant inch between the end of my right side and the start of her left. I could feel the presence of her. ‘Now you’re not looking so great. Do you feel like you’re going to throw up? Did you both eat the same thing today? Adam?’

  The room swayed around me.

  ‘Are we moving?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re on a ship.’ Megan reached up to brush a strand of hair off my forehead, then pressed the back of her hand to my skin. Her touch felt electric. ‘I think you might have a temperature. You could be getting flu or something. It happens a lot on board. Enclosed spaces and re-circulated air . . .’ She moved her hand down to my shoulder, then up to my neck, then across to my cheek.

  In spite of myself, I drifted into her touch, leaned into her hand.

  ‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to tell Peter that his matchmaking efforts will have to wait for another night.’

  She leaned over and kissed me, gently, on the lips.

  ‘Peter?’ was all I could manage to say.

  Megan smiled. Her face was just inches from mine. ‘Are you going to pretend you had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘With . . . what?’

  ‘He said that you liked me.’ Her voice was a playful whisper. Her hand was still on my skin, moving to the back of my neck, settling just below the epicentre of the pain that was threatening to crack open my skull with its shockwaves. ‘But that you were too shy to show me so.’ She sat back suddenly. ‘Unless he was just messing with me. I mean, no offence, I know he’s your friend and everything, but he’s a little off, isn’t he? There’s something about him. He’s a little intense. And tonight in the bar, I don’t know how many times I caught him staring at me . . .’

  I slid my hand under one of the pillows and pulled out Sarah’s scarf.

  ‘Stylish,’ Megan said, ‘but is it really your colour?’

  ‘Sarah,’ I said, but it came out sounding like an indecipherable vowel sound.

  ‘What? Adam, I think you need to lie down too. I think you had some questionable buffet fare. It can be . . .’

  I didn’t hear the end of her sentence.

  A darkness appeared on the edges of my vision and then swarmed in from all sides, reducing it to a pinhole.

  Then there was only black.

  Part Four

  DARK WATERS

  Corinne

  Everything looked so different at night. The corridors were dim and low-lit. The public areas and open decks sparkled with twinkling lights and glowed with soft lamps.

  The dim light might help me, Corinne thought. She was breaking the rules by being off duty and out on the passenger decks. She’d changed into the only halfway-decent outfit she’d brought with her – a delicate summer dress – and was wearing her hair down. Hopefully, if she did happen to meet one of her supervisors or another cabin attendant, they wouldn’t take any notice of her out of uniform, or recognise her without her hair pulled back.

  She was on Deck 8, methodically walking the corridors, looking for an open cabin door. Some of them had notoriously troublesome locking mechanisms – yet another bug on Blue Wave’s brand-new ship – and she was hoping to happen upon one that hadn’t locked properly when its occupants had left.

  But after searching for a full hour across five different decks, Corinne was getting anxious. Every minute she was out in passenger space increased her chances of getting caught there, and thus far every cabin door appeared to be securely locked.

  She wondered if she should give up and head back to crew quarters. Maybe even try to steal a master key, somehow.

  A few doors up ahead, a young family emerged from their cabin. Two adults, four small kids – two boys, twins, of about five or six, one older girl and one younger. The parents were hissing at each other, muttering expletives under their breaths, while the children playfully tussled with each other, oblivious to the tension. The older girl was the last one out, pulling the door closed behind her.

  She didn’t look to see if it had locked.

  It hadn’t. It banged off the locking mechanism but didn’t latch. Corinne knew the sound, because she heard it at least a couple of times a shift.

  She kept moving, walking past the door (a sliver of light was between the doorjamb and the door; it was definitely open), following the family up the hallway.

  Up ahead, the father suddenly stopped and turned around.

  ‘Did you lock the door, Jess?’

  The girl nodded her head slowly.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘I better check.’

  The father started back down the hall. He was steps away from Corinne now. She met his eyes, smiled at him.

  ‘It is locked, sir,’ she said. ‘I heard the click.’

  He frowned at her just as she passed him.

  Dammit. She shouldn’t have called him sir. That was a mistake. But she was used to addressing passengers that way, it had just slipped out.

  Corinne kept walking, past the rest of the family now, hoping the father wouldn’t bother to go back. She didn’t risk turning around to check if he did.

  Behind her, one of the children screamed ‘Stop it!’ and then the mother admonished them all. A moment later, they were on the move again, following Corinne down the hall. At the end she turned right towards the stairs while they turned left, towards the elevators. She stopped at a fire evacuation plan, pretending to study it, until the sounds of the family disappeared completely down the other end.

  Quickly, she retraced her steps back to cabin #8091. The door was unlatched. The father hadn’t gone back.

  After checking first that no one else was around, Corinne slipped inside and closed the door behind her, slamming it hard to make sure that, this time, it locked.

  She turned around, faced into the cabin.

  Directly opposite Corinne was a frail, skeletal woman, just skin and bones shrunken inside a gaudy summer dress. Shocked, Corinne went to the mirror above the dressing table to take a closer look, and found red blotches on her neck and chest, blooming purple bruises on arms. Her hair was thin and wispy, her eyes dull.

  Dead already, that’s how sh
e looked.

  She’d found him just in the nick of time.

  The cabin was family style, with one double bed, two singles and a child’s cot. She found the phone mounted on the wall near the TV. Corinne pressed the button marked GUEST SERVICES and waited for the call to connect.

  ‘Good evening, Mr and Mrs Blackwell,’ a female voice said. ‘How may I assist you?’

  Corinne took a deep breath. This was going to have to be convincing.

  ‘Thief,’ she said. ‘Thief. In cabin. Purse. Money. All gone.’

  Then she launched into rapid-fire French, trying to sound as anxious and as panicked as she possibly could.

  ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. I don’t speak French. Are you saying—’

  ‘Thief. Took all money. Sending Security, please.’

  ‘Something is missing from your room? Is that it, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes. Money gone. Security, please. Uh, en Français, s’il vous plait. C’est possible?’

  ‘Okay, ma’am. I’m sending someone now. Please wait there.’

  Corinne hung up the phone. So long as the Celebrate only had one French-speaking security guard on shift right now and the guest services operator didn’t think too much about the passenger name registered to this cabin, ‘Luke’ would be on his way here right now.

  She began to pace up and down the carpeted floor. What was she going to say to him? She sat down on the nearest bed to conserve her energy. Her breathing was laboured, as if she’d just climbed up several flights of stairs. There was a pack of bottled water on the floor under the desk. She took one and drank half of it back in one go.

  She’d found him.

  Or maybe, in the end, he’d found her.

  Either way, she wouldn’t have to hang on for much longer.

  Her pulse was racing at the thought of seeing him again after all this time. She didn’t know what she should do when he came in. Would he recognise her? Surely. He clearly knew she was on the ship. Would she recognise him? She only had that one photo to go by. He could’ve changed his appearance since it was taken. Should she embrace him? Would he let her? Should she call him by his real name when he must go by Luke now?