by Paul Gallico
Manny Rosen said, 'Mamma, Mamma, don't get so excited! You're doing fine!'
Once more Scott ordered and they heaved. She was two feet off the floor now and held there by their combined strength. Belle continued to scream, 'Let me down! Let me down! Manny, make them stop!'
Manny Rosen hovered around the semicircle of men, now anxiously crying, 'Maybe she shouldn't do it. Maybe she's hurting herself.'
They heaved again and like something in a pantomime the fat woman rose with a scaly sound as the pipes tore at the front of her dress. 'Can you take hold of the axe and hold on for a moment?'
Belle was too frightened to scream any longer. She gripped frantically at the handle and it steadied her long enough for Scott to bend over and get his own back beneath her feet, while the others reached up their hands to steady her.
'Now let go,' Scott ordered her, 'and just lift up your arms. They can almost reach you at the top.' He strained and pushed, but her grip was now tenacious, something to hold on to. Sweat was pouring from her face. A loud sound emanated from her as she broke wind.
Linda Rogo let out a yell of laughter.
Jane Shelby turned upon her crying, 'Oh, you horror!'
Linda blew a raspberry at her as loud and long as the one that had just resounded. Jane's arm had been drawn back to slash her across the face, but it was halted by Rogo's cold voice, 'Cut it out, girls! Cut it out! Time for kidding around later.'
With all the power of his great back, Scott strained again.
'Oh,' wailed Belle, 'I can't hold any more. I'm falling.' She could no longer maintain her hold and now that she was half-way up, the others below, Martin, Rogo, The Beamer and Muller who were all of no more than average height, could not reach enough of her body to keep her pinned to the wall. She teetered for a moment and the edifice seemed about to crash. In desperation Shelby from the top, secured a momentary grip with his fingers in her dark hair.
'No, no!' Manny shouted, jumping up and down in anguish. 'Not by the hair! Not by the hair! Leave her alone!'
But automatic to the pressure on her head, Belle Rosen raised her arms to try to relieve it and Pamela Reid coolly leaning over seized one of her wrists. The English girl asked Shelby, 'I've got one of her wrists, can you get the other?'
He did so. He called to her, 'Just take it easy, Mrs Rosen, and don't be afraid. We'll have you up in a jiffy now.'
Their hold had taken some of the strain off Scott and he now straightened up swiftly, quickly placed Mrs Rosen's feet on either side of his shoulders and then incredibly thus burdened, began the climb himself.
The white, upturned face of the fat woman, her small polyp-like mouth moving miserably as she made mewing and whimpering sounds, rose higher, enabling the two at the top to slide their grip to her arms and drag Mrs Rosen over the top, where she lay on her back, gasping and crying, her arms and legs twitching, like a great fat baby.
Scott dropped down again and said, 'You're next, Rosen.'
Strangely the little man did not protest, although his hands and knees were shaking and his head too was moving from side to side. He said, 'Yeah, let me go. I wanna get up to Mamma. I must get up to her. How do I do it?'
Muller recognized the symptoms of man under stress. Adrenalins would be pouring into his body. 'Just go,' he said. 'Don't worry. We'll boost you.'
It was so. Manny clawed his way upwards without ever turning back or wavering.
Scott grinned as his feet disappeared over the top. He said, 'I'll bet you boys don't go up like that! Okay, the little monkey next. Come on, Robin. Do we throw you, or can you make it under your own steam?'
'I can do it,' the boy said, clambered up and then called, 'Come on, Mum! Come on, Sis! It's easy.'
Jane Shelby said, 'It is, when you're ten.' Nevertheless, she made the ascent with singular grace, followed by her daughter.
Scott asked. 'Who's next?'
'Me,' Nonnie answered.
Muller said, 'Just imagine you're in a pantomime. Exit fairies upwards, laughingly.'
Nonnie went over to the wall and stood there a moment looking up. She was so diminutive that it seemed even higher than it had been before. She said, 'Oh dear, this blasted dressing-gown.'
Linda said, 'Why don't you take it off?'
Nonnie made no reply, but two tiny teeth showed over her lower lip and without further ado, she started up. Although she had tied the dressing-gown around her waist with Hubie's braces, nevertheless it still fell open.
Linda giggled. 'Old man Shelby's having himself a look this time. Not that she's got anything to look at.'
Nonnie waved to Muller, 'Sugar Plum fairy okay, waiting for Principal Boy.'
Scott said, 'Will you go next, Mrs Rogo?'
Linda said, 'Oh, I'm scared! I'll need help. Can you give me your arm?' Rogo stepped forward. She said, 'Him, not you!' She put her foot on to the first ledge and a hand through a projection on the piping.
With her white bra and panties, she had thrown her coat to her husband. The Beamer thought for an instant that she looked like a circus acrobat about to mount to her trapeze. Scott took her free arm and lifted.
'Boy!' said Linda, 'Some muscle!' She went up a few feet and hung there, looking down at him, her rump level with his face, 'Ooh!' she said, 'I'm scared to go any farther. Boost me.'
The Beamer said to himself, 'Why, the little bitch! She's teasing him.'
Without the slightest hesitation, Scott applied one huge hand to her bottom and pushed. Linda went like a cat over a wall. 'Hey!' she gasped, 'You play rough!' but kept on going.
Miss Kinsale said, 'May I try next?' The men gathered at the foot of the bulkhead all looked around startled. They had quite forgotten her.
Scott asked, 'Can you manage?'
'Oh, yes,' said Miss Kinsale, 'when I was a girl on our estate in the country, we always used to climb trees. It's really almost like a tree, isn't it? And Dr Scott has so cleverly made a branch for us. No, no, thank you, I shan't need any help, really. But one of you might bring my shoes, please.'
She stepped out of them and climbed the wall with the same quiet, introspective deliberation that marked all her behaviour.
To Rogo, Muller, The Beamer and Martin, Scott then said, 'All right, fellows, that's that. Get on up. We've lost enough time.' And when they arrived at the top, he himself made the climb half-way, then swung over and seized the gleaming rail of the overhead staircase, freed the axe, used it to gain another hold higher up and in a moment had joined the rest spread out across the upside-down floor of the long, wide, murky alley.
Belle Rosen was sitting up, her husband kneeling with arms protectively about her and she was sobbing uncontrollably.
'Na na! Mamma,' he was comforting. 'Don't take on so. It's all over. You done it.'
'I'm so ashamed,' she wailed. 'I'm so ashamed!'
Ashamed?' Rosen said, 'Ashamed from what? You were great. What you got to be ashamed about?'
'I wet myself,' she went on, 'I couldn't help it. I couldn't look nobody in the face any more. Like a baby I couldn't hold my water. What must anybody think?'
'Nothing, Mamma! Nonsense! So what? Who cares? But you were great! I'm telling you, you were great.' And then looking around almost defiantly at the others, he challenged them, 'She was great, wasn't she? Really great!'
Astonishingly it was the dry as dust, uncommunicative little Martin who gave the response, 'Yeah,' he said, 'that's right. You were really great, Mrs Rosen.'
CHAPTER X
Broadway
Broadway, it developed, was not only the wide, subterranean connecting alley that Acre had described to them, it was as well a warren of storerooms, butcher's shops, poultry refrigerators, bakeries and stockrooms for every kind of comestible. Numerous staircases and alleyways opened off it at intervals.
On a normal visit, one would have encountered store-keepers, masters-at-arms, sailors, bakers with flour-dusted arms, stewards, waiters, men from the paint and carpenter's shops, engineers, wipers, oilers a
nd technicians when the watch in the engine and boiler rooms changed, all going about their business with the minimum of confusion. Only now it was bottom-side up. There had been catastrophe, explosion and sudden death and the survivors amongst the staff were looking for escape.
They knew one another more or less, or could identify by dress, but they did not know the passengers who now intruded into their domain, a strange group led by a huge man in a white, open-necked shirt with a most motley-looking assemblage of women with torn frocks, a girl in a pink négligée and another in bra and panties.
Nor was this group, even when identified as passengers, any concern of the denizens of this area. Their jobs were to serve them unseen, to bake bread, to turn lamb into paper-frilled French chops or garlic-stuffed gigots, to beat up eggs for soufflés and produce whisky, beer and wine in exchange for chits noting receipt of same. From the first throb of the ship's engines after casting off to the final shouts of the dockers seizing ropes and drawing cables to bollards, most of them never so much as saw a passenger or cared. The Reverend Scott and his party were in a land as alien as visited by any Gulliver.
After the solitude of 'D' deck and the strain of the climb, it seemed as though the presence of people inhabiting Broadway would come as something of a relief. Instead it turned out to be more of a nightmare. For as Scott led them astern once more and they moved away from the staircase, the place took on the aspect of purgatory, with people milling about mindlessly. Some of them were drunk, weaving and staggering on the uncertain footing, for the steel conduits here covered the width of the alley; they were larger and contained more valves, turns and pitfalls.
There was one officer amongst them. His face was covered with dried blood from a head wound; the shoulder where his uniform had been ripped away was likewise bleeding. He wore the three stripes of a second engineer on the remaining sleeve. But he had no answers to their questions. His eyes were vacant and when he opened his mouth to try to speak, no sounds were forthcoming. The best that Jane Shelby, Miss Kinsale and Susan could do for him was to sit him down, staunch his bleeding with the napkins they had carried and keep him from his stunned, aimless wandering.
They found momentary contact with two English stewardesses less panicked than the others who, recognizing them, returned for a moment to that British discipline instilled in them on the voyages they had made with the Poseidon when she had been the Atlantis. One of them addressed herself to Jane Shelby saying, 'Oh, madam, ain't it terrible! We don't know what's really happened, or where we are, or how many's been killed. There's an awful lot badly hurt. Are you all right, madam? Is there anything we can do for you?'
Jane felt the pathos. These frightened women so much more needed something done for them than in their state they could ever do for anyone else.
'No, thank you,' Jane Shelby said, 'look after yourselves and your friends.'
The woman was pathetically relieved. She said, 'Yes, madam, that's what we're trying to do. But there ought to be an officer along in a moment. He'll show you how to get to your lifeboat stations. There ought to be lifeboats launched by now.'
There was no use in telling them that the lifeboats, still attached to their davits, would be fifty feet below the waterline and if any had broken loose, or inflatable life-rafts had come to the surface, they would be drifting about aimlessly with at the most perhaps, a surviving sailor or two catapulted from the top deck into the sea, unable to do more than bewilderedly cling to them.
'Yes, I'm sure there will,' Jane said. Her husband marvelled at her control.
The stewardess said, 'We're supposed to go to our posts, but we can't find them,' and then moved away with the others.
Shelby himself had to pull himself together and not succumb to the sickening, almost childlike fear that he was no longer alive; that he was dead and in hell. For the men passed them by as though they were not there, sometimes brushing up against them as if they had been invisible. And indeed, in the gloom it was difficult to distinguish, and had he not been so fearful, he would have noted that there was a considerable diminishing of light from the emergency bulbs.
A group of deckhands and artisans stumbled by. Hubie Muller had continued to try all the languages he knew and now hit upon two Italian artificers and talked with them.
Rogo said, 'Muller's got a hold of a couple of Ities,' and then addressing Hubie directly, 'Find out where the hell they think they're going.'
Scott queried, 'What did they say?'
'There's no use going that way,' Muller said, indicating the stern from whence the group had come, 'one said it's blocked off. Punto di fermata. Caotico. I gather it's chaos. One of the boilers blew up; two of the others just ripped loose and fell into the sea. It's the same in the engine room. You can't get through any more. He says the turbines and generators have torn away. He looked in there earlier and it's full of death. They're going to try to get through to the bow.'
Scott was unimpressed. He said, 'Tell them we're still going aft.'
Rogo spoke up angrily, 'Oh, are we? What about asking us? You heard what those guys said it was like. They seem to know what they're doing.' A short while before he had seemed resigned to Scott's leadership but the eerie atmosphere of the gloomy alley and the confusion there had unsettled him again.
Scott said evenly, 'If you want to join them, that's up to you. But, since when did you accept a situation on the say-so of somebody else without investigating?'
Linda cried, 'Don't let him talk you into it, Rogo. I want to go the other way.'
Rogo ordered, 'Aw, shut up for a minute, will you?' His truculence drained from him. He was a hard man but out of his element. He was a big shot in New York -- Mike Rogo. Here he was nobody. . . . He hated Scott for it but he hated himself, too. For he knew that basically the Minister was right: once you were committed to a line of action, you didn't go off half-cocked because of something you heard. To Scott he said, 'Okay, okay, keep your shirt On!'
Scott told Muller, 'Ask them if they want to come with us.'
It precipitated an argument. While it was going on, one man quite suddenly detached himself and came over to Scott's party. He was built like a wrestler; squat, powerfully muscled, semi-bald with a short scrubby moustache, but his dark eyes were strangely mild and gentle. He was clad in a pair of dungaree overalls, shirtless but with the straps fastened over broad shoulders. He had a huge mat of black hair covering his chest.
Ranged alongside Scott who loomed over him, he said, 'Me go you.'
This set off a gesticulating harangue to which the man paid not the slightest attention. Muller queried the Italians further and told Scott, 'He's a Turk, an oiler. He seems to have survived the engine room because they had sent him to get some cokes when it happened. His name is Kemal. He speaks Turkish and Greek but only a few words of English.'
At the mention of his name the man nodded his head vigorously and smiled, showing several gold teeth.
The Italian said to Muller, 'He's crazy! I think you're all crazy! Anyway, what difference does it make? We're all going to die.'
The group turned and moved away. Linda made as if to follow them. Rogo stretched out an arm and hooked two fingers into the waistband of her panties. Had she proceeded, they would have ripped off. She burst into tears, turned and beat upon Rogo's chest with her two fists. He made no resistance and seemed hardly to feel the blows. Eventually she stopped.
The lights were now noticeably dimmer. The ghostly population of Broadway at times surrounded them, at others melted away leaving the alley all but deserted as they searched for a way to escape, popping in and out of the side aisles, most of them unable to adjust to the new situation of their domain turned upside-down. They were bound by their old habits, unable to think clearly or compensate.
Robin Shelby said, 'Mother, I've got to go.'
'Oh lord!' his father cried, 'Must you?'
Jane said, 'Mustn't one?'
Shelby said, 'Yes, but where?'
'There ought to be one or
two for the crew along here,' Muller remarked. 'They'll be marked W.C. But don't forget it'll be reversed.'
Scott said, 'Yes, that's right. And I suggest that if any other of you have similar needs, that you attend to them now. I'm going aft to see what it's like. I don't know how much longer this lighting is going to last. If they should go out, there'll be panic amongst these people here, if it happens all of you press to the side of the alley. Lie down. Cover your heads with your hands and remain exactly where you are. I'll find you, then, by voice.' He turned to the new member of the party and said, 'Come with me.'
The Turk grunted unquestioningly, 'Okay.'
Scott nodded and remarked, 'We're lucky. He'll know the engine room.'