The Poseidon Adventure

by Paul Gallico

  Muller thought to himself: Lucky? Or was it something in Scott's dynamism that had communicated itself to this Turk? What had made this animal desert his own and suddenly decide to come and cast in his lot with them? He was a primitive, a peasant. What had he smelled? Was he marked for living or dying by his decision? Whichever, up to then Scott had been winning all the way.

  Jane Shelby said to her son, 'Come on, Robin, we'll look.'

  The looking part of it struck Jane Shelby as an absurdity in the face of the catastrophe in which they were involved, where life and death hung in the balance completely out of their control. The sensible thing would have been to have chosen some dark corner and ordered her son to squat. And yet she knew that for all of this she, too, was the victim of that human tendency to go on doing what they had been taught to do or what they were used to doing every day of their lives.

  She reflected that even in war, under fire, latrines were built where a man who in every other detail was living like an animal might retire and eliminate in privacy. And so there they were, the two of them, trapped in the corridor of a capsized ship, remaining afloat by the grace of God knows what, searching for a brass plate with 'C' reversed, 'M' on it, the old-fashioned signal for that apparatus known in Victorian days as a water closet.

  They were intelligent, thinking people now, familiar with the new architecture of their environment, yet each discovery came nevertheless as a shock and a renewal of that sinking of the stomach and feeling of helpless dismay.

  'Oh, Mother!' Robin cried.

  They regarded the upside-down urinals, six of them thrust out from the wall, close to the ceiling, like some ridiculous modern sculptural frieze. Similarly there were the toilet bowls emptied of any water, the hinged seats swinging down. The seal of incongruity upon it all was set by the festoons of the paper rolls that hung to the floor in broad ribbons.

  'Mommy!' Robin wailed, 'I can't!' and he used the name for her that he had in his younger days, before he had graduated to the more grownup 'Mother'.

  It made Jane think of those times too, and she replied, 'Oh come, you're not a baby any more. You must learn to take what comes and adapt yourself. People were using the ground long before anybody ever invented all that nonsense up there on the ceiling. And it was supposed to be much healthier, too.'

  'Mother, I can't,' Robin protested. 'Not in there. It's all full of . . .' Others had been there before him.

  'Well then, do it out here,' she said. 'It isn't going to make all that difference. But hurry.'

  The boy still hung back and through her mind flashed the days and years of his toilet training to pot and seat and all the wonderful blessings of plumbing, and the thought that as a city-bred boy, even on visits to the country, he had probably never once squatted down behind a bush. What a marvelously sanitary world they had created.

  'Then you go away, Mother,' he said.

  'Oh, Robin!' Jane said, 'If you only knew the number of times I've officiated at this rite.'

  'Mother, please!' the boy begged. 'I can't, I couldn't! You said I'm not a baby any more.'

  Jane reproached herself. Of course he was not. And it was she who had moulded his habits. 'Oh, all right,' she said.

  'And don't hang around,' Robin begged, 'I mean really go away. Is anybody coming?'

  Jane looked into the alley but at this time it was almost deserted. She said, 'No. Very well then, hurry, Robin. I'll be with the others.'

  Her instincts bade her remain just around the corner but her sense of fair play countered this and she walked up towards their party.

  Miss Kinsale came forward to meet her with something on her mind. She said, 'Have -- have you found it? Dr Scott suggested that perhaps . . .'

  Jane suppressed a smile and said, 'Yes, I have. But it's not fit for man nor beast. It's all gone topsy-turvy, you know.'

  'Oh dear,' murmured Miss Kinsale. 'I'd forgotten.'

  'Is it anything serious?' Jane asked.

  'No,' Miss Kinsale replied, 'you know, just . . .'

  'Well then,' Jane said, 'I suggest that we nip down this aisle where it's dark, lift up our skirts and dribble quietly, the way we used to do when we were little girls.'

  She wished then that she had not been quite so facetious but to her astonishment Miss Kinsale was not at all put out and merely said, 'How very sensible of you,' and went with her.

  Scott had not yet returned. Left on their own, his followers were inclined to explore.

  'We trust,' The Beamer suggested, 'our noses and our ears. There is the scent of vinous spirits and the sound of raucous laughter.'

  'Right-o,' Pamela said, even though she had never felt less like tippling. She was haunted now by her mother dead in some horribly obscene manner and in some grotesque position that she could not even envision. She knew why she had been taken upon this cruise. It was for her to meet new people, make new friends -- eligible if possible -- to broaden her circle which, as owners of a small but successful dry cleaning establishment in an outlying district of London, was limited.

  She did not even know how to mourn her mother. The city dweller knows death in hospital or home, the unaccustomed silences, the tiptoeing about and 'that room' into which one went in and out with unadmitted irony as noiselessly as possible. But here she was lost and confused.

  She was further miserable because of the man at her side. She would have stayed with her mother that evening if The Beamer had not come tapping at her door. Her unsuspected capacity for holding drink had developed early on in the voyage, when she had outlasted an entire party invited by The Beamer late one night in the smoke-room. Tony Bates, it seemed, was fastidious and did not like lady drunks but this girl who could match him whisky for whisky had been a find. In this manner had begun their curious friendship. But it was no time for drinking now.

  And yet against her very nature she wished The Beamer drunk again so that once more he would be wholly hers. Sober he saw too clearly and there was a hint of mockery in his attitude towards her which was painful. She remembered those two brief sentences which had pierced and wounded her: 'We've only just met!' and 'My God, I've been consorting with a human fly!' Drunk he would lean towards her and rest a warm, moist hand upon her arm in almost an affectionate gesture and say, 'Old girl, I'm afraid I'm beginning to hear what people are saying. We'd better have another one, what?' And thus she was his accepted associate.

  She said, 'I think it comes from there,' and indicated the direction forward on the port side, which formerly had been starboard, where were located most of the storerooms with gangways connecting with interior staircases giving access to the kitchens above. There were service lifts for the speedy transfer of supplies and in one room were enormous tuns of draught beers and ales that were piped foaming directly to the half-dozen bars serving the passengers.

  The Beamer took her by the arm, saying, 'Let's go, my girl!'

  Pamela's heart warmed. Already at the mere thought of finding drink, his behaviour towards her was changing. She was his companion again; he was relying upon her.

  They proceeded down the corridor in the direction Pam had indicated and explored an aisle, On one side of it were what had been right-side up of a series of steel half doors, the tops of which consisted of heavy wire mesh. Now, upside-down, the grill part was on the bottom and the wooden cases of wines had come tumbling from their racks and displayed their stencilled labels tantalizingly: Vin de Bourgogne, Bordeaux, Rosé, Côte du Rhône. The doors were heavily padlocked. The display was at eye-level and the two stood hand-in-hand like children looking into the cages of a zoo.

  'God,' breathed The Beamer, 'what a sight! What we want now is the Reverend's axe. A wine drunk is a lovely one. You can understand why the Bacchi wove vine leaves in their hair.' He then pounded upon the iron with his fists and cried aloud, 'Chinese torturers!'

  'Oh, Tony!' the girl said and bled for him.

  The opposite side was the champagne room. Here the cases, tightly stocked to the ceiling, had not been d
islodged by the whip of the capsized vessel and simply advertised their contents upside down: Roederer, Lanson, the yellow-labelled Veuve Cliquot, Mumm, Pommerey, Dom Perignon, Cristal.

  The Beamer said, 'Bubbly, phui! A woman's drink, recommended by society doctors in cases of mal-de-mer or in early pregnancy.' And then with a grimace he added, 'Sour grapes and no pun intended. I'd drink even that. But what about that nose of yours?'

  'Farther down, I think,' said the girl. They followed the scent to the spirits room. It was open. Cases and bottles were tumbled about. The storekeeper in a blue uniform and a half naked sailor lay before the doors, each clutching a bottle, unconscious.

  The Beamer cried, 'Wonderful girl! Wonderful nose! Nirvana. Whisky, rum, gin, vodka, brandy -- we're home! What will you have?'

  'I'm hungry,' Nonnie announced, 'I didn't have much din.'

  Muller said, 'We ought to be able to find something to eat. Come on, let's forage.'

  The long alleyway known to the crew as Broadway, not only was their thoroughfare but served as a staging area for the vast supplies of food and drink stored under deep refrigeration or semi-cold, or packed away in rodent-proof rooms below at special temperatures for preservation.

  Every twenty-four hours, consignments of tinned goods, cereals, jams, jellies, conserves, bacon, hams, cheeses, butter and eggs, coffee, teas and sugar, fish, meat and fowls, sausages, vegetables and fresh fruits were sent up to special rooms off the alley on their way to the kitchens, thus preserving everything fresh with less likelihood of wastage.

  Not packed as tightly or as carefully racked as in the bins below, the powerful whip of the overturning ship had spilled most of the edibles into an unsavoury heap.

  The floor of .the breakfast storeroom was a glutinous mass of coffee, flour, milk, bacon, sausage and hundreds of smashed eggs. Nonnie made a face and gave a little shudder. 'Boy,' she said, 'what a mess! I was in a show once where they did a scene like that. Two comics with a lot of eggs and flour and water, chucking it about. We had to do six minutes in front of the drop afterwards while they cleaned it up. Is it all going to be like that, or do you suppose we'll be able to find something? I could do with a good tuck-in.'

  Muller had been lost in the picture she had drawn of the famous knock-about comedy act adored of children and Nonnie, in some absurd costume, high-kicking in front of the backdrop while stage hands operated with brooms and shovels. He said, 'Come on, I think I see succour ahead.' They went past tumbled quarters of beef, lamb and veal which would have been on their way to the butcher's shop for final processing, and tumbled about heaps of tins, inviolable to anyone not equipped with a tin opener.

  Nonnie stumbled on ahead with a little cry of delight, 'Bikkies! Lots of them.'

  The upside-down locker they had found smashed open was the one that supplied those dull and inevitable afternoon teas awaited so eagerly by the British, served on silver trays by those immaculate stewards in the main lounge promptly at four every afternoon. Here, besides the tins of Oolong, Orange Pekoe and Earl Grey China teas, was collected sandwich bread, tubes of fish paste, jellies, jams, muffins for toasting, raisin cake, petit-fours and packets of tea biscuits, in short all of the non-perishable articles necessary to the rite.

  It had all been overturned and hurled from the shelves into a jumble upon the floor, not disgustingly but rather like a heaped-up Christmas pile of edible treasure trove; unopened packages of ginger nuts, sugar wafers, chocolate wholemeal, vanilla fingers, mingled with muffins and cup cakes, and heaps of petit-fours covered with multicoloured icing.

  The sight was entrancing to Nonnie and she cried, 'Oh, yummy!' her eyes grown large, her tiny face a mask of anticipatory greed. 'What shall we have first?'

  'Wait,' said Muller, 'we might as well make ourselves comfortable and tackle this Roman fashion.'

  He burrowed into the pile, pushing it into two halves to make a space in between where they could lie down side by side and had only to reach out to pluck something delectable from the mountainous heaps. He prised open several jars of preserves which he divided between Nonnie and himself.

  'Sorry about no tea available,' he said, 'but there ought to be a coke machine somewhere around.'

  'Never mind,' said Nonnie, only half audible due to a mouthful. She was stuffing herself with both hands. It was actually the same choice as passed around by the stewards, but the very profusion of the cakes brought on a kind of frenzy of eating to the girl.

  Leaning on one elbow, Muller rather fastidiously dipped half of a muffin into strawberry jam and ate it with the same delicacy he would have shown at a tea table in Claridge's.

  Nonnie laughed at him. 'You're a proper gent, aren't you?' she said.

  He was amused. 'How would you define a gent? I've seen a lot of them all over the world, an extraordinary number have managed to incorporate a large amount of heel.'

  Nonnie's mouth was filled again. She had engulfed a square chocolate petit-four topped by a half-candied cherry, in one hand she held a cup cake and in the other a half-opened packet of cream biscuits. Compelled to keep it short, she confined herself to trying to say, 'kindness', but it came out 'kin'eff.'

  When she had swallowed, she asked, 'What did you mean, Roman style?'

  'Oh, well,' Hubie replied, 'you know. The Romans ate their banquets lying down.'

  Nonnie said, 'I've been in Rome, but nobody ever ate like that.'

  'I mean the ancient ones, as in Nero's time.'

  'Oh,' cried Nonnie, 'you mean when they had orgies? I went to an orgy once, but it was in London. It was frightfully dull. Everybody got drunk and said we should all take our clothes off.'

  'Did you?' said Muller.

  'Not everything!' Nonnie replied. 'Then we stood around with egg on our faces, giggling, and thought what a rum bunch the men looked without their trousies. A lot of men have such rotten legs.'

  Muller asked, 'So what happened?'

  'The men were too tight to do anything. They got off to one side and started playing leapfrog and kept falling down. It was winter and it was bloody cold as well. Sybil and I put our things on and went home.'

  She suddenly turned her back upon him and Muller heard a slight catch of a sob and wondered what other memories this absurdity had suddenly stirred. And then he thought he knew. He touched her shoulder gently. 'Sybil?' he asked.

  Nonnie turned back to him. 'Y-yes,' and he saw that tears had come. Then she asked, 'Is there any apricot jam?'

  'Coming up!' Muller said. He unscrewed the top of a jar and passed it across to her.

  She dipped in a finger, licked it clean, repeated it and was comforted. She said, 'You're kind. You understand things, don't you? That's my idea of a proper gent.'

  Muller was experiencing a most curious kind of contentment even while he was reflecting upon what more perilous and at the same time ridiculous situation in which anyone could be plunged, to be lying here clad in the remnants of dinner clothes, as it were, on a capsized ship in the midst of a mountain of cookies, next to a common little hoofer with nothing on but a vulgar pink peignoir held together with his braces. Her face and little mouth were sticky with cakes and jam and so were her fingers. She lay on her side, leaning on one elbow, contemplating him with childlike enjoyment. He was utterly charmed by her.

  CHAPTER XI

  What about the Reverend Dr Scott?

  Crew members had generated disturbingly again. They seemed to come out from the walls, though actually it was from the side aisles and the upside-down storerooms and workshops.

  The long alley echoed with their shouts to one another, the rasping of their breathing as they floundered this way or that, and some were weeping. The reversed staircases defeated them. Most of them still had the old topography of the ship so firmly implanted in their minds that they could not see her as she was now; topsides under sixty feet of water, keel up. They were still thinking in terms of stations and lifeboat muster. No one was helping or advising them. They were lost souls in a world where they
no longer knew left from right or up from down.

  In the half gloom they could still identify and avoid the staircases and companionways that had led originally from the alley up to 'D' deck and which now were wells. Aft a whole section of the partition had been blown away, leaving a dark, bottomless pit.

  Shelby said, 'Scott's right. If the lights fail, it'll be hell here. Those people will go crazy. We'd better get out of their way.' He and the rest had remained where Scott had left them.

  'Such as where?' Rogo asked.

  Martin said, 'Along the side, I expect, like he told us. Up against the wall there. The big pipe will give us some protection. I could do with a rest.'

  Rogo said, 'That makes sense. Lie down there, Linda, and you won't get stepped on.'

  Linda cursed him as usual but no one even heard it any more. Her obscenities used like a sailor's had lost all potency and meaning.