The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  And there’s Joan and John, a talkative, tapestry-crafts, mannish sort of woman and her ex-teacher husband from Wollongong. He sits up very straight like the teacher’s pet in school. ‘John’s got Alzheimer’s,’ Joan announces in front of him when they meet new people. This is awkward. John’s always dressed like a primary-school boy in short-sleeved shirt and short, elastic-waisted pants pulled up high, short grey socks and sneakers. I made some friendly, fellow-teacher-type remarks to him but he just stared straight ahead and pulled up his socks.

  The Singles next. There’s Olaf, a lovelorn Swedish businessman and widower who’s trying to woo Jane, a retired doctor. Linda the ancestry buff. And Doug Monk, a talkative former pharmacist who’s full of facts on everything, like ships’ tonnages and speeds and the names of seabirds. He’s a keen birder. (‘Frigate bird at two o’clock,’ he says. God save us!)

  And the computer hogger, Brad, a noisy Brisbane businessman who buys a garish comical T-shirt in every port and then wears it to dinner. He has a head of carefully tended, suspiciously dark hair in the early Beatle style, like an eighties current-affairs host. He goes hatless in the tropical sun. When I asked him, ‘Aren’t you going to wear a hat, Brad?’ he answered loudly, for everyone’s benefit (the other men are mostly bald), ‘No point, I’ve got hair.’ Brad loves his hair.

  Did I tell you I’ve been handing out little toy koalas and kangaroos to the locals in each town? To shopgirls and waiters and such. ‘For your children,’ I tell them. After forty years, I miss the kids, I must say. Some ex-teachers don’t at all, but I do.

  My koala distribution made Doug grab my wrist in San Jose and say to me, ‘Has anyone told you, Beverley, that you have a very warm nature?’ I think he’s trying to crack on to me. Only the wrist so far, thank goodness!

  *

  There’s another older woman on board, Susan (who I call the SeaDream Socialist), travelling with a much younger husband, Cliff. She told me she was enthralled with Mao, Fidel, Ho and others in her youth, and travelled to China in the 1970s. One afternoon she escaped from her group in Peking and headed down an alley with a friend where they came across an old man doing beautiful calligraphy in a room with a guard.

  He spoke English, so they conversed pleasantly for some time. Later Susan rejoined the group and told their tour leader. He said, all excited, ‘You stumbled on to the last Emperor of China!’ Well, the younger brother actually, who was heir to the throne.

  Susan said she recently read that he was still alive today, living in Beijing, still under guard and spending his days doing calligraphy. For some reason, she didn’t want me to repeat this story. ’Keep this to yourself,’ she said. And here I am telling you!

  What I found interesting about this idealistic old socialist, who seemingly once had a successful career in the public service (and who encouraged her partner to turn down an ambassador’s job because she wasn’t interested in the responsibilities of an ambassador’s wife as it would curtail her own travel plans), was her final comment:

  ‘Oh, I love SeaDream cruises.’

  Why? I asked her.

  ‘Because of the butler service – they look after you so well.’

  *

  Of course all the birders on board flocked to last night’s lecture, ‘Birds of Central America’, with Dr Raoul Martinez, a Colombian naturalist. Tonight it’s ‘Marine Mammal ID’, with Dr Raoul again, the next night a screened doco, A Man, A Place, A Canal. Doug Monk, the party’s keenest birder, crossed swords with Dr Raoul over the global distribution of the blue heron.

  It got a bit heated, with Dr Raoul suggesting that Doug was confusing it with the grey heron, and maybe even the white heron, which got Doug riled (‘I know my herons!’), and to escape the heron ruckus everyone fled to the Club Bar.

  Over drinks there I overheard the oldest gang talking about ‘Green Dreams’. Dr Jane (unmarried, tall, good dresser, great colour coordination) later volunteered the news that Cath, Dennis and Roy were planning to check out pharmacies at the ports en route for those euthanasia pills freely available in Belize and Panama and Mexico and throughout Central America.

  When I sat down they’d been boldly discussing the Green Dreams. Jane said they meant Nembutal, the death pill. Roy was also announcing defiantly that he’s ‘ninety and going strong’, and Dennis said proudly he was ‘a young eighty-eight everywhere but the knees’. Cath didn’t say, but she’s probably mid-eighties. They seem pretty fit and happy to me so maybe the Green Dreams are just a precaution for the bedside drawer.

  Jane had already volunteered that she’s in cancer recovery herself and that ‘No one gets to see me naked these days’. From the ardent look of him, Olaf wants to try though!

  There’s one ‘younger’ couple on board, Bevan and Jessica, probably early fifties, with the look of second-marriage newlyweds, maybe on their honeymoon. Anyway they’re rattling the cages of some of the older couples with their affectionate public displays.

  Not the men so much, but definitely the older women. ‘I’m glad Leon and I aren’t joined at the hip,’ one older woman (Dawn) bitched. The honeymooning woman is especially demonstrative. I bet they’re the only passengers having sex.

  The only passengers maybe. But the word in the Club Bar is that the tour controller, Hannah Jansen, a vivacious thirty-something South African, is having an affair with the captain, Sigge Nilsson. He’s Swedish, tall, blond and only about forty. When glances and murmured instructions pass between them there are winks and nudges all around.

  *

  I must tell you about one more passenger – Ingrid. She needs an email on her own. In the Sydney departure lounge I’d spotted this skinny, gaudily dressed old bird sinking champagnes and already loud and tipsy. As we belted up for the flight to Mexico she plonked down next to me so I said, ‘Good evening.’

  Her response was a curt ‘I guess so’. OK, I thought, what a rude one you are. After a couple of hours in the air, impatient with the staff’s resistance to serve her more wine, she asked me to press my attendant button for drinks – for her. While we waited, a string of complaints followed about the flight (‘a Mickey Mouse airline’) and just about everything else.

  She came from Melbourne (‘Bleak City’, she called it), and when I inquired if she was travelling alone, she said, ‘Of course. I won’t travel with my husband any more. He’s just a bloody nuisance since he’s had his guts cut out.’

  People were preparing to sleep, but Ingrid complained that she didn’t want to yet. When the wine supplies cut out she sighed loudly, grumbled, stood up, took off her red jeans and bra (I’m not joking!), everything but her knickers, stood bare-breasted in the aisle and changed into her airline pyjamas.

  The flight attendants rushed over. ‘You can’t do that here, madam!’ But Ingrid insisted. ‘I get claustrophobia in those stupid toilets.’ What were they going to do? Throw an old woman off the plane at 35,000 feet? Next morning she stood in the aisle again, shed her pyjamas, bared her boobs (very perky, obvious inserts, I kid you not), and got dressed again.

  As luck would have it, Ingrid was joining the SeaDream cruise too. It turned out she was a loner. She discourages company, hangs around by herself smoking like a chimney, and is always the first into the Club Bar and the last to leave.

  Every night, Diego, the on-board entertainer, plays romantic ballads on his keyboard. He reads the lyrics on a computer screen. He sings in English but I don’t know if he understands what he’s reading. His Filipino version of ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ goes, ‘She don’t play crap games with barons and eels’. Eels!

  Every night Ingrid gets up by herself and dances. Diego claps her and gives her the thumbs up as she swings her bony booty like she’s eighteen!

  Guess what she announced to all and sundry in the Club Bar on our first night at sea? ‘I’m not getting involved with anyone on this trip. No more rumpy-pumpy for this girl. I’m seventy-eight and I’m closing shop.’

  Diego launched into his syrupy interpretation o
f ‘Satisfaction’ and Ingrid began prancing about like Mick Jagger. We all looked at each other, and people raised their eyebrows and stared into their drinks. At this stage no one was used to Ingrid yet.

  *

  I must tell you about our stopover in Honduras. We’re at the Las Palmas resort for the day. Intermittent rainstorms as we shelter under cabanas. The beach is man-made – sheets of plastic laid over the reef, with sand dumped on top of them. The seabed is shallow, but slippery and oozy to walk on. And Leon with Parkinson’s is wading out by himself. He’s two hundred metres out, but in only about two feet of water, not much more than knee deep, when he slips over and can’t get up. He’s struggling and going under, constantly slipping and falling face first.

  I’m the only one in the tour party to take notice. His wife Dawn is drinking mojitos in a cabana and not watching him. Nor is anyone from the ship, or the tour organisers. So I run into the water and wade out to him, pull him up – he’s face down and thrashing and spluttering – and with difficulty get him to his feet.

  He’s a heavy chap, Leon. And I support him and walk him into shore. He’s in a state, panting and snot streaming, and can’t talk.

  At this point the tour doctor, Graeme Fitzsimmons, behaves strangely. He photographs us stepping onto the sand but he doesn’t move to check Leon at all. The whole tour staff’s attitude is peculiar. Though no one has actually voiced that he was in danger, they’re instantly denying it. ‘He’s fine,’ Hannah Jansen says loudly. ‘Looking good, Leon!’ They’ve turned his close call around. Terrified of bad publicity, I’m guessing. And a legal suit.

  ‘Silly of him to swim by himself,’ they murmur. ‘But we were onto the situation from the beginning.’

  Leon might easily have drowned but no one thanks me for lifting him up and bringing him into shore. Strangely, neither Leon nor his wife speak to me either after that.

  *

  Guess what? Ingrid disappeared in Panama City yesterday. She wandered off from our shore party in the Old Quarter. Panama’s not the sort of place to go missing. We walked up and down the lanes looking for her, peering into stalls run by Indians with faces and costumes out of history. No Ingrid.

  Our bus waited and waited in the heat. Sailing time was getting closer, our crew was panicking and eventually they called the tourist police. Finally Ingrid was escorted aboard by the cops. Turns out she’d gone looking for a bar, got caught up with a mob of Spaniards and eventually joined their group from another cruise ship.

  Early next morning we’re all out on the top deck watching in our bathrobes as we enter the locks of the Panama Canal. Fascinating to watch, as the SeaDream creeps along, only millimetres separating the ship’s sides from the locks’ edges. Two determined egrets follow the ship all the way through the canal. Surely, I think, there can’t be any fish in the constantly rising and falling and violently churning water.

  ‘That’s typical egret behaviour,’ says Doug Monk.

  Ingrid’s on deck, too, smoking, in a red silk robe, but she’s deliberately not looking at the ship’s progress through the locks. She’s going through the once-in-a-lifetime experience of the Panama Canal while deliberately turning away from the activity! She’s a strange one!

  I forgot to mention that she’s in my muster station for lifeboat drill. So is Doug Monk. As we stood there in our lifejackets listening to the drill announcement, Ingrid was rolling her eyes in boredom and ostentatiously smoking beside a No Smoking sign.

  Doug whispered something to me. ‘Beverley, If we’re shipwrecked and starving and floating in this lifeboat for weeks in the middle of the ocean, I want you to know I’m not eating Ingrid!’

  *

  Last night the oldie gang all got animated in the Club Bar about that young Australian couple who jumped overboard last month from the Islander Princess. Remember? It was all over the media. Very sad business.

  I can easily visualise the hour before the incident. Drinks. Old jealousies. An argument at dinner. A break-up is threatened. The girl gets emotional. Wanting to make a dramatic gesture, I’m guessing, she climbs over the railing, stands there a long moment on the ledge, waiting for him to say something that will change things. It had better be good. A few seconds of silence pass, or maybe he’s desperately pleading. For an instant she holds complete power.

  And then she jumps. Immediately, her boyfriend jumps after her. His natural instinct. So it’s curtains for him, too.

  He was a country-town paramedic, Roy said, and it was in his gallant nature to save people.

  The terrible tragedy that can result from a moment of madness! All night I couldn’t stop thinking about them struggling in the ocean. Next day when I prised a computer away from Brad, I googled Cruise Passengers Overboard. Well, you’d be amazed how often it happens. Guess how many people go overboard and drown in the sea? On a luxury cruise? On their holiday of a lifetime?

  An average of twenty-four people a year have gone overboard in the last five years. Two people a month. The average age of a passenger who jumps overboard is forty-one and you’re most likely to go overboard (either fall or jump) on the last night of your cruise. For some reason, people from California and Florida go overboard more than others.

  The good news. Well, good-ish. Falling overboard doesn’t always mean you’ll drown. Sixteen people have been rescued since 2000 – one a year – one woman after eighteen hours in the water. Not great odds though: one in twenty-four saved.

  Naturally most people who go overboard are drunk or doing silly things, showing off by climbing on the railing or between cabin balconies. Males mostly. No surprises there.

  *

  You know that genteel dining-room routine aboard passenger ships where the captain and the ship’s officers spread themselves around at dinner? Each table gets an officer. Of course the captain’s table is the prime spot. My table got the ship’s doctor.

  But Dr Jaime and I struck up an interesting conversation. Turns out he’s on his first cruise, too. He’s early fifties, I estimate. He said he’s winding down professionally. His first job was emergency surgery in Mexico City but his most recent position was with a company that sold a cancer treatment taken from the venom of the blue scorpion.

  The blue scorpion is found only in Cuba. They electrocute the scorpion (but don’t kill it because it’s too too valuable) to make it release the venom. This is mixed with water, then used to destroy tumours.

  The only problem, according to Dr Jaime, is there aren’t enough blue scorpions to meet the demand. Their reproduction in captivity is very difficult. Even though each female scorpion gives birth to about forty-five young, they easily die in the laboratory.

  The venom is extracted by a mild electric shock to the scorpion. This extraction method causes considerable damage to the scorpion over time, so they’re only kept for a limited period, and then set free into their natural environment to breed.

  Not surprisingly, the Cubans don’t have a licence to sell this alternative medicine into the US or Europe, with the exception of Albania. So you have to get your stock of blue scorpion venom from Albania.

  Scorpions? Albania? I queried if it actually worked, and he said his mother had a tumour on her face that cleared up after the blue scorpion treatment. He nearly lost me when he said cheerfully he’d take it himself, if necessary, ‘Because I want to grow to a ripe old age like you.’ The cheek!

  At the end of dinner, however, after more wines, he gripped me by the elbow as I was leaving the dining room. His eyes went all puppyish and he said, ‘Success rate is about forty per cent, the same as most serious pharmaceuticals. But not enough for me to spend my life on blue scorpions.’

  I spent most of today on the top deck. Ingrid was sitting by herself there, smoking, while hundreds of flying fish sped above the ocean. I said, ‘Morning,’ as always, ‘Aren’t they great?’ indicating the flying fish glistening in the sun, and she grunted, as always, and turned away.

  An elderly Swiss fellow on the deck agreed with me
about the flying fish though. I hadn’t met him before – Klaus, a retired accountant. He told me he flies to Cuba every six months for a week of salsa dancing. Don’t you love the idea of a Swiss accountant loosening up on the dance floor in Havana?

  *

  Sorry for the email drought, I’ve been out of action with the stomach bug that’s hit the passengers pretty hard. I didn’t leave the cabin – or the bathroom – for three days! Every second person has the gastro. (The others all have bad colds!)

  When you mention the sickness that’s hit everyone, the tour staff all change the subject. The tour doctor, Fitzsimmons, is the worst. ‘Just rest,’ he says. ‘Keep taking liquids. You look okay. You must have picked up something ashore.’ Poor Dr Jaime is running ragged, looking after everyone. The tour officials are all in denial. But suddenly there are signs on the door handles advising you to wipe your hands on the antiseptic pads provided.

  I forced myself out of my cabin to take a convalescing canoe ride up a jungle river in Guatemala. Or was it Colombia? I was pretty groggy and hollow by then. Anyway I thought I saw a two-toed sloth in a tree, then two more, one with a baby. And spider and howler monkeys. And a basilisk or ‘Jesus Christ’ lizard (yes, their real names). So many blue herons that even Doug lost interest in them. And turkey vultures. I get a funny feeling whenever I see vultures. Doug discounts them too.

  I pulled out of the tour of the banana factory though. Coming from Queensland, I can’t get excited about bananas.

  *

  That canoe ride must have been in Guatemala after all because yesterday we anchored near a shanty port called Livingston where the local Garifuna people were selling I Love Guatemala T-shirts. Ghostly-looking boats were moored there, many half sunk, covered with pelican guano and smelling fishy. Pelicans the same colour as their guano squatted on every inch of space on the wrecked and deserted boats.