S.O.S.

by Joseph Connolly

  ‘So tell me,’ went on Derek, with a confidence so thoroughly misplaced, it was truly awesome, ‘what do they call you, lovely lady?’

  ‘Excuse me …’ whispered Marianne – so softly, he may well not have heard. ‘I really have to go, now …’

  She continued to squeeze and dodge and insinuate her continually apologizing self through the knots and swellings of yacking, laughing, drinking people – not really, now, in quest of anyone at all: just struggling to reach the perimeter of all this, and maybe breathe some air. She became stalled at one point, and had to endure the following – delivered almost without pause for breath by yet another freely perspiring and eager man in a far too tight dinner jacket:

  ‘See, I was taught to write songs to this very arcane formula involving carefully chosen BPMs synchronized to time-tested melodic strings with predetermined rhythmic sequences – guaranteed, they told me, just never to fail. Yes. Not a fucking dicky-bird so far, though …’

  Marianne spotted the narrowest gap between a pearl grey sequined dress (doing sterling work on the containment front) and a creamish tuxedo with a tawny and marbled stain on each of its elbows – and she made for it.

  ‘Yes …’ she heard, whether she liked it or not, ‘and then, if you will, she turned around and said to me Well the whole point, Geoffrey – the reason I don’t want to come with you to counselling, is that I actually sexually prefer women to men. Christ Almighty – it’s the only thing now we actually agree on …’

  Marianne passed on – and yes, a sort of space was clearing before her, yes it seemed to be – but now she found herself so terribly close to the band (who had just recently abandoned their seemingly endless rendition of New York, New York and were now well down the road to plucking up for themselves some Good Vibrations) – that it actually was quite deafening. And oh look it is Mum, great – so I’ll just go up to her and … who’s she talking to? Oh yes – would be: no less than the Skipper.

  ‘Yes yes I know it’s all terribly fashionable at the moment,’ Nicole was cooing, ‘but to be perfectly frank with you, Captain, I’ve never wanted to actually try any of the so-called Pacific Rim sort of food because I know it sounds silly but it’s just the phrase, if I’m honest: Pacific Rim, yes? It habitually puts me in mind of lavatories – and I can’t tell you how that just repels me. Ah – Marianne, my sweet. Captain – my daughter, Marianne. The Captain and I are just about to have a dance – aren’t we, Captain?’

  Captain Scar shook Marianne lightly by the hand while saying to Nicole, I warn you now – I am, believe me, no Fred Astaire.

  ‘Excuse us, darling,’ said Nicole quite sweetly, as Captain Scar led her out on to the floor – and then (more whispered, quite darkly): ‘You don’t know where your – ?’

  Marianne shook her head. ‘No, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Haven’t seen him all day.’

  Nicole just briefly narrowed down her eyes into some sort of intimation of just what it was she’d do to David when and if he eventually emerged from whatever no doubt exceedingly alcoholically driven catastrophe he was currently engaged in – and then her whole face was alight and fluttering as she tucked all that out of sight as she began to sort of undulate and then jerk her hips a bit in front of the Captain as he plonked his feet first here and then there, as his arms assumed a fairly frightening life of their own and flailed about him (it’s not really made for dancing, is it? Good Vibrations? Not really). And it’s true, what he said: he was, believe him, no Fred Astaire.

  ‘I must say, Captain … can you hear me? It’s terribly loud …!’

  ‘Just about! Call me Anthony.’

  ‘ … Anthony … I have to say I was horribly out on my guess for yesterday’s mileage. Maybe you can give me some tips …?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said – mileage, yes? Got it wrong. Maybe you teach me?’

  ‘What? Sorry …’

  Nicole compressed her lips and shook her head mutely. And when the Captain indicated by means of raised eyebrows and a jabbing finger that maybe the spot they had recently vacated was possibly best if conversation was the goal, Nicole quite happily concurred, and followed him off the floor.

  ‘Not too great at all the social side of this,’ confessed Captain Scar, somewhat shamefacedly (which Nicole thought so utterly charming: he suddenly looks no more than boyish). ‘I’m a professional sailor, you see. Not very good at parties. I tell you one thing, though, Nicole – I blew up a boat, once.’

  Nicole stared – and she shut tight her mouth the instant she knew it was open.

  ‘You –? Did you say you – ?’

  Captain Scar nodded. And then a roguish smile crept all over him.

  ‘Mind you,’ he qualified, ‘it was a dinghy …’

  ‘Oh yes but still …! I mean still that’s … why are you smiling like that, Captain? Anthony? Hm? Oh wait – I see … you meant blow up as in blow up, yes? Because it was a dinghy …!’

  The Captain joshingly accepted that his ruse had been rumbled.

  ‘So – you naughty, naughty Captain – that was a joke, wasn’t it? You made a joke. Well I think it’s terribly terribly naughty of you to tease me like that.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ went the Captain. Yes yes – it may be naughty, I suppose – I wouldn’t care to say. All I know is it’s my only joke, you see, and so I use it mercilessly: usually goes down quite well, I think. But again, I wouldn’t really know.

  ‘And what you were saying about the weather earlier – yes? Was that another of your very naughty jokes too? You naughty Captain.’

  ‘Alas not. Definitely brewing. Could be Force 9. Nothing to worry about, though. Just a bit rocky. I love it, myself. Reminds me I’m on a ship.’ (So yes – I’m telling the truth about the weather; which is more than I did the other evening about the Titanic going down, oh Christ – this very night; say that every crossing – people like it, I think. One day, I suppose, someone or other will blow the whistle – but so far, OK.)

  Nicole was now aware of a pressing mass of mainly women, lip-lickingly eager for their slice of Captain. I’d better then, she thought, be quick about this:

  ‘I was thinking of going to the Casino, later.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Captain. ‘The den of vice. Good luck.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you …?’

  ‘Ah no – not for the likes of me. I’ll be up on the bridge. In fact …’ he tacked on, eyeing his watch, ‘I very much fear I have to go now, Nicole. But it’s been an immense pleasure making your acquaintance.’

  Nicole blushed with pleasure. ‘Mutual,’ she said.

  ‘Hey Nicole!’ hailed Charlene (yeah – it’s me here, baby. You about ready to put him down now? Or do you bleeve you’ll have him gift-wrapped and shipped back to London for a souvenir?). ‘Me and the guys is gonna, like, split to maybe the Piano Bar? Getting kinda noisy. You sweet with that, Julie honey?’

  ‘Nah – I godda gedda bed. And Benny – I don’t get him down soon he’s gonna need major surgery.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ grunted Benny. (Why don’t no one talk to me directly? Huh?)

  No, thought Dwight, you ain’t: you take one good long look at yourself, Benny boy – you’re a dead man. And then he said:

  ‘How bout we all get ourselves over the Black Horse? How you feel bout that, Patty?’ Cos yeah – the more I’m looking at this Patty broad here, the more I’m liking what I see. I mean yeah OK – she ain’t no co-ed, but the way I figure, how picky can I be? Plus my man Dave might be there, yeah? Then we can dump the dames that don’t cut it and really tie one on.

  ‘I thought,’ said Nicole, ‘ … I was just saying to the Captain here … oh – he’s gone. Where did he …? I didn’t see him go.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Charlene, ‘you drove him off – huh, honey?’

  Nicole immediately stiffened. ‘I hardly think so.’

  ‘Hey babe,’ bantered Charlene. ‘Just kidding around, you know?’

  ‘Yes well. I was actually thinking of trying my l
uck at the Casino …’

  ‘Casino,’ put in Dwight, ‘ain’t even warmed up yet. Let’s grab us a couple drinks, huh? Later, you want, we can hit the slots.’

  ‘Waaall …’ conceded Charlene. ‘Kay. We’ll get maybe one in the Black Horse – but Dwight I’m warning you here and now: you lay offa the pretzels, hear me? Telling you, Nicole – for him I gotta be, like, a full on nurse. I don’t take good care of him, his bowels one day – they’re gonna get to look like linguine. And I ain’t making no late night of it neither: afore I get to bed I gotta wrap me up some paddery. Hey – what’s with that poor little kid! You see her? I dunno who she is, but she sure do look lonesome.’

  Stacy became instinctively aware that she was being actively regarded for some reason or other by people, some people – so she turned her back to them and picked up a satay stick from a great pile on the buffet table and lodged it between her teeth and tugged at it a bit and half the thing came away and she chewed on that a while, not liking it a bit – because she hadn’t actually wanted to eat a satay stick, no she hadn’t – not at all. Just to the left of her, an apparently exasperated and overweight man was hissing at the woman beside him:

  ‘Why in hell can’t you be like Angela?’

  And the woman, with hard dark hair and eyes, shot right back at him:

  ‘Why don’t you earn Malcolm money?’

  At least, thought Stacy, they’ve got each other to argue with. Where is Suki? This afternoon we were, oh God – together. I have never before experienced … I could have just lain there forever (and it was her cabin we ended up in; it’s just, Jesus – so much nicer). And then she suddenly seemed in such a tearing hurry to, I don’t know – get rid of me. Even now I can’t quite believe or even remotely understand it. I mean – did I do something, say something wrong? I don’t think I did. And it’s not that Suki seemed put out, or anything – she just suddenly, she said, needed to be alone.

  ‘But I’ll see you later, yes? Will I, Suki? At this thing later on – yes? You’ll be there? I’ll see you then, then, will I? Or I can stay. Let me stay with you. Why can’t I stay?’

  ‘Hey – c’mon, Stace. Don’t lay a heavy scene on me, OK? I’ll catch you later – sure I will.’

  ‘Kiss me,’ said Stacy, simply – and it hurt her, yes it did, that Suki then laughed; she laughed as if here was, I don’t know – some crazy idea, or something, but it hadn’t seemed crazy before, not when they were lying, newly apart and languid, and Suki had gently blown away the strands of Stacy’s long and sticky damp hair that criss-crossed her face and clung to her half-closed eyelids, and parted lips.

  Anyway. So I plummeted down through the endless decks in the boomingly silent lift (I had to, apparently, get back to my level) and Mum, I suppose quite predictably, wasn’t in the cabin. Barely seen her all day. I didn’t, you know, actually think she’d do all this – not, at least, this soon and so very thoroughly. I had possibly very naïvely supposed that being cooped up here together would have given us a better chance than usual to – you know, really sort of talk, and things. I was forgetting, wasn’t I, that the ship would be affording opportunities – and you know what Mum does with them, don’t you? Plain for all to see. She seizes them – yes she does. And if none is there – well then without delay she sets about plotting their creation. So maybe, I thought, she’s gone straight on (from wherever in God’s name she was) to dinner? Maybe. Hasn’t changed for the thing later, though – because look: little black dress still just hanging there, from those stupidly skinny little straps. So I quickly put on something shamingly similar and thought I’d sort of pile up my hair and twist it round at the back a bit – get a couple of very springy ringlets to maybe trail down past my ears. But it wasn’t going to work, was it? I got one side pretty much OK, but the other just wasn’t having any of it – and then from the sort of wasp’s nest effect I’d more or less got bolted into place, a huge great section just suddenly flopped down in the front all over my face and I just thought oh sod it – I’ll brush it all out and leave it hang where it bloody well likes (Suki, anyway, says she loves the way my hair … I think she said floated behind me, whenever I move. I have never known before that hair has sensations: when she drew her fingers through it – softly, and so lingeringly – it felt like every single fibre was dancing and electric. And maybe too the gentleness of each of Suki’s fingers had had something to do with that, because whenever some boy starts fooling with your hair – I don’t know, maybe this is just me – you’re always, aren’t you, bracing yourself for when he starts tugging it back and sometimes – once, this happened to me – wrenching great handfuls of it around to the front of your neck, and then just holding it there, around a balled-up fist, and touching your throat).

  Well. Mum wasn’t at dinner. So I ate mine alone. Took about twenty minutes. And then I came to this ball. Maybe Suki will be here. But she isn’t. Well OK – maybe Mum, then, might show. But no. And it’s hard, that – it’s hard. Because when already a joy that hovered at the brink of kissing the very edges of love has already lapsed into aching … yes well then it would really help me a lot if there was someone around who could soothe or even explain it. Yes. So where is she? Where’s my Mum, then?

  Suddenly, the noise around her seemed close to intolerable – though Stacy felt sure that the levels hadn’t risen, or anything. It took a dazzled glance upwards to the vast and spinning mirror ball (pink and golden spangles of light made luminous Laurel and Hardy’s bowlers, leapt up in Marilyn’s hair and – just for an instant – made a white-tuxedoed Bogart appear less than suicidal) to wholly convince Stacy that now was indeed and very much the time to go.

  ‘Well here’s a face I know. Oh yes. Oh yes. I well know this face, all right.’

  That, emerging from the clamorous hubbub that now, increasingly, was walling her in, brokenly came across to Stacy as the most distinct – and God, then, I suppose the closest – of all the gobbed-out and bitten-off snatches of nuisance around her. She could have, she realized – just less than one second too late – smoothly applied and got away with the golden syrup of Total Party Deafness Syndrome, had she only allied the determined affectation with a resolute and dead-ahead transfixion, while striding with purpose towards those large and inviting glass double doors that bobbed up into and then ducked out of her line of vision from behind this undulating mass of improbably tinted and teased-out hairdos, interspersed with a smattering of pink and glistening skulls. But no – she had faltered. There was just that so slight but palpable blip in her otherwise seamless advance: her ears were felt to have detected a sparkle of noise specific to herself, and her traitorous eyes had flickered in sympathy.

  ‘Ye-e-e-es …!’ brayed Nobby, delightedly. ‘I thought it was you. Didn’t I say so, Aggie? Stewart? Isn’t that just what I said? All the way over there, we were, and I said Hallo! Hallo, I said – ’

  ‘He did,’ beamed Aggie. ‘That’s exactly what he said.’

  Nobby nodded with wild-eyed eagerness – and Stewart alongside was working hard at back-up, what with his seeming determination to get the corners of his mouth to meet up and say Hi around the back of his head – whereupon, thought Stacy distractedly, his whole orange phizog and that great yellow barnet could be cranked right back like a Pez dispenser (though please spare us the lozenge of anything approaching tongue).

  ‘It is, it is,’ Nobby went on avowing. ‘Those were, dear Stacy, my very words. Am I right? Do I tell no lie?’

  Both Aggie and Stewart heartily vied with each other in a chorus of corroboration, this concluding raggedly with little less than a standing ovation.

  ‘Jennifer not with you, dear?’ asked Aggie, quite solicitously.

  And Stacy suddenly was stung by bitterness. She very briefly contemplated an insolent charade – glancing with intent to the left and right of her, instantly detecting the clear and total absence of Jennifer and coming back dead-eyed and leadenly with Apparently Not. But the gall subsided within her quite as quic
kly as it had rushed right in and filled her up, and in its wake now she felt no more than the weight of the barely shifting sludge of misery.

  ‘No,’ she said. Just that: no.

  ‘It’s Stewart we have to thank, you know,’ gabbled on Nobby.

  Stacy gazed at him. ‘What for?’

  And Stewart did his best to maintain the expression (What for? Typical, that, isn’t it? What bloody for? That sort of reaction, I just can’t tell you, is so absolutely typical of the sort of shit I get).

  ‘Well all this …!’ elaborated Nobby expansively – spreading wide his arms to encompass the whole of the glory: he hit a waiter’s tray to the left of him (no harm done, but it was late and the waiter seemed in no mood to smile at him) and some half-cut Londoner over to the right, who blushed and stammered out an instant apology. ‘Tell you one thing, though, Stewart – old Elvis is looking a bit the worse for wear. Been in the wars, has he?’

  Stewart glanced over at the cut-out; the twinkling mirror ball seemed to unerringly seek out and highlight the corrugations under the King’s accusing eye and across that once-perfect nose. Stewart then shrugged and he went Ha ha. (When I get Elvis back to the office, this time I’ll rip his bloody head off.)

  ‘Ringo Starr,’ said Aggie, quite amiably, ‘has sailed on Sylvie.’

  Stewart was nodding, fondly as an uncle, and Stacy thought if I could just be sick – right here and now – it would maybe be enough for me to just, oh God – leave (and why? Why can’t I, actually, just leave?).

  ‘As has,’ enjoined Nobby, ‘Mister George Harrison, of that ilk.’

  ‘But not Paul,’ said Aggie, quite sadly. ‘But,’ she tacked on, brightening up considerably, ‘he might yet.’

  ‘Nor John,’ rounded off Nobby. ‘Who now, of course, won’t.’

  ‘But never Elvis – that’s what I was meaning,’ elucidated Aggie. ‘Elvis never did.’

  ‘Well,’ put in Stewart, quite as jovially as you might expect, ‘Elvis, of course, never even made it to England. Except, I think, to change planes, one time.’