As she dragged a sharp metal file back and forth behind her already spotless nails, she was sure all would go according to plan on this, the only cruise ship that could truly offer the best of all possible worlds.
Wherever you want to be
Venice or the South Seas …
This catchy little rhyme was embroidered on the hand towel which she threw into a gilt receptacle. It was also emblazoned on tickets, menus and posters all over the ship. It had even lit up the skies of Hobart briefly, as the highlight in the holographic sound-and-light show that had outdone the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony, according to the reporter from the Hobart Mercury.
She was looking forward to the Ghost Tour. It was a way to introduce herself officially as mistress of the ship. She craved respect, and knew that her military bearing and bespoke uniform inspired it among her passengers. Although she presented herself as single, she had been married to Medical Officer/Parson Paul for many years.
The secret to a lasting marriage was, she agreed, a common interest. In their case, it was a joint financial enterprise built up together and based on shares in a company called NICE. This made up for obvious differences in their views of the world. Kirstin, a strict materialist, tolerated Paulie’s interest in conspiracy theories, less so his religious obsession. But that had settled down once he had founded his very own Prosperity Church, where his word was law. As long as he didn’t bother her with biblical exegesis, she let him be the philosopher while she got on with practical arrangements. Theirs was such an ideal marriage that Kirstin never wasted a moment even thinking about it, far less talking about it.
She and Paulie slept in separate beds at home and preferred separate cabins on the ship. His nature was truly monk-like and modest and she admired him for clinging to a faith she could not share. She knew he loved her and needed to be loved in return. He would wait until he was summoned to her quarters later that afternoon, when they would share a drink — coke and ice for him — and listen to their favourite song, ‘Octopus’s Garden’. Paulie was nervous of the open sea, but she was looking forward to showing him the fake rock pool she had set up on her private balcony. It was set on a metal grille base, which allowed water to flow over the rocks, seaweed and shellfish in the pool. As the ship steamed ever southward, she could see how the pure, salty current was making the seaweed dance.
She replaced the nail file in its beaker of disinfectant, then buckled and buttoned herself into her white and gold uniform, aware that a less astute tourist ship operator might have played down, as unmarketable, certain associations with its ghostly namesake, currently a tourist attraction at Long Beach, California. But she knew that people liked being safely titillated by ghosts of women in vintage bathing suits, their wet footprints near the pool. And especially by the promised ghost, the Woman in White, who would waltz alone in the ballroom this very first night.
‘When you are least expecting her. Like Dietrich in white satin, like the ghost on the original Queen Mary …’
Wisely, however, the captain’s patter would not remind them of that other Queen Mary, which had sunk after neatly slicing in half a British warship, drowning three hundred soldiers. Humankind, as the poet said, could not bear too much reality. Particularly while on holiday.
Captain MacKinley revelled in her role as dream-master. Her previous ship, a smaller cruiser called Lady Luck, had embodied the same fantasy in miniature: a Victorian gentleperson’s leisure palace, with fine food and entertainments appearing on cue, all enabled by a retinue of soft-footed servants who knew their place. But this new ship took it all to a new level. Kirstin had mastered not only the dream but the dream within a dream. She’d eliminated the residual boredom of repetition, innate in the Victorian household regime and conducive to their delightfully respectable abuse of laudanum and opium syrups.
On this ship, passengers could complete their grand world tour in just two weeks, ticking off one bucket-list international tourist spot after the other, before returning to Hobart. With the photos — including a ghostly image or two — to prove it.
With a final tweak to her peaked cap and a smoothing down of her hair, she couldn’t resist clicking her heels as she saluted herself in the mirror. She was ready but, like any show-woman, would keep the audience waiting a little longer before her first appearance on stage.
ME #2
I am now the second most powerful person on the ship, advisor to Captain Kirstin. I have brought off a difficult and risky plan, and so far all is going smoothly. Our four target personages are safely on board.
The financial arrangement is excellent too. The captain engaged me on very favourable terms, salary due at the end of the cruise, with all expenses met meanwhile. And there was no trouble taking a few weeks off from the library, starting as soon as the captain had authorised me to begin organising the details.
‘Use your initiative. Arrange it all as you see fit, as long as my own target gets priority.’
When I asked, casually, about her motive for wanting our common acquaintance aboard, she didn’t seem to hear me. Perhaps it was all that thick hair which hid her ears. Whatever her reasons, I was delighted that the Queen Mary had sailed into my life. A millionairess’s plaything, on her maiden voyage, was a dream location for my second perfect crime.
Fortunately, there has been no sign of sour grapes from Victor, the captain’s previous wonder boy. I have snaffled his position, but then nobody could expect to take a year’s leave, as he apparently did, and then return to work at his old rank. I was surprised that the captain even let him on the ship because he just wanders around in a daze. The crew call him Mad Victor behind his back. Apparently he has a rather pushy nanny-state therapist who insisted that Victor needed to get away from the old house where he was nursing his crazy mum. Dead now. Premature dementia, the rumour is, and one look at Victor says it’s contagious. He’s on ‘light duties.’ No threat.
When Captain Kirstin showed me the communication system and all the firewalls and passwords Victor had set up before he left, I realised just how far he has fallen. She instructed me to upgrade it where necessary, so I stuck out my chin and nodded confidently. But that guy had been a genius. Out of my league. I didn’t dare to even change the passwords he’d set up in case I activated all his anal checks and security locks. And to think Victor is now just a lowly dance boy, a dogsbody, who is hardly coping with those banal duties. But I’m hardly going to sing his praises to the captain. No way am I going to assist that little weirdo to climb back up the greasy pole to Captain Kirstin’s favour.
Victor now sleeps in a humble eight-berth staff cabin, while I have a private suite right next to the captain’s quarters. I don’t have an office, as such, for as the captain’s right-hand man, I am on duty twenty-four hours a day, with the emergency pager on even when I sleep. Which will be rarely, as I also have to scan the CCTVs at precise intervals, twenty-four/seven. She’s taught me her various emergency alert codes. Yellow is low, naturally, and will usually just mean some old codger has kicked the bucket after too much excitement. In that case, I am to supervise the menials, now including Mad Victor, who will transport the cadaver to the cargo freezer, where body bags are always ready and waiting. Red is the highest alert, obviously.
‘You are my new Julian Assange,’ the captain said, pouring me a whisky in her luxurious quarters. I almost blushed. Then, after a toast to our joint success, I stood at her shoulder and pretended to understand the wall screens showing flickering rises and falls in the stock market where her NICE shares were going through the roof. But NICE is under threat, she explained, as she handed me a print-out of a dozen sites I am to monitor for adverse postings. Someone is trolling NICE. On the Lady Luck, she confided, Victor had hacked one site to bring it down and she expects me to take similarly swift action against any perceived threat to the source of her fortune.
I am well up to this challenge but, frankly, the stock exchange bores me. So I am relieved that I don’t have to actually understand
what I’m expected to hack. Alert word NICE, all caps, delete anything critical. That’s my brief. Maybe one day I will become as addicted to the markets as the captain seems to be, but I hope not. There’s something rather demeaning about it.
There are degrees of status, after all, even in addictions.
As we went over the details of our complicated pact, I couldn’t help being flattered by the way the captain was waiting on me. Like a servant, she refilled my glass and offered me creamed truffles and crackers. In fact, I suspected that our roles were now reversed. And why not? It took genius to line up all those red herrings as I have, a whole bunch of suspects to take the focus away from me. And Captain Kirstin, of course.
She was sitting so close to me that I could hear the metallic jangle of those silver and turquoise earrings. What if she made a move on me? That would be complicated.
Now perhaps is the moment to explain my earring thing. And my other reservations about being sexually exploited by Captain Kirstin on this cruise.
It is not the idea of casual sex, in itself, that puts me off. Far from it. In the old days, after I had upgraded my image, I had lots of arty girls who, as everyone knows, are totally promiscuous after smoking half a joint. And in bed it was as if they were setting out to prove just how versatile and sensual they were. Really, if they had just stayed still I wouldn’t have complained. Anything on top of that — if you get my drift — was a bonus.
But then, without warning, the pussy palace closed. At least for me. What happened? On the first day of the year 2000, or so it seemed, a message was spread like viral malware infecting all the girls I was about to meet. At the same time, like those synchronised menstruations in girls’ dorms that you read about, they started with the body piercings and the shaving. I have always been squeamish about earrings, but now the metal mania was spreading. In the nineties, in my experience, it had been confined to noses or eyebrows. But now, every time I managed to get a girl’s clothes off, I’d be snagged by a nipple-or navel-ring. And, particularly scary, even down there it was no longer safe. Talk about vagina dentata.
I suppose I should have been relieved that the downstairs shaving at least meant I could clearly spot the labia-ring in advance. But the delicate area was now a deforested hillock. Added to my new problems, the regrowth was prickly. A rash or ingrown hairs made them scratch when they thought I wasn’t looking. I was trying not to look. What’s a normal man to do? I mean I’m in no way a paedophile, proved by the manly fact that I love a wild and moist tropical jungle down there.
I am telling you this so you will understand that it is entirely my own choice that I have not had a girlfriend for a long time. And that even Captain Kirstin, with her warning-beacon earrings, would find any looming seduction graciously rebuffed.
I leaned away from her, ever so subtly, as she explained that, whenever I am not attending to a specific task, I am to stand, patient as a courtier, as it seemed to me, just outside the captain’s quarters. But that is going to leave me precious little time to attend to my own complex arrangements. When I tried to explain this, she waved away my objection.
‘Outcomes, only report outcomes.’
I was surprised by that sudden formality towards me. Had she noticed that slight movement away from her? I am usually so careful with body language. But the die is cast. Captain Kirstin and I were destined to become partners in crime as soon as I realised the identity of her quarry.
When she presented me with that scrap of paper in Araballa Library, it all came back to me. I had not thought about that girl for twenty years, having always efficiently used pleasant addictions to kill painful memories.
I had been happy alone in my own bed for months before I met that girl. I used to fall asleep easily, my phone in my hand, soothed by the latest news of bushfires around the globe. California, Australia. But I came as close as I ever had to loving that girl the moment she revealed to me her dark secret.
And that was when I made the fatal mistake of sharing my own.
2
PERSONAGE A: LILY ZELINSKI
Lily Zelinski, who was sitting alone in the ship’s Grisette cocktail bar, did not complain that the scheduled Ghost Tour was late. She was expecting to be ordered back to shore at any moment.
She did not want to draw attention to a possible error by asking questions about the gift vouchers. Her name was clearly embossed on each, but she still could not believe her luck in winning a raffle she had forgotten entering. Surely she would have remembered the prize? A free winter solstice cruise from Hobart to Antarctica on the boutique Queen Mary’s maiden voyage? Had it been a Shop-a-Docket? Another person might have easily found this out, especially the Queen of Exposé, as the press had once dubbed her.
In this adult Disneyland of lounges and bars, voices strained against blaring screens, strolling musicians and the manic fanfares of unusually frequent pokies wins (jackpots that were provoked by the captain’s select crew, who discreetly inserted a memorised sequence of coins — pour encourager les autres). Apart from the diddler machines and the absence of children, the ship reminded Lily of a superior shopping mall. She felt pampered by the proximity of glittering staircases, low chandeliers and enormous tropical palms. Overhead, blue-tinted glass ceilings disguised the threatening grey clouds and the fully enclosed decks rendered any direct contact with the elements optional.
And so she was really here, trying to blend in at the replica Parisian bar and treating herself to her first cosmo. She paused before picking it up, feigning interest in the rate at which the icy droplets ran down the inside of her heavy crested cocktail glass. She rotated it until the rows of ruby, green and gold bottles lined up behind the barman became jewel-coloured lozenges of light. After her first sip, she was surer that she was safe. The ship was now in the middle of the ocean, so they could hardly ask her to leave. No one was going to tap her on the shoulder after all. Dropping her tense shoulders and settling back to enjoy the reliably numbing alcohol, she caught a glimpse of her own image in the glass-topped counter. She was not displeased with the sophisticated grace of her newly blonde hair.
‘Good colour when you are eighty-nine per cent grey madam. No way you look fifty.’
Madam had changed hairdresser after that irredeemable faux pas, for madam was only forty-five and meticulously packaged. The new girl, however, was excellent. She had suggested a softer shade, as well as this long, floaty green chiffon band, selected from among the rainbow hues stacked behind her counter.
‘Lime green to highlight madam’s lovely green eyes. Take two or three in that shade and always wear one as your signature piece.’
Lily straightened the wispy green headband, then brushed a drop of pink liquid from her immaculate white linen skirt. The one small consolation of early menopause was that she was free to wear white at any time of the month. Comforting, the alcohol, so she ordered another. It was a small amount to spend, considering that, apart from cocktails and spirits, all else on the cruise would be free. She peered more closely into the countertop world and approved her deeply etched social smile. It gave her a misleading air of satisfaction with life.
Lily knew that a second drink would make her maudlin. But a free cruise deserved a celebration, didn’t it? Better get the dreaded second over with and order the third, which invariably cheered her up again.
As usual, each sip of the second gave her a dimmer view of her future. Far from festive now, she saw only a downward spiral to a lonely death. Too late to regret having made an unconscious despot of her only son, a potentate to whom she had willingly enslaved herself for the last twenty-five years. He was far away now, studying in London, and all that was left of him was this little incised smile on the brave face he liked to see. Still, hadn’t he deserved her devotion, seeing that she had failed to give him a proper father after Teddy left? It was true that if a man left his wife for you, soon he’d make you the left wife. But her son had been so jealous of any possible new boyfriend. Middle age had happened too damn
quickly. She hadn’t seen it coming, and here it was, caught in the countertop.
Feeling less nervous now, she raised her eyes from her drink to watch the busyness, the smiles of the team of young men behind the bar. Had they been chosen for their good looks, or was it that youth itself was now enough to make any face attractive to her? She taught journalism classes to young things like them at Araballa TAFE. Unlike her colleagues, she never tired of listening to her students talk about their dreams, their ambitions for glorious lives. This year the most hopeless student was her favourite. He lingered after class, currying favour. He carried her books, boasting about his girlfriend. She enjoyed the boy’s transparent pride in his catch. She sought out such optimism as an antidote.
‘Like, and we only got together last year and she wants me to meet her mum and dad already …’
Mum and dad. That boy, and everyone else in Lily’s life, uttered the words so casually. With that same dismissive half-smile. But they had always been loaded words to Lily. On her last birthday, with a single bunch of professionally selected flowers from her son as her only present, she had wondered if she had been wrong to exclude her parents from her life. Been too unforgiving.
Five years ago, Lily had received a handwritten letter, the script careful and childlike. She had flinched at the clumsiness of the words ‘birth mother’ after the woman’s signature. As if Lily had ever had any other kind. Blocking any emotion by critiquing the over-familiar style of that first-ever contact, Lily read the letter several times in case she had missed some explanation. No, nothing about why she had been dumped in Araballa Orphanage at birth by this seemingly devoted couple. Yet this strange woman was inviting her to share the family duties of visiting and watching over an old man who was also a stranger to Lily. Her ‘birth father’.
5 Ways to be Famous Now Page 2