My Great Ex-Scape

by MacIntosh, Portia

  We’re ushered from the check-in area to the bottom of a ramp that leads up to the enormous ship. The bright white beast of a cruise liner is even bigger than I thought it was going to be. I’d seen photos of it, but you just can’t imagine how impossibly huge it is when you’re standing next to it.

  ‘Here you go,’ my dad says, handing us a pile of papers. ‘Your cards and all your room info are in here. We’re going to go and get settled in. We can meet you after?’

  ‘OK, sure,’ I say. ‘See you in a bit.’

  The lobby of the ship doesn’t seem all that different to a hotel lobby. You could actually be forgiven for forgetting you were on a ship at all – I wonder if that will change when we start moving.

  ‘Sorry about my mum and dad tagging along,’ I tell Eli. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he insists, laughing it off. ‘Always lovely to spend time with them.’

  I search through the papers in my hand. ‘OK, so that’s my suite number, I just need to work out where it is…’

  Eli takes the piece of paper from me. ‘There’s a map on the other side, I’ll help you find it.’

  We walk along a corridor, weaving in and out of other people looking for their cabins. I don’t pay much attention unless we pass a staff member – if they are male, I glare at them while I work out if they are Josh or not. As soon as I realise they are not, I go on my way.

  We approach the lift, to go up to our floor. There’s something about a lift on a ship that I find really unnerving. Although it looks nothing like it, I can’t get the lift scenes from Titanic out of my head. The scenes with the stairs are way better in that movie, so I think from now on I’ll take those. Not that I’m likening my transatlantic crossing to that of the Titanic. As anxious as I can be at times, I can honestly say that I haven’t floated the idea of sinking.

  ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ Eli says as he riffles through the papers.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask before stopping outside a door. ‘Oh, look, this is my suite.’

  ‘Actually… this is our suite.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You only asked your dad to book two suites.’

  ‘Yeah. One for me, one for you.’

  ‘Except he thought you were inviting him and your mum along… so I think he’s assumed you wanted one suite for them and one for us…’

  ‘Oh… Ohhh, yeah…. We could book another?’

  Listen to me, I think I’m made of money now.

  ‘We could… but didn’t your dad say he booked the last two? And is it not a bit late now we’re on board and checked in?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Well, you’ve proven yourself to be a completely fine roommate over the last couple of days,’ he jokes. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘I think our bed-sharing days might be behind us,’ I remind him.

  ‘Perhaps, but we do have a sofa, apparently… You just might have to tie me to it, if the sea gets a little rough.’

  ‘Stop flirting with me,’ I joke. ‘But yeah, I’m sure we’ll be fine.’

  Eli does the honours, letting us into our room. Our shared room. I can’t believe my dad thought I invited them along, and that I was planning on sharing a room with Eli. When we were dating, Eli wasn’t even allowed to be upstairs at the same time as me. I don’t even just mean to sleep over, I mean that if I were upstairs getting ready, Eli wasn’t even allowed to come up to use the toilet.

  We walk into our suite and, again, I had imagined what I thought it was going to be like and this is not it. It’s a large room with a super-king bed in the middle. There’s a desk, a decent-sized TV, an inviting-looking sofa. The decor is nice. Subtle. Most of the soft furnishings are taupe. I worried about pokey little windows with water splashing against them, but we’re so high up and we’ve got our own balcony.

  ‘Ooh, we’ve got an aft balcony,’ Eli says.

  ‘A what now?’ I reply.

  ‘Basically we’re at the back of the ship.’

  ‘That’s good?’

  ‘Yeah, these ones are bigger – I looked it up – and when you’re at the back, there’s less wind.’

  I walk over to the large glass door and peer through it. We aren’t just at the back end of the ship, we’re right at the back, looking out behind the ship. This means that, when we set off, we’ll be able to watch as the UK gets smaller and smaller until it disappears.

  ‘This is really, really nice,’ Eli says.

  He sits down on the sofa and bounces a little to test its firmness.

  ‘Are you sure you want to sleep on it?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, it’s really comfortable, come here,’ he insists.

  I sit down next to Eli, who wraps an arm round me.

  ‘Thanks for bringing me along,’ he says. ‘Unless I assumed I was invited…’

  I laugh. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘I’ve been working so hard recently and swearing I would take a break soon but… well, it’s no fun being single sometimes, is it?’

  ‘That it ain’t.’

  ‘I’m glad this has forced me to take a little time off. So thank you.’

  I rest my head on his shoulder for a moment before an announcement plays over the speaker that apparently neither of us realised was in our suite.

  Our captain speaks, introducing himself to us before advising us on when and where to attend our lifeboat drill.

  ‘Lifeboat drill?’ I squeak at Eli.

  ‘Yeah, I guess they always do them.’

  ‘I mean, it makes sense but… still… makes me a bit uneasy…’

  He just laughs at me. ‘Come on, grab your life vest, let’s go get it over with.’

  As instructed, we remove our life vests from the wardrobe and head to the dining room, where we’re all supposed to meet.

  My mum and dad, who it turns out are staying in the room next to ours (they just got there much faster), are already there, sitting at the dining table, wearing their life vests.

  ‘I’m pretty sure you don’t have to put them on,’ I say, laughing at them sitting at the perfectly laid dining table, all suited up to abandon ship.

  ‘No need to go overboard,’ Eli quips.

  We high-five each other with our eyes until we’re interrupted by a steward.

  ‘If everyone could put their life vests on please.’

  Oh, OK, I guess we do have to wear them.

  I put mine on, but it doesn’t quite sit right. I glance round at everyone else, who looks just fine in theirs. Dorky as hell, without a doubt, but they fit.

  ‘Erm… Why is mine sticking out like this?’

  ‘It’s your boobs,’ Eli laughs.

  ‘OK, but I’m not the only person with boobs,’ I say in as hushed a tone as possible.

  ‘It’s that bra you’re wearing, it’s got ’em up under your chin,’ he informs me.

  I glance down at the life vest, the bottom of which stands about 20cm off my body.

  ‘God,’ I say. ‘It had better still work.’

  ‘You’ve got your own buoyancy aids,’ he reminds me.

  I give him a playful nudge into his life-vest-covered ribs. I’m not even sure he feels it.

  We are given a boring yet vital talk on health and safety and what to do in an emergency before we are led outside to our lifeboat. I think I expected them to be more sophisticated – and less over crowded than they’ll be if the throng I’m standing in all piled in it at once. Still, if it’s survival of the fittest, I’ll bet on myself. I might not be very fit, but I’m one of the youngest people here. In fact, there aren’t many young people on the ship at all now that I think about it.

  ‘We’re so much younger than everyone,’ I whisper to Eli.

  ‘We are… Imagine if we all got shipwrecked on an island, it would be up to us to repopulate it!’

  ‘Nobody wants that,’ I joke. ‘It’s weird that the suites are all older people.’

  ‘Skint millennials can’t afford suites,’ he re
plies. ‘We’re the exception.’

  ‘I’m barely an exception, I’ll burn through my money in no time. You’re the property-owning image consultant. I am a skint millennial.’

  ‘Only because of this bunch of tax dodgers,’ Eli replies.

  An old woman coughs loudly behind us. ‘You might be young, but you’re not very smart,’ she tells Eli, not sounding at all impressed with what she just heard. ‘You’re on a Silverline Cruise – they’re for pensioners.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Eli asks.

  ‘Most of the people on this cruise are retired,’ she says. ‘And we’ve paid tax for years, thank you very much.’

  Just as the safety drill comes to an end, and Eli and I exchange a shared look of ‘we have to get off this ship’ – I feel something funny. An unsteadiness beneath my feet. We’re moving. I am officially stuck on this boat for a week, no getting off, no turning back.

  ‘Well… this is going to be interesting…’ Eli says.

  ‘It sure is.’

  10

  ‘Breathe, Rosie. Breathe,’ Eli instructs me. ‘You need to exhale.’

  No, I’m not having a panic attack, I’m just wearing a dress. A long, red, clingy thing that Eli talked me into on our shopping trip. He talked me into quite a lot of items of clothing I wouldn’t usually choose for myself, and these items can be divided into two piles: items Eli talked me into and items Eli talked me into after we drank too many cocktails at lunch. This dress is absolutely from that second pile. The sexy pile. The absolutely not me pile. The so tight I’m too scared to breathe out in case I burst the zip pile.

  I didn’t spend too much money on clothes. Well, I’m only on this ship for a week before it’s back to unemployed reality. I heard dinner was always a formal affair aboard cruise ships so I bought a couple of fancy dresses, hoping I could alternate them without anyone realising - although now I’m here, that feels impossible. But this dress, this sexy, gorgeous, clingy, red, not me, silky, floor-length gown, was a gift from Eli. A gift that drunk Rosie accepted.

  Eli suggested I wear it tonight and not wanting to throw his lovely gesture back in his face (and forgetting just how tight it was), I said yes.

  So, here we are, casually strolling along to the dining room for dinner, except not all that casually because I’m mostly holding my breath.

  ‘I am breathing, just… in stages,’ I explain.

  I’m hoping that, once we get to our table and I’m able to sit down, I can let my tummy poke out, safely hidden below table level. They say good posture is good for you, don’t they? I can’t see how. I’m at my most comfiest with my belly sticking out, hunched over just a little, my knees doing that weird thing where I let them relax so much they actually start to bend the other way. Whether I’m sitting on the sofa or lying on my side in bed, I’ll just let my pizza-dough body go where it likes. It’s no wonder I’m single, undressing me is like a mid-level escape room.

  There are multiple dining rooms on board the ship, but this one is ours – the Alexander, named after blah blah blah… I absolutely wasn’t listening when Eli read the bit in the guest information book about the dining room to me.

  We flash our ID cards before being promptly shown to our table, except it’s not our table, it’s a shared table. My mum and dad I recognise from my life to date, but there are two other couples too. Two women and two men.

  ‘Rosie, hello,’ my dad says brightly. My dad rarely says anything, let alone says it brightly.

  ‘He’s in holiday mode,’ my mum says. ‘You both look fantastic. Did you pick this dress, Eli?’

  ‘I certainly did,’ he replies before taking my mum’s hand and kissing it. ‘And you look incredible too.’

  We have all actually scrubbed up quite nicely. My mum is wearing a lovely navy blue dress with little silver sparkles and my dad has made an alarming effort, in a matching navy blue suit.

  Eli looks pretty damn good on my arm – a regular Jack Dawson, or should that be a stinking rich one?

  ‘Hello,’ I say to everyone else, suddenly aware all eyes are on us.

  ‘Looks like someone booked the wrong cruise,’ one of the women says with a chuckle.

  Like I’m not living an embarrassing enough life at the moment. I decide to own it.

  ‘Oh, no, not at all. My friend works on the ship, and we thought it might be nice to join my parents on a trip.’

  ‘Married?’ one of the men asks.

  ‘Not yet,’ I reply, baffled by his prying question.

  ‘Been together long?’

  Oh, he’s talking about me and Eli.

  ‘Since we were teenagers,’ Eli replies. Well, I suppose it’s better than explaining.

  As I juggle all of my recent embarrassing incidents in my head, something occurs to me... One Big Question was a TV show aimed at younger people, the social media generation. No one at this table recognises me – I’ll be surprised if anyone on this ship does. At least there’s that.

  ‘I used to work on cruise ships,’ one of the women says. ‘Mostly on the Med – have you cruised the Med?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘We have,’ one of the men says. ‘Best waters, without a doubt. Lovely weather.’

  ‘I took a mini cruise to Dublin once,’ Eli offers. ‘The weather was really bad, we got bashed all over the place.’

  ‘That’s maybe the worst sea you can go on,’ the woman says.

  ‘Have you seen The Poseidon Adventure?’ the older of the two men asks. ‘When the wave washes over them and the ship turns upside down and everyone is screaming and hanging from the floor?’

  ‘Colin!’ his male companion ticks him off.

  Colin recalls this scene from the film with all the humour and belly laughs you would afford a Carry On movie.

  ‘What?’ Colin replies. ‘It could happen.’

  ‘This is Colin and Clive,’ my mum tells me. ‘They’re friends who go on holidays together.’

  ‘A couple of eligible bachelors,’ Colin says. ‘We met working in the oil industry.’

  ‘How fancy,’ one of the women says.

  ‘Licence to drill,’ Clive jokes.

  Oh, what a couple of likely lads. Clive must be pushing sixty. He’s quite brown and wrinkly, like he’s spent a lot of time in the sun. His hair is suspiciously dark brown and is the same colour all over his head, which makes me think it has come out of a bottle. Colin is a little older – or at least he looks it, with his grey hair and his handlebar moustache. I don’t know how to describe their accents other than sounding like the old men in suits at the bank in Mary Poppins.

  ‘Nice to meet you both,’ I say.

  ‘And then we have Karen and Linda, who are also here together,’ my mum continues.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  Karen is the one who was talking about working on cruise ships and Linda is her friend. They both have the exact same shade of blonde hair, it’s incredible how identical it is. Once again, given that these ladies must be in their sixties, I’d hazard a guess their colour has come from the same bottle.

  There are menus in front of us with three courses on them, with four or five options for each one. Servers walk around the tables taking everyone’s orders. To start, I am having three cheese Gougères, followed by salmon en croûte for my main course. For dessert, I have chosen the hazelnut dacquoise and, if I’m being honest, that is the bit I am looking forward to the most.

  Our first courses arrive and the presentation is impossibly fancy. A few mouthfuls of savoury choux pastry sit in the centre of my plate, surrounded by an elaborate garnish and some kind of reddish brown drizzled sauce that I can’t identify by sight or taste, but I could eat it until I died, it’s so delicious.

  ‘We’ve has a lovely time learning all about your parents,’ Colin says. ‘But what do you two do?’

  ‘I’m an image consultant,’ Eli tells him.

  Colin looks baffled. ‘Oh, right,’ he says, narrowing his eyes. ‘What does one of those do?’

/>   ‘I sort people’s lives out,’ Eli says, putting it simply. ‘Say, if someone isn’t doing as well as they could, or if they make a mistake.’

  ‘Hey, you could do with his help, Rosie,’ my dad offers through a mouthful of his food.

  I shoot him daggers.

  ‘Ooh, what have you done?’ Linda asks nosily, lighting up at the hint of gossip. I think she and Karen have been a little bored throughout the work-based small talk.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I insist.

  As the conversation dies down, Collin takes it upon himself to liven it up again, talking to Eli about his job.

  ‘We had some business with some oil at work – slippery stuff, you know, can’t always contain it. So, you know, people get upset and… we had one of your lot clean it up. Metaphorically, of course. Oil itself is much harder to clean up.’

  There’s so much to dislike about Colin, it’s hard to know where to begin.

  ‘What do you two do?’ Eli asks Karen and Linda.

  ‘We’re retired now,’ Linda says. ‘We both worked on cruise ships. Amazing, that my daughter followed in my footsteps. We’re a cruise family.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say politely.

  ‘She’s been dragging me on them for so many years, it was bound to happen,’ Karen adds.

  Oh my God, they’re mother and daughter. I thought they looked a little bit alike, but I also thought they looked the same age. Either Linda was really young when she had Karen, or ship life is a cruel mistress.

  ‘Mother and daughter,’ Colin says. ‘How lovely.’

  It seems like he’s leering over both of them, but he can’t be, can he?

  ‘What do you do?’ Clive asks me politely.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ I tell him.

  This gets Colin’s attention.

  ‘Argh,’ he screams theatrically. ‘Don’t hack my voicemails!’

  I laugh politely through my fake smile.

  ‘I mean, didn’t that stuff happen in the early noughties?’ I say. ‘I was probably only just into my teens, so not guilty.’

  ‘Still, I’ll keep an eye on you,’ he says. ‘Just in case.’

  As the conversation grinds to an awkward halt and our plates are taken away, it isn’t long before our fellow diners start chatting amongst themselves about all the different cruises they have been on in their lifetime. With a little time for just me, Eli and my parents to chat, we discuss our plan of action for our time on the ship. I didn’t realise we were going to have a plan of action – then again, I didn’t realise my mum and dad were going to be here with me. My plan of action was to relax, drink too many cocktails with Eli and maybe seek Josh out for a quick chat, just to see if he has any helpful little nuggets about our time together. Then I’ll sail off into the sunset, find Simon in New York and just see what happens. The more I think about it, the more I convince myself that it must have been Simon who sent the flowers. If that’s true, Josh will probably be too busy to spend much time with me anyway.