Twelve months. Can it really have been so long? Tamsin has not the usual milestones — sitting, crawling, standing, walking — to help her keep track.
‘Twelve months,’ the woman says, clucking her tongue. ‘Oh, they’re gorgeous at that age, aren’t they? Well, I’m sure your little Kate will look adorable in these.’
They are shoes, this time, of the softest pink leather. Tamsin checks her watch. Now that Michael is working again, there is no need to rush. There is plenty of time yet, before he gets home, to add to her accumulation of secrets in the suitcase beneath the bed. In the street she sits at an outdoor café table and watches the movements of doctors’ wives and flowers and glossy cars. Into the boutique from which she has just come, go women with loose shirts over growing bellies. But Tamsin does not envy them. Not anymore.
I
t is all very well to dream of climbing through the ceiling of a newspaper office via the branching ladder of an overgrown pot plant, out into the starry night sky. But even if you elect to take a more sensible approach — tender your resignation in warm and regretful terms, work out your notice, and leave through the front door on a Friday afternoon after a few paper cups of cask moselle — you still find yourself as bewildered as if you really were adrift on a rooftop, staring into the benignly unhelpful face of the Town Clock, with nothing more than a Mini with a busted door, twenty-seven pairs of red shoes and an arts degree to your name, wondering what on earth to do next.
I went to see Eve.
‘What’s it like?’ I asked her, part way through the third bottle of wine, having invoked the privileges of dear friendship and rare appearance in order to keep her up drinking long past the hour Adam had excused himself and gone to bed.
‘What?’ she asked sleepily.
‘All this,’ I said, waving my hand to take in the new and tasteful expanses of the remodelled picker’s hut, the room where her calm and dependable husband lay in his half of the marital bed, the nursery where their little boys were twinned in deep sleep and rude good health, the pair of matching dogs as flat as rugs before the open fire, and the walls ripely hung with painted apples. ‘You always were five steps ahead of me, Evie.’
‘That depends entirely, dear girl, on which direction you’re headed.’
‘But where do I go
now
?’
She threw a cushion at me. ‘Go to sleep, for God’s sake. I’m up to my neck in toddler shit in two and a half hours.’
A few weeks later, I set sail.
Although, I find ‘sail’ to be a curious verb for the action of the floating white American skyscraper upon whose luxurious decks I stood as I pinned to my lapel the shining name tag that bore the legend ASSISTANT PURSER ROSIE LITTLE.
Oh please, admire me in my cruise company uniform: the snug-fitting bottle-green skirt, the matching fitted jacket, the nylon nanna-print blouse, the beige pantyhose (that I ripped through at the startling rate of one pair every two days due to a ridiculous propensity for snagging), and the sensibly low-heeled bottle-green pumps. And please, do reach into the breast pocket of my jacket and bring out, for your amusement and mine, the laminated card which I could (and did) get a written reprimand for failing to carry, and upon which are printed the ten commandments of my life aboard the vessel. My favourites were always Number Three: ‘I smile, I am on stage’, and Number Ten: ‘I never say no. I say “I will be pleased to check and see” ’.
I shared my flimsy walled, lower deck cabin with a Texan called Beth. Although she quite possibly had to have the pom-poms surgically removed from her cheerleader wrists before she took up her job as a shipboard dancer, she was forthright and funny and we were friends in an instant. Her boyfriend, also a dancer, was a Mexican called Octavio, whose polished manner and industrial strength hairdo remained undented even after a full day of cha-cha-chaing the wibbly flesh of seventy-year-old Nebraskan matrons.
‘Octavio is the only man in the world who would take his girlfriend on an outing to Tiffany’s to show her the ring that he’s going to buy for
himself
,’ was Beth’s favourite of her stock complaints about Octavio, all of which she would deliver with a 360-degree roll of her wide eyes and follow with a full-lung-capacity sigh.
If you have ever been a passenger on a cruise ship, then you will know that there are diversions scheduled on the half-hour, at least. There are dance lessons in a variety of styles, cooking classes, ice sculpture demonstrations, investment seminars, nature talks, and auctions of the kind of art that is designed to pick out the colours in your curtain fabric. But not one of these activities is more favoured by the American retirees — who come aboard in order to fully exercise the hard-earned privileges of a lifetime of work in the family carpet/rubber/plastics/44-foot motorhome business — than the activity in which it was my thankless task to accommodate them: complaining. Some might disagree with me, and put forward the view that
eating
is more popular even than complaining. But I always found it difficult to think of eating as a discrete activity when — much like blinking — it was something that passengers seemed subconsciously to be doing whenever they were awake.
As a passenger on a cruise ship you may, three times a day, take your designated seat in the Emerald Court dining room and order anything on the menu. You may order
everything
on the menu. And since the food is included in the overall price of the cruise, this is precisely what you do. You order six plates of food and take two mouthfuls from each, retaining room, of course, for whichever dessert the pyromaniac of a chef is flambéing on that particular day. Should you miss a meal, or get peckish, you can dine out any old time at the pizzeria, or call into the patisserie for a snack. And should you be on deck in the deep night of an ocean crossing, you might be lucky enough to see the ship perform a moonlit excretion: a colossal tide of waste food mingling with an equally colossal tide of human shit in a gleaming, spreading slick.
I spent a year in bottle-green uniform. And then another. Pulling into port at dawn, setting sail for somewhere else at dusk, I gathered the seaside cities of the world in postcard-sized impressions. From behind the smooth curve of my reception-area desk, I fielded complaints about the standard of toilets in war-torn nations and the unacceptable wait for the between-decks elevators. I pacified indignant passengers returning from shore excursions having learned that not every shopowner on the planet provides change in American dollars. Occasionally I was let out to join a shore excursion, ostensibly as an interpretive guide, but actually as a shepherd for our white-haired and woolly-brained charges.
I tolerated as best I could my English and chook-bum-mouthed supervisor (whose parents spelled her name ‘Natarsha’, with the extra ‘r’, just to be absolutely certain that she sounded like a insufferable prat), who once squeezed me into her cupboard-sized office in order to tick me off for taking three turns, instead of two turns, in the elastic bands that we used for securing the change bags at the end of each day. It was Natarsha who routinely checked that I was carrying my commandment card by asking me to take it out and read to her Number Six: ‘I wear proper and safe footwear that is clean and polished, and I wear my name tag’, or Number Eight: ‘I answer the phone with a smile in my voice’, and who filed a formal reprimand with Head Office on the day she caught me without the commandments in my pocket.
As for the Love Boat? Ha! The old saying was true: the only people who took cruises were the overfed, the newlywed and the nearly dead. And for two years, my romantic adventures went no further than the vicarious enjoyment of Beth and Octavio’s turbulent tango, and a mildly flirtatious friendship with a croupier in the onboard casino. Garry was from Adelaide, told the kind of filthy jokes that could only have been scraped off the floor of an Australian pub, and he could kick my arse at the pool table. We each earned ourselves a demerit point when we were caught, in the early hours of the morning, in the passenger-only zone of the on-deck hot tub. It was my second strike, but it was Garry’s third.
‘One for the road?’ he asked, gesturing to his cabin door with a hitchhiking thumb on the night before he was sent home, unemployed.
‘Thanks Gaz, for the offer, but “I will be pleased to check and see”.’
By the time my two years turned into two and a half, it was summer in the northern hemisphere and the ship was sliding like a big white Monopoly hotel up and down the shattered-diamond coast of Alaska. And as it dodged through dense archipelagos and followed curving bays with mouths full of the bared and aqua-blue teeth of glaciers, both the passengers and Assistant Purser Rosie Little were introduced to a new kind of diversion.
He was older than me — just enough to make me feel younger — but not very much taller, and he came aboard for the season as a visiting writer, to give daily readings in the Top Deck Lounge and to mess up my composure with his speckled, teasing stare.
‘Rosie and Russell. Oh, that’s cute,’ said Beth, when I confessed to the fizz of excitement I’d felt on the day that it had fallen to me to give him a tour of the ship, after which I’d stayed in the back of the lounge to listen to him read in his wiry Scottish accent a suite of tender poems about bird flight and heartbreak.
‘Why cute?’ I asked.
She stretched out on her bunk in her pale blue babydoll nightie, and opened a packet of Oreos. Beth was impervious to the gut-lifting sensation of the ship heaving on an ocean swell. I, on the other hand, sat up in bed sipping ginger tea.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘that nominative thing you’re always talking about.’
‘Nominative determinism? What do you mean? Whycute?’
‘Look up “Russell”,’ she said, flinging me the baby name book that she kept in her bedside drawer and used for the purpose of making long lists of possible first and middle names for the children she was sure she would one day have with Octavio.
‘Ruben, Rudolph, Rupert … here we go … Russell: the colour red, or red-haired one,’ I read out.
‘See? Rose Red meets her man!’
‘Beth,’ I said, closing the book and running a finger down its spine, ‘that actually is a bit weird. Because guess what his last name is?’
‘What?’
‘Short.’
‘No way! Rosie Little and Russell Short? Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You two are MFEO.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, c’mon.
Made
For Each Other.’
Russell Short and I began to spend a lot of time together and, for me, the conversation we shared was like an exotic banquet after years of white bread. It was both sweet and piquant, full of allusion and quotation, and it was almost enough to mend my difficult relationship with the word ‘eclectic’. It was a conversation that required footnotes, too, and one that had me up late at night in the ship’s library, cracking open the untouched leather of a fine dictionary to look up words like ‘deliquesce’, or hunting on the internet for the rest of an Emily Dickinson poem, with the opening lines of which — ‘Nobody knows this little Rose/It might a pilgrim be’ — he would quite often greet me.
And so we flirted, up and down the Alaskan coast, until one day when we were on deck, sipping scotch chilled with ice chips from the hunk of glacier that Russell had brought back from a walk in the mountains, and he said, ‘You know, we’re playing a game, you and I.’
His words gave me a little jolt, making me think that he was about to say something dangerously real. But when I looked over at him for a cue, he seemed perfectly calm.
‘We are?’
‘Yes, we are playing a game. But we are only playing it in our minds. Do you want to play for real?’
‘For real?’ I asked, wishing I had the faintest clue what he meant.
‘Well? Do you?’
‘I don’t know. What’s the name of this game?’
‘The name of this game is Not Pushing the Glass off the Table,’ he said, downing his scotch and crunching the last shard of ice between his teeth.
‘And what are the rules of Not Pushing the Glass off the Table?’
‘Ah, sensible girl. A cautious approach,’ he said, inverting his tumbler.
It was one of the kind that tapers into a hexagon of cut panels and he placed it upside down on the table, close to the edge.
‘The aim of the game is to see how far you can push the glass without actually pushing it off,’ he explained, and pushed the glass until a slender crescent of its rim extended over the edge of the tabletop.
‘Now your turn,’ he invited.
‘Like so?’ I asked, moving the glass only a fraction.
‘Oh come on. It’s only your first go. Fortune favours the bold.’
‘Is that better?’
‘Passable,’ he allowed. ‘My turn.’
And turn about, we continued to move the glass, making the crescent grow.
‘You see,’ he said, tapping the glass forward with his fingertips, ‘the wonderful thing about this game is that you can push and nudge the glass towards the edge, but if it falls to the ground and smashes, you always have the consolation that it was most expressly not your intention to break it. Your turn.’
When the amount of unsupported rim was an almost perfect half-circle, I gave the glass a tiny push, stopping just short of the point at which I thought it would begin to teeter.
‘I’d say that’s it. Right there,’ he said. ‘That’s as close to the edge as that glass will go without falling.’
‘You’re piking out?’
‘You think it can go further?’
‘Isn’t that what we have to find out?’ I asked.
‘You’ve played this game before, haven’t you?’
‘Your turn,’ I invited.
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘Not at all.’
‘But you want me to do it anyway?’
‘Yes,’ I said, giggling.
‘And of that you are certain?’
‘Go on.’
‘No, I forfeit. You do it,’ he said.
And I did. I gave the glass one more little push, and when it landed on the deck it did not so much shatter as simply fall into pieces. At our feet were the thick wedge of the glass’s base and several triangular shards — isosceles, equilateral — all of them pointing in only one direction.