The Suntaster
On Monday morning, the sun shone firmly for the first time since the ship had left the dockland, shrouded in grizzling mist and ghosted with grey shades and crammed, skeletal cranes against a sheet-steel curtain of sky. The next day or two had been no better. The mist had swamped in through every open door and the sea, as if using the mist’s fingers, had eked up and salt-dulled the brass work, speckled the windows and portholes with tiny crystals of salt.
But on Monday, the sun shone from a clear blue sky that was deep overhead and fierce. No clouds dared gather In the direct heat and the decks, by ten a. in., were too hot to sustain the passage of bare feet and passengers began to come onto the tennis and stadium decks wearing swimming trunks or bikinis, flapping sandals and sun-glasses, black-eyed like insects, the sun catching their lenses and giving a small explosion of multi-faceted light, like the compound eyes of large wasps or the backs of glistening beetles, against a pink background of flesh.
Where the wind was slight and the ship’s shutters cut it from blowing, the smell of suntan oil and copper-toned fluids reached up the nostrils and fought there with the tang of sea and warmth.
Monday was the first day for the worshippers of heat, the adorers of sun and burnt skin, the moment of annual sacrifice for those who travelled this way every year, to return to the grey docks bronzed, warm and ready to face winter and the envy of stay-at-homes and secretaries.
“A drink, sir? May I suggest a tall lemon juice and soda with ice? Or perhaps a John Collins?”
Penglass looked at his watch: 11.30. He must have nodded off to the ship’s drone of engine and air conditioner.
“Yes,” replied Penglass, “a John Collins.” He ordered with authority, then doubting, added, “Is that the one with gin?”
“Yes, sir.” There was a hint of condeseention: the steward knew he was a first trip passenger.
The drink was served and Penglass signed a slip - ‘Henry Penglass: cabin A49.’ He Upped more than he should, hoping this would cover his inexperience, somehow bribe the steward, prevent him from a joke at his expense with the other stewards. He invented a joke at his disadvantage. ‘That old goat Penglass in A49: he doesn’t know what his John Collins is. Bet he knows his John Thomas - or does he?’
The steward put the glass on the deck: already the ice was beginning to melt, become rounded and opaque.
Suddenly, the ship’s siren blasted out, Penglass started into wakefulness. The public address system came on and he heard it clearly from somewhere over his shoulder, not raucous, but loud.
A bell was chimed eight times over the speaker, then -
“Twelve noon. The ‘Alaria’ has sailed 627 nautical miles since noon yesterday, at an average speed of 26. 12 knots. At noon today, the temperature on the bridge was 97° Fahrenheit and the air humidity 78%. Today’s interest talk in the ballroom is entitled, ‘Navigating by the stars’.A dull snap indicated the transmission was over.
Myopic from the heat, almost, Penglass stared at his watch: 1.45. How had he missed time so? Fallen asleep? He must have nodded off.
The drink was warm by his side and the level had risen where the ice had melted. Yet it seemed to him only just to have been served. He sensed still the grip of the steward’s pen in his hand as he’d signed, He lifted the tall glass and drank gulpingly, then spluttered violently as be swallowed a chip of ground clove at the bottom.
He realised he’d have to move fast if he wanted to eat: lunch would soon be over.
“Lunch, sir?’ A steward, a different one from before, stood before him. “Can I bring you a buffet board here on deck, sir? We serve lunch on deck on pleasant days, whilst at sea, sir.”
“Yes. Please.” Penglass made every effort not to ‘nod off.’ He watched the people in chairs around him, eating, drinking, laughing and talking and, seemingly, distanced from him through the heat.
The steward came with a tray that clipped onto the arms of the deck chair, across Penglass’ middle, like an invalid bed-table. The Platter was tastefully arranged: crab and crayfish, the flesh still the shape of claws, French salad with a tart dressing, roll and butter suspended over a bowl of ice to keep them fresh, firm, caramel pudding, a glass of iced and minted tea and a sliced and sugared orange. He picked up the knife and fork and began to eat, determinately. His mind moved away, Had the last hours been passed in sleep? Or had he simply been day-dreaming? Yet no recollections came to him of his thoughts or meanderings.
The meal, its cucumber and dressing, cooled his mind and body, temporarily. It was good to replenish the machines again, feel his body work up to the food, his stomach go about its task of digestion an and appreciation. Penglass was, in a secretive manner, proud of his physical condition, the result of keeping ageing at bay, whilst his wife had grown frowns and lines. Since her death, he’d felt healthier, somehow cleaner, and slept better than for many years.
Thinkingly, but without attention, he lifted the tea and drank. He’d hurried with the latter part of the meal, in order not to seem slow and idle to the others around him, to the stewards. There was a sharp splinter of ice still in the glass and he swallowed it.
‘God! Christ!’ He sucked his breath in as the ice bit his throat and oesophagus. He felt its painful journey down as his head swum wildly. He wanted to retch, to drink more, to stop, to drown in the glass funnelling up to him, all together. And in this commotion, he realised he’d not sworn so vehemently for a long time. His knife and fork fell to the deck, ringing on a metal disc in the planking.
“You alright, old chap? Something caught in your throat? Here!” A hand hit his shoulderblades. The voice he detested came from all around him, and Its hands helped him sit up.
“Fine, fine, thank you. No wrong done.”
Penglass gasped again and the world righted and the sound of the ship and the engines and the wind and the conversation re-established themselves about him, in their old order. And the voice again: its condescentions and familiarities.
Henry Penglass was not of these. His was a first cruise, a first taste of first class luxuries, with cheap drinks and cigarettes, late-night dancing and a steward to attend to his desires and needs.
This fortnight was the climax of years of saving, of not buying a new rose bush or a new blade set for the mower, of not going away for bank holidays, of not eating beef every Sunday. This cruise was the highlight of his guarded saving and scrimping, the first climax of his recently-embarked-upon retirement.
He was here to relax and feel new: to be reborn into a life free from the worries of desk and invoice, policy and endorsement, of greenfly, of moss and clover in the lawn. His wife was dead and beyond his immediate memory. The house and garden was sold: he lived in a flat overlooking a park, had one small row of potted cacti on a tiny verandah, had his pension and superannuation payments and enough from a modest endowment policy to live comfortably. This trip was his first comfort.
But the sun was warm. Too warm. Penglass had never known heat like this: it was never as strong in the garden, even in the hot summer of ‘59, the Indian summer of hot, close evenings, heat lightening and open windows, even at the risk of burglary . . . He knew nothing of this kind of heat.
Placing a deck-chair on the edge of the shadow cast by the ship’s massive cream funnel, he sat down in his swimming trunks (the first he’d had since boyhood) and self-consciously spread himself with suntan cream. The slight smoke from the funnel, a grey haze that pointed astern in a crooked line, a black upcast shadow of the white wake on the blue sea, slid its own ghost shadow over the light buff deck planking. It spread from his feet, his eyes catching it as he finally added protection to the soft upper parts of his feet. It seemed faintly to hypnotise.
He lay back, with his sunglasses on and opened a novel, selected from the ship’s mediocre library. The sun was bright, very bright. Even with dark glasses, he still found reading irritating to his eyes. The words seemed to move on the white page, throb with the ship’s Intrinsic throb, its ever-present pulse. He put the book down by his side and closed his eyes.
After a while, even this dozing sleep became uncomfortable, his mind seeing the red flutter of blood in his eyelids, racing through miniscule vessels, spreading the light and heat into his deeper regions. He began, for the first time ever, without exertion, to sweat. He wiped his forehead.
“Your first cruise?” A voice spoke. Penglass turned his head away from the sun. A middle-aged man sat next to him beneath the sun, this stranger already slightly tanned, his blond hair slightly bleached by heat and salt and, to Penglass’s taste, slightly long.
“Yes,” said Penglass. “I’ve not been this way before.” Conversation was not forthcoming.
“It is an interesting way to travel these days. A dying art, cruising. Something fast disappearing in the age of flight, you know. A pity. Been doing it for years myself. There’s nothing like taking it easy. Cheap booze and good service.”
A pause, then a query.
“Do you play bridge, old man?”
The voice was expectant, hopeful almost. Penglass already disliked it, adding it to the discomfort of heat, sweat and light, much as an old horse would regard a fly, biting a dead nerve. He was not overweight. Far from it: ‘good trim’ had been the doctor’s words. But Penglass felt heavy, weighed down by heat and now, increasingly, by this voice, that rang false. He hated it. Its stressing of words, its pretensions, its self-confidence and, and this really galled Penglass, its instant familiarity, its sought-for chumminess.
But he would not make an ‘unfriend’ on the cruise - not this early, anyway. So he answered.
“I’m afraid not. Never been my game. Prefer chess or something more demanding.”
He knew he was being pretentious, too.
The voice did not reply, seeing itself in this other person and strolled off. The passenger’s back was already slightly brown, and Penglass noted with wry humour that a black streak of tar ran down its very centre, where it had lain on the bare deck, bearing the heat for the sake of bravado and the young women.
A steward leaned over Penglass, slightly, his shadow interupting the sun that had crept over him, as the ship turned in its course. The interuption brought Penglass back to the immediate from thoughts of his now-sold garden and departed spouse.
Penglass looked around. No-one. The deck was deserted but for a young girl in her twenties, asleep on a towel, on her belly, with the strap of her bikini undone to worship more sun with flesh. Laughter and jollity eked through the wind from astern, where everyone had gone for an ‘event’ at the swimming pool.
Lying back in the chair, with the young girl oblivious to him, he was alone. His mind came slowly from its blackness to the realisation that he was by himself in the throb and light and wind. He sat up slowly, gasped as from the ice he’d just swallowed. His watch caught the glint of sun from windows on the bridge 4.45.
It couldn’t be! He’d not been gasping for two and a half hours!
He felt his forehead sweating and pulled a handkerchief from the belt of his trunks, to mop his brow. The soft linen felt as if it was emeried, his hands felt as if they’d been caressed by the tongues of many large cats, till the skin was bruisedly red. Penglass fumbled for his sunglasses, and with his hand behind them, used them as a mirror, looking closely as the distorted, convex view of himself the lens offered. He faced the redness of his temples and cheeks and nose; his lips were cracked like a leper’s and distortedly wide in the reflection. His arms, chest and stomach burned with heat and were already finely blistered. The sun had reached him.
Standing was not easy. He slowly made his way across the deck, pulsating with the ship’s engine throb, toward the doorway leading down to the air-conditioned interior of the vessel, with its cool, green-glassed public rooms, the soft carpets, dim reading lamps and people playing chess; and the cooling ring of cutlery as afternoon tea was served.
His hand reached for the brass doorknob, still in the sunlight. It was hot and the heat exaggerated itself in his burnt palm: the handle was as a live coal. He bore the pain, turned and pushed. The door opened and a cool wave of air washed over him. Suddenly, it was like flying in a strong wind. His raw skin and brow seemed to shrink away, waste with the change of temperature and the pressure across his head bit into the bone of his skull, needling his brain.
He yelled, stepping backward, staggering away from the blinding cold.
His yell woke the girl. She sat up slowly, carelessly, with the ease of youth and beauty and luxuriousness. Her hands held the bikini top to her breasts: she fastened the straps. Her eyes blinked, adjusting to the late afternoon sun.
She just saw him through the diminishing heat, through the haze that rose from the deck, balancing on the rail on the ship’s side.
He reached upward, stretching his arms, wide, as if in prayer or supplication or anticipation of light. She could not scream or move, but watched him gently topple forward, like a doll, rigidly held and with arms fixed, up-raised.
As she reached the ship’s side, she saw him fall the last twenty feet, legs and arms spread out, stellate, star-like, The sunlight caught his watchstrap. And then, as if slowed down by time to an infinitesimally gentle motion, he met the sea and a myriad of droplets and bubbles and surf rose around him, brilliant, and closing over him.
She just thought she heard a dull moan, or a plea, or a prayer, before the other passengers reached her.
Russell Taylor - Drawing |
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