I am the Entertainments Officer on board the exclusive cruise liner Queen of the Bay. Several of the ship's company have accused me of being a cynic. This I admit but I defy anyone of intelligence to do my job and not be a cynic. I ask you to disregard the guff about the cynic being a truthful man and consider the cynic as a person who sneers and pokes fun at convention. And if you do that then you have got me down to a tee.
To the passengers I am sweetness and light but away from them it is a different story. I know I am a phoney. Indeed I relish being a phoney, but how can I like the passengers we carry: The nouveau riche with their provincial manners and total lack of style, and those retired British Army Officers who get some kind of anachronistic kick when ordering whisky panis from the lascar crew. And their wives. Dried up old sticks temporarily escaping permissive Britain with its stentorian pop music and zombie fornicating youth all high on crack or smack or whatever.

And, God, the women travelling alone – age doesn't matter – are drooling for it. And don't say, You lucky bastard to have women begging for it because I am not included in the price of the passage ticket however much they want it and if they want to get stuffed they can go elsewhere. And the old. The professional aged who delight in boasting of their advancing years and boring the unfortunate sucker who trips over their sticks with a "Who would think I am eighty-seven?" When in reality the senile sods look at least one hundred years old.
I am told that my job as Entertainments Officer is one to be envied. Envied? On an average cruise there are one thousand passengers waiting – though not necessarily wanting – to enjoy themselves. Frustrated men search the decks for the non-existent sophisticated models that regale the ship's brochure.
Oh, dear God, I am the Entertainments Officer.
I entertain. To my great delight I am in overall charge of those high kicking, all-singing cabaret acts – with feathers. I also run the Casino – how grand a name for such a tacky, money-grabbing operation. I organise Gala Night with its repetitive fancy dress parade. I ooze into the microphone that the next entrant will be Chest of Drawers or The Fairy Queen. If I see yet another Ship's Funnel I shall scream at full throttle on the promenade deck for fucking ever.
But worse, worst of all are the cocktail parties. And no sensitive person needs to be told why they are so disgusting.
What happens today, the one lousy day off I get in port between cruises? A day with no passengers on board when I should be sleeping off my hangover and resting up for the next cruise of glamorous grannies playing deck quoits. What happens? I am in the midst of yet another cocktail party given for a bunch of shoreside nobodies. And because I am me, I have to lend banal chat to the cretinous gathering.
The panoramic forward-facing windows show the depressing damp of depressing grey Tilbury Docks. The Azores Lounge's ceiling has a pastel blue sky with cumulus clouds, and the carpet is sea- blue with a gold motif which surges on bad days. Today most of the basket weave chairs and the simulated bamboo tables have been cleared away to make room for the standing guests. The men guests are bright and trying to be Young Executives with soft cotton shirts stretched over expense account stomachs. The women guests are brittle high-heeled creatures festooned in chunky jewellery. Musk perfume hangs thick as fog.
I turned away to read a notice hung above the dummy hearth:
WELCOME ABOARD – YOU ARE GUESTS OF RONDO TRAVEL
A woman at my elbow said, 'Super, isn't it?'
'Super!' I echoed wondering what the silly bitch was on about.
'A lovely boat,' she said.
Most people I know at sea – seamen is a far too nautical term for my seagoing chums – would cringe at a landlubber (God forgive me) – even a landlubber as handsome as this woman – calling the multi-million pound ship the Queen of the Bay a boat. But in one way she is right, any ship with such an end-of-the-pier-name as Queen of the Bay deserves to be called a boat.
'Quite,' I said, averting my gaze from the vertigo carpet which had hit a very nasty squall.
'Is it true that over four thousand eggs are eaten every day?'
'God alone knows, darling.'
'It makes my flat in Chelsea seem minute.'
Chelsea! I almost puked. She would be the daughter of Councillor and Mrs Mustard and Cress who adore the monarchy and open jumble sales for the poor.
'Do you know Chelsea?' she predictably persisted.
'I have fond memories of Chelsea, darling. I had a somewhat curious experience there – of a sexual nature.'
'Do tell?' She giggled, stroking the bodice of her tooled leather dress.
'Do you know Slighter's Close?' I asked. It was the most prestigious address I could think of.
'Oh, yes.'
I was a character in a play and she my audience.
'I returned from a weekend – hunting in the Shires – last spring. I am a close friend of the MFH. I know it is politically incorrect these days but I have the occasional urge to mount and ride to hounds. You see I am but a country lad at heart.
'I was delayed leaving the cottage then made a simply dreadful muck of the trains and had less than half an hour to get to Slighter's Close where I had been invited to a party. I was in my tweeds. It was far too warm a day for Harris, and Harris Tweed would scarcely be de rigueur at the Rigley- Bishops, that I can say for sure.' I didn't bother to check out with La Chelsea if she knew the Rigley- Bishops because I had just invented them.
'Go on!' she gushed.
'A moment.' The effort was too much. I signalled Hassan, a faithful serf whom I always tip excessively, and he bore down with tray on which were two glasses each containing gin. Hassan poured the contents of one glass into the other, topped it up with diet tonic water and gave the brimming glass to me. He ignored the woman completely, but she was so absorbed in bloody me and bloody Chelsea that she didn't notice his slight. After a civilised draught of gin I was just able to continue my tale.
'Naturally, I had my evening togs in my bag but there was simply nowhere to get changed.
Luckily I spotted the public convenience at the corner of Hammond's Way and Jubily Street. You must know it?'
She appeared a trifle taken aback but I sailed on. 'It was the most awful squash. Those cubicles aren't designed to change one's clothes in. I experienced the most terrific trouble putting on my shoes. God, I have always hated patent leather.'
Absentmindedly she again touched the bodice of her dress.
'Aren't they squalid places? That awful gap at the bottom of the dividing walls which seem to link the cubicles together. I was reminded – and not pleasantly, I might say – of communal showers at school after games.
'When I was struggling with my shoes, there appeared, in that gap below a point on the wall where someone had written, "Beware Limbo Dancers!" – a hand. The hand waved a sheet of folded toilet paper at me.'
She appeared rather absorbed in my tale. I drained my glass before continuing.
'He – whoever my neighbour was – was communicating. All the noise and movement I had made getting changed into my evening togs he must've mistaken for signals. Perhaps he thought I was getting into drag.'
'But the hand?' she gasped.
'Indeed the hand. I remember The Hand vividly. A no-nonsense and tanned hand with square rough nails. Also, do not forget the toilet paper that The Hand held. It would have been bad manners in the extreme for me to ignore it. Just as well for there was a pencilled message on it. Just for me.'
'A message? How outrageous. What on earth did it say?'
'"Are you circumcised?" '
She shrieked in delighted horror. Several of the fashionable men guests and the fashionable women guests turned to look.
'What on earth did you do?'
'I thought his question was asked in the manner of friendship rather than if he were conducting market research.' I took another burra peg from the attentive Hassan who had oiled his way into reach again. 'I wrote, "Yes, darling, are you?" Then I pushed the paper back under that gap.'
I sensed I had gone too far. She seemed, at that moment, quite out of control and physically I was not up to coping with hysterics. Her shrieks were alternated with snorting gasps. The wretched woman had tears flowing copiously. She clung to Hassan. All persons in the Azores Lounge stared quite openly. However trying the circumstances, I felt I had an obligation to finish my tale for I am the Entertainments Officer.
'Wasn't it too outrageous?' I said. ' "Rather Date-a-dick", I thought – at the time.'
'Please,' she gasped. 'For God's sakes stop. I can scarcely breathe.' Then she spotted her hand gripping Hassan's black hairy wrist and withdrew it sharply.
Servants, well, Indian servants, seemed to be out of bounds at cocktail parties – in Chelsea.
'I had to suffer the consequences of my insane actions. But there was instant karma, my dear, for the message-sender came very much out of his closet and I have to tell you he was waiting for me outside my cubicle door. I recognised those frightful navvy's boots immediately. My dear, I almost fainted. It wasn't as if he were fey or a dirty old man. No, indeed. He was a powerfully built builder's labourer. Such shoulders! And he gripped hold of my suitcase in his iron tanned fist and I followed him meekly out of that dubious place thinking, "My God, we are dating!".'
'You didn't try and make a run for it?'
'It seemed not politic to tell him to buzz off. And after all he did have an earthy and a certainly rugged charm not to mention a tight hold of my suitcase. One might say there was a directness about him that one certainly doesn't encounter at the Rigley-Bishops.'
'You took him there?' She asked showing a before unrevealed disbelief.
'In torn jeans that showed a great deal of sun tanned muscular thigh traced with golden hair.' Suspicion and incredulity showed in her expression.
I had the feeling I should be sipping a cigarette in an amber holder. Why do I get so involved when telling my stories? It is my job, I suppose. As I am Entertainments Officer – and the senior Entertainments Officer in the shipping line, I might add – I have to entertain.
'My dear, I don't have to paint the scene for you. You will be au fait with such highbrow get- togethers. Devout old things in chiffon and velvet analysing art. And let's face it, darling, none of those phoneys had ever written or painted any goddamn worthwhile thing in their sad phoney lives.
Sid – that was the name of the lavatory hunk – was quite at home. Embarrassment was not his problem – at all. Sid mingled like a fiend. Many Golden Manhattans aided his passage through that pretentious drawing room. Golden Manhattans were the disgusting in-drink at the Rigley-Bishops.
'An ardent devotee of the cinema tried to discuss Fromberg's The Cigarette with Sid. But Sid only smiled and said that he preferred Bugs Bunny. The devotee was stopped in his tracks. Hilary de Scot-Yard asked Sid what painting interested him and Sid, whose sole experience of art was urinal graffiti, said, "Dunno, do I?" His audience was intrigued. Here was someone who had to be significant in some way to be invited to the Rigley-Bishops dressed as he was. The intellectual
gathering stopped discussing cinema and James Joyce and studied Sid.
'Hilary de Scot-Yard was much taken. That audacious patch of impudent thigh riveted him.
Hilary smirked at me. "I've got it," he said. "You are teasing us. This young man is art. You brought along a human being as a work of art. No coy nude either. But physical and self advertising. Quite blatant. Quite sensual." He then muttered, with an uncanny insight, "What do you call your work of art? Unprivate Parts"?'
The woman's fascination was total. I had done my job. My fiction had entertained her. With the rudeness that is obligatory at cocktail parties, I excused myself, 'Must rush away, darling, am bursting for a pee.'
The carpet no longer rose nor fell as I pushed my way through the musk-drenched cigarette- smoking crowd.
I allowed the heavy plate glass doors to whoosh shut isolating Them in the Azores Lounge.

I padded across the foyer's thick carpet to hide in the telephone kiosk where I fed coins into the phone box placed on board when alongside. How successfully I had enchanted the woman with my fiction. But not all was fiction. Sid is real. I am phoning him now. I am longing to hear his gravel voice. And when he speaks I shall visualise his wonderful square fingers writing down my message in the same laboured way he had written the message he had sent me under the gap in the trysting place at the corner of Hammond's Way and Jubily Street.

This story © Paul Mann.

From: The Seaman's Mission by Paul Mann
Paradise North, Manchester & Brighton
ISBN 978-0-9553543-2-8
£8.99 UK

Paul Mann's most recent novel, The Last Cargo Ship was published by Paradise North in 2008. Buy it <here>

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