Prosperity Drive (24 page)

‘She should come out our way. Trip of a lifetime. We'd sponsor her, see her right. Great life out there, Moss. We'd fix her up with a nice Aussie bloke.'

That was the clincher for Mam. She had often regaled Anita and Viv with tales of her own ancient flirtations. Racy episodes with young men that dissolved into hilarity in the retelling or petered out with the same line. ‘And then I met your father.'

Anita wasn't sure if it was a happy ending.

‘Soon,' her mother would go on, as if she couldn't wait, ‘your titties will grow like this.' She grabbed one of her capacious breasts and placed Anita's hand on it. ‘Then your monthly bleed. Ready to be a woman.' The word had a fat, obscene sound. Anita could hear the womb in the middle of it. Her titties, as if in sympathy, barely grew. Now with Viv out of the picture, all of her mother's romantic energy would be trained on her.

‘She'd love that, Ambrose, wouldn't you, Nita?' Mam had said.

It was a done deal, as far as her mother was concerned, as good as an arranged marriage.

Nothing could have prepared her for the terrible vertigo of seafaring. The heft and sway of the waves formed a sickening horizon at the portholes, the decks seemed always at a dizzying tilt. When storms came, they churned not only her innards, but the digestion of the ship. It became sick in a gale, coughing up its fixtures. In the dining room the cutlery would fall in a silvery faint, the soup bowls drooled.

Port Said was their first stop, though they were not allowed to disembark. All the same, Mew urged them to don their best dresses, in which they promenaded along B deck. Below them hawkers held up cages of screeching birds. There were goats on tethers and chickens in crates.

‘A gunny gunny man,' Bursar Bob said cheerily, ‘look girls! He's going to do a trick.'

They crowded around the rails, Lil moving in to his side, Mew winking at Anita in companionable conspiracy.

At the foot of the gangway, a large robed man with an extravagant moustache held a little chick in his palm and lifted it up to them, as if for inspection. He stroked its beak and made purring sounds at the golden furry ball. Anita expected a swish of handkerchief and for the peeping chick to disappear. The conjuror smiled, a silvery flash, popped the chicken into his mouth and swallowed it whole. He beat his chest and roared triumphantly. Coins rained down on him from the
Australis
. He scrabbled desperately on the ground amid the hail of copper, then plucked a fresh chick from a crate by his feet. Anita thought she was going to be sick.

The
Australis
moved on. They approached the Canal. The Suez, a puckered seam Anita remembered from the schoolroom map. After so much open space they were suddenly enclosed; after so much solitude on the high seas, they were suffocated by land, miles of it, ochre and tinder dry, flat and arid, sentries of palm trees the only relief from the cloudless skies. And after weeks as a solitary ship on a singular journey, there were other craft, liners and tankers and launches, as if this narrow tumult of water were spawning craft. It was a welcome break from the vastness of ocean, the monotony of an empty sea. They travelled through the Canal at night. As darkness fell, the
Australis
sprouted illuminated wings; the crested insignia on her prow opened up and on its nether side was a huge searchlight by which they navigated their way. It was like a giant moth-catcher, or a portable moon that kept just ahead of them. Halfway down they halted in the Great Bitter Lake to let the north-bound convoy through. Our sister ship, Bursar Bob declared, as the
Sydney
passed by and recognised the
Australis
with an ill-tempered belch of her klaxon. Lining her decks, leaning over the rails, their doppelgängers waved at
them. Anita stared at the familiar silhouette, the same geometry of funnel and porthole; even their signature smoke scrawl in the sky was replicated. The
Sydney
drew level and for a moment they were twinned. And then, with an impatient belch, she was gone. Anita, standing on deck, felt her old life receding.

Aden was dry land. By then they were clamouring to get off, to still the incessant tossing of the sea, which had filled their heads like the fluid in a barometer. The first impression they encountered on terra firma was its oddness, the awful solidity of the fixed viewpoint. And the noise of humanity crammed into a small space. They tripped gaily down the gangplank of the
Australis
, four girls in summer prints clutching their day passes, and melted into the crushed stench of the marketplace. Men and animals jostled on the quay; stallholders ululated as if trading were a form of penance. Their smells intertwined, sweat and spice and shit. In his professional capacity, Bursar Bob had furnished Lil with a set of rules. Don't drink the water, don't reveal too much flesh, don't talk to the natives. The natives moved in droves, haughty and disparaging, or crouched like raptors on the ground throwing dice and hissing.

‘Your Arab,' Bursar Bob had said, ‘should not be encouraged, particularly by such flowers of Empire.'

‘I love it,' Lil had whispered, ‘when he talks flowery.'

I am not a flower of anybody's empire, Anita thought savagely.

They trod daintily through the narrow, arcaded streets and dark alleyways in their floral frocks and strappy sandals in search of civilisation, which Bursar Bob had assured them existed. A troop of soldiers on camels and bearing flagstaffs passed them by; there was a constant traffic of skinny boys on overburdened donkeys, but they ended up dusty, tired and disappointed. Bursar Bob had failed to materialise so Lil had
an excuse to be downcast. Anita, Mew and Stasia had less reason, but as happened constantly during their voyage they infected one another with their moods.

They had planned to buy trinkets but there weren't shops as they knew them; there were small dingy stores, but they sold only household goods and provisions. There were rickety stalls set up on street corners stacked with strange fruit but, schooled as they were in Bursar Bob's precautionary fear, they didn't linger long enough anywhere to get engaged. If a stallholder addressed them, they imagined they were being mocked or cursed.

Eventually they found the Crescent Hotel recommended by Bursar Bob (‘The Queen stayed there!'). They flopped gracelessly in the tea rooms, perspiring heavily in their soiled finery. It was a high-ceilinged establishment with tiled floors and cane furniture. Terracotta urns housed spidery ferns, which whispered in the deliciously cool air generated by the snappish whirr of ceiling fans working away like trapped winged creatures. They ordered iced tea and petits fours, fanning themselves with the menu cards while a slippered boy waiter, wearing a fez and starched whites, padded from table to table bearing decorated trays of shivering china. It was a reprieve from the onslaught of sensation − and heat − outside, and they wallowed in it.

Lil was distracted – as ever – by the prospect that Bursar Bob, having recommended the Crescent, might actually turn up there himself, so she kept a beady eye on the revolving doors while Mew and Stasia bickered over the tepid tea and the tots when the bill came. Anita excused herself and went in search of the Ladies' Room. She hoped it wasn't going to be one of those holes in the floor that Bursar Bob had warned them about.

A sign with an elaborate curlicued finger pointed downstairs and Anita followed it down one flight of steps and then another, finding herself in a dark brown corridor lined with
louvred doors. Like the saloon bars in a Western, she thought. It was warm down here, warm and airless, and she found her forehead beading and her underarms dampening again. She ploughed on to the end of the corridor but it was a dead end. She must have made a wrong turning, or gone too far. She was about to retrace her steps when one of the doors opened and a man stood there, guarding the door with his arm. He wore a high turban-like thing on his head, flecked with black and white, and what looked like a white nightshirt with a pair of pyjamas underneath. His skin was the colour of treacle. He smiled at her quizzically, as if
he
had lost his way and was about to ask for directions. Instead he made a small, chuckling sound. She noticed the large gap between his front teeth that made his otherwise placid face – steady brown gaze, a flared nose – look comical.

‘I was just …' she began. But he probably had no English.

She did not want to be rude and simply turn her back on him in case he'd think her haughty. He dropped his arm and pushed the louvred door back. Was he inviting her in, she wondered. Or daring her? She should not go in, she told herself, but out of politeness she found herself stepping into a tiny room more constricted than Cabin C12, even with four girls in it. There were two cots; the bottom one where the man had been lying – sleeping? – showed signs of disarray. It was spitefully hot inside. Hanging from the window frame was a blue uniform like the shadow of another man quenching the white block of light. It had brass buttons and gold epaulettes and a name tag over the breast pocket; she saw he was Mohammed. He closed the door behind her silently and shot a rickety bolt across to lock it. Now she should be panicking, she told herself. Now she should be crying out, screaming
Help, Help!
– This was exactly the kind of thing the bursar had warned them against. But she didn't do any of these things. She noticed he was barefoot and this, somehow, made him seem less threatening. Slowly he began to unwind his
headgear as if he were unfurling a plait of hair and let it slither to the floor. He gestured to her. She unbuttoned her cardigan and peeled it off. It was like a game of forfeits where the moves had already been decided. He caught the hem of his tunic and whipped it off over his head; she inched down the zip of her dress working blindly behind her back. She lifted it away from her − the bodice of it was stiff and when she dropped it on the floor it stood for a minute or two before surrendering and falling. Standing in her vest and pants, she faced him in his loose pantaloons swathed around his loins. Soon, she thought, he will speak and then I will return to my senses, but he didn't. He put his hand to her face and crushed her mouth into a buckled rose so that even if she had wanted to speak, his mouth on hers would have prevented it. He led her by that kiss to the crumpled bed and they fell on it together. She thought of the crudest, most knowing thing she could do. She thought of her mother. She opened her legs.

Afterwards, she gathered up her spilled clothes and swiftly dressed. She slid the lock back and looked behind her before she stepped outside. He lay there, spent, but watching her intently. Although he showed no signs of moving, she made a fugitive dash for the stairway and started the climb up into the light, her thighs throbbing, her heart agape. Stasia was standing at the head of the stairs in the lobby of the hotel.

‘Where on earth have you been?' she asked. ‘We've been looking all over for you. Lil and Mew had to go on ahead.'

‘I got lost,' Anita said.

At Colombo, the
Australis
moored some way off from the port. Squat white buildings quivered on the horizon; rowing boats jostled in the swell the ship brought. Men stood on the buffeting boats and called up to the towering decks, beads and trinkets threaded through their fingers, while their empty nets trailed disconsolately in the choppy waters.
Sahib!
From
this distance, Anita wasn't sure if they were even selling anything; they might, with their glossy hair and squinting smiles, have been simply pleading for mercy.
Sahib!

A tender ferried passengers ashore but only Mew took up the offer. Lil was having a pig of a period, and Stasia was penning a letter to Frank W. Anita lay out on one of the timbered deckchairs strewn around the pool, like a giant watery eye on A deck, deserted. She felt bereft of curiosity. The floating world of the
Australis
was her only interest now and, when she allowed herself to remember it, the scalding memory of submitting to the golden man in Aden. It wasn't that it had been unpleasant; even when he had borne down on her he had not been rough. There was something athletic about the way he had moved whereas she had felt like a burden – a white flour sack – that must be manoeuvred into place. When he'd done –
that
– an unbearable spear of pleasure ran through her, a piercing sensation followed by a hollow falling. But in the girls' company, she was smugly silent. She had gone beyond them, left them behind with their useless and florid romantic speculations. When she thought about Aden, the secrecy of the encounter gave her more pleasure than the memory.

The entire ship celebrated when the Equator crossed the international dateline. Anita wondered why. These were imaginary lines on a map, but, by that stage of the journey, what had once absorbed their interest – the moody changes of the ocean, the flowery foam of the ship's wake, even the heartbreaking sweep of alien sunsets − had dimmed. All that could rouse them now was noisy diversion. It was a calm evening, a starry night. On went the summer frocks they had not worn since Aden, though they had to throw on their northern hemisphere coats and woolly cardigans to ward off the chilly southerlies. Lil wore a pair of evening gloves. This was the night she intended to bag Bursar Bob and, sure enough, at some time in the small hours the pair of them slipped away. Mew danced
showily with Viktor Varga. He was courtly with her; she was tipsy and broke her heel. At midnight, the ship's hooter was blown three times, echoing eerily over the night wash of waves, a puny reminder to the elements that they had had been there, a nautical graffito. Later the stewards blacked up and slung grass skirts over their whites and did a high-kicking dance on A deck, as the passengers clapped and hollered, and snaked around the pool, conga-style.

‘C'mon,' Mew urged her, having abandoned Viktor, but she couldn't join the raucous carnival; it seemed disloyal.

After the Equator it was all downhill. The blanched decks, even the Brisbane bar, lost their appeal. Their hygiene took a knocking; they took to bathing less; their bars of sugar soap lay unused for days on end. They started to skip meals because they were too lazy to rise and dress. Their lethargy had found its natural home – an ocean-going liner adrift in an endless sea. They dozed on their distressed bunks, abandoned by dreams, sinking deeper into a comradely lassitude, as if even their sleep had become bored with them. In the privacy of the cabin they could no longer face one another; they turned towards the wall and escaped into sleep. When Anita did venture up on deck there were fewer and fewer passengers around. It seemed as if they were losing people overboard.