#
“Do you see the dress that woman is wearing?” We’re walking up on the top deck now. It’s a cold breezy sort of day and the decks are pretty much empty but for us and a few of the more hardy passengers.
“I know,” I say. “She was wearing it yesterday. I wouldn’t be seen dead in it, myself.”
We make this sort of joke at every possible opportunity. They’re probably not all that funny. You give a little laugh anyway and put your arm around my waist. I pull myself closer to you, hugging you around the middle with both arms and we walk along for a while like that together. The day is getting greyer by the minute. The clouds are low and dark and it’s becoming difficult to tell the difference between the sky and the sea. After a while you shudder a little and say, “I can’t stand this cold anymore. Why don’t we go inside for a bit?”
“We can if you like?” I say.
“How come we had to end up on a Scandinavian cruise ship, anyway?” you carry on. “Why couldn’t we have ended up somewhere warm? What’s wrong with the Caribbean? Why can’t we be somewhere where, you know, there just aren’t any glaciers or icebergs or anything? Wouldn’t that make a nice change?”
“If we were in the Caribbean, you’d just be complaining about the heat.”
“I know. But at least I’d be warm while I was doing it.”
We turn around and make our way back towards the restaurants, just like the rest of the passengers have done.
“You’re just being ridiculous again, anyway,” I say. “You don’t feel the cold anymore than I do. We don’t have the right parts anymore.”
“You see, I know that,” you say. “But I’m still shivering. It’s very strange. It’s like that thing amputees do. You know, where they want to scratch the foot they don’t have anymore? I see the wind and the sky and I feel cold. I shiver. I can’t help it.”
I lean over and whisper in your ear. “Shall we go inside so that you can imagine you’re warm again?”
“That would be lovely, thank you.”
#
One of the things about being dead is that you don’t notice time passing anymore. I know it used to be important – time for this, time for that, time for lunch, time for bed, time we were going, race against time, watching the time, making time, spending time – but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Maybe it’s because we’re out at sea all year, but even the passing of the seasons don’t leave much of an impression on us. We just don’t notice. And night and day, they’re all the same to us, just one long stretching moment that lasts forever, each one day just the same as the last. Except for the days we spend in dock, of course. Except for the days we are attached to the land. But we don’t like to talk about them. No, we don’t like to think about those days.
#
It must be evening, because the passengers are dressing for dinner. There’s some sort of event going on. A dinner dance thing. We saw the posters for it. We talk about going along, just for the fun but “you know, I just don’t have a thing to wear, darling,” I say.
“It’ll be deathly boring, anyway,” you say.
“And the people we’d have to talk to? I’d rather die!” I say.
“I don’t know, though. The chef has a new dessert. I hear it’s to die for,” you say.
“And the Captain’s wife? Drop dead gorgeous, so they say.”
We carry on this for a while then go off to amuse ourselves in one of the staterooms. This is something we like to do from time to time. We move things around in a spooky manner while people are dressing. Like now, for instance, we move the hairbrush from the table where the lady left it and put it on the bed while her back is turned. Then we watch while she gets confused, finds it and puts it back on the table again, at which point we wait ‘till she turns away then move it again, back to the bed. We are not scary ghosts. We can’t manifest ourselves, or frighten people out of their wits or anything like that. If we put our minds to it, however, we can certainly be very annoying.
For a while it’s funny. She gets more and more flustered, turning this way and that way as if she thinks she’s going completely mad. But then something happens and it’s not funny anymore. She starts shouting at her husband, telling him to stop messing her about and he shouts back and all of a sudden they’re calling each other all sorts of names and she slaps him and he slaps her back and storms out of the room, slamming the door behind him so hard that a chair falls over and a mirror breaks. It all happens so quickly that we don’t even have time to leave. When he’s gone we stand there for the longest time, listening to her cry, curled up in a heap on the floor by the bed. Then we shuffle away, neither of us saying anything or knowing what to do with ourselves.
#
“We don’t get sick. We don’t get hurt. We don’t get tired. We don’t need to sleep or to eat…”
“I miss eating, actually. I liked it. And sleeping, curled up in a nice warm bed. I miss all that.”
You wave your hand at me and make a tutting noise through your teeth. “Don’t interrupt me, I’m trying to be positive. I’m trying to think positive thoughts for us.”
“I’m sorry. Please continue.”
We’re curled up on a sofa in the bar. It’s very late at night and the place is completely empty except for the two of us.
“We have all the time in the world to do anything we please. Nobody wants anything from us. Nobody expects anything from us. They don’t even notice us. We are completely in charge of ourselves. Completely free in a way that no-one else on this boat will ever be.”
As you carry on talking, I can’t help thinking that I’m not sure that any of these are good things, necessarily. That maybe I don’t want to be quite so free as this and about how, if we are so free, why it is that I feel so trapped. I know you’ll tell me that I’m being too negative and not embracing the way things are now, but I can’t help myself. This is the way my mind goes.
“We don’t even need to eat or sleep anymore.”
“You said that one already.”
#
Later on we realise that the dinner event was being held to mark the end of the cruise, which means we’re coming in to land again. This is not a good thing. Bad things happen when we make landfall. There are others like us, you see. But they live on the land, not the boat and they can only come aboard when we come close to them. We have to hide. We have to stay away from them. They laugh at us and hurt us and tell us horrible, horrible stories. Stories about where we are from, who we were before we died and about where we are going to. Terrible things. You say they’re lying, that they only say these things to hurt us, but I don’t know whether you believe that or not. So we hide and we wait until the ship leaves port and they go away and we can be alone again.
While we’re hiding, down in the ship’s hold in a cupboard surrounded by boxes and packages, you put your arm around me and pull me close towards you. Your eyes are afraid. You don’t like this anymore than I do, but you’re trying to hide it. You’re trying to protect me from the hurt as much as you can.
I whisper to you, “I’m glad we’re together. I know things won’t ever change now. I know it will always be like this, but I don’t care. I don’t care if this lasts forever, so long as you’re here. So long as we’re together.”
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