Unsatisfied

The man threw himself into the Mediterranean Sea at around 4pm in the afternoon in full view of two passengers. The journey was halted while he was rescued and the voice-alarm told us to ‘Remain calm, remain seated, and let the crew do their job.’ So, naturally, we all stood up, wandered over to the port side of the ship, and watched the rescue take place.

By the time I got there, the rescue operation was well under way. I stood next to my wife, who stood next to Vic and Tony, and we peered down over the railings to the water below. By then, the man had been hoisted from the water, ensconced within a rubber ring. It bounced against the hull of the ship with a heavy thud as they pulled him up onto the deck.

It was slow and unsatisfying, and the crew told us to return to the bar. Many did, including my wife, who turned away and walked back to our seats. She urged me to join her and I acquiesced, but not before I took one last look. It was then that I saw it, seconds before he was dragged onto the fourth-floor deck. A thrilled look in his eyes. The soft, intoxicated smile on his face.

~

Two days earlier, my wife and I had taken a taxi from our hotel to the port to board the Diamond Lady. After a week in Athens, I felt unsatisfied.

I had been unsatisfied with the Acropolis and the Parthenon and the Kerameikos and the Plaka neighbourhood.

I had been unimpressed with its busyness, with the other tourists and tour guides and their endless enthusiasm for history and the smugness of the architecture and everyone’s fascination with myths and legends and stories and the certainty that there was no certainty when it came to good and evil and everything in between. Those stories left me unsatisfied, and I was bored of feeling like that. Just as I was bored of the heat and the smog and the noise and the food and the locals.

At the port, we paid the taxi driver and tried to check in. The clerk behind reception said we were early. The ship was not ready to board.

He directed us to wait in the café and pointed towards a door on the far side of the room. There, we could drink tea and wait for the boarding announcement. I picked up our bags, stiff and heavy like dead baby seals, and shifted them into the café.

We drank tea, the most unsatisfying of drinks, and passed a bag of crisps between us. The shiny plastic scraped against the table and the sound clawed against my skull. My wife read the cruise company’s brochure and gave me uneasy looks.

The boarding call came an hour later. First in a thick, masculine Greek then in a chipper Essex twang. A steward came in and secured our luggage, tossed it mercilessly onto a vehicle with other bags, and drove off. We handed over our tickets and passports. Then content we were ourselves, we were permitted to board.

Stepping onto the deck, the captain and the first mate welcomed us onto the boat. Theirs was a false and decorous modesty. A tiresome formality. My wife grinned and I frowned, unsatisfied, and she apologised for my dreariness and diagnosed it as a headache.

Once aboard, we were directed towards the main concourse to check in. We saw eagerness, excitement, vitality. It was an anaconda wrapping itself around my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs.

On the main concourse, my wife re-examined our tickets and I cast my eye around. Red-faced pensioners moved in and out of stores and bars and restaurants. They moved with practised grace—this was no one’s first cruise—and welcomed themselves, and each other, back home.

At the far end, next to a bar, was the reception. We joined the queue to get room keys, and my wife started talking to the couple in front. They were similar to us, similarly red-faced, similarly comfortable in their white shirts and cream cargo shorts. They were Vic and Tony, from Newcastle. It was their second cruise of the year. They’d been to the Caribbean in January. This was our fourth, and it was only July. We liked to keep busy, my wife said, while we were still capable. It was an unsatisfying answer, but my wife knew better than anyone what I was capable of and they accepted it without question.

Vic and Tony were the sort of people who partook heavily in the official cruise activity programme, who confused professional courtesy for friendliness, who called everyone by their first names, and who insisted you join in too. My wife embraced their enthusiasm and by the time they reached the front of the queue we had agreed to meet them for a game of bowls before dinner. Their smiles were splinters that cut across my face.

In our room on the tenth floor, we disembowelled our luggage and thrust its innards into drawers. When we were ready to head upstairs, I tried to feign exhaustion but my wife wasn’t having it. She grabbed an itinerary from the drawer, and me by the elbow, and shuffled us towards the lifts. I found this performance unsatisfying, but I consented to playing the required role for now.

We played a game of bowls with Vic and Tony. We were joined by Amy and Leon, by Harold and Maureen. My wife explained, her wooden laugh shattering in half across my back, that I was the quiet type. They talked and I listened. I nodded and allowed my wife to dictate the flow of conversation. Afterwards, we went to dinner then had an early night.

At 7am the next morning, my wife dragged us to the main concourse to sign up for official activities. It was mobbed. Grandchildren energetically circled their grandparents, like they were tying ropes around their legs. Young couples, people who had retired in their fifties, took it all in and seemed embarrassed by their youth.

My wife signed us up for everything she could. There were art classes, badminton matches, bowls tournaments, Greek cooking classes, nightly games of bingo, history lessons, excursions, exercise classes, photography seminars. There were massages and spin classes and advertorials for condos and pyramid schemes and products no one needed. There were lectures on maximising our pensions, on ways to reduce clutter at home, on how to reorganise our finances, how to tell if wine has been corked, and which gins were worth buying.

‘It’ll do you good,’ she said, and I knew what she meant.

The boat arrived in Santorini at midday, and we decided to remain on board. We had been there before. It was an unsatisfying place.

We met up with Vic and Tony and played backgammon, then headed into the Music Hall for our first lesson, an unsatisfying presentation on the history of the Diamond Lady. The speaker was a regretful-looking man in his thirties. He talked for an hour about the journeys the boat had taken and the passengers it had served. It was so tedious I became sleepy. The sleepiness made me furious, which made me too angry to drift off.

We ate lunch and played more bowls. We played a quick game of badminton then went into the casino. We were robbed by the one-armed bandits. We played games of bridge and poker and drank martinis. We ate dinner and played more card games. We drank more martinis, and drunken blurriness took me away. For a short time, I was almost content, but it returned in the morning, the same monotonous ache. It stayed with me until later that day when the man threw himself into the water.

~

The man was the only thing people wanted to talk about, although my wife was not keen for me to partake in these conversations. Too morbid, she told Vic and Tony in a wary tone. Instead, we spoke of other things as we indulged in everything that the cruise had to offer.

We were treated to a viewing of an original Rembrandt (donated to the ship by an anonymous and wealthy benefactor); we watched The Poseidon Adventure in the ship’s fifty-seater cinema; we sculpted vases from ocean clay; we tasted mediocre Italian wines; we lost more money in the casino; we played a dozen games of bowls with Vic and Tony; played round after round of gin rummy; hand after hand of poker; a game or two of solitaire; and drank cocktail after cocktail, all of which was unsatisfying because it couldn’t make any of it bearable.

My wife fell asleep early so I roamed the ship in search of the man who had jumped. I would have preferred to look during hospitable hours, surrounded by people who chewed and gnawed their false teeth on the gristle of gossip, but after he jumped I began to exude a certain kind of energy—my wife called it a ‘symptom’—and had glued herself to my side. It was an unsatisfying development, but I was undeterred.

I wandered the fourth floor, returning again and again to the place where he had been lifted from the water, as though I might find a damp outline of his body or a phantom who could steer me in the right direction. Unsatisfied with how little remained of his rescue, I sauntered towards the gambling halls and the late-night cocktail lounges, the inhabited places where tired staff served subpar infusions to rosy-cheeked alcoholics and the terminally numb. They didn’t know him, hadn’t seen him, but they were like him: flotsam pulled from the water, coated in seaweed and sticky with anemones; only they had been dumped in the bar and left propped up on stools like rotting cadavers.

~

We were playing badminton with Vic and Tony three days later, somewhere between Naples and Barcelona, when the man threw himself in the water a second time. The engines wound down and the alarm cried out through the speaker system: ‘Remain calm, remain seated, and let the crew do their job’.

We ignored this and leaned on the port-side railings which surrounded the ship as the crew pulled him from the water. The chatter was less upbeat this time. People had been curious before; now they were aggravated. For most of the passengers, enough was enough. They weren’t going to give him the attention, the gratification, so they sauntered away. My wife did the same and tried to drag me back to the badminton courts, but I resisted, shook her grip from my arm, and said, ‘I’ll be along soon.’

I stood there waiting for that flicker of a smile to cross his face. When it did, I was satisfied. He was dragged away again, and I stared out at the aimless sea for almost an hour before my wife returned and told me to join a game of Uno.

~

The crew refused to answer any questions about the man. They refused, even, to tell us his name. To their frustration, we found out anyway. His name was Billy, and his second leap into the water confirmed everyone’s prejudices about what they thought he was doing. It was suicide. It was not suicide. It was an accident. It was not. He was a prankster. He was disturbed. He was a fool. Everyone agreed that he was deeply inconsiderate. I was unsatisfied with these answers, and I was determined to find out more.

~

We played Scabby Queen and Scrabble and Monopoly. We drank cocktail after cocktail after cocktail, and whenever my wife went to the bar I rushed over to members of the crew and asked them about Billy.

They claimed they knew no more than I did, but it was clear from the way their voices and language shifted at the mention of his name that they were monitoring him. They were protecting him from the ire of the passengers, as well as from himself. They were not imprisoning him, but he was being watched by crew members who moved in tight circles around him. They did not have to tell me this. I had a way of understanding things. Body language was one of many tongues I spoke. All I had to do was find the bodies that knew more.

~

We stepped off the boat in Barcelona, at my wife’s insistence, and we wandered the streets in a furious, unguided manner. With only the map she bought from the concierge stand, we took lefts and rights without apparent purpose.

She had done this before, in Buenos Aires, after what I’d done in Montevideo. She was trying to dizzy me, to create spirals which would knock the animalistic thoughts from my head. It had worked before, a half dozen times before, but only for a short time. It left an emptiness inside me that greedily craved what was missing, the anger that had been lost. We did this for hours then returned to the boat.

We played tenniquoits with Vic and Tony. We drank sangria and rioja as though coerced by geographical adjacency. It was unsatisfying, dizzying, and I seethed at my wife’s attempt to unspool me.

I made excuses, claimed sickness, and slipped away, but instead of returning to the room, I took the lift to the lowest deck and began to circle the ship. I moved around the outer perimeter and curled my way to its centre. The lower decks were heavy and solid and thick. The water pressed against the hull with a friendly grip, but one that could turn deadly in an instant. Passengers moved through the corridors, and I tried to identify the knowing looks, the secret confidences. The things that meant that Billy was close.

I moved up, curled inwards, and climbed another floor, then another. Unsatisfied by a lack of progress, I began to bang on random doors, not waiting for anyone to answer. Early evening was a time of transit, between activities, between the dining hall and the bar. The engines came on, and the ship began its journey to Gibraltar.

The higher I went, the quieter things became. I was unaware of it at first, but then I felt it in the clank of my footprints, the twirling of my breath. The crew were gone. The passengers too.

Then I saw him, at the end of a long corridor on the eighth floor. Waiting for me. He stood against the wall and waggled a finger at me. Come closer.

The hairs on my arms exploded with excitement. I moved closer. I hadn’t felt like this since Montevideo. The possibility of it. The excitement. The need.

I moved closer again. Ten feet away from him, he lifted himself from the wall and entered the cabin on my left. I followed behind him and when I crossed the threshold, he surprised me, pushed me forward, twisted my arm around my back, and tossed me down onto the floor.

‘What do you want?’

I looked up, breath helixing out of my lungs.

‘What do you want?’ he said again. I saw, then, how young he was. Thirty at most. Short and scraggly and uncomfortable in his own body, with a slight forward tilt to his frame.

‘I want to know why you do it. Why you throw yourself off the ship.’

I rolled over and pulled myself into a sitting position with my back against the wall.

‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘You have nothing to fear from me. I’m not annoyed. I’m here because I can’t figure you out. You’ve done it twice, hit the alarm before you jumped both times. That’s not an accident. And the look in your eyes when they pulled you aboard. It wasn’t fear or relief. It was ecstasy.’

He took a step back.

‘I do it because I’m afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Afraid of everything,’ he said, sighing, the weight of keeping it to himself finally draining from his body. ‘I’m afraid of being hit by cars, being stabbed. Afraid of the ceiling collapsing on me and burning to death and choking on my dinner and being poisoned and struck by lightning and my heart giving out for no reason whatsoever. I’m afraid of drowning, too, if you can believe it.’

‘Then why do it?’

He took a couple of steps towards me. ‘Because the fear is everywhere. Everywhere except out there.’

He pointed out of the porthole.

‘Out there, I will be rescued. In the life ring as they pull me up, I am safe. There is peace and safety and security.’

‘There must be an easier way to get that feeling.’

‘On the contrary. This is the perfect place. In the city, on the coast, out in the country, there are no guarantees. You cannot be sure someone will save you from an oncoming bus. You cannot jump from a height and expect to be caught. But out here, there are protocols. I hit the alarm. I jump into the sea. I am rescued.’

‘But the fear comes back, doesn’t it?’

‘It never stops. But out here it has limited space to grow.’

Billy held out his hand. I grunted, accepted it, and was lifted to my feet.

‘I want you to do it again,’ I said, suddenly.

‘Sorry?’

‘I want to watch you do it.’

‘They’ll stop me,’ he said. ‘They’re guarding me.’

‘I don’t think they are,’ I said, somewhere between truth and wishful thinking. He stuttered, paused; I smiled at him. ‘We’ll look out for each other.’

I walked past him, pulled open the door, and stepped into the corridor.

He poked his head out, looked up the corridor, then back at me. He nodded, a perfunctory ‘let’s go’, then rushed towards the lifts.

We went down to the third floor. On the sixth, descending, a woman in a bathing suit, towel draped over her shoulder like a fresh kill, pushed the button for the fourth floor and faced the door. She paid us no mind, but we held our breath until she departed. The lift’s vibrations tickled us with relief as we arrived at our destination.

‘I jump from the fifth,’ he said. ‘If they’re watching me, following me, we need to out-manoeuvre them. If they find me out here they’ll lock me in my room until the end of the trip.’

We moved in quick bursts and at each junction Billy stopped to investigate.

We climbed two flights of stairs and moved inwards, along the spine of the ship, until we reached the bow. From there we made our way to the outer deck on the port side. We paused.

‘What now?’ I asked.

Billy pointed at the wall. A red-and-white-striped rubber ring dangled on a hook. Next to it was a small, red button which said ‘For Emergencies Only’.

Billy walked over to it. I matched his steps, and when he reached up to press it, I grabbed him by the wrist.

‘Let me.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I want to be part of this.’

Without averting my gaze from him, I hit the emergency button with my palm.

‘Okay okay okay. Now. It takes them forty-five seconds to respond,’ Billy said, the excitement spilling into his voice. ‘Tell them you saw me jump. Tell them you arrived too late to stop me.’

He moved over to the railing, hoisted himself onto it, and sat facing the sea. His body quivered, and he began counting down from ten. As he did this, I stepped over, behind him. On the beat between three and two, I raised my arms and pushed him.

He flailed down into the water. The shortness of the distance was unsatisfying, the splash as he hit the surface was soft and disappointing. He didn’t explode, didn’t displace a trench of water. A wave crashed over him, and he was gone.

But I didn’t have time to think. They would be here any second. So I bent down and untied the lace on my right shoe and tossed it a couple of feet away from me. I lay down on the deck, twisting my body into splayed scissors. I pressed my face against the wooden decking. I closed my eyes and ripped the smile from my face, reshaped it into one of agony.

Within seconds, one of the crew arrived, found me lying hurt on the floor.

The exhilaration wouldn’t last forever. The ship’s doctor would realise I wasn’t injured. The crew would realise Billy was missing. My wife would figure out that I had killed him. But in that moment, it didn’t matter. I lay there on the deck and took slow, deep breaths and tried to enjoy it while it lasted.