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  ‘Oh, Mum, we’ve had a hell of a night.’

  Jill set the jar down and came up the stairs towards her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Shhh. He’s sleeping now. I just finished getting him down.’

  ‘Come on,’ Jill said, threading an arm around Linda, helping her up. ‘Let’s go in the kitchen and I’ll put the kettle on.’

  In the kitchen, as the kettle began to rumble while Jill busied herself with the cups, tea bags and milk, Linda sat at the small table and talked. ‘He wouldn’t eat, we’ve had to put him back on the drip, he just didn’t want to take his medicine, the new stuff, said his throat hurt, kept spitting it out, getting himself into a right state, till finally Ken and I were both holding him down and it got to a point where he couldn’t breathe, he just … couldn’t catch a breath. It was, Christ, it was horrible. Sorry.’ Her mum didn’t like swears.

  ‘That’s OK, darling. You’re upset.’

  ‘Then he couldn’t settle so we were both up and down half the night. God knows what Ken must be like at work today.’

  ‘Isn’t there some other way to give him the medicine? Tablets? Could you put it in his food?’

  ‘Apparently not. It’s a suspension. Something to do with the way it works on the lungs.’

  Jill brought the tea over and sat down. Her poor daughter. Linda was thirty-five and looked fifty. These past three years, since Jamie was diagnosed, had been brutal. Jill, meanwhile, was wearing quite well at sixty-seven. Still drove herself everywhere. ‘The day you drive a car is the day they carry me out of here in a pine box,’ her Derek used to say. He was right in the end – Jill had started taking driving lessons right after he died. Twelve years ago now.

  ‘What’s that, Mum?’ Linda asked, nodding down the hall towards the jar sitting by the front door.

  ‘Oh! One of the collecting jars, from the Black Swan on the high street. Nearly six hundred pounds they think! Since Christmas! How about that?’

  ‘Oh, bless them,’ Linda said. Then she burst into tears.

  ‘Shhh, come on, darling.’ Jill pulled her daughter to her. ‘Inch by inch. We’ll get there.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, I don’t think we’re ever going to get there.’

  ‘Of course we will. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

  ‘If you’d seen him last night … he … he …’ the words coming between sobs, her face buried in Jill’s neck, ‘he looked like he was drowning, Mum. The fear in his eyes. He was terrified.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’

  ‘All this bloody Rome wasn’t built in a day and we’ll get there. Chicago, the whole thing, I sometimes think it’d be kinder if he just, if he just –’

  Jill grabbed her daughter’s face and twisted it up to hers. ‘That’s enough, Linda. You hear me? Enough now. I won’t have that kind of talk. I simply will not have it. God has a plan for that boy and he is going to live.’ Linda collapsed sobbing in her mother’s arms. ‘There, dear. There, there,’ Jill said. ‘You’re just exhausted. You’re not thinking properly. We are going to fix this.’

  ‘Oh, Mum …’

  Jill held her while she cried. After a while she said, ‘Go on now. I’ll go up and sit with him for a bit. You go through and lie down on the sofa and have a lovely nap. You’ll feel much better. I can stay tonight if you want.’

  ‘Haven’t you got your am-dram stuff?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll manage without me.’

  ‘No, please, Mum, you go. Ken’s back at five. If I can just get forty winks …’

  ‘OK. Come on, let’s get you settled. I’ll come down in a bit and make us some lunch.’

  After she’d laid a blanket over her daughter Jill crept quietly up the stairs and into her grandson’s room. The curtains were drawn, giving it the authentically sleepy tang of the sick ward. Jill sat down in the armchair next to the bed and looked at Jamie, sleeping. It was incredible, you’d never have thought it to look at him. Other than the canula going into the back of his left hand, leading to the bag of glucose on a stand, there was nothing to tell you how sick he was. A bit pale, yes, but basically a perfectly beautiful five-year-old boy. Nothing to suggest that, in the words of one of the doctors, he had the lungs ‘of a seventy-year-old miner’.

  De Havilland’s syndrome – which was about as rare as it came. Basically the tissue of his lungs was corroding unusually fast. Breathing difficulties obviously. He struggled to clear his airways. Eating and drinking were difficult. In many ways it was like Linda and Ken had been dealing with the stress of a newborn for five years now. There was one specialist unit in the world performing an operation that had proved successful in stopping, even reversing, the disease. At St Michael’s in Chicago.

  Jill looked up from the bed, towards the wall above it. On it was a big poster, a poster Jill had helped to make. It was a thermometer. Below the thermometer were the words ‘JAMIE’S OPERATION’; above it the target figure: £60,000. The level of the thermometer had been coloured in red up to just below the £30,000 mark. It had taken all of the tiny bit of savings Jill had, all of Linda and Ken’s, donations from friends and family and three years of writing letters and putting jars and tins in local pubs and shops to get here, to get to just below halfway.

  Jamie coughed and stirred a little in his sleep.

  Jill swept a strand of the boy’s fine blond hair out of his face and soothed his brow. He murmured and turned onto his side. She held his hand and leaned back a little in the chair, gazing up at that home-made thermometer on the wall still hopelessly, infuriatingly short of the magic figure. Jill allowed herself to think something that she never, ever thought.

  Would another three years be too late?

  SIX

  ‘BLOW, WINDS, AND CRACK YOUR CHEEKS!’

  Susan watched, only mildly astonished, as Lear, played by that frightful old ham Bill Murdoch, roared and threw his hands out wide, catching the Fool, played by sweet little Freddy Watson, square in the face with the left, sending him careering sideways into a piece of heathland scenery, sending it crashing onto the floor, making Jill Worth jump up in her seat, causing her to scream as she plunged the needle she was using to sew Regan’s torn costume into the soft pad of her thumb. ‘Bother!’ she yelped. (Jill was about the only person Susan could think of who actually would say ‘Bother!’ or ‘SUGAR!’ when hitting her thumb with a hammer.) Frank the director put his head in his hands and emitted a low whine as onstage the rehearsal – the final dress rehearsal – ground to a halt amid the bickering familiar to anyone who had attended their fair share of Wroxham Players rehearsals.

  ‘Bloody hell, Bill!’

  ‘You were too close! You know I do that then!’

  ‘Oh, this bush is cracked now.’

  ‘Yes, gentlemen, can we –’

  ‘I need to stand there so –’

  ‘Can’t you –’

  ‘Where’s props? Props!’

  ‘The audience won’t care where you are, Freddy! It’s –’

  ‘EVERYONE!’ Frank roared. Silence. ‘Can we, let’s just take a moment.’ He got up from his seat in the row in front of Susan and headed for the stage, a muttered ‘Jesus’ escaping him.

  ‘Are you OK, Jill?’ Susan asked. Jill was furiously sucking her thumb.

  ‘Mmmm. Just … didn’t want to get blood on the costume. We don’t have a spare.’

  ‘Shall I get you a plaster?’

  ‘No, thank you, Susan. It’ll be fine.’ She shook her hand like she was holding an invisible thermometer.

  ‘Bloody Bill Murdoch,’ Agnes Coren said, looking up from her magazine. ‘You take your life in your hands every scene you’re in with him.’ Agnes was playing Regan and took great relish in every sadism the play allowed her to visit on her co-star. ‘Did you see earlier? In his whole “reason not the need” bit? Grabbed my bloody hand. I thought he was going to break my wrist!’

  ‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘He does rather like to go for it.’

  Agnes looked at her watch. ‘Roll on
six o’clock. I’m dying for a drink.’ Over on the side of the hall glasses, a case of red wine and a few bowls of nibbles sat on a trestle table. Next to the table was a black plastic bin filled with ice containing white wine and beers. It was tradition, after final rehearsal, before opening night: a small gathering for friends and family, all of whom had undoubtedly helped with learning lines, contributing clothing for costumes and buying more tickets than was strictly reasonable.

  ‘Mmmm,’ Susan said, sipping her coffee. Her head was still fuzzy from the champagne earlier with Julie. She shouldn’t drink at lunchtime, she really shouldn’t. ‘Mind you, I can’t help feeling this party might be a bit premature.’ She nodded towards the stage where Frank was negotiating between Bill and Freddy. Johnny Grainger was hurriedly repainting the damaged bit of scenery.

  ‘Be all right on the night, love,’ Agnes said. ‘It’s like this every time.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I’m making some tea. Anyone want one?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Jill and Susan chorused as Agnes went off across the hall.

  ‘OK!’ Frank was saying, coming back down the steps, clapping his hands together. ‘From the top of the scene, let’s go again.’

  ‘BLOW, WINDS, AND CRACK YOUR CHEEKS!’

  Susan sipped her coffee and turned the page of her magazine. She became aware that, in the seat in front of her, Jill’s shoulders were shaking.

  ‘Jill … are you …?’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry, Susan.’

  Jill turned round and Susan saw in the half-light that her face was glistening. Surely she couldn’t have hurt herself that badly?

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh, just …’ Jill blew her nose on the hanky ever-present in her cardigan sleeve. ‘Sorry, just … our Jamie. The poor lamb.’

  Susan stroked Jill’s shoulder. Her grandson – some rare disease. His lungs, Susan remembered. ‘Not getting any better?’

  ‘No.’ Jill sighed. ‘It’s not going to either. Unless he gets this operation.’

  ‘Oh, love,’ Susan said. ‘How’s your –’ Susan had to search quickly for Jill’s daughter’s name – ‘your Linda holding up?’

  ‘She’s just exhausted all the time, Susan.’

  ‘Poor thing.’

  The two women sat there for a moment before Susan added, reflexively, ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  Jill sniffed and smiled. ‘You don’t have a spare thirty thousand pounds I could borrow, do you?’

  Susan smiled too.

  SEVEN

  ‘YOU WANT IT all this time, don’t you? You dirty bastard,’ she said. ‘You greedy, dirty fucking bastard.’

  ‘Mmmf! Unnnnggg!’ came his muffled reply.

  She was circling him slowly, pointing at him with it, the only sound in the room the creaking of her patent leather boots. The boots had savagely spiked heels and stopped three-quarters of the way up her thighs, just revealing her stocking tops. She was naked from the waist up, huge breasts dangling free, the nipples an incredibly bright red from all the lipstick slathered on them, the way he liked it. And ‘room’ was an inadequate description. ‘Dungeon’ was more accurate. He had spent considerable time and money getting this place just right. The walls were completely plastered with pornography – S&M stuff, group sex, some strong bestiality images – and the only light came from a blue neon sign he’d had made at a specialist place. It said ‘RAPIST’. The shelves were covered with sex toys – restraints, costumes, vibrators, dildos, eggs, Ben-Wa balls, nipple clamps, anal beads, strap-ons and the like – and jars of lubricants. Countless DVDs. Behind the circling dominatrix the black eye of the video camera stared unblinklingly at them from its tripod.

  Yes, much time and money had gone into getting this place exactly as he liked it.

  ‘Unnff, urrrgh!’ He was straining forward, trying to get to her. But it was hopeless – his arms were tethered to the ceiling by leather straps. He was kneeling on the table, a kind of massage table, naked save for the leather mask that completely encased his head. Her knickers were stuffed in his mouth forming a makeshift gag. Only his eyes had free reign – mad white globes staring through the eyeholes in the mask, following her around the room, never leaving the tip of the dildo she was pointing at him.

  The dildo was a specialist custom-made job. He called it ‘The Rectifier’. It was matt black, close to two feet long with a girth of just over six inches: basically four coke cans stacked on top of each other. The sides were ridged, with additional spiked knobbles close to the base.

  ‘You can’t take all of this, can you? Can you – you fucking loser?’

  ‘Hnngggg! Uhnnnnn!’ He was nodding frantically, denying this vicious slur as she moved around behind him, out of his sight. He tried to crane his head to follow her but couldn’t. The top of the mask had a D-ring that was also tethered to the low ceiling. He could hear a wet, thick dripping sound. Oh God, what was she doing back there? The delicious agony of not knowing, of being utterly defenceless.

  What she was doing was slathering KY jelly onto the Rectifier. His buttocks were already well greased with the stuff. (He bought it by the case from CostCo – got a good deal.) He was shaking his arse frantically now, trying to lean backwards as far as the harness would allow, proffering his glistening cheeks towards her. She smiled as she noticed this. Nearly laughed. Begging for it, he was. She had a few weirdo clients – you were in this racket long enough you’d get a few nutters – but this guy really was out there. Loved it up him. Loved it.

  She came up behind him and whispered close to his ear. ‘I’m not going to do it this time. You’ve had enough. You filthy piece of shit. I’m going. I’m just leaving you here.’

  ‘UNNGHHHHH! ARRRRRR! ARRRRRR!’ He was going absolutely bananas now. Trying to talk. Shaking his head from side to side, trying to spit the gag out.

  ‘Do you really want it?’ she purred into his ear. ‘How much do you want it?’ She slipped the tip between his cheeks, very gently probing his anus with the monster.

  ‘MMMMMFFFFNNNGGG!’

  She tore the gag out and he screamed:

  ‘PLEASE! PLEASE PUT IT IN MEEEEEEEEEE!’

  She began to work it in, cautiously at first. It was like trying to force a truncheon into a closed sea anemone.

  Unseen by her, working away back there at the coalface, his eyeballs flipped upwards in their sockets and he began to emit a long, grateful, musical sigh.

  EIGHT

  THE CLINKING OF glasses, the squeak and pop of corks and the happy chatter of the Wroxham Players and friends unwinding. There were about fifty people – cast, crew, close friends and family – packed into the set of three interconnecting dressing rooms, where a makeshift bar had been set up in the corner of the largest one.

  ‘Not much talent,’ Ethel said sadly, scanning the room. ‘He’s not bad though …’

  ‘Ethel,’ Julie said warningly, as she followed Ethel’s gaze through the crush, to see that it had settled on the unlikely lust figure of 72-year-old props man Johnny Grainger.

  ‘Oh, keep your knickers on and get me a top-up,’ Ethel said, proffering her empty wine glass. ‘I’m just window-shopping.’ Julie thought that, even by her own standards, Ethel had outdone herself tonight on the outfit front. She was wearing some kind of ball gown, its taffeta ruffles bubbling up and all around her like foam, like there was a wave breaking beneath her and spilling out all over the wheelchair. The dress revealed more cleavage than most would think appropriate for a woman approaching her tenth decade. It looked like a bricklayer had fallen down into her chest, leaving just his bum crack visible.

  ‘How many have you had?’ Julie asked, taking her glass as she turned to see Susan pushing her way through the crush towards them, trailing Jill Worth behind her.

  ‘Hello, Ethel,’ Susan said, bending down to kiss her cheek. ‘Thanks for coming. You look … wow! Julie, you know Jill, don’t you? She helps with costumes.’

  ‘Of course. Hi, Jill.’

/>   ‘Hello, Julie.’

  ‘Jill, you remember Ethel.’ Jill looked down to see Ethel grinning up at her.

  ‘Aye-aye, Jill,’ Ethel said. ‘How’s your arse for love bites then?’

  ‘My …’

  ‘Just ignore her, Jill,’ Julie said. ‘She’s senile.’

  ‘Yeah, senile like a fox,’ Ethel said.

  ‘Look, I’ll get you one more drink if you promise to behave,’ Julie said. ‘Susan, gimme a hand at the bar. Can I get you anything, Jill?’

  ‘Oh, just an orange juice please.’ This request caused Ethel to look suspiciously at Jill.

  ‘Right, back in a mo.’ Julie led Susan off towards the makeshift bar.

  ‘So, Jill,’ Ethel said, ‘speaking of foxes – who’s that fine silver piece over there?’ She pointed with her grabbing stick.

  ‘The silver …’ Jill looked across the room. ‘Oh, Johnny? He does props and scenery. Lovely man.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Married?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is he married? Hitched?’ Ethel spoke as though Jill were senile. ‘Taken?’

  ‘Johnny? I, well, yes.’

  ‘Ach, well. There’s many a family cat keeping a few stray bitches happy on the side, eh?’ Ethel dug an elbow into Jill’s ribs.

  ‘Cat?’ Jill said, really confused now.

  Over at the bar, Julie and Susan waited their turn. ‘All set then?’ Julie asked.

  ‘As set as we’re going to be. I think opening night might be a bit hairy.’

  ‘Look, Susan, about this afternoon, I’m sorry for being so down. Not fair after you’d gone to all that trouble, with my present, with lunch and everything.’

  ‘Darling, honestly, it’s me who should be apologising. I’d no idea things had got so tough for you. I wish you’d let me help me you out.’

  ‘You already have.’

  ‘More I mean. I’m sure if I asked Barry to move some money around –’

  ‘No, no. Something’ll turn up. The solicitors think there’s still a chance I’ll get some money back off Thomas.’