7. Whose got their knickers down

So here we are, the three of us getting acquainted two feet from each other and one of us is on the loo. I know that Giles and I used to pee in front of each other but we had shared a life together.
Nicky doesn’t seem to notice or care that we are taken aback and carries on chatting.
‘So do you know what bar you’re in then?’ she asks us.
‘No, no we don’t,’ Vanessa says.
There is a knock at the front door this time. Nicky says she'll see us down the crew bar later and closes the door. How stupid I’d been. It hadn’t even occurred to me where the toilet might be.

Before we have a chance to open it, the door is swung open barely missing the side of my face. Paul is standing at the other side of the door this time wearing the uniform I recognized from the brochure as that of a bar steward. He had black trousers and an electric blue waistcoat over a crisp white shirt that was held tight at his lumpy neck with a tiny black bow tie. A golden name badge was worn on his left lapel and read, Paul - Senior Bar Steward. His hair is wet with gel and he is wearing my grandmother’s remedy for head lice as an aftershave. Up until now Paul is probably my second least favourite person, Sue being the first. Paul has gone out of his way to be unfriendly.

‘Be upstairs in the crew bar in five minutes,’ he says, looking around the cabin and smirking.
I think to myself that it’s probably a bit early for a drink but what the hell, it was nice to be invited, even if it was just by Paul. I tell myself off for thinking so badly of him and ask him if he can wait for us.
‘No can do,’ he replies, and clicks off down the corridor, expertly spinning his tray with his middle finger. Watching him mince down the corridor, I realize he must have tacks of the bottom of his shoes.

We decide that the best way to sort out the luggage is to first decide who sleeps where and what space belongs to whom. After haggling about the bunks (Vanessa has the bottom) and agreeing about the storage space, we set about unpacking. We went about the cabin in complete silence except to apologize for stepping on or elbowing each other.

Quick learners, we take turns touching up our faces in the mirror. We are just leaving the cabin, when Nicky appears, still in her bra and knickers, in the loo door. She tells us that we should lock our side of the bathroom door as anyone could walk in from her cabin to ours.
‘Always keep it locked,’ she warned. ‘Where you two off to anyway?‘ she asks.
‘Got to go,’ I say, ‘We've been invited to drinks in the Crew Bar, we're going to be late.’
She looked a bit bemused by this and shouts out that the crew bar is closed during the day. The banging of the door behind us drowns her voice out. If she hadn’t been caught with her knickers down so to speak, we could have gotten directions to the crew bar from her.

‘What was he doing with the hand baggage?’ I asked, Vanessa before I forgot to bring it up. ‘It said on his name badge that he is a senior bar steward.’
‘Who?’ says Vanessa, as we are reaching yet another stairwell.
‘Paul, the guy that showed us to the cabin. He said to Sue the Crew Purser that he was doing hand baggage duty.’
‘No idea,’ offers Vanessa, unhelpfully. ‘Never mind him, what about our chatty toilet friend. What the fuch was that all about?’ she asks, screwing her nose up.
‘Look, let’s find this bar and have a drink and a chat,’ I say. Inside I feel that this job is not going to meet all my years of expectations.

I really needed to sit down with a nice G&T and reflect on the events of today. My stomach is grumbling from nerves and lack of food. I still haven’t eaten since the night before. We were on the fourth set of stairs and the hundredth corridor before we managed to find our way up to the airstrip. There were lots of people walking and running around in different directions.
‘Do you know where the crew bar is?’ Vanessa asked a young girl in a pink and white uniform.
‘You two the new body-bashers are you?’ she asks, in a thick Australian accent.
‘What?’ I ask, ‘what’s a body-basher?’
The girl can see that we are totally bewildered. She loses interest in us and starts to walk off again when I call after her.
‘Sorry, the crew bar?’ I ask hopefully.
‘Ow yeh, down these stairs,’ she points across the airstrip to where we had just come from, ‘you can’t miss it.’

Nearly half an hour has passed since Paul came to our cabin. By the time we discover where the bar is hidden we are both uptight and flushed. We press a couple of happy faces on and enter the bar. The rest of the group are sitting in a half-circle facing the bar although it’s difficult to see them in the dimly lit room. From what I can see the bar is tastefully decorated in bold blues and greys.

There is an oval-shaped dance floor further to the back in the middle of the room. On entering further into the room I see three men in officers’ uniforms standing at the bar.
‘Oh fuch,’ whispers Vanessa, ‘they’re waiting for us before they hand the drinks out.’ All eyes are on us as we enter the bar. One of the officers steps forward to greet us. He has his hat-cocked arrogantly to the back of his head. He comes forward, stops and smiles. Perhaps I have exaggerated here, the smile was actually a baring of teeth rather than a smile. There is nothing in his eyes to say that he is going to whip out his cocktail shaker and shake us up some martinis while doing a samba around the room.
‘Es very good of you ladees to join us, perhaps we could ask you to seat down?’ He half-bows and with his arm, he sweeps us into the bar to join the others. Greg was sitting near the front, bolt upright in his chair with a notebook and pen in front of him. He didn’t try to hide his enjoyment of our late entrance. We shuffle towards the only two empty chairs left, which are right in the middle of the front row.

The cocky officer is telling us that he is the Sheep’s Safety Officer. No name, just Safety Officer. He tells us that the safety of the sheep is the most important thing we have to know while we are onboard. Over the next few days we will be trained in lifejackets, how to alert the bridge in case of an emergency. Each of us should have been given a blue card that gives us details of our emergency position on the sheep. Lifejackets, emergency drills, weekly crew drills, coastguard drills, watertight doors, fire extinguishers, lifeboats, life rafts and in-port manning. For the next three hours we watched and listened to the voices of these three men and the safety videos they played us. We sat in silence and complete bewilderment.

Weary from concentration, brain has gone into overload. I am absolutely starving and am almost faint from thirst. Luckily for me the two girls along from us are being letched by the cocky safety officer giving me something else to focus on other than passing out. Someone gets up to go the the loo, vacating a chair for the Safety Officer to survey his prey from a closer viewpoint. Sitting down and leaning in, one leg twisted back around the other, his hat still cocked back on his head. I overheard one of them say that they work in the beauty salon.
‘Ah I see,’ sang the officer. ‘You are the new, what do they say, erm body-bashers, ees that right?’ He laughs to himself at his attempt at being clever. The girls both nod, one more feverishly than the other, who looks bored by him. I too get up and follow the neon signs to the toilet and splash some water on my face.

The toilet was brightly lit and my reflection left me in no doubt about the state of me. I return to my seat as the other two officers are talking. They are security officers, both English and easier to understand even if what they were saying wasn’t any clearer.
‘…And no food lying around in your cabins,’ shouts the shorter stockier of the two English men. ‘Every week we will inspect your cabins. We want beds made, your lifejackets and blue cards placed visibly on the top of your bunk. And I don’t want to find one crumb in your cabins, right?’
‘Is that clear?’ he asks a man sitting off to my right.
The man stares back at him blank.
‘Is that clear?’ he says, this time with a little more authority in his tone. Still no answer.
‘What’s your name?’ asks the officer, bending down to the man.
Still, the man sits there staring back in silence.
‘Are you deaf?’ he bellows, ‘what is your name?’
A man behind us tells him that the man's name is Ed.
‘Ah ha, finally,’ he exclaims, straightening up. ‘And doesn’t he have a tongue of his own?’
‘He doesn’t speak English, Sir,’ replies the man behind.
‘Then what the hell is he doing here if he doesn’t speak English?’ shouts the stocky officer, spitting with outrage.
‘Does anyone else here not understand a bloody word from today’s training, come on, anyone else?’ Stocky is purple in the face and throwing his arms dramatically about in the air. The other security officer comes over and places his hand on stocky’s shoulder and whispers in his ear. They have a heated sotto voce conversation for a couple of minutes and stocky is back with us.
‘Can you,’ he says, pointing to the man behind us, ‘ask if anyone here doesn’t understand what’s been going on for the last three hours?’
The man stands and babbles away in his language. He could have been asking if anyone agreed that stocky was a dick head, or to put your hand up if you want to go home, for all we know.

Slowly Ed raises his hand and so do another four people. The four other people turned out to be from all different parts of the world but all spoke Spanish. A Portuguese guy also stands up and says in very limited English that he too could not understand everything that was happening. Stocky gets the message across to everyone that if anybody has had any difficulty understanding anything today then they must stay behind. It occurred to me that I wouldn’t like to have my life in the hands of these people, or anyone else’s life in mine.

Although I had the advantage of speaking English, sending out lifeboats, rushing to save the lives of other people before myself and being expected to run around every week with a bunch of people who are pretending they know how to save the "sheep" and speak English, I don’t think so. The sensible thing to do would be to own up and say that I don’t really follow what’s going on. But naturally I don’t want to appear dim so I don’t say a word and hope that I will learn. Anyway, maybe I have absorbed more than I realized?