The Haemorrhaging Humourist

Following my Uncle Ollie’s advice I had in fact “put the white on the window” and closed the door of the Tookay Café in the arts centre for the last time. I was exhausted from running away from Denis and Jackie and the committee, who were trying to have a quiet word in my ear about little things like rent,  bills, esb.  Imro.   

Stuff.

  I should have been having a little word in theirs about telling the punters they could leg it to the Thomas Moore at the Interval and that Billy would ring the bell for them to come back. Chopped liver, I thought as I ran back downstairs to chop liver and whip cream after Juliet Turner had sung “Burn the Black Suit”.  With hindsight, it would have been easier to dispense with the middle man and just throw the money over the quay. I may as well have been nailing jelly to a tree.

I was sitting in the foyer of an adjacent hotel when my phone rang.

Can you join a ship this evening as a chef?  says a man.

Begob and I can, says I.

This was when I still used to say yes to life. Nowadays, I am more likely to respond Hell, no - or not in these heels. I packed an overnight bag and a book, and took a train to the Harbour.  In the breeze blocked hallway of the Irish Ferries offices, I follow the suited man down a warren of carpeted hallways as he hands me out sets of whites and checks. We thought you were a man says he, as he hands me the giant XXL jackets and pants. I am loving the neckerchiefs and aprons, the shoes - not so much.

They are white and steel capped and size 7.

I can get into a 3 if I have to. 

“You can swap onboard”   says he with a hopeful smile.  I believed him.  He leads me aboard like a lamb to the slaughter. A man in a high- viz shouting into a walkie -talkie nods me over to the lift while the boys fly around on the cherry pickers, doing doughnuts in the new cars, emptying  the decks. I arrive out into the passenger  entrance on deck 7  and a man takes me to my cabin and tells me to come back downstairs when I am dressed.

 I am on nights.

I stare around the cabin. Twin pink bunks, pink blankets, pink sheets. It is 2001 but this is not a space odyssey. I put on the clothes. I am in a  lather from rolling up things and from pulling down things.  The sleeves, the legs  - the sleeves. The shoes are massive. There is no way on Gods little green appled  earth they will stay on. I undress   again, re-dress in mufti and march around the ship looking for the duty free shop to buy socks.  £15 sterling on my visa later I have purchased and donned 3 pairs of Guinness socks to be sold to second generation septic tanks wearing mustard leisure suits. They were beside the Shillelaghs and cans of Irish air. I pressed a few hundred pens that played When Irish eyes are smiling just for fun. The blonde at the desk looks at me in disbelief. She thinks I am a passenger.  “Just think what Toucan do”  I proclaim and  scooch the shoes on over them and limp up the stairs. At reception the girl hands me a giant hat that makes me look like the Pilsbury dough boy and I try to restrain my hair under it. She directs me along the deck where I hope to meet someone to show me where the kitchen is at.

First of all it is not a kitchen and second of all you need to know this.

Ships are bizarre places. They are like floating hotels that serve weddings all day every day. They are crewed by wildly disparate people who are used to packing a bag and heading to Africa following  a phone call. They are hard as nails and unshockable.  If 1000 people drive on board they are with you all day, and demand to be fed and watered and entertained. They can’t just wander off and have a walk or a bag of chips and come back for a nap. So ships are staffed differently and there is always cooking and drinking and cleaning up going on.  You are either turned in or turned to. Turned in being turned to the wall for a kip and turned to being shoulders to the wheel. There is never a time when you can march down a crew alley without being told to whisht a thousand times. Big Mick is turned in, they will roar at you. Bernard is on splits. Paddy is on watch, Ronnie is on the wheel. The only time the whole ships company is present and correct, from the old man to the galley boy’s cat and the ship’s Mary, is when there is a fire drill happening.

I walked in on it.

400 eyes saw me framed at the top of the stairs looking like a miniature Krusty the Klown via Popeye, my oversize jacket rolled up, the legs of the navy checks folded up a thousand times, at half mast, the giant white clown shoes , the toucans on the socks.  There was a split second of silence and then a wave of laughter. The man who is lecturing about the Marine Evacuation System  stops talking about inflating systems and pressure gauges and looks up at me. I could not be more purple. There is so much blood rushing around my body I feel faint and can hear a roaring in my ears. The crew are motley and varied and from all corners of the world but the humour here is ALL Dublin. It is savage.

Oh, Mrs your hair is only bleedin’ massive, shouts up a chef the same size as me, but from the safety  of a uniform that fits. There is nothing uniform about me. An hour later we are sailing away from the quay wall into the teeth of a gale that the captain calls a bit of weather. I am skidding around the galley trying to remember which hot box is mine, and how I keep a tsunami of 600 eggs from slipping out of a cooker built like a metal coffin when she rolls again. The shoes are a distinct hindrance. I am the only female in the Galley. I survive the seasickness by eating tiny cubes of chilled melon.

In the morning I crawled into the small pink bunk and slept. In the night, I did it again. I stayed on board for a week and had to take a ship to shore call from my Father who did not know where I was. I did not know where I was, as I had left my phone charging at home. After a number of months, I changed watch,trips, block, the colour of my hair and titles. I worked in every area of the ship. I loaded stores  and learned about Man United from the store man flying around the bowels of the ship on a trolley, signed articles to consent to be transported and given enough fruit not to get rickets,  carted linen to the cabins, brought steaks and pepper sauce to tables of toothless welsh truck drivers, poured pints for travelers at 8am, cleaned skidmarks off the backs of jacks , made a million bunks, wiped up a lot of sick, and stood  like a relic of  aul decency in the Captains mess, awaiting instruction, my hands folded behind my back, my waistcoat buttoned.  

I watched a Maitre’d so drunk he waited a table in his underpants with his trousers folded across his arm like a tea towel.

It is because of this and my baptism of fire onboard that I could spot a new man at a thousand paces.

He had a head the length of a reticulated Python.

He had the face of the man from “One flew over the Cuckoos Nest”, as long as a Kardashian at a mirror, with 2 tufts of hair at the side. It was a cartoonish face. The only thing missing was a punchline. He stood  6ft 7” at the desk and signed in with the crew. I saw the tips of giant white shoes sticking out the top of his giant hold-all.

 It was ironic that he was the Clown.

He had the saddest face I ever saw.

Every day he dressed in his cabin and made his features different with make- up and lipstick, drawing on a smile, presenting himself to the world and the children he was paid to please. He blew up balloons and fell over and took pies in the face and all the time when I passed him I could feel it, the palpable sense of otherness from him,  the lonliness , a feeling of being  cut adrift, loosened, all at sea.   All at sea.  I watched him sit alone at the table staring out at the waves while his meal cooled in front of him. He was polite, with a refined  accent, and a mild stoic air. I tried to include him or engage, but I was too busy drawing on my own face and presenting myself to the world.  Chuck  Palahniuk  once said , when somebody’s blood  is lapping at your feet, you WILL step back.

We only noticed he was missing when the children went berserk and ran amok and someone had to be paged to hoover up the popcorn and wipe down the bulkheads. I was on Cabin accommodation that week, which meant I could wear a T shirt and not have to deal with the general  nonsense of the general public, hiding below stairs, if you will.

“That bleedin’ Clown is missing and the place is in a jocker below” says the small chef when I walk through the crew galley dragging a gash bag after soojeying a cabin. I knew where the bleedin’clown  was. He had a laminate hanging on the door saying please do not disturb or he would have been woken everytime we passed a lighthouse, which was a lot. I walked to his cabin and knocked. No answer. I knocked louder. I called out but the only sound was the roar of the engines and the sea. I took out my pass key and opened the door.

The cabin was pink.

The entire cabin was pink. Even though I was trying to process what I was looking at, I was simultaneously trying to write it in my head. My eyes scanned the small space, the intrusion, the violation as he laid there. His clothes strewn around, wallet and papers on the deck, vulnerable and laid bare. I entered his space and stepped through the pink stuff, and walked to where he lay on his back and cradled his giant head in my hands. Beside me at the bedside was a glass of water with  pink stuff in it, like jelly,  his teeth on the locker, pink gloopy jelly  clinging to the shiny white enamel,  and on  one of his giant white shoes, there was more of the same.  It was alien and bizarre. It looked like someone had upended a giant strawberry trifle all over the room.  There was a scream from the door ,a flurry of faces,  then the sound of pounding feet as they ran to get the Master At Arms and the Purser.  I wondered if he felt the blood roaring in his ears as he bled out. I wondered if he felt his heartbeat in his throat.  I wondered a lot of things about him. He was going, or gone, but I was there. The next time I looked up the Chief Purser is standing framed in the door with a face like thunder on him.

“Michelle - he says - what have I told you before about the gloves?”

M.D.M. September 2013