Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
The fun thing about facing a problem like this on a superyacht is that we’re on a superyacht.
I am haunted by an image that will never leave me.
I can think of very little but the angle at which the syringe was hanging from Mick’s arm and the way his head was resting on the seat of the toilet.
It’s beyond horrible. But I can distract myself with any one of the many entertainment facilities that the Tanis offers.
So, after five minutes of spiralling discussion, I leave the others to plan their own programme of activities and, after a quick change of clothes, I go looking for the cinema.
The engine of the ship is easy to ignore, but I occasionally hear it – or at least feel it.
A slight vibration buzzes through the hull and up through the various decks, and it makes me think of a huge sleepy creature suddenly yawning.
It helps remind me that there is another plane below our own.
An underworld where a whole community of people must live and sleep and work, with only a few chosen representatives allowed to see the sun before scuttling back there.
I imagine myself going all the way down through the decks to meet these affable mole people and becoming their queen.
Sadly, the cinema is just below my room, so I don’t have to explore any further.
Though I have spent precisely no time whatsoever in direct sunlight since stepping off the plane, my skin feels refreshed and replenished as I enter that cool chamber to disappear into darkness.
The room is perfectly air-conditioned – fresh but not too cold – and I feel like I’m swimming underwater as my eyes take their time to adjust and I stumble around in search of a light switch.
“No, no, don’t do that,” a voice says from nowhere, and I come to a complete stop.
Jake sticks his head out of a door that I couldn’t see until now.
I figure he’s found the projectionist’s booth before I can, and I wonder for a moment whether we’re depriving some poor underworld dweller of their raison d’être.
Is there a person on this ship whose sole function is to start a DVD player, just as monarchs from the past had fireworks masters and peacock keepers?
Ade said he was operating with a skeleton crew, so presumably not.
Jake is busy setting everything up and a minute passes before he speaks again.
“I’ve chosen a movie just for you,” he says, as if he knew I was coming.
The room is small, but there are three rows of seats and a line of tiny lights in the aisle to guide us to them.
There must be a manual of some description in the booth, as he seems very knowledgeable about how it all works.
He’s even found a key to a cupboard just below the screen from which he now takes two bags of popcorn.
He hands one to me, and I try to hold on to the sadness that had gripped me before the prospect of cinema-sweet refreshment buzzed through my brain.
“I was hoping to watch the concert film Mick made,” he says in the right tone of voice for such a statement. “I thought it would be a bit of a tribute to the guy, but there’s no sign of it here.”
“What have we got instead?” I sit down in the middle seat of the middle row.
“Wait and see.”
He dashes back up the aisle, and a minute later a light turns on that does very little to brighten the room.
There’s a kind of blackness to it, so it must be the projector bulb.
I look up at the beam above my head, but then it changes colour and a snow-capped mountain rears up on the screen before me, and my ears are filled with the sound of an orchestra crescendo.
“Too loud! Sorry, too loud!” the warning travels out to me. “Give me a sec.”
The volume decreases, and a few moments later Jake bounds back into the room and crashes down beside me, almost sitting on his own bag of popcorn.
“It’s lucky they didn’t explode and go everywhere,” I tell him. “You would have had to beg to share mine.” I stick my tongue out, and the white light bouncing off the wall shows me his smile.
I recognise the movie from the second name on the cast list, then feel annoyed that I didn’t get it from the first. A bird’s eye view of St Peter’s Square appears before the words Roman Holiday pop up in giant printed letters.
“I introduced you to this film!” I say, excited to see it again after so long.
“I remember!” He copies my chirpy tone, and we fall silent as the credits roll.
It feels good to travel back in time seventy years to when men wore killer suits and women could walk around dressed like Audrey Hepburn.
For a very silly moment, I question whether anyone died of overdoses back then, before remembering that Roman Holiday was made right around the time that Frida Kahlo died from a lethal dose of opiates.
So much for nostalgia.
And yet, sitting in this darkened room watching a movie with Jake as we did three times a week when we lived in the same building, I can’t think of any time in my life when I was happier.
We went through lists of the best films ever made, both to find new favourites and feel like we weren’t completely ignorant.
We swapped recommendations, and while that did mean I had to sit through the action masterpiece Con Air more often than I would have liked, it also felt like we were learning to accept each other as we should.
By the time that Gregory Peck shows Audrey the sights of Rome, I keep having to remind myself that Jake and I broke up for a reason.
I mean, I can’t recall what it was anymore, and so I don’t immediately push him away when he finishes the popcorn and puts his hand on the armrest next to mine.
But I only put my head on his shoulder because it’s the afternoon, and I’m always sleepy at this time – plus we seem to have skipped lunch.
With changing time zones, staying up late and everything else that’s happened, I haven’t the energy to stay awake no matter how charming Audrey and Gregory and Jake might be.
I don’t know how much of the end of the movie I catch, but I wake up hours, minutes or seconds after it’s finished and find that my ex-ex is still doing a good job as my pillow.
I don’t wake him. I just settle back into a dream in which I get to wear beautiful clothes and zip around an ancient city on a Vespa (but women, minorities and the poor are simultaneously treated better than they were in the fifties).
By the time I wake up for good, it’s late in the afternoon and I’m starving hungry.
I listen to Jake’s almost musical breathing as he sleeps in the faint glow of the projector’s beam.
Part of me wants to wake him with a kiss.
Part of me wonders whether, now that we’re older and hopefully wiser, we could make it work, but I don’t bother him with any of this.
I put my lips against his forehead and whisper a silent goodbye to the boy that, deep down, I probably still love an awful lot.