Singapore to Brisbane - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 89

In classic cruise-ship style, the Van Gogh has assigned restaurant seating. This means that once the
maitre d' has chosen a place for you, you're stuck at that table for all eternity. Breakfast, lunch, and din-
ner—with the same set of people—day after day. My tablemates have eaten every meal together for the
past several weeks, and the strain shows. One evening, the white-haired man who sits to my left suddenly
lifts his head from the paperback novel he's been reading at the table. “How long do we have left on this
cruise?” he asks no one in particular. “Eight weeks to go? Jesus Christ, it's like a prison sentence!” When
he gets uncomfortable looks in return, he ducks back into his book.
THOUGH it's only three days, I swear it takes weeks for the ship to finally reach Bali. My heart leaps like
a flying fish when I sight Rebecca standing on the dock.
As we carry our bags onto the ship, I ask her what it felt like to be in an airplane. But it turns out she
doesn't remember at all: She got plastered at the Singapore airport bar in an attempt to subdue her crippling
fear of flying. She landed in Bali late last night, somehow drunkenly found herself a hotel, and then caught
a cab this morning to meet the Van Gogh at the pier.
At dinner that evening, the table buzzes over two new developments. 1) Rebecca has joined us, raising
the overall beauty and vivaciousness of the group by orders of magnitude. 2) With my luggage back in my
possession, I'm wearing a new outfit for the first time in nine meals.
Group conversation is aided by Rebecca's wise decision to order two bottles of wine and freely share
them. The oldest fellow at the table, clearly in his cups, reveals to us (with no small amount of pride) that a
few years ago he legally died on a hospital operating table. He had a cardiac arrest and then surged back to
life. “It's true,” says his wife. “Ken died.” She tells us she bought insurance for their tickets on the cruise
“in case he doesn't make it the whole way round.”
Rebecca and I pass the next few days sunning together in adjacent deck chairs, maintaining a constant,
low-level alcohol haze. Dinners continue to blur the line between deadpan hilarity and awkward horror. “I
used to be a dancer,” undead-Ken's wife says, during a conversation about the jobs we'd all worked at be-
fore we retired. “I had trouble getting work because I was too skinny.” Attempting a comment on changing
societal ideals and representations of the female body, I say to her, “That wouldn't be a problem these days,
I guess.” Hearing this, she looks down at her plump torso with a hurt and baffled expression on her face.
Before I can explain the misunderstanding, another man interrupts to tell us about his time in the British
military. Later, there's a round of disquietingly racist comments as the oldsters agree that “England just
isn't for the English anymore.”
Though Rebecca's attitude is infinitely brighter than mine, she agrees with me that we must exit this
cruise at the earliest possible instant—before we ourselves morph into a wrinkled, humpbacked, perpetu-
ally sloshed British couple. My original plan was to take the cruise all the way to Brisbane, where we're
catching our freighter, but I no longer find this option acceptable. A ride to Australia is all we needed from
this ship, and that's all we'll take from it. Hanging out with barely motile geezers has bruised our sense of
adventure, and we need to escape.
When the ship makes a brief stop in Darwin—a sun-roasted town of 120,000 on Australia's forbidding
northern coast—we run back down that gangplank I was so thrilled to sprint across in Singapore. Once on
shore, we don't look back. I'm eternally grateful to the Van Gogh for letting me aboard and for ferrying me
across the Java and Timor seas. But I now feel as though I've been liberated from a floating nursing home.