Page 15 of Old Girls on Deck

‘This is very comfortable,’ I said happily, pulling the bedclothes up around my chin.

‘Can we have the curtains open a bit,’ Diana said, ‘I don’t like sleeping in the dark. I always think more. And I don’t like doing that. I often turn the television on to help me go to sleep. It’s not as though anyone is going to see us. And there aren’t any streetlights.’

I pulled them halfway back and got back into bed.

And then we turned off the bedside lights after a lot of fiddling with various switches which seemed to turn on the lights in the bathroom, the entranceway, and the balcony before we found out how to turn everything off.

A faint glow illuminated the room.

‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘Thank you for inviting me. I’m glad I said yes.’

‘We wouldn’t even be here without you! And we’ll have fun, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘I can feel it in my water.’

There was a few minutes of quiet, before Diana got out of bed again and stumbled into the bathroom, grumbling.

‘You shouldn’t have mentioned water; it always makes me want to go.’

Then she clambered back into bed and rustled around for a bit, thumping her pillows before she was settled.

‘Don’t forget, if you’re not comfortable, there is an extensive pillow menu,’ I said.

‘Cheese and onion,’ Diana said.

‘Salt and vinegar,’ I replied.

There was a long silence, and then Diana added.

‘Do you remember when there were only plain crisps, and they came with a twist of salt in blue paper?’

‘And very rarely you got two?’

‘That was always exciting,’ she agreed, ‘but not as good as a faulty KitKat where it was solid chocolate and no wafer.’

‘We were easily pleased back then,’ I said. ‘Today everyone wants everything all the time.’

‘And then complains about the cost.’

‘We are getting old. Listen to us. We sound like our mother.’

Diana shifted about a bit and sighed.

‘Fancy Casper having a cocktail named after him. He would have been so pleased.’

The motion of the ship was very gentle, almost as though we were being rocked to sleep.

‘Are we in the Bay of Biscay yet?’ I asked.

‘Maybe not yet.’

‘I thought it would be rough? Tom said it would be.’

Diana tutted. ‘Tom knows nothing about it, he’s never been on a ship in his life. And it’s generally not too bad at this time of year, it’s worst in the winter. When the storms come in from the Atlantic and hit the shallower water over the Continental Shelf. But more ships are sunk in the Pacific, or the Indian Ocean.’

‘What about the Bermuda Triangle?’

She laughed. ‘Barry Manilow. I love that song. Casper used to give a talk on it sometimes when we were in the Caribbean. Apparently shipping disasters there are no worse than anywhere else, just more famous. And it gets more hurricanes. And electromagnetic storms. And there’s some theory about the increased magnetism from the volcanic flow causing problems.’

‘You know a lot about strange things, don’t you?’