chapter seven

As she sat abruptly upright in the strange bed, making sure to clutch the teal chenille bedspread to her naked bosom, Dorothy could feel the lump from her on-deck mishap throbbing relentlessly. Her mind automatically turned to Frank: would he be searching the whole ship for her, frantic with worry? He would more likely be taking the opportunity to pester the pretty teenaged girl in the next cabin, she concluded, before remembering with a slight grimace the blow that had rendered his pestering days well and truly over.

Hoping now to ascertain her whereabouts, and preferring anyway not to dwell on deeds that could not be undone, Dorothy began slowly to focus on the empty cabin around her, and upon noticing a crisp nurse’s uniform hanging on the wardrobe door felt decidely relieved to know she had been taken to the ship’s infirmary. But upon closer inspection, the uniform appeared not so much to be a starchy cotton as a slightly clammy rubber. Dorothy shuddered, released a trilling yelp, and jumped away from the item as if it had come alive, unaware that the cabin door had begun to open behind her.

chapter six

Marjorie Butterwell could wait no longer. The half-masticated human digit sat ominously on her new apricot formica kitchen bench, moistly cocooned in several layers of Glad wrap, until this very instant altogether too troubling for her to countenance.

Unsurprisingly, the finger had eluded the notice of Marjorie’s significantly overweight and generally inebriated husband Bernie, who only ever entered the kitchen to retrieve a fresh tinny from the fridge, and who had been installed for the best part of the last two days on a now almost wholly submerged Lilo in the backyard pool.

Seized only now by outrage and resolve, Marjorie dropped the vegetable peeler she had been using and streaked into the backyard, panting bestially and brandishing the offending item above her head. But blinded by hysteria, Marjorie managed to trip on the lawn sprinkler, plummeting gracelessly into the pool, sending the finger catapulting back over the fence into Dorothy’s yard.

chapter five

Dorothy could not account for the visceral churning that overtook her as she succumbed, magnetically it seemed, to the silent, omnipotent pull of the other woman’s steely gaze. Entirely unlike anything she had every felt with Frank, whose frequent febrile attentions had left her quietly dry-retching on more than one occasion, it was instead disconcertingly similar to a single confusing moment some forty years earlier involving the captain of the girls’ hockey team and a jar of boysenberry jam.

At only a few paces from the source of these previously dormant inklings, herself now appearing to sport a mannish half-smirk, Dorothy’s left temple abruptly broke the flight of a stray coit, flung with spectacular, over-zealous incompetence by an elderly German man attempting the normally harmless on-deck pursuit for the first and last time.

And so, rendered unconscious for the second time in mere days, the hapless Dorothy once again awoke in a state of emotional disarray, in a cabin she didn’t recognise, and it seemed in a state of immodest undress.

chapter four

Meanwhile, three days into her voyage of reawakening, the memory of on-going family humiliations fast fading, and blissfully unaware of the grizzly discovery by her suburban nemesis, Dorothy was on the verge of her own carnal discovery, the kind of which she could not remotely have imagined.

Taking the air on deck, hoping to quell the last persistent pangs of nausea which had dogged her since the cocktail incident, she felt the somewhat spooky sensation of being observed. And indeed at every turn, with increasing and alarming frequency, a woman she thought probably Greek (remarkably similar to her local fishmonger’s wife, she remembered) would appear in half view, eyes trained on Dorothy with an unsettling squint.

Unable to escape the stranger’s pursuit, and by now inexplicably unwilling to so so, she realised, Dorothy took a deep breath, passed one furtive hand near her hair, clutched her handbag tightly to her front, and started towards the mysterious interloper.

chapter three

At about the same time that Dorothy was unceremoniously peeling herself off the table, the coarse weave of the starchy table cloth lightly imprinted into her right cheek, a minor incident was unfolding back in Gymea.

Marjorie Butterwell, the scatty, obsessive woman over the back fence with whom Dorothy had maintained a chilly stand-off for all of their twenty-three years as neighbours, was fastidiously hanging out her husband’s underpants on the Hills Hoist when she caught sight of Graham, the family’s scrappy Maltese terrier, burrowing his way back under the fence from Dorothy’s side. Only after Marjorie had ceased her shrill and patently ineffective reprimand did she notice what appeared to be a chicken wing in Graham’s jaws, the object of his grunty, salivating over-excitement.

But when she finally managed to prise the mangled morsel free, she recognised it not as a piece of poultry but a human finger.

chapter two

And so it was in an excitable state, what other passengers would later describe as “oddly manic” and “twitchy”, that Dorothy commenced her on-board adventure, released as it were from the cage of self-doubt and suburban propriety.

No sooner had she taken her place at the Captain’s Table dinner on the first night, resplendent, she hoped, in a mauve drip-dry rayon pantsuit last worn at the bowling club fundraiser two years earlier, than a handsome young swarthy steward presented her with an enormous, paper umbrella-festooned, lime green cocktail, the first hasty gulp of which left Dorothy reeling. Deciding, after a nervous glance around the table, that the initial sensation was actually quite positive, Dorothy proceeded to swallow the entire sticky, fizzy concoction, pausing for breath only when her throat became momentarily obstructed by a hitherto unseen glacé cherry.

When she eventually came to, the dining room was deserted.

chapter one

Once Frank’s body was firmly buried in the backyard under the rhododendron bush, with the busy-body next door suspecting nothing, Dorothy packed a selection of polyester mix outfits and boarded a ship for Europe without so much as a word to her daughter Gwen who was too busy anyway preparing what she thought was a stylish 14^th birthday party for her adopted son Lance, a future homosexual and chartered accountant and Dorothy’s least favourite grandchild.

In all truth, she had never wanted a family, certainly not a mildly retarded daughter with an unhealthy obsession for home knits in a range of frankly ugly colours and textures of alpaca, and certainly not a lecherous husband with constant bladder infections, known in their local area for accidentally-on-purpose spraying female neighbours with the garden hose.