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.