S.O.S. Titanic (16 page)

People pressed behind them. "Hurry," they screamed. "Hurry." There was no holding back now, with the slant of the ship and the sea so close, no way not to be filled with terror. "Hurry!"

"I'll be right after you," Barry whispered to Pegeen. "I'll not let you fall."

Mary went first up the crane, gripping every metal handhold, every span, climbing it like a ladder. Their life jackets made them more awkward than they should have been, but still, black boots found a toehold, numbed hands held tight. Pegeen turned once to look back at Barry and then beyond him to the drop to the deck, or the other way, to the waiting ocean.

"Don't look down," Barry yelled. "Don't look."

They were on the boom now, edging across it, with Frank recognizing them, shouting encouragement. "Come on, Mary girl. Come on, Pegeen. You're doing grand."

Mary was at the railing, Frank helping her across, then Pegeen. Barry.

"You!" Frank began, and Pegeen said, "Are you mad entirely? There's no room for bad feelings on a night like this."

Barry was over, too, onto the deck. He listened. Could that be the ship's band still playing? It was the hymn he'd heard them playing before. The words churned in his head.

God of mercy and compassion,
Look with pity on my pain.

"Where's Jonnie? Where's Mick?" Pegeen called.

"There's two collapsible lifeboats. They say they're on the roof of the officers' room. One of them's away, but the crew can't get the other one over the side. Jonnie and Mick are trying to help get it free." Frank stopped. "All the real lifeboats are gone, Pegeen. Every one of them. They're gone without us."

Pegeen held her fists against her mouth.

"I know where the officers' quarters are," Barry said before Pegeen and Mary could think more about the other words and what they meant. Pegeen had his hand now and she was holding on to him as if she'd never let go. It was strange how trying to make her feel less terrified helped him to be less terrified himself.... "I have a knife. Maybe I could cut the rope myself on that collapsible."

He stopped. Masses of people were swarming up the boat deck toward them. Hundreds of people. Hordes of people. Screaming, falling, sliding back, clawing for handholds on the slippery, slanted wood. Their shrieks were the shrieks of terrified animals—and then behind them Barry saw that the bow was almost buried in the ocean and that the ship was covered with water halfway along the deck. People flailed about in icy greenness, caught even as they ran, grabbing for each other, for anything that floated, and the sea rushed behind them, swallowing them as it came.

"Get on the railing," he yelled at Pegeen. "Jump!" He fumbled her up. From the railing to the sea was no higher than from the top of a stepladder to the floor.

"Barry, come with me," she screamed. Her shawl had fallen from where she knotted it over her life jacket, and he didn't pick it up. No use. No time. It would drag her down anyway.

Quickly he pulled the whistle on the chain from his neck and put it around hers. "Hold on to this," he said. "Blow it and I'll come."

Frank was thrusting Mary up. She had one hand on Frank's shoulder and she was screaming, "I can't swim. I can't swim." And Frank said, "The life belt will hold you up, Mary. You have to go." And then Barry saw him slip and go sliding down the deck the way a person would slide down an icy hill on his back, spread out, his hands grasping and finding nothing.

"Frank!" Pegeen was trying to scramble down again herself.

Barry reached up. With one hand he pushed her; with the other he pushed Mary. He heard their flyaway screams, heard the splashes as they hit the water, shouted with all his might. "Swim away from the ship!"

Still holding the railing, he turned. Frank lay spread out on his stomach. People clawed past him and over him, their screams high and piercing as seagulls'.

"Get up, man!" Barry shouted.

"I can't," Frank shouted back.

Barry let himself go, sliding down the deck the way Frank had slid before him "My scarf's caught," Frank gasped, one hand going to the back of his neck, the other picking desperately at the knot of the scarf in front. "I can't get it loose here. I can't reach behind myself."

Barry felt underneath Frank's neck. The scarf was hooked on the corner of a ventilator. Frank's weight had pulled it tight.

"Can you get it, man? Can you? It's choking—"

Barry had his glove off, had the little knife out of his pocket, the blade open. A faraway woman's voice inside his head said, "A sweet little souvenir of the
Titanic.
Sweet little souvenir..."

Frantically he sawed.

Water lapped around Frank's chest, floated the corner of the gypsy scarf.

The red cotton parted.

Frank slid forward, but Barry had him under the arms, the two of them holding each other, trying to stand.

And then, behind them, Barry heard a different sound. A whooshing as if a great wind were rising—and he looked and saw all the water in the world coming at them.

The wave was big as a house, icy green edged by the yellow deck lights. In it were dark shadows with moving arms and legs, people still struggling as it overtook them. He had one startled glimpse of Mr. Scollins, eyes and mouth agape, the jewel bag in one hand, before the wave caught and devoured him.

Without a second to think, Barry grabbed the strap of Frank's life jacket with one hand, shouted, "Get ready!" and then the wave was on them. The wave took them for itself and carried them with it.

At first he thought he was dead. It was tomb dark and he couldn't breathe. His arms were moving, though, reaching through icy water ... and then he bobbed up, out into the air, and hung there, gulping and retching. There was noise all around him, screams, howls of agony, pitiful cries as soft as kittens' mewling. Painfully he turned his head and saw other heads in the water around him, hundreds and hundreds of them; saw the dark, floating figures, the blur of the white life jackets; and remembered.

The sinking ship. Frank Flynn. The wave. Feeling was coming back into his body now. There was pain in every part of him. Frank should be somewhere close. Hadn't they been together? A dark head beside him, a piece of red trapped in the life-belt strap. But why was his face in the water? Why was he looking down through the ocean?

Barry reached out. "Frank!" He caught the hair, turned up the lifeless face, the eyes and mouth open. Frank. He'd drowned, or smashed against something. Barry floated beside him, sick at heart. What could he do? Nothing. Frank was dead.

He must say some words, though, over the dead body, if only because of Pegeen. He touched the back of the wet, lifeless head. "Good-bye, Frank. I tried to be your friend at the end. I hope maybe you had time to know that. God bless. Good-bye." Poor Frank. Poor all of them.

Around him people called names. "John! Helen! Grace!" All around him they called for God—called for help in feeble gasps.

"Pegeen," he screamed. "Where are you?"

He paddled the other way and saw the ship. It was still afloat, its lights glowing eerily both above the water and under it. Only the round stern and the poop deck stuck up out of the ocean, so high, so high up that the small black figures clinging to the railings looked like swarms of bees.

As he watched, the stern rose even higher and the screams grew louder. The first funnel was underwater now. Orange sparks rose from it like embers from a bonfire. In the wash a wooden chair flowed toward him and he grabbed for it, remembering the man throwing the pile of them over, lifetimes and lifetimes ago. The cold was like a thousand knives that cut through him, stuck in his bones. Nobody could live in this cold.

"Pegeen!" he screamed again. And then there was a terrible ripping, tearing noise from the ship, as if her insides were being torn apart, an explosion as the second funnel went under. The lights went out and a great moaning rose from the people in the water. Barry had one last glimpse of the small black bugs on the stern falling, or jumping, in clusters when the ship stood completely upright as if on her head. Her three giant propellers, like arms, reached for the starlit sky.

Got to get away. Got to get away, there'll be suction.
All those people would be pulled down. He would be pulled down. He splashed furiously, getting distance between himself and the ship. When he looked again he saw that the
Titanic
had slipped quietly, soundlessly beneath the ocean. There was nothing to tell where she'd been now, except the dark sea filled with the moving people and the glitter of stars.

Was that a whistle? He stopped his breath. Pegeen! Again.

He tugged the chair with him as he flapped toward the sound, kicking with his numbed legs, the life jacket holding his head out of the water. Once he thought he had her, but it was someone else, someone who clung to him, tried to climb on him, over him, pushing him down. Someone frantic, with claws and staring eyes, whom he had to fight off or he'd be drowned himself.

When he heard the small peep again, it was almost next to him, and he touched her.

She let the whistle fall from her mouth to dangle on its chain, her face white, her hair floating like a dark shroud around her. She was letting her head flop forward the way Frank's had. But he had her and was pulling her. Telling her to kick, to stay afloat, not to give in. "
Try
" he begged. "
Try.
"

"So cold," she said. "I'm so cold."

Then he saw the second wave, not as big as the one that had swept along the
Titanic'
s deck; smaller, lifted probably by the ship's sinking. There were things in it, things rushing at them. He saw the heavy piece of wood and he swiveled Pegeen so he was between her and it, and it smashed him on the head, blinding him with pain. He still had Pegeen, though.

"Lifeboat!" she yelled, and through the dizziness and pain he saw something high on the wave that looked like a raft with people clinging to it, people on top of it. A collapsible lifeboat, but upside down. It was going to sweep right by them.

"Help us!" he shouted to the person kneeling on top of it, the raft rider, and he thrust Pegeen forward and saw her hauled up; reached for the boat's edge and felt himself heaved up, too. Felt nothing else.

They were on the keel of the upside-down lifeboat, twenty or thirty people crouching or kneeling on its curved, wide bottom. The overturned boat was so heavy with them that water slopped over the sides, ran off the gende slope. Barry was leaning against someone ... Pegeen. He moved and she put a hand on his shoulder.

"Barry, you've come to. Thank God. But don't shift like that, you'll have us all in the ocean." She bent over him and wiped his face with the sleeve of her wet coat. "You're bleeding all over your poor face. The stitches have come apart. And there's another big gash under your hair." She touched it with fingers that tried to be careful, but that hurt so much he jerked away.

What were those sounds all around them? like a flock of starlings in the field at home, scolding as they took off into the sky.

Barry turned his head. All those people, floating still, their voices so weak and faint. No other boat but their own in the strange, white star-filled sea, flat and calm except for two small gleaming mountains in the distance. For a second he thought they were Slieve Moran and Slieve Tor and he was home looking out of his bedroom window across Pinter's meadow at the gende hills beyond. But he was somewhere on an ocean, and those were icebergs like the one that had sunk the
Titanic.
All those people—starlings, crying for help. Again he tried to move. "Can't we save them?" he asked.

"We have no paddles," Pegeen whispered. "We're drifting away. Oh, my darling brothers, my poor Jonnie ... my poor Frank ... my friend Mary." She was crying quietly, her tears dropping onto Barry's cheek.

He remembered Frank suddenly, his open eyes staring down into the sea. At least she hadn't seen him. At least that much.

"There's no room on this boat anyway," a man beside them said, a big man in a wet, slimy fur coat that he wore over his life jacket.
A bear,
Barry thought.

As if to test them, a hand reached up and grasped the edge of the keel. "Please," a man's voice croaked. The weight of the hand made that side of the boat dip sickeningly, and the bear smacked the clutching fingers with a metal canteen he held. "Go away," he growled. "Do you want to drown us all?"

Pegeen leaned forward, pulling on the edge of the bear's coat. "Let him on, please."

"He's gone," the bear said. "We're all goners, if you want to know the truth. It's just a matter of time."

"Good luck, then, lads," a faint voice from the water said.

"You beast," Pegeen cried weakly, thumping her hand on the bear's boots.

"Where are the other lifeboats?" Barry whispered to her. "Can't they...?"

"They're away," she said. "Far awav by now. They never came back."

"Is this all of us that were saved?" Barry asked.

"All," Pegeen said.

Barry lay looking up at the sky. It seemed to close in on him, then drift away as far as heaven itself. Sometimes the sky and all the stars in it spun in circles. He turned his head. Not so many cries now. The birds had flown away. He frowned. But weren't a lot of them still sleeping, dark on the water? Big white birds, bigger than seagulls, frozen birds. Was one of them a Mick Kelly bird, snug in his white life jacket? Things drifted by them. A striped red-and-white barber pole, a wicker chair. The night was white and the sea, too, filled with jiggling slabs of ice.

There was coughing on their little upturned boat. There was retching, the splash of vomit spilling overboard into the sea. His head throbbed. It felt as though the top of it were missing.

The sea was getting choppier. It splashed spray on them. Their little boat seemed to wallow. Sometimes his mind cleared, and when it did he didn't like it. He'd lost his gloves somewhere ... Grandpop's gloves. One of them he remembered letting go when he took out the knife. Lost the gloves. Lost Grandpop.