Forever Sinking

I was very early to stir most mornings, well awake to the pitiable weather of my head and the view of my ceiling all fraught with a meddling flotsam of spectres that’d ripple over it in the hours before dawn. It nettled me to be so restless, and even before any hope of first light, to already be upright and drawing into my goose-fleshed ritual of winter dress.

Quietly, I’d light a wick, stoke the stove, splash my sinking face in the chilly basin. I’d pull and clasp into a black woollen skirt and coat, and crouching before a small de-silvering mirror on the dresser, would tend my wreck of a mane back into a careless, low pomp. I’d fasten long-buttoned boots while keeping watch over the stove’s kindling, to be sure the fire had bitten in, then I’d shut my head and hands tight with bonnet and gloves.

Monty would be asleep on his father’s side of the bed and likely to still be so when I returned. At five years old he was an able boy, given that he’d already learned how to fend with many of the tasks of older children. If he ever woke before I crept back in through the door he’d likely have already gotten up to feed the fire and set a pot of oats for stirring. He’d have dressed and drawn back the curtains, tidied the bed. Mrs Wallace in the rooms beside would take stock if she ever heard his feet drop from the bed after I had slipped out. She’d bump her hip through the door, brew in hand and sip while he ran a commentary on his work. He liked to be capable and determinedly furrowed into his own mind on the matter.

"I’m to be a ship steward one day," he’d declare, "Like my father, Montague Vincent Mathias."

I was as soundless as I could strive to be readying in the darkness. I didn’t want to disturb the sleepy, candlelit serenity on his little face—that a child should always know and never be woken from—and certainly not rouse him to take up duty in place of the dead.

"Kiss, little Kiss," I’d whisper from the doorway, blowing a peck from each woollen hand.

The street lamps would still be casting a glow into night when I took exit onto Western Esplanade. Icy air printed the cold into my throat as I counted one breath for every four quickening clacks of the heel towards Town Quay. Southampton roads bore few faces in those small hours, and only some I passed would take notice. They might have been musing over the foggy manifests of their breath, or travelling towards wretched pre-dawn business, or like me, bolting from ghouls while in search of a particular ghost. I’d sometimes have gestured kindly to one or two by the time I reached water, to where the ship berths were and where, like a monstrous iceberg, I’d scour all of my grievances against the limits of the eastern docks.

***

She’s unsinkable. That was the particular talk in Southampton after the Titanic first docked still wet and steaming from her Belfast birth and splicing up the skyline with all the hefty promise of a biblical ark. Within days the coal strikes ended and immediately the White Star Line began taking up crew for the Titanic’s maiden voyage. Hundreds lined the docks in anticipation of a reprieve for our clobbered city, the strikes having stripped many a Southampton living down to the very sinew.

Montague bounded through the door that evening, tagging my brother, William, along by a jolly thread.

"Trudie, my dear! Allow me to present the very finest mess steward and the most unreasonably irritating able-bodied seaman to have secured a crew ticket on the new beauty in town: Miss Titanic, the black-haired, golden-gammed, red-hemmed star of the seaman’s stage! Four and five pound a month to ride her, respectively.” They both took a fancy bow then burst into whiskey laughter, wrestling about, knuckling heads.

“Oh, is that right!” I exclaimed, feigning almighty insult with a slap of my hand onto the table hard enough to rattle a spoon, but not loud enough to disguise my pleasure.

"Aw now, don’t let Mont’s sketch of Miss Titanic get you all jealous, sis," William replied, straightening up out of the scrum. "She’s a fine sort alright, but more of a bloody bull all said and done. They reckon even God himself can’t put her down."

I remember that distinct moment amid all the cheerful scuffing of the night—it pickled into memory, only to ruin with time. A strange, difficult feeling of sadness had come, which I mistook for relief, and yet in the same still frame I’d locked joyful eyes with Montague and traded a tender, wordless understanding that this new ship must surely mean only the most buoyant of times lay ahead.

***

Berth 44 of the White Star Dock looked altered when I arrived in darkness, unfamiliar from behind the gates at the secured perimeter of the terminal. Without the billowing schedule of daytime travellers and steam-shot whistle of pending departures, Southampton port bore a watchful, yellow-eyed nature; low-lying of nocturnal ilk. Looming were all the sinister figures of an ocean gateway: gantry cranes, narrow buildings, funnels and hulls, either spot lit or else eclipsed and silhouetted by the threads of stays and shrouds, like ribs extending into a mixed plot of masts, themselves like headless spines.

Through a squint I’d seek out tiny echoes of the goodbye, trying hard to imagine a phantom of the ship that had so optimistically filled the dock on the day it had left. Like a madwoman I’d whisper through the gate: goodbye, see you soon, journey well. And as if that were the truth, I’d raise my hand in the air, fingers ticking almost imperceptibly as I thought of little Monty on my hip, wildly flapping his yellow handkerchief in the midday sun to be sure that his father would see him. Perhaps my husband would have reported that he did in the letter I had hoped would drift through my window, or slip under the doorway, or that I’d find tucked with a few petals under my pillow. There it would be, a perfectly dry envelope stamped RMS Titanic, Transatlantic Post Office 7. Inside, pages beginning with a dear and closed up with a darling.

Such foolishness arrived, but never the letter.

For a mind pent as mine—all caulked up with broken-heart machine parts and pale, watery, hauntings—it was impossible to behave well. My first winter alone compelled these wild escapes from sleeplessness, pumping off into the night like a heady laneway cat, frightened as the mouse it would like to eat, and rehearsing the words, a full year since said, with the absurd expectation that I might have a chance to say them all again.

There was a quick way to the water where sometimes I’d seek to find him—a little east along the port boundary to a narrow slip just wide enough for a side-step, then a descent down rocky stairs that vanished into the lapping ocean. Unbuttoned boots, stockings tugged away by their toes, skirt gathered to the hips: improper though it was I’d sit on a low step and soak up to the knees in the icy slap of the sea. With eyes shut I’d inhale the salty brisk and let the cold sink through to ache my bones, casting me over with its hypnotic net. I’d imagine falling down, down with him, both of us clinging to something—a deck chair, or an elaborate hat swept from the head of drowning lady, or the severed lid of a grand piano. So very cold it would have been, even furthermore than freezing, and our skin, bleached of colour, would glow as the pitch ocean drew us down into its belly. I would put a breath, like a kiss, into his mouth as we declined, all feathers and floating petticoats and pointed tails of his steward’s jacket drifting up and around us with the tangling gestures of a gently sinking pirouette.

This would be enough to exhaust the brutalising thoughts of those Titanic bodies and the terror of drowning among scores of others in the midst of a moonless, ice-pocked ocean. For a time, it would stop the intrusion of wondering how dire to brawl for a solid grip on the last breathing portions of ship. Especially one that had slipped beyond the reach of a God they thought it would never need. And how cruel to be reduced to a scream amid an ensemble of screams, then slowly become no sound at all among so many descending or otherwise drifting silences. I couldn’t think of how Montague suffered, only that I should suffer with him.

When the heavens paled with the first flush of morning I’d return home and be warming my feet by the stove well before it properly dawned. I’d tuck my briny illness into a little pill box quite a time before the blue blood of England had fully pulsed through the sky, reminding us third-class of Southampton to get beyond our tragedy.

I’d kiss little Monty’s sleeping hand and put his father to bed, then wrestle again with the fact that of the two cheerful men I saw off on the Titanic, it was my brother, William, who had survived.

***

After those first months, no one spoke about the sinking. Words for it lost their air once the sadness had gathered its fullest weight. The Titanic was far too heavy to keep raising it again and again because it was enough that it never stopped sinking, over and over. Only the most bereft faces gave off the truth, and of all the Southampton families who took a loss—over 500 so it’s said— most had little choice but to rear their chins. I couldn’t be sure what others might have perceived of my condition, except for Mrs Wallace, who in place of a mother and as an expert widow, maintained it was just simple grief and would see to it that, at least by day, I wouldn’t list too far in any direction.

“Aye, it hurts, but there’s no audience for your crying,” she told me. “Too many of you to be heard. And a good mother doesn’t drag a wee lad down into the depths with her.” She hauled me upright, anchored her fingertips deep into my hand bones and set her words hard into my ears with large, grey, porthole eyes. That’s how my tears came to stop while the sun was out and Monty needed me, but always with a prickling agreement that they’d return in the dark.

We were never again so free to openly suffer as those original days when we all held our breath in a black, heavily-hatted, weeping crowd outside Canute Chambers. Telegraph messages were volleyed between rescue ships and opposite Atlantic shores while we waited and reasoned and waited longer, begging for the White Star Line to release a list of the living.

The disaster fell on a Sunday, but it wasn’t until Thursday that the wall of white paper set outside the offices was finally complete with the hand-written names of Southampton’s saved. There were no words anywhere for Montague. I strained over and again to find him, but no name was inked. It was as if one of the witness marks that a machinist scores on the aligning edges of two separate parts had been suddenly erased. His body was never recovered or assigned a mortal number. He wasn’t laid out on a re-purposed ice rink in Halifax to be claimed with great, loving effort or at least buried abroad with dignity. There was no way of knowing how many fathoms away he was from me or the mark that, for a burning moment, I had considered striking on the inside of my wrist.

The Bishop of Winchester briefly eased my suffering from the pulpit of St Mary’s on the first empty Sunday. He openly boomed with radiant praises for the bravery of the dead, but then he rumbled an insistence that the hearts of his broken congregation should train away from anger and ill judgement, towards a lesson served in humility.

“All men who uttered a challenge to the power of God’s eternal sea have received a dreadful check,” he’d said, sending my mind to William, who was yet to return home, thankfully unchecked.

My much-loved brother, saved from a haranguing ocean death, despite that it was he and not Montague who dared to repeat aloud that even God couldn’t sink the ship. I felt so swiftly disarranged, and in a second burning moment, dared to wish it wasn’t William who lived, but my husband— for the good of his son and because who, least of all he, should deserve such a dreadful lesson? Very quickly I shunted the lunacy of that wish from my head, concluding that my brother, nor any other who lived or died, should be made a deadly example by God.

Instead of praying, I betrayed the Bishop’s instruction and angrily judged the moon for not having offered even a sliver of herself to silver the iceberg and make it bright enough to be seen. Coward moon, I’d thought, while the other churchgoers seemed to abide much more orderly prayers.

I chastised the ocean for being so still that it didn’t trouble up around the icy danger, whitening the waters to give a greater distance of alert. Further, I rebuked the guilty iceberg for breaking away in the first place, only to blight the starboard side of the Titanic with such precision that within 2 hours and 40 minutes the hull had gulped enough water to perish 1500 souls.

I hadn’t yet heard that the ship’s lookout was offered no access to binoculars, or that there weren’t nearly enough lifeboats, and that the lifeboats they did have weren’t all adequately filled. It hadn’t quite surfaced that the Captain didn’t order to slow the vessel, despite warnings clearly received about an ice field that lay directly ahead. Later I would learn that another ship, the Californian, was only 10 miles away, but ignored the Titanic’s visible distress flares and didn’t move to wake their only wireless operator who’d retired to bed well before the Titanic had frantically tapped out its SOS.

Anger and ill-judgement eddied, but quietly, so no one would know how harshly I felt. Especially not Miss Newman, whose job it was to cycle all over Southampton inspecting the eligible needs of residents supported by the Titanic Relief Fund. She’d tick boxes on pages while talking very kindly to Monty about the faithful dog she always brought along as an associate. But she’d also look around in sidelong ways for signs of spirit bottles or loose morals, and she didn’t like to hear about irritations of a kind that the Bishop had warned against.

“Be grateful for your 6 shillings, dear, there are others with more children to raise who qualify for less.”

“Right you are, Miss Newman,” I’d reply. And of course, she was.

***

Poor William, so full of guilt that he should be among the few who survived, despite the bravery of his efforts to fill nine life boats, and with only minutes to spare, that he saw the last collapsible boat full of women and children to a safe distance from the sinking. He must have watched the ship split and slip below the surface. He'd have heard every frightful sound.

My brother couldn’t look young Monty in the eyes for too long before tears would well. He couldn’t talk about a thing. Not even if I asked him, implored him to tell me what he knew of Montague in those final hours. He couldn’t pry his mouth enough to utter even a syllable of a word, so I kindly ceased the enquiry.

One day he yielded, very unexpectedly, with a pen. I found the small note on my table, written on a torn scrap of paper, folded under a sprig of chamomile:

I didn’t see Mont that night, I was so busy loading the lifeboats. I didn’t see him after we struck. I didn’t see him anytime that evening, or even earlier, because we were both at work. I’m very, very sorry, Trude. Sorry for you and little Monty. Sorry for him.

***

I still haven’t found an adequate word for my condition. Neither up, nor down. Perhaps I am just poised in a sort of hovering state. If I ever had the chance to peer inside the head of someone like me, I’d think them crazed. Mrs Wallace would still insist that I am perfectly fine, though I feel it’s unfair to consider me that way when I am clearly ill-fitted to a crippled ship that keeps sinking in my head. There is so much drifting down, down into icy darkness, then back up, up to kiss the wind-chafed cheeks of my blessed child.

Dancing and breathing and war and death and love and growing goes on. Still, I remain a mystery to myself.

I am a whip of wind turning paper scraps on the pavement.