Plead with the Fishes

April 15th 2:34 am

“Papa!”

Harvey Sawyer woke, drowning.

The water so ice-cold it felt as though it cut through his skin like glass. He was submerged from the neck down; as he awoke, with a gasp - the water slicing along his throat – his eyes flew open, but there was only darkness.

“Papa save me, please!”

The cold sunk it’s teeth in with one last bite, and then his whole body went numb.

Keep swimming, he thought desperately to himself. He imagined his legs treading water, two pale limbs kicking desperately beneath the black sea, but he could not feel them moving. Keep pushing. Stay alive. Stay alive, Maria, stay alive!

“Harvey!”

Harvey gasped again, sucked frozen, salt water into his lungs. And then, with a splutter, awoke in his bed.

His wife was shaking him.

“Harvey.” Her voice trembled, threatened to spill over with sobs. “Harv.”

Harvey blinked. He was lying on his warm, soft mattress, his wife’s warm, soft hand curled over his bicep. Moonlight was drenched over his carpet by the window, lit the room in a gentle silver glow. He could see the ceiling above him, the curl of his wife’s fair hair beside him.

And yet he felt frozen. So cold, his blood was slush in his veins, could hardly pump his heart.

And that darkness…it lingered…crashed down on him, he could hardly keep afloat under its weight.

“Martha,” he said. “Something is wrong.”

Papa! The voice echoed. Everything felt so dark that the voice appeared like a flash of light. Papa!

It was Maria’s voice, calling for him.

“Maria…” he didn’t know what to say, how to say it. Their daughter was half a world away, set sail across the seas. He didn’t know what he knew. Could only feel that cold, that dark, oppressing weight. A sense of stark, startling doom.

His wife’s lower lip quivered.

“I know,” she whispered. “I heard her too.”

April 14th 8:52am

Milford-on-Sea was easing through a quiet, still morning – one that smelt of salt and spring – as Wendy hesitated outside the post office.

High Street was beginning to burble with life; the bell of the grocer jingled as the door opened and closed, voices along the street rose and fell. Wendy wrung her hands, peeking through the shuttered window of the post office, then skittered away, timid as a mouse.

“Miss Croft!” someone greeted, coming up to the door of the post office. It was her neighbour, Mr Riggs, smelling of tobacco. “Wonderful morning, isn’t it?”

Mr Riggs was a stocky, stout fellow, who’s round cheeks always seemed to be stained a rosy shade of pink.

“Yes, it is,” Wendy agreed, quietly. The sky was a pleasant, pale blue, the sun golden and Spring-warm, squinting as a bright eye between two sheep-wool clouds.

“Must be glorious out there on the sea,” Mr Riggs said, cheerily stuffing his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. He turned his head seaward. “What do you suppose they’re eating for breakfast? All the eggs, bacon and sausages you can imagine, I’d say.”

Wendy’s stomach churned.

“Your sister must be having a ball! Such a lively little thing, that Daisy. I imagine she has spent her days dancing, swimming.”

“The pool is only for the first class,” Wendy mumbled.

“Ah, that’s right, that’s right.” Mr Riggs broke away a moment to greet the man who waved at him from across the road. When he turned back, he beamed down at Wendy, patting his round belly as though having just finished a hearty meal. “It was a wonderful thing you did for your sister. Why, everyone around here always speaks of your kindness! A truly selfless act, giving up those tickets. You rarely see such things these days, eh?”

Wendy would not call it selfless.

“I read your poem,” Mr Riggs continued. “It was quite good. A bit flowery for my tastes, though.”

“Thank you.” She desperately wanted him to go away.

“Well,” Mr Riggs patted his belly again. If he was anyone else, Wendy would’ve assumed he’d read the look on her face as his cue to leave. “I ought to leave you to it. We’re all quite eager to hear from your sister when she returns. I’m sure she will have some stories to tell!”

“I hope.” It was so quiet, Mr Riggs did not hear.

“We’re all so fond of her,” he added, more to himself than to Wendy, as he stepped up to the door of the mail office. “Yes, quite fond. A lovely girl. Quite lovely.”

He went inside. Wendy let out a deep breath.

It was quite ridiculous, but since the day her sister had left, Wendy had found herself outside the mail office every morning, hoping, by some miracle, to receive a letter with her name printed across it.

Poppins! The letter would be begin. I am having such a wonderful time on the Titanic!

There was no reason for Wendy to feel so anxious. If anyone was to be having an absolute ball, it was her sister. Wendy could still see the excitement on Daisy’s round face when Wendy told her that she was giving her the tickets. How her eyes had lit up like stars, her dark curls falling over her forehead as she lifted up on her toes. A bird taking flight.

“Oh, Wendy!” she’d squealed, clutching her hands to her chest. “Oh, I love you! I love you I love you I love you.” She’d swept Wendy up in her arms, spun her around. Wendy had laughed. “You’re to come with me, right?”

“No, no,” Wendy said. “You’re taking Thomas, of course.”

“Oh, this is too much. I’m going to cry, Poppins! This is too kind. Ma! Pa! Did you hear?”

Wendy had won two tickets for the Titanic in a poetry competition. It had gone like this: she’d seen an ad for the contest in the paper and she, being a poet, entered it. She did not expect to win it. She did not think of what she, with a fear of sailing, would do if she won it.

It had, then, been quite an easy decision to hand the tickets over to her bright, adventurous sister, and her husband, Thomas. They were newlywed. What better honeymoon than the Titanic?

But Wendy had hardly slept since her sister left. It was as though the ocean lived within her stomach, a rocky, stormy sea, that toppled every ship that dared to cross it.

What if something happened? What if a deadly disease swept through the ship? What if Daisy and Thomas fought and she had no one to run to? What if she fell overboard? What if the whole ship sunk?

What if, what if, what if?

But Wendy knew her anxiety was deceitful; her own mind playing cruel tricks. There was nothing to worry about. Daisy was having a wonderful trip.

Wendy began her walk home. A raven swooped down and landed on a fence beside her; black as death against the faded sky.

“Oh, shoo,” Wendy hushed, her heart tightening at the sight.

Nevertheless, there was little Wendy wanted more than that addressed letter, a bright and cheery Poppins scrawled across the first line.

April 14th 4:03pm

“…and you? Are you married?”

“No, ma’am.” Maria carefully stepped over a pair of shoes left by the bed as she tucked in the sheets. She had been doing her rounds in small, shrunken-shouldered silence when the cabin door had swung open and a dark haired, red-lipped woman had staggered in.

She’d collapsed face first on a bed, unaware of Maria, and groaned into her pillow.

Maria had hesitated, her hands still folding fresh towels as if of their own accord, debating whether to leave the guest in peace, or quietly continue working. It was not the same with third class guests as it was with first class – it was far more likely this guest would forgive her presence – but there was still an underlying presumption that she and the guests were to be separate.

Finally, she said, “I can come back, ma’am,” and the woman had jolted upright.

“Oh, I didn’t see you!” she said. Her lipstick had smudged at the corner of her mouth; her black curls tousled and frizzed from the sea-wind and salty spray.

Again, Maria offered to leave. But the woman waved the suggestion away.

“Please,” she said, “don’t stop because of me. I’m just having a bit of a huff.”

Maria nodded and carefully placed two fresh, folded towels at the end of the made-up bed, before tiptoeing to the other one. She had expected to continue to work in silence – a slinking shadow, only caught in the corner glances of guests, an invisible pair of hands that magicked their cabins to cleanliness each day.

But the woman fell back against her pillow and said, “Men,” in a way that seemed just as much directed at Maria as at the polished wooden ceiling. “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them,” she continued, and then it all came out, like water from a spout. “I love my Thomas dearly, I do, but sometimes we have the most ridiculous arguments! And on our honeymoon nonetheless!”

And so the woman had chatted to Maria as she worked, the gentle swaying of the ship beneath them, blue-bright sunlight filtering in through the portholes.

“Do you live on your own, then?” the woman asked. “When you are not sailing across the seas?”

“I live with my parents. My father is not very well.” The reality of Maria’s situation went unsaid; her, out in the middle of the ocean, working to earn enough to support a father who needed her there beside him.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear,” the woman said, sadly. “I’m sure you take good care of them.” She had moved over to the porthole, and was watching the waves ripple and curl, the water become soaked in warm orange at the horizon as the sun began its slow descent. Silence stretched on, and Maria was grateful for it. She did not want to dwell on her father.

“I grew up by the sea,” the woman said quietly; it was as though the sight of it had transformed her into a different person. She spoke pensively, gently. “My sister and I…we were such ocean creatures. My sister was more a sand crab, though, sticking to the shore. I think in a past life I was dolphin. Or a whale. Singing songs down there in the deep.”

“Do you sing?” Maria asked. The woman flushed.

“I’m not particularly good,” she said. “My sister is the talented one. She’s a poet. In fact, it was a poem of hers that won her the tickets for this trip.”

“I love poetry,” Maria said. “Though I mostly read it.”

“Oh, you must meet Wendy, my sister. I’m sure the two of you would get along splendidly.” The woman was smiling, and her youthful, light-hearted energy returned. "Do you have any special talents? Oh! Let me guess. You're a modern Da Vinci."

Maria laughed.

"I don't jest!" the woman said, though she was still smiling. "You seem good with your hands. Those towels are folded impeccably."

Perhaps from anyone else, Maria would have assumed she was being ridiculed, but the woman spoke in earnest.

"Well, I suppose I can do this," Maria said. Then she turned away. "Here, for you." And she turned back, holding up a towel folded into the shape of a swan.

The woman laughed. "Oh, that's so delightful!" She placed it very carefully on her bed. "Everyone will be so jealous." Maria's chest filled with warmth. "Well, I should be heading up to supper. So, thank you, seriously. Both for the swan and the chat. " The woman paused as she passed Maria. “Oh.” She pointed to herself. “Daisy.”

“Maria,” replied Maria.

“Well, Maria,” said Daisy. “I hope you can see your father again soon.”

“Thank you,” said Maria. “I hope things work out between you and your husband.”

“Oh, they will,” laughed Daisy. “But I may not talk to him for the rest of the day.”

April 14th 11:42pm

Daisy pressed the heel of her palm into her eye.

“I’ll go and see what’s going on,” said Thomas, tugging on his shoes. The sound still hung in the air; Daisy’s sleep-ridden mind tried to make sense of it. A loud bang. The scraping of metal. A gasp leaving someone’s throat. “Wait here, okay, dear?”

“Where else would I go?” Daisy grumbled. In the faint light, she could see Thomas give her a tight-lipped look, his brows drawn together. When he bent to kiss her cheek, she moved her face away, and he sighed. It was the same oh-Daisy sigh that her sister would give. “Enough with the dramatics,” Wendy would say. But Daisy couldn’t help that she was still annoyed at him.

But as Thomas left the cabin, and Daisy blinked at the light that came gushing in from the passageway, she had the sudden, overwhelming urge to tell him she loved him. He knows. He knows you’re not truly mad. He knows better than anyone. But still, Daisy said it. “I love you.” Though she blurted it just as the cabin door closed, so it was unclear whether Thomas heard her at all.

12:07am

“Daisy.” Maria found the woman sitting on her bed, hands twisting anxiously in her lap. “Everyone is to be ready on deck.”

The cabins, passageway, had become full of movement. Maria was moving cabin to cabin to alert everyone who had not already awoken, who had not yet heard the news. Daisy looked a statue, silent and pensive amongst a flurry of pigeons.

“I’m waiting on Thomas,” said Daisy. Her face was stony, stubborn, but there was something tender about her mouth. “He told me to wait here. We’ll go up together.”

A large family carrying their luggage bustled past Maria in the passageway, their eldest child knocking her in through the cabin doorway. Maria stumbled, caught herself, whipped around, and found them all paused. Looking at her. The mother spoke but it was not in a language Maria knew.

They didn’t know what was going on. Each of their faces reflected a different shade of panic back at her.

“You need to go up to the deck,” Maria said, carefully, pointing upwards. The mother blinked. Spoke again in her foreign tongue. “The deck,” Maria repeated. “Look – I’ll go with you.” She pointed at herself then back at them. Then, glancing back: “Daisy, you really should come too.”

“Thomas is coming back for me,” Daisy said.

“He may not even be able to get down the stairs. He’d be fighting against a crowd of people going up,” Maria pointed out.

Their eyes met. Daisy pushed her lips up toward her cheek, shook her head. “We’ll lose each other if I leave now. At least while I’m here, he knows where I am.”

Maria hesitated. The mother spoke urgently behind her; her youngest child had begun to cry. The ship groaned in response. Light cut along Daisy’s neck, her jaw, as she looked out the porthole. It appeared, to Maria, only as a circle of black, but Daisy seemed to see something out there, in the darkness.

“Alright,” Maria said to the family. Her gaze on Daisy was so heavy, it was an effort to drag it away. “Follow me.” And when she left the cabin, more passengers rounded their eyes on her, spoke urgently in foreign tongues. Her uniform, once a shadow casting her into darkness, designating her to the corners, along the walls, on the edges, had now become a beacon. Faces turned toward her light.

She heard Daisy’s voice as she left.

“The sea is growing closer,” she said.

Ice struck Maria’s heart. She urged the families towards the stairs. A frantic scream tore through the passageway. Maria ran to meet it.

The doors to the stairwell were locked.

12:15am

It was a cold, moonless night, and the sea stretched out as a second sky.

Wendy stood on the shore, looking out at the black. A wind whipped her skirts behind her. Salt water clung to her skin.

It was odd, unnerving being out here by herself. She and Daisy used to sneak out to the beach late at night together. It felt so freeing when she was by Daisy’s side; the dark sea stretching on and on; and endless possibility. Alone, the darkness from the sea, the sky, felt like two hands crushing her between them.

“Get her back home safe,” Wendy told the ocean. “Get her back to me.”

2:05am

“That was the last one.”

They watched as the lifeboat was lowered. The woman beside Maria began to scream.

It became a desperate push-and-shove. A man climbed over the rail and leapt, landing on the lowering lifeboat, sending a shriek of pain echoing out into the sea.

“Take my baby! My baby!” a woman cried, and held her child over the side of the ship. Someone grabbed Maria by the shoulders and yelled at her to do something, anything. There must be lifeboats, there must be more.

In the chaos of the deck, Maria caught sight of the eldest child of the large immigrant family; he was only a boy, but he’d been stopped when he’d tried to follow onto the last lifeboat after his mother. Women and children only. He and his father had watched as their family was lowered away, becoming only a spot of oil-lit light out on the sea. Maria had watched him suck his mouth in, cheeks billowing, as he tried to hold in his tears.

He had helped her shove against the locked doors. Keep going, Maria had told him and his father, and then she’d pushed her way through the crowd, looking for another way out. She hadn’t gone by Daisy’s cabin in her search, and now, up on deck, Maria desperately wished she had.

Everything was a blur. It was a lawless land, a storm. But Maria’s vision perfectly zeroed in on the face of every dark-haired woman she saw. Looking for those blue eyes, those red lips.

Where are you? Maria thought urgently. Let me see you. See you just as you saw me.

2:47am

Harvey and his wife sat over cups of tea at the dining table. It was silent. Lamp lit. His wife put her trembling hand to her mouth and chewed at her thumbnail.

Before she had spoken in a mantra. I’m sure she’s fine. They were just bad dreams. She’s fine. I’m sure she’s fine. You know how we’re both prone to worry.

Now she broke her nail off in her mouth and spat it to the floor. Then blinked, surprised that she had done it.

Harvey bent his head and began to pray.

2:11am

The deck’s tilt was steepening with every passing second. Everyone lunged for a rail. Some people began to jump over the other side. Just kill me now, someone wailed, we’ll never make it, just kill me now.

Maria looked out at the lifeboats, little dots of light out on the sea, with a rabid desperation. Very few of the third class had made it onto them; they’d been trapped below deck for so long. That woman’s baby was shrieking. In less than a matter of hours it would be dead. Perhaps in a matter of minutes.

Take me with you! Someone screamed out to the lifeboats. Take me please take me please save me.

Maria realised it was her own voice, ripped violently from her throat.

“Jump,” said the person next to her. In Maria’s mind, it was Daisy. She needed it to be so, so she would not die alone. “Jump now or you’ll be sucked down with the ship.”

“I can’t swim,” sobbed Maria.

The air filled with thwacks of bodies hitting the water. It filled with screams. With a low groan from the ship, like a whale calling out to sea.

There was little to be remembered before she struck the water. Her panic so severe it was though she had begun to shut down from it. Heart slowing, vision blackening, a quiet preparation. But the piercing cold woke her anew.

And she knew, faintly, that before the water, her heart had called out to Daisy. Daisy, Daisy, Daisy. A stranger. No, she was two strangers; both the woman who laughed with her lipstick smudged, and the woman who looked pensively out at the sea. There was so much to know. There was so much they could say to each other. Who was she? Where was she? Why was she not here?

But all Maria had was a laugh, a fleeting smile, a flash of blue eyes. A small moment of connection. This was monstrous, it was beyond belief. Her heart cried out for what was human.

Don’t let me be invisible in death, too.

But as her body was swallowed by the ocean, her heart cried out further, louder. A hand reaching up toward the night sky. A hand amongst thousands. A body amongst thousands. Never had she felt so alone.

She called out for her father.

And that night he woke to the sound of her voice.

April 20th 11:35am

Wendy had scarcely left her bed all week.

They’d heard the news. Everyone had heard the news. As the survivors began to speak, a picture was painted. An iceberg, a lack of lifeboats, a dark night filled with screams.

But the stories always felt so far away. A birds-eye view, someone from the outside looking in. What had happened to all those people? The people who hadn’t made it? Why hadn’t they made it while others had? What were they saying to each other, as the ship went down? What did their hearts beat for, as the water came rushing in?

Daisy.

The unknown of it was perhaps the most painful thing of all; it was a gaping, festering wound that would not let Wendy move or talk or breathe. What were those last moments like for Daisy? Had she fought until the end? Had she had Thomas by her side, or had she been alone? Was darkness the very last thing she saw?

Would Wendy ever know? Would anyone ever know?

Wendy would dive to the bottom of the sea if it meant knowing. She would beg and plead with the fishes; just tell me. Tell me so I can sleep. Was she in her lovers’ arms? Did she have that comfort at least?

There was the hope, of course, that Daisy had survived. That they’d find her any day now. And she’d come bursting in to meet them, her smile lively, her eyes dancing.

Their mother hoped. She scoured the papers, read the names of those who had been confirmed dead. Abigail Stone. William Thomas. Maria Sawyer. Robert Yates...

Had any of these names known Daisy? Wendy would think. Had any of them seen her in her final moments? Daisy’s name never appeared. That was hope.

Wendy found hope to be a sick, cruel thing. Anxiety, in a way, was a comfort. There was more likely to be light at the end of anxiety. Hope, she found, only made way for darkness.

Her mother appeared at her door.

“A letter.” She was crying, and could not say any more.

The letter was addressed to Wendy and had been mailed from Queenstown, Ireland; one the Titanic’s stops before New York. It was written in an excitable, messy hand, as though written in laughter, written by distracted fingers, written in a small space of life between one adventure and the next.

Poppins! It read. I am having such a marvellous time on the Titanic!