Out-and-Out Liars. Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 1)

Of Ice, Fur and Fire

Mary Mary celebrity drag chanteuse found herself on the HMS England heading for the Arctic. She awoke from her deck chair slumber to passengers interrogating her as to how much she earned and if she was entitled to be there at all. Mary Mary’s sudden appearance among them offered the assembled mob an outlet and scapegoat for their pent-up leaking and enraged elitism; although every cabin faced seawards, there pervaded on the HMS England the nagging suspicion that the next man’s view was better. When had she boarded? They asked each other. From what fraudulent act was she fleeing? Had she stowed away in Jersey, her crime even to heinous for that bandit’s haven? She wasn’t on the entertainment roster. And what was she doing in a powder blue baby doll nighty? Even worse, was she poor, a refugee from a council estate?; if they had had to save all of their lives for this cruise, for that is what it was, then how could this castaway from a sink estate, a scrounger, have even scrimped the money for a full passport. The word prostitute lingered on their collective lips.

“Two thousand pounds this trip cost me and my wife”. Said an irate man drawing his wife closer to him and consulting the crowd encircling a bewildered Mary Mary.

“Yes, two thousand”. The mob chimed in agreement; Mary Mary was as welcome as a single woman on a couples package holiday; she was an obvious threat!

“Get the Captain” Someone suggested. Mary Mary stared out to sea, the sky was a beautiful azure, a few gulls followed in the ship’s wake and their cries punctuated the general stutter of resentment that had extended, undiluted, from the seething mainland jostling for divisive trouble among the strived-for and hard-earned deckchairs and loungers.

Indeed, when Mary Mary leapt from Chelsea Bridge to escape her homophobic assailants and was blown beneath its structure and neatly on to a passing dumpster, disappearing between the bags of consumer rubbish, she momentarily threw her dressing gown over board; Mary Mary was an out-and-out liar erste class, on landing among the urban waste this presented the perfect opportunity to disappear; wealth had been a front, she was up to her eyeballs in debt. As she watched from her over-fragrant hide-out people raising the alarm as her dressing gown floated away, at first prostrate, then disappearing, dragged from sight by the Thames mighty undertows.

Mary Mary sat bemused as she and she alone saw the approaching Captain bring an extended index finger to his lips and widen his eyes in a gesture which implored Mary Mary’s discretion. The gesture was completely wasted; she had no recollection of meeting Captain David Cameron on shore leave in a transvestite bar in Southend. It had been late when they had met under the replica Czechoslovakian chandelier at the  glitter ball counter presided over by Madam Jojo, an octogenarian Asian doyen of the London tranny scene who had, curiously, retired to the dismal coastal town. Mary Mary was in the full flow of alcoholically induced amnesia, the blackout erased all memory of the bottles of champagne Captain Cameron had purchased for her and the ‘gals’ who, hung hawk-like around her punter. She could not recall the champagne she quaffed demurely in her baby-doll nighty, an attire barely out of the ordinary in this establishment where flamboyant zeal was de rigueur; under the right, or wrong light the hard edges of survival lent a sepia hothouse ambiance to the place; albeit a hothouse full of Venus fly-traps. With the volume turned down the clientele looked like flamingos, for that is what the bar was called, with the volume up it sounded like a barn yard. Taking Mary, Mary on board the docked and as yet unchartered HMS England was a career move equal only to the fateful wave-to-his-mates by the captain of the Costa Concordia. Mary Mary noticed a fat gold wedding band and a love bite peaking from the collar of  Captain Cameron's uniform.

“She hasn’t paid, she's a stowaway”. Intoned a couple from Stevenage who worked for Stena, the stair-lift company, and who had taken early retirement lest they found themselves seamlessly segueing from shop floor to the company product.

All Mary Mary could think of through the general hubbub of admonishment, was having arrived in Southend and stepping gracefully from the dumpster returning a cabbage leaf and cigarette butt to the potential landfill, she had met some lads who, despite their thuggish demeanour revealed themselves Good Samaritans and showed her, on their smart phones, how to track the chip Mary Mary suddenly remembered she had had surgically installed in her recently missing Chihuahua Mitzi, worn just beneath her Swarovski collar. She typed in the serial code specific to Mitzi in Google Pet Global Map. It was clear from that from the pulsating red dot that her beloved dog was heading for the Arctic Circle.

Even in  blackout Mary Mary was no fool, it was she who at Flamingos, on overhearing that David, was indeed Captain Cameron of the Arctic-bound HMS England, she had latched herself onto him with such subtlety that he had forgotten who and where he was. On board his ship and in between the throes of lust still in her panties she had let go a wet fart and leapt from the bed. Her spatial awareness totally delusional, the Captain face own among the pillows, she had taken the wrong exit to the bathroom. Outside in the corridor she instantly forgot not only why she was there but, faced with rows and row of cabin doors, she had forgotten the one through which she had emerged.

The Arctic Circle now appeared prematurely in the form of a huge glacier barring the passage of the HMS England and was a welcome decoy from the tyranny of gold-plated jewellery and hate. Everyone disappeared to the prow of the ship to take photos of the land mass that had now caused the engines to stall and grind to a doom-laden halt.

How Mitzi, snatched by a passing fox in sight of Mary Mary’s patio doors, had out-paced her in the race to the Arctic was a mystery. The vessel in which her pet treasure travelled was obviously faster than this non-heart-stopping gift shop. Mary Mary doubted that the fox could rob Mitzi of her life let alone her ferociously guarded Swarovski collar; Mary Mary had, during a period of financial straits attempted to divest her pet of her precious stones and lived to regret it; when the ambulance arrived the on-the-spot diagnosis was attempted suicide; to the trained and untrained eye Mary Mary had the appearance of someone who had slashed her wrists.

One thing Mary Mary knew that she shared with her pet, apart form an iron will to live, was fur. Fur coats to be specific, polar fur to be exact. Mitzi failed to understand during her long sulking stints that the very thing she wore around her neck and was loath to part with was the very thing that her owner could pawn at a New Bond Street jewellers thus allowing the price of passage for both to the Arctic to procure polar bear fur coats to compliment their…well, pawned jewellery.

A diet of stick-thin IT girls on Russian Reality TV Shows had obviously addled their brains, but addled though they may be it seemed that misfortune in the form of a homophobic close-shave and a leg-over the garden fence out of sight of her avaricious owner and a hop onto an impounded and fortuitously released environmental vessel the Sea Shepperd the name of which Mitzi had recognized from nature programs on the Arctic, now saw them making their respective journeys towards the extreme northern hemisphere and closer to the object of their desire.