Luck and Freedom
The air was hot and thick, the tension almost touchable. Vi was sitting at a table with Fabrizio, an Italian friend she’d picked up on her way here, playing cards with two broad Swedish men. The game started out as a way to spend time, but it turned into a gamble really fast.
“Vi, you are pazzo. You bet everything we have”, Fabrizio complained next to Vi. The everything in question was some coins, nothing more. She turned to look at her friend, exhaled the smoke from her cigarette and smirked.
“When you got nothing, you go nothing to lose.”
She looked down at the price, scattered on the table. It contained of some coins, a pocket knife, a silver pocket watch and two third-class tickets for the Titanic. Vi didn’t care about the money or the watch, she wanted the tickets. They were her way back to America, back to her home. Vi looked up again and met the eyes of her Swedish seatmate.
“Sven?”, she asked. The man nodded and they exchanged cards. Vi then put one card down and picked up another. It was perfect, she was going to win. But she contained her excitement and looked at the other Swede with her best poker face. Her opponent was visible stressed, which meant that his cards were probably not as good as Vi’s.
“All right, moment of truth. Somebody’s life’s about to change”, she said and turned to her Italian friend. “Fabrizio?”
The man put his cards on the table with a disappointed look.
“Niente”, Vi stated as she threw a look at his cards. “Niente”, Fabrizio repeated.
“Olaf?” Nothing. “Sven?”
Sven laid out his cards and Vi leaned back, looking sorry at Fabrizio.
“Uh-oh, two pair. I’m sorry Fabrizio.”
Fabrizio, who didn’t know that Vi was messing with him, immediately started swearing. “Che “sorry”? Ma vaffanculo! You bet all the money!”
Vi quickly grabbed his arm and interrupted him before he could stand up and start a fight with someone.
“I’m sorry, you’re not gonna see your mum again for a long time…caus we’re going to America!” She slammed her cards on the table and smiled brightly. “Full house, boys! Woo-hoo!”
Fabrizio grabbed the tickets, stood up and shouted at the pub’s ceiling. “Dio mio, grazie!”
Vi leaned forward to take what she won, but Olaf grabbed her by the shirt she was wearing and held up his fist. Vi braced herself for a possible hit as the man swore something in Swedish, but then he turned and hit his friend, who bet the tickets in the first place.
Vi stumbled back, ignored the two men fighting and cheered.
“We’re going to America!”, Fabrizio shouted and held up the tickets again, smiling like a little boy.
“No, mate”, a deep voice interrupted them. Vi turned and caught the barkeeper’s gaze. “Titanic go to America in five minutes.” Vi turned to look at her friend, and without another word the grabbed their bags and stormed out of the pub, made their way through the crowd and caught the ship last minute.
“We’re the luckiest sons of bitches in the world, you know that?”, Vi shouted at Fabrizio as they ran along the crowded corridors of the Titanic to find their room. They really were lucky to be here.
*
Lost in her thoughts, Caitlyn went through the paintings she brought with her in her giant room. Sometimes she talked to a maid about where to hang which painting, but mostly she kept her thoughts to herself.
“God, not those finger paintings again”, her fiancée said as he stepped into the room, a glass of bourbon in his hand. “They certainly were a waste of money.”
“The difference between Cal’s taste in art and mine is that I have some”, Cait said without turning around. “They’re fascinating. Like being inside a dream or something. There’s truth but no logic.”
Caitlyn often spent her time thinking about those paintings, and the worlds and visions they pictured. They were different from the real world, and Cait didn’t like the real world. In comparison to her paintings, it was colourless and cold. Cait sighed and thought of her fiancée, who she's being forced to marry.
She really was unlucky to be here.
*
It’d been one day since they left the coast of Ireland, the Titanic headed for the open sea. Vi and Fabrizio had befriended the two Swede’s who were sharing their room, who had expected Olaf and Sven and not two random renegades.
Now, Vi and her friend were standing at the very front of the ship, where the left and the right railings joined. She leaned against the cold white metal and gazed upon the sea underneath her.
“Look, look, look!”, she shouted against the wind over to Fabrizio and pointed at the group of dolphins swimming with the ship. Some of them jumped out of the water and landed with a splash. Vi couldn’t but admire those elegant sea creatures. They could do what they wanted, go wherever they wanted and simply be free. And that’s what Vi loved so much about her own live. She didn’t think she could get any closer to real freedom than she was right now.
Vi looked up again and breathed in the cold and salty air. Then she stood on the lowest bar of the railing, spread her arms as if they were wings and shouted from the top of her lungs.
“I am the king of the world! Woo-hoo!”
Yes, Vi truly felt free.
*
Cait was sitting at a table in a smaller dining hall, together with her mother, Cal, a newly rich woman named Margaret Brown, and two of the “important people”, as Cait called them in her head.
“She is the largest moving object ever made by the hand of man in all history. And our master shipbuilder Mr. Andrews here designed her from the keel plates up”, a slim man with a moustache explained proudly.
“Well, I may have knocked her together, but the idea was Mr. Ismay’s”, Mr. Andrews answered and nodded towards the slim man. “He envisioned a steamer, so grand in scale and so luxurious in its appointments that its supremacy will never be challenged.”
Cait tried to look as if she was listening, which she wasn’t of course. Her head was outside the many windows, somewhere flowing with the wind, between the waves of the sea and the clouds of the sky. Lost in her thoughts she grabbed a cigarette and lit it with a match.
“You know I don’t like that, Caitlyn”, her mother whispered next to her. Cait would’ve liked to roll her eyes, but her experience suggested otherwise. Instead, she looked at her mother and exhaled the smoke right in her face.
“She knows”, Cal interrupted the silent ranking match and took Cait’s cigarette. Then he ordered something to eat for himself and Cait, without asking her first, of course. Cait tried to ignore the anger rising in her chest and stared out of the window again, imagining to be anywhere else but here.
“You gonna cut her meat for her too, there, Cal?”, Margaret, who everybody called Molly, interrupted. Cait didn’t know what it was, but she liked Molly. She was different from all those other born-rich people.
“But who thought of the name “Titanic”? Was it you, Bruce?”, Molly smoothly changed the topic before things could get even more heated.
“Yes, actually”, Mr. Ismay answered. “I wanted to convey sheer size, and size means stability, luxury, and above all, strength.”
Cait knew exactly she shouldn’t say out loud what came to her mind in that moment, but she still did.
“Do you know of Dr. Freud, Mr. Ismay? His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you.”
Molly didn’t hold back her amused smile and even Mr. Andrews grinned, but the other people at the table did not like Cait’s “joke”.
“What’s gotten into you?”, her mother whispered. She almost sounded like a snake. And that’s also exactly what she was, a snake.
“Excuse me”, Cait said and left the table, escaping from the typical “Excuse her, normally she’s not like this”-phrases, which would undoubtedly follow.
It’s another one of those moments where the walls dare to cave in around Cait. She’s feeling trapped, and her ridiculously tight dress didn’t help the sensation of breathlessness. Again, she wished to be flying with the wind, light and without any sorrow or fear.
Yes, Cait truly wanted to feel free.