Comrades by Rosita Boland

Author:Rosita Boland [Boland, Rosita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473585379
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

There were two pictures with the invite, a drawing of the real Titanic sinking and one of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their infamously cheesy scene at the prow of the ship where she’s holding out her arms, pretending to fly.

I was appalled. I thought this proposed party, a year hence, was in the worst possible taste. I could hardly believe that my smart, funny, wise friend was planning such a crass travesty of an event.

‘Is this a joke?’ I mailed back. ‘People died! Hundreds of them. It’s not funny!’

Jon had no time at all for my accusations of bad taste. He just laughed at me. He even got a bit annoyed when I told him off and announced that I would definitely, absolutely, a hundred per cent not be attending. I brought it up several times when next we met. ‘Don’t come if you don’t want to come,’ he told me finally.

He thought a century was long enough to be satirical about a historical event, whereas I thought some things were beyond satire. True, the party was also to be a fundraiser for the RNLI, but the untapped puritan in me wondered if they would want to accept the money if they knew the circumstances in which it had been raised.

As the year wore on, I received more than one reminder about Jon’s Titanic-themed party, which I ignored.

I am not sure at what point I decided that I would, in fact, go. It was partly about not wanting to be left out. Partly because I was questioning my own uptightness about what was, after all, a party. At any rate, I changed my mind, very much to Jon’s amusement. He enquired as to what I would come dressed as.

Just as I had done so many years before when I had first read A Night to Remember, I did not identify with my actual kinspeople from that time. I would not be going as an ‘enterprising Third Class waif’. No, I was going to be a First Class passenger, complete with a magnificent, museum-worthy Victorian vintage black velvet and jet-beaded cape I had been gifted from someone whose relative had once been the wardrobe mistress at the Gate Theatre.

On the evening of the party, all dressed up, I took a taxi across town to Jon’s home. ‘Nightswimming’ by REM was playing on a loop downstairs as guests-stroke-passengers arrived. There was an envelope for each guest. It contained a schedule of the evening’s events and a boarding pass. Jon had allocated us each a name of an Irish Third Class passenger; we were to discover at the end of the night if we had survived or not.

The evening’s events were timed to coincide in real time with the centenary of the sinking.

10.30 p.m. Welcome from the Captain

11.30 p.m. Iceberg alert

11.40 p.m. Direct hit

11.41 p.m.–02.19 a.m. Heavy drinking

00.00 Jack ’n’ Rose prize (best costume)

2.20 a.m. Remembrance for the Titanic

2.30 a.m. Lifeboats and legacies – please donate to our RNLI Howth collection

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