It took Julia Stiller less than a minute to retrieve the small tablet from her handbag and log in to the ship’s free Wi-Fi. Beforehand she closed the balcony doors of her cabin and drew the curtains so the setting sun didn’t reflect in her screen.
‘You’re scaring me,’ she said to Tom, and sat down at the dressing table beside the television.
The email he’d sent her just a few minutes earlier had no subject or accompanying comments. She tapped her finger on the blue underlined text, immediately opening a website with a simple design. It looked amateurish, like the privately run forum on which Julia occasionally exchanged information with others who suffered mood swings due to an underactive thyroid.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘Isharerumours,’ Tom replied. ‘The plebs’ version of Facebook. Lots of schoolkids use this portal to bitch about teachers or fellow pupils. It’s hugely popular because you can log in anonymously and there are no controls whatsoever.’
From the breathiness in his voice Julia could tell how uncomfortable Tom was finding this conversation. And she could imagine the expression on his face as he sat at home in front of his computer, while she was focusing on the imitation iPad she’d bought from a food discounter.
Tom Schiwy had the knack of earning affection and sympathy from those in his presence just by looking at them. Not a bad qualification for a liaison teacher, although when she was a girl Julia would never have disclosed to such a good-looking man that in PE the class sneered at her for being a roly-poly. These days her weight was still north of the German average, but the years had been good to her. The podgy teenager had turned into a round, but well-proportioned woman who’d learned not to get exasperated by her powerful upper arms and thighs, big bottom or chubby cheeks, but to accept the compliments that plenty of men gave her: for her eyes that sparkled with life, her pout and her dark, slightly curly hair that framed her oval face like an expensive painting when not tied up as it was now, emphasising her high forehead with the little beauty spot above her right eyebrow.
‘What now?’
A postcard-sized video window had opened up before Julia’s eyes.
‘What’s that?’
‘That… that…’ Tom stammered. ‘It’s hard to… Please just watch it.’
‘You’re really scaring me,’ she repeated, but tapped on the large arrow in the centre of the video file.
The recording that now began was typical of the quality of those hidden cameras familiar to reality TV shows, where amateur detectives try to catch out unfaithful husbands. A time code in the bottom corner of the screen revealed that the video had been taken five months earlier, in the spring of this year.
To begin with neither the lighting nor zoom were right, assuming that the gadget responsible for these shaky pictures had such a function. It took a while for Julia to see that someone was filming from a moving car. It was dark, and drizzle was falling onto the windscreen, which was why the tail lights of the car in front blurred the picture for the viewer. The camera panned across a black dashboard to the passenger seat and captured the front of a sombre tenement block, a grey concrete eyesore of the sort you see on every second corner in old West Berlin.
‘Why do I need to watch this?’ Julia asked as the car slowed down and now passed at walking pace by the forecourt of a second-hand car dealer.
‘Because of this,’ Tom replied at the moment when the car stopped at a driveway and the electric window on the passenger side disappeared into the door.
To begin with Julia couldn’t see anything apart from a dense row of trees which virtually concealed the playground behind them. If there was a streetlamp here it was either faulty or far away; at any rate there wasn’t even enough light to make out what the poster was advertising on the huge billboard by the side of the road. Likewise, the woman who suddenly emerged from the dim twilight, wiggling her hips as she approached the car, was little more than a shadow at first. Even when she bent down to the passenger window, thereby entering the light of the camera, Julia couldn’t recognise the face because it was pixelated. In a pretend wicked voice, the woman whispered into the camera, ‘You can do anything you like with me, sweetheart, but filming costs extra.’
‘Christ Almighty!’ Julia panted, inching herself away from the dressing table. She turned around, but Lisa had closed the connecting door. She was alone in the cabin and, besides, her daughter had said she wanted to take a look around the ship.
Is that…?
The woman in the video was the same height, had the same black hair and the same slim build. And worst of all: she had her voice.
‘Is that…?’ Julia gasped, but couldn’t utter her daughter’s name.
No, it can’t be. It’s impossible.
The girl, who’d now taken a step backwards and turned around to show off some flesh, was wearing clothes that could easily be in Lisa’s wardrobe: a petticoat dress, fishnet tights and spotted peep toes. It was the sort of thing she’d worn before switching from her rockabilly phase to her Goth one without any transition.
But the voices weren’t that similar, Julia tried to convince herself.
‘Please tell me that’s not my daughter,’ she begged Tom as the film cut to a radically different camera angle.
‘No…’ Julia groaned softly when she saw the steering wheel. The dark dashboard. And the back of the girl’s head, moving back and forth rhythmically, accompanied by squelching noises, while the faceless man in whose lap her head was buried moaned with pleasure.
‘Is that Lisa?’ Julia rasped.
She heard Tom exhale. ‘Hard to tell. Possibly.’
‘Possibly is not definitely. It could be someone else, couldn’t it? A fake?’
‘Yes, maybe. I mean, you don’t see any faces.’
‘My God,’ Julia sighed. She closed her eyes, unwilling to face up to the significance of what she’d just seen.
‘Okay… Okay…’ It took her three attempts to complete her sentence. ‘That’s not her!’
It mustn’t be her.
‘I’m not really sure either,’ Tom agreed. ‘But I’m afraid that what we think is irrelevant.’
He asked her to open up the comments column below the video. Julia felt ill. The screen was flooded with vile contributions from users hiding behind pseudonyms, while her daughter was referred to by her full name:
easyeast: Sick! Lisa Stiller?
Habbybln85: Yup. I’ve had her too.
Tao I: She’ll do anything for cash.
sventhebam30: Quality’s shit. Just a blowjob, no fucking? Boooooring.
JoeGeothe: Fuck me, what a slapper. Bi@t€h!
GuestI: Yes, filthy whore. Hate sluts like that.
‘Can this be deleted?’ Julia asked. She felt numbed.
‘Hardly. The server’s in Togo. And even if we locate the provider, which I doubt, it can be found on half a dozen other portals. This shit stays on the web forever.’
‘It’s nonsense. It’s got to go. My daughter doesn’t do things like this. I mean, she’s not a prostitute! It’s… You—’
Tom interrupted her. ‘I’ll say it again: it’s completely irrelevant whether she does these sorts of things or not. Your daughter lives in a world where rumours are stronger than the truth.’
‘How long has this filth been on the internet?’ Julia’s voice was quavering.
‘About six or seven weeks, if the date when the file was uploaded is right. I only discovered it today in the playground when the kids were handing round their mobiles to watch it.’
‘This explains everything!’ Julia said in a fluster.
Her bad marks, why she’s barely eating anything, her ghastly clothes.
She slapped her forehead in anger. ‘And I thought these were the perfectly normal excesses of puberty!’
Or the after-effects of our separation. Or both. But surely not that!
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Tom said, but this wasn’t any comfort. What Max had said when she was awarded custody was right.
I’m not up to it.
Once again she felt helpless. The world around her was teetering; she felt dizzy. No wonder – the carpet had just been pulled out from beneath her feet. Never before had she been so painfully aware that she’d failed as a mother. In every respect.
‘Now do you understand why the two of you have got to get off that boat immediately?’ she heard Tom say.
Yes. Of course. That means…
She was unable to order the thoughts in her head.
‘I’m not sure. I mean, Lisa seems to be happy here, perhaps—’
‘Of course she’s happy!’ Tom protested.
‘—this holiday’s good for her!’
‘No. No way!’
‘Why not? Surely a bit of distraction is exactly the right—’
‘No!’ Tom was almost screaming. At that moment she heard the first bang.
A shot?
Julia jumped and looked at the balcony door. The explosions in the port grew ever more frequent. Behind the curtains the light had changed. Outside there were flickers and flashes.
‘Because I know teenagers who’ve done things to themselves after far less cyberbullying,’ Tom said imploringly.
Suicide?
Julia got up laboriously from the table, yanked open the glass doors to the balcony and stared at the blue-and-gold sea of light in the evening sky from the fireworks shooting into the air to mark their departure.
‘I can’t take her off the ship,’ she heard herself say.
‘But you have to. If Lisa’s planning to take her own life, there’s no better place to do it than on a cruise ship sailing the high seas! All you’ve got to do is jump. It’s the perfect place to die!’
For heaven’s sake. No.
Tears streamed into Julia’s eyes and, in her case, it was certainly not down to the wind.
It’s too late.
She felt the vibrations that were now far stronger than when they’d boarded the ship. She gazed at the people waving on the jetty. Looked down, searching in vain for the gangway they’d used to embark.
On deck music rang out from the loudspeakers, an orchestral theme that could have been from a Hollywood film.
And as the cruise liner slowly pulled away from the jetty, Tom’s ominous voice mingled with the whooshing of the water, the departure music and the bass drone of the foghorn that sounded a further six times before falling silent for the duration of the transatlantic crossing.
Just like Julia’s hope of a carefree holiday with her daughter, of whose whereabouts on this gigantic ship she didn’t have the faintest idea.