Oh good, there goes another lifelong ambition. To spend my old age upon a cruise ship. Unlike the others (living in a hotel by the age of 30, declining a British honour, taking full control of my personal grooming), this is an ambition I’ve chosen to back out of with dignity, rather than having it cruelly removed by age and cash.
Here is what I used to imagine cruises were like – and please picture the following as if they are medium-format prints hand-tinted by a nostalgic raver. A series of ballrooms, connected by mirrored corridors. Buffets as long as the M1, with a separate room for puddings. Swimming pools heated to a rich chlorinated blood, monogrammed towelling robes, and the very gentlest scent of Poirot. Cabins that feel like luxury live-work spaces, where the gentle rock of the ocean soothes passengers to sleep in a hushing lullaby. Very good karaoke. Everything dense and velvet, and radiating contradictory glamour – old Hollywood cut through with the louche punkiness of a Divine gif. Then, at every stop, a new type of holiday: safari on Monday, ruins on Tuesday, the beach on Friday. The idea that one could simply lie there in a turban and let experiences come to you, thrills me.
But then, of course, I learned the truth. As I type, the 2,666 passengers onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Yokohama are still confined to their cabins, as 130 have tested positive for coronavirus. Those in windowless cabins are being allowed out in shifts to take air once a day, the rest of the time presumably lying quite still on their bunks and wondering if this is death, or this. Another cruise ship – the World Dream – has been quarantined in Hong Kong after three former passengers caught the virus. A third, the Royal Caribbean’s Anthem of the Seas, has docked in New Jersey while people are tested, and a British-American owned liner, the Westerdam, has been turned away by Japan, just in case.
Cruise ships are notoriously effective disease incubators, with vast floating norovirus outbreaks common. Vomit sloshes across the polished decks, passengers groan their bodies from lounge to toilet, stopping only to finger a Danish. Like mythological ghost ships, adrift and occasionally alight, these cruise liners seem to take on the illness of their passengers, lurching tearfully across the sea, sickness rippling behind them.
And bad things happen on boats. In HBO’s Succession, the Waystar Royco empire’s cruise ship division spent years covering up onboard deaths and sexual assaults. While the Roy family dance around their canapés to try and make the scandal disappear, the scale of the ships, the distance from shore, the abstracted nature of such crimes is part of what allows them to elegantly ignore the lives destroyed. It’s no coincidence that their fictional awfulness happened at sea – there’s been a host of mysterious deaths and disappearances on cruise ships.
A website called cruisejunkie.com charts passengers and crew overboard – the current figure since 1995 is 361. In a piece investigating the 2011 disappearance of crew member Rebecca Coriam, the journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson talked to the founder of the lobby group International Cruise Victims about his theories of “murder, negligence and cover-ups” and his claims that the sexual crime rate is 50% higher than in the average American city. “You’re on a ship,” Kendall Carver told Ronson. “There’s no police. Once you leave the port, you’re in international waters.”
On the one hand, yes. The picture painted is one of a floating hellmouth, a ticking bomb pushed out to sea. The infections are a stark reminder that you are stuck breathing the same air as strangers who want to tell you all their opinions again – on a good day, you could simply avoid them by taking an early breakfast, but on a bad day you will be joint hosts of a germ that makes you defecate in sync. To climb aboard a cruise ship is to lower yourself, lobster-like, into a soon boiling pan.
Fossil fuels burn behind them, they destroy the fragile habitats they visit, nobody appears accountable for crimes onboard. Like riverboat barmitzvah parties, where guests aren’t allowed to leave until the last slow dance has died, cruises carry the same ominous threat as any thriller – the genre necessitates an element of horror. Passengers are giving up the autonomy they have worked years to secure – another stranger will decide what they eat, who they drink with, and whether they ever return home.
And on the other hand… it still appeals. The giving up control, the forced fun, the nice towels. I am even fond of the idea that artificial towns are being thrown together simply for cruising tourists, who alight after lunch, grateful for the simulacrum of culture provided, back to the cabin in time for a nap before tea. What peace. And swimming pools on a boat! Water upon water! Such balls-out decadence! But sighingly, I must cross these dreams from my list. We will call it exercising cruise control, and move on to the next disappointment, gracefully.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
