Left Behind: An Adventure in Titanic Quarter

Sunday means mass at Saint Bridgid’s, and I was awake early and half-dressed when I heard a quiet voice calling my name through the door. “Rebekah…Rebekah…”

Maybe if I ignore it, it’ll go away, I thought. I had only been up for a half hour and was not ready to receive visitors in my room—or anywhere, really, based on my appearance. The mirror in front of me showed a girl with pale skin and still-dripping hair.

“Rebekah…Rebekah…”

Knock, I thought wearily, opening the door. Mel stood there, fully dressed, and looking as if she had been awake for hours.

Mel is my next-door neighbor, living on the room to my right. I can hear her Skype her friends and family back home when I am still asleep in bed, and often I can hear her shouting when I wake up in the mornings. The noise doesn’t bother me too much, as I find it comforting to know a friendly face is on the other side of the wall, but when someone wants to interact with me at nine in the morning, I get a little irritated.

Especially when I’m not fully dressed.

“Good morning,” Mel said cheerily.

“Hiya,” I said.

“I was wondering if you wanted to compare schedules…?”

Tomorrow is our first day of classes, and Mel had wanted to see my schedule all week, as she wants to sit in on my classes—which makes me highly uncomfortable, especially because my classes are ones she’s not at all familiar with. I’d been telling her we could compare our schedules all week but really putting it off, and now she had caught me at my weakest moment. “Gimme a minute,” I mumbled.

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

I ran a comb through my hair and found a pair of flip-flops, located my room key, and joined her out in the hall. After going over every single mark on my planner for her, and explaining the things she did not understand, I realized mass was in half an hour and I was only in leggings and a black camisole.

“Hey, Mel, I gotta get going…I’m still not ready for church…”

This sparked another controversy, as Mel wanted to know if I was going to Fisherwick. Fisherwick was hosting brunch after their services today, as Cosmin had told us yesterday, and I knew a lot of the weekenders (the people who stay in the dorms on the weekend) would be there for a free meal.

“No, Mel. I’m going to Saint Bridgid’s.”

“So I will see you there?”

“No. I’m going to a different church.”

“But you will go to the lunch?”

“No, I can’t. The times collide.”

“Then I will go with you, to the church, together?”

I sighed and leaned against the wall for support, wondering if my voice was still too husky with sleep to be clearly understood by a non-native English speaker. “Mel, I have to go, and I’m not dressed…”

She looked me over and said, “I think you look very nice,” and I blinked at her, then went inside and found a nice sweater to wear.

Saint Bridgid’s was about the same as last week. There was a different priest today, his accent harder for me to understand, but the mass was still the same disorganized mess. I spent more time than I care to admit people-watching. In front of me was an adorable little boy and his father, and he kept looking around and asking his dad, “Where’s God?”

He never found God, but Hannah says he was watching me, especially during the Creed. I hope that I interested him as much as he interested me.

After mass, we hurried back and changed into street wear, and went to the Student Union for the Titanic tour. Belfast built the museum last year to celebrate the Titanic’s anniversary, and the International Centre at Queen’s was going to take us there and back. We met Mehgan, Jolien, Anem, and Mel there; Mel still wondering why we had not gone to Fisherwick, and why we had to go to a certain church.

“Can’t you skip one week?” she asked, perturbed.

“No,” Hannah and I said, shaking our heads.

“Oh. But if I do not go to church one week, is that bad?”

Hannah and I looked at each other, torn between the easy answer (no) and the long, theological answer (yes). Eventually we steered the conversation into clearer waters (I am, obviously, not cut out to be a missionary) and then went to board the bus. Mel grabbed my shoulder and pointed to one of the guys who works for the ISPC, or the International Support and Postgraduate Centre, with short blonde hair and a deep blue shirt. “I no like him,” she said firmly.

There was nothing wrong with him as far as I could see. He had freckles that I thought were cute, and I thought he had kind eyes. “Why not?”

“I just don’t like him. Do you like him?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really know him.” This was a placating answer; I really thought he was the same cute-freckled guy who I might have liked to know at some time or other.

Now I wish I had listened to Mel more closely.

The Titanic Museum is an architectural wonder. It’s built on the docks right in front of the station where the Titanic herself was built, and designed to look both like the ship and as a tribute to the White Star Line company that built her. There are five steel gray corners, each built like the prow of a ship, and when you get closer you see that the architect made little pools of water surround it, so that the building really looks like a docked ship. In front of the entrance is a bronze woman curved like a mermaid; she is supposedly a tribute to Kate Winslet in the famous 1997 James Cameron movie, Titanic.

Inside is the gift shop and restaurants, and escalators going up. The walls looked like rusted metal, and the ceiling shone with stars. On the floor was a beautiful compass rose, with a shipyard song carved around the edges. An employee handed out what he called a “memory ticket,” telling us with a forced smile (believing, no doubt, that we were all semi-illiterate) that these tickets could not be redeemed for anything, so please do not try. Then he led us up the escalator to the first floor, and said, “This is a self-guided tour, so please go at your own pace.”

So we did.

Everything about the Titanic Museum is a marvel. I can’t imagine all of the hours and workers it must have taken to build it; from the architecture, to the layout, to the historians and graphic designers needed to make it the success that it is. We followed the lives of several men and women aboard the Titanic, starting from the Titanic’s commission, to the two years it took to simply build the dock used to built the Titanic, to the actual process of building it. One room had an amazing projector, half interactive, that showed us the layout and plans of the ship. There was an amusement ride, that showed us the steps necessary to rivet the metal together, and what life was like for the men who built the unsinkable ship. Then, slowly, we moved on to the day the Titanic was released into the sea, still missing most of its appliances and furnishings, and from there to what the Titanic would have looked like fully furnished. One room was a marvel of graphic design that took us through each floor of the Titanic, digitally remastered to look as it would have before it set sail, complete with music, and so dizzyingly real that Hannah had to take a moment to sit down and catch her breath.

And then, of course, came the sinking.

The walls were lined with poetry here, with lights making the floor look like we were standing at the bottom of the sea. The walls showed us a video of what the Titanic must have looked like, being swallowed by the sea, and voices of survivors spoke above our heads, recounting those last moments. The people we had followed throughout the museum appeared at the end, with captions on whether they lived or died, and how they had died. One man, Artie Frost, had designed the Titanic, and when news came to his daughters that he was “lost,” they ran around London looking for him. Another man, Bruce Ismay, survived the Titanic, and was publically ridiculed to the point that, during the investigation following the Titanic’s sinking, had to be escorted to the courtroom by policemen for his own protection. It was heartbreaking. I wanted to go back in time and see all of their faces, and see the Titanic in all of its glory; I wanted to rescue every last person aboard.

The next room was a short video of the Titanic underwater, showing us the remains of women’s shoes, of chamber pots and frying pans, along with an interactive computer screen showing us the massive bed of Titanic relics that rest on the ocean floor, and their locations. After this came the legacy; all of the movies, songs, and books written about the Titanic, as well as the end of the Titanic’s two sister ships, the Britannica and the Olympia. Both had been turned into war ships, ferrying American soldiers to Europe or being used as hospitals, and experts surmise that had the Titanic survived its maiden voyage, it would have ended thus as well.

We had been about two hours, maybe two and a half hours at most, when we emerged at the end of the tour, and from the window ledge Hannah and Mehgan spotted what we thought was our bus. Hurrying, we ran outside, but it was gone when we emerged. The wind had started up, and it was ferocious and cold.

At a loss, we went back inside, and met Anem and Jolien too. Mel, I knew, was still looking at the Titanic’s legacy and would be out in a moment. Anem went to talk to one of the employees, asking if they had seen any other Queen’s students. I went and gathered Mel. At first news looked grim; we thought that we had been left, all six of us, in the Titanic Quarter of Belfast. But then another employee said, “Oh, no, they’re on the third level, watching the movie; they’ll be down shortly, or you could go join them.”

We sat down. Anem and Jolien got something to eat at the café. Mel, fiercely independent being that she is, wandered off. Mehgan and Hannah and I tried to pick out people in the gift shop that we thought were with us.

“There were fifty of us,” Mehgan kept saying reasonably, “And if six of us are missing, that’s three rows on the bus. They’d count. They can’t lose six of us, they’d notice…”

The restaurant was slowly being closed; chairs were being put up. Even the café where Anem and Jolien were sitting was emptying. The employees were gathering and gossiping, all clear indicators that the museum was closing.

And the others in our group, and the Irish lad from the ISPC in the blue shirt, were nowhere to be found.

“We’ve been left behind,” we all realized. All six of us had been left in a museum in East Belfast, across the River Lagan.

I found Mel again, and all six of us gathered together. Arem called for a taxi on a phone conveniently placed inside of the museum for this purpose, and we sat together, pondering.

Outside was the first taxi (as most taxis only hold three passengers at most, although there are some that can hold up to six), and Anem, Jolien, and Mehgan started to get in. Just as they did so, a man in a green sweater started asking if we needed a taxi.

“No, thank you, we’re with Value Taxi,” we said, “we ordered two, and we’ll be fine.”

We sent the first group off, and Hannah, Mel and I stood outside in the cold. Mel was snapping pictures, and eventually she wandered back over and said, “Now we walk?”

“No, we’re waiting for our taxi.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“Mel, that’s a two hour walk. We’d have to cross a bridge and a highway. I don’t want to do that, do you?”

My knee was already starting to throb. It’s started to do that, now that the blister on my foot is healed; if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I didn’t fancy a two hour walk—for it would, I was certain, be at least a two hour walk, perhaps longer, since we had no idea how to get back. I have only ever walked as far as Cathedral Quarter, which is just north of the City Centre. (You might have to google a map to understand this one.)

As we waited, the man in the green sweater came back up to us and started to pick a fight of sorts. “Did they tell you to pick Value Cabs?” he asked.

They had, actually, telling us the other competitors would rip us off. Anem had asked the prices while on the phone and we knew it was going to be about seven pounds to get a lift home. We didn’t feel like getting ripped off even more. “No,” I said, getting all tangled into politics I know nothing of.

“It’s illegal, what they’re doing! We have a right to be here! It’s illegal, and I want proof of it—”

“We ordered two taxis,” Hannah said firmly, “and we ordered what we ordered, and the other one is on its way now.”

Luckily, another girl needed a lift home, and he left us alone to drive her back. We sat there a little longer, and then a red cab appeared. The driver rolled down the window and said our party name, and we nodded and got inside.

Our driver was a psychopath.

It was bad enough that I was already imagining dreadful things, all thanks to BBC Sherlock. In the pilot for BBC Sherlock, “A Study in Pink,” a cab driver is picking off victims and kills them by forcing them to commit suicide. I sat in the car, trying to convince myself that everything was going to be okay and keeping an eye on our total, which kept going up in increments of ten pence for what looked like every minute, and praying we wouldn’t hit any red lights. I needn’t have worried about the red lights. Our cabbie was practically a race car driver.

He tried to engage us in conversation about the museum, but being Americans, Hannah and I only responded vaguely: “It was very nice.” Mel ignored him completely, and was busy playing with her camera.

The next thing I know, we are speeding through Belfast, and crashing into a red light. He stops, and then says in a heavy, foreign accent, “I am like a race car driver; I just want to go through red light!” He went on like this a bit longer, and from what I could understand, he might have been asking our permission to run red lights.

“Please don’t,” Hannah said, slightly faintly.

“This Audi, she run fast. It’s like an insult not to drive her fast, you know?” and then he started to make revving engine noises, as if he or we were children again. Hannah and I laughed (myself more hysterically, I believe; I am the type of person when, confronted with bad news and calamity, will laugh before she cries) and Mel was looking at me like, Is this normal?

The green light came on, and we shot back off. Silence reigned in the little car, and then he turned on a CD, saying, “This is corny, lame stuff; it’s so bad, it’s cheap,” and then he started skipping tracks. “Not this one, not this one, I have the perfect song; oh, no! Wrong CD!” he pretended to slap his head. I was beginning to feel like banging my head against the window. Then, suddenly, after skipping at least ten songs (how many songs were there on this CD?) he cried, “Got it!”

And James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” filled the car.

Luckily after that all attempts at conversation fizzled out, because the cabbie was content to just smile and nod his head and go, “Eh? Eh?” when he caught our eyes, and we would smile and nod and say, “Yeah, yeah.”

He dropped us off at Elms Village, charged us 6.50, and then turned around, honking and waving and shouting merrily. Mehgan, Jolien, and Anem looked at us, and then him, strangely.

“He’s not from here,” I said.

The rest nodded; they’d guessed for themselves.

“What—what exactly was that song he was playing?” Anem asked tentatively.

“Sex Machine.”

“Oh.” She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “Anyway, I’m going to the ISPC tomorrow to complain. Shall we all meet there at ten tomorrow morning? Do any of you have class?”

None of us had class then, so we all agreed to meet, complain, and demand a refund. In total, for the two taxis, we had spent 13.50 pounds, all because we had been left.

“They didn’t tell us what time to be back,” we all said, “how could we know? How could they not count and see six of us were missing?”

We parted ways then, each of us having plans. My knee was starting to throb painfully, but Hannah and I had plans to meet Victoria and go to the SuperTesco so I could buy a frying pan. We had planned on leaving at least an hour sooner, but in waiting for our imaginary bus, we had lost a great deal of time.

To get to SuperTesco, one needs to take at least two buses, but in the interest of money, Victoria thought we could meet the bus at the second station. This is a wonderful idea in theory, but the buses stop at 8:30, and it was already about seven. We booked it, myself lagging behind, but by the time we made it to the City Centre and the bus stop, it seemed we had the wrong stop. No bus arrived, at least. With a sigh, we decided to go to the smaller Tesco on Lisbon Road, and we limped there, only to find that one closed.

By this time I was starving, and my knee hurt. We crawled back home, after stopping to get Victoria desperately needed supplies at the 24 hour gas station nearby. Then Hannah and I returned to Holly Grove and made a pizza for dinner.

And very good pizza it was, too.