Valkyrie at sea By Diana the Valkyrie (c) 1998; Valkyrie@TheValkyrie.com Part 1 - the Cabin Mate from Hell Update: 01/08/1998 to valkyrie What follows is a work of fiction. Yes, I did go on a cruise, but the ship had a different name, so did the captain, and quite a lot of the other stuff is made up. On the other hand, quite a lot isn't. Even a Valkyrie needs a holiday. If you do the same thing day after day, you get a bit stale, you lose sight of the wide horizons, the broad vistas. And inside me, the urge was building up, to go a-Viking, pillaging and plundering across the sea, burning and raping across foreign lands. Well, the rape part of it sounded enticing. So I made a visit to my nearest travel agent and booked a cruise on the good ship Utopia. 70,000 tons, 2000 passengers, 800 crew; I thought that if I couldn't get myself raped among that lot, then I couldn't be trying hard enough. There were the usual difficulties about my name; although my bank has gotten used to the idea that I'm Diana the Valkyrie, the travel agent had problems with my middle name, kept wanting to capitalise the T. So I sailed under the false colours of Diana Walker, which is a name I sometimes use when I don't want to alarm people. Golly, though, a good cabin is expensive. Well, I thought, with any luck I won't be using it much, so I said I'd share with some complete stranger, hoping that this would mean trousers of a suitable age, but knowing deep down that it would probably be some old biddy of forty or more. And so it was, that in the middle of July, I turned up at Southampton carrying three large suitcases and my big floppy hat that I'd acquired a while back in Italy, and looked very summery. As did my frock, which was a green and orange cotton print, mid-calf. I gave my three suitcases to a porter, who quickly realised that he wasn't going to be able to carry them without a trolley. "Blimey, wotcher got innere, darling?" "Clothes" I replied, without bothering to explain how I'd had to sit on the suitcases in order to close them, and when Diana Walker sits on something, it gets very compressed. You see, although aeroplanes have this horrible 44 pound luggage limit, ships don't have to worry about weight so much, so I packed everything I thought might be necessary for a week-long spree of rape and pillage. The bags weighed in at 50 pounds each by the time I'd gotten Judy to help me close them, no wonder the poor man could barely lift one of them. I gave him my number two smile (the number one might have given him ideas) and one of the new two-pound coins, and told him to do his duty. I walked through embarkation, and as I passed through the arch bells started to ring. Dammit, I thought they only did that in airports. So I took the blade out of my hair and let the security guard satisfy himself that I wasn't carrying a gun (actually, I rather enjoy being patted down, except that I always seem to get unlucky and get searched by the woman part of the team). They didn't worry about the knife, because of a rather clever ruse I'd discovered. The blade was four inches long, which keeps it within legal limits for an offensive weapon, although why anyone imagines four inches isn't enough to inflict fatal damage is beyond me. But the really clever thing, is it's engraved on the blade with "Cheese knife" down one side, and "Souvenir of Skegness" down the other. Well, if you're setting sail for foreign lands in search of rape and whatever, you'd be silly not to be carrying insurance, wouldn't you. And I'm not so keen on the sort that gives other popele money if you're killed. I hurried down to my cabin, eager to find out what sort of dishy trouser they'd provide for my entertainment. Trouser? Dream on, Diana. What I saw made me long for some plain old biddy; what I saw was competition. Or perhaps I should say Competition with a capital C. A capital C, long blonde hair, thin as a broomstick and at least six feet tall. Then she stood up and smiled at me, five foot five of barrel-shaped Valkyrie facing the tallest, blondest Cabinmate from Hell you could ever dread to see. "Hi", she said. "I'm Linda" in an American accent. "I'm from California, and I'm here to ruin your holiday". No, she didn't actually say the second part, that was me thinking. "Hi, I'm Diana, er,..." I thought fast. I looked up at her, and revised my six foot estimate to six foot six. Then I thought, there's three thousand people on this ship, maybe she won't want them all. I thought, I can either fight her and lose horrendously, or make friends with her, get her paired off as fast as possible, then I have a clear field. Or failing that, go to plan B. You've probably wondered why so many stunning girls have female friends who aren't nearly as pretty. Why would a normal girl want to mess up her chances by being anywhere near someone like Linda? The answer is simple; I call it the honeypot theory. It's irrelevant whether you like honey or not, if you want to attract bees, you open a pot of honey. Zillions of bees are attracted to the honey, and while they aren't paying attention as they should, you can catch a few for yourself. It works every time. The only mystery, is why so few women use the technique. Then my luggage arrived. They trundled my bags to the cabin on porters trolleys, left them outside the door, and knocked. Linda opened the door, tried to pick up one of my bags, and couldn't move it. So I went round her and lugged it in myself. I opened one suitcase, and started to unpack. I opened the wardrobe/cupboard and discovered that it was already full of dresses that were at least 15 inches too long for me, and turned to Linda, who smiled and said "Not much space, is there?". She pushed her stuff to the side, making a small space for me, and I reckoned I might be able to unpack half of one of my suitcases. Yow. "So what do you do?" she asked. Yes. Um. Difficult one, that. Choosing the Slain is a good answer, but not many people understand the reference. "I work in a bank" was a good answer, I find it's as good a conversation-stopper as "I'm an accountant" or "I'm a lawyer". But I waved goodbye to the bank when the web site took off, it's much more fun - a bit like owning the honey-pot. The trouble is, how to explain a thing like that to ordinary people? "I'm in the entertainment business" I said, and she shrieked "Oooh, so am I, I'm a dancer, what do you do?" Ugh ugh ugh. But you don't have to answer people's questions, they always prefer talking about themselves anyway. "A dancer?" "Yes, I'm in the Utopia's show. I wear high heels and put my hair up and wear this head-dress, and I look about eight feet tall, they love it." I nodded, thinking, I bet they do. "So how tall are you really, Linda?". She sat up straight on the bed; in that position, and with me standing in front of her, her head was level with mine. "I'm six-nine, so when I wear high heels, I'm seven three, plus putting my hair up adds another five inches." I looked at her, then I looked up at the cabin roof, then back. She stood up, and this time she stood up straight. Her head just touched the ceiling. I lifted my arm up; I couldn't anywhere near reach the ceiling. Suddenly, the ship mooed. "Hey, that means we're leaving" she said, so we rushed out on deck and watched the band play us out of the harbour. Then we went to the cafeteria for coffee, and I read the ship's newspaper. Since this was the first day of the cruise, there wasn't much organised, but one item caught my eye. "Football match on the Sun Deck". Now normally I'm as uninterested in football as anyone else, but the more I thought about this, the more I wanted in. I've always thought it's really silly that 22 men should chase a ball around a field when they could be chasing a Valkyrie, but then I thought, maybe if they had a Valkyrie to chase ... It's the same principle - if you want bees, go where the honey is. Or at least where the beehive is. Linda couldn't see it; I expect she doesn't need honey, being a walking jar all by herself, but I'll take whatever help I can get. So we went back down to the cabin to change. What do you wear for football? Linda wore a short skirt and carried a bag with her high heels in "I can't put them on till we get somewhere where there's enough headroom". I dressed more carefully. Reeboks on my feet, otherwise I'm not going to look at all footballish, a mid-calf tartan skirt, and a T-shirt on top. Yes, I do realise that it's not exactly the right sort of skirt for football, but I don't really have much choice. I look utterly appalling in jeans, I look hilarious in slacks, and a short skirt shows my thighs, and my experience is that men get a bit scared when they see my thighs, and sort of hold back. So we turned up for the footie game, and Linda slipped on her heels when we got up on deck, and I stopped even trying to look at her face which was now a good eighteen inches above me. I wondered how she thought she was going to play in heels, but I soon learned that Linda's idea of playing football was derived from her idea of what football was, which is hulking great brutes armoured like turtles running at each other in the American style, whereas my idea was what she calls soccer. The great advantage of soccer is that the men wear a lot less, which means that collisions are a lot more enjoyable. So we chose teams. I was the last to be chosen (I had to argue quite hard to be allowed to play at all, and had to demand to see the rule that excluded me) playing for the Blues, so naturally Linda decided to root for my team. I wish she hadn't. Linda's idea of rooting was to do cheerleader-type things. Maybe you haven't seen this before; I don't think most of the players had. As a consequence, whenever Linda went into one of her routines, play just stopped. Instead of Linda leading the cheers from the spectators, for the players, Linda was the spectacle that the players stopped to watch. She could actually kick her leg straight up in the air next to her head but several inches higher. My best gambit was to hurtle headlong into some likely-looking man, bounce him off me, and then hold him tight so that we fell over together. On the other hand, that's a gambit that I've always found works quite well, especially if you're both enthusiastic and apologetic. Gradually, the game deteriorated into a contest between Linda kicking the air eight feet above deck level, and me cannoning into some bloke, and then clutching him hard as we fell over. Sometimes I'd be on top, sometimes underneath; both ways work well. Then I crashed into someone, fell over with him on top, but with the ball underneath me, and that was the end of the game. I mean, you can't play football with a burst ball, can you? So Linda did a couple of cartwheels and a somersault, and I suggested that we all went to the bar to recover. Except the two that I'd cannoned into a bit too hard, of course, they decided they needed a hot bath and some liniment to help with the bruises. If it hadn't been for Linda, this would have been top-notch. One Valkyrie and a dozen healthy sweating men is about right. Add Linda to the pot, and the law of averages would give her half of the blokes I'd worked so hard to get, but the law of Tall Leggy Blondes gave her the other half. Grrr. Well, they didn't entirely ignore me, but it was Linda they were all trying to impress. She sat on a barstool looking like a queen on a throne, and they were all doing the macho man thing. And when she told them that she was a dancer in the ship's show, you could have cut the hormones with a knife. So then two of them got into an argument about who'd buy her next drink, and they decided to arm-wrestle for it, and then two more decided to show off, and then Linda, who knew *exactly* what she was doing, announced that she'd kiss the winner of a Round Robin arm-wrestling contest. The hormones precipitated from the air, and sloshed around the floor in bucketfulls as they started pairing off to vie for the hand of the lady, and I started thinking maybe I should give up on this lot and try to find some blokes who hadn't seen Linda yet. And then I thought, having seen the passengers, about half of them were old dears pushing fifty or worse, half of them were giggling teenagers who needed a razor about as much as a peach does, and I was probably looking at the only useful men on the voyage right now, apart from the crew. And then I though, even if there are a few besides this lot, I'll have the same problem as soon as they see the Cabin Mate from Hell, so I might as well face the problem here and now. Oh well. Looks like Plan C then. If you're playing a game you can't win, some people just grit their teeth, try harder, and Never Give Up. I prefer to change the game. No question that Linda had me beat on hair, eyes, nose and everything south of there, but there was one little item up my sleeve that she didn't have. I'm a Valkyrie. So, as they were drawing up the list for the Round Robin armwrestle, I shoved myself into the middle of the group and said "Put me down too." They looked at me a bit askance. Joining them for footie was one thing, but this was man stuff. I smiled sweetly and produced my ace. "Scared I'll beat some of you, are you?" I asked sweetly, as if such a thing was impossible. It's a well known fact; if you want to get a man to do something, phrase it as a challenge. "I bet you can't climb Mount Everest", and off they'll go in hundreds, killing themselves to get to the top of a lump of rock for no particular reason other than that it's there. So they added me to the list. "Diana the Valkyrie" I said. A couple of them gave me a funny look when I said that, and I smiled at them. Then the gong went for dinner, and we all went to our various places in the dining room. Thank heaven, I wasn't on the same table as Linda, I don't think I could have taken that. My table included three old biddies, two old dears, a boy with cheeks like a peach who seemed fascinated by the front of my dress, and a bloke. The bloke looked possible, except that he was crew. On the other hand, why should being crew rule him out? He had on this natty white jacket that left his buttocks nicely exposed, apart from the fact that he was wearing trousers, of course. Nice buttocks. Not great buttocks, not buttocks to die for, but a good respectable set of buttocks. And three bars on his shoulders, which made him a sergeant. Or maybe it didn't. So I asked him. "I'm second nav" he said. "I'm Diana. how do you do Mr Nav.". "No, I mean I'm the second navigator, I'm the one who works out where we are. You're Diana Walker, I saw you playing football earlier." Oh, so maybe it wasn't wasted. I blushed prettily (you do that by surreptitiously holding your breath for about 40 seconds) and asked him about how he did his job, men love to show off about that. So he started on about latitude and longitude, and star fixes, and sextants and chronometers, and I really shouldn't have, I know it's wicked of me, but I never can resist this sort of thing, I looked all wide-eyed and innocent and asked, "Oh, don't you use GPS then?". I mean, for heaven sake, you can go into any electronics shop and buy a Global Positioning System gizmo that gives you your lat and long to within a short distance, 100 yards, I think it is, which is good enough until you're manoeuvring into port, at which point you can use the old Mark 1 eyeball and "left hand down a bit" till you're tied up. Oops, I mean moored. "Isn't that right?" I asked? This time he went red, and spluttered a bit, so I slapped him on the back in case it was a fishbone stuck in his throat, I had a cat that had that once, awful business. The cat survived, I nearly lost a finger. Where was I? Oh yes. Second nav doing his impression of a beetroot. So then he stopped coughing and said "Would you like to see the bridge, Mrs Walker?" "Miss" I corrected, not being married, and not wanting to conceal that fact behind the ambiguous Ms that some people try to use on me "but call me Diana". I mean, if you're available, why try to hide the fact?