‘Bella, Bella, Gale’.
I rolled my eyes and wondered what he could possibly
want from me, since we’d only just rotated engineers the day before and he’d
been onboard a mere 24 hours. I sighed and answered my radio, ‘Go ahead, Gale’.
‘When you have a minute, will you come down to the
control room please?’
I already knew what it was about.
‘Is it urgent, I’m kinda busy?’ I lied.
‘That’s why I said, when
you have a minute’, he spat over the radio.
I decided that I didn’t have a minute and took my
sweet-ass time fixing up the cabins. About 50 minutes later, still without any
intention of going to the control room, my made my way down to the crew mess to
make myself a tea. Lo and behold, there I found Gale with his arms folded
across his chest, frantically pacing up and down.
‘Ah,’ I exclaimed, ‘there you are. I was just about...’
‘Can you come to the control room please’, he cut me
off mid sentence.
I was going to wind him up more, but decided to alter
my approach and said, ‘Sure. What do you need?’ I was starting to enjoy myself.
‘Just come to the control room please’, he repeated
through gritted teeth.
‘No problem’, I said, and began to make my way to the
control room with him goose-stepping behind me like a Hitlerjugend, only
fatter.
‘I really am busy, Gale, what is so important that I need
to do this now?’
‘I need you to open an attachment for me.’
I stopped dead halfway down the deck and turned to face
him. ‘Seriously? An attachment? You can’t even open up a file? You’re an
engineer for godssakes, I’m sure you can figure it out. Or get one of the boys
to help you, they’re sitting on their arses.’
He was starting to get very annoyed that his big take-down,
which he had clearly played out in his mind, wasn’t going according to plan.
‘No, I want you to do it okay. Just do it.’ He whined
commandingly.
I turned around, muttered the words ‘timewaster’ and
continued across the deck, down the stairs, and into the control room where his
computer sat. Once we were both in the room he leant back on the wall and
crossed his arms across his chest, feigning nonchalance.
‘Open it’, he smirked, cocking his head in the
direction of the computer.
‘Gale, I can see from here it’s a link to my blog, and
I’m not gonna open it’, I stated matter-of-factly.
‘Open it’, he smirked again.
‘Yeah. That’s not gonna happen’. I shrugged.
He bolted upright, now fuming that not only had I
foiled his big reveal, but that he now too was not getting his way. ‘I already
know all about it, Magnus told me everything! I have a right to know what was
in it if it’s about me!’ he yapped.
‘Firstly, you know about it because I told you
yesterday that I wrote a blog that you featured in and I apologised for not
asking you first’, I replied calmly. ‘And secondly, you don’t have a right to
know what is in my private writing, none whatsoever. I, on the other hand, have
a right to write about whatever and whomever I want. These two things are
called the right to privacy and freedom of speech. You can have a gander at
those if you’re so desperate for a read. And if you have a problem with it,
take it up with the Leader, I’m going to go do my work’.
‘Oh no you’re not!’, he threatened, and called the
Leader over the radio. The Leader, who anticipated Magnus’ bean-spilling and
the fiasco to come, was there faster than you can say ‘gorilla’. I’m pretty
sure he was waiting outside the door. Before the Leader could open his mouth,
Gale demanded that he make me open my page.
‘Unfortunately, I can’t make Bella do that’, he
reasoned. ‘My belief is that she has written things for her friends and family
to read, and there is no law that...’
‘So you’re not going to make her do it?’ he
interrupted, one of the Leader’s pet peeves.
‘Gale,’ the Leader started again, ‘unfortunately I have
no right...’
‘Well, great.
That’s just great!’ he disrupted again,
and spun around on his heels to leave. Regrettably for Gale, he spun around
with such point-proving gusto that his first step in the opposite direction
landed off beam, giving him a case of the wobblies, and he tripped over the Jet
Ski bed. A glare from the Leader caught my laughter short and my grin melted rapidly
from my lips. He righted himself with a few steps and stormed out hastily,
probably in search of a tampon.
I looked at the Leader both amusedly and
apologetically.
He patted me on the back and commented, ‘You really do
cause me a lot of shit, you know’.
‘I know’, I admitted apologetically.
We later found out that when Leader sought out Gale to do
some damage control, he had locked himself in the 40°C engine room and
wouldn’t come out.