“That panic face would have got you out alive”

WE’RE WATCHING Titanic at home.

Towards the end of the film, when mass drowning is imminent, I say, unthinkingly, “God knows how I’d react in that situation…” but swallow the end of my sentence uncertainly when my daughters and husband turn their heads round like three perfectly synchronised door-knobs, to stare at me.

“You’re joking, right?” my husband says.

“No,” I say, “I can’t imagine how I’d be in that sort of life or death situation.”

“You’d be that one there,” he says, and points at a deranged-looking woman running around the deck in crazed circles, blinded by panic and hysteria. “Definitely not that one there,” he clarifies, pointing to a stoical-looking woman who, having managed to secure a seat in the first lifeboat to be lowered into the sea, is now clutching her offspring in a calm, dignified manner.

I’m quietly devastated. I harbour a lovely little notion about myself that I might be the kind of person about whom it could be said, with great respect, “she is fantastic in a crisis and should have been a paramedic.”

I find, as I get older, that it is getting more and more difficult to harbour lovely little notions about myself, since my husband and children have lived with me long enough to spot which notions are matters of fantasy, not fact and feel authorised to knock them sharply on the head.

“No, Dad, you’re wrong, I know she’d look like that one there,” my eldest daughter points to the deranged woman on deck “but she would get us in the boat like that one did,” and she points to the dignified woman sitting in the lifeboat.

“You’re right,” he concedes, “she’d get you out alive, but everyone would know about it, even the captain.”

My younger daughter says, “she’d have been so embarrassing,” and does an impression of my panic face.

I interject, “that panic face would have got you out alive.”

“Yes, but no one would ever forget it,” she says.

“Remember when Mum fainted when I cut my eye?” she says to her sister.

I’m watching the members of the Titanic orchestra play a tune, while the ship sinks. I note admiringly that they are as calm as grass.

“I was low on blood sugar. It was the middle of the night,” I say.

“You woke the whole house up,” she says, screaming “Manuela! Manuela!”

“Your aunt is a GP, as you know,” I say.

“But then she had to deal with you, while I bled to death.”

Since all I remember of this event is waking up on the kitchen floor and seeing an odd look pass between my sister and husband over my head, I cannot quibble over its details.

Passengers are letting go of ship rails and hurtling down vertical decks. I look away.

“And that one time you went skiing,” my daughter says, “when you were on the chair-lift, you cried the whole way up and then it took you the whole day to ski down.”

“Vertigo is a medical condition,” I say. Having let go of ship rails, the passengers fall to their deaths, bouncing off hard items such as metal posts and fog horns along the way.

“You looked like a crab coming down the slope,” my other daughter says, “you were holding on to the ground with your hands. No-one could believe it.” My daughters are laughing their heads off.

Now DiCaprio is clinging to an ice floe.

“You even panic in films,” my daughter says, “which aren’t real. What was the name of that film you watched and half way through you went completely…”

“Deliverance,” my husband says. He starts to hum the instrumental composition for banjos from the film. It is hideously evocative.

“Stop it,” I say, stuffing my fingers in my ears.

Leonardo sinks down, down through watery, silent gloom to the ocean floor. I feel queasy. “Anyone want tea?” I say, getting up.

Their heads turn round like three perfectly synchronised door-knobs again. They stare atme.

As I head into the kitchen, I hear my daughter say, “Titanic. Please. It’s a PG… oh my god, like, everything freaks her.”

And… my lovely little notion is knocked on its head.