“And now, please welcome… Lola Starbuuuuurst!” said the host into the mic, his voice booming across the auditorium.

The audience clapped and whistled as Lola Starburst walked on stage, clad in a canary-yellow, lycra dress, diamantes, and a huge yellow feather boa.

“Let’s hear Lola’s dulcet tones then, shall we?” Harry said, slurring his words a little. His lips tried to find his curly, pink cocktail straw as his hat fell off into the gigantic bowl of nachos sitting front of him.

“Harry!” Lisa said, laughing so much that she fell off her seat. A passerby helped her up from the floor.

“Sorry - just a little tipsy,” she said with a hiccup.

Lisa screwed her eyes up and tried on focus on the hazy… yellow… fluffy thing on stage. Was that a pineapple on her head?

Lola Starburst began to warble away as the crowd (most of whom were in various states of inebriation), stood up and clapped out of time to her Calypso melody.

“Is that ‘banana’ song by Madonna?” Harry said, finally finding his straw, as Lola shook her maracas and sang about ‘going bananas’.

“Yeh, Dick Tracy!” Lisa said, pointing at him with a big grin.

All of a sudden, the entire room tilted. Tables and chairs toppled over the audience, and people screamed as they crashed into the stage, breaking ribs, and being knocked unconscious.

Lola’s pineapple-hairpiece went flying off the stage as she fell through the curtains, revealing the next act in various stages of undress as they got ready for their performance. And all the while, Lola’s backing track played and played, trumpets blaring.

The ship tipped more and more. People piled up on top of each other, the stage acting like buffer for everyone and everything that had toppled in that direction.

The tannoy came alive with a rather hysterical, male voice.

“This is your captain speaking,” it said, voice trembling and seeming far more high-pitched than prior announcements. “We’ve… urr… hit a spot of trouble… seem to be being sucked in by… what looks like… a giant... whirlpool… uh… trying our best to steer away from it… urge all passengers to hold on to anything large, that’s fixed to the boat…”

The tannoy fizzled out.

“I knew we shouldn’t have come on this trip!” Harry said, as he held on to the base of their small table (one of the few tables in the back that was bolted to the floor because of its shape). “What did I say about the Bermuda Triangle? What did I say?”

But Lisa didn’t reply. She was too busy focusing on keeping her hold on the table base. And she closed her eyes as the ship tipped more and more onto its side until she was hanging from it vertically.

——

Lisa opened her eyes groggily to Harry who was slapping her cheek lightly.

“Alright, Harry, stop it!” she muttered, waving his hand away.

“Ahhh thank goodness!” he said, sitting back on the floor and breathing a sigh of relief.

Debris was strewn everywhere around them. Many passengers were lying on the floor, injured. Others were milling around, looking lost or trying to find their loved ones.

“Come,” Harry said, helping Lisa up, “they’re asking people to get out the ship ‘n wait outside. Safer there.”

They followed the trickle of dazed passengers to the exit. Both of them sucked in a breath as the vista opened up before them. Nothing but flat, wet sand stretching for miles in every direction.

They each slid down some kind of enormous, inflatable slide and were met by a dischevelled attendant, who helped them up and handed them each a foil blanket.

“Where are we?” Harry asked the attendant as he handed them each a small bottle of water.

The haggard attendant looked around, fear in his eyes, and shook his head, “We don’t know.”

They walked towards the other passengers who were all sitting in a group, a fair way away from the beached cruise ship (which, Harry noted, was leaning dangerously at an angle).

They plopped themselves down beside an old lady with wiry, dark grey hair, who was knitting quietly. How she managed to get those needles down that slide, Harry would never know.

“Oh, it’s obvious ain’t it?” the old lady said when they asked her what she thought was going on. “We’ve gone through to the other side!”

“The other side of what?” Lisa frowned.

The other side of ‘what’, indeed…