8. The Seagulls

"What's Ben got?" As soon as he heard his brother utter the question, Ben tried to sneak off into the bathroom with the intention of locking it behind him. Unfortunately for him, he was too slow. Sue noticed just in time and stuck her foot in the doorframe so the door remained open. She managed to get through to the bathroom despite Ben attempting to push the door shut. In the struggle, it was revealed what he'd had as he'd dropped it onto the floor. Pete dived in and picked it up. It was the seagull from the deck.

"Ben!" Sue began, "What did we say on the deck? We said NOT to take the seagull with you back here."

"Actually, Jake said that, you didn't. I thought you might be ok with it." Ben replied

"No Ben, if you remember, we all objected. Anyway, when did you get it? We saw you put it down"

Ben refused to answer this question and instead carried on with another argument, "Well, we might as well keep it and experiment on it now. Now that it's here I mean," he said.

"No Ben, definitely not, daddy will take this back up now and throw it into the sea" Sue asserted

"No mummy, don't do that. It might get eaten by sharks!" Karen butted in, with Ben nodding in agreement

"WHAT DID WE SAY ABOUT DROPPING THE SUBJECT OF SHARKS KAREN?" Sue snapped.

Karen looked shocked and kept quiet as Ben finally lost control of his seagull and Sue gave it to Pete to throw into the sea. Pete returned a few minutes later and suggested that the family explore some more of the onboard shops or, at least, anything that didn't involve the deck and/or dead animals. Upon entering the toy shop, Pete noticed a toy seagull.

"Look, Ben, there's a seagull you can experiment on" he said, jokily.

"It's not real," Ben stated matter of factly "all that's inside of that is fluff". He walked out of the shop and asked if it was time for lunch yet. It was, so they chose the French restaurant and had omelettes and fries, a meal over which Karen worried that the eggs would be from battery hens and Ben theorized that the eggs were from hens that lived on the sea.

"Karen," Jake began, attempting to calm his sister, "these eggs are from organic hens from France. When we stopped there the other day, the chefs got off the boat and selected the best from the hen fields, okay?"

Karen nodded, relieved, and Sue and Pete silently thanked Jake for taking away the potential of another argument on the scale of the earlier one on sharks.

Ben, realising his fight was lost on the seagulls, asked if they could ask the kitchen staff for some of the eggs so that he could experiment on them by attempting to nurture them into chicks. Once again his attempts at scientific enquiry were rejected, on the basis of the low probability of the egg becoming a chick as it'd been kept too cold for too long and also as a consequence of the fact that the eggs may go bad over the course of his estimated project timeline (about a week).

Eventually Pete and Sue got a bit fed up with Karen's shark obsessions and Ben's experiments, so they decided to put the kids in the on-ship cinema under the watch of Jake and the cinema attendants (only after they'd produced identification documents to satisfy Karen that they could be left alone with them). With the two hours or so of free time they got, Pete and Sue went to the bar and drank their troubles away, before going back to the cabin alone...

Meanwhile, a couple of floors up, Ben had snuck out of the movie theatre and onto the deck again to look for more experiment opportunities. He climbed the ship's outer decks, and managed to get to one of the highest parts, where he began to clamber back onto the rails...

Back inside the ship Pete and Sue realised it was time to go and collect their kids from the cinema room, where they were told of the escape of Ben, and how he'd been seen heading for the deck. Pete and Sue looked at each other with expressions suggesting they knew what they were going to find. They corralled Jake and Karen out of the theatre and onto the deck.