Casting Off (14 page)

Steve was pulling faces at me behind Nic’s back, miming smooching and in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink fashion encouraging me to introduce the Frenchman to the concept of the great British
lunge. I wasn’t interested in Nic in that way. Jenny came back, dressed up and with a full face of make-up, and pulled her stool close on the other side of him. Clearly she was.
How’s Steve going to take that?
I wondered.

The dark-haired American from dinner appeared in the bar and I went over to talk to him. His name was Luke and he was from West Virginia. I am a sucker for a southern accent, either British or
American. And for a suntan. And for a pair of green eyes. He was only 25 and had already owned, built up and sold his own construction business. He had left behind a beautiful actress girlfriend to
‘be free’, he claimed. Rock climbing was his passion but he thought he’d give diving a try and had come to Mabul to do his dive master. I have absolutely no interest in rock
climbing or dive-master studies but I could have listened to that accent and stared into those eyes for days. He was gorgeous and his old-fashioned charm was doing funny things to me. He suggested
a walk on the beach and led me outside by the hand.

A walk turned into kissing on the sun lounger for what must have been hours. We saw Nic come out and help Jenny into his dinghy. Then Steve stormed out of the bar and set off along the
beach.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I told Luke, grabbing my shoes and running after Steve. ‘Steve! Steve!’ He must have heard me but he kept marching on. ‘Steve!
Wait!’

He stopped abruptly and turned to me. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he spat.

I stopped dead. ‘What? Here on the beach.’

‘I’ve been ringing you. I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I left my phone on the boat.’

‘I didn’t know if you were coming back or staying out all night.’ He was furious.

‘What? Of course I’m coming back to the boat. I was just there, on the beach. I stayed near the door, so I could see when you came out.’

‘Wait there,’ he ordered.

‘What? I’m here now. I’m coming.’

‘No! Wait there! I’ll get the dinghy and come and get you.’ He stamped angrily away, leaving me, confused, waiting in the sand.

We’d moored the dinghy at another dive company’s shop and it would take him ten minutes to walk there and another five to drive back to me. I went back to the sun lounger but Luke
was gone. No doubt as soon as he’d realised he wasn’t going to get his end away he’d legged it immediately. I sat on the sand to wait for Steve, wondering if he would be so angry
that he would go back to
Kingdom
and leave me stranded on the island all night to teach me a lesson. He finally appeared and I waded out to the dinghy.

‘You are so off the boat,’ he said.

‘Fine.’

We motored along for a few metres.

He began again. ‘I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I was keeping an eye out for you,’ I explained again. ‘I wasn’t just going to go back with some guy.’

I couldn’t understand him. ‘Why are you so angry with me?’ I had to shout for my voice to be heard over the engine as we went faster through the deeper water.

He was silent. Then he said: ‘When was the last time you were in love with someone and switched it off, just like that?’

Love? Where was this coming from?

‘Never,’ I said in a small voice.

‘I’m jealous, OK? Do you get it? I was fucking jealous. I can’t deal with this. You are so off the boat. Tomorrow you are gone. Understand? Get the fuck off my boat.’

The weird thing was, although I thought he was massively overreacting, I wasn’t shocked or surprised by being ordered to leave. It could be that the alcohol was keeping me calm but I
didn’t care that I was suddenly homeless on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, with no idea of where to go to next. Two months ago, I’d have been panicking that I didn’t know
where to go, how to get around, how to speak the language. The visits to remote villages, the getting by on sign language, the snorkelling had taught me that. I was becoming braver. I’d been
away long enough now to feel OK with things when I was outside of my comfort zone. Also, I was incredibly relieved that the decision to leave had finally been made, one way or another.

A small part of me wondered whether he would regret his angry words and apologise to me in the morning but he didn’t. We avoided each other, Steve spending the whole day in the cockpit
reading, of all things, and me inside. I directed most of my attention towards Layla, who decided to be nice to me now that I was leaving. Late in the morning, Jenny and Nic came in off the reef in
his dinghy. She must have spent the night on
Sunrise
.

I had to make plans. Steve was avoiding the subject so I didn’t know when I would have to leave or how – maybe he would dump me in Mabul that same afternoon and I’d have to
bribe a dive company to take me to the mainland and stay in a god-awful hostel in Semporna while I sorted myself out. My friend Grace was going travelling around India and texted to ask if I wanted
to meet her. I rang the Indian embassy in Kuala Lumpur and they said it would take a minimum of nine days to get a visa and I would have to wait, passport-less, in KL while it was processed. I
still had 25kg of belongings with me and, as wonderful as it would be to see a familiar, friendly face, I couldn’t bear the thought of lugging sailing boots, thermals and a lifejacket from
hostel to hostel in India. I still wanted to sail.

Steve said he was going to collect his re-filled dive tanks from Mabul and while he was ashore I checked my emails. There was one from a guy called Tyrone who was looking for crew and whose
advert I had replied to a couple of weeks earlier. They were in Sandakan. Could I call?

Steve came back. He had been waiting with Jenny for her transfer to the mainland to catch her flight home.

‘I hope you don’t mind but I talked to Jenny about our situation,’ he said. I didn’t mind at all. She’d advised him it was better for me to leave the boat now while
we were still friends, he said. He agreed but said I could stay for a few days while I sorted myself out.

‘I didn’t make a play for Jenny last night,’ he said,’and she didn’t make one for me because you were on the boat and it would have been too messy.’ He was
telling me that I wouldn’t be his girlfriend and that he couldn’t get another one while I was here. I thought he was going a bit too far with that – Jenny clearly fancied Nic, as
she’d spent the night with him, not Steve. It had nothing to do with me. But if it hurt Steve’s feelings less to believe that I was the only obstacle between him and true love, I
wasn’t going to say anything to shatter his belief.

‘I’ve had an email from another boat looking for crew in Borneo,’ I told him.

‘Great!’ He seemed pleased and relieved, not like the last time, when I had broached joining
Blue Steel
.

Everything happened so fast from then. I rang Tyrone, expecting a booming black American man’s voice on the other end of the phone, but getting a Northern Irishman. He explained
they’d just arrived from Papua New Guinea and that a crew member was leaving in Sandakan to go home. They’d be going up to Kuching and on to Singapore, Langkawi and Malaysia. This was a
fairly similar route to the one I’d turned my nose up at with
Blue Steel
but now urgency made it seem much more appealing. But how to bring up the subject of whether he was a skipper
advertising for a wife?

‘So, are you a couple and you’re just looking for some extra help?’ I asked, tentatively.

‘What? No. We’re just four crew – me, two guys and a girl. It’s Katherine that’s leaving.’

Excellent news.

I wanted to make sure I covered all the bases this time. ‘I should probably tell you that I’m a vegetarian, in case that’s a problem.’

Tyrone laughed. ‘Well, we are about to lose our vegetarian and I think the boys were looking forward to cooking meat again but it’s not a problem.’ This was getting better and
better – they were used to having a veggie on board. There was an awkward silence.
Please pick me!
I prayed silently.

‘Well, you sound nice,’ he said. ‘Can you come on Monday?’ Yes! I was in! We settled on Tuesday, to give me more time to figure out how I was going to get to Sandakan. It
was three days away.

We had a farewell dinner and beers ashore again with Greg and Debs and Nic. Luke from West Virginia wanted me to stay with him but I didn’t want to do anything to risk Steve rescinding his
offer of taking me to Semporna on
Kingdom
so that I could get a bus to Sandakan.

Back in that stinking pit of a town I scouted out the bus stop and bought a ticket for the next day and posted 5kg of my stuff back home to my parents so I only had one bag to handle. I was
learning how to be a better traveller.

Steve’s emotions were running high. From anger that drunken night and acceptance he moved on to sadness and tears, frequently coming to hug me.

The morning I left, he handed me one of the boat’s water bottles. ‘This is so you can take a little piece of
Kingdom
with you,’ he said and I was touched at his
gesture. He was calm as he walked me to the bus stop and I was the one who got upset. I was feeling guilty for having hurt his feelings and a little bit afraid of going off by myself to who knows
where with God knows who. Again. Steve didn’t hang around to wave the bus off. Once I was in my seat and my bag was loaded into the hold, he turned his back and walked away. I watched until I
couldn’t see him any more. It was over.

Y
ou remember that stuff I said about hating creepy crawlies? Well, that was life on
Gillaroo
. There was an infestation of ants that
crawled everywhere – over the galley surfaces, the ceilings, across the toilet paper, along the beds. And cockroaches. Big, fat, one-inch-long cockroaches that waited until the sun had gone
down before scuttling out of their secret hiding places to climb the walls – usually of my cabin, centimetres from my pillow. Entomophobia aside,
Gillaroo
was far from being a luxury
yacht. There were no hammocks or home comforts, no fans to help us cope in the tropical humidity and heat, and we not only washed in rainwater collected on deck, pouring a couple of litres into a
plastic bucket and then tipping it over our heads, we drank it. You might well expect that I took one look at that catamaran and its back-to-basics living conditions with wildlife included and got
the hell out of Dodge. But actually I loved it. I told you I was learning how to be a better traveller.

I was nervous as I waited in Sandakan yacht club to meet Tyrone. Because we didn’t have that back history of emailing and Facebooking, I didn’t even know what he looked like. So when
he appeared, although I didn’t know what I had expected, I knew enough about yachties to know what I
wasn’t
expecting. And here it was. He was white, really white, like he
lived in the rainy UK, and spent all his time indoors sheltering from the precipitation, not on a yacht that had been travelling non-stop through tropical climes for two years. There was a woman
with him, wearing a matching sunhat tied neatly under her chin. She was extremely pale, too.
How was it even possible?
I asked myself.

‘Hello,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Are you Tyrone?’

‘Yes,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘And this is Katherine. She’s the one that’s leaving. She’s flying off tomorrow.’

The slightly surreal feeling I was experiencing continued when we climbed into the dinghy. There was no outboard. Without a word of explanation, they each picked up a wooden oar and began to
paddle us out into the sea. It was a big, heavy dinghy and the progress was very slow.

‘Which boat is
Gillaroo
?’ I asked Tyrone.

‘This one here,’ he replied, pointing his oar at a large red and white catamaran at anchor. Eventually, after many, many more minutes of silent paddling, we were pulling alongside
one of the hulls. They were low at the back so it was much easier getting aboard than trying to clamber up
Kingdom
’s ladder. Tyrone handed up my bag and I walked into the
boat’s cockpit. It was huge – the size of a standard living room in a house. There was a red fabric roof over our heads, keeping out the sun, (Aha! A clue to the pastiness!) and benches
with red cushions on them ran down the port and starboard sides. On the starboard side was a table big enough to seat eight people and a stack of white, plastic outdoor chairs. And there was a
stainless steel chair at the helm, which was on the port side. You could have held a party for 20 people in that cockpit, it was so roomy
. I think I’m going to like living on a
catamaran
, I thought.

A young guy appeared from inside.

‘This is Hugo,’ Tyrone said.

‘Hi,’ said Hugo, stepping forward to shake my hand.

Here was a tanned person. So someone went on deck sometimes. He was 19, from New Zealand, and had the widest smile possible, his sharp top canine teeth emphasising the breadth of his grin. Hugo
was a little bit shy – although I suspected he would come out of his shell when around kids his own age – and obviously well brought-up, as he was always keen to help with anything.
Gillaroo
was his second boat and I was impressed that someone so young had made it so far from home by himself. His only drawback was he was flat broke. ‘Is it ixpinsive?’ he
asked of everything, as he had barely two pennies to rub together until he got back home.