Casting Off (19 page)

‘Probably,’ he nodded. I wondered why a shopkeeper on a calm, sleepy island like this would need a machine gun.

Guy had told us to look for a bar called Pooh and that his friends’ dive shop was behind it. We spotted the AA Milne character illuminated in blue and walked round it to the back.

It’s not only the water clarity, landscape and culture that are different in Thailand; the time zone is, too. We were an hour late. But no one seemed to mind, and Guy’s friend Neil
went out to buy beers for us with his islander’s discount. After a beer and within the group scenario I started to feel less tangled up inside around Guy and I was able to relax and talk and
laugh with him just as I did with everyone else. Thoughts of the possible French girlfriend held me back from openly flirting with him.

From the dive shop we went to Pooh bar, where we had to leave our shoes outside. There was such a pile of discarded rubber flip-flops that I idly wondered if I’d be able to find my
Havaianas again. There were no chairs in the bar, only foldout mattresses to cushion our bums as we sat on the reed-matted floor or reclined like feasting Romans at low tables. This bar was the
busiest place Aaron and I had seen when we did our little recce through the village and yet it was only about half full. The divers left and the three of us walked through the brush again, with our
reclaimed footwear on, to a beach on the other side of Lipe, to sit on sun loungers in the dark and drink vodka and Red Bull.

In the humid evening, as a slight sea breeze blew salty air on to our faces, the conversation turned to relationships.

‘If it was the right girl, I’d follow her anywhere,’ Aaron said. I snorted but Guy nodded.
What was this? Two romantic guys and one cynical woman? Surely it should be the
other way round
?

‘Hannah wants to teach in England and I’ll go with her, even though I’ve already been there, done that,’ Aaron said. ‘We’ll just have to find another way of
getting there now that I’m leaving
Gillaroo
.’

‘You’re leaving?’ Guy asked. ‘Why?’

Aaron told him what had happened in the Malacca Straits.

‘Shit! That sounds like a nightmare,’ Guy said, stretching back in his deckchair. ‘Maybe you’re better off out of that.’

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Why would you follow a woman?’

‘I followed my ex to Germany,’ he shrugged. ‘Lived there for a year. Learned German.’

‘Sprechen Sie deutsch?’ I asked.

‘Ja,’ he said and followed it with a stream of German words I didn’t understand.

‘Ich bin elf Jahre alt,’ I informed him, using the only German I could remember from secondary school. ‘Ich möchte ein Erdbeereis.’

When we could drink no more, we walked back right across the island to our beach and our dinghies. As we got under the cover of trees again, and it was darker, Aaron walked a couple of metres in
front and I dropped back to be level with Guy. We picked our way along the path and he took my hand and kept hold of it as we carried on walking.
OK, so he is definitely coming on to me
now
, I decided, the warmth from his palm driving any concern about la femme française out of my mind. I had forgotten to pay the beach bar for my afternoon beer when we came ashore so I
went off to settle my bill, all £1.20 of it, while Aaron fetched our dinghy. I thought Guy would be doing the same with his but when I turned away from the bar I could see him standing in the
shadow of the trees on the path, waiting. Yes – there was a tall, gorgeous, travelling, sailing guy waiting for me under a gently rustling palm tree on a tropical, moonlit night. My stomach
flipped again, my breath caught and I walked over to him. He pulled me close and kissed me.

As kisses went, it was a very good one. You can’t get much more of a romantic setting than under swaying trees on a sandy beach by starlight. It was the full-on Hollywood works. All that
was missing was a camera panning 360 degrees around us. It left my head spinning.

Guy and Pauly had a clear ‘no bringing girls back’ rule but Pauly was off chasing two Swedish girls that he’d met on the island, even though the one he liked most had a
boyfriend, and he wasn’t going to be returning to
Incognito
that night, unless he was thinking of making a swim for it.

‘Does your boat rule mean no girl
visitors
are allowed?’ I asked Guy, stressing the temporary nature of the noun.

‘I think visitors are OK,’ he said, smiling and turning towards the beach.

Aaron had already pulled
Gillaroo
’s dinghy into the water

– the beer must have given him superhuman strength – and it was bobbing gently in the shallows.

‘I’m going to go to
Incognito
for a tour,’ I told him, trying to sound nonchalant while feeling ridiculously pleased with myself. ‘See you later.’

It was tricky climbing on to the back of the narrow steps on
Incognito
’s transom and there were a lot of obstacles lying all over the rear part of the deck and in the cockpit
– clothes, buckets, brushes, diving equipment, empty beer cans. It was absolutely tiny compared to
Gillaroo
, probably less than half her width. Inside was cramped, too, although
bigger than it had been under the original design, as Guy and the friend he owned the boat with had cut away the front wall, joining the forepeak cabin into the main saloon. He gave me the tour,
which took all of ten seconds, since I could see almost everything from where I stood at the bottom of the companionway steps. In layout it was similar to
Kingdom
, but shrunken down and
with stuff everywhere. This was clearly a boys’ boat. Doris Day had not been round to give it a ‘woman’s touch’. Saucepans were even – the horror! – left
unwashed on the side. There was an aft cabin but it was used for storage, not sleeping, and so was the head.

‘So where do you go to the toilet,’ I asked, ‘if it’s full of stuff in here?’

‘Over the back.’

‘OK but what if, you know, you need a poo?’

‘Still off the back,’ he laughed.

‘What, you just hang on and squat out over the sea?’

‘Yeah. I call it the poop deck. And we use the outside shower as a bum gun.’ Definitely a boys’ boat.

Guy sat down on the sofa by the captain’s table and flicked some switches on the control panel. A fan standing on the table sprang to life. He looked at me and patted his lap. I sat on his
knee and he pulled me close again.

Kissing is difficult on a tiny boat. Unless you stand dead in the centre of the main cabin and don’t move, there’s no room for arms, legs, heads. Tables, fridges, spare bits of
plumbing, books and cable ties all get in the way. To fit in between the furniture you have to contort yourself into an uncomfortable position that leads to a dead leg or arm or a cricked neck. You
can try lying down but the sofas are too narrow to fit two people on and the floor is too hard. We settled on the forepeak bed, shoving tools and junk over to one side, and fell asleep, wedged in
on our sides with our legs dangling in mid-air, my shoulder jammed up against the feeder pipe for the anchor chain that rudely cut through the centre of the bed and Guy’s head bent back at an
unnatural angle.

He ran me back to
Gillaroo
at 4am and I slept for a bit longer before Tyrone and Chris started fixing the rub rail, which was working loose, back on to the dinghy in the cockpit, inches
away from my pounding head. I kept looking over at
Incognito
all through the day, hoping to catch sight of Guy so that I could wave or beckon him over, but he didn’t emerge from the
bowels of his yacht once. I knew he was still on board because his dinghy was tied on at the back. Was he regretting kissing me?

‘See?’ Aaron teased me when I was making my breakfast, his pale skin reddened from the sun. ‘I manifested you a sailing boyfriend.’

‘He’s hardly my boyfriend,’ I said, trying to be cool. ‘And I’ll probably never see him again.’ Nevertheless, I copied down his email address from a piece of
paper he’d given to Aaron.

‘Are you lefting it now?’ Aaron asked me later that afternoon, as we bobbed about in the sea off the back of the boat, holding on to the dinghy hoist pulleys to keep ourselves in one
place. I sensed an explanation of another of his life theories coming up.

‘Am I what-ing it?’

‘Lefting it. Look.’ He let go of the pulley hook with one hand to touch his nose. ‘Breathe in through your nose. If more air goes in through your right nostril it means
you’re sad or unfulfilled or something.’ He waved at his nose again and inhaled noisily. ‘But if more air comes in through your left nostril it means you’re really
happy.’

I was sceptical but I tried it. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

‘Try again.’

‘Both the same,’ I said.

‘Ha.’

‘But surely that means I’m balanced?’ I said (and breathing properly, I didn’t add). ‘In yoga, when we do breathing exercises, we breathe through one then the other
nostril to balance them out.’

‘Well, I dunno about that. All I know is, it’s good to be leftin’ it.’ He breathed deeply again, as if to double-check his nose was still content with his life
choices.

W
e had only a week to reach Phuket, where we had to clear into Thailand, and so we had to move on. As we left Koh Lipe the next morning, I felt
gutted that I hadn’t seen Guy again. It looked like he still hadn’t come out of his boat. Could he really be that embarrassed and desperate to avoid me? I took a last, dejected look at
Incognito
as we pulled out of the bay.
Maybe it’s better this way, as a perfect, romantic, brief encounter,
I tried to convince myself,
without everyday reality stepping
in and spoiling things. Always look on the bright side, and all that
. I didn’t entirely believe myself but there was nothing I could do about it.

Our next stop was Koh Muk, for the emerald cave. Apparently, at low tide we could pass in the dinghy through a low entrance in the rock and feel our way through to a beach that was actually
inside the island. Low tide was at 7am and we had to zigzag up and down the face of Koh Muk before we spotted the way in. There were no strings of garish buoys to indicate where it was, no signs
screwed to the rock, no man waiting to charge us 500 baht to go in. Just a hole in the cliff. Tyrone cut the throttle and we ducked our heads to pass under the overhanging grey rock and felt our
way along the passage in the dark with our hands. As we finally emerged, blinking in the sudden bright sunlight, we found ourselves in the middle of a small, circular lagoon. It was stunning, so
perfect it almost looked man-made. The water was bright turquoise, lit up by the white sandy bottom. A pristine beach curved in the opposite direction to the wall of rock we had just emerged from,
forming an eye shape, and beyond the beach were coconut palms, stretching up towards the light coming from the wide circular opening above us. The rocks formed steep grey cliffs all around. It was
absolutely beautiful and we were the only ones there.

After we had whooped and clapped, listening for echoes, I paddled through the water, thinking about how lucky we were to be able to come here by yacht. The emerald cave was a popular tourist
attraction and presumably later in the day the peace would be disturbed by the roar of boats pulling up, laden with passengers who would swim through the entrance and fill up the beach. Surely they
couldn’t experience this in the same way as us? If I had come here with my mates, hungover, on a £30 boat trip with a bunch of strangers, I wouldn’t enjoy it half as much as I was
doing now. The four of us, Tyrone, Aaron, Chris and I, had fallen into a reverential silence and the high tide had wiped away any traces of the previous day’s visitors from the beach. I felt
a magical and almost spiritual connection to the natural beauty of the earth.

What Tyrone and Aaron were feeling was not quite as deep. ‘Elvis was ’ere’, Tyrone wrote in the sand with a stick. Aaron gleefully scribbled, ‘Hello, tourists!’ We
scarpered before anyone else arrived.

The further north up the coast of Thailand we went, it seemed, the busier it got. Koh Phi Phi was a horrible, frantic maze of a place, swarming with boats and sunburned chavs. Phi Phi Don, the
bigger of the two islands there, is shaped like an hourglass, with a bay on either side. The first side we tried to anchor in was horribly rocky-rolly with wash thrown up by ferries and tourist
boats so we tried Lohdalum Bay: much calmer but with huge coral bommies sticking up almost to the water’s surface, so we had to anchor quite a way out and Tyrone said no one could go ashore
after sunset because it would be too complicated and dangerous to try to navigate through them in the dark. Not that I minded much: the place was a nasty seething mass of tattooed, semi-naked
people looking to get drunk, high and laid. I took one trip ashore in the daytime, to get cash from the ATM, and that was enough for me. The narrowest part of the island had been rebuilt after the
tsunami as a warren of alleyways lined with restaurants, clothes stalls, dive shops, internet cafes. It was poky and bewildering and easy to get lost. As I waited for the ATM to dispense my notes,
a group of drunk Scousers came up behind me. ‘Fookin ’ell, warra cunt,’ one said. Nice. Especially at three in the afternoon. Flying the great British flag abroad.