Casting Off (34 page)

I wasn’t the only one who had it tough: Daniela, cleaning up after the children, would find lumps of chewing gum on the sofas, where they had dropped out of open mouths, sticky sweet
wrappers and fingerprints everywhere and iPads stuffed carelessly under mattresses. The guests would go into the store cupboards and help themselves to fresh towels, even though theirs were being
changed every two days and their pillowcases on a daily basis. The tumble dryer was broken and Daniela spent half her time on her knees in the 48°C engine room, stringing laundry up across the
ceiling in an attempt to get it to dry.

Imran was trying to keep up with an always-changing list of demands for meals and adaptations and was constantly having to go ashore to get more provisions. With the 185-coffee guests, they ate
so much he had to shop three times a day. Sometimes he’d spend hours preparing a meal, only for the guests to decide at the last minute that they’d rather eat out and, frustrated,
he’d pitch half of it into the sea.

And Carlo? Well, Carlo was re-folding the guest towels just so, lining up the water bottles in the fridge so that all the labels faced outwards and stacking the forks in perfect alignment in the
cutlery drawer. He was under a lot of stress – the boat was losing money each year and bookings were down, he told me.

‘It is the financial creases and the war in Libya,’ he said, finishing one cigarette and immediately lighting another (of the four crew, I was the only non-chain-smoker on board).
‘Usually we would have maybe ten charter in a season. What is best for us is to have twelve, maybe thirteen charter. But these Americans, they are very afeared of Libya and they think the
terrorist will come look for them here in Italy. So this year they do not come. And we have only five charter. It is cupside down.’

Five charters meant not only less money for the business but also considerably fewer tips for the crew – and the Americans were a sore loss. Tips can make up half of a charter crew’s
salary and are important because they might only work for six months in a year. Gratuities are not compulsory but in the contract that guests receive it makes it clear that it is expected that you
tip the staff for their hard work in, say, getting you your favourite ice cream in the middle of the night or procuring fresh prostitutes. And the Americans are the biggest tippers of the lot.

‘This one year,’ Imran told me, ‘American family is coming. They are just two. Me and American man we are good friends. We sit together on deck, talking, talking, always
talking, and look at the stars. They give me 1500 euros. Now I am sad they not come
Panacea
this year.’
I bet you are, Imran
, I thought.
That would buy a lot of school
books for your three clever daughters
.

I’ve never thought of myself as a person motivated by money but I was discovering that when you’re being worked into the ground for 17 hours a day, tips start to matter. Our first
charter we each received a crisp 500-euro note. I didn’t even know they came in that denomination anywhere other than Monopoly. They aren’t actually legal tender in the UK and I had to
find a special currency dealer in London to buy mine off me. But other times we received far less – 100 euros here, 20 euros there and once, in the case of a group of the owner’s
friends, who had been given approximately 4000 euros of boat hire, food, alcohol and service all for free – absolutely nothing at all.

Our first charter of the five was a Central American family of eight – they of the seasickness – who had holidayed on
Panacea
before. We were to pick them up in Vieste, on
the east coast of Italy, and take them to Croatia for two weeks.
Panacea
was in the Aeolian islands, between Naples and Sicily, and we had a three-day delivery trip around the toe of
Italy, across its sole and up and round the heel to the mid-calf. The seas were rough and Daniela suffered badly, only just managing to make it from her bed to the toilet in time to throw up. Imran
spent his time slumped in the corner of the galley, not really able to stand, and Carlo and I took over his watches, spending stints of up to 12 hours each on deck. Everyone could have done with
some time to recover once we got to Vieste but no – we got a call from their driver that the guests were almost there while we were in the middle of our dinner and we had to hastily pack it
all away before greeting and serving them and setting off immeadiately for our overnight trip to Dubrovnik.

They seemed a glum bunch when they arrived, varying in age and height from a little boy of five to the patriarch, a grandfather of about 65.
They don’t seem very excited to be on
holiday
, I thought,
but I suppose if they’ve just flown all the way from Central America they’ll probably be tired
. We offered drinks and snacks and struggled on board
with the three suitcases each they had brought with them. Within a few minutes the luggage, divested of clothes, had been dumped in the saloon.

‘Where on earth are we going to store all of these cases?’ I asked Carlo.

‘Don’t worry, Em-ma,’ he said. ‘I will take care of it.’ He piled them all up in his and Imran’s shower, which meant whenever we needed to wash – mine
and Daniela’s shower was out of order – we had to take them all out and stack them on the bed and then repack them in the shower cubicle again afterwards.

In the morning, when they came out for breakfast at 11.30, they seemed less rude and sullen, despite the fact that they had suffered from seasickness on the way over. The grandfather, in
particular, and his son were especially friendly, but as a whole they were a very quiet bunch who didn’t seem to like yachting or the water. I don’t think the grandmother spoke much
English or any Italian and the daughter was generally busy trying to keep her three kids and niece under control.

Imran filled me in on the family history – they had stayed on
Panacea
several years in a row. ‘The totter [daughter, I eventually worked out], she come before with her
husband but now the marriage is broke. The son, he come one time with wife. Phew, she crazy! Now he no with her no more.’

The daughter was absolutely stunning, with long, thick dark hair and a beautiful figure. She had had three children and was in much better shape than I was. Her brother, who was a couple of
years older but still under 40, had warm brown eyes that twinkled when he smiled and a spattering of freckles across his nose. He was fond of wearing white shirts so I nicknamed him Enrique
Iglesias.

‘I was in London last year,’ Enrique told me. ‘I ate the – how do you say? – fish and chips.’

I laughed. ‘Did you have mushy peas?’

‘What is this mushy peas?’

I described them and he wrinkled his nose. ‘No, this I have never try.’

‘Son want to ask Golden Lady to have drink with him,’ Imran teased me one night after we’d finished dinner. He’d taken to calling me Golden Lady because my hair had been
lightened by the sun to a yellow tinge. At first I was flattered – until I found out it was a jingle from a TV advert for tights. ‘That why he walking, walking around boat every
night.’

‘Don’t be silly, Imran,’ I scoffed. A small part of me was secretly pleased that a handsome, Central American, horse-riding, playboy millionaire’s son might have taken a
shine to me, especially as I was effectively his servant. But, even if it was true, as a guest he was off-limits. And I’ve seen
Downton
. I know how these things turn out.

Carlo, to my mind, had some pretty crazy rules about what ‘the rich people like’ – and don’t like. One was about the rubbish. Obviously, if you are feeding eight guests
and four crew three meals a day you are going to generate a not-inconsiderable amount of trash. But Carlo didn’t want the guests to see it, even when it was neatly tied in black sacks. For
some reason he thought it would offend them. So it would pile up during the day in the galley and we’d have to wait until the guests were ashore – or asleep – to drive it over to
the mainland and get rid of it. I dubbed it Mission Impossible: sometimes as late as 1am we’d tiptoe across the deck, lower the black bags silently into the tender and drive off to dump them
into skips on land.

Other strange ‘rich people’ ideas would crop up every now and then. One day I walked into the galley to see Imran cutting the ends off every single baby plum tomato in a bowl that
must have held 200.

‘Captain say me rich people no like tomato ends,’ he told me, when I asked. I just raised my eyebrows in response.

Earlier that day we’d been lucky enough to be able to do the rubbish run during daylight hours – a rare treat indeed. I drove the tender up to the Mljet quayside and held on to a
rock with one hand while Imran nipped ashore with the black sacks. While I waited for him to come back, a tender for another superyacht pulled up. After one guy leapt had ashore with his rubbish,
the driver leant over to shake my hand and introduce himself.

‘I am Sven,’ he said, moving the wooden toothpick he was chewing from the centre of his mouth to one side so that he could speak. He was your typical Slav – a huge beast of a
man, thickset, with a vast neck and overhanging brow. His close-cropped hair was blond and his skin golden. Probably in his mid-30s, some of his muscle was turning to fat but he was not
unattractive despite that.

We chatted briefly about the different boats we were on and then he said: ‘Perhaps we could have drink tonight, hah? Give me number.’ Because I was still in traveller mode –
and keen to meet new people – I gave him my number, not really sure if he was being friendly or asking me out on a date. He pulled a small mobile out of his pocket and typed it in, struggling
to work the tiny keys with his enormous hands. ‘OK, I SMS you,’ he said, gunning his tender’s engine as his crewmate climbed on board and shooting off.

SMS me – to use the euro-speak term for texting – he did. And he swung by at midnight in his tender to pick me up. Enrique was pacing the deck as I climbed down the side of
Panacea
’s hull.

‘I want to walk a little,’ Sven said, as we moored his tender. When he said ‘walk’, he actually meant ‘talk’, and he regaled me with tales of his life for two
hours, barely pausing for breath – or to ask me anything about myself.

Sven had an ego to match his giant stature. He was, it turned out, the owner and captain of a 30-metre charter boat, not the deckhand, as I’d assumed. For 11 years he’d worked on big
ships as a chief engineer, visiting dozens of countries around the world but almost never getting to see anything of them beyond the harbour. One time, he told me, he had gotten frostbite all over
his body when he had to go on deck in temperatures of –37°C to change a masthead light. He had been in hospital for a month. And a decade of drinking demineralised reverse osmosis water
had left him with terrible toothache – which was why he chewed on the toothpick constantly. ‘It wreck my tooths.’

I found his tales fascinating – so far removed from the usual date chatter back in London over a beer. So I agreed to meet him the next night as well, since both yachts were due to be
anchoring off the same island.

‘How was your day today?’ I asked him as I clambered into his tender again, using the porthole of a guest’s cabin as my ladder down. ‘How were your guests?’

‘My guests were fine, my beauty,’ he said, standing wide-legged to steer us away from
Panacea
. ‘You hear about the 35-metre boat?’

‘No. What 35-metre boat?’

‘The one that was shipwrecked today. It go on the rocks with all guests still on board. Fuck! You didn’t see it?’

I bounced slightly on the side of the rib as we accelerated away. ‘No. We didn’t see anything. What, so a charter boat went aground? Near here?’

‘Yes, the fucking stupid captain went straight on to this rocks that was on fucking chart.’ The toothpick was switching from side to side as he talked. ‘I hear on radio, hah,
so I goes over there and fucking captain is doing nothing. So I says, “You! You fucking crazy? Get guests off now.”’

‘What did he say to that?’

‘No matter. Soon all guests gone. And then I says, “Don’t worry, my friend stupid, I will get boat off rocks for you.” Because this fucking captain, he don’t know
what to do.’ I had a vision of Sven, like a fat, Croatian Hercules, swimming through the sea, clutching a thick tow rope, dragging a stricken vessel to safety single-handed.

‘And you did it?’ I asked.

‘Yah. I find other ship and we pull and pull and get boat off rocks.’

‘And it’s all OK now?’

‘No. Boat is fucked.’

This man is so ridiculously, over-the-top masculine,
I thought,
it’s like he is a caricature of a man. He probably sweats pure testosterone. If he was a cartoon character,
he’d be Sven the Honourable or something. He’s practically ‘Me man. You woman. Come live in my cave. Uggg!’

It was funny that I thought that because an hour or so later, after he’d caught a fish – with his bare hands, naturally – he effectively threw me the old Neanderthal chat-up
line.

‘What I want is to find woman,’ he informed me, sitting down on a low wall by a darkened restaurant and dipping his feet in the sea to cool them off after a hard 18-hour day standing
up. ‘Buy house in bay in Croatia, keep my boat in bay in winter. Somewhere near village so she can walk there for shopping. But I am tired of Croatian women. All are the same. All just want
money and jealous – so jealous. Too much trouble.’ He sniffed and jostled the toothpick. ‘Maybe I find nice English woman?’ He looked at me sideways. For a second I pictured
it: a headscarf, long skirt, wicker basket, a winding path through the woods to the village to buy bread and apples. It was a bit Red Riding Hood, I grant you, but fairytales were my main go-to
reference point for eastern European life.