Casting Off (40 page)

‘He just spends all his time inside on his iPad,’ Grace said. ‘He never wants to go ashore. He says he can do all that when he’s old.’

I felt my eyebrows rise. Because there were few guests, other than friends of the owners, the crew had more time to themselves. But when the owners came on board they worked even harder than I
did. ‘I did a week of 22-hour days,’ Grace told me.

My eyebrows shot even higher. ‘How do you cope?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘It’s hard but it’s only for a week at a time. And the money’s good. I mean, I’m not a trained chef, only a cook-stew, but I’m on 3500 euros a
month.’

I almost spat out the mouthful of beer I’d just taken. ‘Three thousand five hundred? And do you get tips on top?’

‘Oh, probably about, um, five thousand over the four months.’

‘Christ!’ I told her. ‘I’m in the wrong job.’

The more we chatted, the more it seemed that I really was in the wrong job. I’d been happy to take the position on
Panacea
because it was my entry to that sphere. Sail boats paid
less than motor yachts, I knew, but I’d thought that that would be fine if I was being paid to do something I loved, sailing. In reality, we hadn’t sailed once. And I was a glorified
cleaner-cum-waitress stuck with a crew I didn’t really get on with.

Grace was in her second season working on her boat, and she got to live and work with her boyfriend and had a really nice, friendly captain. With the pots of cash they were managing to save,
they planned to buy an old wreck of a house in France and renovate it. I was, to pinch an Essex girl phrase, well jel.

‘She got a bad boat,’ Grace had told Mark when he’d come back from the bar with a fresh round of drinks. She said it matter-of-factly, like there were good boats and bad boats
out there, and I’d just had shitty luck. It set me thinking.

As I took a taxi back to Naples Mergellina – paid for by Grace’s captain, who had shoved a 50-euro note in the hand of the driver to cover a 15-euro journey, after paying for all of
the drinks and food (their boat even had a crew fun fund) – half-formed ideas tumbled around my drunken mind. Maybe I could do this. If I could swallow my pride about being a
‘servant’, I could earn serious cash and have to work only for a few months each year. If things worked out with Guy, he could come with me, too, as crew. It was a bit odd to think that
I was now reconsidering a career that only a few weeks ago I had summarily written off.
But that’s the beauty of this new life
, I told myself.
You’re just finding your
feet. And you decided to be less of a planner, more impulsive. So maybe you don’t write it off. You leave the door open and see what blows through it
.

Two days later, while I was idly wondering why my knees and elbows hurt – a hangover, it turned out; it’d been a while – Carlo and Daniela came back from Rome, on the same
train (coincidence?) – Daniela with a chic new wardrobe, hairstyle and push-up bra (coincidence? – I still couldn’t work out if they were officially a couple or not) and Carlo
with an important announcement.

‘I have called the boatyard in Tunisia but there is no spaces,’ he said. ‘It is the financial creases – everybody looking for somewhere cheap to go.’
That’s a shame
, I thought.
I was looking forward to visiting a new country – and eating some spicy food for a change
.

‘I do not want to go to Turkey,’ the captain went on. ‘The wind there is too strong and the trip is terrible. So instead we go to Licata. There is a very good deal for us
– just 3000 euro for the winter. And it is not so far. We leave on Friday.’

‘Where is Licata?’ I asked.

‘Sicilia.’
OK, so not a new country but I’ve never been to Sicily before. Cool. Mafiosi, here we come
.

The life cycle of
Panacea
came full circle – in June there had been a mad rush to get her ready and out of the boatyard for the charters; now the boredom and sitting around was
over and it was all hands on deck to get her packed up and into the boatyard for the winter. Rugs, linens, snorkelling gear and silver platters were packed into the bilges. Leftover cases of wine,
expensive olive oil, the prosciutto-slicing machine that we had used only once and my George-Clooney-maker vanished into the back of a van and off to a warehouse. We hoisted the tender, lifted the
anchor, dropped the mooring lines, cast off the stern lines and set off on our final journey to Sicily.

The crossing was rough and cold and the wind didn’t stop even when we were in the supposed shelter of Licata marina, meaning I only managed one of my two days of deep cleaning. All of a
sudden, it seemed, time had caught up with me and, before I knew it, it was the last day of October, All Hallow’s Eve, the time for naughty spirits to rise up from their secret hiding places
– and for deckhands to fly home because they’ve reached the end of their contract.

Carlo rose with me at 4.30am to see me off. He woke Daniela, who gave me a hug and a nice smile – the first I’d had from her since we left Castellamare – but Imran stayed in
bed, sleeping.

Carlo thanked me for everything as he handed my bag to the taxi driver. The fact that we would never see each other again, that I wouldn’t be returning to
Panacea
, lay unspoken
between us. It didn’t need to be verbalised and for once I was grateful for his Italian manner – had he been English, he’d have been compelled to politely say maybe he’d see
me again next year, and I’d have had to mutter some half excuse in response and we’d both have been left with the annoying feeling that we shouldn’t have said that.

He stuck out a hand for me to shake – no Italian two or even three kisses, just formal business – and I felt the rough callouses of both our palms (yes, I had grown them, too)
scratch against each other. With a small wave I got into the taxi to take me to the bus stop, to get to the airport, then the other airport, then the tube and train ride it would involve to get me
back to Derbyshire.

There was no overwhelming sense of relief that my time on a ‘bad boat’ was over, that I wouldn’t have to serve another coffee or scrub a deck as I watched the dry hills of
Sicily shrink beneath us when my plane took off. Nor was there any of the nostalgic sadness that normally sets in when you leave a job, a home or even a lover. I didn’t feel anything really,
apart from when I checked in my travel wallet for my passport and happily saw the three crisp 500-euro notes nestling in there, tucked in with some other 200s, 100s and 50s. That Monopoly money
symbolised freedom.
It’s going to buy me a fair bit of time to go cruising, especially in Asia, maybe six months
, I thought, resting my forehead against the cool glass of the plane
window.
Work, and especially worrying about what kind of work I’ll end up doing, can wait. Now there’s just fun, travel, sun, sailing – and Guy
.

I
t was the day before I was due to fly to Langkawi, when I was in the middle of shopping for plain popcorn kernels – Guy had asked me to
bring some: ‘It makes a good snack for cockpit parties’ – that I handed in my notice to myself after deciding to quit English life.

‘I’m off,’ I told my former British self. ‘To Malaysia. To live on a boat. With a man. But not with a cat.’ And I felt ridiculously pleased with myself for it.

The canned foods aisle of Sainsbury’s in the Derbyshire former mining town of Ripley was the last place I’d have expected to experience another one of my epiphanies, to be hit by a
little bubble of bliss. On a tropical beach, almost definitely. While admiring a spectacular view, probably. But in a fluorescent-lit identikit supermarket while crowded on all sides by the
blue-rinse brigade shuffling past with their half-laden trolleys, hems of their trousers damp from the November rain flooding the pot-holey car park? Not the most obvious of locations.

However, descend a little bubble did, enveloping me with its carefree attitude and lightness of spirit. The bubble accompanied me back from the supermarket to my parents’ house, it helped
me pack my (one, reasonably light) bag, it came with me to visit my friends, it drove with me to my sister’s house to hold my tiny, two-day-old nephew for the first time and watch in awe as
his impossibly small fingers grasped my thumb.
I’ve got to stop having these little epiphanic daydreams
, I thought,
or eventually they’re going to lead me to the loony
bin
. But I only half meant it: I was enjoying these blissful moments too much to care.

And so, once again I found myself at Gatwick, clutching a one-way budget ticket to Asia, with no more of a plan than to fly to Malaysia, take a taxi to an agreed location and then wait for a man
to turn up in his dinghy to whisk me off to his yacht.

I have got enough brain cells to recognise that I was following a path that I had taken before, and which hadn’t worked out too well. But things were different this time: different place,
different boat, different man. The main change was in how I felt about that man. I liked this one, really liked him – which was something of an unusual situation for me. And I was a different
person, too, much more laidback and more confident, less worried about planning, about a career path, about what the future held. I was much better at going with the flow, at trusting fate and
knowing that, somehow, everything would work out fine. Apart from when I’d been offered two positions as a ‘wife’ in eastern Europe, I hadn’t thought about marriage,
children or detached homes with gardens for months. And this time I didn’t have a bill for £100-worth of excess baggage in my pocket – that at least showed that I’d learned
something.

On the plane, I ate the meals I’d paid for, I slept when I could, knowing that jetlag was inevitable and that I’d get through it in a few days, and stepped off the plane in a pair of
light linen trousers, a thin T-shirt and flip-flops to collect that one bag, which came through the clear plastic flaps on to the carousel with no delay.

No worrying about brushes with drugs enforcement officers this time
, I thought, poking fun at my former self as I swung it lightly on to one shoulder.

The airport was empty and I walked straight up to the desk to pay in advance for my taxi. A battered yellow and red car pulled up outside, its number matching the one printed on my voucher, and
I smiled as I recalled that all Malaysian cabs looked like that.

Bright green palms and giant ferns lined the roads, looking obscenely verdant and full of life in the bright sunlight. The sky seemed bigger than I remembered, full of towering grey cumulus
keeping everyone guessing about whether they were about to dump their heavy load over the island or not. The taxi wasn’t air-conditioned and I started to sweat lightly under my T-shirt.
I’d chosen a white and pale pink striped one because it wouldn’t show the damp patches and it had a high neck to avoid causing offence to the locals. I pulled at it gently, to stop it
from sticking to my back, but I didn’t mind the humidity too much. After the freezing air-conditioning on
Panacea
and the bitter cold of an English early winter, it felt good to feel
a bit uncomfortably hot. Besides, there was no aircon on
Incognito
. Temperatures inside
Gillaroo
had reached 36°C when we were in this part of the world. I’d have to get
used to it.

As we drove along the dusty road, passing the odd motorcyclist wearing a coat backwards, it felt like a homecoming. Part of it was a sense of familiarity with Langkawi, with the sights, sounds
and smells of South-East Asia. In Italy I’d missed the food – and its associated fragrant scents – badly. One time, when I caught a whiff of soy and garlic in the air, I’d
followed my nose to an Asian fusion restaurant, the only one I’d seen in six months, and been so pleased that I’d bitten into my spring rolls too soon in my enthusiasm and burnt the
roof of my mouth. Now, the smells of chicken satay being barbecued, of hot roads and exhaust fumes from the motorbikes blew into the taxi through the open window. I took a deep (albeit poisonous)
lungful. I looked, greedily, at every tropical plant we passed and I remembered how much I’d loved the jungle and its beautiful vulgarity.

We passed a moped rider going the wrong way along the side of the carriageway, against the flow of traffic, and then we were at a crossroads I recognised, on the outskirts of Kuah town. I rooted
in my bag for my phone.

‘Just coming into Kuah now,’ I texted Guy. ‘Where shall I meet you?’

‘Tell your taxi driver the blue jetty, where the ferries come in,’ came the reply, almost immediately.

I leaned forward, to make myself heard to the driver over the radio. ‘Can we go to the blue jetty, please?’

He looked at me blankly in the rear view mirror of the car, uncomprehending.

I tried pigeon English. ‘Blue jetty. Ferry. You know?’ His eyes crinkled as he understood me.

‘Ah, yes, perry. Perry chetty.’

I sat back, but then remembered there was another jetty across the bay from where the boats anchored, where the large ferries from the mainland docked.