Casting Off (7 page)

Now, hearing Josh’s claim that he knew the couple, I felt the familiar journalistic tingle. When you think you might be on to a good story, your pulse quickens, you get a shot of
adrenaline in your gut and your mind clears instantly, allowing your concentration to sharpen so that you can focus on getting every single detail correct. I hadn’t felt that intense
‘story alert’ moment for a long time. Without meaning, or even wanting, to, I started to interview Josh. I guess old habits really do die hard, even when you are consciously trying to
leave them behind.

‘How do you know the Chandlers?’ I asked him. Steve shot me a look, almost as if he had noticed the switch my brain had made from chatty mode to reporter.

‘I spent six months with them and taught them to dive,’ he said.

I asked him what they were like. The usual response: nice, normal people, he said. But then he added: ‘They’d take chances. They’d, like, break away from the safe convoy when
we were coming across the Gulf of Aden and they’d go off and anchor somewhere by themselves.’

He explained that to get through the danger zone, the section of sea closest to the Somali coast, ten boats went together in convoy, sailing at night with their lights out to reduce their
chances of being seen. The Chandlers got through safely that time; it was later, when they were still in Seychelles waters, that they were captured, he said. For a split second I thought,
That’s a story I could write and sell
, but then, just as quickly as the idea came, it went again.
It’s not you any more
, I told myself.
Let it go. You’re a
sailor now.

I turned to Kristin and asked her how long she’d been sailing for. Never, before she joined Josh for the Borneo race, she said. That was odd. From how she talked about Josh’s mother
a lot and the way they seemed so close, I had formed the impression that she was the original girl-next-door and that an engagement was on the cards. But Josh had been sailing for months and
months. So were they a new couple? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare. As the conversation continued, Josh mentioned that before Kristin flew out he had had two other female crew members.
Doubly odd
, I thought, but forgot about it as the conversation moved on.

As we left the restaurant in search of a taxi, she took my arm. ‘It’s so nice to meet another young couple,’ she said.

My immediate reaction was to snatch my arm out of her grasp and shout: ‘Whoa! Hold it there, lady. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Steve and I are soooo not a couple. This is
just an ill-thought-out fling I’m starting to regret. And he’s not even young.’ But that would have been mean in so many ways so I didn’t and just smiled politely. I
didn’t expect to see her or Josh again, anyway, as the following morning the two-man, one-woman and one-cat crew of
Kingdom
were setting off to explore the wilds of Borneo.

They have satellite TV, it turns out, in the wilds of Borneo. A few miles north-east of Kota Kinabalu we anchored off a stilt village at Teluk Ambong where the wooden houses, bleached pale grey
by the sun, had taken over the beach. They were so close to the water that at high tide the fishermen could drive their boats right up to their homes, tie up and step off into their living
rooms.

As we were well out of the city, I put on my ‘shore clothes’ – cropped trousers and a long-sleeved cotton shirt, before getting into the dinghy. After spending most of my time
in a bikini, I felt ridiculously covered up but this was an out-of-the-way kampong (village) in a Muslim country and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.

It was just a short walk from the beach, between the wooden stilts of the houses, avoiding wandering goats and ducks, before we were in the quiet ‘street’ – a wide strip of
sand that separated two facing rows of houses. There was no one else around. John strode along the only constructed pavement, a pathway made of strips of wood, into the kampong shop to buy some
smokes and Cokes. I had a look round its shelves – out-of-date sweets, dusty crackers, biscuits and soap.

John said something I didn’t understand to the shopkeeper, who smiled and nodded his acknowledgment as we left.

‘What did you say to him?’ I asked John, following him down the narrow path.

‘Terima kasih. It means thank you.’

‘Terima what?’

‘Terima kasih. Like “tear up my car seat”.’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ I said, really liking the mnemonic. ‘Tearup ma kaseet!’

‘You got it,’ he said. ‘Just drop the t at the end.’

‘Tearup ma kasee!’

We probably could have gone ashore naked and not generated more excitement than we did in our modest clothing. While we were in the shop the news of our arrival had spread fast around the
kampong and now there were gaggles of children waiting to see us. A chorus of ‘Helo!’ (that’s ‘hello’ in Malaysian) came from a large group of boys, aged five to maybe
12, who had gathered in the street right outside the shop. They all had short black hair and very white smiles and grinned at us and then whispered something funny to their friends, who screamed
with boisterous laughter. They wore football shirts – Manchester United, Liverpool – and ate bags of crisps, dropping the empty packets on to the sand when they had finished.

‘What your nem?’ they asked us, over and over, pushing and shoving at each other to shake our hands first, touching their right palm to their chest between each shake, to bless us.
‘Where you plom?’
Plom?
I wondered.
Is that a Bahasa word? Ah – Where are you from?
‘Foto! Foto!’ they yelled at John, pointing to the camera hanging
from his neck. He obliged and they adopted the stance of boys the world over: feet wide, smiles wider and flicking Vs at the lens.

The girls were just as curious but their shyness was greater than their courage and they watched us from a safe distance, hiding behind a car and peering over the roof. A few were brave enough
to wave back to me but none would come near.

John went off to say hello to the village imam and Steve and I took a stroll along the ‘street’. This was the first non-Western settlement I’d ever seen that wasn’t a
city. The houses were all about ten feet off the ground, with wooden steps leading up from the soft white sand. There was no glass in the windows, just slats or netting, and many had curtains made
from old bedsheets. Often the front door was open and we could glimpse into people’s bare living rooms, smiling back at the grandparents, parents, teenage children and babies who sat on the
bare wooden floor, staring out at us. The roofs of the houses were corrugated iron and chickens scratched around the stilts at ground level as goats rambled past, herding their kids in a line. To
my naïve eyes these families seemed dirt poor, with their ramshackle huts for homes and their children dressed in charity-shop-rejected clothes, yet there were Astro satellite TV dishes
attached to the sides of half of the houses and 4x4 trucks parked here and there. Apart from the discarded crisp and cracker packets the children had dropped, the village was neat and tidy.

Steve rummaged in his backpack.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

‘The headsets,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give them away.’

He had brought along two sets of foam-covered earphones that we’d been given for free when we’d bought internet dongles in Kota Kinabalu. On the yacht, before we came ashore,
I’d thought he was crazy – what useless piece of charity was this? After school I had been so focused on getting straight to university and then into a journalism career that I had
never had a gap year: never taught children in Africa or witnessed the favelas of South America. I only knew ‘favela’ meant slum because I’d learned the word in my GCSE geography
class. In my limited experience charity was doing things like baking cakes and selling them to your friends’ mums or dropping a few pennies into a can being shaken in the street. My sketchy
idea of charity in a developing country involved handing out American $1 bills to desperate one-legged adults or buying bags of rice or apples for starving children. Real Comic Relief tear-jerking
montage stuff. Giving out flimsy electronic equipment in a village in Borneo did not quite fit in with that. I imagined us having to force them on some bewildered kids who would later toss them
aside, not even knowing what they were, so that they could return to scavenging for grubs among the jungle trees. But as Steve pulled them from my bag, a young man ran straight over and asked us
how much we wanted for them.

‘How much?’ I whispered to Steve, thinking I must have misheard. ‘He wants to
buy
them?’

‘No, no – free gift for you,’ Steve said to the youth, handing over the headsets. The young man climbed happily with his prizes up the stairs into a house. So much for my
rose-tinted view of Borneo village life – probably he was going to plug them straight in to his PS2 so he could turn the sound up as loud as he liked without risking his mother shouting at
him to ‘turn that racket down’.

I thought again about the ‘shacks’ that I had seen and adjusted my perspective. Apparently this was suburbia, Borneo-style. The houses were built of wood on stilts because that was
the way they had always been built here. The children were clean and healthy, the TV dishes and cars showed that people had jobs. It was no slum. Clearly I had a lot of learning to do.

T
wo picture-perfect islands were waiting for us to explore them: Pulau Mantanani Besar and Pulau Mantanani Kecil. Sitting off the north-west coast
of the peak at Borneo’s tip they were the inhabited larger (
besar
means big) island and his little (
kecil
) brother, whose only feature is a dive platform and a couple of
huts. We tackled the smaller of the two first. At high tide the beach was only a metre deep and covered with driftwood.

‘Watch out for snakes,’ Steve called back over his shoulder as he led the way.

‘Shit! Really?’ I said, hesitating. John strode ahead and I copied his high-stepping gait to the heart of the island, where we found a man-made clearing with a few tall trees dotted
about. The whole island was only about 40 metres wide and we’d seen all there was to see within a few minutes. The real entertainment was to be had in the sea. John was in his element
snorkelling in the incredibly clear water around the reef. I love swimming – in a pool – but am more than a bit daunted by the sea. I generally prefer to be on it, rather than under it.
If I’m in deep or cloudy water my imagination runs away with me and I picture things coming up from the deep to touch me. It’s not only sea monsters and sharks I worry about, any little
aquatic creature will do it. But I wanted to try snorkelling and Steve showed me how to roll out of the dinghy and held my hand as we followed tiny shoals of fish into very shallow water. I willed
my heartbeat to slow and concentrated on steadying my breathing but the tips of my fins started catching on coral, adding to the feeling of claustrophobia. In my panic I imagined I was only
millimetres away from scraping my bare stomach along the coral and when I tried to lift my body further away my feet sank deeper and I kicked the coral harder. It was just too much and I had to get
out.

‘Maybe it was a bit too shallow for you,’ Steve tried to reassure me as I tried to haul myself, in an ungainly manner similar to a whale beaching itself, back into the dinghy. I
promised him I’d try again another time and instead enjoyed the views by putting my mask back on and sticking my face under the water, turning myself into my own glass-bottomed boat. With my
body safely out of the water, it was fascinating to watch tiny black fish with luminous blue stripes and their little yellow cousins darting in between the golden corals.

In the afternoon I was sitting in the cockpit of the yacht when a couple of fishermen approached us in a small blue wooden skiff. In the bottom of their boat was a collection of coconuts and one
man hauled out three on to our deck. I said ‘Helo!’ and got a reply in Bahasa. They clung to the side of the yacht, holding the two boats close together, and grinned at me. Steve and
John had heard the outboard engine and came on deck to see what was going on.

‘We should give them some money for the coconuts,’ I said to Steve, quietly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They were a gift.’

‘That’s what people do out here,’ he added, smiling at the Malay men.

I thought he was being tight and forced him to ask the men if they wanted money. ‘Ringgit?’

They shook their heads but continued to cling to the boat and point to Mantanani Besar. We decided between the three of us that they probably wanted to take us on a tour of the island so we
changed into our shore clothes. I asked Steve if we should pay them for this.

‘They just want to show us around,’ he said. ‘They aren’t interested in money.’

He went downstairs and came back up carrying an inflatable globe. ‘Sekolah?’ he asked the two fishermen. They smiled and pointed to land.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked him.

‘I want to give it to a school and they said there’s one on the island.’
Another odd piece of charity
, was my first thought. But then I remembered the kampong and the
headphones.
Hey, what do I know? I keep being wrong about this
.