Casting Off (10 page)

Back in London, I used to cram so much into every day: 11 or 12 hours in the office, two hours of commuting, a trip to the gym or a run, cooking, cleaning, catching up with friends. Now a whole
day could easily pass by with me doing little more than going on a couple of outings to look for animals. Each day was luxuriously long – like that feeling you get a few days into a vacation
when you finally start to relax, but a more extreme version. The heat and humidity of the jungle sapped a lot of energy but that was OK – there was little to do anyway and nothing urgent.
Things between Steve and me had settled and I loved sleeping by myself in the forepeak, stretched out to try to expose as much of my skin as I could to the puff of the fan.

I learned to drive the dinghy and we did drifts every day, switching off the engine, settling down in the bottom of the boat to be swept along by the current, our backs leaning against the
inflated rubber hull, just staring out at the jungle as it inched past. After a few non-events, I learned to recognise the kinds of trees monkeys like to live in and we discovered the best time to
go monkey-watching was just before dusk. The sound of crashing branches was the first sign we were in the right place. We’d hear noises and then look around the canopy until we saw leaves
moving. Then I would adjust my eyes, like you do for those 3D-image posters that were all the rage when I was about 13. Remember those? You let your eyes go out of focus and some of the meaningless
dots and swirls would recede or move forward until you could see the three-dimensional image of Jesus, or if you couldn’t see it you’d wait until your friend said something like,
‘I can see his beard!’ – and then you’d lie and pretend you could, too.

The same thing applied to the monkeys except going boss-eyed didn’t help. What I had to do here was look for grey or brown patches among the leaves and watch them until they moved. Once
I’d got one monkey in my sights I could then see all of the others, like I’d passed some secret test. It seemed as if only then would they come out for our entertainment, leaping from
branch to branch or sometimes huge distances from tree to tree, like circus performers. Tiny babies clung to their mothers’ bodies while older children played, daring each other to jump from
a greater height or starting a wrestling match. The long and short-tailed macaques, with their sad-looking faces and grey fur, were the most hyperactive breeds. But I loved watching the proboscis
monkeys, a species only found on Borneo. They may have been slower but they were so entertaining. They have a distinctly unathletic build, with enormous Tellytubby bellies and skinny little arms
and legs covered in two-tone red and grey hair. When they walk along a branch they waddle like a nine-months-pregnant woman, even the males, who are easily identifiable because their tiny red
penises are always hanging out and often standing to attention. Their upturned noses and round faces make them look either benignly surprised or angrily glowering, depending on whether their chins
are tilted up or down. They are possibly one of the oddest yet most human-looking creatures around. I was spellbound.

They were fond of sitting in the Y-section of a tree where two branches joined and on one evening we saw them not long into our drift. We were looking at one family, about 20 or 30 metres above
us, and keeping as quiet as we could. But we were spotted anyway. The big male saw us and actually did a double-take. Then he hauled himself to his feet, his hands on different branches, and stuck
his head as far forward as it would go to get a better look at us. If his eyes had popped forwards out of their sockets and a cartoon-style car hooter noise gone off, it wouldn’t have seemed
out of place. He stayed like that for ages, occasionally looking away and then turning back to us and craning his neck forwards again, holding on to his branches the whole time.
Blue Steel
Ron had said that jungle sights were ‘better than a movie’. I’m sure Mr Tubby, up there in his tree, watching these funny-coloured, non-furry animals sitting in the bottom of a
grey rubbery triangle, would have agreed with him.

On that trip I fell in love with the rainforest. Despite the hideous heat and humidity, the flies and mosquitoes and the fear of crocodiles that kept us out of the cooling waters, it was the
most amazing place I’d been to. The most beautiful scenes in England, even at the height of spring or in the full colour of autumn, just cannot compete. If I look out of my parents’
window on to the rolling valleys of Derbyshire, there is undeniably beauty there but it’s of a quieter, more tamed variety. Refined, in a mute-toned, prim, British way. The Borneo rainforest
might be bold and brassy in comparison, with its primary colours and rowdiness, but that wild sluttiness only added to its appeal for me.

During the hottest part of the afternoons the animals took a siesta and Steve and I retreated to the shade of the yacht. One day I was lying in a hammock on the foredeck that Steve had strung up
between the roller furler and the mast, trying to keep as still as possible to get some respite from the constant, abundant sweating in the stifling rainforest humidity. It was a big hammock and
Steve climbed in the other end, disturbing me while I was trying to read. Reading is one of my big loves but working in the newspaper industry had killed off the enjoyment for me – when you
have to read tens of thousands of words a day, the last thing you want to do in your free time is pick up a book. Your brain is ‘literally’ tired. But by now I had been away from London
long enough, my mind had had time to heal itself from its exhaustion. Like getting over a sickness, it was starving for stories and I made sure I fed it everything I could get my hands on –
even some sickly sweet romance novels another boat had lent me. Steve wasn’t a reader and didn’t really understand the enjoyment of it. Reading was something he did when there was
nothing else to entertain him. His stock of non-boating books were the Harry Potter and the His Dark Materials series. Oh, and one on the enjoyment of tantric sex.

He put his feet on my lap. Even though we were sleeping in separate cabins, he was still touchy feely with me, often hugging or stroking me. I felt bad enough for rejecting him that I tolerated
it when we were alone on the boat, but as soon as there was anyone else around I made sure I moved out of reach.

‘All right?’ I asked, trying to be polite, even though I was mildly annoyed at being disturbed and his feet on my lap were making me hotter.

‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘I want a girlfriend and it seems you’ve decided it’s not going to be you. But I’m finding it really hard to understand why. When
we’re on land we’re one thing in front of other people – not touching, conforming to ‘normal’ behaviour, but when we’re on the boat, we’re something else.
If we were away at sea we might find we ended up having a relationship anyway.’

I had put down my book to listen to him. Now I fiddled with the edges of the pages as I thought about what to say. He was the one who had asked me to move out of his cabin, implying he
wasn’t interested in being a couple, either, so why was he now saying the opposite? I was certain that, despite my earlier behaviour, even if we were off in the middle of nowhere I
wouldn’t change my mind. Moving my legs as far away from his feet as was possible in a hammock containing two people, I told him I’d make an effort to behave ‘normally’ all
the time, if that was confusing him.

‘So no more cuddles?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied, thinking,
They are always instigated by you anyway, never me
,
so that isn’t going to be hard for me to stick to
.

‘OK,’ he agreed, looking away at the jungle and adding that he ‘might have to go and listen to the Archers’, which was code for meaning he needed to cry.
Oh
crap
, I thought
. What mess have I got myself into?

‘Look, Steve, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’m hurting your feelings and I don’t want to.’

He nodded, his hand covering his face, his mouth creasing into a grimace, and I stayed, squirming in the other end of the hammock, until he had finished. After he had calmed down, he said he
would email other women who had replied to his ‘crew wanted’ adverts. He had put them on the backburner while I was on board, he said.

Through other conversations we had had, I had come to understand how difficult he had found it – and still was finding it – to meet someone. He had chosen this life on a boat and he
wanted to be with a woman who would enjoy it. The trouble was that most yachties are already firmly established couples who sell their homes and businesses to live out their jointly held dream.
Steve said he wasn’t interested in Thai or Malaysian women so that meant he had to advertise to Westerners. He’d tried internet dating and even placed a small ad in a magazine. The
distance between the UK and Malaysia meant there was no casual meeting up for a coffee to see if they got along and calling it a day after an hour or so if there was no chemistry. Instead, a
long-distance relationship had to be cultivated over the phone and email.

‘And because of the time difference,’ he explained, ‘the only time they can talk is after work, which means I have to get up at 4am if I want to talk or chat over Skype or
Facebook.’ A few women, he said, had flown out to visit. Of the three, he had liked one and had gone to the UK to visit her. She was a successful businesswoman and, even though he never
described her, I built up an image of her in my head: like Deborah Meaden from
Dragon’s Den
crossed with Karren Brady; busty, fond of sober but expensively cut skirt suits and
always, for some reason, wearing a chunky necklace of oversized navy blue beads.

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

‘She was too commercial, so I ended it.’ Music can sometimes be disparagingly labelled as ‘too commercial’, but people? ‘She liked to own things,’ he
clarified. Ah. And there aren’t a lot of chances to go shopping in the Malaysian jungle. Hell, shopping out here consisted of old guys in a little wooden boat bringing you a pumpkin.

I felt sorry for him. I’d tried internet dating in London and had never quite been able to reconcile the idea of the person I’d built up in my head from his profile, photos and
emails with the actual, real-life man standing in front of me. And that was easy dating, as I could walk away if I didn’t like the guy. That’s not exactly possible when you’ve
whisked the lady off to a picturesque, remote spot in the hopes of letting the romance flow and you find out you’re incompatible and the furthest you can get away from each other is 46 feet.
Maybe 56 feet, if one of you climbs into the dingy.

Over the following days there was no awkwardness on Steve’s part so I concluded that he was fine with everything. Now we were ‘mates’ he started to tell me about the women he
was hearing from. He’d read me their emails and show me photos they had sent as they downloaded, very slowly with the dreadful connection we got and only then if we anchored in certain
places. I began to realise that he had very high standards: one was rejected for her poor grammar (although I have been guilty of doing the same in the past); another because she was too chubby; a
third purely because she was American. I am not chubby nor American and, as an editor, my grammar is not too bad.
That must have been how I slipped through his filters
, I thought. I was
glad he felt able to talk to me about it and the underlying atmosphere that had permeated the boat since Claire and Lizzie had left dissipated. In my new spirit of openness, I had tried it, found I
didn’t like it and now it was time to move on and focus on having fun – and ignore that little twinge of guilt that was niggling in my belly.

E
lephants everywhere!’ read a text from Greg and Debs up the Kinabatangan on
Southern Cross
. Steve and I had left the river to go to
Sandakan town to restock but we didn’t need any more motivation than that to return to the rainforest.

‘
Kingdom
,
Kingdom
, this is
Southern Cross
, over,’ came Debs’s voice over the VHF when we were halfway up the river.

I grabbed the handheld radio and pressed the button to transmit. ‘
Southern Cross
, this is
Kingdom
. Hi, Debs. We’re fine, thanks. How are you? Are the elephants
still there?’

‘G’day, Emma, how’s it going? Want to switch to channel 68, over?’ I’d forgotten that we weren’t supposed to be clogging up the emergency channel 16 with idle
chit-chat. It was easy in the lazy heat of Malaysia to forget all the strict boat protocol stuff that sailors religiously stick to in the cold waters around the UK. But at least I didn’t use
‘over and out’ to sign off.

I left Steve steering the boat up the river, dodging the enormous drifting logs again, while I nipped below to plug my camera in to charge while the yacht’s engine was running. As I
reached for the inverter, my mobile phone vibrated with a text message. Messages from home were rare – I suspected it was very much ‘out of sight, out of mind’ – and a
strong enough signal to receive them even rarer. It was from Lou, an old flatmate and a friend back in London, the inbox said. And it was a baby scan.

Hot tears sprang into my eyes and an unmoveable lump suddenly appeared to lodge in my throat. I stared at the grainy grey image. ‘Looking forward to meeting you, Aunty xx’,
she’d written. I hadn’t even known they were trying for a baby. Huge sobs burst from deep inside me and I jammed a hand over my mouth to stifle the noise. Hunched over in emotional
agony, I ran into the bathroom, locked the door and cried and cried and cried.

Plenty of my friends had had children and I don’t know why this one was more of a shock than any other but it hit me really hard. Maybe I would have handled the news better in London and
it was receiving such a stark reminder here, in a tropical jungle, of all places, of what others had that I didn’t that affected me so strongly. My life here in Borneo was child-free and
there’d been none of those reminders about what I ‘should’ be. The people I hung out with were generally older and even if they had children they were grown up. Feeling left
behind hadn’t crossed my mind the whole time I had been here – and even for months before I left the UK, as I’d been so absorbed with preparing for my adventure. In a way it was
like relapsing on the booze after going cold turkey for a while – just one hit affected me so much more strongly than before. It took me a good 20 minutes to calm down and compose myself
before I could go back on deck.