Casting Off (12 page)

Waves of hatred were coming off him. Maybe his 3am emailing sessions weren’t going well and he was tired and frustrated. I didn’t know. And right then I didn’t want to find
out. I went to do the washing-up to distract myself and to try to empty the thoughts from my mind, but it was no good. I felt victimised, embarrassed, guilty and angry with myself for being an
idiot in everything I had done and said and, even more, for what I had not said. I started to cry. Steve heard me – not difficult when you’re sat only a metre away, and came to put his
arm around me. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Well, you just accused me of prostituting myself, that’s what wrong,’ I replied.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that.’

I offered to go online and change the payments to £25 a day and transfer him the difference for the days I’d already been on board.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’d appreciate that.’

Living with one person is tough enough. Living with one person in a small space where you do everything together 24/7 is harder. And living with one person who you used to sleep with in a small
floating space where you are together 24/7 and you can’t get off is the hardest of all. The pettiest little annoyances become big issues pretty quickly, and when you do argue, tension lingers
in the air for a long time afterwards.

Knowing this, Steve announced that he wanted to ‘play a new game’. ‘We tell each other something about the other one that annoys us. Then we can clear the air.’

‘Erm. Right. Why?’

‘Come on, just try it. You can go first.’

Hmm
, I thought.
What have I done wrong now?
I was going through a stage where it seemed I couldn’t do anything right – handle the sails, wear the
‘correct’ clothes, clean the toilet, play with the cat. Every time he would stop me and show me how to do something differently, i.e. his way. So, the game.
What should I
say?

‘OK.’ I took a breath. ‘Don’t tell me what to eat or comment on what I eat.’ This was one thing that had been really annoying me. It started with Steve saying he
disliked stodgy rice and progressed to his transferring his fear of all carbs and putting on weight on to me. He was Dr Atkins’s biggest fan.

‘So no more talk about obesity?’ he tried to joke. But I was on a roll now.

‘No, and no pointing it out when I do or don’t have seconds at dinner or want a biscuit. And no more grabbing hold of my belly and wobbling it up and down. It’s so frustrating,
at 32 years old, with a good education, my own home and a pretty responsible job, to be told what to eat as if I were a small child. Carbs are not the enemy.’ My voice was rising as I warmed
to my theme. ‘I happen to think my diet is pretty good, with lots of fruit and vegetables, thank you very much. I only weigh fifty-eight kilos, for God’s sake!’

He was right – this new game was fun. I felt a lot better for getting things off my chest
. I should do this more often, rather than hold things in because I worry about upsetting
people
, I thought. Now it was my turn to take it. I steeled myself, ready for the onslaught.

‘Please can you not leave the foot pumps sticking out of the floor when you’ve finished at the sink,’ he said, and wandered off. That was it. I felt pretty small. But I helped
myself to a biscuit without having to sneak it and that felt good.

To make amends for the earlier arguments about the advert and money, I offered to polish all of the stanchions, the posts that hold up the safety lines around the deck of the boat. There were 24
of them, all stainless steel and growing rust. I thought it’d be a bit like doing the housework: a bit of scrubbing, a bit of buffing and Bob’s your uncle (actually, he is but he
prefers to go by Robert). How silly I was – the man who keeps his saucepans wrapped individually in plastic is not going to be placated with a quick squirt of Mr Muscle.

He showed me the technique. First I had to stick blue masking tape around the base of each stanchion, to prevent polish from staining the teak deck. ‘But this tape is expensive, so
don’t use too much of it,’ he said. Next I had to apply a special product and use a toothbrush to scrub away at the rusty sections, rubbing until the pale pink paste turned grey.
I’d wipe it away, check for any residual rust, and keep repeating the procedure until it was all gone. Then I’d get a clean rag and rub, buff and polish until my fingers blistered and I
could see myself reflected in thesteel. The base of each stanchion had two thin steel legs coming out of it and the plates were fastened to the deck with screws and, of course, the rust liked to
develop in these awkward-to-reach places. It took me nearly an hour to do each stanchion, crouched or kneeling for three days under the beating sun.

But all that good, Protestant hard work didn’t make me feel any better. In a way it made things worse because I began to be angry that I was actually paying Steve £25 a day to work
on his boat. I know that I offered to do the job and he was busy doing other things – wiring a rotating glitter ball into the cockpit (like that was an essential task), changing oil and water
in the engine and batteries, mixing up that home brewing kit I’d lugged from the UK but forgetting to add the sugar so that the yeast didn’t ferment and the whole brown, sludgy lot
ended up being thrown into the river – but I started to get a real bee in my bonnet about it.
He needs to decide whether he wants a paying customer or an employee
, I muttered to
myself as I rubbed away.

When I took a break to read a book it sparked off another argument. He said I wasn’t helping out enough, that I should ‘take care’ of downstairs while he did everything on
deck. By downstairs duties he meant doing all of the cooking, washing-up and cleaning. I was furious – I hadn’t travelled all this way to be someone’s housewife or maidservant. I
had come away to sail, travel and explore but, sitting on anchor up a river, we were doing none of those things.

I started to think about leaving
Kingdom
and sent a text to
Blue Steel
’s Ron asking if he was looking for crew. I also checked the crew website for other boats and sent
out three emails. In one I asked the skipper outright whether he was looking for platonic crew or a girlfriend. I didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.

I don’t know if Steve sensed that I was looking to make good my escape because the morning after I’d sent the emails he apologised for some of the things he’d said, and
explained he felt ‘resentment’ towards me
. No shit, Sherlock – even Dr Watson would have noticed that
. I asked why he resented me and he said it was because I
hadn’t been paying him enough money – ‘It costs me £60 a day to run this boat,’ he said – and for not wanting to go out with him.

Ron texted to ask if I wanted to go with him. I confessed to Steve and he was shocked and upset, telling me
Blue Steel
’s planned route, from Kota Kinabalu to Kuching to Tioman and
then around Singapore to Thailand, wouldn’t be very good. I asked Debs, as an independent source, what she thought of that journey and she said the water was dirty and it would mainly be
motoring, rather than sailing, and dodging fishing boats. I also had an email from a man called Will about a one-year trip from New Zealand to the east coast of America.

‘Why on earth would anyone want to go that quickly?’ Steve asked, incredulous.

‘I do,’ I said.

‘But why? You came away to change your life and you want to stay the same. You don’t think about what’s important in life.’ He meant that I had lived a fast-paced life in
London and now I was refusing to slow down. That wasn’t entirely fair of him – I had slowed down, it was just that my idea of slow was much quicker than his. The first few weeks of my
time on
Kingdom
had been great and we’d travelled a long way but the last month we’d been pretty much in the same place. I loved the rainforest but I was itching to move on, to
discover the new things out there. Steve still didn’t know when he was going to set sail for the Philippines and I didn’t want to spend another three months pottering back and forth
between the same towns we’d already been to.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it seems like you’ve already made up your mind to go with Ron.’ And I almost had. I started looking up flights to KK and Kuching. But then I was
uploading photos from my camera to my computer of the Kinabatangan river, Banggi with the otters and a coral cay we’d stopped at, and I got all dewy eyed as I relived all the wonderful things
we’d seen. I told Steve I’d like to stay. For some reason, although we had our problems, I felt a loyalty to him and I didn’t want to let him down. Also Big John had told me he
had seen cockroaches on
Blue Steel
and I really can’t stand the scuttling, shiny-shelled, filthy beetly things. So, blaming my horror of arthropods rather than my inability to
confront the real issue, I put my head in the sand and tried to convince myself that everything was OK.

I
t is possible my attempt to leave gave Steve a bit of a kick up the backside because only a day or two later we were motoring out of the
Kinabatangan and on our way to Sipadan, an island famed as one of the best scuba-diving sites in the world.
Southern Cross
was heading the same way as us and we set a course for Semporna,
the town nearest to Sipadan. On our way we heard
Southern Cross
talking on the radio to a French yacht called
Sunrise
. The skipper, Nic, had been anchored and a local approached
in his boat, not saying anything, just watching closely. Nic looked down and saw he had automatic guns lying by his feet. We heard him tell Greg over the VHF that he would leave the area. He
sounded remarkably cool about it. That’s the French for you.

Here, on the north-east coast of Borneo, almost as far south as the Indonesian border, with the Celebes/Sulu Sea bringing fresh water, we were worlds away from the yellow murkiness of the
Kinabatangan. The water was up to 200 metres deep and the most beautiful, iridescent blue.

Unfortunately, Semporna was a dump of a town: dirty, smelly and busy. We wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible so that we could go to Sipadan.

‘You know you can’t go to Sipadan,’ a guy who owned a dive company, Scuba Junkies, told us. ‘It’s a restricted area. You need a permit to dive there and they only
give out fifty each day. It is forbidden for you to anchor there.’ Great. That was that plan gone.

Sipadan is a world-class diving site which attracts people who want to see everything, from tiny seahorses to big pelagic fish and sharks, all in one place. To protect its wildlife, habitats and
status, the resorts on the island were closed down and the number of visitors limited. The conservation practice worked: they practically guarantee that you will see turtles there. Obviously I
wasn’t so big on the diving but I was keen to do my glass-bottom-boat bit. I still hadn’t seen a turtle, other than the rescued one and the hatchlings on Pulau Gulimaan. The closest
I’d come was a few ripples on the surface. But Steve definitely wanted to don his scuba gear. We could, we were told, anchor at Mabul, an island eight miles away from Sipadan that had a few
small dive resorts on it.

So we went to Mabul. The contrast with Semporna was unbelievable. It was a tiny sand island with four or five resorts on it, low-rise buildings set back from the water and blending into the
jungle. There was one very smart-looking Chinese resort with wooden bungalows on jetties that extended a hundred metres or so over the sea so that the guests were completely surrounded by turquoise
waters. It was six-star honeymoon stuff: raked sand, cordoned-off swimming areas, eco-huts in local hardwood. A few yachts were already anchored.
Southern Cross
had overtaken us and we saw
Sunrise
, the French boat that had had the run-in with the armed fisherman.

Surely this was paradise – even more of a paradise than the other places I had visited. The novelty of beautiful islands wasn’t even close to wearing off, especially with one as
stunning as Mabul. The water was the clearest I had ever seen. As we motored along we passed over a huge clear area, about a quarter of a mile square, that had no reef or rocks on the bottom, just
pure white sand and thousands upon thousands of spotted starfish, all lying a similar distance away from each other to form a pattern so perfect it was hard to believe someone hadn’t placed
them all out by hand. Beyond the starfish was a coral reef. We had to be careful to drop our anchor over a white patch of seabed so that we dug into sand, rather than destroying reef. But as we
paid out the chain we drifted backwards until we were floating safely above small patches of coral. Within an hour we had visitors: the usual little silver shoals I called poo fish, because they
liked to hover around the head’s outlet pipe, and some rich, dark blue fish that had skins like velvet, with long U-shaped tail fins that swayed gently in the current. They looked like jewels
against the white sand beneath. It was here I learned that fish talk. Those velvety blues chirruped so loudly I could hear them while I stood on deck.