Casting Off (13 page)

And turtles, turtles, everywhere. They surfaced by the side of the yacht, taking a gasp of air and diving down again. They popped up in front of the dinghy when we were motoring ashore and
we’d have to alter course quickly to avoid running them over. There were hawksbills and green turtles and Greg taught me how to tell the difference between them, to look for the point at the
bottom of the shell, near the tail. If there was a point there, it was a hawksbill; if not, it was a turtle.

The Australians were pure water babies. Debs was a school teacher but she had been a kayak champion in her youth and still had an athlete’s body, lean and long, and Greg had been a pearl
diver in the north-west. He had an enormous ribcage and incredibly broad shoulders and could free-dive for minutes and minutes on end.

I don’t know how Debs knew I was afraid of snorkelling but she took it upon herself to ease me into it gently. The last time I had tried, with Steve, I had freaked out and had to scramble
back into the dinghy. Debs took me out on to the reef, miles away from the yachts, in her dinghy. It was just the two of us and I didn’t know her very well so I felt like I had to be on my
best behaviour. Also, here was another woman, who was less likely to put up with wimpy crying at the sight of a few little Nemos than a man would. Steve had instructed me to roll into the water
from the side of a dinghy and made me wear my snorkel on the left-hand side, because ‘that’s what scuba divers do’. He would pull me along, trying to be encouraging, but in
reality just adding to my panic because I wasn’t in control of where I was going or at what speed. Debs was much less regimented about it.

‘All right?’ she asked, as she stopped the dinghy engine and lifted it up out of the water, to reduce drag because she was going to tow it along with us as we swam. She pulled her
mask over her eyes, put the snorkel into her mouth and jumped. No rolling, no faffing, no nonsense; just easy and relaxed. I swallowed hard and looked down. I couldn’t see any fish around the
boat, just clear water and some coral. There was no way I could witter on about wanting to stay in the dinghy and do my glass-bottomed-boat act in front of this fearless Amazonian Australian. I
closed my eyes, held my breath and jumped. And it was great. Debs stayed close to me but didn’t crowd me. She’d look out for interesting things and point them out to me then surface and
tell me all about them while we trod water.

‘Is that a clownfish?’ I asked, recognising them from the movie
Finding Nemo
.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘They’re such territorial little guys. If you get too close they’ll have a go at you, swim right up and bump into your mask.’ It was funny
to imagine this little fish, all of 5cm long, trying to take on a human being.

She dived down and fetched up a cowrie shell for me to see. The mollusc was still alive and a thin, suede-like membrane covered the outside of the shiny shell. It was soft to the touch and when
we brushed our fingers against it, it recoiled inside its shell. She told me about corals that looked like brains, like trees and like antlers, and even about ones that picked up their legs and
walked. I had trouble remembering the names of all the fish she showed me so I made up my own: fusiliers were ‘yellow and purple fish’ because, well, they were yellow and purple. A
weird creature with a wobbly skirt that changed colour to match whatever it was next to swam past: Debs explained it was a cuttlefish. I was astounded as it bore no resemblance to the flat bony
shells my auntie used to give to her budgie for it to sharpen its beak against. I saw something that looked like a bright red rose and showed it to Debs. She said it was nudibranch eggs. I had no
idea what a nudibranch was but if its eggs were that beautiful, I imagined the creature itself must be spectacular. (I was a little disappointed to see one in a book and find it looked like a
multicoloured slug.) The longer I spent in the water, the more comfortable I felt as I began to recognise that the fish were more afraid of me than I was of them – they would always move out
of my way, even if I swam right into the middle of a large shoal.

By the time we saw a turtle swimming near us, I was confident enough to follow it, off the edge of the coral drop-off and into 40 metres of deep blue water. I kept my eyes on the animal rather
than looking around for the bottom. I think the turtle was just as curious about me as I was about him. He fixed me with a beady eye and slowed his pace so that we swam along in synchronicity. I
waited for him when he dived down to check out an interesting patch of grass and stuck my head above the surface at the same time he did when he had to take a breath of air. We had lost part of one
of his back flippers so I nicknamed him Stumpy. Three hours passed in what seemed like minutes. We only got out because we started to feel cold, even in the 31°C water. On deck, drying in the
sun, I was so elated I radiated happiness. I was so proud of myself for conquering a fear and, more, for actually enjoying it. I’m sure the magical beauty of Mabul had as much to do with it
as Debs’s kindness and patience. Who could resist taking a look at all this extraordinary life under our keels once they had had a glimpse of how astonishing it was?

Steve had managed to get a pass to Sipadan and joined a dive tour for the day and I was sitting in the cockpit, still euphoric, when he came back in the dinghy.

‘I’ve got some great gossip!’ he yelled, over the engine, as he tied the dinghy alongside.

‘Gossip?’ I asked, surprised. The only people we knew here were Greg and Debs, and I’d been with the latter all day.

He switched off the engine and climbed on board. ‘It’s about Sexy Josh and Kristin. You’re not going to believe this.’

On his dive trip, most of the other customers had been couples but there was an English woman who he had ‘befriended’: a thirty-something blonde called Jenny. Steve had been chatting
to (chatting up, probably) Jenny and told her that he lived on a yacht. She knew someone who lived on a boat, she told Steve. She’d met him in Langkawi when she was on holiday last year and
he’d swept her off her feet – after he’d told her he was single. He’d taken her camping in the rainforest, they’d gone out for trips on his yacht. They’d had a
holiday romance and, afterwards, they’d become friends on Facebook. Jenny was so smitten that she’d arranged to come back to Borneo this year to meet up with him; they’d had lunch
in Kota Kinabalu. The guy was Sexy Josh, Steve told me with glee, and Kristin had, apparently, seen some Facebook messages and hit the roof. But Jenny didn’t know that we knew the
Americans.

‘I’ve invited Jenny over for drinks tonight,’ Steve said. ‘I’m picking her up in an hour and I’ll stop by
Southern Cross
and
Sunrise
on my
way to Mabul and ask them over, too.’

So we were seven crammed into the cockpit. I liked Jenny: she was about 35, slim and pretty, and worked in advertising. Once she’d sunk a few G&Ts she started telling everyone how she
wanted to get married and have children but that she hadn’t been on a date for two years.
What about Josh?
I thought. It was very nice to have confirmation that I wasn’t the
only single girl left in London but it also made me feel like a bit of a cliché. She even lived two roads down from me in Clapham.

Before Steve drove Jenny back to her dorm room on the island, the pair of them, plus Greg and Nic from
Sunrise,
arranged to go diving from the dinghies the next day. Nic had told us he
was a dive photographer. He travelled around in his yacht, mostly by himself, shooting underwater life and publishing his best pictures in spectacularly beautiful books. He was the epitome of
cool.

Steve and I swung by
Sunrise
the next morning to fix the time they were all going to meet. Nic, fresh from the shower after a dawn solo-dive, crouched down to talk to us, dressed in a
sarong, his long, wet, dark hair hanging loosely around his shoulders. He had that slightly arrogant French look and his thickly lashed green eyes danced with amusement as he spoke in halting
English.

I had the boat to myself (plus the cat) for the latter half of the morning while the others were diving and, when Steve and Jenny returned to
Kingdom
for lunch, I listened to him
flirting with her while I made a meal for the three of us.
Here we go again
, I thought. She came back with him after the second diving session, too, for sun-downers, and invited us to her
resort for dinner.

‘I’ve got to go because it’s my friend’s birthday and I promised him I’d be there,’ she said. ‘But why don’t you two come, too? It’s a
self-service buffet and I don’t think they’d notice.’

At Jenny’s resort the benches were packed with young people, a bit like the dining hall at university, except with better tans.

We loaded our plates and found a table at the back that had space and tried to act like we belonged there. Two young, shirtless Americans were sitting opposite us.

‘Good diving today?’ one of them asked.

‘Yeah, great, thanks,’ Steve replied. Maybe they thought we were all divers, just like them. Steve had had done his usual trick and brought a cool bag loaded with drinks. We emptied
our borrowed plastic water beakers and filled them with wine.

‘Hey, where did you guys get wine from around here?’ the dark-haired American asked. ‘All I can find is that Filipino rum. Say, are you guys from that sailboat out
there?’ We admitted that we were. ‘I knew it,’ he said, looking at Steve. ‘You’ve got wine and you’re wearing a shirt.’

‘Wearing shirts?’ I asked.

‘Well, divers and sailors always have their uniforms. Sailors always wear shirts, see, and divers wear T-shirts.’ I looked around at the other divers in the room. Of the men that
were clothed, each one was dressed in a round-necked T-shirt. Steve was in his uniform of Hawaiian shirt and shorts. Greg and Debs arrived – Greg in a collared shirt – and then Nic,
also in a Hawaiian shirt. Come to think of it, I had never seen Steve in anything other than a casual, short-sleeved shirt with a collar. The American was right.

Cruising sailors are not known for their sense of style. When you do see a man in a T-shirt, it is invariably printed with the logo of a brand of beer of a country he has visited or the name of
a marina he has stayed at. These T-shirts are usually freebies. Colours have faded in the UV, whites have turned grey from being hand-laundered in buckets of rainwater and the rigging has torn
holes in almost every garment. The women aren’t much better: they either dress like men in shirts and shorts or wear shapeless, baggy dresses. They are usually bra-less and because of their
average age this really isn’t a good idea. For a relatively young cruiser, Steve had an even worse sense of style. When I had first arrived on
Kingdom
, I had seen a pair of his jeans
hanging up, drying, and had been confused about why such a small man would need such a large pair of jeans. And heavily stonewashed ones at that. All of the cupboards on the yacht with hanging
space were crammed with short-sleeved shirts in garish colours and giant patterns. His ‘best’ shirt was collarless with long, voluminous sleeves and lacing across the gaping neck. It
looked like Errol Flynn’s undershirt but he thought it made him look dashing. He had a go at me once, upset, about why I never complimented him on anything he wore. How can you tell someone
that you never say they look nice because you think every piece of clothing they wear is hideously ugly?

Dinner over, we moved the party upstairs and sat on stools around the bar. Jenny went to her dorm to shower and Steve was talking to Greg and Debs so I started a conversation with Nic. The wine
was finished and we switched to Tanduay, strong Filipino rum that is loaded with chemicals that makes you really, really, drunk very, very quickly. I was soon seeing two Nics. Before coming to
Thailand and Malaysia he had been diving and working in Madagascar. He thought Steve was my boyfriend so I quickly set him straight on that front, explaining I was a paying customer and that
I’d come out to Borneo to race.

‘Race?’ he said, clearly not enamoured with the thought. ‘I do not like this racing. The last thing I raced after was my wife – and I lost.’