Casting Off (22 page)

You would think that, having been to an actual official immigration office, had a conversation with two immigration officials, paid money to an immigration agency and had some official
immigration papers stapled into my passport, getting on to my plane to fly to the UK would have been straightforward. Oh no, my innocent friend, not in Thailand, where the bribe is king. On second
thoughts, the king is the king in Thailand and it’s a criminal offence to disrespect him and probably not even an offer of a substantial bribe could get you off the hook for that – but
that’s another issue entirely, and one that, having written this sentence, I am likely to have to deal with if this book is published in Thailand. But anyway, as I was saying, bribery rules
in Thailand, OK? But I didn’t know that. Then.

I stood in the immigration queue at Phuket airport, ready with ticket in hand to fly to Kuala Lumpur and on to Stansted. When I reached the front of the line I handed over my passport to the
official. He opened it at the stapled-in pages, frowned and told me to go to the immigration office. Red faced, I left the queue and followed the signs to the office. A woman official beckoned me
to sit at her desk. She grilled me on how I had arrived in the country: by what boat? Where to? Where from? Why did I have this form in my passport? Why had I not posted the 20, 000 baht bond?

‘I went to immigration,’ I explained, ‘and they said I could pay an agent to put up the bond for me. Then they gave me these papers.’

‘Who is agent?’ I didn’t know – the male ‘boss’ on the phone had sorted it all out for me.

‘Where is receipt?’ I didn’t have one.

The woman, in her sharp military-style navy uniform, eyed me sternly.

‘The people at immigration arranged it,’ I tried again. ‘I come back Thailand two weeks. I go England my brother wedding.’ Now I had resorted to pidgin English to try to get my point across. ‘They say OK.’

She read through my papers again and took them off with her. I looked around the office while I waited, finding some solace in the fact that it was open plan. Less chance of my being locked
in.

The woman came back with my passport. ‘I must send copy to immigration office. You pay 500 baht for taxi.’

Why
, I wondered,
does the immigration office need copies? They were the ones that had signed the forms in the first place. And the copy is unlikely to get there before my plane
leaves in 40 minutes, anyway and… Ah
. (Ting! went the lightbulb in my head.) A bribe. I was relieved that she had dressed it up as an official fee to pay, saving me the embarrassment of
taking some notes out of my wallet and wafting them under her nose, adding to the wad until we reached an agreement. To be honest, I was so green at this stuff that I wouldn’t have had a clue
how much to make my starting offer for, anyway. I handed over the 500 baht ‘administration fee’, which was all the cash I had in my wallet, and walked through to the departure lounge
– without a receipt, naturally.

I
t was effing cold in England. There was even snow on the ground. The UK was in the grip of one of those record-breaking cold snaps and I’d
heard it had reached minus 18°C in Derbyshire one night, near where my brother was getting married. I was coming from 30°C in Thailand. That’s a temperature difference of nearly 50°C.

It was so cold, in fact, that the doors of the hold of the plane had frozen shut and they couldn’t get them open to unload our suitcases, so it was another long wait at the carousel in the
pre-dawn hours of the morning. I tried to get water from a vending machine but it kept spitting out my money rather than a bottle of Hildon. Next I went to fetch a trolley, to save carrying my bag
(just the one this time) on my back, and it charged me a pound.

There were posters all around the baggage reclaim area advertising different ways of getting into London. There was the Stansted Express, which took only 45 minutes to Liverpool Street but it
was a ball ache to get from there to Clapham, where I was headed, and, besides, as one of the most expensive train journeys in the UK by the mile, it cost far more than I was willing to pay. The
better option, I decided, was to take the National Express coach. It took longer but put me in Victoria and cost only a few pounds. Plane hold crowbarred open and luggage retrieved, I trudged off
towards the coach stand. They had a timetable on the desk and I realised that the next bus wasn’t for two hours. The millionaire’s limousine service – sorry, Stansted Express
– was going shortly but at a price I really couldn’t bring myself to pay. In Malaysia, I was living off that amount of money for a whole week. Then I remembered I’d been to
Stansted before on the local, stopping train service. I walked over to a ticket machine – of course, half of them were out of service – and put in my destination details. The price came up for an adult single – £17.70 for a half-hour ride to Tottenham Hale in north London. I blinked at the screen. Surely
there was some mistake? I cancelled it and tried it again. No mistake. So it was wait in the cold, empty airport for two hours or pay up and put up. Reluctantly I slid my card into the slot,
cursing ‘I fucking hate this country’ under my breath. Gold-plated ticket retrieved, I was on my way to the platform when I passed a vending machine and realised how hungry I was. I stuck in
cash for some chocolate – and neither it nor money came out. I didn’t have time to argue it out with anyone so I left it and got on the train, which was dirty, covered in graffiti and
the heating was broken. Welcome to England, Emma!

My stiff upper lip and British pride deserted me completely then. They had already been weakened a bit by the free and easy style of living abroad that I had been witnessing. The realisation of
how ridiculously expensive everything was – why would that £1.50 I had lost in the sweet machine only get a me quick sugar fix over here when it can buy an entire fresh, healthy meal in
Asia? – and the grubbiness and crappiness of everything broke me. Nothing worked – they couldn’t even get a door open in a country where it is winter for about eight months of the
year. The UK was grey, grey, grey. The people were grey-skinned and ugly. They wore grey, ugly clothes, lived in grey, ugly houses and had, judging by the scowls I was seeing on the train (and this
was a Saturday, so they didn’t even have the excuse that they were stressed-out commuters), grey, ugly personalities.
Why does everyone in this country let themselves be bullied into
working more and more hours, slogging away in their grey offices and factories, just to earn a bit more money to buy more useless crap that they don’t need in the first place
, I
wondered. The people I had seen and met in Malaysia and Thailand – the locals, that is, not the tight-fisted yachties or the drunken holidaymakers – seemed much more content with their
lot. Yes, they had less, but they wanted less. They worked at a slower pace – much to the yachties’ chagrin when they needed a job doing – but they chose to do so and
weren’t made to feel ashamed about it. They smiled hello to strangers, they dressed in colourful, beautiful clothes, they were polite and they didn’t go around scrawling on the sides of
trains with magic markers
.
And don’t even get me started on the weather.
I’ve had it with England
, I thought.

Thinking back, I like to imagine that a ray of yellow sunlight cut through all that negative thinking and greyness to shine down on me, and me alone, on that train, illuminating me with a golden
glow, bathing me in a wash of warmth and filling my ears with the sound of angels harmonising as this next thought popped into my head. Sadly, I don’t think that actually happened – but
what I did have was an uncommonly clear moment of thought. A realisation. An inspiration. A eureka moment. I had an epiphany.

It came to me all of a sudden, a complete idea downloaded into my brain in a millisecond. If I could slow it down and reproduce a transcript of that lightbulb moment, it would go something like
this:
’Sod this. I’m off to live somewhere hot and sunny. I’m going to get a job to do with boats, save a bit of cash, and buy a house – in the Caribbean. It will have a
beautiful green garden full of flowers, an outdoor pool and a spare room for family and friends to stay in. I’m going to get a ute, like in
Neighbours
, and I’ll drive happily
through the dusty roads to the airport to pick up my constant stream of visitors. We’ll eat barbecued fish – only not catfood tuna – and they can have the run of the house while I
have to pop out for a few hours to see to my boat/tourist business. I won’t have any money worries because it’ll be miraculously cheap to live on my Caribbean island, I’ll never
wear grey or black again and I’ll be tanned, happy and healthy. All the time. It’s going to be ace.’

In case you haven’t already noticed (not likely), I have a very overactive imagination and I even filled in the smallest of details of my daydream: the colour of my house – yellow
– and the positions of where my friends would ride in the ute – adults in the front, with the air-conditioning, kids allowed in the truck bed, because I’m cool. I even went so far as to think about whether my parents would come to visit –
they aren’t fans of hot climes.

And it didn’t really occur to me that that couldn’t be my life. For the past 32 years, if I had wanted something, I had just applied myself and gone for it and usually it worked. I wanted to be a journalist on a national newspaper, even though I was a sheltered kid from northern suburbia. I wanted to be able to run long distances like a gazelle, even though I
couldn’t limp along for more than 10 minutes without having to stop. I wanted to own a property in a decent postcode, not somewhere that was so far out of London it gave me a nosebleed just
thinking about it. I don’t mean to sound big-headed; I prefer to think of myself as determined. If I had a goal, I just applied myself to it, found ways of working with it or around it, and
eventually, many breathless training sessions or village fete reports later, I got there. Why should this be any different?

It was with this thought in my mind that I returned to Thailand and to
Gillaroo
. My fortnight in the UK had been a blur of shivering coach and train rides up and down the country, from
London to Derby to the New Forest to Brighton and back to London again, seeing my little brother say ‘I do’ to his fiancée (now there are two Emma Bamfords in my family),
catching up with friends, rebuffing countless queries about when I was going to come back home and boring senseless absolutely every single person I met about my epiphany, my Caribbean house and my
ute. The odd one was excited at the prospect of cheap holidays in an exotic location; most just looked at me kindly, nodded and patted my hand.

Tyrone had been busy while I was away, finding not just two but four new crew members. Pablo and Libertad, a Spanish couple in their early twenties who had been cycling around Malaysia and
Thailand, had already moved into my cabin when I returned, their bikes wrapped in multiple layers of clingfilm to protect them from the rust and stored in the hold. I decamped to the front cabin
that had been Hugo and Aaron’s – the one that was on the cockroach superhighway.

Pablo and Libertad had never sailed before and Tyrone decided that I should help him teach them. We got a Spaniard each – Pablo was mine. They looked like typical, black-haired southern
Europeans: Pablo was small and skinny, with a toothy grin and good-looking features that reminded me of Noah Wyle, who played John Carter in
ER
. Libertad looked a little like a boy –
she wore men’s clothes and had very short hair – but had the sweetest, loveliest personality, always checking everyone was OK, laughing and finding fun in everything.

The other crew, an English couple, Ben and Vicky, who were a couple of years older than me, were to arrive later in the week, Tyrone said, and we would leave for a four-day passage to the
Andaman Islands on 23 December. Christmas Day would be at sea, hundreds of miles from any land.

I had just enough time for another quick visit to Lanta. Guy picked me up again and I was bursting with excitement to tell him about my epiphany. We lounged on beach chairs, staring out at the
sea over the tops of our bottles of Tiger, as I explained. I was fairly confident that, unlike people back home, he would understand where I was coming from, that he would see it as a realistic
aim, that he would be as excited for me as I was for myself.