Casting Off (35 page)

Thanks for the offer, Sven, but no thanks
, I thought.
Peeling turnips in a remote farmhouse is not my future. Where are the white Caribbean beaches, the tropical garden, the fun
parties and the ute? I think I’ll stick with my epiphany.

A
fter we waved the Central Americans off, each clutching a crisp 500-euro note in our hand (actually, we were more subtle than that – Carlo
discreetly handed out the tips after they had departed) I had the chance, at last, to take stock of my new life.

That first charter had been hard work, no doubt about it, especially going into it straight off the back of six weeks of boatyard work when my head had been jammed full of new stuff to learn.
But Carlo assured me that other guests would be easier to deal with and would keep better hours, not wanting breakfast at 11.30am and dinner at 1am.

‘And now you know what you are doing,’ he said. ‘So you will find much easier.’

I wasn’t so sure I would. Being busy and being rushed off my feet meant I had no time to think about my situation but now, with a few days off, I began to notice all the little things
about the job that I didn’t like. Food was a big issue. Italian food is lovely – if you go out for an occasional meal or if you pop over to Rome or Venice for a few days on holiday. All
that lovely pasta, bread, pizza, tomatoes, cheese. But eat it day in, day out for two months and it starts to get a bit bland. Pablo and Libertad would have loved it – no ‘Is it
spicy?’ here. There was fresh fish and seafood available every day, but as I had gone back to being fully vegetarian after my two fish-eating episodes, I didn’t eat it. So my diet
consisted of bread, bread, more bread, cheese, fruit, pasta and biscuits. Dinner would often be cold vegetables, rice and bread. It wasn’t exactly balanced, and I was ballooning by the
minute. The fact that Imran put enormous glugs of olive oil into the pasta sauce wasn’t helping my men’s shorts to fit any more loosely, either. I once measured the bottle after
he’d used it and worked out that we were getting 200 calories from the oil alone. Each.

When Enrique had been on the boat, he often tried to make conversation with me and I found myself speaking about my past life as a journalist. For some reason, I didn’t want him or his
family to think of me as just a servant. I was a little bit ashamed to be seen as just a waitress. I wanted them to know that I was just as intelligent, as widely travelled and as cultured as they
were. I needed them to see beyond the uniform. As time went on, I continued to struggle with this. I hadn’t even considered, when I decided to change my life and my job, what a change in
socio-economic status would mean to me. I was no longer an A/B – as a cleaner and waiter on a temporary contract, I was demoted to C1/C2 or even a D. And that rankled.
Am I really such a
snob that this matters to me?
I wondered.
Why am I finding this so hard?
Imran must have noticed that I was having difficulty with it. ‘Why you do job this level?’ he
asked me, when I told him I had been to two universities. ‘You higher level. For me, OK. For Daniela OK. Why you not profession?’ He came from a culture where education was everything
and the idea of someone getting to a senior level in a real career and then jacking it all in to do a menial job, although in an arena they loved, was incomprehensible to him – and just plain
crazy.

It was also becoming very cliquey on the boat. The crew naturally split into smokers (Carlo, Daniela and Imran) and non-smokers (me). And also into Italian speakers (Carlo, Daniela and Imran)
and non-Italian speakers (me). And into night owls (Carlo, Daniela and Imran) and early birds (me). Daniela was always following the captain around like a puppy dog with her big brown eyes and
stopped speaking to me beyond necessities. I think that she regarded me as a love rival for Carlo’s affections, which was plain crazy. Imran spent a lot of time on the phone arguing with his
wife and Carlo was always busy rearranging things just so. I was lonely and, stuck out at anchor, there was nothing I could do about it.

I’d never felt lonely on a boat before. I’d sailed with all kinds of people in a variety of circumstances up to this point, and I had always got on well with everyone. Even Steve and
I had had fun, before it all turned weird. So I was very happy to find out that for our next charter we would be teaming up with another superyacht for the week and we would have three new
almost-crewmates: Massimo, the owner/captain, and Lucia and Anton the deckhands.

The guests, from South America this time, were due to arrive on my thirty-third birthday. There were 11 of them – three families – split between
Panacea
and
Andante
. When they came, in a flamboyant Brazilian whirl, it was immediately clear that they were going to be more fun than the first set of guests. We had two families on our boat and
Andante
took the third family and the son of one of ours. That was the sleeping arrangements sorted; the rest was a lot more fluid. Sometimes we’d have eight on our boat for the
morning; other times people would swim from one yacht to another so every time we moved anchorage we had different people on board. Like teachers on a school field trip, we had to be careful to
make sure that between us we had all 11.

They had stated in their pre-charter preference form that they would eat most of their dinners ashore. That soon changed once they got a taste of Imran’s cooking. It’s that 200
calories of oil – ignorance is bliss and it does make everything very, very tasty. They chose to eat all meals on board, with often the adults taking lunch on our boat while the children ate
on
Andante
and in the evening they swapped over. That made catering easier for both chefs and the ever-changing rota of guests more fun for me to serve. They were a happy and hyperactive
bunch – every time one of the three teenage girls walked past me they would trill, ‘Hi, Emma!’ – and it was great to see them enjoying the boat: swimming, snorkelling,
asking to go for rides in the tender to explore caves, rocks and bays. I was more than happy to do anything they asked: making flasks of camomile tea so the girls could try to lighten their hair in
the sun, teaching their younger brother how to drive the dinghy.

Their mood permeated the crew, too, and Carlo allowed us to let our hair down a bit. After he had taken the guests to swim through sulphuric bubbles that wiggled their way up from cracks in the
rocks around the Aeolian islands, he picked me up in the tender and let me swim, too. There were no fish around, just tiny mercurial spheres bubbling upwards in vertical lines. It was like floating
in a glass of champagne. Nose out of the water, it was a different matter, though: those pretty little bubbles stank to eggy high heaven.

‘Em-ma,’ Carlo said to me one morning, as I was clearing away the last of the Nutella-smeared breakfast plates, ‘the guests have asked if you would like to join them to go to
Stromboli.’ This was unexpected. I had become used to only seeing the islands and towns we visited from the boat and had learned to suppress the urge to go exploring.
I am here to
work
, I told myself
, not on holiday
. I’d never been up a live volcano before and I felt honoured to be invited.

Stromboli was one of the seven Aeolian islands, the area that
Panacea
mainly took charter guests to. Each island was very different from its neighbour and, with seven to visit, it was
perfect for a week’s charter itinerary. Most of Stromboli was an active volcano that put on a spectacular fireworks trip every night. One of
Panacea
’s tricks was to have a late
dinner and then motor round to the far side of the island, where it was too deep to anchor, and just drift (keeping a careful lookout and a hand by the gear lever, obviously), to watch showers of
sparks and big jets of flames spout from the volcano’s mouth. On land, there was an organised trek to the top, starting just before sunset and reaching the pinnacle at about 10pm to enjoy the
show before returning to the bottom about midnight.

Clad in hired heavy-duty boots and with bamboo poles in hand, we set off on the long trek up the volcano’s side. All but one of the guests had come and Anton, the deckhand from
Andante
, had been invited, too. Anton was younger than me and about the same height. I had only seen him and
Andante
’s other deckhand, Lucia, briefly a couple of times. A
Moldavian, Anton had a round, baby face but was strong from the boat work and a previous job in construction. The sun hat he wore tied under his chin reminded me of Tyrone.

The steep slope was hard going under the hot July sun and I was soon sweating, especially with the added extra water bottles I was carrying for the guests. Anton walked with me and, since he
spoke no English and I not a word of Moldavian, his first language, we tried to muddle through by combining my tiny bit of Italian with liberal use of the international languages of pointing and of
drawing pictures in the air.

‘Guarda,’ he said, plucking a blackberry from a bush we passed. ‘Una mora. Come si dice, in inglese?’

‘Blackberry,’ I said.

‘Bleck barry? Bleck barry!’ he said, then giggled, miming using a telephone. ‘Bleck barry.’ He waved the fruit in the air as he tried out the word then popped it into my
open mouth
. Uh-oh.

As we climbed higher, the shrubs became fewer and fewer, until there was just the occasional fire-scorched blackened stump. A long, long way down,
Panacea
was a tiny black dot in a dark
blue sea. The steep slope of the volcano continued below sea level and the water was deep, meaning we had our full 240 metres of chain out. I prayed the windlass would work, as it had been playing
up the past couple of days, and I didn’t fancy hauling all of that up by hand.

At the top we sat, where instructed by the guide, in black sand still warm from the afternoon’s rays, and looked down on to popping and snapping flares of fire. I was glad of the warmth of
the sand; now we had stopped climbing, and it was dark, cooling sweat was wicking the heat away from my body. I shivered in the thin long-sleeved top I had brought with me. The way back down,
although far quicker, was tricky – we effectively had to ski down the sandy slope in our boots, using our bamboo poles as brakes.

‘Vorrei offriti una pizza ed una birra,’ Anton said at the bottom of the slope.

‘OK. Grazie,’ I replied, having understood enough to know birra was beer and pizza was… pizza.

We said goodbye to the guests and popped into a restaurant. After all the climbing, I was starving. In the loo I glanced in the mirror to see a face covered in grey ash. Looking good.

God knows how but I managed to understand enough of what Anton was telling me to glean that he was 26, had lived in Italy for six years and that this was his second summer on
Andante
.
He could speak Moldavian, Romanian and Italian and, when he was a teenager, he had done a year’s national service as an armed guard patrolling the Moldavian/Romanian border. His brother lived
in Moldavia, his father was dead and he loved his mama and Moldavian techno music. The first parts, up to the national service, I was taking an educated guess at but I’m pretty sure I
understood his last two points – mainly because he got out his phone to show me a picture of his mama (Eastern European. Headscarf. See?) and to play me some truly dreadful squawking electro
racket.

He was a sweet boy, though, and I was glad to have a friend.
Andante
ran charters in a similar area to
Panacea
, so I knew I’d probably see him again from time to time
through the summer.

And I did – the very next night. Both yachts were moored in a marina in Salina, so after dinner was finished, Carlo said we could go ashore if we wanted to.

‘Vorrei offriti una birra ed una granita,’ Anton said this time. He was nothing if not direct. I accepted, again. When I tried to pay he wouldn’t let me.

The granita, not that far removed from the sugary confections that used to emerge from Mr Frosty’s rotating belly, was tooth-achingly sweet and did not go with beer. So we switched to
cocktails. When we ordered our second round, Anton asked for takeaway cups and we went for a stroll along the promenade. Italians like to stay up late but by this hour there were few people out on
the streets. We walked towards the seafront and jumped across the breakwater rocks until we were by the water’s edge. After a quick swim in our underwear and flip-flops to guard against the
painful spines of the sea urchins we could see clinging to the rocks (the water was that clear even by moonlight), Anton kissed me and tried to take things further.

I moved away. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Perchè no?’

‘Perchè. No.’

‘Perchè no?’

‘Perchè. No.’ Why no? Because. No.

‘Pleeeease?’ he begged. ‘Pleeeease?’
So he does speak at least one word of English
, I thought, as I firmly shook my head and put my jeans and T-shirt back on in
order to go back to the boat.

A week later,
Andante
moored next to us in Naples Mergellina marina and Anton asked me out for pizza and beer again. As we sat in a restaurant, over wine, ricotta and mozzarella, his
phone rang, interrupting the flow of conversation – or, rather, the stilted, head-scratching game of charades crossed with Pictionary we were using to get by. It was his Mama. He leaned back
in his chair and gabbled away at her in Moldavian. I sipped my wine, smiled politely and waited patiently, expecting him to make his excuses to his mother shortly and hang up. He talked. I sipped,
smiled and waited. He talked some more. He looked at his plate and gesticulated over it. I started imagining their conversation, to pass the time. ‘What have you had for your tea?’ I
guessed she was asking. ‘Are you taking good care of yourself?’ ‘Ricotta, Mama. And yes, I am eating my vegetables. No, I’m not drinking too much. Yes, I am getting enough
sleep.’ Finally, after 20 minutes – 20 minutes! – he hung up.