Casting Off (36 page)

I asked him what he did in the winter months, when he wasn’t working on
Andante
. He told me he was going to go back to his brother’s farm in Moldavia, where they kept pigs
and had 1000 bottles of locally produced wine.

‘You can come with me,’ he said, in Italian. ‘Spend the winter in Moldavia on the farm. Did I mention the 1000 bottles of wine? Maybe it is more – maybe 1500 by
now.’ So here I was again, being made an offer to don that headscarf and tuck myself away in a little former Soviet village in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t aware of having asked the
universe to manifest me an Eastern European husband and a harsh winter existence to go with it, so why did these opportunities keep cropping up? It was weird. Again, like Sven’s offer, it was
so wide of the Caribbean mark that I didn’t have to think twice about it turning it down. And, as I’d told Steve, not everything in my life was about getting a boyfriend. I had an image
of me snuggling up in the barn with the pigs to keep off the Moldavian cold, mud smears on my face and straw sprigs in my hair, and clutching some gut-rotting potato wine. Thanks, Anton, but no
thanks.

E
m-ma! George Clooney! George Clooney!’

No, that wasn’t a cry from an excitable Daniela, having just spotted a Hollywood A-lister driving along the Amalfitano coast in a roadster. It was an order for a coffee from the latest
group of guests, a bunch of Italians who liked to have a laugh and a giggle – and to slap me on the bottom.

Even before they arrived, we sensed that they would be a difficult bunch. On their form, they stated that they wanted their privacy and Carlo instructed us all not to chat to them, just to serve
them what they asked for and then move away to a discreet distance. Imran said they sounded like a solo female guest he had once had on another boat. The woman had stipulated that only one waiter
must attend her at all her meals and that he must stand in a certain place on the deck. He was to remove her plates
immediately
she had finished eating but – and here’s the rub
– he must not, on any account, ever look at her. What his trick was for knowing she’d finished, I don’t know. Maybe he held a little rear-view mirror out every two minutes to
double-check she’d actually polished off her lobster. These rich people and their don’t-look-at-me-or-feed-me-the-ends-of-tomatoes demands.

The ringleader of this group of six Italians asserted his dominance almost as soon as he had taken off his espadrilles and put them in the basket we kept at the top of the passerella, so that
guests didn’t bring grit from the street on to the decks.

‘Where is the wine I ordered from the broker?’ he barked. ‘Is it here yet? We must have Champagne. Now.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ I replied, practically curtseying to him, and went off to find the 200-euros-a-bottle Veuve Clicquot he’d had sent on ahead. Of course, there was something
wrong with it. ‘It is too cold,’ he said. ‘Can’t you get anything right? Where is the captain?’

At lunch, the bullying attitude continued as I cleared away the plates from the pasta vongole. They had eaten all of it, so I knew they must have liked it. But still there were complaints.

‘There was sand in this one clam,’ Mr Big Boss said. ‘Fetch the chef.’

Imran was in the galley, putting the finishing touches to the calamari and polpo (octopus). ‘Imran, they say there was sand in the vongole,’ I told him. ‘They are asking for
you. Can you come?’

‘What sand is?’ he said, startled. ‘I am washing it many times. Did they eat it?’

‘Yes, they ate all of it. I’m sorry – please can you just come?’

Mr Big Boss gave Imran a public dressing down, treating him like an ignorant, inexperienced pot-washer, rather than the experienced chef who had cooked for the household of an Arabian prince
that he was.

‘Sand can ruin an entire dish,’ Mr Big Boss went on with his lecture, while Imran hung his head and listened to the rant.

I walked back through to the galley with him to collect the main course.

‘Now guest getting hungry, captain getting hungry,’ he said.

‘Hungry? They can’t be that hungry – or bothered by the sand, Imran,’ I pointed out. ‘They ate the whole lot.’

‘But if captain find out, he getting hungry with me.’

‘Hungry? What are you on about?’ I frowned as I balanced a heavy platter of seafood on my forearm. The penny dropped. ‘Oh, angry. Yes, probably.’

We braced ourselves for Carlo to get really cross. He had recently bawled out Daniela so loudly that I could plainly hear every word he said while I was in the saloon and they were in the
galley, with the door closed. I took to temporarily blocking up the fridge outlet vent with a towel if I thought he was going to blow a fuse so that the guests couldn’t hear. Strangely, given
the circumstances, he was calm for this charter.

And, now that Mr Big Boss had had a chance to show us who was, well, big boss, he relaxed and actually became quite pleasant, too. Possibly it had just taken him some time to relax from the
stresses of big-city life and get into the holiday mood.

He and his friends were pleased when I told them we had a Nespresso machine on board. They nicknamed the coffees ‘George Clooneys’, because he advertises the machines, and ordered
them after every meal. Each had a variation – a tall George Clooney, a decaf short George Clooney, a George Clooney so short and extra concentrated that it became a mere George Cloo.

After the thaw came jokes and japes and then macho stunts – diving into the water from the tender while I was driving it along, leading to a nasty gash on a foot and an order from the
captain, who dressed it, not to go into the water again – and macho stunts descended to bum-slapping and inappropriate hugging. On their part, obviously. I wasn’t going to slap some
fifty-something hairy Italian ass, even if we had developed a working relationship that was almost akin to friendship.

One of the guests, an architect, was the first up every morning, and would read the paper over his George Clooney. He was my favourite of the group – he had been invited on the holiday by
Mr Big Boss, who was footing the bill, and he wasn’t obnoxious or rah rah but was a quiet, content and normal man. I glanced at a headline one morning – some kind of mass shooting.

‘What happened?’ I asked him, leaning over his shoulder to try to make sense of the pictures.

‘In Norway,’ he said. ‘A man – how you say? – shoot… shot… many people with gun. Very sad.’ He flicked through the pages of the newspaper so I
could see the images and headlines. I couldn’t understand much of what was written in the story but I gleaned enough from the layout, photos and numbers to understand that nearly 80 people
had been killed in a car bomb and gun attack. I felt the old journalistic interest flicker to life – I always did love a hard news story like that one, sick as it may seem – but then I
doused the little flame, cleared away the coffee things and went to fetch the breakfast food for the guests.

That little bit of journalistic interest would rear its head again a couple of weeks later, when reports started to come through about the London riots. Sitting on a luxury yacht at anchor in
the tranquil waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, surrounded by Champagne and Chanel, langoustine and Loewe on a daily basis, it was surreal to imagine a bunch of disaffected youths smashing their way
into Foot Locker and Curry’s to nick a pair of Nikes and a microwave. Even stranger was to picture a gang of middle-class dads facing up to a council estate mob on Clapham’s Northcote
Road, where the rough shops meet the JoJo Maman Bébé branches, in order to protect their wives, children and shiny silver VW Golfs from harm. I know who my money’d be on in a
scrap between the kids in my block in SW4 and a bunch of media-bespectacled, soft-in-the-middle Henrys and Barnabys. Far, far away in Italy, it was easy to see the satirical humour in the situation
but from the postings I was seeing from London friends on Facebook, the reality was a lot more frightening. It was a big deal and an even bigger story in England but I found I didn’t miss
being in the newsroom one little bit. Far more exciting things were happening here, on
Panacea
– and I’m not talking about coffees, crew fallings-out or table presentation. No,
these were exciting things to do with my epiphany: Guy had been in touch.

You remember him, right? Handsome devil, rides a motorbike, owns a yacht, lives a life as a free spirit in Asia? Big, beaming white smile? Long-lashed hazel eyes? I visited him a couple of times
in Thailand? Was pleased for me when I told him about my epiphany but said that the ‘Caribbean wouldn’t work for him’? Yes,
that
Guy. Just as I was passing the half-way
point of my time in Italy, starting to wonder what I’d do when it was finished, and was missing actually going sailing and feeling a bit lonely, here he was popping up again, being manifested
by the universe. And he had an offer for me – an offer which, unlike Sven’s and Anton’s, I couldn’t say no to.

W
hat seemed like a lifetime ago, I drew up a list of options, directions in which to steer my new life now it was freed of the old and rusting
shackles of city life, social expectations, England and journalism. To recap, when I scrawled it down in a tattered notebook in the Andaman islands on board
Gillaroo
, it went something
like this: Option 1: Get a job as crew in the Med in summer and in the Caribbean in winter. Option 2: Go home and settle down. Option 3. Carry on Cruisin’. Option 4: Go and find Guy. At the
time the decision had been made for me: I’d been offered this job on
Panacea
, I’d accepted it and Guy had said that was a shame, as he’d been hoping I’d go sailing
with him to Indonesia for the summer. I’d cheekily replied, ‘Some other time?’ and left it at that.

I had heard a bit from him from time to time over the past six months – he’d been on his boat in Malaysia, doing some jobs on it with a friend, then had left it anchored in some
mangroves to go travelling in the Middle East. If we were both online on Facebook at the same time we’d have a quick catch-up chat, but I was forever having to drop my phone in my pocket to
dash off to see to some guests’ needs and we didn’t really get beyond occasional snatched moments of small talk. I was always happy when his name cropped up in my messenger window but
Thailand, travels and freedom were seeming very long ago now I was in the middle of a busy working life in Europe.

Time for a tangent. After Mr Big Boss and his friends departed in Naples, we had a couple of weeks without guests. It was the height of summer, what should have been our busiest and most
profitable time, but instead we were languishing in Naples Mergellina marina for 300 euros a night. Mind you, it could have been worse – the megayachts moored just up from us were paying up
to 3000 euros a night for their slots.

They were absolutely enormous things. Watching them come in to moor up was a spectacle not to be missed. If I was sleeping in my cabin and I heard the tell-tale fart of a bow thruster vibrate
through the water I’d climb up out of my bunk on to the deck to catch the entertainment.

It being the height of the season, all the big boys were out – the 65-metre behemoths with shimmering white hulls and crews of 15 or 20. We looked like a grubby little sailing dinghy next
to them, they were that big – as large as blocks of flats. The entrance to the marina was tight and they had to moor stern-to, Mediterranean style, and therefore turn through 90 degrees in
the small gap between the anchor chains of the other megayachts and the little plastic day boats on the other side, and squeeze their way, in reverse, among the other billion-dollar gin palaces to
stop just the perfect distance away from the quayside so that the owner’s mistress could teeter off the back in her six-inch Manolos. Sometimes there’d be a queue of them waiting to
come in. Imagine trying to get into a tight supermarket car park space that is only a foot wider than the car on either side, on a day when the tarmac is covered in black ice and while a whole host
of other angry drivers, all desperate to claim the space for themselves, are all huffing and puffing and tooting their horns at you to get you to hurry up. They were very skilled drivers, these
captains in their billion-dollar machines – and, of course, they always had a bevy of mini-skirt-clad stewardesses ready with metre-long inflatable fenders to cushion the blow and spare their
blushes if they did get it just an inch or two off.

Their crew were always tanned and gorgeous – and often blonde. This is an industry that shamelessly hires staff on the basis of what they look like. Stories abound of chief stewardesses
being sacked once they reach 35; or a captain – a man who had previously been like a best friend to the owner – being fired purely because he is balding and the missus can’t abide
it. When you send in your application for a job, you must always send in a photograph. It’s not about glamour – women should wear their hair neatly tied back and there’s none of
the heavy make-up favoured by air stewardesses – but a natural prettiness in women, and a clean-shaven face for men, is a given. And if you don’t like it – tough. There’s a
queue of other Mirandas and Petes lined up behind you, who are unencumbered by your modern sense of equality. Take it to your union rep. What’s that? There isn’t a union? Well,
that’s just hard luck, love.

Female deckhands were rare; I only saw a few others during my whole six months in Italy. Things might be different in America or Australia but in macho Italia, men do the men’s work and
women dress the flowers and plump the cushions. One afternoon in Naples I spotted a girl working on Roman Abramovich’s former boat
Ecstasea
– he’d traded in the too-small
85-metre megayacht for the 165-metre
Eclipse
. Blonde and beautiful – naturally – she was suspended in a harness like an abseiler, dangling off the side of the boat, cleaning
the topsides by dipping a long-handled brush into a bucket of suds that was tied round her waist and hanging by her ankles. A steel track, like a curtain rail, ran along the topsides above her,
constructed solely for this reason – to suspend a human cleaner from on a weekly basis. Another deckhand, a guy, stood by the rail, sliding her forwards towards the bow as she finished
scrubbing each section, and hosing off the soap suds behind her.