Casting Off (37 page)

Cleaning was a proper industry on these boats – my paltry four-hour efforts were nothing compared to those of the megayacht crews. For two days we had the most beautiful yacht imaginable
– the 36-metre 1930-built J Class sailing yacht
Shamrock V –
moored next but one to us. While I spent the morning switching between a variety of jobs,
Shamrock’
s
bosun was 46 metres up her mast in his climbing harness, bottle of Glassex in one hand, polishing cloth in the other. He was up there at 8.30am, he was up there at 10.45am, he was still up there
– although much closer to deck level by this point – at lunchtime. Five hours polishing a mast. Honestly, who can even see that far up?

I felt like a fraud next to these slick, competent, cool people. They weren’t the friendliest bunch – no one said hello when we converged at the rubbish bins or hosepipe points. I
don’t know if it was a power
v.
sail thing – maybe they saw us as the pikeys of the marina. After all, these boats charter out at 450,000 euros a week – quite a lot more
than we charged.

Carlo set me a task of polishing all of the bubbles out of the hull that had started to form between the black hull paint and the clear top coat. From a distance they looked like saltwater
crystals but they didn’t wash off and instead had to be sanded out. It was really a job that should have been done over the winter, in the boatyard, by a burly bloke with power tools, but
here I was, bobbing about in the dingy, trying to scrub away at them with sandpaper in one hand while holding the dinghy flush to the yacht with the other. Whenever I pushed hard enough against the
hull to start to see some effect, the dinghy moved until I was more than arm’s reach away. I adapted a technique of stretching up and clinging on to the toe rail with the fingertips of my
free arm, and that would work for a couple of minutes at a time until so much lactic acid built up in my extended arm that I had to let go and shake it until the burning subsided. Also, it was
summer in Naples and it was incredibly hot and humid. Memories of Malaysia came back as sweat beaded on my back and rolled off the tip of my nose. I kept my head down, worried I was becoming a
laughing stock among the other, better equipped exterior crews.
Ecstasea
Blondie looked way cooler, elegantly flying on her wire like a dancer in a show; I just looked like a scrubber. A
frazzled, sweaty scrubber in men’s clothes. And then, moving the dinghy from one hull to another, I got a rope tangled in the outboard engine’s propeller. Proper schoolgirl error. I
swore under my breath, hoping no one was watching me turning beetroot with shame.

‘Em-ma! Carlo called down from
Panacea
’s deck. ‘Take a break.’ He didn’t have to tell me twice. I climbed up the side of the hull and back down the ladder
into the crew cabin. The air-conditioning was bliss, working its way up from my ankles as I descended. Within a few minutes, under its cooling influence, I was more myself. I didn’t feel like
sleeping
. I’ll work on my tan
, I decided.
Might as well try to even out these farmer’s marks on my arms and legs while I have the chance.
Changing into a bikini and
grabbing a towel and my iPod, I climbed back up into the sun. Towel rolled out on the guests’ sunbathing deck – handily, the sunshades had been removed while we were in port – and
prone position adopted, I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the sun on my back.
Ah, this is the life
.

‘Em-ma!’ I heard Carlo shouting through my reverie. ‘What are you doing?’

I sat up. ‘Taking a break, like you said.’ A few weeks ago I would have felt weird to be in front of my boss dressed only in a bikini but I’d seen him in just his teeny-tiny
black Speedos a fair few times by now, when he went into the water to check the underside of the boat, so I was less embarrassed about it.

‘No, no, no. I am sorry but you cannot remain like this. I know a lot of the peoples here. What if they see you like this and tell the owner? You cannot remain.’ I sighed quietly to
myself and stood up. It’s not like I was topless or anything. And, being in a bikini, who would even know I was crew rather than a guest, anyway? However, I should have remembered that this
was
not
the life,
my
life. This was the guests’ life. I wasn’t cruising any more (and enjoying myself); I was working (and being told off). I sighed.

‘OK, captain,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’ I went back to my cabin and put my men’s clothes back on again, resigning myself to having
funny-looking patchy skin for ever.

The upside to being banished from sunbathing (and here we’re off the tangent and back on track) was that I filled my time by going online. And, at the same time I was logged on to
Facebook, so was Guy. I told him about my sunbathing boob and we chatted about the cruising life.

Wow, I miss it so much
, I thought
. I’d be more than happy to forgo flushing toilets, aircon, hot water and silver plates for bucket showers, tins of beans and some
freedom
.

I vented my frustrations at Guy on Messenger and he sympathised with me and somehow, without his directly asking me, the conversation turned to the winter and our going sailing together.

‘It would be lovely to sail with you, if possible, nice to have someone who knows what they are doing for a change,’ he wrote. ‘I bet you could show me lots of stuff I
don’t know. It would be really interesting and fun as well. I have a boat, we should use it!’

‘I am totally in,’ I replied, wondering if this was for real or was just flirting. ‘Where would we go? Still Indonesia and Papua New Guinea? I know if you go to Indo you need a
special cruising licence.’

‘Yeah I know all about that. It’s called a cait and it’s the reason I have never sailed in Indo, because you need to apply one month in advance with all the crew
details,’ Guy wrote. ‘But if I knew it was you and me that would be a cinch.’

It sounds like he really does want me to go sailing with him
, I thought.
But it’s so hard to judge someone’s tone over email or online chat. How to tell?

‘I really wanna set up somewhere I can dive casually and have a place in the sun!’ he wrote.

I paused, fingers over my phone’s keys, then decided to be a bit cheeky and try my luck. ‘Well, you should come to the Caribbean with me, then.’ This was a bit naughty –
I didn’t actually have any plans to go to the Caribbean for the winter
. But hey
, I reasoned,
there’s plenty of time to sort something out if he does call your
bluff.

The phone bleeped as his reply came through. ‘I seriously am considering checking out the Caribbean with you,’ he wrote. I blinked and re-read it. What was this? The guy who’d
said the Caribbean ‘wouldn’t work for him’ was now ‘seriously considering’ checking it out with me? This was bloody amazing. I read his message for a third time, in
case I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick. Nope, there it was, in clear type, on the screen. He wanted to spend at least the winter with me. My heart did a little celebratory backflip and I
did something unbelievably cheesy – I leapt up from my seat in the shade, jumped up and down on the deck and punched the air. Yes, that’s right, I copied the high-energy moves of a
bunch of mid-1980s, long-haired, stonewash-jeans-clad soft-rock singers.
That’s
how thrilled I was.

Unable to wipe an enormous silly grin off my face, I wrote back, heart racing. ‘OK in all seriousness, unless you meet the diving, poker-playing woman of your dreams and sail off into the
sunset (sunrise I suppose if you’re going east) with her, I’m inviting myself along on to the boat this winter.’

‘It’d be funny if we sailed all the way to the Caribbean,’ he replied. ‘Seriously, I think winter would be lots of fun no matter where we go.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because I need some fun – there’s a serious shortage of it at the moment. I think working can wait.’

Just like that, I had a plan of what to do once I left
Panacea
at the end of October. I was going to finish my old option 1, working as crew on a superyacht, and I was going to head off
into the sunrise with Guy, which, in the same list I’d scribbled down six months ago, was option 4. And we were going to sail to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, have amazing adventures and
somehow end up in the Caribbean, thus fulfilling my epiphany. I did cheesy move number two and cast my eyes to the heavens. Could life get any better than this?

I
mran was spilling over with excitement, humming loudly as he moved about the boat at our new anchorage, a wide smile on his bony face.

After five days in Naples marina, Carlo had decided we were going to stop haemorrhaging money and move to Salina in the Aeolian islands instead, where we could anchor for free. It was a
beautiful anchorage, next to the main harbour, with views of low-rise white houses and green hills, punctuated with bright blooming bushes and the occasional moped put-putting its way up the steep
roads. It was a far lovelier place to wait for our next charter than dirty, noisy Naples, with its polluted water, oil-stained tarmac and inbred feral cats with eyes that looked in different
directions and that had parts of noses or ears missing.

‘Imran,’ I said, following him into the galley, where he started taking vegetables and herbs out of the fridge and plugging in his food processor. ‘You seem different. What is
it? Oh – no cigarette. And why are you so happy?’

‘Hi, Golden Laydee,’ he sang. ‘Is Ramadan. First day today.’

I knew a little bit about Ramadan from my time in Borneo – we’d seen shopkeepers lolling about on the pavement, exhausted, sapped of all energy by the heat, humidity and lack of a
good lunch, counting down the hours until sunset when they could eat – but not much more than that. Imran seemed a lot more upbeat than they had – but then he was a very faithful
Muslim, having done Hajj the previous year.

‘Does that mean no smoking as well as no eating?’ I asked.

‘No. Nothing in mouth. Even water.’ He carried on humming as he worked.

I was horrified. ‘No water? But it’s 32 degrees outside.’

‘Is OK,’ he said, smashing cloves of garlic with the side of a knife. ‘Is for God. And not too long. When moon finish, Ramadan finish.’ He threw some ingredients in the
blender and pulsed them together. ‘You like pal-apple?’

I drew a blank. ‘Pal-apple?’

‘Yes, pal-apple. Food my country. Very good. You eat it.’

Pal-apple, pal-apple – what could he mean? I looked at the ingredients he had on the counter – some chickpeas, tomatoes, cumin, fresh coriander he’d picked up in the Asian area
around the train station in Rome when he popped home to visit his family.

‘You mean falafel?’ I asked.

‘Yes, pal-apple. I make for when Ramadan is finish tonight.’

Come sunset – he had a printed-out list of the official times so that he didn’t eat a second too soon
(‘Sometimes mountain is coming in way of sun’) – he prayed in his cabin, heated the oil and the smell of frying spices filled the boat. His jubilation was catching and
everyone’s spirits were lifted and we laughed and talked together over a relaxed meal, the first time we’d done that, it seemed, since before we had our first guests on board.

Next morning, though, it was a different story. I climbed out of my cabin and walked back towards the cockpit, to go below to make some tea. Imran was smoking a cigarette off the back of the
boat, his shoulders hunched over.

‘I break Ramadan,’ he said, sadly, when I asked what had happened. The broad smile of the day before was gone. ‘Captain say me no set alarm for 4am for to pray because he
sleeping. Yesterday I wake up myself and go outside to pray. This morning, no wake up. So Ramadan broke.’

‘Does that mean the whole thing is off?’ I asked.

‘No. I can do more day at end,’ he said. ‘Just for today Ramadan is not coming. Tomorrow I try.’

The third day, he did wake up in time ‘for to pray’ – while we had no guests on board he asked Carlo if he could temporarily move out of their shared cabin into another so that
he didn’t disturb him by rising in the middle of the night. By day five or six the humming, the big grins and the religious energy had faded. Instead, like those listless Malaysians I’d
seen lounging outside their shop entrances, Imran took to lying around. And who could blame him? I imagine it’s bad enough half starving yourself but having to quit the fags at the same time
when you’ve a 50-a-day habit? He lay on the sofa, he lay on the table, he lay on the steps descending into the saloon. Anywhere that was big enough to accommodate him, he lay, staring into
space, doing nothing. It was a good job we didn’t have any charters – I don’t know how he would have coped. Or how the guests would have coped, trying to pass the breakfast dishes
over a prone, starving Muslim.

All that fasting must have been playing havoc with his blood sugar levels, too, because he became an absolute Fury. That fight we’d had when we took the boat out for the first time was
nothing on this. He screamed at me, inches from my face, when I asked him what I thought was something fairly innocuous about the breakfast dishes on about day ten of Ramadan. We had taken a
last-minute five-day charter of 10 guests, which was more than we had space for, really – the woman who was paying for the whole trip was sleeping in the saloon. It was even more of a squeeze
at the table at mealtimes and I just wanted to ask Imran to please put the breakfast food on small plates, so I could fit them all on.

His eyes grew wide and he sneered at me.

‘Why you always like this?’ he asked.

‘Like what?’

‘In morning, all…’ In his anger he couldn’t find the words and he broke off to wave his hands violently around, stabbing the air with a spoon he was holding.
‘Women, always like this.’ His voice rose to a loud shout and I worried the guests would hear. I tried to calm him down.

‘It’s not a big problem,’ I said. ‘It’s just using small plat—’ He cut me off, shouting at me again. Steam was practically whistling out of both ears. I
left. The next day he criticised the way I cleaned the boat apropos of nothing and that afternoon he got angry again when I set off to drive him ashore in the dinghy to do the food shopping. I
decided to have a word with Carlo.