Casting Off (39 page)

It wasn’t just the lack of strength and fear of injuring myself again; there were lots of other factors as well. Pretty high up was the lack of control I had over my own life: I
couldn’t decide when to get up, what to wear, what to eat, when to eat it or what time to go to bed. Even showering was dictated to me. I missed the freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted
to do it. I also really missed exercise – I had a theory that not being able to do my yoga or go running had weakened my core muscles and added to the back injury. And I hated not getting the
opportunity to use my brain very much or to make decisions.

The upsides to this job were great, without a doubt – travelling around, meeting interesting people, earning good money. There was a problem with the Italian bank account I had opened when
I arrived and I couldn’t access any of my salary, which meant I was building up a tidy sum of savings. I had my tips in cash, as well, so I had access to money if I needed it, but, beyond the
odd bottle of contact lens solution or a pretty scarf, there wasn’t really the need to buy anything and we rarely had the opportunity to go to the shops, anyway, unless it was a trip to the
supermarket to buy food for the guests. I worked out that, with holiday pay, I would be taking about £12,000 home with me. That’s not a bad savings pot collected over just six months.
It would certainly be enough to keep me going for a while out in Indonesia with Guy.

I found myself wishing that I’d known about the superyacht industry when I was 22. Back then, the positives of travel and money would have far outweighed the negatives of lack of control.
If I’d started 10 years ago I could have been a chief stewardess by now, amassed an absolute fortune and possibly been well on my way to retirement. It was a great industry, for sure –
just not one to be breaking into when you’re a slightly cynical, washed-up 33-year-old weedy ex-journalist, perhaps.

I wasn’t ready to quit the yachting life, though.
What I need to do
, I decided,
is find a different way of working around boats, one where I am in control so I get the
benefits without the drawbacks. And one where I don’t have to physically damage myself in the process.

Obviously one way of getting to hang around boats for a while longer was my upcoming trip to Indonesia with Guy. OK, so I wasn’t going to be earning big bucks, but I’d still have the
travel, meeting new people and being around boats parts sorted. Plus, there’d be all that fantastic Asian food to eat – and I was presuming I’d be able to choose my own bedtime.
Pure luxury. Just that, you know, what with no hot water, aircon, washing machine, etc, it’d be pure luxury without the luxuries.

‘I’m looking forward to it as well,’ Guy wrote, ‘but we do need to decide where to go. I am busy programming during the day. So I haven’t had much time to get into
it. Are we talking about being in Langkawi in early, mid or late November?’

My sister’s first baby was due at the end of November and I wanted to be in the UK for that so we settled on early December for meeting up in Malaysia. That would give me a few weeks after
leaving Italy to visit friends and family in England and get everything sorted out. I felt the familiar thrill as we sketched out a rough plan to sail to Sumatra. One little doubt was niggling away
at me – that I’d never lived with a boyfriend before, let alone spent 24/7 with one on a 36-foot yacht in a place so remote we were likely to go weeks without seeing anyone else. Steve
had promised me lots of other boats around;
Gillaroo
had had a big crew;
Panacea
was work.
Incognito
was just Guy and me. Boyfriend part aside, I was a bit of an old hand
at going to live on boats with virtual strangers by now, so it wasn’t hard to suppress the little niggle. Also, planning the trip – looking at weather and current patterns, charts and
immigration information, would give me something to do in the five weeks between having our last charter and flying home.

‘An adventure. Woo hoo!’ I wrote to Guy, before slipping my phone in my pocket to go and take another order for coffee and gelato.
I can’t wait
.

I
ronically, once the charters were finished, I missed the guests. Their demands, their annoying habits and their rudeness had at least given the
four of us as a crew something to bond over. Now that we were on our own, as a team we grew apart again, although Carlo and Daniela were getting increasingly closer. Stuck in Naples marina for five
weeks, with no anchors to drop, no tender to have to drive, no elaborate meals to prepare and serve and no cleaning to do, it was deathly dull.

Carlo headed off to Genoa, to the boat show, and then on to Rome, to attend to ‘business’. He was trying to work out where would be the best – and cheapest – place to
keep the boat over the winter and so far Sicily, Turkey and Tunisia had been mentioned. Daniela, coincidentally, went with him to Rome, apparently to collect her passport in case we left for a
country that wouldn’t, unlike Croatia, allow her to use her Italian ID card to gain entry. I caught her Veeting her bikini line the day before the pair of them set off for the train station.
Presumably you are hoping that that’ll be for the benefit of the captain
, I thought,
rather than for the Italian passport office civil servants
.

Imran and I stayed behind, to take care of the boat in the windy October weather. As soon as September finished, the sun vanished and heavy rain and wind storms rolled violently in over the
Mediterranean to strike the Bay of Naples.
Panacea
, held in place by two mooring lines and six thick stern lines, strained at her ties in the wind and swell like a huge dog after the scent
of a rabbit at its leash. I was worried that, if there was a problem, I would have to motor the boat out of the marina and re-park it. I had done it before – but with a 38-foot plastic
sailing yacht in spacious marinas in calm weather, not a 1-million-euro, 100-tonne steel behemoth in a howling gale.

‘Imran,’ I asked, ‘can you drive this boat if we need to move?’ He claimed he could but I had my doubts. I crossed my fingers that we wouldn’t need to.

In my boredom, I watched a lot of TV. There was a flat screen in the saloon and we could get a decent enough signal at certain times of the day if it wasn’t too windy and if we stuck the
portable antenna outside, on the coachroof. I discovered that they didn’t dub over
CSI
in Italian, and after a couple of weeks I became quite knowledgeable about the work of
early-millennium crime investigation labs in Miami, LA and Vegas.

Imran ignored the American-language TV but was hooked on Italian-dubbed romantic Swiss soap operas, quiz shows and movies. We watched the start of the remake of
Planet of the Apes
together one evening.

‘When they make it, this movie,’ he asked me, through a thick fug of cigarette smoke in the saloon that I was trying my best to ignore, ‘do they go film it in space?’
Ah
,
bless
, I thought, and tried to explain CGI to him but he was the kind of man who struggled to work a non-smart mobile phone, so I think the concept was lost on him.

When I wasn’t catching up with 10-year-old formulaic US dramas, and when it wasn’t so windy that the gusts blew me sideways into the Naples promenade traffic, I ran. After my back
injury, I was conscious of trying to do whatever I could to strengthen my back and core muscles. I had running shoes – covered in paint and a bit frayed in some parts where I’d
accidentally sanded part of them away with my power tools back in the boatyard – a sports bra and my iPod shuffle, so I was good to go. Whenever I’d been to the supermarket to get bread
or tomatoes for the boat I’d noticed that there seemed to be a constant stream of people jogging along the waterfront. So I laced up my shoes, did a loose attempt at stretching, and limped
out to join them.

It turned out to be more like an army obstacle course than a running track. There were slow-moving, talking and gesticulating Italians to weave through and piles of dog poop to leap over. When
dusk came, and with it the cover of darkness and protection from prying police eyes, African immigrants spread bedsheets over the pavement and carefully arranged their precious cargo of fake Gucci
and Dolce & Gabbana handbags, belts and purses. These were the only black men I saw in Naples, crouching against the sea wall in their djellabas, mirrored hats jammed on to their heads. I think
the police mainly turned a blind eye, as long as the transactions only proceeded after dark. Occasionally, probably as an exercise in meeting arrest quotas, a cop car pulled up and the knock-off
goods instantly vanished into the bedsheets and the streets of Naples became dotted with men toting these giant bundles, trying to look for all the world like black Dick Whittingtons seeking the
fabled streets of gold.

Naples waterfront is a busy place, full of tourists and locals, strolling, chatting and kissing. My god, were there a lot of lovers there. Teenagers, twenty-somethings, even fifty-year-olds were
constantly engaged in public displays of affection, snogging and wrapping their arms so tightly around each other that it was difficult to tell which denim-jacket-clad arm belonged to whom. Boys
sat on the low wall, or on the breakwater rocks, and their girlfriends clambered on to their laps to straddle them, face-to-face, all the better for full-on, passionate Frenching. Evening,
mid-afternoon, morning – the time of day didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. It was enough to make a prudish jogging Englishwoman blush.

On my third or fourth run, when I reached my halfway point, I stopped momentarily to catch my breath before turning back. I felt my pulse throbbing in my face and could tell, from the colour my
lower arms had turned, that my entire head was now a fetching shade of puce. As I paced, fiddling with my iPod to find a motivating tune that would encourage me to carry on, a man in running gear
stopped me.

‘Scusi,’ he said and I removed my earphones to hear a fast stream of Italian.

‘Mi dispiace. Non parlo italiano,’ I said, shrugging and holding the earphone between my fingers, ready to put it back in my ear.

‘Ah, you Eengleesh?’ he asked, jogging on the spot. ‘What you do here in Napoli?’

I told him I worked on a boat.

‘I live in Venice, not here, but I am here working,’ he said. ‘I stay here two weeks. I am not knowing anybody.’

Madonna!
I thought, to borrow an Italian term of exasperation. (Mamma mia! was another one I had adopted – yes, Italians really do use it.)
Madonna! Don’t tell me I am
being chatted up, on the street, by a stranger, while I’m in the middle of a run. I look a mess. I am fluorescent pink. I am sweating so much that salt crystals are starting to cling to the
underside of my chin. And droplets are dangling from the tip of my nose while I am talking to him. These Italians – they certainly are an amorous bunch. And none too fussy, it
appears.

‘Maybe you would like to meet me for a drink?’ the man asked me. I made a lightning assessment in my head. He was good-looking, yes, liked keeping fit, obviously, had plenty of
confidence, apparently. But I doubted I’d be able to overcome the horror of his having seen me in this kind of stinking, perspiring mess. So I politely declined, making up a lie about having
to attend to some guests on the boat, and took off, running faster than my natural pace to get away from him, self-conscious that he would be checking out my bouncing bum, putting enough distance
between us until I felt it was safe to stop and catch my breath and prevent myself from having the heart attack I felt was coming on, I’d pushed myself that hard.

Amorous advances aside, once I was through the pain barrier of the first four or five jogs, I started to really enjoy it. Each day I went out I strayed a little further along the path,
increasing the distance of my route. At first I could barely make it past the bag sellers to the stone Castel dell’Ovo and back before my lungs ordered me to stop. But over the course of a
couple of weeks I added more sights to my route: a second, small marina, outdoor tennis courts, a third marina, a park, a lido, the cruise ship dock. Eventually I was up to nearly an hour and
enjoying feeling fit. My back was no longer giving me any trouble. I added in some Pilates-style moves in the (un)comfort but privacy of my cabin. I had moved into the twin guest cabin opposite
Carlo and Imran’s – Daniela had taken an aft double – but it was still so small (my bed was 28 inches wide) that it was tricky finding ways to fit outstretched legs and arms into
the space. But at least I could sit up in bed and I no longer had to perch sideways on the loo.

The rhythm of running became a sort of therapy and I let my thoughts wander as I ran, straying here, there and everywhere. Most of the time, they landed on Guy and our upcoming trip. We still
had not much more of a plan other than to meet in Langkawi in early December. As I jogged, I looked around at the strangers I passed, but none of them seemed as interesting, as different, or as
good-looking as him. Little of shivers of excitement about my new adventure with Guy shuddered their way up from my belly whenever I thought about it.

A message came through one empty, endless afternoon from a friend, Grace, who I had done a sailing course with. She was working as a cook and hostess on a French yacht for the season and they
were coming in to Naples for one night, on their way to France. Did I want to meet her for a beer? Did I ever.

I took a taxi up the darkening streets of Naples, past beautiful old houses with enviable views over the bay. The Irish pub was empty this Monday evening but I didn’t care. It had –
oh joy of joys – pints of Heineken and deep-fried cheesy bar snacks. It was heaven.

‘I thought you’d enjoy a taste of home,’ Grace said, sucking on a gin and tonic. She introduced me to her boyfriend Mark and the captain of her boat, an Aussie. They were
without owners at the moment, on passage from Croatia to the south of France.

We swapped tales of our torture. Grace and the boys were on a private 40-metre motor boat that mainly catered to the owners – one of whom was a teenage boy worth 40 million euros.