Casting Off (6 page)

What better way to recover from a hangover than by relaxing next to the pool of a five-star country club with a fresh coconut to sip from? It was the first time I’d drunk fresh coconut
water. I knew the health freaks back home went nuts for the stuff, shelling out £3 a can in Whole Foods in Kensington High Street to rehydrate after their yoga workouts. I shouldn’t
mock – I loved my yoga workouts; I was just too tight to hand over £3 for a drink afterwards. It was sweet and a little bit salty, like those rehydration sachets your mother makes you
drink after you’ve had a dose of the runs, and I knew it was probably doing me the world of good.

Lizzie and I went for a dip in the pool. The water was refreshingly cool and we bobbed about gently, not bothering to exert ourselves by doing any real swimming. I knew I’d signed up to be
on the boat on my own with Steve and had flown all the way out here to do just that. We got on well as friends – both online before I came to Borneo and in person. But his behaviour was
making me nervous as it was clear he wanted more and I did not. I didn’t feel threatened by him exactly, more uncomfortable. It had been fine when there were other people on the boat and I
had really enjoyed our being a crew of four – five if you counted the cat. I tried to talk to Lizzie about it.

‘I really hope Big John comes on board,’ I started. Steve had told me that Big John had asked if he could join us on
Kingdom
for a few weeks after the girls had gone. She
looked at me, her blue eyes inscrutable. ‘I mean I think it would be more fun, you know, with more people around.’ Damn my inability to vocalise what I actually feel. What I should have
said was, ‘I don’t want to be on my own with Steve. What would you do if you were me?’ Instead I fluffed it and she replied with some platitude or other and I lost my chance to
talk things over before she and Claire left.

She probably thought I was an utter loon to have flown halfway round the world to join a lonesome man on his boat, anyway. It was a standard reaction before I left when I told friends and family
what I was doing. They were used to my going off sailing with people I didn’t know for a week at a time but this was more than that – they knew it and so did I. ‘You what? On a
boat with a man? Alone?’ was the stock response. Usually it was followed by ‘Have you seen
Dead Calm
?’ or ‘Is it going to be like in that film with Oliver Reed, you
know, that old one, where they have sex all the time?’ Looking back I can see where they were coming from but at the time I was so caught up in my own excitement of what an adventure it was
all going to be that I just laughed along with them.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so blasé – he tried to kiss me again that evening when we were standing in the cockpit. ‘You just need more time,’ he said when I moved
away, seeming not in the least offended by my blunt refusal.

It is a well-known fact that women are wont to change their minds at the drop of a hat. And so it was that, not two days after trying to tell Lizzie that I was unwilling to share a 46-foot boat
with the skipper, I ended up sharing a cabin with him. One minute I was innocently unpacking my rucksack into a spare locker he had in his cabin, the next I was not-so-innocently occupying the port
side of the double bed. Reader, you’re shocked? Well, imagine my surprise.

At school, for my A level in English Literature, we studied
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and had deep discussions about how much of a part the comely farm girl has to play in her own
seduction. Having reached the ripe old age of 31, I admit I was no Tess Durbeyfield ingénue, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the wicked cur Stephen seduced me. But I’d
like to think that the thoughts that passed through my mind might also have occurred to Hardy’s heroine when the villain of the piece kept needling away at her: ‘Oh, I can’t be
arsed with this. Maybe it’d just be easier to go along with it.’ Also, as they say about Dr Pepper: ‘Try it. You might like it.’

I was lying on the sofa, talking to Steve, who was busy in the galley cooking our dinner. I was a few gin and tonics into the evening and he was making me laugh. Now that we were on our own, he
felt the need to show off less and was back to being Macho Boat Steve. Layla miaowed bad-temperedly.

‘What?’ he asked her. ‘You don’t get the joke? Well, we think we’re funny, even if you don’t.’ He stirred the white sauce he was making for cauliflower
cheese, put the spatula down on the work surface and leaned over to have another go at kissing me. This time I didn’t stop him. Maybe it was the strength of his attraction to me that knocked
me out of my flip-flops. Or perhaps it was the gin.

Actually, these are just excuses. In reality, I was angry with myself for being such an uptight
English
person. There were things about Steve I liked – his sense of humour, his
kindness, this lifestyle he offered, his skills as a sailor. OK, so he wasn’t my usual type – and my type is very specific: tall, posh, fair-haired, plays ‘rugger’, preppily
dressed, younger than me. Steve was none of these things so I had automatically discounted him. Now I wondered if that was fair. Also, keeping him at arm’s length was a way of protecting
myself. If you don’t start a relationship, you can’t get hurt when it ends, is I suppose what a psychologist would say my motivation was. I knew, deep down, that this fear of getting my
heart broken yet again was why I had never got that husband, family home and kids in the UK. So if I was changing everything else about my life, why not this pattern of behaviour, too? Perversely,
it was a way of being less passive and taking control for once.

Layla seemed to be a bit startled by what was going on but came to accept it when she realised that she wasn’t going to have to share her Whiskas biscuits. The new arrangements would work
well in Big John’s favour, too, as he’d have the forward cabin all to himself.

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with what was happening between us but I felt unable to stop it. I did think that perhaps I was loosening up a bit and should just go with the flow and see
what happened. After all, that was part of the reason I’d come away, to change my life.

K
ota Kinabalu was my first taste of a large Asian city. The big draw for tourists is Gunung Kinabalu, the great hulk of a mountain that glowers
behind the city. People book months in advance for the chance to scramble up its sides. I suppose they must do it for the challenge as it certainly wouldn’t be for the views from the top: we
could see the mountain from where we were anchored but only once or twice did we glimpse its peak; most of the time it was shrouded in mist. The rest of the city is all shopping malls divided by a
system of highways that would put Spaghetti Junction to shame.

Being in a city has its advantages for the cruiser, though: access to a wide variety of food. After Lizzie and Claire left, Steve and I spent three hours in a branch of the Malay supermarket
chain Giant stocking up on various essentials that would be impossible to find once we were off the beaten track: pesto sauce, tortilla wraps, tonic water, muesli. Our trolley overflowed.

We got to the till and started to unload the 800 ringgit (£160 worth, which is an obscene amount to spend on food in Malaysia) of goods on to the conveyor belt. Steve, being a keen
environmentalist, always told the shop that he didn’t want plastic bags as we’d brought our own reusable fabric ones. Often the staff didn’t understand and put our items into
plastic bags; we would unload them from the plastic and repack them in our own bags, leaving a stack of plastic by the till. Even the eggs came out of their boxes and were re-nestled, one by one,
into special containers we carried with us. Clearly they thought we were mad but they gamely went along with us and our funny foreigner ways. In Malay supermarkets the practice is to seal each
plastic bag of shopping with a bit of branded sticky tape, I presume to reduce the temptation to slip the odd extra item inside on the way out. Our no plastic bags scheme – ‘Selamat
kanbumi!’ Steve would say to the employees, which he told me translates as ‘Save the planet’ – mucked up their anti-shoplifting system and the only way they could get round
it was to stick a piece of the branded tape on to each and every item we bought. So it went into plastic, out of plastic, into fabric, was plucked out of fabric by a member of staff, sticky tape
was applied and then it went back into fabric again. No wonder it took us three hours to do our shopping.

This branch of Giant had a non-halal section, where Steve found some bacon and sausages to restock his freezer. When we placed some smoked Danish on the conveyor belt the young till
operator’s eyes nearly leapt out of his head. He stopped the belt and stared from it to us and back to the bacon again. He rang his bell for a supervisor but none came. He broke out in a
sweat. We realised what was happening – that he couldn’t bring himself to touch the haram meat to scan it, even though it was in a sealed pouch. I tried to be helpful and ran the packet
through the scanner myself, stuck on a piece of tape and put it in our cool bag. I repeated the action with all the other non-halal items. But he was still freaking out. He put two layers of
plastic bags over his hands, like gloves, I assume because he was worried the bacon had sullied other items it had come into contact with, and more on the glass surface of his scanning machine. I
have truly never seen a man so frightened before. His eyes were rolling around in their sockets. I felt so guilty for putting him through that. I tried to tell him, ‘I’m with you, buddy
– I’m veggie,’ but he either didn’t speak any English or he had forgotten it in his sheer terror.

Much more interesting than supermarket shopping were our trips to the fresh food ‘wet’ markets. Some foods we recognised – bananas, cauliflower – but others were a
complete and utter mystery. It was food shopping by lucky dip; one trip we bought some purple tuberous things that I guessed might be yams, a hairy coconut with a leek growing out of the top of it
and a big green dusty thing that may or may not have been a mango.

Food shopping would become a bit of a bone of contention between Steve and me: I was happy to just go to the local market and eat whatever we could find, doing without, say, almonds or wholemeal
flour if I had to. But I had only been away from the UK for a few weeks and trying exotic foods was all part of the adventure. I could remember what good, unsweetened bread tasted like (my tip to
you – never buy a prepacked sandwich in Malaysia. Salty fish paste does not go well with white sliced that is so sugary you can feel cavities developing as you chew); Steve had been abroad
for a decade and he wanted to eat like he would have done at home: stewed lamb shanks, bacon and eggs, cauliflower cheese – even if that meant days of asking around for a specialist store
that stocks Cheddar, and then an hour and a half bus trip either way to procure 2kg of the stuff. The way he looked at it was that it was worth the effort and he had the time and money to spend.
Me, I would have been content dining out thrice daily on greasy roti telor bread, mee goring (fried noodles) and nasi goring (fried rice) and spending less than £2 to cover all three
meals.

As arranged, Big John turned up at the dockside with an impressively small amount of luggage – unlike me, he knew how to pack – and the three of us went to meet Josh and Kristin for
dinner at an Italian restaurant on the waterfront. Josh told us he had been sailing for three and a half years, through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and South China Sea to Malaysia,
where he had joined a rally and the race. He was keen to do the same route Steve had told me he planned to cover. I asked him where the one place he really wanted to go was. He replied Palau, an
island east of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean.

‘And why do you want to go there?’ I asked him.

‘Imagine paradise,’ he said, fixing me with those green eyes. ‘Everything you dreamed paradise could be. Well it’s there and it’s called Palau.’

Palau was on the route Steve had mapped out to me in his emails. Josh’s enthusiasm was catching and I felt my pulse quicken with excitement. Paradise? Far-flung, exotic places? Sailing
there on your own – well, Steve’s – boat? That was more like what I had imagined my trip to be, not this: eating pizza in a city. Granted, the city was Kota Kinabalu in Borneo,
which technically qualified as a far-flung, exotic place, and the restaurant was by the sea. It’s just that it was by an open sewer, too, and the whiff was ruining the whole
dining-alfresco-in-paradise vibe quite a bit.

Josh dropped into the conversation the fact that he knew Paul and Rachel Chandler, the middle-aged British couple taken hostage by Somali pirates nine months earlier. I felt a jolt. It was an
odd convergence of my old life back in London and my new one at sea: only a couple of weeks before I left London, when the news came out (prematurely, it later emerged) that the Chandlers were
about to be freed, I was asked to write a feature for the paper about why people give up everything to go sailing.