Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (21 page)

I went down into the cabin then to email home at once, and I saw there was an email waiting for me from Dr Topolski. He was back on earth now. They’d brought him
down a week before, in Kazakhstan, a bit of a bumpy landing, he said, and he was back home with his family now on leave for a while, and he’d been doing some investigations. He hadn’t forgotten about me. On the contrary, he’d been in touch with Mum and Grandpa a lot ever since he got down. He’d come up with something “pretty interesting” about Kitty, but, tantalisingly, he wouldn’t say what it was. He did tell me that his whole family knew about me, that they were all thinking of me every day, that they had a map of the Atlantic ocean pinned up on the kitchen wall and were charting my progress, moving the bright yellow pin that was me a little further north and little closer to England every morning. He knew that I’d been going through a hard time, he said, but he wanted me to know, “There’s a whole bunch of people here in Vermont and all over the world just rooting for you.” Every day after that I felt as if I was recharging myself somehow.

I was sailing into trade winds which didn’t make for comfortable sailing, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t only the winds that were blowing us along now anyway—and
Kitty
Four
was flying—it was the emails that came in all the time from everyone at home, and from Dr Topolski too, everyone contributing to my new sense of wellbeing, of euphoria almost. I never saw my turtle again, but I’ve never forgotten him. I can still see his face gazing up at me, a kind face, old and wise. Sometimes I think that turtle saved my life.

With every day that brought me closer to England, I kept asking them about Kitty, but all I got back was that there was no real news. They had one or two hopeful “irons in the fire,” whatever that meant. It didn’t sound very hopeful. To be honest, I thought they were just stringing me along, trying to keep my spirits up, knowing perfectly well that the last thing I needed to hear was bad news about Kitty—that they couldn’t find any trace of her, or worse, that they had discovered she was dead. Often I’d sit there down in the cabin, Dad’s lucky key cupped in my hand, wondering what had been so important about this key. What did it mean? Why had Kitty given it to Dad that day all those years before when they were parted? What was so special about it? He had always called it his lucky
key. I’d hold it and squeeze it tight, and every time I’d wish on it, just as Dad used to wish on it. I wished I’d find Kitty alive and well in England and that I’d find out at last what the key was for.

I’d be lying if I said that my new euphoria didn’t from time to time give way to times of sadness. There was still an ache inside me, left by the loss of my albatross, that would not go away. I thought of him so often. Every bird I saw reminded me of him, of the majesty of his flight, of his grace and his beauty. And sitting in my cockpit in a cold grey North Atlantic, I looked out and saw an albatross of a different kind, an albatross of the north, a gannet, diving down to fish, splicing the sea. He was magnificent, but not as magnificent as my albatross.

It was a good thing I was so buoyed up now and so determined, because in those last couple of thousand miles just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. First of all, the North Atlantic turned out to be every bit as vicious and hostile as the Southern Ocean.
Kitty Four
took a terrible battering. And it wasn’t just one storm, it was a whole succession of them. We’d sail out of one and straight into another. We got knocked down three times in three days, and the last time was very nearly the end of the story.

Not many single-handed sailors go over the side and live to tell the tale. I did. It was my own fault it happened. As Dad used to say, I was a silly chump. I was in the cockpit
in a storm and I wasn’t harnessed in properly. Yes, I was tired. I hadn’t slept for a couple of days. But that’s no excuse. I was just a chump and very nearly a dead chump. I was caught completely unawares when the wave came. As the boat lurched violently I was catapulted overboard. Somehow I managed to grab a safety wire and just clung on to it. But
Kitty Four
was on her side and I was dunked in the ocean. I remember hearing the roar of the sea in my ears, and I knew that was always the last sound a drowning sailor ever hears. Then
Kitty Four
righted herself. She flipped up and I found myself flung back into the cockpit still in one piece, just. But I was nursing a broken arm—I knew it was broken at once because it was completely useless—and I was cursing myself loudly. You’re a lucky chump, a very lucky chump, I thought, when I’d stopped my cursing. My survival was down to Dad’s key, I had no doubt about it, it was entirely down to Dad’s lucky key.

I didn’t feel any pain in my arm at first. It was too cold after my dunking in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. But when I’d dried off and warmed up down
below in the cabin, then it began to hurt like hell. I knew I’d need help, so I picked up the Satphone and rang home. Grandpa answered. I told him all I needed was a doctor to tell me what to do, and I’d manage. No arguments, Grandpa said, he was going to have me airlifted off. “You can’t sail a boat with a broken arm,” he said. I don’t think I’d ever shouted at Grandpa before (or since) but I did now. I told him that we were only fifty miles or so off the coast of England, off the Scilly Isles, which was less than a hundred miles from Falmouth; that
Kitty Four
and I were going to finish this thing together, and that I’d never speak to him again if he did it. Mum and Grandpa had a little talk about it—and five minutes later I had Dr Topolski on the phone. It turned out he was a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of physics and engineering and just about everything else. He “examined” me by asking me dozens of questions. Then he talked me through how to make a splint, how to bandage it to my arm—not easy one-handed, but I did it.

Of course it wasn’t just me that was beaten up and hurting. It was
Kitty Four
too. Not the boat herself, she was
fine. She’d just rocked and rolled, and bobbed up again, like she always did. She’d been built to be indestructible and unsinkable, and she was. It was all the bits and pieces that were beginning to fail as we neared the English Channel. Neither the generator nor the desalinator was reliable any more. The self-steering was in pieces. I’d tried mending it, but with one arm I couldn’t do it, so it meant I had to be up there in the cockpit almost all the time. In fact I’d have had to be there anyway, because there was a lot of shipping about now, more than I’d had on the whole trip, and for a little yacht, for any yacht, that’s dangerous. I could see them, but in seas like this I’d be lucky if they saw me before they ran me down.

I didn’t tell anyone how bad things were really getting. I knew how Grandpa would react, how upset Mum would be. Instead I wrote chirpy emails, sounded deliberately upbeat and jokey on the Satphone. I think maybe that having to sound chirpy was very good for me. The truth was that I was now really worried that I might not be able to make it. My arm pained me every time I moved. Every sail change I made was sheer agony. I came to a decision.

I emailed home saying I’d put into Scilly, and not go on to Falmouth. After all Scilly was England. It was as good a port as any to end the first half of my voyage. Mum phoned me back. She said she and Grandpa had thought about it and they were flying over to England as soon as possible, and they would let me know when they’d landed. I said I didn’t want any fuss, and that they weren’t to tell anyone what had happened. I was already dreading a welcoming flotilla coming out to meet me. Grandpa said that even with no website up there, there was huge interest in the papers everywhere.

“Just don’t tell them I’m coming into Scilly,” I told him. “Promise me, Grandpa.” He promised, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew the temptation of having “Stavros Boats” on the television news in big letters, and his little Allie, the apple of his Greek eye, standing on deck and waving, would be too much to resist. To be honest I expected the worst, but I’d come to terms with it. Maybe it would be quite fun anyway, and even if I didn’t like it, I could stand back and smile through gritted teeth—after all, I’d done that before in Hobart.

So there we were the next day tootling along with a bit of a limp, but happy as Larry (I do sound like Dad sometimes I know, but I love the phrases he used. I inherited them. They’re mine now.) All the storms were behind us. The forecast was set fair all the way to Scilly. Sunshiney day, clear skies, and not a sign of a welcoming flotilla—amazing, Grandpa had kept quiet. I had just sighted land, not much land, but land all the same, and it was the land I wanted to see—the Scilly Islands. I toasted the occasion with a mug of hot chocolate. The Scillies looked like little grey dumplings lying there low in the sea, about ten miles off. We were going nicely, about five knots. It was early morning. I was so nearly there. I’d seen a whale, or perhaps a basking shark, in the distance the day before and was looking out for him again. What I saw instead was a school of porpoises playing off my starboard bow, giving me quite a show. This was the kind of unexpected, spontaneous welcome I really wanted.

But I was enjoying it so much that I wasn’t keeping a good look-out all around. That was when a sickening shudder shook the boat. She reared up and rolled, and
then crashed down into the sea, where she stopped dead, as if the life had suddenly gone out of her. The tiller was light in my hand, so I knew at once that we’d lost the rudder. Then I saw pieces of it floating away astern of us. I thought at first we must have hit the whale, but we hadn’t. The dark shape I saw lurking just beneath the surface rose then and showed itself. It was a dirty orange with flat sides and sharp edges. A container, a lousy stinking container. I cursed that container ship wherever she was, then I cursed all container ships wherever they were. Cursing over, I checked below. At least we weren’t holed. We hadn’t lost buoyancy. We were rudderless and helpless, but still afloat. I hoped we could drift in on the tide at first, but a quick look at my chart confirmed what I already knew, that there were rocks all around Scilly, thousands and thousands of them.

I had no choice. I used the Satphone and called out the lifeboat. Within half an hour they were alongside and threw me a line. So with a busted rudder and a busted arm I arrived on the Scilly Isles, came into St Mary’s Harbour, towed in ignominiously by the lifeboat. Because of that, of
course, there was a lot of interest, and very soon they found out who I was. No flotilla, thank goodness, but any hope I might have had of slipping in unnoticed was gone. They whisked me up to the hospital to have my arm looked at and told me I had to stay there the night, but I said I didn’t want to. I’d had a better offer. Matt Pender, the lifeboat coxswain, said he could put me up at home with his family. So after my arm was set and plastered he came to fetch me, and we went straight to a pub where they feted me as if I was Ellen McArthur. “Proper little hero” they called me. Everyone made a fuss of me and I loved it. I tried phoning home, but no one answered. They’d probably left already. I didn’t mind. I was so happy to have got to England, so happy the boat was in one piece, just about.

I did some TV and radio interviews the next day, got them over with. Then I went down to the jetty to tidy
Kitty Four
before she went off for repairs. There were crowds all around her, dozens of people photographing her, and she was just bobbing up and down loving it all, taking her bows.

I waited about till everyone had gone before I went on board. Then we had a quiet time together, just
Kitty Four
and me. I emailed Mum, emailed Dr Topolski, told everyone that repairs would take a couple of weeks at least, that I would catch the ferry the following day from Scilly to Penzance, and then the night train to London Paddington getting in at seven o’clock on the Wednesday morning. If they were there by then, they could meet me, and we could go off to Bermondsey and start looking for Kitty right away. I told them something else too, something I knew neither of them would want to hear. I’d decided that once
Kitty Four
was repaired, once my arm was better, I would be sailing
Kitty Four
home. I’d do the whole thing just as I’d planned, the whole circumnavigation, and nothing anyone could say would stop me. “I mean it, Grandpa,” I wrote. Before I left
Kitty Four
I got an email back.

“Whatever you say, Allie. See you at Paddington seven a.m. Wednesday morning. There’s a big clock there on platform one. Meet you there. Love Mum and Grandpa.” They’d given in just like that. I couldn’t believe it.

Matt and the whole lifeboat crew came to see me off on the ferry to Penzance. I’d never been hugged so much in all my life. I liked it, I liked it a lot. I had to wait around a while until I could get on the night train for London. So I was quite tired by the time I got into my seat. I was getting out my laptop. I wanted to send another email to Mum. When I looked up, there was this bloke sitting opposite smiling at me. We got talking as you do. His name was Michael McLuskie.

The rest you know already, just about all of it, anyway. What you don’t know is what happened when I’d finished telling him my story, when we got into Paddington Station the next morning. The train came into platform one, and we got out together, Michael carrying my rucksack as well as his. (He wasn’t just good-looking, he was thoughtful too, still is—mostly.) I could see Mum and Grandpa under the clock waiting, looking around for me.

“That them?” Michael asked.

“That’s them,” I said.

“So it’s true, all if it, everything you told me. None of it made up?”

“None of it.”

“Then,” he said, looking straight at me, and meaning every word he said, “then you are the most incredible person I’ve ever met, and I’d like to see you again, if that’s alright.”

I don’t know to this day what made me say it. “Look,” I said. “I’m hungry. Why don’t you come and have breakfast with us, with Mum and Grandpa and me?” He didn’t say no, which was why, after Mum and Grandpa had each hugged me again and again, and after we’d all cried and laughed Cretan style under the clock at Paddington, we all piled into a taxi, and went off to their hotel for breakfast.