Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (15 page)

We were all there together to see
Kitty Four
go into the water for the first time. Zita launched it for us. “I name this boat
Kitty Four
. May she take you both to England. May you find Kitty, Arthur, and all you’re looking for. And most of all, may she bring you back home safely.” I saw a lot of grown men cry that morning, and I was one of them. So was the old man. Allie held my hand tight as we watched.

“Thank you, Dad,” she whispered. “She’s going to be the best boat, the best boat in the world. I know she is.”

That evening as we celebrated I knew something wasn’t quite right. I felt dizzy first, then there was a pain in my head that wouldn’t go away. I’d always felt fit as a fiddle before, so when I fainted the next morning, Zita called the doctor. So the saga began – the tests, the waiting, more tests, more waiting, then the results, the verdict. The doctor gave it to me straight, because I asked him to. I had a brain tumour – malignant, advanced, aggressive. There was nothing they could do. Surgery wouldn’t help.

Radiotherapy wouldn’t help. Chemotherapy wouldn’t help. Nothing would help. When I asked how long I’d got, he said, “Months.”

“How many?”

“Five or six, difficult to be precise about it. I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” I said.

Since that day I’ve had so much to think about, so much to get sorted. I told Zita that I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want anyone to know outside the family, that I just wanted everything to go on as normal as possible, for as long as possible. Without Zita, without Allie, and without
Kitty Four
I would have fallen apart. I know that.

We finished her together, fitted her out just as Allie wanted her. I wanted to see her in all her yellow glory – yellow she had to be, Allie said, because all the other
Kittys
had been yellow, and they’d been yellow because all the foods she most loved as a little girl were yellow – custard and butter and bananas. I was there on the quayside to see Allie take her out for the first time, saw her dancing through the waves, and I knew I’d never built a finer boat.

There was something else I had to do as well before I went. I had to talk it all out, write it all down, everything I could remember right up until now. To start with I could
manage to write well enough on my own, but as things got worse, as my sight gave up on me, I’ve had to dictate it. I prefer it that way anyway. Telling a story is so much easier for me than writing it. Some of it I’ve dictated to Zita, but sometimes I can tell she finds it hard to endure. That’s why Allie and I are finishing it together.

So in the end we didn’t sail around the world together, but we have sailed around my life together. Allie told me yesterday that she’s talked it over with her mother and the old man and they’ve given their permission. She says she’s going to sail to England on
Kitty Four
on her own now, that when she gets there she’s going to do all she can to find my sister Kitty and tell her all about me and find out about my key, Kitty’s key. And then she’s going to sail back all the way home again. Zita and her grandfather are still a bit sticky about it, she says, but they’ll come round. They will too. She’s quite a girl, my Allie, quite a girl.

There’s times I think she only told me that to make me happy. But when Allie says something she always means it – she’s very like her mother that way, very like the old man. So I think maybe she really will do it. The thought that Kitty and Allie might one day meet up makes me very happy – my real world meeting my dream world. It’s just a pity I won’t be
there to see it, that’s all. Or maybe I will be. Who knows.

As I said at the beginning, I knew the ending of my story before I began telling it. But maybe it isn’t quite the ending, not yet. I’ll live on for a while in Zita’s memory and in Allie’s memory. I’ll be part of their lives for as long as they live, just as Marty and Aunty Megs have always been part of mine. This story of mine will help me live on a little longer. And I want that. I want that very badly. Living a little longer is suddenly the most important thing in the world for me.

But this is the end of the story, the story of me. What will happen to me soon is the end of everyone’s story. Not a happy ending, not a sad ending. Just an ending. Time to say goodbye.

I always liked messing about with boats, and
in
boats too. As Dad said, I’d been doing that just about all my life, from the bath to the Southern Ocean. I think I was born to sail, and I mean that. So when I set out on my great sailing adventure, it was because I wanted to do it. I’d been dreaming of doing it for almost as long as I could remember. I didn’t do it just because I promised Dad I would. That was only part of it. Yes, Dad had built the boat for us to sail to England together, to find Kitty together. And yes, it’s true that I try very hard to do what I say I’m going to do, to keep my
promises. So of course I went in memory of Dad, but mostly I went because I wanted to go.

He was just a bloke I met on a train, the night train from Penzance to London, and we got talking, as you do. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. I had my laptop out, and I was busy writing emails to Mum and Grandpa. Besides, I didn’t want to talk. I was tired. I wanted to get my emails done and then have a good night’s sleep. But we just got chatting. No, that’s not quite true. He started chatting, and I listened. I think I listened because he was funny, and because he was Australian, the first Australian boy I’d talked to face-to-face in months. He rattled off his entire life history in about a minute, before the train even left the station.

He was called Michael McLuskie. Born in Sydney, went to school in Parramatta. Hated it. Spent all the time he could on the beach, surfing. Left school. Decided he’d go round the world searching out all the best surfing beaches he could find. Came to England, to Cornwall, to Newquay and St Ives. Big mistake. No one told him they didn’t do
proper waves in England. You could find bigger waves in a teacup, he said. He’d spent the last couple of months sitting on drizzly grey beaches waiting for waves, and now he’d run out of money. He was going home, to sunshine, to Australian surf, the real kind, the rolling kind, the thundering curling kind, the riding kind.

“You surf?” he asks me.

“No,” I tell him. “I sail.”

“Same thing.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Have a Mars bar,” he says.

And that’s how it all began, with an argument and a Mars bar. Six years on and we still argue from time to time, not that often. But when we do, we often patch it up by sharing a Mars bar. It helps us remember that train journey, the time we first met. It makes us smile, and it’s really hard to argue if you’re smiling. I know because I’ve tried.

“So what about you?” Michael says.

“What about me?”

“Well, I’ve told you the story of my life, so now you’ve got to tell me yours.”

“You’re just chatting me up,” I tell him.

“Yes, I am,” he replies, “but tell me all the same. It’s a long journey.”

He was right about that. It was going to be about eight hours through the night, and the seats were uncomfortable, so sleeping wouldn’t be easy. And besides, he was very persuasive.

“What happened to your arm?” he says.

I’d almost forgotten I had my arm in a sling. I’d already got used to it like that. “It’s a long story,” I tell him.

“I’m listening,” he replies, flashing me his wide white surfer’s smile. “And you can tell me your name too if you like.”

I told Michael my story (and my name) that night because I liked him. There, I’ve said it, and that’s the honest truth of it. To begin with I thought,
I’ll do what he did, just rattle through my whole life history, get it all over with as quickly as possible
. But once I’d started it didn’t work out like that, and that was because he kept trying to draw more out of me.

I began my story just as the train jerked into motion,
and began to groan and grind its way out of the station. As it turned out, I didn’t finish until the next morning. And I think I know why I confided in him as much as I did. It was because he listened so intently, seemed so riveted by every word I said. It was like I was telling my story to a little kid at bedtime. He just didn’t want me to stop, and he kept asking questions, kept wanting me to explain things more. So it wasn’t just me talking, it became more of a conversation between us than solo storytelling. And I had so much I wanted to show him, so much evidence: all the emails on the laptop, a typescript of Dad’s story (rather battered by now) and Dad’s copy of
The Ancient Mariner
, both of which I’d had with me on
Kitty Four
all the way from Australia. He loved the emails particularly, and he told me why too. It all became so real when he read them, he said, as if he was there on the boat with me.

So that’s how I’ll try to tell you my story then, just as I told it to Michael that first time, but without his interruptions.

Dad died just two weeks after I’d finally finished typing out his story. So he had his copy of it on his bedside table. He couldn’t read it by this time, but he knew what it was all right, and he was very proud of it. The last time he was conscious I sang him his song over and over again, till I was sure he’d heard it. “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my fair Lady.”

He didn’t open his eyes. But he squeezed my hand. He’d heard it.

We gave him a good Cretan send off, the kind he’d have liked, all of us there, the whole family, and we sang our songs and danced our dances. Then we went out in a flotilla of boats, Mum and me in
Kitty Four
, and we sprinkled his ashes far out at sea, just as he’d wanted us to do. I read a few verses from
The Ancient Mariner
. I knew his favourite lines, so I ended with them.

Just as I was finishing that last line an albatross came winging over us and floated above us on the air. Dad’s spirit was in that bird. I knew it and so did Mum—we didn’t have to say anything to know what the other was thinking.

As we watched it fly away I told her about the promise I’d made to Dad: that once he was gone, I’d do the voyage we were going to do together on my own. I’d sail to England, do all I could to find Kitty, and then sail home again. I expected an argument from her—I knew how nervous and upset she’d been about the whole project, and that was with two of us doing it. But she just said very quietly: “I know all about your promise, Allie. He told me, and besides I know his story, don’t I? He was so proud of you. You go. You do it. It’s what he would have wanted. But when it’s done, you come back home, you hear?”

Fitting up
Kitty Four
, and planning the whole trip, and all the sea trials needed to test out the equipment, took several months. Mum wasn’t going to let me go until she was quite sure everything on board was just as it should be. Grandpa was the same. He checked and double-checked everything. And all this time Mum was beginning the search for Kitty. She surfed the net, but that got her nowhere. She sent off emails to public record offices in London and all over England. Nothing. She wrote to one or two friends who lived there asking for their help. Everyone did what they
could, but no one could find a trace of a Kitty Hobhouse born in London, probably in Bermondsey, at about the same time as Dad—though, like him, we could never be quite sure of when exactly that had been.

We set up a
Kitty Four
website so people could chart my progress at sea, and follow me all the way to England. And there was a link to the whole story of the search for Dad’s missing sister asking anyone who might have any information about Kitty Hobhouse to get in touch. Maybe someone would read it. Hopefully someone would know something. We had hundreds of hits, huge interest, lots of good luck messages; but no one, it seems, had ever heard of a Kitty Hobhouse of Bermondsey, London.

Mum didn’t give up. She and Grandpa used the press too. There were front-page articles in the newspapers, national as well as local. “Allie’s Epic Voyage.” “Allie Searches for Long Lost Auntie.” I did radio interviews, TV interviews. Grandpa liked the TV coverage best of course because the boatyard’s name was up there behind me: “Stavros Boats” in huge blue letters—bow to stern, the whole length of the boat, on my cap, on my wet weather
gear, on just about everything. Grandpa was always there to stage the interview—he never missed a trick.

Mum thought the press coverage might be our best chance of tracking Kitty down. But no one phoned, no one got in touch, no one emailed. I got to thinking about what Dad had told me when he was a bit down once: that it had all been so long ago, that sometimes he wondered if Kitty had existed at all, that she could be just a figment of his imagination, that someone else could just as easily have given him his lucky key. So we could be looking for a figment.

As usual Mum stayed positive. Kitty was real, she was sure of it. Kitty was as real as her key, she said. She would keep looking while I was gone. Sooner or later, something had to turn up. All through Dad’s illness she had been the same. Everyone around her only kept hoping because she did. Whatever made Dad feel better she made sure we did. Most of all he loved to see us dancing, all of us together, the whole family. “Let’s do it like we always do it,” she’d tell us, “so that he feels the joy in it.” Even when he died, she was the strongest of us all. It was Mum’s strength and
determination that was to keep me going over the next five months. I could never have done it without her.