Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (19 page)

Went up into the cockpit a few minutes ago and my albatross is back from the Horn, done his explorations. He’s sitting in the sea, and by the look in his eye he’d like another fish. Soon as we turn north I’ll put the line out again, and hope to catch a fish or two. That should keep him happy. It should be flatter that side, so better for fishing. Then up to the Falklands for a bit of a rest. I need it. Kitty 4 needs it. she needs a good clean – covered in barnacles and slime. Slimy she may be but she’s done Hobart to the Horn in 60 days. Not another boat like her in the whole world. Just gave her a smacking great kiss to tell her I loved her. Put Louis Armstrong on the CD. “What a Wonderful World”. It is too.

Just got all your congrats, thank you, thank you, and and and your grate grate news Mum about Kitty, you said something would turn up and it has, but only because you never gave up. Love you so much. It’s incredible, brilliant, wonderful, grate! So I’ve got a whole new family I never knew about! And Kitty is real, really real, not a figment of Dad’s imagination. Tell that bloke who emailed you that he’s the best vicar in the entire world. When I get to England I’m going to go to St James in Bermondsey to see the baptism records for myself, see the place where they were baptised. I keep looking at the family tree you sent me, Mum, I can’t believe it! New grandparents! Ellen and Sidney Hobhouse. And the marriage certificate too – Ellen Barker (spinster) Sidney Hobhouse (cobbler). Now I know for sure that Dad was a baby once! He was a happening, wasn’t he?!! And so was Kitty. Like you say Mum we mustn’t get our hopes up too much. We still have to find Kitty, and when we do it may be too late, she could be dead, but at least we know she is or was a true person, a happening, just
like Dad, real just like
Dad
. Will you thank the vicar bloke from me too for helping us like this and tell him I want to meet him when I come to London. So Dad was right about Bermondsey too. Is that far from London Bridge? He had a better memory than he thought he had, dear old Dad, didn’t he? Best day of my life, I’ve rounded the Horn and I’ve found a new family. This calls for another hot chocolate, maybe two. Know I shouldn’t, know I’ll run out. But who cares? A

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx – zillions of them.

Thinking back I should have stayed longer in the Falkland Islands. I didn’t, mostly because the hopeful news I’d just had about Kitty made me impatient to be on my way again. The Falklands is a bleak and barren place, that’s for sure, and the people are tough—they have to be. But they were kindness itself. My arrival caused quite a stir. Lots of people were following my trip now on the website, so they knew I was coming. I had lots of helping hands, and a place to stay in Stanley which was a home from home for me. Mrs Betts mothered me like a happy hen who has just found a lost chick. I had all the baths I’d been longing for, all the breakfasts too. I did a couple of interviews, but then she made sure I was left alone to recover.
And
Kitty Four
was well looked after too. Within a week she was tidy and trim again, not a trace of slime, and the barnacles gone. She was ready to go. The solar panel was fixed—I’d been having a lot of trouble with that. She was filled up with diesel, and I had all the provisions on board I needed to get me to England, all the packets of hot chocolate I could ever want! I was just waiting for the right wind, and the right tide. But an onshore wind was blowing a gale, and it went on blowing for days on end, apparently quite common in the Falklands. So I couldn’t leave. If I’d tried I would have been crunched against the jetty.

Mrs Betts offered to show me the island a bit while I was waiting. So off we went in her little Morris Minor van, bumping our way across the island. She took me all over, told me about the daughter she had who’d left the island and was living in New Zealand and had a baby now, but how she’d never seen her grandchild. I told her a bit about Dad. She knew something about him already from the newspapers, and she made me recite
The Ancient Mariner
just to prove to her that I could—she’d heard about that too, from the website I guessed. I knew almost forty verses
by then, so she got the lot. We saw penguins and we saw sheep, all huddling against the cold of the wind. She took me to the British war cemetery, and told me about the war they’d had there when the Argentinians invaded the island twenty years before. It made me so sad to see all those graves. Standing there, the wind whipping about us, I thought of Dad and Vietnam, of young men dying a long way from home. “They were fine boys,” Mrs Betts said suddenly. “But then so were the Argentinians. And they all had mothers.”

That evening, my last on the Falklands, I read her the last part of
The Ancient Mariner
, because she said she wanted to know what happened. She had tears in her eyes when I’d finished. “So in a way it’s a kind of happy ending,” she said. Then she looked at me hard. “I’ll be thinking a lot about you, Allie. I want your journey to have a happy ending too. And I want you to find Kitty. You deserve a happy ending.”

She offered me her phone then to ring home. She said I should, that a daughter needs to speak to her mother, that emails weren’t enough. So for ten minutes I talked to Mum
and Grandpa, who kept snatching the phone from one another. We laughed a lot and cried a lot too, which meant we didn’t say as much as we should have. Grandpa kept going on about a “big surprise” that he couldn’t tell me about yet, and then he would almost tell me, and Mum would snatch the phone off him again, and I could hear her telling him off, that he’d promised to say nothing, not until they could be sure of it. I was certain I knew what it was.

“You’ve found Kitty, haven’t you?”

“No, it’s not that,” Mum said. “But we’re still looking.”

“Then what’s the surprise?” I asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” she told me. But I knew something was going on.

I had a big send-off the next day, and as we said goodbye Mrs Betts gave me a digital camera. “A going away present, because yours doesn’t work, dear,” she said. “This one does, I promise.”

And so it did too. The first photo I took was of Mrs Betts waving goodbye from the jetty. I was in such high
spirits. I was on
Kitty Four
again. I’d had all my home comforts with Mrs Betts—but I’d missed
Kitty Four
, missed the smell of her, missed the movement of the sea underneath me. This was my real home. This was where I wanted to be. I knew I had a lot of tomorrows ahead of me before I reached England, about sixty-five days away. Then I’d go to London, go to St James in Bermondsey, and find Kitty if I could. As I left the Falklands, I had never felt better about the outcome of the whole expedition.

But now I was back at sea I had one growing doubt, and it was a doubt that nagged me every hour of every day that followed. My albatross wasn’t there. I had dolphins, dozens of them all around me. But the last I’d seen of my albatross was the day we’d sailed into the Falklands. I’d just presumed that he’d be out there, that he’d be just waiting for us to put to sea again.

I was wrong. The days went by. I began to feel so alone without him. My emails became shorter and shorter at this time, partly because I didn’t want Mum to know how miserable I was, and partly because I wanted to be up there
in the cockpit as much as possible so that I would be there when he came. But he didn’t come and he didn’t come. And by now I’d worked out why of course. Albatross rarely come this far north. They are southern ocean birds, I knew that. But I went on hoping he’d come back anyway. I tried to keep myself as busy as I could, tried so hard not to dwell on my loneliness. But I couldn’t sleep at nights now for thinking about my albatross. I was beginning to believe, in the darkness of those long nights, that I really was on my own now, that Dad had gone too, gone with the albatross. I had been right about that then: they were one and the same. Having been so hopeful, so sure of everything, I was suddenly overwhelmed with misery.

There was a lot of kelp about, ugly-looking stuff, the bubbly kind, the thistly kind, and some of it in very thick long strands of up to twenty metres. And it was all around the boat. I felt hemmed in by it, threatened. It looked like writhing sea snakes coming to get me, reaching out to grab me. It would rise up on either side as we ploughed through it. I longed not to have to look at it, to go below, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t just because I was looking for my albatross that I
needed to be up on deck. I had other reasons.

There were suddenly a lot of fishing boats around down there, I could see them easier at night all along the horizon—and fishing boats were every bit as dangerous as icebergs. Get caught in the miles of nets they trail behind them and I knew that would be the end of everything. I hadn’t ever felt this low before. To make it worse my pc was playing up, and for the first time on the trip I could neither send nor receive. The wind died. The sea stilled. There was grey sea, grey sky all around, and I was marooned in a sea of serpents. I sang to keep my spirits up. I could think of nothing else to do. I sang till my throat ached, every song I’d ever known. But one song I sang again and again,
London Bridge is Falling Down
. It was a cry of pain, I think, but also a cry for help.

How fast things can change at sea. I came up into the cockpit one morning to find the kelp all gone, the fishing boats nowhere to be seen. And the wind was up and gusting. It was like the whole earth had suddenly woken up around me. Where there had been grey, there was blue, endless blue, beautiful blue. I breathed in deep and closed
my eyes. When I opened them, he was there floating down towards me on the wind. An albatross, my albatross. He didn’t care about north or south. He just wanted to come with me. When I’d finished all my crying and whooping I told him exactly what I thought of him leaving me in the lurch like that for so long. Albatross can’t smile of course, that’s what most people think. But they can and they do. They smile all the time. And when I threw him a fish I’d caught for him that evening he was smiling all right. I know he was.

I was down below in the cabin a couple of hours later, baking the first bread I’d made since leaving the Falklands, and still revelling in the memory of my reunion with the albatross. His return had not only cheered me, it had clearly had some magical effect on my pc which was now working again, perfectly. Then the phone rang, the Satphone. It had rung only a few times on the whole trip, and then it had always been a coastguard calling, and always much nearer land. I picked it up, worried there might be something wrong at home, or maybe it was just Mum panicking because she hadn’t been able to reach me on email.

“Hi there,” it was a man’s voice. “This is Dr Marc Topolski. You don’t know me”—he had an American accent—“but your Grandpa’s been speaking with NASA. They phoned right up and suggested I might like to talk with you.”

I didn’t understand what he was on about, not at first. “I’m not ill,” I said. “I don’t need a doctor. I’m fine.”

“Sure you are, Allie. Thing is, Allie, that I’m up here right above you in the International Space Station, and you’re right down below us, and your Grandpa said you can see us sometimes and how you’d like to get in touch. And I thought that seemed like a fine idea, because we’re both kind of explorers, aren’t we? And so I thought like you did, that maybe we could like get together on email or by phone, from time to time, whatever you like, a kind of ongoing conversation. Might be fun. Might be interesting. What do you say?”

I couldn’t say a thing.

I had that first amazing phone call from space, so my emails tell me, on the 29
^th
March. Grandpa’s surprise was a surprise all right, the surprise of my life.

G’day best Grandpa in the world. No question. You are the coolest Grandpa that ever lived, the greatest, the greekest. Just had the surprise you told me about, the one you made happen. I can’t imagine anything more surprising happening to anyone ever anywhere. Thank you, thank you Grandpa. He’s going to send me a pic of himself and the crew up there, and we’re going to have what he calls “an ongoing
conversation”. I think it’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me. He sounds like George Clooney, but don’t you dare tell him I said that. I think Americans must all gargle in stuff that makes their voices so husky. And…and…and, what you don’t know is that my albatross is back with me too! So I got an albatross and an astronaut all in one day. Not bad eh? Don’t know how long my albatross can stay. He’s already way too far north. I’m going to try to feed him lots of fish to keep him with me, which is silly I know because he can catch all the fish he wants for himself, albatross are quite good at that stuff, but he seems to like hanging around for mine too. Can’t believe how many of you are looking out for me now out here, all of you at home, my albatross and now Dr Topolski. No one ever had a supporters’ club like that before. Grib forecast is horrible, so I’ve got lots to do and in a hurry. I’ll get back to you later soon as I can. Love y’all, specially you greek Grandpa. Axx

Hi Mum, g’day Grandpa, not had a lot of time to do anything except sail the boat. So have had no time to write emails to you or to Dr Topolski. Just been through a storm like no other. Two knockdowns, but I’m still alive and kicking, still here to tell the tale so no worries. Most of the time there was nothing to do but hunker down below and hope, getting quite good at that. did a lot of bad singing and quite a lot of clutching Dad’s lucky key too. 70 knot gusts rising to 80. vicious wind. Massive flat top waves, wind flattened, the worst kind, the really dangerous kind. Breaking waves of grey water, a spray storm all around me. I just tried to keep the wind and the swell on the quarter as much as I could. Not always possible which is when things went very badly wrong, nearly catastrophic. We came beam on twice into a rolling breaker, and she just went over. Both knockdowns happened in the space of half an hour. Not a half hour I ever want to repeat, I promise you! Nothing I could do, but I knew she’d pop right up again.