Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Part 4

I went inland after the navy, b.u.mmed my way around, picking up any work I could find. I went gold mining in Western Australia, worked on a cattle station in the Northern Territories, spent most of my time branding cattle. I did seasonal work picking grapes in vineyards outside Adelaide, in the Clare Valley it was. And after that, I was a jackaroo for a while on a sheep station near Armidale in New South Wales. After that I never wanted to look at another sheep in my life. Back-breaking work,smelly work. At times I felt like I was back on Cooper's Station.

I couldn't settle anywhere, not for long. I kept moving on, moving on. I wasn't leaving anywhere. I wasn't going anywhere. I was just drifting. I still wore Kitty's key around my neck, never took it off, not once. But I'd long since stopped believing it was lucky. I wore it, mostly out of habit, and maybe because I still thought that I might one day be able to go back to England and find Kitty, find out if she'd ever existed even, find out what the key was for.

But I never did it, and I know why. I was frightened, frightened of discovering the worst that she never had existed, that I'd made her up so as not to feel entirely alone in this world. I still thought about the key, though, when I caught sight of it in the mirror as I was shaving. I thought about it every time I touched it. But any real hope I had harboured of actually ever doing anything about it was fast fading, along with my sanity. My centre would not hold.

I don't know why it happened when it did. None of it really makes much sense to me even now. If there was a physical cause that triggered my troubles and when it comes to health, I don't think body and mind can be separated then it might well have been lack of sleep. No matter how exhausted I was after a day's work, I couldn't get to sleep. I'd lie there, not tossing and turning, just thinking. And no matter how hard I tried, my mind kept coming back to it. It was always the killing. It was the s.h.i.+ning tuna lying on the deck bleeding, fighting for life, d.i.c.kie Donnelly's last breath warm on my hand.

But there was another picture there that haunted me, that would not go away every time I closed my eyes. I'd seen it first as a black and white photo in a magazine, I think, then in a film on the television. It was an image of a young girl in Vietnam, running down the road away from her village. She had been burned by napalm bombing, dreadfully burned. She needed help. She was coming towards me. She was naked and she was crying. And she kept coming towards me, holding out her arms to me, and suddenly her face would be Kitty's face. I knew I'd been part of the war that had done that to her, to a girl just like Kitty and to thousands and thousands of others too. Every night she was there, and every night I couldn't sleep.

I'd be late for work in the morning, or I'd fall asleep on the job. I'd get the sack. Time and again I got the sack. Any money I did earn I'd gamble away the same day I got it. I'd hitch a ride anywhere and had no idea where I was when I arrived nor why I'd gone there. I felt myself slipping into a deep dark hole of despair. I couldn't find any way of stopping myself, and in the end I didn't even want to stop myself. It seemed a lot easier just to give up and let go. So I did.

I woke up in hospital. They told me I'd drunk a bottle of whisky, and taken a lot of pills. The doctor said I was lucky. Someone had found me in time. I didn't think I was lucky at all. He wanted to keep me in hospital, for my own safety, he told me. I'd had a breakdown, he said. It was an illness like any other, and I'd have to be hospitalised until the treatment was over. I gathered pretty soon that it was the kind of hospital you could leave only when the doctor said you could. I looked out of the hospital window and saw the sea. I asked where I was. "Hobart, Tasmania," he said. When he went out he locked the door behind him, just as Mr Piggy had at Cooper's Station. I was a prisoner again.

So there I was, over forty-five years old by now, rock bottom, suicidal and losing my mind in some hospital in Hobart, and I don't remember to this day even how I got to Hobart. But I still had Kitty's key around my neck. The doctor asked me a lot about my childhood. I showed him my key, and told him about Kitty too. He asked if I hadn't made Kitty up entirely. Hadn't I invented her because I so much wanted her to exist, wanted to have a family?

He was a strange man, my doctor. He never smiled, not once. But to be fair to him he didn't get angry either. And I gave him enough cause to get angry. Thinking back, I treated the poor man a bit like a punch bag. He didn't seem to mind, just let me rant on. Nothing rattled his professional calm. I had the strong impression he didn't believe a word I told him. And I don't think he cared much either. So after a while, I didn't tell him anything more. We'd sit there having long silences together, and I'd gaze out of the window at the sea and watch the boats.

It was during one of those silent sessions that I felt the stirrings of a new longing. I wanted to build boats again, and to sail them. I'd sit in my room and recite The Ancient Mariner aloud over and over again. It made me feel I was out there at sea, and it reminded me of Marty and Aunty Megs. And I remember too that I'd sing London Bridge is Falling Down very loudly in the shower. I loved my showers, and singing made them even better. I was sad and alone, very alone, grieving for everyone I had loved, everyone I had lost.

Then one morning there was this new nurse on the ward who smiled at me, not because she was trying to be kind but because she was kind. She treated me like a person not a patient. My whole world lit up every time I saw her. I was mesmerised, and not just by her gentle beauty and her s.h.i.+ning black hair. It was the sound of her laughter, her sheer exuberance that lifted my spirits and made me feel lonely without her. When I told her about Kitty's key, about Cooper's Station and Marty, and Aunty Megs and Vietnam, she listened, and she wanted to know more. When I recited The Ancient Mariner to her, she listened. Bit by bit, every time I saw her, I felt myself coming together again. I made a model boat for her, a liner with three red funnels. I was beginning to see a way out of my darkness. And once I could see the light, then I knew I could climb up towards it.

So that's what I did, and when I walked out of that hospital a couple of months later, my nurse was waiting for me. Zita, she was called. And I knew as she drove me away that morning that she was all I'd been looking for all these years. I found more than happiness with Zita. I found myself again, then a home too, and an entire family. Best of all, I now had a reason for living.

Oh Lucky Man!

What Zita had done was to restore my faith, and not just my faith in myself, but in the wider world around me too. When you're down and out you get to thinking only how bleak and brutal the world is. The more you believe it, the more you expect things to be like that, and the more they prove to be like that. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's the spiral I was in. What Zita has shown me since the day I first met her is that the world is not like that, most people are not like that, I'm not like that. She didn't do it by telling me, by preaching to me, but just by being who she is. Genuinely good people are like that. The sun s.h.i.+nes out of them. They warm you right through. Zita's like that. As the song goes and songs do get it right sometimes when she smiles, the whole world smiles too. She was half my age and she chose me to love. If she hadn't told me first, I'd never have dared to tell her back. Oh lucky man!

She came from a family of smiling people. That's where she took me the day we drove away from the hospital, to her family home down by the seash.o.r.e in Hobart. There was a whole tribe of them, the most extended family I'd ever met, Greeks all of them, Cretans, dozens of them and loud with laughter when they weren't crying that is. They are people of extremes, wonderful people. They welcomed me at once as one of their own, and that meant everything to me. I was Zita's man, so I was part of the family, no questions asked. They were all open-hearted and whole-hearted. The children climbed on my knees that first lunchtime. They tugged me by my fingers towards the sandpit or the swing or the beach. They'd found a new great big puppy to play with. I laughed with them in the suns.h.i.+ne, just as I'd laughed with Marty at the Ark all those years before.

From that day on I knew I had a proper home and a proper family of my own. And I danced, for the first time in my life I danced. Cretan dancing. Zita taught me, tutored me through the awkward stage where my feet simply refused to step to the music, told me to feel the music, to let the music do it. It worked. But I'll never dance like a Cretan, like Zita. You can see the music floating through her. She's a wonder to watch.

But there was more. Zita hadn't mentioned it before. Maybe she left her father to tell me himself. "Zita she say you likes boats, Arthur," the old man said after lunch as we walked together by the seash.o.r.e. He had a truly wonderful white moustache which he stroked often, not out of affectation but rather out of affection, I think. There was a glint in his eye that demanded and expected an answer. You didn't have conversations with Zita's father. He talked, you listened.

"Me too," he went on. "I likes boats. I grow up with boats when I was little boy on Crete. Now I have my own boatyard. Stavros Boats. Now I build my own boats big ones, little ones, fat ones, thin ones, anything that sell. And I build good boats too, the best boats. We all build boats, the whole family. You can help us, yes?" He didn't wait for a reply. "That's good, that's good." He stopped then and turned to me. "I want Zita to marry a good Cretan boy, young and strong. But she say she want to marry you. Zita, she like her mother you don't argue with her. So you're not Cretan boy that's not your fault. And you're not young that not your fault either. She like you and you likes boats that's good enough for me."

I was like the cat that got the cream and fell on his feet all at once and the same time. And it got better too. Within a month or two I was married to Zita, and I was designing all the old man's boats for him, and making models for the children too. We lived all together in the huge family home adjoining the boatyard, where everyone had their own chair on the verandah even me, my wedding gift from Zita's father.

Then came the icing on the cake. I know you're not supposed to mix metaphors, that cats that get the cream and icing on the cake hardly seem compatible. But to describe this supreme moment of my life, I need all the metaphors I can lay my hands on there's another one! Before I knew it, Zita and I had a little girl of our own, Allie Alexis really, but I've never called her that. Everyone else does, but to me she was always Allie.

"She's got your nose," Zita told me. Luckily for me that's all she's got of me. The rest is perfect. I have to say that because it's Allie who's writing my story down at this moment, typing this all out for me on her word processor. But it happens to be true. She types as fast as I can speak, which is amazing. But then she's always been amazing to me, ever since she was born nearly eighteen years ago. It seems like yesterday.

Down in the old man's boatyard, I was adapting Mr Dodds' designs for ocean-going yachts, for dinghies, for motor boats too. For the first time now I had the opportunity to imagine a boat, to dream it up first in my head like a story, then sketch it and design it and build it. But all the while I kept Mr Dodds' principles in mind: that a boat should be built to dance with the sea, not just to go fast or look sleek. I had one or two arguments with my new father-in-law about this, but as soon as he found my designs were selling well, he was more than happy to let me do what I wanted.

One boat I conceived, designed and built all with my own hands. I never let anyone else go near it or even see it till I'd finished it, and then the first person to see it was Allie. I called her Kitty. It came into my head it just seemed a good idea at the time. And Allie liked saying it over and over. So the name stuck. Kitty was bright yellow, and built to sail the roughest waves in Allie's bath, to survive close encounters with all her plastic ducks and loofahs. Based as usual on one of Mr Dodds' designs, Kitty was st.u.r.dy and sound, the most bath-worthy boat ever built. Allie couldn't turn that boat upside down even if she wanted to and she tried often enough. Turn Kitty over and she'd just pop right back up again.

When she grew bigger, I built her a bigger boat, Kitty Two, I called this one, to sail on the pond, yellow again and fully rigged. Mr Dodds' designs, I discovered, worked every bit as well in the sea or the pond or the bath. And just as soon as she could walk, I made her first real sailing boat, a dinghy, Kitty Three. This one was big enough for the three of us to go sailing together in her. Once, on Christmas Day, Allie insisted on taking the tiller so I let her. As she took us out to sea that day, she began singing her favourite song London Bridge is Falling Down! Can't think who taught her that!

Allie was a natural sailor it came I'm sure from starting so young. I hardly had to teach her at all. She took to it instinctively, and loved every minute of it. She won her first race when she was six. She just lived for her time on the water. Every day after school she'd be down at the boatyard, not only watching either, but building. For her, the boatyard was the next best thing to the sea, and she often had a canny way of making the one thing lead to another.

She learned boats the proper way, Mr Dodds' way, my way: from the keel up, from the inside out. And she learned the sea, because she was always out there. I'd go with her when I could of course, but if I couldn't then she'd pester someone else in the yard. She wasn't at all easy to say no to, not for me, not for anyone. Even the old man, her grandfather, who was no one's soft touch, was putty in her hands. Zita used to say Allie had us all round her little finger, and that was just about right. But she was clever with it too. She knew she had to put in the hours down at the boatyard. Whatever needed doing she'd do it. She was the same kind of dogsbody Marty and I had once been in Mr Dodds' yard. She was a hard worker, and the blokes saw that and liked it, which was why one way or another she'd usually manage to get one of them to take her out sailing.

It was seeing her so at one with her boat, so happy, that inspired me to take it up seriously again myself. Watching the joy on her face, the sheer exhilaration, was infectious. I discovered I didn't just enjoy sailing because she was with me, I began to love it again for itself, the way I had before. I was loving it because it made me feel alive again like nothing else. True, the sight of a pa.s.sing fis.h.i.+ng trawler, the unmistakeable lines of a wars.h.i.+p on the horizon could still trouble me. But it was the heady, happy days with Marty I remembered most. And now I was out there again alone or with my own daughter. Zita came out with us only rarely on what she called picnic days, when the sea was listless, when there was so little wind the sails hung there limp above us. She liked it best like that, but Allie and I were bored out of our minds.

It was on one of those picnic days that it happened Allie would have been about ten by then I think. The three of us were lazing there in the sun after lunch. I had my eyes closed when I felt Allie fiddling with my lucky key. She loved doing that. "Tell me about the key again, Dad," she said, "and your sister Kitty." I'd told her the story hundreds of times before, trying to make it a little bit more interesting each time, as you do. This time when I'd finished, she took it off me and put it round her neck. "You know what we should do when I'm a bit older, Dad? We should sail to England and find her. Could we do that, Dad?"

That was exactly what Marty had said I should do all those years ago as we were sailing past Dunedin off New Zealand.

"Could we, Dad?" Allie asked again.

"It's a long old way to England," I told her. "Half way round the world. And what if we can't find Kitty when we get there? I've no idea at all where she'd be."

"We could find her," Allie said. "Course we can, and we'll find out what the key's for. I think it's a box. Got to be, hasn't it? S'only a little key. And we'll open it up. What's inside, d'you think?"

And then I said it. I said it quite deliberately. I'd thought about it, and I meant it. "I don't know what's inside," I replied. "But we're going to find out, Allie. I'll have to build a bigger boat of course, but I can and I will. We'll sail to England and we'll find Kitty. If she's there we'll find her. It's something I should've done a long time ago."

"Do you promise me, Dad?" she said, looking up at me wide-eyed with excitement.

"I promise you, Allie," I replied. And it was a promise I was determined to keep.

I looked across at Zita then, and she knew I meant it too.

I could see she was suddenly fearful. But I couldn't backtrack now. I'd promised. Everything had been decided in those few moments. When Allie was older, we'd do it. We'd sail to England together and find my sister, Kitty, and discover what my lucky key was really for. On the way back home that evening, I was already designing the boat in my head Kitty Four, she'd be called.

Kitty Four It could have been just a pipedream. It would have been if Allie hadn't kept me up to the mark. She didn't pester me not exactly. But she did prod me, and every prod was a reminder, and all the reminders served to crank me up, to get me going, make me feel guilty if ever I was thinking of back-sliding she knew me too well, she still does. She knew the dream of the boat, the dream of her great ocean adventure, would never come to anything unless she made it happen, unless she made me do it. I had my own reasons for delaying the commitment, and they weren't just backslides. I had good sound reasons too.

Both she and I needed far more experience of ocean sailing before we could embark on such a voyage Zita was adamant about that. There was no way she'd let us go, she said, unless she was quite sure we were both ready for it. The old man said the same.

"Yous not going till I say yous ready," he said. And he always meant what he said.

Zita also made it absolutely clear that Allie couldn't go until she was eighteen and that was years ahead. But years have an uncanny knack of pa.s.sing. The boat I was building in my head was a thirty-three footer the ideal size for ocean sailing, Mr Dodds used to say, because it's compact. "Size," he once told me, "is not all it's cracked up to be. Look at what happened to the t.i.tanic." And while I was busy dreaming up my compact thirty-three footer, I was out there practising hard encouraged by Allie, who was herself entering and winning every race she could.

I knew what she was about. With every new silver cup on the mantelpiece she was proving to us all just how good a sailor she was. Zita was proud of her and her grandfather was too, too proud I sometimes felt, but then grandfathers are ent.i.tled. But neither was happy about the prospect of the two of us going off around the world. They made that very clear. And already Allie was talking of not just going to England and stopping off there to find Kitty, but of doing the whole thing, the entire circ.u.mnavigation.

As for me, I won no silverware, but I was in training. Four times I went crewing on the Sydney-Hobart race, and of course, everyone at home was there to see me off, follow my progress on the television, and was there to welcome me when I came home. I had some hairy moments the Sydney-Hobart race specialises in providing those. No boat I sailed in ever won. But for me that wasn't the point. I was learning again everything I'd learned with Mr Dodds and Marty, and more besides. I could feel my confidence and strength growing with every race. Best of all though, and thanks to Allie's persistence and dogged determination, the old man himself was coming round. He was still cautious, but he was beginning to encourage us now in our great endeavour. Allie had it in her blood, he said. Cretans were the greatest and bravest sailors in the world.

When I told him I needed some time off work to do some longer sails on my own he arranged, just as Mr Dodds had done before, for me to deliver Stavros boats far and wide. I sailed again to New Zealand, solo this time. I took a boat to Bali once, with Allie, and another to Hong Kong, solo again this time. On each trip I was testing my endurance, learning how to deal with minor and major catastrophes alike, and all the time I was learning the sea again, learning the winds and the tides. I was ready. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

By now Allie was sixteen. The two of us had done lots of sailing together, ocean-going, long trips. I knew how good a sailor she was far better than me already, that's for sure. She only had to feel the wind and to look at the waves to understand what dance they wanted to do, what sails were right; she had already mastered all the new gizmos of modern sailing. That side of it seemed to come as naturally to her as the sailing itself. When she was on board I spent most of my time cooking or watching albatross or dolphins, or stargazing. I just wasn't needed. But she was still only sixteen. Still Zita wasn't at all happy about it. And still we didn't have a boat.

We had a design though by now, and just as importantly, we had the means to build it. The old man had done a deal with me. He'd sponsor the whole thing, he said, pay for everything down to the last can of baked beans. But he wanted the Stavros Boats' name and the logo up there on the sails, and along the sides. And he insisted we had to get as much publicity as possible.

"We can sell many many boats on the backs of this," he said.

"Just so long as we can call the boat Kitty Four" I told him.

"You calls it what you like," he said. "Just make it the safest boat you ever built in your life. And you brings my little Allie back to me safe and sound, you hear me?"

By now of course everyone down at the boatyard was part of the great project. We all built the keel together. Everyone rallied around and helped, all of us fired by Allie's energy and enthusiasm. They all knew her well after all she'd been hanging around the boatyard ever since she was knee-high. They'd watched her grow up and now they wanted to be part of her dream, wanted to help make it come true. They all knew the story about the key I wore around my neck, and about my sister, Kitty. Everyone in the boatyard felt they were part of the same story. Better than that, they were making it happen. Never was a boat built with so much care and affection as Kitty Four. We all wanted to build the safest boat that ever sailed the ocean. Knock her down and she'd come back up. Turn her over and she'd right herself again. She had to be unsinkable; we'd make her unsinkable.

Allie worked alongside the rest of us in the shed, late into the night for months on end. Zita allowed her do it only if she kept up with her school work. She was very strict about it. So Allie did both. Keeping Zita on side was the most difficult part of the whole thing. As the skeleton of the keel began to look like the beginnings of a real boat, as Allie's eighteenth birthday came ever closer, as plans for the trip began to crystallise, she worried more and more. Both Allie and I did all we could to allay her fears, to convince her that we'd be fine. But night after night, she'd lie awake beside me. I tried to rea.s.sure her about how safe the boat would be, how we'd make sure everything was just as it should be, about how good at sea Allie and I were together. We'd been in big seas, we'd managed, we'd coped, we'd be fine. Telling her though wasn't enough.

It was Allie who came up with the idea that at last enabled Zita to feel a little happier about it. She gave her a part in it all, a vital part. She told her we were going to need someone to run the whole communications side for us back home, all the emails, Satphone, the website. Allie said she would teach her everything she needed to know. That seemed to make all the difference. As we finished the keel down in the boatyard, Allie and her mother worked together at home. They converted the box-room to a communications room, fitted it all out, bought all the computers and gizmos they needed.

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 b.u.t.ter 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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.

By Arthur Hobhouse.

(brother of Kitty, and Marty, son of Aunty Megs, husband of Zita, father of Allie.) PS This story is dedicated to Zita. Kittys key and my copy of The Ancient Mariner are for Allie to keep.

Part Two.

The Voyage of the Kitty Four.

What Goes Around, Comes Around.

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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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, flas.h.i.+ng 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.

Two Send-offs, and an Albatross 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.