Lumps of rock

I've finished my second and final week with Barefoot Cruises. They've had good value from me. This afternoon I'm flying out of Airlie Beach for Brisbane where I'll kill a couple of days before meeting Bronwyn in Byron Bay next week. After these last two weeks I have a sudden sense that I need to hurry my travels along. Very strange but very clear, this feeling that I'm on the run from something grim.

This last week at sea has been more of the same - the sailing, when it is actually sailing, is very fine - my favourite job is hanging upside from the mizzen boom to furl the sails and fix the covers. At Nara inlet we moored by old Aboriginal caves. There are eight or nine spots in the inlet but only one is available to the public, a heavy overhang where chrysali dangle between 8,000 year old paintings of turtles and hammerhead sharks. It is massively underwhelming, and the marsh flies are a menace. I cut my feet very badly on the oyster shells at the beach. They are cemented into the rock by some mysterious chemical reaction between salt water and fresh that welds everything together in concrete. I've been limping ever since - Barefoot by name and nature, a bloody smear in my flip-flops.

The passengers are all chumps. I haven't felt this antisocial since the Snow Goose. We had a 'yachtsman' in his Musto sailing cap who couldn't tie knots. A family of wholesome and healthy Canadians... dad Scott would stand and silently watch us at work. It was disquieting, this intense observation during the most innocuous tasks... Amy chopping carrots, me cleaning the heads, Spencer on the brass... just... watching. And there was Dave, a retired factory owner who had political views slightly to the right of Robert Kilroy-Silk and may well be wanted for a quiet chat in Nuremberg. His wife was petrified of East Europe and said at least once every day "Now I'm not a racist but-"... I avoid all of them whenever possible. Very few of them are aware of the wheelhouse roof and this is my refuge, rocking with the tide, cold can of beer, drum beat goes knock-knock-BANG from the halyard block on the mizzen mast. When the lamps are out, the skies are full of light. There are quick moments I could stay here forever.

I can't stay here forever. My hands are wrinkled with dishwater, slick with bubbles. I clean the tupperware mugs with the same three identical motions. The GPS sytem is directly above the sink, and as I scrub and rinse I stare down the seconds of GMT glowing in the corner of the screen. It is 10.36am at home, and the greasy spoon by Greenwich market will still be recovering from the morning trade, wiping clean the hooked rings of spilt tea and sweeping along the crumbs from bacon rolls. There will be children anxious to sit in the front seat of the DLR, and never mind the chewing gum. People will be drinking coffee and tasteless water fountain water all over Britain, tired from computer screens or phone calls or last night's television or this morning's Metro or meetings where maybe something was achieved after all... The Canadian twins are bickering in high, healthy voices about who will sing melody in their self-appointed country music recital. I'm desperately trying to calculate if I have enough battery power to make it through The Soft Bulletin. If not then sitting on the far end of the bowsprit' should be sufficiently distant to muffle them. Too late!
"Don't sit under the apple tree...
with anyone else but me...
anyone else but me...
anyone else but me...
you're my l-o-v-e..."

It is quiet, and sad. The time at home is 10.41am. Grey suds conjure a map of Africa in the dishwater. Captain Bob is talking about the stars, the Seven Sisters. Orion is upside down so the sword belt is a business tie.

After dinner, Bob is in his cups and cheerful. He makes up his mind, takes a deep breath, and orders the passengers outside. He turns out the lights and unties the boat hook. He carefully dips it in the millpond waters of Nara inlet - and the sea is suddenly alive with bright green phophorescence! Iridescent, luminescent, radical, crazy light! Agitated algae reacting with disapproval to the new tumult in calm waters make a silhouette of everything that rattles them. Fish are bright green as they come to investigate the boat hook. No-one but me wanted to swim but this was too special to miss. I jumped in from the wheelhouse roof in my pants and didn't bother with a stinger suit. Under water, it is white-green and not black. The light is electric, constant and strong to my swimming, a thick halo of phosphorescence, alive to every movement, diving down, treading water, swimming round the boat. The sea is warm but I am scared of crocodiles and after ten minutes I climb up the anchor chain and over the jackstay, back to my shorts and beers.

These crazy skies, these billion stars, all that dead cold life... Over the hill, the moon is starting to rise through thin cloud and the reflected light boils up in an inferno like the Do-Lung Bridge in Apocalypse Now. I know who's in charge here. I see a shooting star almost every night, and almost every night I make the same wish. Lying on the wheelhouse roof, rolling onto my belly to look again at the myriad dots of phosphorescence, I am caught between the two infinities. Just drifting between the tiny things and the big. They are both mindless and impossible, and I am thick with life, but they are perfect and I am humble. The storm is gathering. The radio said so. Thirty miles away, lightning illuminates vast walls of cloud.
"Best to batten down 'em hatches," says Bob over his can of pre-mixed rum'n'coke. "It's gonna be a wet one."
"But," quavers Susan from Nimby-under-Punting, "surely the boat doesn't leak in the rain?"
Captain Bob eyes her, happily. "Yeah, she does," he grins. "Oh, fuck yeah."

I slept on deck anyway. The rain woke me about two and I didn't sleep so much after that. I just got wetter and angrier.
"Come on, Australia! Is this the best you've got?!" I've slept in worse than this, wetter, colder. This is nothing. I woke the passengers, shouting at the sky. The first job of the day is bailing out the dinghy. Shin-deep in rainwater, rain pouring down, standing in a dinghy floating in the sea. Ridiculous. Too slow for breakfast. The yachtsman used the last of the hot water for shaving, so no coffee. Feeling a little hysterical. Making beds and cleaning toilets. Back to Airlie Beach, back to the hostel and the backpackers, classed as a number in a Queensland Tourist Office statistical report.

The lodge next to ours is full of Australian kids on a surfing tour. The are made of sinew and muscle, dreadlocks and first beards. Troy is performing with poi, doused with kerosene and lit from a cigarette. The Swedish guys offered him meths instead of kerosene. Apparently they don't think they can drink any more but they don't want to throw it away.
"It's a bit heavy, it makes your eyes stream. You want some?"
No, son, I don't. Away with you. Troy's girlfriend turns up the John Butler concert on the radio and Troy whirls the fire brands round his head, demonic in the dark, twisting spine and bent at the knee, stamping dancing jumping up and the fire ROAAAAARS in each quick arc. When I see him the next morning his left arm is stuck in a new plastercast.

And what do I wish for, these wasteful wishes with every shooting star, every lump of rock? I'm not telling. The time at home is 2.23am, and you are all asleep or drunk or on drugs.

I'm sick in my guts of this place. I need to flee. This is the first time I've ever wanted to catch a flight. Roll on Brisbane.