The Desert Run

by Gregg Dunnett

  She was too large to fit into the standard berths at the marina, so had to be moored at the end of the pontoon. I had to walk out the whole length of the floating wooden footpath between line after line of smaller craft until I reached the giant T shape where the bigger boats were moored. Directly in front of Prima Donna were two even larger yachts, shinier and more impressive. But I wasn’t disappointed by this. What we needed was the biggest boat we could get away with while still being just a little upstaged wherever we put in. No point drawing more attention to ourselves than necessary.

  I held onto the guard rail and walked toward the back—the stern, I knew it was called, now I’d done my course. I jumped down into the cockpit, looked around for a moment, and searched in my pocket for the key which Carlos had presented to me once the money had gone through. Maybe he thought it odd I didn’t want to look the boat over before buying it, but I didn’t want to make it obvious that a guy who knew nothing about boats was buying one of the most expensive on his books.

  I looked around me one last time before I unlocked the door. All around me, the air was filled with the noises of the ocean. There were birds wheeling around and the knocks and clangs of ropes slapping against masts. Outside a giant rock breakwater, and visible through the harbour entrance, the wind was blowing the sea into steep walls of chop. Further out, these were streaking the water with smears of white. I pulled open the hatch and hoisted myself down the steps, glad my job didn’t involve taking the Prima Donna anywhere on my own.

  Downstairs—down below—she was beautiful, all polished wood with touches here and there of brass. There was a table with wings folded down where I stood now, pleasantly surprised at how much headroom there was, and in front of me, a corridor led forward where I could see the doors of lockers, the toilet, and the cabin at the bow. Behind me was the galley and opposite that, the chart table, a bank of computers and screens mounted on the wall. She had everything; she could practically sail herself, Carlos had said that morning. That was lucky since I didn’t know how to sail it, and my confidence in my new skipper was pretty limited too.

  I chose the rear cabin for myself. Not that I’d ever thought much about it, but I’d always assumed the captain of a boat would sleep right at the front. Apparently, this isn’t the case. The cabin that’s tucked away at the back is usually more spacious and more comfortable, and since I was going to be here on my own for a while, I decided it might as well be mine.

  Then I got to work. I spent the rest of the day and all of the next running my errands. To the supermarket to buy supplies; to the various hardware stores I’d identified earlier, where I could buy all of the other equipment and materials I needed. There was a trolley that yacht owners could use to wheel their gear from the marina’s car park out along the floating walkway to where their boats were moored, but even with this, it was still a pain to get everything out to the yacht, and then onboard.

  As beautiful a boat as the Prima Donna was, at that point I just didn’t get the point of the whole sailing thing.

  38

  I shouldn’t even have been out there alone at that point. The Prima Donna’s new skipper—who insisted I call him that, partly due to the genuine benefit of staying in character as much as possible, but mostly because he just liked it—had pored over the surveyors’ reports and floor plans with me and discussed how this would work. The original plan was for the two of us to come out together, both to buy the boat and fix it up.

  But the original plan changed at short notice when he got the news that Aussie Mick, who handled the distribution end of things, was unhappy with some aspects of the operation. Most likely he wanted more money. I understood why that meant the skipper had to delay his arrival, but on the other hand, I really could have done with someone who knew a bit more about boats than I did.

  I’ll give you an example. The lockers and cupboards in the front of the boat were full of gear, and there wasn’t going to be room for all of it once I’d finished. But since I knew just about nothing about sailing, I didn’t know which bits of kit I could safely get rid of, and which we needed to keep. Some bits were obvious. The anchor, I guessed, was a keeper, but the lockers at the front seemed to be filled with sails. Far more than it looked like we needed. I checked up on deck, and the boat was already fitted with the big sail at the front and the main one at the back—so why did it need the ones down below? Spares? I didn’t know.

  I made the best of it and cracked on. For the first few days I was doing nothing but working and sleeping. Until something happened that changed that.

  At first, I’d assumed the boat moored in front of the Prima Donna was empty. It was another sailing yacht, even bigger than mine and called Miss Adventure. But it turned out to not be empty after all. One morning, when I was taking a break from all the chaos downstairs, something caught my eye on Miss Adventure. A figure was moving on deck. I frowned initially. The fewer people around, the fewer people who might wonder at the noise and mess I was making—but then I got a better look at who was moving around, and my frown turned to a look of interest.

  At first, I just saw her from the back, walking along the side deck of the yacht. Long, tanned legs in little navy blue shorts and—because there was a bit of a chill from the wind, I suppose—a white cashmere jumper that struck me as not looking very nautical, but what the hell, she looked good in it. Then she turned around and walked back toward me, and I got to see her face. She was concentrating on where she was stepping, so I felt able to have a good look. About my age, pretty but not in the way that you might imagine a woman on a superyacht would look, not in-your-face looks. Hell, what am I saying? She was gorgeous. Hair touched blond from the sun; tall, slim. She stopped concentrating, and I should have looked away, but I found I couldn’t tear my eyes off her. Then she was stepping over the guardrail and walking down the pontoon toward me.

  “Hi,” she said brightly in an unmistakable English voice, “I’m Jenny. We noticed you turning up the other day. I thought I’d come and say hola.” The way she said it, it was clear she already knew I was English, I wondered how she knew.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  It turns out it’s very much the done thing for people on yachts to chat to their neighbours when they’re tied up in port. Lucky old me, eh? Maybe it’s something to do with how they don’t have anyone much to talk to when they’re all sailing around out at sea. Who knows? Who cares?

  “She’s beautiful. Is she yours?” Jenny touched her hand to the teak deck, at waist height to where she stood on the pontoon. She had graceful fingers, long and slim. I looked from them to her face: blue eyes set deep, framed by eyelashes that were surprisingly dark. Her teeth white, her lips just open. I could have stared at her all afternoon.

  “Sort of,” I said. “Me and a friend have bought her. He’s coming out in a few days.”

  “Really?” she said to this, her eyebrows arched and her eyes wide. “I was joking. You look far too young.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, maybe.” I didn’t really want to dwell on this so I went on: “How about your one?”

  “Miss Adventure? Is she mine? God, no.” Jenny laughed, a lovely sight.

  “I’d love it if she was though,” Jenny talked quickly. “That’s my dream one day. One day I’m going to find a million dollars and buy her and sail her all around the world.” She smiled a friendly smile.

  “But for now, I just work aboard.” She screwed up her nose at this. It looked so pretty I was unable to reply.

  “I’m sorry I talk too much.” Jenny went on. “She’s owned by a couple of businessman. They’re hardly ever on board though, mostly they just get us to sail her around from place to place.”

  “Us?” I asked, for a couple of reasons.

  “Me and a couple of others.” She smiled.

  “That’s an actual job?”

  Jenny wrinkled her nose again and laughed so that her breasts moved beneath the softness of her jumper.

  “Yeah, course it is.” She gave me a
look like she couldn’t decide if I was being funny or not.

  “Is this boat really yours?” she asked.

  It was something I hadn’t really considered properly up to that point.

  “Yeah,” I said, a bit thoughtfully. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Are you not going to invite me onboard to show her off?”

  That surprised me, and I wasn’t really ready for visitors, but I agreed anyway. I held out my arm to help her climb on, even though there were plenty of other handholds. We held onto each other’s hands for a little longer than we needed to.

  “She’s beautiful,” Jenny said again when I’d followed her below, watching how her hair fell to her shoulders. We stopped in the saloon; I didn’t take her any further forward since I was still working up in the front. “What are you doing, though? What’s all the wood for?”

  I felt my pulse creep upwards. There was nothing on display that would raise real suspicions, but her being on board was an unnecessary risk. I didn’t like that, but I liked her being there all the same.

  “I’m just fixing a few things up. We’re sailing her back to England in a week or so.”

  “Cool. We’re off to the Caribbean next.” She put her head to one side. “Hey, we’re all off to a party tonight. Why don’t you come along?”

  I thought for a moment, and as I did, she reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun.” She smiled at me, with even, white teeth.

  “OK.”

  “Great. There’s a restaurant on the quayside. We’ll grab something to eat first. I’ll pick you up.”

  We looked at each other.

  “I’d better go. I’m supposed to be fetching bread.”

  “OK.”

  I watched her step off the boat. She must have known I was still looking as she walked away because she turned back to me and smiled again.

  “I’ll come by at about eight?”

  When she did so, she’d changed into a tight black dress that stopped halfway down her thighs. Her hair was tied up to reveal her slim, shapely neck. She introduced me to the skipper of her boat, a Scandinavian guy with hair so blond it was almost white, and a couple of other people they were with. They were a fun, easy-going bunch, and they seemed to see where this was going, so they left Jenny and me to talk together most of the time. We sat opposite one another in the restaurant, and she told me how she’d gotten into sailing and the job, and about all the places they’d been. She was some sort of deckhand-cum-hostess-cum-model, there to make sure the boat’s owners and their guests would have their every need attended to. I didn’t ask but I guessed she was employed as much for her looks as her culinary skills.

  We ate fish and drank wine; her skipper kept ordering more as soon as the bottles on the table ran low so that I was worried who was going to pay at the end. When I tried to offer my share he stopped me and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Then we went on to the party, in a loft-style apartment a few streets back from the harbour. Jenny held onto my arm as we walked there, drawn in by the heavy bass tones of the music. The door was open, and a trail of people were sitting on the stairs in the hallway, drinking and laughing. In a way, it reminded me of our old flat, back in Brighton.

  We wandered around—it was too loud to talk—and we smiled and pushed through the throng of young, beautiful people, and we danced, and we smoked outside on the balcony, and then we found a quiet corner, and Jenny kissed me, her tongue pressing into my mouth and her hands resting in my lap. She kissed me with an urgency that told me this was something she’d been thinking about the whole day. She shook out her hair, and I stroked it and curled it around my fingers. And as the party died down, she asked if she could come back to the Prima Donna with me.

  That was when I really got it, this sailing thing. I left the hatch open so that that the bright stars threw a little light onto Jenny as I unzipped her dress. It fell to the floor, and she smoothly ensured her bra and pants followed. Then she lay herself back on the saloon table and pulled up her knees to open her legs. She squirmed to find a comfortable position as I took off my shirt and pulled down my underwear. Then I leaned into her, the moonlight cool on my back.

  Yeah, I kind of got the attraction of sailing that night.

  39

  Between the skipper not being there to help me out, and Jenny popping in as often as she did, I didn’t get as much work done on the boat as I’d planned, but rather than leave anything undone, I just limited the areas I was working on. What that meant in practice was I finished the extra compartments up in the bow, but I didn’t get to do the ones I’d planned in the stern. I couldn’t see that it mattered; we weren’t adding that much extra weight, and the Prima Donna was a big boat. It’d be fine, I told myself.

  And a couple of days before we were due to leave, the skipper finally turned up. I drove back down to the airport to pick him up, back down the oceanside road. It seemed forever since I’d arrived there myself and the flood of tourists with their sticky children and their angry sunburn was a shock after the time I’d spent isolated on the yacht, with only my tools and Jenny for company.

  I saw him before he saw me. Doing his best to blend in, but looking nothing like the holidaymakers all around him. He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, eyes hidden by mirrored shades. All his gear in a discreet holdall carried by his side.

  “Hey Skipper!” I called out, and he veered left in the arrivals hall to intercept me.

  “Hello Jake,” he said pushing his shades up into his hair. For a moment we stood there unsure how to react. Then I couldn’t help myself, I grabbed him in a hug.

  “Good to see you Ben,” I said.

  “Get off mate. And call me Skipper. It’s important to keep in character.”

  “Whatever mate. Skip.” I replied. I was happy to indulge him and before long we were both smiling at each other. We’d come a long way since that first trip in his shitty old camper van.

  “So, how’d it go with Mick?” I asked, as we turned to walk outside to where I’d parked. “All sorted?”

  “Mate don’t ask. He’s a pain in the arse. I think we got it sorted.”

  “What was the problem?” I asked. I was only making conversation. This had never been my area of the business.

  “Just the usual.”

  “He want more money?”

  Ben didn’t answer but I saw the muscles around his mouth tense before he looked away.

  “It’s sorted Jake. Honestly you don’t want to worry about it.”

  I accepted that. He did his part, I did mine. We’d got on just fine that way this long, I didn’t think it was about to change.

  He smiled now, then clapped me around the shoulders.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s fucking boring. Let’s get out of here. Show me my fucking boat.”

  Ben had pushed hard for this idea. He loved boats. He’d had some uncle with a yacht when he was growing up, and him and his brother used to do trips across the English Channel, cruising around Jersey and out to the Scilly Isles. I’d been cautious if that was enough experience for what we had planned but Ben had convinced me.

  Now we walked around the deck together, Ben tracing the routes of the ropes, checking the tightness of the hatch covers. Then we went down below, and I showed him all the work that I’d been doing. I pointed out I’d only been able to set up the front lockers as we’d planned, and I asked him if he thought that mattered, but he was relaxed about it, and we moved on. After we’d checked everything, he climbed back into the cockpit and stood behind the wheel, as if this was the part that really interested him.

  “Maybe we should take her out for a test sail tomorrow,” he called down to me. I was grabbing a couple of beers from the fridge down below.

  Then he must have seen Jenny, climbing off her boat and walking over to ours, because his back straightened, and he ran a hand through his hair, then pushed his sunglasses up to hold it in place. His tongue ran lightly around his l
ips in a smile of anticipation. Then I heard her speak from the pontoon.

  “Hi, I’m Jenny. Is Jake around?”

  I watched from below as Ben’s eyes sharpened, and his mouth fell open. I poked my head up to see. Jenny was leaning on the guardrail, the tops of her gorgeous breasts pushed up against it, her legs on display too, her sun-kissed hair blowing in the light breeze.

  “Hey you. You want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  I collected another bottle and climbed back up, then introduced her properly to Ben. We drank in the afternoon sunshine and chatted easily together. I savoured the taste of that beer, that feeling of relaxing in the warm sunshine, everything just perfect with the world. Most of all I enjoyed the jealous look in Ben’s eyes every time he glanced at Jenny, and she glanced at me.

  We left two days later. Our first time taking the Prima Donna out from the marina. There was a bittersweetness to it. Jenny watched and waved from the deck of Miss Adventure, where earlier, we’d been lying together in her little cabin, almost unable to stop holding onto one another, but promising that we’d meet up again, somewhere, and soon. I didn’t have much time to think about that now, I was so busy following Ben’s instructions: pull all the ropes in and coil them up; take in the fenders, the great plastic bumpers that hung down the side of the boat. For all his previous assurances I could see Ben was nervous, being in charge of the Prima Donna for the first time. We left under the power of the engine, a reassuring, purring throb that made her thrum as she cut through the calm water. It was strange, watching the view of the marina change as we moved at last. It was like I’d forgotten the boat could move.

  I waved to Jenny until I could no longer see her, only the tall mast of Miss Adventure, and then I made my way back to the cockpit and stood by Ben, watching the rocks of the harbour wall slide past just a few metres away. Outside its protective arm, I could see the water was lively with whitecaps.