A Thousand Miles from Anywhere by Sandra Clayton

Author:Sandra Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

27

Just Another Day in Paradise

There are squalls overnight. Next morning the water in Falmouth Harbour is still very rough and we decide to forswear our small dinghy in favour of the local water taxi. We have both enjoyed a long and spectacularly sound night’s sleep, and I admit that I am not as alert as I should have been when calling up the water taxi on the VHF. As a result I commit the cardinal sin of VHF etiquette: I forget to ask the man who answers my call to nominate a working channel and instead begin giving him the name of our yacht and our location over Channel 16. I am immediately made aware of my error by a fellow countryman – albeit with an accent noticeably winched up a class or two – shouting at me to clear off and ranting about people and all the crap you get on this channel nowadays.

When we do finally board the water taxi my next cardinal error of the day is to repeat yesterday’s. As an inveterate chatterer to strangers I begin a conversation with the water taxi man as we head for the shore. I am barely halfway through my first sentence when he looks into the distance over my right shoulder and says, ‘Yes, Lady,’ with just the same inflection on the second word that the baker used yesterday. Women, it seems, should be seen and not heard. We continue the rest of the journey in silence.

At the marina we spot a bird we have never seen before. We have books on European birdlife aboard but nothing for the Caribbean so we go into the bookshop. A late-middle-aged man is just leaving. Wearing an air of entitlement and a linen suit reminiscent of Somerset Maugham, he sweeps impressively between us as if we don’t exist while calling back to someone within that he’ll only be an hour or so. It is the voice of the incandescent man on the VHF earlier. He also fancies himself as a broadcaster apparently, and will be heard maundering endlessly on ‘Harbour Radio’, a channel he monopolises daily with the racing news and weather forecasts as dodgy as his accent.

In a distant corner of the shop a late-middle-aged woman with peroxide hair, and English skin too long exposed to a Caribbean sun, is reclining on a long, low chair with a telephone receiver to one ear. David immediately becomes absorbed in a search for charts of the local waters while I seek out the shelf with the bird books on it. I soon find what I want. The price sticker is exorbitant, even for a stripped pine and rocking chair place like this one, but it is a very nice book and I am tempted.

David can’t find what he’s looking for but, still browsing, begins making his way towards me. I turn to look at the woman lying back luxuriantly in the reclining chair on the far side of the shop and wonder if it might be better to call in on the way back to buy the book as we have a lot to do today.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.