Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (4 page)

I didn’t know a lot about boat maintenance then, but it was obvious that this poor old thing was in the most terrible state. Clearly nobody had done a stitch of work on it all winter. It was a wreck. I climbed onboard and looked it over. There wasn’t even an engine in it—the removal of which seemed to be about as far as the winter maintenance had gone. I sat there in the hot sun on the boat and studied the battered woodwork. It didn’t take much to see that the infamous Captain Bob Weare was a crook, or an incompetent, or both.

Having established the way things stood with the Crabber, I spent another afternoon in the bar trying hard to concentrate on my Greek grammar, but more often contemplating what looked like the ruin of my promising summer. There was no sign of Weare. I wondered how Jane, with all her apparent competence and authority, had been gulled by this person who had neither address nor phone number, but just a bar as a point of contact. But then again, she had contracted me as skipper and
sent me a check for the boat’s expenses. Perhaps she was a little too trusting.

IT WAS MORE THAN
a week before I managed to run Captain Weare to ground.

One evening I entered the Thalassa as usual, a little angry by now and far from confident of meeting the person whose deceitfulness was laying waste my plans for the summer. But on this occasion Yannis, the waiter, beckoned me over.

“Weare is here,” he said in an undertone, flicking his eyes toward an outside table. “There is Weare.”

Apprehensively I went over to the table, where the man was drinking a beer with some associates. “Would you be Captain Weare?” I asked, making an effort to be polite and unaggressive.

He half turned and looked at me without warmth for a moment before saying, “Who wants him?”

Weare, seated in his chair, was a short, stout man with no apparent neck. His face was a shocking red and dominated by a round and pockmarked nose and eyes of a watery and unlovely blue. He wore a filthy white boiler suit.

I extended my hand, which he shook perfunctorily.

“My name’s Chris,” I said. “And I’m looking after the Crabber this summer for Jane Joyce.”

He considered me arrogantly, then took a swig from his beer. “You are, are you?” he said. “Well, the boat’s not ready yet; there’s some finishing touches left to do.”

“I should think there are,” I said, struggling to contain myself. “It hasn’t even got the engine in …”

“The engine,” sneered Weare, “is the least of its problems. It’s got osmosis.”

It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep my temper, but the bastard held all the trump cards—he knew the boat and, more to the point, had the engine, keys, and papers.

“So what do you intend to do about it?” I spluttered.

“Know about osmosis, then, do you?” he asked, as he reached for the beer again and, with his eyes fixed on mine, took another long swig.

I stammered something incoherent about this not being the issue.

“Look,” he growled, “I haven’t time to explain it all to you tonight.” And he turned his back to me and spat some words out in Greek. From his friends’ raucous laughter I could tell they were obscenities.

Quaking with fury, I went to pay my bill at the bar. “I tell you what Bob Weare is like,” said Yannis, with a look of complicity. “He is of bad character.”

I went to a phone box and rang Jane in London.

“Chris,” she said, “I’ve always had my suspicions of this man, and from what you say I now doubt that he was ever a captain of anything. The title is mere mendacity. You have my full confidence and authority to do what needs to be done. I am so sorry for your trouble. It is entirely my fault for putting my trust in this serpent. I promise I will make it up to you, but now, if you will, I would like you to take the matter out of the detestable Weare’s hands, arrange to have done whatever work
needs to be done to the boat, and sail her down to the island.”

There was something about the sincerity with which she issued this trusting and near impossible demand that seduced me utterly. I was impressed, too, by her ability to take command of the situation; even surgery wasn’t going to sideline such a tough and indomitable woman. At that moment I would have laid down my life for her. Certainly I would take on the task of sorting out the beastly machinations of the serpent Weare. But it would be far from easy, as I knew nothing of Greece, my command of the language was negligible, and I had never fixed up a boat before. On top of which there was Weare to contend with, and as the days went by he seemed, by his general intransigence and obstructiveness, to do everything in his power to make things even more difficult than they already were.

I had imagined, now that a whole month had passed, that I would be living on the boat in the pretty little harbor of Spetses, and that my days would be spent cruising pleasantly from island to island with my enchanting employer and her friends. Instead I was stuck in Kalamaki, one of the vilest spots in Greece, where the roar of the constant traffic on the busy coastal road to Athens was smothered every ten minutes or so throughout the day and night by the noise of aircraft taking off and landing. There was a long, grubby beach on the edge of the road and a line of enormous ugly hotels.

The marina itself was vast, and all the more galling for me as I watched boat after boat set off from the harbor mouth into the beautiful blue sea beyond. They were like
flying ants, launching themselves one after another from a blade of grass, and me the poor earthbound ant, condemned to stay behind, wingless, and watch them, as the sun caught and then flickered in the beauty of their silver wings.

The only consolation—and there’s always at least one consolation—was a patisserie half an hour’s walk away in the town. Here I would sit at the end of the day, and with the joy of Nikos Kazantzakis’s
Zorba the Greek
—I had dumped the grammar—assuage the misery of my situation with a coffee and the most divine chocolate cake, or perhaps a mango ice cream. It is one of life’s great blessings that the safety valves of the human condition operate in such a simple way: misery’s turmoil sweetly stilled by a sip of fine wine; pain dulled by a bite of good bacon, or a smile from a pretty girl.

Little by little I made progress, too. I traveled on foot in the heat and the dust from one yacht chandler to another until I found somebody prepared, for a consideration, to help me sort out my problem. I hit upon a person who I reckoned was called Ecstaticos, although I was told later that it was Eustathios. He was a smooth operator if ever I saw one, in a sharp suit and shades, and with a glinting smile, but at least he was prepared to take on the job. “My men will be there tomorrow morning,” he assured me as we sat in his opulent air-conditioned office in Piraeus. “They will assess the problem and do the work and you will have your boat.”

I shook hands with him, and bounced off to ring the Boss. As a result of being so steeped in
Zorba
, I had taken to calling Jane “Boss,” which she seemed to like.

“We’re on the move, Boss,” I cried joyously down the phone. “Work starts tomorrow morning and I guess I’ll be bringing the boat down sometime next week.”

“Well, hot lickety dogspittle, I knew all along you were the man for the job. Well done, dear Chris, and thank you, thank you.”

A WEEK LATER, AS
I waited disconsolately and alone on the wreck of my summer command, a disreputably shabby old three-wheeled tin van, known by the Greeks as a
trikiklo
, wormed its way among the potholes, rusting iron, and nautical detritus of the Kalamaki boat graveyard. I watched it with interest, and the smallest shred of hope kindling in my heart. Could this really be the manifestation of Ecstaticos’s promise? It pulled up uncertainly. The incumbents extricated themselves from the little cab and looked up at me.

“You Jane Joyce?” said the shorter of the two, squinting against the sunlight.

“No, I’m Chris.”

“I’m Nikos.”

We shook hands. The other one emerged from the other side of the boat, which he had been inspecting.

“Hi,” he said—they both spoke English with a strong transatlantic accent—“Nikos.”

“You’re both Nikos, then?”

“Yup,” they chorused. Not that you could confuse the two of them: one was tall and dark with an aquiline nose, the other slight with a close red beard.

“Y’know, Chris,” said red-beard-Nikos, “I would say that this ain’t so much a yacht like we was led to believe, more a boat, no?”

While he was making this observation tall-dark-Nikos was dragging a heap of junk, which might once have been tools, out of the
trikiklo
. “Right, let’s look see what we gonna do.”

They crawled all over the boat, poked it and tapped it and scraped it and confabulated unfathomably in Greek.

“Got some osmosis and it don’ seem to have no engine,” announced red-beard-Nikos. “The engine we can get a noo engine an’ put ’er in, the osmosis we gotta take the whole outer coatin’ of the hull off and give ’er another coat. Then we oughta clean up the spars a bit an’ touch up the woodwork … take about a week, I guess.”

A week … just a week! The scales of gloom dropped from my heart, and I skipped inwardly with sweetest delight. Ana was coming over for a holiday in a week—and the thought of having the Crabber to cruise her round the Greek islands before the boss turned up … well, I could scarcely contain my happiness.

And then I remembered I didn’t have the boat’s keys. I put this to the Nikoses.

“Keys, man?” laughed tall-dark-Nikos. “Keys are for engines. You got no engine. We get a noo engine, noo keys. No problem.” And having sprung me free in one simple phrase from the hold Weare had over me, he pulled the cord and started the generator. Each Nikos then connected up an angle grinder and laid into the hull.

I was jubilant and would have gamboled like a lamb and sung like a lark except that the whining and screaming
of the grinders and the evil-smelling black dust of vaporized paint and glass fiber were choking out every impulse. The sun had risen and was hot as hell, too. But the Nikoses were young and tough, and it seemed like they knew what they were at.

“You wanna grinder?” asked tall-dark-Nikos.

“Sure, if it’ll make things quicker.” I tied a handkerchief over my nose and mouth in imitation of my new friends and got stuck into the other side of the hull. It was an awful job, the noise and the smell and the filth and the heat, and it had not been a condition of our agreement that I would have to work on the boat. But anything to expedite the process and, besides, I might learn something.

I was lulled into a sort of a trance by the roaring of the generator and the screaming of the three grinders. Every now and then the note of the generator would rise, as a result of one of the grinders being turned off, and one of the Nikoses would appear around the side of the boat, watch my work for a bit, and offer an observation on some subject not necessarily connected to the business in hand.

“Y’know Chris,” red-beard-Nikos addressed me one morning, “it seems to me that English medieval history is very poorly documented. What is your opinion of this?”

I switched off my grinder and laid it on the ground. I looked at Nikos for a bit and he looked at me.

“Hard to say, Nikos,” I said.

He considered this for a moment, then returned to his side of the boat. I started my grinder, the generator dropped, then picked up again as the other Nikos turned his grinder off, the better to hear what his colleague had
to report. They discussed my noncommittal reply for a bit, then the generator took up the load again as both grinders got back to work, and we would all sink back into the working trance.

Ten minutes or so later the engine note would rise and, sure enough, the other Nikos, the handsome dark one, would appear. “You think Shakespeare wrote all the late plays, or you reckon it was that Philip Sidney?”

In this fashion the work continued until about two o’clock, when the heat became too intense to carry on, and the Nikoses downed tools, climbed back into the
trikiklo
, and went off for a siesta.

They didn’t come back that first evening, and the next day they didn’t turn up at all … but the day after they came and worked like lunatics without stopping, all day long. They were not what you’d call altogether reliable, but it was clear that they knew what they were doing, and little by little we got to like one another. But as the week passed, the wretched Crabber was nowhere near ready for sea. Maybe I found it hard to hide my disappointment as I waved good-bye to the Nikoses on my way to fetch Ana from the airport. I trudged off in the direction of the road. A minute later, there was red-beard-Nikos, panting by my side.