She pressed the cut-out button. Two minutes later she came back.
'You need to be at Gatwick at three thirty this afternoon.'
My heart sank, but I already knew I was going to be there.
'How long for?' Not that it mattered much, I was already a couple of jumps ahead, thinking about how I was going to make excuses to a recently turned nine-year-old.
She said, 'I don't have that information.'
Once she'd finished with the details of the RV I put the phone down, expecting a refund of my unused coin, but I got nothing. The phone box in the pub was one of those private ones where you can charge whatever you want. For a pound I got all of sixty seconds.
I walked back, making my way around the crowd outside that had moved with the sun toward the ship. I was racking my brains thinking of what I was going to say. Not to Josh that wouldn't be a problem but to Kelly.
I saw Josh looking for me. It was only about twenty or thirty meters to the gangplank, and I was looking up at him and slowly shaking my head, getting some of the message across in advance. He knew exactly what was happening; he'd been there himself.
I went up the gangplank, pretty certain I would be in the shit, and no doubt starting to look suitably guilty. This was the first occasion Kelly and I had had any decent time together since she'd been in the U.K.; it was like a newlywed leaving his honeymoon to go back to the office.
As I got on deck she and a few other kids were helping to clear up the plates under the bosun's instructions. For a horrible second or two I had a flashback other in her house just before her family was killed, laying the table for her mother in the kitchen. It made me feel even more guilty, but I told myself we'd both get over it. She would be upset but I could make it up to her when I came back. Besides, she'd seen Josh and the kids, and we'd had a whale of a time. She'd understand. Plus, she could see her grandparents now.
Josh knew what was on the cards. He bent down to his kids.
'Yo!' He clapped his hands together as they waited for the instruction.
'OK, kids, let's get all these plates back to the bosun,' and he dragged them away.
I said, 'Kelly?'
'Mmm?' She didn't look up, just carried on being too busy picking up plates. She wasn't going to make it easy for me to give her the news.
'That was my boss on the phone. He wants me to go away.'
She still didn't look me in the eye as she put the plates in a bin. She said, 'Why?'
'They've got a job for me. I told them that I was going to be with you for the week and I didn't want to go in, but they said I must. There's nothing I can do.'
I was kind of hoping she'd buy the line that they were to blame, not me.
She stopped what she was doing and spun around. Her face told me everything I didn't need to know.
'Nick, you promised.'
'I know, I can't help it. I've just been bleeped ' 'No,' she stopped me.
'It's beeped!' She was always giving me a bollocking for getting it wrong.
Her face had gone bright red. Tears were starting to well up in her eyes.
'Listen, Kelly, we can always do this again some other time. Just think, Josh and his children have to leave for home in a few days and won't have a chance to see all these places, but we can come back.'
'But you said ... you promised me, Nick ... you said you wanted to have a holiday with me ...' The words tumbled out, punctuated by angry gasps for air.
'You said you'd make up for not seeing me on my birthday.
You promised me then, Nick ... you promised.'
She didn't just have her hand on my heartstrings, she'd braided them into ropes for extra purchase and was pulling on them big time. I said, 'I know I did, but that was last time. This time it will be different, I really mean it.'
Her bottom lip was starting to go and her eyes were leaking down her face.
'But, Nick, you promised ...'
I stroked her hair.
'I'm sorry, I can't help it. I've got to go to work. Oh, come on, Kelly, cheer up.'
What the fuck was I saying? I always hated this. I didn't know what to do or say, and to make things worse I reckoned I was starting to sound like my Auntie Pauline.
The cry had become heartrending sobs.
'But I don't want you to go ... I want to stay here and be a sailor ... I want you to stay here ... I don't want to sleep on this boat without you.'
'Ah,' I said, and the way I said it was sufficiently ominous to make her look up.
'You won't be sleeping on the ship. I'm going to take you to see Granny and Grandad. Listen, I promise, I really do promise, I'll make this up to you.'
She stared at me long and hard, then slowly shook her head from side to side, deeply wounded. She'd been sold down the river, and she knew it.
I wondered if she'd ever trust me again.
There was nothing I could say, because actually she was right. Just to make sure I avoided the issue, I walked across to the bosun.
'We've got to go,' I said.
'Family problem.' He nodded; who gives a fuck, he just gets paid to wear the hat and growl.
Josh came back. His kids were halfway through a lesson on how to hoist the sails. I said, 'We've got to go, mate.'
I tried to pat Kelly's head, but she flinched away from my hand. I said, 'Do you want to go downstairs and change? You can say good-bye in a minute. Go on, off you go.'
As she disappeared I looked at Josh and shrugged.
'What can I say, I've got to go to work.' And then, before he had the chance to come up with all sorts of different ways that he could help, I said, 'I'm going to take her down to her grandmother's now, then I'm off. I'm really sorry about this, mate.'
'Hey, chill, it doesn't matter. These things happen. It was just really good to see you.'
He was right. It had been really good to see him, too.
'Same here. Have a good flight back. I'll give you a call as soon as I've finished this job, and we'll come to you next time.'
'Like I told you, the beds are always made up. The coffee, white and flat, is always hot.'
It took me a moment to understand the white and flat bit.
'Is that some kind of Airborne saying?'
'Kinda.'
I said good-bye to his kids and they got back to pulling ropes and getting bollocked by the bosun. Then I went down below and changed.
We stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a blue-haired New Age guy saunter across. I laughed.
'Kelly, look at that bloke there! Isn't he weird!' He had big lumps of metal sticking out of his nose, lips, eyebrows, all sorts. I said, 'I bet he wouldn't dare walk past a magnet factory.'
I laughed at my own joke. She didn't, possibly because it was so bad.
'You shouldn't make personal remarks like that,' she said.
'Anyway, I bet he s been to the Bloody Tower.' Her schoolwork might be suffering a bit but she was still as sharp as her old man.
I looked across at her in the passenger seat and felt yet another pang of guilt. She was reading about how wonderful London was from a flyer we had in our rental car; she was sulking away, probably wondering what could be so important in my life that instead of taking her to see the Crown Jewels, I was dumping her back with her dreary old grandparents whom she already saw enough of during the weekends out from her boarding school.
We drove through Docklands in the East End of London, past the outrageously tall office block on Canary Wharf; then, as we followed signs for the Blackwall Tunnel, the Millennium Dome, still under construction, came into view across the Thames. Trying anything to lighten the mood, I said, 'Hey, look, the world's biggest Burger King hat!'
