When a young writer and her fiance hitched a ride on a yacht with a charming couple and their young daughter, they thought they were in paradise. But then things turned sinister and they found themselves trapped on the open sea
When I was 18, something happened on a yacht in the Mediterranean that has always haunted me. It could only have happened when it did, in those days of no telephones, no contact, of huge distances, of isolation, an ease with the lack of communication that my children will never know. We had one thing that my children will never have: personal freedom. Without the invention of social networks, I used to write meticulously in my diary. So I know exactly when I lost the last of my innocence, because I have it in writing. It happened quite suddenly; during a single sentence, it was snatched out of me.
My fiance, Tom, and I were madly in love, and had been since I was 14. He was a brilliant sailor and our sole aim in life was to buy a Scandinavian yacht and sail it around the world. Or maybe that was his aim, but it made no difference – we were so close, we were almost the same person.
At 17, he and I had hitched around France, encountering the usual travelling weirdnesses along the way: getting mugged, sleeping in public toilets, getting stuck on roadsides, running out of money and nicking food, but the following January we left on a proper adventure. We took a coach to Greece, then made our way to Kos, where we hitched a ride on a fishing boat over to a little town in southern Turkey. I described in detail in my diary another English couple on the boat. They were in their late 30s, perhaps early 40s and had an angelic-looking two-year-old daughter. By the heavy bags of shopping they carried and their general bohemian demeanour, it was fair to presume that they lived out here. They barely made eye contact, seemingly content in their own happy unit. There was something romantic about them. I remember thinking that one day Tom and I would be like that with our own children.
Our plan was to stay in Turkey for a little while and earn enough money to keep hitching eastwards. We were very ignorant. All I knew about Turkey came from Midnight Express and Turkish Delight, neither of which seemed like great advertisements for going there. We put our tent up in a field and soon found ourselves work in a boatyard, scraping the bottom of a yacht belonging to a wild-haired, bong-smoking New Zealander who went by the name of Kiwi Pete. We worked hard for him and managed to save the equivalent of a couple of hundred quid.
One day we bumped into the English couple from the fishing boat. They were much friendlier this time, and to our surprise invited us on board their yacht for drinks. They brought out the raki and we sat around the galley table. One drink turned into many; in fact, we sat there all night, laughing and chatting. They were called Michael and Anne, and had spent the last few years living in this boat. They were attractive in their own way, slim, fair and tanned, hippy-looking. He was bearded, with piercing blue eyes that he used to great effect. Their daughter was almost cartoonishly sweet; her fringe roamed wonkily across her forehead. Michael was the boss – that was obvious; he liked to tell a story or two, and his wife laughed as if she hadn't heard them before. Her face spoke of a troubled life, but when she smiled, it transformed. There was something very charismatic about him. As we got more and more drunk, I remember feeling that perhaps I was revealing too much about myself, but I couldn't help it; it was the way he was probing me, telling me it was all right to bring things out into the open, there was nothing to hide in life. He kept grilling me until eventually, loaded with raki, I began to cry, properly cry – great guffawing sobs. I hardly ever cried, let alone in front of a stranger, but Michael had touched a nerve from my past. And he kept pushing. I remember that he took great pleasure in comforting me, and it was no surprise to discover that he had once been an interrogator in the police.
Michael seemed utterly enchanted by Tom and my relationship, almost excited by us, telling us how rare and precious it was to see such pure love, so young. I suppose we were flattered and maybe a little smitten by the pair of them. I'd never come across adults who spoke and behaved like this, who held such disdain for the conventionalities of society, who had lived such rich and fascinating lives.
We ended up not making it back to our tent, crashing out in the galley, and in the morning Michael presented us with an offer: did we want to go on a trip around the bay with them? We were not ones to stare long into the mouths of gift horses. We mumbled something about the inconvenience of two extra passengers and he said it was no problem – little Susie could sleep in the forecabin with them. We mentioned the fact that we had only a couple of hundred quid – he said that money was no object: he was on a generous pension from the police force after having been retired after "an incident". Tom and I were full of the spirit of adventure and the invincibility of youth, so we said yes. We went to gather our few possessions and returned to the boat. We then lent him our hard-earned cash to buy provisions (his pension didn't come through until the end of the month), we filled the boat up with diesel (ditto) and left the harbour on the next stage of our adventure.
Alarm bells rang almost immediately. It was a windy day and Tom had put up the sails as Michael motored out to sea. Shortly, Tom suggested putting a reef in and I remember the puzzled look on Michael's face as he stood in the gangway. "What's a reef?" he asked. And it soon became apparent that they had never sailed the boat before. So we agreed to crew the boat in return for our keep, glad to pay our way. We sailed out into the choppy open sea. Michael was jittery, nervous about being too far from shore; it transpired that he couldn't swim, either, so instead we crept along the increasingly deserted coastline. A routine became established: we'd get up late and have a leisurely breakfast, Tom would sail the boat, we'd anchor in some empty natural harbour for the evening, then play cards, drink wine and talk about life, love and the universe until we crashed out. It began as a fascinating time. Michael was one of the most challenging and unusual people I had met: he constantly questioned the status quo and was curious about everything. Anne was harder to fathom. She seemed alternately in awe of him and scared of him; she would get drunk and often was to be found staring blankly ahead with a look so haunted that I worried for her. There was one night when, during a card game, I realised she'd left the table. I went on deck to look for her. I found her out in the chill wind, motionless, hanging upside down by her feet over the rails at the bow, her head in the icy water, comatosely drunk. I shouted down and Tom and I hauled her back in and tried to warm her up. We were confused as to why her husband found the whole thing so amusing. Susie slept through our noise-making and would awake fresh-faced in the morning, raring to go. She was a perfectly happy, good-natured child. She never said a word and I don't remember her ever crying.
It was on the fourth day when the sun began to shine that Michael suggested we should all be naked. "Only in nakedness can we reveal our true identities," he said. And with that they stripped off. I wasn't comfortable with it. He kept encouraging me to take off my clothes. I tried to be a bit "hippy" and took off my top, but would find his eyes lingering on me and began to feel uncomfortable. But it was obvious that there was nowhere to go, just barren, mountainous wilderness.
'Nothing's ever right for him,' I wrote in my diary. 'It's too windy, too cold or too sunny.' What the hell was he doing living on a boat?And the wind was dwindling, the water getting stiller. Michael was in no hurry to go anywhere – this was how they lived their life, slow and leisurely, no rush, no contact with anyone; no friends had come to visit them, no family got in touch. They were just the three of them in the world. It was a surprise to hear that they knew Kiwi Pete and even more surprising to hear them speaking badly of him – he'd always seemed like a good person to us, although we knew he had a shady past. Michael used to get in rages sometimes. "Nothing's ever right for him," I wrote in my diary. "It's too windy, too cold or too sunny." What the hell was he doing living on a boat?
When he was like that, we would stay out of his way as much as was possible within 32ft with a maximum width of 6ft. Anne would drop hints about their lives back in Britain, and it wasn't difficult to piece together the fact that they were running away from something. But there was nothing unusual about that: most people who lived at sea were running away from something or other.
Then, one night, we were playing cards as usual, getting on well, drinking wine, discussing their life, when Michael looked up and said, in the most casual of tones, "We always include Susie in our love-making, we wouldn't dream of leaving her out." I laughed. I thought he was joking. He looked at me deadpan, those blue eyes reaching into mine. "I'm serious, Clara," he said. "We have always included her, right from the beginning. And when she reaches the age of seven and wants penetration, I shall be the first to give it to her."
I stared back at him. He wasn't joking. I felt a chill creep through me as he carried on talking in the same tone about the Golden Age and civilisations where incest was the perfectly natural way of things; it was just a question of what was presently fashionable in society. He said that "victim" and "abuse" were just society's way of controlling us, telling us what to think, how to behave. I wanted him to stop, to shut up. I looked at Tom, whose jaw was hanging open. I looked at Anne. She kept nodding nervously and saying to me, "I used to think like you, I used to think it was wrong, but he showed me, he'll explain…"
I stared at Michael in total confusion, trying to maintain my bearings when it felt like the world was turning upside down. And then I looked to Anne – she was part of it. At least she had the grace to look ashamed. Susie was two years old, lying asleep next door in their bed. This had been going on under our noses. I felt sick, but I couldn't even get up. Michael was still talking. This man was proud of his actions. He had been grooming us to partake in his warped little self-contained world.
I couldn't bear to be anywhere near him, he repulsed me. Everything he said disgusted me, his dreadful catchphrases: "Let me tell you a little story…" "I've been there…" "I see things I'm not meant to see…" "I know what you're thinking…" Everything was spoilt now. It was all bullshit.
In the days that followed, we were pretty silent. We whispered long into the night, making plans to kidnap Susie. In the daytime, we tried to keep her away from him as much as possible, as if we could protect her. I'd try to snatch moments with Anne, telling her she had to escape. She was quiet and sullen. I couldn't sleep. Tom and I spent the time scanning the horizon for signs of life, for a place to get off. But there was no escape. We were trapped, there was no wind, and there was no civilisation. We were going nowhere.
We froze Michael out and he didn't like it. He was losing control. He knew he had lost us. His tantrums got worse. Anne became more and more cowering, wincing when he yelled at her. Susie was clearly confused as to why the atmosphere had changed. Four awful awkward days passed, but finally the wind came and we were able to get moving. The relief as the twinkling harbour lights appeared out of the darkness, the white mosque wailing us in. I kissed and hugged Susie goodbye, feeling so treacherous that I was leaving her and her mother in his hands. Michael refused to give us back our money. We didn't have a single penny and he knew it. He had chewed us up and spat us out. So we sat on a street kerb, gutted, wondering what the hell we were going to do. I felt truly broken.
I wanted revenge. We remembered someone Michael didn't like: Kiwi Pete. We hitched round the coast to the boatyard to see if he was still there, whether he knew what was going on. He was smoking some weed in the saloon of his boat with a huge German musician we'd met briefly before. They took us in and we told him everything, no detail spared, word for word what Michael had said and done. Pete went very pale and still. Then he lost it and flew into a rage. He told us that he was going to kill Michael.
Over the next few days, things really started to kick off. They were plotting how to "get rid of" him. They came up with several plans There was a moment when I realised that they were serious: Pete produced piano wire and lead weights to sink the boat.
I didn't want to spend the rest of my life knowing I had been responsible for the killing of a man. We dissuaded them. We put up a few signs in bars and pubs that Michael frequented, outing him as a paedophile – a feeble protest, really, but it felt like something.
Looking back, 28 years later, I wonder why I didn't scream and shout at Michael, or take his child away, or report him to the police. The truth is, it never even occurred to us to go to the police – in the 1980s, the police were avoided at all costs by people like us. Besides, Michael himself was a policeman. I think our behaviour was more about survival: we had been trapped and manipulated, and we just wanted to get away from him. I think how different things would be now, one little post on a social networking site, one click, one photograph, how much easier it would be to humiliate him. I have no idea what happened to them. I wonder where that little girl is now. She'd be 30. I've tried to track them down a couple of times to no avail. And, Susie, if by some small chance you are reading this and recognise yourself, I am truly sorry that we didn't do more for you. I only hope your mother got you away from him. I like to imagine that you and she somehow managed to save yourselves, and that perhaps you are still living at sea, seeking that elusive thing: personal freedom.
• Names and details have been changed. Clara Salaman's novel, The Boat, inspired by this time in her life, is published by Head of Zeus at £9.99. To order a copy for £8, including UK mainland p&p, call 0330 333 6846, or go to theguardian.com/bookshop.
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