I grab my rucksack out of my rented locker and rummage inside for my phone to check the time.
It’s 5:09. The boat leaves at half five.
I panic jog out of the shop and in the direction of the port. Six streets in, I realize I don’t have my rucksack. I must have left it on the bench by the lockers in the shop.
Fucking hell.
I race back.
It’s not there.
“Did someone turn in a rucksack?” I ask the attendant. “I left it here a few minutes ago.”
She looks at me blankly.
“Sorry, no,” she says.
Which means I am in a foreign country with no money or proof of my identity save for a tasteful blue cruise line wristband embossed with my name.
And it’s now 5:16.
Making it back to the ship on time will be somewhere between tight and impossible.
It’s fine, I tell myself. Surely there must be a grace period when it comes to a vessel catering to elderly tourists addled with sunshine and rum. My passport is still on the ship. All I need to do is get back to the port and explain my predicament and I’ll be off to sea to complete this miserable voyage.
The trouble is that I arrive at the port just in time to see theRomance of the Seagliding out of the quay.
I wave my arms madly. “Wait,” I call frantically. “Wait.”
Other tourists are watching me, some concerned, some snickering. “Look,” I hear a jocular American say to his wife. “A runner.”
I skip past the queue at the embarkation entrance and breathlessly corner one of the agents.
“I’m meant to be on that ship,” I say, my chest still heaving. “Can you radio and tell them to come back?”
He chuckles. “Once it departs, it doesn’t come back.”
“Surely they wouldn’t just leave a passenger stranded,” I say. “Please, there must be a tender, or—”
“Over there,” he says, pointing at a kiosk by the gates to the port. “That’s where you go when you miss the boat.”
Ah. There’s a protocol. Mildly reassuring.
I sprint toward it.
“Hello,” I say to the attendant. “I missed my ship. That gentleman”—I point to the dock agent—“suggested you might be able to help.”
The attendant gives me a sympathetic smile.
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Felix Segrave.”
He nods. “Yes, the ship alerted us that you hadn’t returned.”
“So they knew, and they left?”
“Ships are not permitted to depart past the scheduled time. By regulation.”
