We could easily have changed our minds. Our boss said that we could withdraw our resignations any time during our notice period, right op to the last day. One of our colleagues had recently done just that, returned to work with chilly toes and his tail between his legs. When the doors of the New York bound Airbus closed and it started moving, we both let out a sigh, releasing all the pent-up tensions from the last three months. The deed was done.
Before this all started, when we were still dreaming of leaving our jobs to sail around the world, Nicky had declared that as long as we motored out the harbour, turned right, raised the sails, passed Cape Recife and set course for Rio, or St. Helena, or wherever else our fancy took us, it didn’t matter if we never made it. If some freak wave sank us before we lost sight of land, it wouldn’t matter, she would die happy knowing that we’d had the courage to take the risk to venture towards the unknown.
Crossing the Atlantic in an Airbus wasn’t quite the adventure we’d imagined, but, metaphorically, we felt that we had passed Cape Recife and left the safe life behind. Because of poor connections in New York, we would have almost twenty-four hours to explore.
A day is not enough to do more than scratch at the Big Apple’s skin; many New Yorkers never get as far as the core. But we were determined to take the biggest bite that we could.
After dropping our suitcases at the hotel before breakfast – no check-in until much later that afternoon – we took the Long Island Railway to Penn Station. Nicky quickly befriended two young men from Chicago, who were sitting opposite us. They were as clueless as we were about how to get around, but the man across the aisle, who overheard our conversation, chipped in and matched the subway’s tangle to our plans.
We were on a tight schedule, and a budget, but we had a plan. Our first destination was the iconic Staten Island Ferry, which took us from Manhattan across the Upper Bay, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to Staten Island, and back again, for free.
Then the Metro took us to West 72nd Street and Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, across the road from The Dakota, where John Lennon was shot. Strawberry Fields was, unsurprisingly, jammed with tourists wielding their look at me sticks like light sabres. For them a memorial park was not a place for quiet reflection. The man ripping it up on his guitar, belting out a cacophonous version of ‘Imagine,’ didn’t give peace a chance.
With two items on Nicky’s list ticked, it was time for mine: Greenwich Village. I don’t know why I wanted to go there, but to me it is synonymous with New York. New Yorkers have a reputation of being unfriendly, but Nicky proved the opposite. She started chatting to a flight attendant at the subway station, who was waiting to go home after a long flight home. He was so tired he hadn’t noticed what the weather was doing outside, was surprised when we told him that it looked like rain. He recommended a small Italian restaurant without a sign outside on Bedford Street. Cotenna was everything that he promised, and more. The Saturday lunchtime gathering was sparse and mostly local. We were served by the Maître D’, a Frenchman who rules his domain from under a pork pie hat with a soupçon of Parisian surliness. (He seemed to be having a bad day, with a number of his staff not having shown up for work.) But his demeanour added to the atmosphere, and beneath his indifferent exterior beat the heart of someone who really cares about food. The meatballs, washed down with an excellent glass of red, were sublime.
It was a late lunch and as the sun began to set on the city that never sleeps, we made our way up Seventh Avenue to the mayhem that is Times Square for the final act. Roadworks had turned the busy intersection into gridlock. Beneath the veneer of discordant lights, competing for attention, a NYC policeman posed with a gaggle of oriental tourists, while nearby a Congolese hawker handed out advertisements to anyone who would take them.
A sheik, by his garb, pontificated for a clutch of cameramen. Then, as night fell the other shows began: groups of women wearing little m
ore than body paint joined the me
lee, touting tourists for tips. We left them to it, retreated to the subway and back to the hotel. We finally got to the room at nine o’clock, knackered. We set the alarm for 2 AM and collapsed into bed.
Meanwhile Hurricane Matthew had veered away from Jamaica and was headed for Haiti.
Only when we had accepted our new job and resigned from our old, did we begin to absorb the reality of our decision. Nicky hardly slept for the first two weeks; first from excitement, then from fear. Shortly before we were offered the job in Haiti, she had learned that she had a benign tumour that was growing and needed to come out. Nicky is not good with general anaesthetic. The first time she was wheeled into an operating theatre, she had a look on her face that I’ve only seen on one other occasion: it was the same look I’d seen on my father’s face the last time I saw him. Somehow, he knew he’d never see me again. Nicky’s surgery went well, but she was on light duty for six weeks afterwards.
three weeks to sell the house. During that time, it transformed from a home into a show house, ready at a moment’s notice to welcome a prospective buyer. Living in a house that has nothing out of place, with all the surfaces (including the desk in my study) neat and uncluttered, is not something I want to do again. But Nicky’s attention to detail and Precious (our housekeeper’s) diligence worked. Prospective buyers fell in love with our house and before long we had accepted an offer. Then began the task of sorting through two lifetimes worth of possessions and deciding what not to keep.
Slowly the house began to empty; the books went first. A house without books is a desolate place; but the sight of empty bookshelves helped a little towards breaking our connection with our home.
On the last day of the month we closed our suitcases, threw the final orphaned odds and sods into a plastic bag to be stored with understanding friends, said a tearful goodbye to Precious, who was off to her new job, and drove to the airport for the long flight to New York and on to Port-au-Prince.