He was a man alone in his world.

Fletcher chose a cruising sailboat, squat-masted and heavy in the rigging, for his lone dash around the world. Ambitious, maybe, but he could cope. He was Fletcher.

In a squall halfway across the Bay of Biscay his radio sparked and died. Undaunted, he sailed on.

Becalmed in the Doldrums, he sniffed out the elusive breezes and tacked his way free, reaching the coast of Africa bronzed and lean from his ordeal.

Making landfall in Nigeria for repairs to a split mast, he bought the services of an ebony goddess in downtown Lagos. He spent a week in her mountain shack, overlooking a wooded valley blighted with oil refinery storage tanks. And when he left he carried on his arm a tattoo of her tribal mark.

In South Africa he crossed the Karoo on a racing camel, hanging on with grim determination as the swaying beast pounded over the parched bundu. Across the lofty Drakensberg in the flatbed of a bakkie hauling fruit, and down into Zululand, where he met a shy Zulu maid and flouted the twisted laws of that beautiful but saddened land. And leaving her tear-stained, just ahead of the Kaffir patrol, he quit the soiled Eden.

Sailing on to Mauritius, he tasted the delicate French cuisine and swam from silver beaches as yet unspoiled by tourists.

Eastward into the rising sun, against the flow of mortal living, then south to Perth, where he went walkabout to find Alice Springs and the pub with no beer. Here he unloaded his tucker bag full of canned lager. Fletcher would forever after be known as the Pom who ended their drought.

And on to the end of the earth, where he was an honoured guest at the last Maori war feast. He found the meat strangely distasteful yet exciting at the same time, without realising its source.

Then, island-hopping across the vastness of the southern seas to meet beautiful and amoral savages who, ignorant in the ways of the Europeans, welcomed the tall, bronzed traveller. With a childlike trust they offered their food, their hospitality, their daughters.

Again eastward toward the rising sun and into our yesteryears. To encounter Drake and his fellow explorers braving the fury of the Horn, to hail and thank the long-dead pathfinders.

Fletcher lashed the sails and roped himself down as he rounded the Cape, running with the gale, tossed and battered and spray-blown, lips cracked and salt-caked, muscles aching and crying out for sleep, head filled with that howling cacophony of wind and his own screams, until the swirling waters of the channel spat out the flimsy craft into the broad swath of the Southern Atlantic.

He had made it, rounded the Horn. Ahead lay the land of Good Queen Bess. What changes could he expect after three years' absence? How would she receive him? With a knighthood, or the executioner's axe?

A buzzer sounded somewhere far away.
Fletcher sighed. The rolling sea and clear blue sky faded, taking with them the bracing wind and the acrid smell of ozone.

He blinked as the helmet was lifted and harsh daylight rushed in. A slip of a boy in a white coat was busy removing the sensors from Fletcher's pale and puny chest, but the old man couldn't feel the sting of sticking plaster separating from skin. He felt nothing below the neck.

The youth smiled. "That's enough for today, Mr Fletcher. We don't want to tire you, first time out, do we? It went well, for a trial run. Shame about the time slip. We'll work on it. Same time, same place tomorrow?"

The boy waited patiently while Fletcher slowly and deliberately chinned in his reply. Letter by painful letter, the words formed on his mobile display, then his wheelchair spoke metallically.

"Yez, pleez, Dogtar Zmit. Zame time, zame plaz toomorro."

The End
© Frank Swales