Boating for Beginners

by Winterson, Jeanette

  And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made… ... he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground;

  But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth….

  And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark;

  And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.

  And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.

  'Damn good story,' thought Gardener as he drank his coffee. Absolutely plausible once you started to go along with it. He wondered what they'd find in the days that followed.

  Soames was the first to find the gopher wood that showed clear signs of ancient wet-rot. It was the first time that Gardener had seen Soames look pleased. He immediately telexed his university, and all the papers jumped up and down and all the Bible scholars said, 'We told you so' and all the born-again believers said, 'Praise the Lord.' Gardener was fed up — he was just a skivvy — and so he decided to go off the next day and dig around by himself...

  And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:

  I do set my bow in the cloud ...

  'This is odd,' thought Gardener to himself as he extricated it from the earth. 'It looks exactly like the barrel of a one-armed bandit.' (Gardener knew about such things because his father had serviced them at funfairs.) How had it got here? And why was it covered in ante-diluvian slime? He put it to one side and continued. The next thing he found was a message in a bottle. It was written on parchment he guessed, and therefore the bottle would have to be skilfully broken in order to get it out.

  He rushed back to Soames who was still packing the gopher wood. Soames examined it, then carelessly broke open the bottle. He deciphered the writing. ' «Hey girls, I made it,»' he read slowly, '»love D ...» D what?' Here he faltered. 'Dorcas?' Gardener craned his neck to read it, then he cleared his throat. 'With respect, sir, it looks like Doris.'

  Soames turned on him, his face purple with rage. 'Don't joke with me. You did this, didn't you? Some kind of revenge, eh? I know your type. What kind of a cheap hoax is this?' and he tore up the parchment and threw the bottle over the mountainside. 'Doris! What kind of a name is Doris? If you want to joke, show some flair,' and he stomped into his tent, leaving Gardener nonplussed. It was the longest sentence Soames had spoken, but that didn't help.

  The next day Gardener found what looked like an ancient bottle dump — in fact it looked like a French farmer's back yard. Gardener ignored it. It was all a bad dream..

  And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

  And he drank of the wine, and was drunken...

  The morning after, Gardener asked to be sent home. He didn't say why. In fact he'd found a book, clearly thousands of years old, bound in a tough animal skin unlike anything Gardener had come across before. As he turned the brittle pages — only a few left and most of them badly discoloured — he had the horrible feeling that his mind had gone. He could read Hebrew, he could read Sanscrit, he could read hieroglyphs and had done so accurately many times before. But what he was reading now, while in a recognisable combination of languages, was quite ridiculous. If he hadn't known better he would have said it was part of a romantic novel; and in the bit he had, the heroine was in the kitchen whipping up a mushroom soufflé.

  He kept the book. He still has it, and friends admire it as a clever joke and roar with laughter when he starts to translate it. 'Gardener,' they say to one another. 'What a sense of humour.'

  But for Gardener himself as he grows older and more esteemed the question comes back and back. 'Where did it come from? Who wrote it? And Doris, who was she?' And he answers himself time and time again as he walks down English lanes watching the stars: 'God knows,' he says. 'God knows!'