Narrow Margins

by Marie Browne

  This mood was not alleviated by our first sight of Happy; she was as grey as the weather, covered in pigeon poo and listing gently to the left.

  ‘I told you we were wasting our time,’ I grumped at Geoff, ‘let’s not bother. Can’t we just go home?’ I pulled Sam off the safety railings as he tried to pitch himself into the marina basin, ‘Get down, Sam, for goodness’ sake, this is not a flaming playground.’

  Geoff frowned and, fed up with watching his wife and son indulging in a pulling and screaming match, reasonably suggested, ‘Look, we’ve come all this way, is it really going to kill you to just take ten minutes to get the keys and have a quick look inside?’

  As there was no good answer to that without resorting to outlandish exaggeration, I ignored him and continued my attempt to heave Sam off the railings. He clung on, kicking and screaming, until with one good pull I managed to physically tear him away and set him, with a bit of a thump, back on solid ground.

  We tagged along, arguing hotly about the need for safety and choosing an acceptable place to play. Geoff ignored us and amused himself by having a good look at all the other boats for sale; way out of our league of course, or all of 30 foot long. By the time we got to the office Sam had turned into a ‘wailing child’ who told any passer-by that mummy had tried to break his arms.

  He cheered up slightly as we went into the office which was situated behind a shop, and immediately fell in love with a large, badly coloured, plastic model of the duck from the Rosie and Jim children’s television series. Its head turned and it went ‘quonk’ in a slightly nasal tone.

  While Geoff was sorting out the keys to Happy, Sam and I had another argument about his obsessive need for plastic rubbish, and by the time we left the shop, Sam was in full flood, telling everybody about his horrible, abusive mother, who not only tried to break his arms but never bought him anything!, ever!!!

  Happy was moored between two other boats, under cover, in an open-ended shed type affair. After a sticky two or three minutes spent trying to manhandle a miserable and unhelpful child over the adjacent narrow boat, we finally stepped onto the rear deck.

  Sadly, the smell of unloved and slightly damp boat was, by now, becoming almost welcoming and, sure enough, it wafted out in an effusive greeting as we opened the back doors and fell down a tall step into the gloom. Geoff decided that he was going to start at the bow (or the ‘pointy bit’ as I always called it, much to his disgust) and disappeared down what appeared to be the inside of a large, round coffin lined with doors.

  Sam, finally free of the clutches of his hated, criminally abusive and fiscally restrictive mother, trotted after him, and I was left to wallow in the expected yuckiness of my surroundings.

  The internal decor of Happy Go Lucky was horrible; even if I had been in a good mood it would have been horrible. Unfortunately for the boat, I was in a foul mood and it was the most horrible thing I had ever seen in my life, but at least it seemed to be free of scary fungus.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the outlines of the kitchen from hell started to appear; it was the type of kitchen that usually sported the headline: ‘Misunderstood mother forced to live in purgatory’. Everything was covered in dusty old grease and had obviously been thrown together by some insane and untalented DIYer with a cheap Formica addiction.

  There was a microwave, which strangely enough looked brand new, a fridge which just as obviously wasn’t and a glass-topped hob. A sad collection of mismatched plates, chipped mugs depicting badly drawn, very kitsch cartoons (mostly of people falling into various locks around the country) and cheap cutlery were all stacked higgledy-piggledy on old, warped shelves that clung tenaciously at strange angles to the back wall of an open-fronted cupboard.

  The greasy, beige, faded curtains, which, at one time, I imagined, were patterned and cheerful, now hung lank and miserable from the four remaining hooks still attached to a tarnished fake brass curtain rail. Fixed at only one end, it and its resident curtains drooped sadly toward a floor resplendent with greasy, pitted, beige and brown 1970s classic lino.

  Happy Go Lucky was built in 1994, so the seventies decor struck me as a little odd. The whole thing had a horrible similarity in both furnishing and smell to that in my grandma’s flat just before she passed away. She had steadfastly refused to replace anything and had been living in the same surroundings for about 50 years.

  I wandered through the kitchen – this took about four steps – and into a seating area furnished with more greasy curtains in the same material, a very straight and hard-looking settle upholstered in a knobbly grey material with frayed edges that allowed the grubby foam beneath to leak through. The settle could just be seen, skulking, embarrassed, behind a wobbly-looking folding wooden table.

  To stop items sliding off the top, someone had fixed proud-standing strips of wood to each edge. As I couldn’t imagine that Happy Go Lucky ever had occasion to battle manfully through huge rolling waves while travelling at four miles an hour down glass-still canals, I could only assume the proud edges of the table were either merely decoration or put there as an irritant to anybody trying to clean the wretched thing.

  Trying to move the table out of the way without having to actually touch it, I lowered myself gingerly onto the settle and spent a couple of minutes studying the literature packed into the bookshelves on the opposite side of the boat.

  I assumed that holidays on board had been so boring that the books were there to stop the passengers committing mutiny. There was certainly no book less than ten years old. A collection of Dickensian Classics cosied up to the Great Book of Vampire Stories – this, in turn, was wedged beside a set of well-thumbed Mills and Boon love stories; a book for every taste, obviously.

  These packed shelves ran down the length of the boat; tens of feet of them, filled to overflowing with either novels or small books and pamphlets covering ‘Things to do on canals’. I was rather confused – as far as I was concerned, a canal holiday entailed getting on the boat; floating about a bit; getting off the boat; there couldn’t be much more to it than that, surely? However, the sheer amount of literature cluttering the insides of Happy gave me a bit of an insight that I might be mistaken and that a canal holiday could be much more exciting than I had ever imagined.

  Bored with looking at the books, and needing someone to pick an argument with, I went in search of Geoff and Sam. Choosing a door at random, I reached across the passageway and pushed it open to reveal a tiny bathroom.

  There was a small cream-coloured and yellow-stained toilet lurking in the corner, next to it was a shower, half hidden behind a faded and mould-ridden curtain. At first glance I thought it strange that someone had decided to put a black carpet in the shower tray, but, on closer inspection, it turned out to be half an inch of stagnant water. A tiny sink attached at a slight angle on to the buckled and damp-stained wall opposite completed the ‘bathroom suite’. It made a perfect picture of decay and neglect which the smell did nothing to dispel. In fact, the whole thing presented the perfect site for a cholera-breeding program.

  There were six cabins, each boasting a double bed filling the space wall to wall, and a vanity unit comprising a tiny sink, some shelves and an age-spotted mirror. The only way to get on to the bed was to take a flying leap from the doorway and hope that nothing collapsed beneath you.

  I wandered back to the sad little seating area and, picking up one of the pamphlets on narrow-boat holidays, I decided to find out exactly what a narrow-boat holiday entailed and plonked myself back onto the demoralised sofa. Opening the leaflet at a random page, I alternated between reading it and waving it about in the air, hoping to dispel the cloud of stinking dust that had puffed up as I sat down. I was pleased to confirm that a narrow-boat holiday wasn’t exactly for the thrill-seekers among the population, unless maybe you were over 105 years old and were fairly realistic about the type of thrills that you were seeking.

  Finding nothing remotely of interest in the pamphlet, I shoved it back onto the shelf
with a sigh and looked up as Geoff and Sam came grinning and chattering down the boat toward me. Both were alive with excitement and discussing Sam’s new bedroom, how the rest of the boat would look and what they could do with it.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I muttered to myself, ‘this looks like trouble.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Geoff bounced up to me with a huge grin and before I could start moaning about how awful it all was – how unhygienic, nasty and smelly – he rushed on with his thoughts.

  ‘Isn’t this great? I’m pretty sure it’s bone dry and just think with all the cabins and extra walls that would have to be removed, I might never have to buy any wood at all, what a saving.’ He paused for breath and looked around. ‘Is this as far as you’ve got? What do you think?’

  What I wanted to say was ‘I think it’s horrible, it smells, I’d rather wee over the side than use that toilet, it looks as though it wants to eat you, it smells, and if I stand in the middle with outstretched arms I can touch both sides, where are we going to put everything, how are we going to live in this, it smells, it’s tacky and epitomises all that was bad about the seventies, how am I going to cook, I miss my house and I haven’t even moved out of it yet and I miss my garden even more, where are all my clothes going to go, there isn’t even enough storage space for my shoes and that includes that ridiculous excuse for a kitchen, AND IT SMELLS!!!’

  My traitorous brain, however, committed mutiny on the spot and, obviously taking pity on my poor, hopeful husband re-wrote the script and forced me to say, ‘Erm ... it’s got potential?’

  It was obviously the right thing to say, as, with a huge smile, he grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me toward the pointy end (sorry, the bow), excitedly explaining as he went along, ‘We’ll have Sam’s room here and the galley (the what?) will have to be moved to here; this will be the saloon (the what?) but we should be able to have a fair-sized head around here (a fair-sized what?); of course she will have to be surveyed and hopefully they’ll accept an offer, but as long as all that goes to plan, I think we’ve found our home – what do you think?’

  I looked into his eager, excited face and told another huge lie. ‘If you’re sure you can make her lovely, sweetie, I’m with you all the way.’

  Arrrgh! Nooooooooooooo! IT SMELLS!

  Chapter Four

  Dumping Shoes is Grounds for Divorce, You Know

  TWO DAYS BEFORE OUR house completion, knowing that Happy Go Lucky had been on the market for some time, we put in a ridiculously low offer. Geoff lived in the hope that the offer would be accepted and I half hoped that it would be turned down. However, as moving day was rushing toward us, there wasn’t really that much time to gripe about it.

  As the packing ploughed on we had a few minor tiffs, especially the day that Amelia, who was still emphatically against the idea of moving with us, actually put a plan into motion for once in her life, packed her own stuff up and moved into her boyfriend’s parents’ house. I wasn’t happy with the idea and had been expecting her to change her mind but, as she had so firmly stated, she was 18 and there was nothing I could do.

  Luckily, Huw is lovely; 6' 4" and built like an overly hirsute piece of string, he actually took the time to come and try to allay all my fears and worries, which was very mature for an 18-year-old. It didn’t help at all but I appreciated the gesture.

  We had met his parents who, strangely, seemed to be so convinced that they were taking on ‘a lovely girl, so helpful and polite’ that I came away from the meeting wondering if Amelia had paid a stand-in to cover for her as we seemed to be discussing a different teenager.

  From the very start of the dreaded boxing-up exercise, Geoff had maintained that this was an excellent opportunity to do a major ‘life laundry’ and had blithely thrown away anything either he hadn’t used for a year or that he hadn’t seen me using. In the early days of packing I was more likely to be seen dragging things out of the skip than actually putting them in.

  Things finally came to a head when he tried squeezing past me in our small hall with two very lumpy black bags.

  ‘What’s in there?’ I asked, failing to inform him that I had noticed a couple of stiletto heels sticking out through the plastic. Geoff’s eyes slid sideways and he took a step backward, ineffectively trying to push the bags behind him.

  ‘Just some last bits and pieces I found under the spare room bed,’ he muttered. Picking up the bags he tried to slide past me again.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ I shrieked, ‘those are my shoes!’ I lunged toward him and grabbed one of the bags. Not only was it full of shoes, but boots and bags as well!

  That was the final straw; I was tired, dirty and miserable. I had the choice of living with my mother-in-law, or on a floating coffin that smelled like we would be sharing it with the resident carelessly interred corpse, and as far as I was concerned that was no choice at all. Now this useless, hairy lump was going to throw my Jimmy Choos in the skip.

  It was all his fault we were in this state, and it was his stupid idea that we go and live with his mum or on a boat (reality wasn’t playing a huge part in my life at this point), Sam couldn’t swim, so he was going to fall off the boat and drown about two minutes after we cast off and even if he didn’t die he was going to be so emotionally scarred by all this that he would probably end up with his own counsellor at ChildLine.

  Geoff took one look at this wild-eyed and maniacally angry woman lunging toward him and decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valour. He dropped the bags and fled.

  A couple of minutes later, he called gently up the stairs, his voice following the trail of scuffmarks that I had made in the paintwork as I had stamped past, swearing and dragging two bags with sharp heels sticking out, acting the part of expensive grappling hooks.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  I stuck my head out through the bedroom doorway. ‘No I’m bloody well not, just leave me alone,’ I shouted down at him and, turning, stamped back into the bedroom, the angry slam from the door echoing around the bare room.

  I leant against the door and stared at the dents and impressions in the carpet; it was as though my beautiful furniture was still there, just invisible, and for a moment I could forget that it was either sold, given away or just dumped.

  Sighing, I emptied the shoes out of the bags and watched them bounce across the floor. I spent the next five minutes arranging the 30 plus shoes and boots into their pairs and placing them around the wall of the bedroom. Staring at them I sat on the carpet in the middle of my invisible bed and promptly burst into tears.

  I must have cried solidly for a good ten minutes and then, finally getting angry with my pathetic self for being so upset over a couple of pounds of shaped leather, I stood up and walked around the room, picking up each shoe in turn and throwing it with as much force as I could muster against the opposite wall.

  It’s strange; you can only cry and wail for so long before your conscience starts to metaphorically tap you on the shoulder and every single time, the voice it uses sounds just like your best friend – at least mine does.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ it scolded. ‘Either you stop now or you’re going to end up with a nice jacket to match those shoes, one of those popular styles with the arms that tie behind you. You started this, shit happens – either sort yourself out or be miserable, your choice.’

  Helen, a no-nonsense paramedic, has been my best friend for about 15 years and throughout that time I have always relied on her to give me a major verbal slapping when necessary. It has happened so many times in the past that she can now accomplish a good dressing down even when she isn’t actually there – not a bad trick.

  Geoff had given me the mandatory half an hour to calm down and had finally worked up the courage to brave the shoe- and furniture-deprived psycho wailing banshee-like in the bedroom. He stepped through the battered door carrying two cups of tea and a large bar of chocolate.

  Looking around, he took in the shoes scattered around the ro
om and the dents in the paintwork. (I suppose I should apologise profusely to the new owners but, in view of the price they got the house for, I’m not going to. So there!) He put the tea and the chocolate down and then started to gather up the shoes. He handed them to me, one at a time and I quietly placed them back in the bin bags. There was one pair, a beautiful pair of black leather boots, well worn and well loved, that I had real trouble putting in the bag. I stood there, hugging them for a couple of seconds until Geoff came over and gently took them from me. I assumed he was going to throw them into the bin bag but instead he left the room with my boots tucked under his arm. A couple of minutes later he returned, carrying a suitcase. Unzipping it, he placed the boots reverently on the top, and making sure they wouldn’t be crushed, he zipped it back up and turned to me with an enquiring look on his face.

  For some reason, this struck me as really sweet and started the tears again. I was blotchy and sniffly but managed to give him a weak grin. Through all this, he hadn’t said a word. Handing me my tea, he unwrapped the chocolate, broke off a large piece and, leaning down, held my nose until I opened my mouth which gave him somewhere to stuff it. Standing up again he picked up the bin bags and put them outside the door where I couldn’t see them. When he returned to sit down beside me, he stole half of my remaining chocolate to go with his tea.

  We sat there chatting about nothing; I knew it was just an excuse to give me time to completely calm down. When he judged that normality had returned, he handed me the last piece of chocolate and very quietly stated that he had just got off the phone to the marina, our offer had been accepted on the boat, but that if we went ahead the present owner wanted no comebacks.