‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my love, my lovely love. I’m so sorry.’
She said nothing.
‘Ing?’
She took a breath. ‘Nobody in our boat again. Please.’
‘Nobody in our boat again,’ he said. ‘Just you and me.’
That night he lay awake with his fat idiot’s arm around her and looked at the cabin roof whilst the rain drummed on. The hurricane lamp creaked on its hook as the wind shifted the boat in the water. Inga’s hair was still wet and it soaked through the chest of his pyjamas. Never been happier, he thought of saying, but didn’t.
They had enough for one more tank of diesel and that was about it. He couldn’t get any more on credit. And he’d lied to Inga about it every time she asked. Fucking fat bloody fucking idiot. He’d been giving out drinks tonight, chucking all their food on the barbecue and showing off the boat like some bloody rock star. Was that what he’d wanted those people to think? Didn’t even know half their names. And they’d trashed the inside of the boat – his and Inga’s gorgeous, groovy, precious boat. All the money he spent on it. Fucking idiot. Pulling out the barbecue ten thirty at night.
He didn’t sleep. Lay there listening to the boat, their boat, hearing those curious sounds she made. Sighs as she shifted on the water.
He would have to sort it. It was his mess.
The next morning he got up early and left Inga sleeping. What a morning, he thought, and couldn’t say it. He walked a mile down the canal to a pub in Hounslow where the landlord had said something cryptic over a pint a couple of weeks ago, the kind of thing Fizz recognised and had ruled out ever getting involved in again. When the bloke saw him he pulled two pints and took him to a table in the corner. He explained it all and really it didn’t seem too difficult. He was looking for someone to transport a number of crates up to Ladbroke Grove once a fortnight or so. Stuff that wouldn’t fit in a car and couldn’t risk being unloaded off a van. ‘All our business goes by water. Comes in on the Thames and then out –’ he traced a wiggling line on the table with his finger – ‘on the waterways. You can reach a lot of places by water.’
Fizz was to call some unpronounceable foreign bloke when he got to the Kensal Road junction and some of his pals would come and unload the crates and that would be that. No need to know any more. The landlord opened the till and stuffed an envelope with cash as prepayment, and wrote a phone number on it. On Fizz’s way back to the boat the envelope felt shaming hot in his trouser pocket.
He told Inga half the truth about there being no money, and then said they could earn a bit bringing booze up from the Hounslow pub to Ladbroke Grove. ‘It’s a cheaper way for the pubs to move it around,’ he said, sick at himself, ‘no tax on water transport. We’ll be using the boat like she used to be used.’
‘Is it legal, Fizz?’ She looked straight at him and he threw an arm over her shoulder and pulled her in, getting himself out of her eyeline.
‘’Course it is, my love.’
On the first run he’d been jumpy but it went okay. When they got up to Kensal he made the call from a phone box on Harrow Road. Got through to a swarthy accent who told him to park the boat by some warehouse buildings on the other side of the canal. As Inga brought them into the bank three blokes appeared from the direction of Golborne Road. Two of them were teenagers, fair, shaven-headed and over-muscled. The third one was smaller and skinnier, dark with raked-back hair and stubble. He wore a black leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots. Sore-looking, pink-rimmed eyes. Fruity cologne. He stepped forward to shake Fizz’s hand as Fizz stepped down on to the towpath with the mooring rope. ‘Ciao,’ he said – it was the accent from the phone. ‘The crates are inside?’
‘Yeah,’ said Fizz, trying to seem cool in front of Inga. The little dark bloke whistled to the two blond machines and motioned them on to the boat.
‘My brothers,’ he said. Fizz nodded. Right. The bloke went over to the warehouse doors and looked both ways before cracking open the padlock and swinging one door back. Inside was dark, but Fizz could see a tarpaulin laid out on the ground up to the door. He didn’t want to look any further in. He turned round to the boat and gave Inga a big smile and a thumbs up. As each man went in carrying a crate, the boss man barked instructions in a language that sounded throaty and harsh. It was over quite quickly. There was another handshake, and a fat envelope. A nod. ‘See you soon, friend.’
The boss man said the same at the end of each of their transactions, and not a lot else. More concerned with getting the job done quickly. So Fizz and Inga kept on going up and down between Hounslow and Kensal and after the fourth or fifth journey Fizz relaxed. It was fine. A couple more, then they’d have enough money to stop. It was a relief to have the cash.
They got the boat cleaned, replaced the carpet and stocked up. Fizz wanted to take Inga shopping in Chelsea but she refused. So he went off on his own and bought her a long necklace of amber beads from a costume jeweller’s, like one she’d had in LA. She told him off, but he knew it was a keeper. It was round her neck that night and they lifted their table on to the towpath and lit the hurricane lamp. The amber followed the curve of her collarbone and lit up in the lamp’s light. Stunning. They ate and he searched for her hand under the table. ‘Look at us now,’ he said, ‘plastic plates on a metal table. Sorry, Ing.’
‘We don’t need much,’ she said. ‘Just the odd thing. I’m happy.’
He should have stopped there.
Three days later, another shuttle down to Hounslow and back, dropped the crates with the man and his thugs. As they pulled away from the bank – a siren. The two crew cuts bolted down the towpath, and Fizz and Inga watched as the boss man snapped the padlock shut and ran after them. Police appeared on the bank, waved the boat towards them.
‘What is this?’ said Inga, her voice shaking.
Her hand was on the tiller and she steered them in towards the uniforms on the towpath. He went to the back of the boat, tried to take her other hand.
‘I’m sorry darling. Fuck.’
The police went over every inch of the boat, even took up the decking, went through the engine compartment. They pulled the bedclothes off and knifed a line down the mattress to check inside. They went through the wardrobe, every item. They didn’t speak while they were doing this, only to tell Fizz to sit still and shut up. Inga was silent. When they’d finished the search the police took her up to the towpath, questioned her separately. Through the boat’s wall Fizz heard her monosyllables. ‘No. No. I don’t know.’ He answered the same, but got blustery and desperate. They wouldn’t let him outside to be with her.
Eventually the police left – they’d found nothing. Fizz followed them out and as he stepped off the deck to the towpath, Inga stepped on.
‘I don’t know what was in those crates, Ing. I honestly haven’t a clue.’
She moved out of his reach, went down into the cabin. He clattered down the steps after her.
‘I didn’t know, Ing. They didn’t say what was in them.’
‘You told me that they contained alcohol for a pub.’ Halcohol. She said this so quietly.
She wasn’t looking at him, but around the bits of their life, and he followed her gaze as it took in the wrecked cabin, the mattress slashed with its innards all over the floor, clumps of grey foam clinging to the orange carpet. Some carpet in the corner had been pulled up and a floorboard removed, curved joists of the boat’s skeleton were visible underneath. The drawers of their kitchenette had been pulled out and stacked on the floor, the oven door was off; same went for the grille for the extractor fan. The hurricane lamp was on its side on the counter, smashed. Fizz could see the the lid of his barbecue sticking out of the engine room doorway. Their wardrobe was empty, all the clothes on the floor. Fizz’s loud shirts, Inga’s quiet beiges, her whites.
She walked to the engine room and lifted a plank from above the doorway. She put her arm inside and brought out a handful of notes. ‘The police are obviously not so good at fin
ding things.’
‘Where’s that come from?’
‘Some money I put away. I knew we were running out. You always spend everything.’ She counted two hundred quid on to the bed. ‘This is for you. I am taking the rest. I am going to go and stay in a hotel. Don’t follow me.’
He stepped forward to beg –
‘There is nothing for you to say, Fizz.’ There was an edge in her voice that made him stop. That blankness in her eyes: she had already gone and the more he sweated and grasped at her the further away she would go. So he made himself stop and stepped back, managed to ask:
‘Will you be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll be here.’
‘I know.’
She fingered the amber necklace.
‘Do you think you should take this back to the shop?’
‘No, no. You’ve got to keep it. It’s yours. From me.’
‘I do love it.’
She moved forward and put a hand on his chest.
‘I do love you.’
He dropped on to the bed as the doors swung shut behind her.
That night – the first in nine years that they had been apart – he lay on his back and he heaved. He mauled his eyes with big hammy knuckles as the tears filled them again and again and again. His chest was cracking open: the pain came up through it and along the back of his throat. He choked on the pain. Twice he thought he heard footsteps outside and staggered out, but no one. Each time he checked the ropes were tied properly to the mooring hooks. He mustn’t drift away. He promised he would be here. He had to stay put.
At dawn he gave up on sleep and began to tidy, folding their clothes, hanging them in the wardrobe. What would Inga have to wear in her hotel? She hadn’t taken anything with her. This gave a flush of hope, but then he began to worry. She hadn’t anything waterproof. What if it started tipping it down? There was nothing to her, his lovely girl.
He pushed his face to a porthole. The sky was clear. No sign of rain. But the worry wouldn’t leave him; it was getting harder inside somehow, a barbell lying across his chest.
Heavy.
Pressing down hard on his breath.
He finished doing the clothes, put the drawers back into the kitchenette. But it was an effort. He went into the engine room and screwed the lid back on to the engine compartment. He gripped the handle of the barbecue and as he pulled it up – a new pain: a sharp line down his left side, as if someone had cracked a whip along his arm. And again and again. The pain became a shrill ache that spread to his heart.
He clutched at his chest and tried to push the ache away with the butt of his hand. He looked down expecting to see his heart beating as he fought with this thing. Just saw the rising heave of his chest, heard his panting breath.
This was bad.
He took the doorframe in his other hand and pushed up the steps, through the doors and on to deck. The buildings were spinning around below the blue sky – he saw the double doors of the warehouse and the rectangle of the huge tower block before they spun out of view.
Or was it him, spinning?
He saw the flat green of the water and the concrete slabs of the towpath leading off in both directions slab after slab after slab and at the end near the bridge he saw her figure the long column in white with pale hair the tiniest wrists walking towards him and saw the lovely long legs lift and bend into a run as he spun around again to face the sky dark blue pale yellow burning behind those buildings his legs fold and he goes down bum first and then big fat shoulder hits the floor and head lolls and he is looking along the plank lines at the blue ridge of the boat.
What a morning, he thinks to himself.
What a girl.
TWENTY-EIGHT
For two days Odeline has hardly been able to eat, only nibbling on some stale pieces of crackerbread from a packet on her bedside table. She hasn’t left her boat. She has spent most of the time lying in bed looking at the cracked varnish of the buckled planks on the walls. Chalet style. One of the handsomest houseboats on the water.
Odeline is in despair. She has mimed this emotion many times before, with woeful eyes and a mouth twisted down into a tragic mask. Real despair feels different – she is not in fact aware of how her face appears. When she looks in the mirror it has no expression at all. It feels as though this real despair is expressing itself internally, somewhere between her heart and her stomach. She imagines a huge metal barrel with rusted edges. If you were to chuck a stone in, it would rattle around the sides and clatter at the bottom. She is an empty echoing barrel.
Her father doesn’t want her.
She has no future with the Cirque Maroc.
Ridley doesn’t want her. Ridley’s not even here.
Her life’s work is worthless.
Her prop box is gone.
She has £102.52 to add to her expenses, with still nothing to enter in the cash column of her accounts book.
Her only friend has been taken away.
Of all these, the most terrifying, the most real, perhaps because it is the most recent, is Vera’s disappearance. The blue and white tape and the splintered door of the barge cafe, the smashed plates and the heap of sodden clothes, this is the film that plays over and over in her head. The shock of seeing it has not passed, and it seems to contain an even worse reality than her father’s rejection, or the unsatisfactory finances evidenced in her accounts book. The world is a cruel, cruel place. She has never liked it, but that was because she’d thought it boring, and then disappointing. Not violent, not cruel, not brutal like this.
When Odeline thinks of Vera, the empty barrel in her stomach begins to spin, violently, the stone hits the sides faster and faster, rising to a terrible drumroll.
She imagines Vera’s wrists ducktaped too tightly, her hands puce.
She imagines her crammed into the boot of a car.
She imagines Vera’s body in a ditch, a gunshot through her temple.
Perhaps it was Vera’s evil brother-in-law who came to get her. Did he have his thugs with him as he threw her around? Did they snigger as he called her names again? Odeline imagines Vera’s body rolled into a shallow grave on the side of the motorway. She imagines her flowery skirt billowing as her body is thrown off a bridge into the River Thames. Is he lying in wait for Odeline too, waiting for her to come out from her boat? Will she meet the same gruesome fate?
Odeline has eaten her last crackerbread. At some point she will have to go out for more food. Or she could not. She could stay lying like this on the bed until her body gives up. There is something magnetic about lying here all day. It is the opposite of what she has told herself to do all her life, with her daily schedule and her go go go. She imagines her skeleton in the suit trousers, collarless shirt and waistcoat being found one hundred years from now. Big shoes hanging off the bones of her feet. The relic of a neglected clown. Quite a poignant image, she thinks.
She imagines she can hear her bones creak as she lifts herself up off the bed. She feels dizzy from being horizontal for so long. She sways slightly, hair rustles the ceiling. The cabin looks different from an upright perspective. So narrow, so small. The faded orange-and-brown-patterned chair appears distant, as if there is a cloud between it and her. The bookshelf looks as miniature as a doll’s. She blinks and then checks the cash in her moneybelt. She doesn’t bother checking herself in the bathroom mirror, but goes straight to the cabin doors, sliding back the latch and opening them, wincing as the sunlight streams through.
She shields her eyes with a hand and steps up on to the deck. What is this? No brown, rippling canal water. Her boat is sitting on green, as bright as grass. For a second she thinks she has been plucked from her mooring and dumped on dry land, but then sees the stooped blue bridge and the grey-headed drunk leaning on her mangled trolley by the bench. Duckweed – that’s what Ridley called it – duckweed surrounding her boat, laid like a carpet along the canal. Her boat is stuck like the other objects poking out of it. A wicker
dog basket, a clear plastic tube of blue styrofoam shapes, hundreds of upright bottles and cans, half submerged. There are no birds, nothing moves.
Further up the towpath, by the barge cafe, John Kettle is taking the lid off a small pot of drawing pins. He jams his thumb at the clasp and the lid flies off, drawing pins spray over the towpath and the cafe table where he is using a pepper mill to weigh down a pile of papers. ‘Damn it,’ he says desperately, and gets down on to his knees to start picking them up. He doesn’t know why he bought the coloured ones: they seem childish now for such a serious thing. When he has them all back in the pot he lifts a sheet of paper from under the pepper mill and turns to the barge cafe door, which is hanging from its top hinge and splintered from halfway down. He pins the paper to the door and then steps back to look. Perhaps one should go on the end of the boat too, in case people can’t read the writing from behind the blue and white tape.
When he sees a tall dark figure in the corner of his vision he ducks under the tape quickly, with the papers under his arm. Turning round he sees it is Odeline walking out from under the bridge. ‘You’re back!’ he says.
Washed out, jaundiced, great purple bags around her eyes. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
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