by Peter Helton
I saw with relief that the boat was still there. Boats did get stolen, mostly by drunk joyriders after the pub, but Dreamcatcher lay peacefully moored near the George Inn. Once we were on the boat, I stuffed all the extra items into the corners – I had added all my favourite cooking gear – knives, saucepans, wok, omelette pan, Turkish coffee pot and cups – and put the revolver in the cutlery drawer. Tim did the honours at the George and with two folding chairs and me on my collapsible painting stool we savoured the balmy atmosphere at dusk on the stern deck, watching the ducks float by while sipping our drinks. People strolling past smiled or gave us enviable looks. I had arrived.
‘Very pleasant. I could get used to this,’ was Tim’s verdict.
But Rebecca’s mood was not as carefree. ‘Do you think they might come back?’
‘Who? Back where?’ I asked.
‘Back to the house! I worry. You’ve asked Timmy to house-sit and I worry they’ll come back. If you disturbed them when you came home earlier, they might come back and search the house again.’
‘Shouldn’t think so. I think they were probably done.’
‘They are dangerous people, Chris; they killed one poor chap in an arson attack and tried to do away with another. What if they put petrol through your letterbox? With Timmy in the house?’
‘We’ve got smoke alarms,’ I suggested.
‘Fire extinguishers?’
‘Not as such …’
‘If there’s a fire, we’ll jump for it,’ said Tim soothingly.
‘We?’ asked Rebecca.
‘You’re staying too, aren’t you?’
She gave me an exasperated look that seemed to say Now look what you got me into, before she decided. ‘Yeah, all right, I’m a light sleeper. But I’ll be bringing my own fire extinguisher …’
When it got dark and they rose to leave for home, I slipped Tim two keys. ‘The Yale key is from the gun locker, the other one from the drawer in the little writing desk where the cartridges are kept. If you hear intruders, use the blue cartridges.’ I had emptied the bird shot from half a dozen twelve-bore cartridges and filled them with Arborio rice; less lethal but still devastating at close quarters.
‘I’ll keep them handy, just in case.’
The two wished me good luck and disappeared hand in hand up the towpath into the night.
The nearest street lamps were few and far between and so far away that beyond the windows all was black. I shut the curtains and closed both doors. The twelve-volt lighting and the dimensions reminded me of old-fashioned train carriages. This was it then: I was on my own on the boat, skipper of the Dreamcatcher. I made up the bed and got inside. It felt very comfortable. I turned out the light and lay awake, staring into the darkness, wondering what I had forgotten to bring.
NINE
‘Sugar!’ I swore politely as I stood in the galley, because that’s what I had forgotten to bring. I liked it in Greek coffee which I had hoped would wake me up on this bleary morning. I had spent a night of interrupted sleep, groping around for the bathroom in unfamiliar surroundings and lying awake for long stretches, listening to the night sounds of the canal’s wildlife through the open window in my sleeping quarters. I had finally fallen asleep again just as it threatened to grow light outside and then slept into the middle of the morning. Now I hunted around in all the cupboards and eventually found a mug stuffed with sachets of sugar, pinched from various cafés no doubt by the previous owner. The sugar inside had clumped from the damp but I didn’t mind; I liked my Greek coffee métrio, with a small spoonful of sugar. When I had warmed a couple of croissants in the oven, I took my breakfast in the sunshine at a small folding table on the stern deck. Croissants to go with my quince jam, I guessed, would be hard to come by in future. They were a mundane thing at home, but here they felt like a luxury and I savoured every mouthful, blowing only a few crumbs to an unimpressed audience of ducks. By the time I had finished my second coffee, it was after eleven and I felt suspiciously relaxed. As I finally started the engine and cast off, a tiny part of my brain was doing a little jig. It was the part that thought my chances of catching up with Verity were so tiny that really what I was doing was embarking on a painting holiday. I spoke sternly to it in a grown-up voice, reminding it what we were here for. It blew me a raspberry.
Having already had a day of boating under my belt, I now felt like an old hand at this as I pushed off from the cut. Wrong again. Immediately, I got beeped at by a narrowboat whose approach I had failed to hear over the sound of my own engine. I hastily reversed out of its way, too enthusiastically as it turned out, and slammed the boat against the mooring, back where I had started. Take number two. I made sure nothing was coming either way. Revs and heartbeat settled at a steady pace as I finally set off. Just on the other side of the bridge, the Raft Café was already doing good business and I passed it extra slowly so as not to upset people’s cups of coffee, trying to look as though I’d been narrowboating all my life. A small boy holding a plastic toy in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other stared as I puttered by. I waved. The kid waved back with the ice-cream hand. The ice cream fell off the cone on to the ground. The child’s inconsolable wailing followed me for a while as I accelerated away. I put ‘waving at children’ on my not-to-do-on-a-narrowboat list. I immediately had to slow down again. You need to slow down when passing moored or oncoming boats; traffic was already quite frequent and there seemed to be no end to moored boats around here. I began to understand why the Road Movie is a more successful genre than the Canal Movie: a boat chase at three miles per hour would be nail-biting for all the wrong reasons. Had I done something really stupid by abandoning the road and taking to the water? I passed a boat coming the other way – not a hire boat but a private one with its roof full of logs; the skipper acknowledged me, I smiled back. Nah, this was fine. Verity was not my responsibility. If I found her, I’d make sure she was safe, but it was unlikely I’d ever hear from her again. And I was patently running away from my real job of watching Janette Blinkhorn. Every time I came past anglers, I scrutinized the still figures as I dutifully throttled back, but I could not possibly pretend that this had anything to do with earning money. What those sullen men were hoping to drag from the dark waters of the canal I had no idea. I took deep breaths of fresh country air scented with diesel fumes from my own engine and puttered, smiling, towards bankruptcy.
Eventually, the moored boats thinned out and I achieved something close to the heady top speed of four mph. I may have even broken the speed limit here and there, but the engine note was most pleasing at walking pace. There was very little current on this stretch and the tiller only needed gentle movements to keep the boat in the centre of the water or to move it gently to the right when traffic came the other way.
Ah … lovely … nice. On a sunny September day, what could be better than taking your time, letting the canal make all the decisions and getting nowhere fast? How could this possibly be improved? Why, with a mug of tea, of course. But you can no more make tea while skippering a narrowboat than you could while diving the Great Barrier Reef. Even though you’re only twenty feet from the kettle. I pootled on until I got really quite thirsty. Parched. Gasping for a mug of.
Of course, with a car or even a camper van you just pull in at a convenient place and put the handbrake on. Stopping a sixty-foot narrowboat is a trifle more involved. You can’t just stop the engine and dive inside to make tea. The boat will move. You’ll drift into moored boats or block the traffic. It will do nothing for your popularity ratings. Eventually, I managed to spot a likely place that didn’t have a ‘Private Mooring’ sign on it and gently parked the boat, grabbed the heavy steel mooring pins, the mallet and the stern rope, and hopped ashore. While holding firmly on to the rope, I hammered the reluctant mooring pin into the ground, then tied the boat to it with a granny bow because I had forgotten the knots Jake had showed me, then repeated the operation at the other end of the boat. Great, I had successfully parked and only hit my thumb o
nce. In the galley I put the kettle on and made a mug of tea which I took outside and set down near the throttle. Then I hopped ashore and pulled pins, coiled ropes, stowed pins and mallet and got under way again. I put ‘driving off without a mug of tea’ on my not-to-do-on-a-narrowboat list. I drank my tea, I puttered along; all was well with the world for ten minutes. Then I needed the loo. This is where you normally call to your shipmate to ‘hold the tiller for a moment’ while you nip below, but for the single-handed boater there is no such luxury: a call of nature means mooring pins and ropes and mallets and hitting of thumbs, then doing it all in reverse (the mooring bit) and asking yourself searching questions about whether there is anything else you might want in five or eight or ten minutes. No? Then we shall proceed.
The novelty of driving a houseboat around kept me occupied, and the slowly changing scenery fascinated me. In a car or on a train the land flies past; you have little time to rest your eyes on anything, none at all if you happen to be the driver. On a boat, however, everything happens at a stately pace and trees, wildlife, people and buildings all roll past to be examined at leisure. It was after lunchtime and my stomach was rumbling, but I felt I had not done enough catching up to warrant tying up again and breaking for lunch. Not that there had been much of a chance to moor the boat anyway. I was coming up to Dundas Aqueduct and suddenly the place became busy. For quite a while I had noticed many cyclists on the towpath; now they were coming thick and fast, which made me suspect that there had to be a hire place nearby. Boats were moored nose to tail along this stretch, many of them permanently, judging by the encrustations, as I thought of them, of flower pots, bicycles, log piles and windmills. At last I came into a kind of basin and a wharf with a small crane or two. There were boats manoeuvring and boats queuing, and I realized that I had reached Dundas Aqueduct, which shoots off at a surprising right angle. I couldn’t see it from the boat but it was the River Avon and the railway line below which it crossed in a hundred-and-fifty-yard-long channel, only wide enough for a single boat – hence the queue. Eventually, it was my turn and I threaded the nose of Dreamcatcher, sixty feet ahead of me, into the mouth of the aqueduct and managed it without ramming anything. Perhaps I was getting the hang of this. The aqueduct also sits astride the border between Somerset and Wiltshire, which meant that for a short moment the front of the boat was in one county while her skipper was still in another one. Another small basin, then a sharp turn right towards Bradford-on-Avon, a small town straddling the river. There were boats moored permanently on this side of the aqueduct too, but eventually the traffic thinned out again. I was threading my way past a double-parked boat and a couple of people in plastic canoes paddling along when an oncoming narrowboat came noisily chugging towards me at twice the normal speed. Loud music was booming from unseen speakers; drunk half-dressed blokes were dancing on the foredeck and the roof. Whoever was skippering it had his forward vision impaired by dancing figures and too much lager. The canoes scooted out of my way, but the oncoming boat started to zigzag and eventually aimed to pass me on the wrong side. I pushed the tiller hard over and gave it more throttle to avoid crashing into the boat. One or two of the drunks cheered as I narrowly avoided their bow while burying my own decisively in the opposite bank.
The boat chugged away towards the aqueduct and took the noise with it. The couple in the plastic dinghies, one yellow, one red, glided almost silently past me and disappeared into the distance. I put the engine in reverse. The boat didn’t budge. I gave it more throttle. This churned up the water into a muddy froth but the boat refused to move. Armed with the boat hook which lived on the roof, I went forward on the outside of the boat by shuffling sideways on the narrow ledge that runs around the edge of it. The branches of an overhanging shrub made my life more difficult than necessary as I poked ineffectually at the bank, hoping to dislodge the bow, with no effect whatsoever. I shuffled back. Mysteriously, now that I had run Dreamcatcher aground, there appeared to be no more boat traffic at all, though a few walkers on the towpath opposite gave me curious looks of the look-at-that-idiot-stuck-in-the-bank variety. Eventually, from the direction of the aqueduct, a boat did appear – not a narrowboat but one of those high-prowed, fibreglass cabin cruisers. It was large and looked brand new and certainly big enough to give me a tow; it proclaimed its name – Free Spirit – in large swirly writing on the prow. Only the head of the skipper was visible above his windscreen; the man wore sunglasses and seemed oblivious to my waving from the tangle of shrubbery covering my boat’s bow. I clambered towards the stern as fast as I could and called, but the cruiser passed right under my nose without its skipper taking any notice of my calls and animated waving. There was another man on board, sitting in the stern, but he was facing forward and did not look back, oblivious to my hailing them.
I had another go with the throttle, backwards, forwards, backwards, hoping to get a rocking motion going as you would with a stuck car, but instead I created a muddy whirlpool that spread in an embarrassing circle in all directions. I stopped when a narrowboat appeared from the aqueduct side. I got my waving in early this time and, to make sure it wasn’t mistaken for over-enthusiastic friendliness, waved with my boat hook. The approaching boat slowed and with obvious expertise glided to a halt precisely so our two sterns drew level. The entire boat was painted in a dusky purple and was called Morning Mist. Her skipper was a man in his forties, dressed, despite the sunshine, completely in black: black jeans, trainers and T-shirt. His nose was long and bent slightly to starboard, below which an eight-inch-long pointy beard compensated for the virtually non-existent hair on his suntanned head. When he opened his mouth to speak, a gold tooth flashed in the sunshine. ‘Stuffed it into the bank, have you? How on earth did you manage that?’ I started making my excuses, describing the incident and the boat I blamed for my predicament. ‘Yup, saw them a moment ago, crashing into the entrance to the viaduct. Pissed as the proverbial. Hire companies simply don’t care who they give day boats to. And, of course, they didn’t stop?’
‘No, neither did the next boat that came along, even though I waved and called.’
‘Really? Another hire boat, I suspect.’
‘It wasn’t a narrowboat; it was one of those cabin cruisers.’
‘Oh, a plastic duck – they don’t count, a different breed of people,’ he said dismissively. ‘Don’t share our ethos, do they?’
I didn’t wait for an explanation as to what this ethos consisted of; instead, I asked, ‘So, do you think you could pull me off?’
‘Never on a first date.’
‘Let me rephrase that.’
‘Don’t bother. We’ll have you out of there in no time. I’m Vince, by the way.’ Vince spoke with an educated voice and just a hint of Somerset, and he knew his stuff. He handed me a length of rope and told me to make it fast on Dreamcatcher’s bow, then he manoeuvred Morning Mist into position. We opened our throttles together, me in reverse, Vince forward, and Dreamcatcher slid off the bank to freedom.
‘Thanks, Vince, I owe you one. Actually, I was just about to stop and rustle up some food. Fancy it?’
‘Smashing idea.’
We moored not much further along behind a line of other boats and Vince came aboard. He was so tall he could only just stand upright in a narrowboat. He scrutinized every detail of Dreamcatcher with a practised eye. ‘What’s the engine?’
I remembered that one. ‘Lister SR2,’ I said casually.
‘Vintage.’
‘Yours?’ I asked as though I cared.
‘Beta Marine.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah, it’s a marinized Kubota engine.’
‘Ah yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Reliable,’ I hazarded.
‘Totally.’ Vince remarked on the workmanship and the solid oak panelling of Dreamcatcher. ‘Mine’s a symphony of plywood and yacht varnish, but that’s how they come these days.’
I started by grinding coffee beans in a hand grinder and made a cafetière of coffee. ‘Ah, real coffee
, eh?’ sighed Vince when he sampled it. ‘It’s all instant on board the Mist but I do stop for a cappuccino every once in a while. This is good stuff.’ I had taken on board every bean of Annis’s coffee collection. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke, I take it,’ he said, indicating my ashtray. ‘Yeah, sometimes I tell people I took to life on the water because the canals are the last place on earth where you’re allowed to light up.’ He took out a tobacco tin, rolled himself a fat cigarette in the blink of an eye and lit it with a brass Zippo lighter.
‘You’ve been living on the canals long?’ I asked, rattling my pots and pans.
Vince had a habit of stroking his beard before answering any question, as though he had been asked to consider a philosophical problem. ‘Seven years this October. You?’
I consulted my watch. ‘Coming up to five hours now.’
Vince spilled coffee into his beard and broke into hysterical laughter followed by a coughing fit. ‘Ah, sorry,’ he said when he had recovered. ‘You had me fooled for a minute. It doesn’t feel like a holiday boat; it has a lived-in feel, if you know what I mean, and it’s bloody crammed with stuff. So you’ve only just taken to the water?’ he asked incredulously.
Foolishly, I hadn’t prepared for this question. It hadn’t occurred to me to prepare a cover story and now I played for time while searching cupboards. I couldn’t have said why, but I somehow felt reluctant to divulge the whole saga to Vince, no matter how helpful he had been. I could say I was on a painting holiday or I could pretend I was starting life on the water. I compromised. ‘I’m trying it out for a few weeks, to see if I like it.’