by Adam Roberts
A long grey wall glimmered in front of them: the side of a house, roofless of course, and the windows unglassed, and bindweed growing in darker patches all over it. Daniel took Davy in through an opening and then groped in the shadows, assembling a tent by, it seemed, touch alone.
Finally he lit a tiny portable stove: a compact metal dome that, at Daniel’s prompting, put out a claw of blue-purple flame.
“I try to be frugal with this,” he said, “but needs must. I’ve only the one blanket, and it’s antique thinsulate, which is all a bit shit. But it’s better than nothing.” He wrapped this around Davy’s shoulders and then, by the uncanny blue light, he made first one and then two cups of tea. The shadows loomed and writhed around the two them. There was just enough light for Davy to be able to see that they were in the ruins of a house, tucked into the corner of one of the old rooms under the last remnant of roofing. Then Daniel turned off the stove and darkness swallowed them both.
Five seconds of clutching this tin mug in his gloved hands and sipping the hot fluid were sheerest bliss: the worst of the cold receding. Then there were several minutes of intense discomfort as sensation returned to his hands and face—it boiled and stung and he couldn’t stop tears of suffering leaking from his eyes. Eventually sensation returned to his fingers, and they felt less like they were being flayed with a potato-peeler. Ten minutes and he almost felt normal again.
Daniel may have been going through a similar experience. At any rate the old guy sat cradling his own mug and staring into darkness.
“You can explain all this?” Davy asked.
“I can explain some of it,” Daniel replied, in a tired voice. “Tomorrow. Now we need to sleep.”
Davy had never agreed with anything so vehemently in all his life.
Chapter Six
TWO DAYS AFTER Hat’s boat sank the Monsoon came and everything and everyone battened down for the duration. Aggie’s tavern was full for the inundation, but she took pity on Hat and let him make up a little bed in amongst the barrels of one of her two store-rooms. Since all his money was on the wreck, he had to agree terms of credit, and here she was less pitying and more hard-nosed. Not that Hat had any option. He ate stew, had a beer, smoked a herbal cigarette and listened to people alternate consolation with theories as to who or what had blown up his boat. Coal dust was the dominant theory, although some blamed Guz—they’d been shaking up the Downs for over a year, a light but unmistakeably military force that didn’t seem inclined to pull out. They weren’t levying any tax, and weren’t interfering in day-to-day life too egregiously, so people didn’t object with any great vehemence. Still they were the closest the North Wessex Downs had to strangers, so naturally they came under suspicion. Hat nursed his pint and had no opinion on Guz.
“So what do you think happened to your boat, Hat? Who do you think is behind it?”
Hat ran his thumbnail vertically up and down his bearded chin cleft.
“What will you do now? What line of work, do you reckon?”
Hat took a sip from his pint. Shook his head, slowly.
Eventually people went to their rooms, or else left the tavern, in ones and twos, into the hard falling rain, until only Agnieszka and Hat were left in the bar, with only the red light of the dying fire for illumination.
“What will you do?” Agnieszka asked. “You got to find a new way of making a living, I guess.”
Hat stared into the fire for a long time before he said, “Sheets.”
“Textiles?”
“Plastic.”
“Plastic sheets?” Surprise verily oozed from Agnieszka’s voice. “Are you very for-real serious? But where will you get your stock? I mean plastic’s useful an all, but most of the land round here has long since been picked clean of it. And you couldn’t go into business here, anyway not on this side of the Downs. Bert has all that kind of business sewn up.”
“Bert Rand,” said Hat, nodding. “I’ll have to go see him tomorrow.”
“Partnership, you mean? He won’t be interested in that. Why would he? He’s doing fine as he is.”
Hat nodded slowly.
Next morning he went anyway. Rand sold his plastic out of a big shed, a half hour’s walk west out of Goring. Perhaps it had once been a barn, or a storage facility; but now it was piled high with a sterile rainbow of plastic sheets and bags, thousands and thousands of old supermarket bags, binbags, old sheets. Rand told the sodden Hat that immediately before the Monsoon was his busiest time of year. People getting ready with as much waterproof material as they can afford and such. There wasn’t much stock left.
Hat explained what he wanted and gave Agnieszka’s name as a guarantor on credit. Rand was a lugubrious elderly gentleman, skinny and possessed of a long thin nose with a large bulb of flesh at the end, like a clove of garlic.
“If you’d come last month,” he said, “I’d have told you to fuck off down the hill to the river and jump in. That much plastic? Still, still. As it is, nobody will be buying now until the farmers come in the spring. So how much you offering me?”
Hat named a price.
“Fuck off halfway down the hill and jump in a hedge,” advised Plastic Bert.
Hat suggested a slightly higher price.
“Fuck off about ten yards, just enough to take you outside,” said Rand, “and wait there until you’re wet right through.”
“I’m already wet right through,” Hat pointed out.
“I’m charging a damages fee for any rips,” Bert said. And that was that. To seal the deal he took Hat into a small room heated with a black iron stove and they toasted one another in potato vodka. Then Bert selected a range of larger sheets from the supply. Some were clear plastic, some blue and one was a kind of shimmering black-green, and twice as thick as the others. These Hat folded as best he could, tied them, and balanced the resulting parcel on his head as he went down the hill.
Agnieszka was puzzled. “That’s not enough stock to start a shop,” she pointed out. “And ordinary people don’t want big sheets like that. They want small bags and so on to make waterproofs. And farmers aren’t in the market for plastic during the Monsoon. Still, I suppose you know what you’re doing, Mr Hat.”
Hat doffed his hat. Water dribbled off the rim when he did so.
There wasn’t anywhere in the tavern spacious enough to spread the sheets out, so he had to work on small sections at a time, with the rest folded underneath, which made the whole job much harder than it would otherwise have been. And Agnieszka kept coming through to see what the stench was—“Foulest smell known to mankind, burning plastic. Unless burning hair is worse.”
“Burning hair,” Hat agreed, “is a bad smell.”
“What are you doing?”
“Melting it along lines,” Hat said, scratching his beard.
“If you want to get warm, then come in the saloon bar. I’ll shoo the regulars away from the fire—for five minutes at least.”
“Much obliged, Agnieszka,” said Hat. But he didn’t come through.
The next day Hat went out to a specialist dealer he knew north of Goring, and bought some actual-to-God nicotine cigarettes. They cost almost as much as the plastic, but he no longer cared. He’d been smoking herbals for so long he has forgotten what actual cigarettes were like, and now that his boat was on the bottom of the river he wasn’t going to postpone any longer. He folded the six cigarettes in paper, and wrapped the paper in plastic, and tucked them in a pocket, and came back through the rain to the tavern. Agnieszka’s theme for the evening was: “you can’t stay here forever you know, Hat.” He nodded, and nodded again, because, after all, it was true. “It’s not that I dislike you or anything—you’re a harmless old boy, I know. But this isn’t your home.”
“I know it’s not, Agnieszka,” he agreed.
“I know you’re paying me, but you need to make other plans, and sooner rather than later. Don’t get too comfortable here.”
“I won’t, Agnieszka.”
The day afte
r that the rain was falling as heavily as ever, and nobody was outdoors. Streams ran down the middle of all the riverward roads, and the roofs were furred with spray. Hat took his parcel of plastic down to the river and sat for a while on a log on the bank under trees that acted as only partial cover. There was no point in putting it off any longer, but some part of him was reluctant to take the inevitable next step. Of course there was no alternative. Where was this reluctance coming from anyway?
He told himself to get a grip. Always a useful asset, a grip.
So he took off his coat and his trousers, and then, as a final gesture, he took off his hat. All three items were sodden with rainwater anyway, but he folded them and put them under a bush. Then, clutching the weighty heft of folded plastic to his chest, he walked to the river, jumped in and sank straight down.
The mid-morning sky was murky and grey-black with rain and cloud, and the light underwater was much dimmer. But the submerged boat was more or less impossible to miss, and to say Hat knew every single inch of it intimately stem to stern, inside and out, was no exaggeration. He pulled himself along and through the main hatch, inside. There he stowed the plastic, yanked himself down and through to a particular yellow-painted box. Then he was up and to the surface where the raindrops patted him on the head as if congratulating him on a job well done.
The water was cold. Not unbearably so, but Hat was not a young man, and had no desire to stay longer down there than he needed to. He swam to the bank and tossed the yellow box on the side. Then he took a couple of deep breaths and ducked down again; hauled himself through the hatch and began unfurling the plastic. It was much harder to do than he had anticipated—almost complete darkness, and the plastic reluctant to move in the water, liable to get tangled in itself, and just as he thought he was starting to make progress he had to swim back to the surface to breathe. After four or five dives that accomplished very little, Hat took a rest on the bank, sitting in the constant rain, shivering a little, and thinking about things. The next dive he swam to a stow-hole and pulled out an old plastic hose, once stiff but now malleable with age. Back above water he tried to rig it as a breathing tube. But it didn’t work: even when he tied one end to a buoy, so that it floated, and swam down with the other: the effort of hauling air so far down hurt his lung muscles, and resulted in not enough air; and what little made it down was flecked with rainwater that had got in and made him choke and cough. So he gave up on that idea and simply did what he could in the dive-times he was able to squeeze out of his increasingly weary body.
By mid-afternoon he’d more or less unfolded the plastic inside the sunk boat. The innards of the craft were divided by a bulwark about two thirds of the way down—if Hat had had the foresight to shut the door tight on the fateful day of the explosion then he wouldn’t have as great a labour as now faced him. But it couldn’t be helped. The front two thirds were the important bit.
Hat dressed himself in his soaked clothes, reverse-peeling the sopping fabric over his wet and exhausted flesh. Then he trudged up the hill to the tavern. The saloon was crammed with people, and he couldn’t get anywhere near the fire. Agnieszka was in an angry mood, shouting at people that they couldn’t take advantage of her shelter and her heat if they weren’t even going to buy her fucking drinks, and that if they weren’t even going to buy her drinks they could fuck off into the rain. Hat slipped through to the store-room where he was staying, stripped off and dried himself as well he could with one of his two blankets; then he sat wearing nothing at all wrapped in the other. Wearing nothing at all except, of course, his hat.
The following morning his clothes were still damp, and the fire was long dead in the saloon.There was a peculiar yuckiness of getting dressed in wet clothing.
Hat went out once again in the relentless Monsoon downpour. Again there was nobody about, and again he was absolutely soaked almost as soon as he stepped outside. But his heart was lighter. Down at the riverside he partially undressed as he had done the previous day. Then he dived into the body of the sunken boat and fitted the pump’s hose to the nozzle sealed into the plastic inside. Hauling himself onto dry land, shivering in the rain, getting back into his soaked clothes, still shivering.
A good bout of exercise would warm him, he told himself. And so he set to work.
The pump was one with two rotating handles, one on either side—an ancient but still perfectly functional artefact. Usually Hat employed it to clear the bilge, but it could be switched about to push air into, rather than sucking water out of, whatever it was attached to. So he began turning the handle, as the rain splashed and splattered and gusted around him. Some ducks drifted up to watch him, perhaps intrigued by the bird-tweet squeak with which the right handle sang; but when he didn’t feed them they grew bored and drifted away.
The cranking was hard work, but a decade of winching his boat up and down the Thames had strengthened his muscles.
To begin with he could feel the pressure building as resistance to his strokes, and for an hour or so he pumped assiduously away. There may have been rearrangements of the wreck, bubbles coming to the surface and so on: it was hard to tell, in amongst all the rain. But some way into the second hour, as Hat’s old arms burned with fatigue, he sensed a slackening of the pressure, somehow. The handles kept turning, but it felt as though he was pushing air out through an unattached tube rather than filling a balloon. So he stopped, stripped off again, and went back in the Thames.
He wondered if the nozzle had become loose, which would have been easy to fix, but he soon located it and it was still fitted snugly onto the inlet. So he came to the surface and took a breath and went back down. The first exploratory dive was fruitless, but the second located the problem—the expanding bag had snagged on a coign of the interior space and ripped. A gash big enough to get his hand in, vomiting enough bubbles to make the texture of the water fluffy. A third dive and he effected a basic repair, clipping the rip shut. It didn’t have to be perfect; it just had to hold enough in for the rest of the bag to inflate—once it was pressed against the inside of the hull it would seal itself. Close enough, at any rate, for government work.
Hat came back out, scrambled up on to the dank grass and lay on his back until he got his breath back. The rain eased off, and for a while it even looked as though the clouds might break and some sun might come down. But then a drizzle started up again, and soon enough it was back to full Monsoon downpour.
Hat resumed turning the handles and felt the gratifying resistance again in the action. He cranked and cranked, and after another hour or so he began to sense something was happening. The surface of the river still bristled like a hog’s back with droplet splashback, but now there was something else—a push from beneath, a set of eddies or currents. Then, as he ignored his complaining muscles and increased the rate of cranking, he saw the top of the bridge push through the meniscus and slowly lift clear of the water. Hat pumped on, and the bridge rose, wobbled, tipped forward slightly and then leaned back as the bow came up.
The rain died away for a time, and Hat pumped on, his heart filled with a fierce sort of joy, unusual for him. The boat rose and rose, its flooded stern almost entirely underwater but its bow lifting up like a swan. In time it came all the way up. It was a beautiful sight indeed, sitting on the surface once again, with water draining off in a dozen little curving sheets and mini-overflows, and the myriad raindrop splashes covering the whole like glitter. Panting, Hat jumped onto the angled deck, slipped and fell, picked himself up. The clouds had thinned, and the quality of the light was brighter, as he got to the prow and peered over. There was the hole that had sunk her: a ragged oval, with splinters small and large, and one half-broken plank, all pointing outwards. A blast from inside the boat, then. Leaning himself over the gunwale, he could reach the largest outward-bent plank, and lever it back, roughly, into place.
The plastic bag was not, of course, a perfect airtight whole. Hat could even hear the hissing of its deflation, and as he moved about on the deck he f
elt the whole craft shuffle uneasily beneath him. He needed to act fast. He managed to get one of the two deck-lockers open—water slurped out and poured away across the deck—and retrieved a tarp and some kit. Then he dangled himself over the gunwale again, and quickly tacked the top of the cloth over the hole. To fix the bottom he had to go back in the river again—he was thoroughly wet anyway, and he didn’t need the manoeuvrability required when he’d been swimming through the submerged innards, so he didn’t bother undressing. The bottom of the tarp was fixed and he smeared some putty around the edge.
The sun came out for about ten minutes and the whole wet world sparkled. After that the clouds closed again, and soon enough the drizzle built from downward mist to distinct droplets and on to the harder rain. It was still the Monsoon , after all. Hat didn’t care. He retrieved the pump from the bank, swapped its function about and used it to pump water out of the rear compartment, into which the plastic float had been unable to expand because of the compartment wall. The plastic bag was deflating now, but it had done its job.
The sun was going down. Exhausted as he was, Hat would have preferred to get down inside and start proper repairs to the breach in the hull straight away. But he needed light, and both his boat’s oil-lamps would be sodden and useless. And perhaps it would be best, just for his own sake, to wait until the morning. He needed to rest.
His last task of the day was the most surreal of all. He needed to retrieve one of his lamps, to take it to the tavern and dry it out, but that meant going belowdecks and wrestling with the soggy, bulging body of the mostly-inflated bag—like fighting a blind slug the size of a dragon—to squeeze round between bladder and the inside of the hull, groping his way in darkness to where he knew the lamps were stowed. It took him a while, and began to assume the lineaments of nightmare, but he found the lamp, and got out again and back onto the bank, and at last was able to trudge up the hill though the rain and back to the tavern.