I thought about Sally, and hoped she was thinking about me. I was completely isolated. I sent no messages and received none. I had no way of contacting her.
Our wedding was imminent. My chances of making it were not good. I didn’t know much about marriage but I was sure all the best bridegrooms showed up for their weddings. My absence was bound to be noticed. I was, I thought, stuffed.
Much, much later, here I was deciding to live on the French canals and Sally was still saying, ‘Let’s do it.’ Next day she went out and changed her mother’s legacy into enough Euros to buy a boat and live on it for a year, perhaps two if we were careful, and it was done.
She seemed endlessly able to take my dreams and make something of them without flinching; for the trouble with dreams, with escape and adventure, is that the losses can be heavy. Sometimes lives might have been better left as they were. Changing ours removed us from family, friends, props, routines, and when things went wrong we were naked in the cold.
Chapter Four
Ared sun seared the mist. Seven o’clock. We hadn’t been up that early since we’d left home. We seemed quite alone in the world, not a common feeling in this tiny, crowded country. We unwrapped a New Zealand flag and hoisted it on the varnished wooden flagpole at the back of the boat. Perhaps we should have snapped to attention and saluted, but we did not.
Neither of us cared very much for flags. We’d found that when one was waved it was usually time to turn around and briskly head the other way. Besides, the New Zealand flag was at best ambiguous. Those who didn’t think you were British believed you were Australian. You were expected either to order egg and chips or boast. Yet you were also required to fly your country’s flag at your boat’s stern.
This was a dilemma.
A few days before we left New Zealand, Glenn and Trish had presented us with a little black flag carrying a silver fern and underneath it, to make things perfectly clear, the inscription ‘New Zealand.’ It was the kind of flag you waved at an All Blacks’ game and the daunting thing was that while the proper New Zealand stars and Union Jack puzzled almost everyone, the silver fern was instantly recognised right through Europe. In the world view we were a nation of fly-halves and loosies.
We stuck it on the front of the boat. No one ever got mixed messages from that one.
The water was still. Anyone could see the day was going to be hot (ignoring glum predictions from locals: ‘You are very lucky. But it will rain tomorrow evening or the next day.’).
The diesel’s erratic rumble may have woken a few, but no one came to wave us off. We looked back over our home for the last three weeks. We’d liked it there. The yachthaven was eccentric, far from the clinical order of the marina in neighbouring Kerkdriel where ranks of spotless washing machines and driers stood outside pristine showers amid strict security. We knew about the security because we’d tried to sneak in with a load of washing. I preferred the anarchy of our own mooring.
We passed the pool where lay barges, the historic tug and a few houseboats, one of them accommodating a small boy who offered his little steel launch to marina sailors as a water taxi, shuttling them from boat to café all of one hundred metres away. He handled his boat as other kids rode bikes.
We reached the River Maas, turned left, and were on our way.
The sepia haze over the sun made us seem the centre of an old photograph. We were both nervous. The boat had sat on its mooring since the previous autumn, and it was asking a lot to kick it back into life at a moment’s notice, the kind of life it had never known before; everything on it from boiler to fridge, bow-thruster to shower, about to be used not once or twice a month, but every day.
Sally, not quite knowing what a bow-thruster was, nor caring very much, was suffering from straightforward terror. Her job in the locks was to make the boat fast to one of the bollards set into the lock’s side by looping a rope around it then hanging on. As the water in the lock rose, she had to unhitch the rope and put it around a higher bollard, and so on until we were at the top. It sounded easy enough, or might have, if she’d understood a word of it. I didn’t really understand it either. You had to be there, I thought.
Huge barges passed us on both sides. I remembered a film I’d seen as a child called Monolith Monsters, featuring shiny black things which rose out of the ground and disposed of anything in their way by falling on it. I examined the waterborne behemoths fearfully.
We were content to take our time. In fact, we’d have been happy to go backwards, all the way to the Jachthaven de Maas, where there were no locks and still water.
Locks loomed in our minds.
We approached our first, about ten kilometres up the River Maas, with all the verve and joy the occupants of a tumbrel might have felt as they neared the blade.
How could a mere lock look so big and threatening?
Could it be because it was big and threatening?
What had happened to locks since we’d used the quaint little ones in an English canal thirty-odd years before?
Were the Dutch boasting or were they just mad?
This first lock, the Sluis Lith, looked rather like a cattle abattoir I’d once seen: a long concrete race leading to a huge gate behind which, we knew, the business was done. And bugger, the lights were green, summoning us in. Two ship-sized barges were inside already, along with a small cruising barge, and the lock-keeper was keeping the doors open for us. Escape was impossible.
I remembered Mr Benny’s advice. ‘Locks are not like life,’ he’d told us. ‘In locks you must never be first. You must always come second, or third.’ All was going to Mr Benny’s plan, so far. We swept into the pen, or chamber, and began mucking around with the ropes. This one? That bollard, the slimy thing on the wall there? OK? Wait, the rope was on the wrong side of the boat’s rail. Fine — no, hang on, we were no longer attached. Oh damn, the ropes looked like a cat’s cradle. Or mine did.
Sally organised her ropes and kept her fear to herself. She did her job perfectly; pointed out the bollard she wanted to tie onto so that I could stop the boat in the right place; dropped the loop over it; changed to the next bollard as the water level rose and carried the boat up. From the very first she handled her lines much better than I did. My ropes were always a mess, hers always ran smoothly.
Behind us, a man and woman lounged against the cabin of their boat, their ropes held loosely, extravagantly idly I thought, the couple looking as if they might just have a coffee during this pleasant interlude.
I ran hither and yon, my ropes went everywhere, and while I was still cursing them for being wayward, we were at the top. It had worked. Not quite according to plan, not within a long dog whistle of it actually, but here we were ready to leave the lock and head back onto the river.
We were delighted. We’d survived our first lock and we were still afloat and uninjured. Immensely relieved too. The stretch of the River Maas we’d left lay four metres below us.
‘Sorry,’ we shouted to the other boat. ‘Our first lock.’
‘Then you are making a good job,’ she called back. ‘Do not worry. Follow us now. You must let the professional boats go out first.’
Soon we could see why they waited. The barges set up tsunamis in the lock. The River Queen bucked against its lines.
Our new friends were on their way to France, too. She’d given up her job and he was on a sickness benefit. She told us this without self-consciousness. He was sick, they had to live, that was the contract. They’d built their boat themselves. They were going to cruise while there was time, and they wanted to help.
I loved the Dutch. We followed the woman. Stalked her, possibly. At the next lock, she signalled us to tie up and wait.
An awful lot of barges seemed to be waiting too, and they looked big even from this distance. Inside the lock they’d be monstrous. By now it was hot. We told her so. ‘You are very lucky,’ she said. Her husband appeared from the wheelhouse. ‘They want us to follow in after the Matilda,’ she called, pointing
to a huge barge piloted by a young woman.
The Matilda? This gigantic chunk of iron was no jumbuck, and that oblong of water now being revealed to us by the opening gates certainly was no mere billabong. And how did they know to follow it? How would we work it out without them to tell us?
Still, we waltzed in after the Matilda.
Yup, she was big. Worse, she ran her engines, and propeller, and the wash and the inrushing water combined in an effect not unlike the rapids on the Buller River. But we did as we were told, and found ourselves squeezed under the barge’s stern.
We clutched ropes as if our lives depended on it, and we were convinced they did. Then things went wrong. Sally got her rope around the bollard, but mine was hopelessly tangled. (‘Bound to happen,’ she said later. ‘It’s the messy way you do things.’)
While I was sorting it out — all right, scratching away at the mess like a kitten with a ball of string — the lock doors swung shut behind us and we started to lift. We scrabbled, grabbed, cursed. Our friends politely looked away. Somehow we reached the top, the gates opened, the Matilda accelerated out, and the Queen wouldn’t start.
Fuck.
Lots of beating the air and calling to the Almighty went on. Then I discovered the trouble: the boat was in gear. The engine wouldn’t start in gear. I moved it into neutral. We started up and crept out shamefacedly. Not one of the barge skippers waiting to come in from the other side so much as wagged a finger.
We’d had enough for one day. We waved goodbye to our mates, who sailed serenely onwards. Instead, we tottered into a marina in a little village whose name we were quite sure was an omen: Grave. Yet friendly locals took our lines, told us we were welcome, gave us a map of their town which they insisted was very old and even more beautiful.
The harbourmaster appeared. He seemed nice. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked. ‘New Zealand? Not very many New Zealand boats come here. I have been here thirty years.’
We were chatting to the harbourmaster, who was fascinated that a couple of people from the other side of the world had found their way to his tiny haven, when came the rustle of excitement that preceded a new arrival. Another boat was approaching.
Could it be? Yep, it was. The New Zealand flag.
A cruiser. With a Crusaders’ flag at the front, and a New Zealand one at the back, and a name on the boat itself: Crusader, of course. They berthed, looked around them, spotted us, and for the first time in ages we heard that New Zealand greeting: ‘How are you?’ ‘Sweet,’ I said.
Rudolph and Louise from Templeton, Christchurch, not far from our own home in Sumner, en route to France. I could see the harbourmaster’s astonishment. Who are these people? Why have they come here, all at once?
Louise came belting along the jetty. ‘We can’t find out,’ she said. ‘How are the Crusaders doing?’ ‘Back at the top,’ I said, for I’d read my emails from home just the previous night.
Then we walked around the old town in the creamy evening, admiring houses going back to the thirteenth century and fortified walls even older, listening to the quiet chat of people in the cafés, crashing an opening in an art gallery (a glass or two of indifferent white wine, a polite smile, for these things are universal) revelling in this little village somewhere in Holland, and all was right with the world.
Some people like rivers because, after canals, they’re like seas. The Maas becomes the Meuse when it cuts through Belgium and runs up into France, where it springs from somewhere in the hills near Pouilly on the Langres Plateau. In the meantime it was the Maas, wide and steady as befitted a proper Dutch river making its way to the North Sea near one of the world’s biggest ports at Rotterdam. It flowed through meadows, and fields, and paddocks, and grassland, and whatever names the Dutch had for large areas of pasture, and cattle gazed at us in that goofy way cows do as we passed, and if ever they made a waterway large enough to carry boats across the Canterbury Plains, or the Hauraki Plains, it would be much like this, pleasant, flat, featureless, inhabited by contented animals.
So we left Grave and arrived at Wanssum some four and a half hours later in semi-comatose condition, jerked back to consciousness each time a barge appeared, closed with startling speed, and thundered by with its decks awash and the helmsman, or woman, sitting back in their chairs using their hands only to give us an idle wave.
The only lock assumed remarkable significance. You could not be bored around locks. We found later that as soon as you became complacent they bit you. In the meantime, we were much too scared to be bored.
This was a double lock. One of the two was already full when we reached it. Four huge barges were more than we wanted to mix with. We stooged around and soon the green light appeared on the other lock, and only one barge was waiting to go inside, so we nipped in after it and the day immediately seemed better. The countryside became more couth. Expensive-looking, rather grand houses began appearing along the riverbanks.
‘Wanssum,’ Mr Benny had told us, ‘is a nice little place. You should stop there.’
He was partly right. Wanssum was little.
We reached the port by way of a canal leading off the river, lined with unpromising heavy industry sending up clouds of dust and making lots and lots of very knobbly noise. Perhaps we should have been warned. Instead of nice, Mr Benny might have described Wanssum as glum, or dour, or surly, any of which would have been closer to the mark.
The only mooring space available was very tight, involving some intricate manoeuvring which was watched by a posse of old men sitting in the shade of a tree in front of the marina’s bar. They didn’t look as if they liked what they saw.
By convention onlookers helped with mooring lines as you came into a berth, especially one as tricky as this. No one moved. Instead a man left his yacht on another pontoon, walked around and took our lines. Later he came over again, and asked politely if he could have a chat. His name was Martin and he was anxious for company, he said, when he was properly settled in the saloon with a glass of wine in his hand. He was forty, lonely, vulnerable. ‘I do not like this place,’ he said. ‘It is dismal.’
Martin was travelling in a tiny plywood yacht his father had built forty years before. He was sailing it to the south of France. He was alone, and we thought that was only partly due to the size of his yacht, for Martin had an air of desperation that would not have been attractive to companions invited to share a space hardly larger than a shower cubicle, although of course his craft did not possess such a luxury.
His father was dead and his mother was in a wheelchair. Oh dear, we said.
‘It is her own fault,’ Martin said. ‘She is too fat. You have seen how many people are on sticks or in wheelchairs here?’
We had. But hadn’t we read that the Dutch were now the tallest people in the world? Well yes, Martin said. ‘But all of Holland is sick. Holland is going to the dogs, unless you’re an immigrant, or a woman, or disabled.’
By now we were getting some hints on why Martin was lonely, desperate etc.
How, we asked, would he live when he returned to Holland?
‘I will get sick, or shoot someone. Either way they will look after me.’
And as the sun rose next morning we left beautiful Wanssum, just as soon as possible.
We had some fifty-three kilometres and two locks to travel through that day to reach Roermond, a large town on the base of the narrow tongue of Holland squeezed between Germany on one side and Belgium on the other. In one of them, the Belfield lock, our boat was the only occupant. We always felt guilty when this happened: first because all that complicated machinery, the hydraulics, the electronics, the great gates, were being operated by skilled lock-keepers shifting millions of litres of water only to lift one small boat a few metres in the air. And second, because we were so happy to be that one small boat.
Roermond was wide, spacious. A lake spread on one side and a fine port on the other. It also had designer outlet stores, which overshadowed its fifteenth-century cathedral in the town’
s list of attractions. I needed a hat. The temperature had risen into the thirties during the day, climbing into the forties inside the saloon. It was very hot. ‘You are very lucky,’ said the harbourmaster.
Also sunburned. Sally only had to be out in the sun for an hour or so to become deeply tanned. I only had to be in it for twenty minutes to become deeply pink. I slathered myself in sunblock until I peered fruitily from a white mask like strawberries and cream.
When you presented the kind of horizontal surface to the UVA which my dome did, you had to change the oil every half hour or so. Sally was always amazed that a surface of such high reflective quality could absorb any kind of rays at all.
The Dutch, fair as they were, did not like wearing hats, except for those butch little peaked caps affected by some sailors. Wide-brimmed sunhats of the kind common in Australia and New Zealand did not seem to exist here. Perhaps they weren’t needed. Maybe we really were lucky.
Finally I bought the best hat I could find, a fey blue confection from the Hugo Boss outlet store. It cost 19 Euros, or some $38, and of course I immediately found a much better one in the Two Euro Shop.
New hat or not, I had no chance in the sartorial stakes within the marina. A strutting Dutchman inhabited the huge motor yacht beside us. He wore nothing but shorts so tight that any budgie smuggled therein wouldn’t stand a chance. His wife, a tense-looking blonde, favoured bikinis of the kind that had fellow-boaties craning their necks, or at least those folds of flesh where their necks once had been. Now they expanded and contracted like bellows.
We were due to leave Roermond early next morning. The engine started with its usual reassuring purr. We idled past the rows of expensive craft and their serried ranks of German flags, for here we were close to the German border.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 7