After Sally left, Eve took Noah out and walked along the damp railings in the local park. Another dog barked in the distance and Noah lifted his head from a smell and looked in that direction, then up at Eve.
“Not worth your valuable time,” she murmured. “Not a dog worth bothering with.”
He wagged his tail as if this agreed precisely with his judgment, and went back to the smell.
That night, Eve slept on a futon in the room she used as an office. She slept deeply, but in the morning she remembered half-dreams of a lean, upright figure in a long, plain nightdress moving past her open door from bedroom to kitchen and back. In the daylight, Anastasia’s eyes were red and her steel wool hair more tangled and scratchy than usual.
“Are you going to be all right?” asked Eve.
“No. I told you. The chances are I’m going to die, no matter what.”
“I meant, living here.”
“You know the answer to that, too. If you’re trying to find out whether I’m regretting the Easy deal, then yes, I am. But however much I want to run out of here back to the Number One and carry on as if I’d never bothered asking the bloody doctor about the symptoms, I’ve come to the conclusion that that would be giving up—and giving up is not what I do. I could say I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward, but of course the chances are I wouldn’t have to. But I wouldn’t even fancy dying with myself, if I’d let myself down.”
“That’s a relief.”
“You want to do this?”
“I do.”
Anastasia smiled.
Finally, Eve and Sally moved onto the Number One. Eve, with Anastasia’s example so close by her elbow, took changes of underwear, trousers, T-shirts and jumpers. She left behind all her jewelry, her makeup, her high-heeled shoes and anything which needed to be hung up on a hanger. Neatly put away, all these things were a way of life she had stepped out of but could so easily, with the opening of a wardrobe door, step back into. If she chose.
Eve expected Sally to come festooned with suitcases and overnight bags packed with all the clothes she owned, but she was wrong. Sally arrived on foot, with a rucksack and a carrier bag.
“I just walked away,” she said, climbing onto the boat. Eve knew what she meant.
* * *
So here they were, en route, with a bend ahead and the sun shining, the rumble of the engine beneath their feet and the breeze created by their passage ruffling the surface of the coffee in their mugs.
2
To Ricksmanworth
ROUND THE BEND WAS a boat, moving toward them, the impossible length of it filling the canal, the man driving it a fingerpost on the distant rear. Everything that Anastasia had said about how to manage the Number One rose up in Eve’s mind and made no sort of coherent pattern. Go to the left or the right, slow down or speed up, reverse or idle. Even which way to push the tiller became, in that moment, a decision she could not make. The only fact related to the driving of a boat she could be sure of was that it pivots around the midpoint, so moving the front one way will swing the stern the other. At that moment, this felt like a needless and distracting piece of information, like knowing the force effect of two objects colliding at a given terminal velocity, but not knowing where the brakes are.
The figure on the approaching boat bent toward his control panel and sounded his horn. As if, Eve thought, I’m too busy admiring the countryside to notice he’s there. She pushed the tiller to pull the front of the Number One to the right of the other craft. It started to pivot, as the laws of physics and Anastasia had decreed it would. The front moved out of the way of what she could see was a beautifully painted and polished boat with a man in a form of fisherman’s smock standing on the rear watching her, from beneath the brim of a sou’wester-shaped hat, with unwavering calm. The name picked out in gold on the front of the boat was Algernon.
As the bow of the Number One moved, just in time (a phrase Eve used to use with smug confidence in her industrial days when it was applied to the trivial matter of logistics rather than the life-and-death matter of driving a boat), so the rear swung out as if desperate to deliver the blow to Algernon’s paintwork that the front had avoided. Algernon’s owner, or possibly Algernon in person, shifted his tiller slightly and Eve, correcting one error with another, opened the throttle to drive the Number One through the gap he had created. A collision was avoided and Algernon (he looked like one) chugged past, a slight smile visible between the upstanding collar of his smock and the drooping brim of his hat.
“First day?” he asked, as he went by. “I’d reverse now, if I was you.”
The advice came too late. The front of the Number One slid into a patch of overhanging willows and changing to reverse made no difference, as the propeller thrashed about in insufficient depth of water to move in any direction. She put the lever in neutral and the boat settled more easily in what water there was, shifting position just enough to allow the willows to sweep aside one of the folding chairs from the front well that they had put on the roof in anticipation of a quiet, sunny lunch in an hour or so. It dangled above the surface of the murky water, full of mud and debris from the Number One’s maneuvers, then dropped and sank with barely a bubble to mark its passing.
Noah came rushing up the steps to join Eve and bark at the departing rear end of Algernon. The man at the tiller turned his head and raised his hat. Sally came out at the front of the boat, batting aside the willow branches, and said: “Supercilious bastard,” which Eve assumed meant Algernon rather than herself. But none of the moral support offered by her crewmates made any difference. She stood, engine idling, and thought: this is Tuesday. I’m meant to be in a Program Planning Meeting, checking the milestones on new product launches. Had she been there, where she ought to be, Eve would have known what she was doing. But instead, here she was, demonstrating to the world—that is Algernon, Noah and Sally, but most of all herself—that she was completely out of control.
Sally was working her way down the side of the boat, sweeping leaves and twigs back into the water as she went. Eve wanted (what had become of her?) to cry, but diverted herself into anger, preparing herself to despise Sally for whatever platitude she was going to utter when she reached the stern: whatever soothing nonsense she was putting together as she minced along the narrow ledge, it would be enough to justify the rage Eve felt mounting within her.
Sally dusted her hands on her jeans and said, “Do you think the frame of that chair is magnetic?”
“What?”
“The frame. We have a magnet on a string, remember, for fishing dropped keys and paddles out of the canal. I wondered if it would work on a folding chair.”
“I made a complete fucking balls-up of that,” Eve said.
“I’d have hit him,” said Sally.
“I bet you wouldn’t. I bet you would have steered round him and exchanged pleasantries about the weather.”
“No, I meant I would have wanted to punch him on the nose, if I’d been you. But also, I probably would have hit the boat. Let’s go fishing.”
It took so long to retrieve the chair that Eve calculated it would have been cheaper, had they been paying themselves the minimum wage for doing it, to go and buy a new one. They began by rocking the Number One from side to side to free it from the mud, then started the engine and inched it cautiously back and forth over the target area. They used the magnet on a string, and the boat hook to probe the depths, with Eve trying to make sure her jeans weren’t exposing any underwear as she hung over the side, and Sally trying to stop Noah licking her face as she hugged a tree trunk to keep the boat steady. Passing boaters behaved appallingly, slowing down and offering to help or wishing them luck. But the satisfaction of seeing the chair finally break the surface at the end of a boat hook and land, dripping and slimy, on the roof, was worth the sacrifice of all the time it took and all the humiliation endured. During the battle to recover it, the Number One had begun to feel like their true domain, the three of them its ruling t
ribe. At least, Eve felt so. She knew so little of Sally.
* * *
THEY WENT TO THE PUB, leaving Noah behind. Sally had accepted he was harmless, but she still found him hard to overlook. Whenever he brushed against her leg or stood on her foot she was reminded that she didn’t like dogs. Every time Noah caught her eye, she could tell he was noticing that she didn’t like dogs. So they left him behind. There was a football match on the TV in the pub but there was little passion for the game, or for this particular match, among the audience. They sat in a loose arc round the screen and talked among themselves, roused only occasionally to expressions of disgust or admiration. Eve went up to the bar. Sally chose a window seat with a view of the backs of the watchers’ balding heads and a distant, oblique angle on the footballers. She tried to recall what, in the life before, she would have been watching at this moment on the set at 42 Beech Grove. It was hard enough to remember what day of the week it was.
“I take it you don’t want to watch the game,” said Eve, coming back with their drinks.
“I don’t. I don’t mind if you do, though.”
Eve shrugged. “I tried to become interested in football. There was a time when I wanted to be one of the boys, before I realized they were not a club worth aspiring to join. I made a real effort to work out what it was all about, and to care about one team above all others, but I couldn’t do it. I went along to a few games, in company with an expert, and even that didn’t do it for me. So little happens. I’d rather watch snooker. At least in that game, every tap on every ball counts. In football, they can tap the bloody thing back and forth for a full eighty minutes and not a single touch makes a jot of difference at the end.”
“I’ve never watched it,” said Sally. “Live or on TV. I’ve always assumed I wouldn’t like it—which isn’t very impressive, I know.”
“Your husband isn’t a fan?”
“No.”
On the screen, a goal was scored, or almost scored, or was scored and disallowed. A cluster of blue shirts and yellow shirts dispersed into their constituent parts and a yellow shirt filled the screen, in close-up, supporting a face which could have stood for the model of Christ in agony in a Renaissance painting. The audience half rose from the arc of seats and exclaimed and subsided again, resuming whatever conversation had been interrupted.
“So it wasn’t because he was a football bore?” said Eve.
“What wasn’t?”
“The walkout. The big break. The ‘had-it-up-to-here’ moment.”
“No. No it wasn’t, actually. I never intended to tell anyone this, because it is both strange and trivial, but it doesn’t seem to matter now, so here goes. It was Crocodile Dundee Two. Or it might have been Three. Have there been three?”
“No idea. For the sake of mankind, I’d hope not.”
“Exactly. Let’s call it Two. We’re watching Crocodile Dundee Two on some TV station for zombies and there’s a bit at the end where the hero summons help from his Aboriginal friends to save his wife or the planet or his favorite raccoon hat.”
“Wrong continent.”
“What?”
“Raccoons. North American.”
“Oh. Well, can’t have been that, then.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Crocodile Dundee tells whoever is with him in the middle of the outback, where there is nothing but bare rock and stunted trees and snakes, that he is going to make a phone call. He takes up something like a stick on a string and he whirls it round his head, faster and faster, and it sets up a cadence of sound, rising and falling, making a noise but no sense. Unless you were an Aborigine in the bush, presumably. And as I listened to it, I thought: this is like my husband’s voice. Going on and on, rising and falling and creating a noise which is somehow impossible for me to listen to or understand. And I thought: enough.”
On the screen the match ended and the watchers drifted away. It was quiet in the pub and Sally had the relaxed feeling, which often came to her in public places, of being alive and safe but without responsibility for herself or anyone else. She had a fondness for supermarkets, where there were always lights and people, where it seemed impossible that death, decay and emotional trauma should exist.
“Did you explain to … What is his name, by the way?”
“Duncan. No, of course not. I’d still be there now, trying to make him understand. I just told him I no longer wanted to be married. To him or anyone else.”
“How did he take it?”
Sally thought back to the day before she met Eve, the Number One, Noah and Anastasia, sitting at the table with Duncan and the celebrity photo obscured by a crumb.
“Quietly,” she said.
As they walked back along the towpath in the dark—Anastasia would never have forgotten a torch—Eve asked whether there was anything else, apart from the tendency to drone on, that would justify Sally in taking the step she had.
“Well,” said Sally, “he used clichés and—what would you call them?—sayings, aphorisms. Then he’d substitute some rubbish word for the ending. Like ‘Too many cooks spoil the Stabat Mater’ or ‘More haste less polymyalgia.’” Eve laughed. “After a bit,” said Sally, stumbling on a piece of rough ground and grabbing Eve’s sleeve to stop herself falling, “it stops being funny.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” said Eve. “Many a true word spoken in spaghetti.”
“As they say,” said Sally.
“What?”
“That’s what he would add. ‘As they say.’”
“As, indeed, they say. Now, where is the boat?”
As if she had pushed the button on a remote control, Noah set up an unearthly howl, guiding them down the line of moored boats to the Number One.
* * *
EVE WOKE UP WHEN A shaft of sunlight, striking through the overhead skylight, caught her in the eye. She pulled the curtains open. She habitually wore outsize T-shirts which habitually rode up over her thighs as she slept. She bought them, cheap, wherever she could find them, and most of them were decorated with slogans celebrating long-gone events or achievements that had been celebrated by relatively few people. The one she was wearing this morning said “Northampton East Ladies’ Darts Tour 1998” in burgundy letters on a pink background. A badly drawn hand holding a dart of mammoth proportions and doubtful perspective gestured over her left shoulder. She remembered none of this as she reached for the curtains and drew them back.
She had a view of still, slightly scummy but nevertheless sparkling water and a fringe of trees on the far bank. Noah, who was asleep on the floor beside her, reared up and opened his mouth as if in preparation for one of his trademark howls. Instead, he yawned, revealing discolored but functional teeth and a pink tongue. He stretched, a version of dog yoga. Eve wondered whether she might not take up yoga again, in the orderly constraints of the boat. She looked at the thigh exposed by the darts team T-shirt and thought: perhaps jogging.
Noah caught her eye and, so it seemed, jerked his head in the direction of the back of the boat. She rolled out of bed and went through the kitchen, up the steps, slid the hatch cover back and stepped out onto the rear deck, taking hold of the roof to keep herself steady.
To the right and to the left, along the towpath either side of the moored boat, were fishing rods, extended over the canal at random angles between 90 degrees to horizontal. Each rod was attached to a fisherman. Every fisherman’s head turned in her direction. Eve let go of the roof of the boat and tugged at the hem of her T-shirt.
“Good morning,” she said, to the nearest rod.
“Going soon, are you?” he said.
“I’m not dressed yet.”
“That’s as maybe, but your boat’s blocking Aaron’s station. Isn’t it, Aaron?”
“Huh,” said a youth standing beside him. The crotch of Aaron’s trousers was nearer to his knees than his waist, and his knees were not a great distance from the ground.
“And Jason’s!” shouted someone else, fro
m farther down the forest of rods.
“And Carl’s!” said a voice from the other direction, the speaker obscured by the back end of the Number One.
“Your fucking dog’s eating my bait!” yelled Aaron.
The Number One rocked slightly and Eve rocked unsteadily with it. From the front of the boat, fully awake, fully dressed, setting her feet faultlessly between the fishermen’s bags, baskets, boxes and stools, stepped Sally.
“Don’t worry,” she said, picking Noah up and holding him uncertainly at arm’s length. “We’re going almost at once.” Noah hung limply from her arms and submitted to being handed over to Eve, who dropped him into the front well.
“You’ll be cleaning that up, I hope,” said the fisherman who had spoken first, indicating where Noah had deposited the contents of his bowel on the worn section of the path where it stood the best chance of attaching itself to a passing foot, like an opportunistic seed looking to find fresh ground to take root.
“Of course,” said Eve. Collecting dog feces had not featured in their instructions from Anastasia and it fell outside her experience.
“Here,” said a fisherman, and held out a flesh-colored bag.
Sally took it and, with a motion too quick for Eve to follow, collected the little brown pile, tied up the top of the bag and handed it to Eve—who almost dropped it, not anticipating the feel of the plastic and the soft mass of the contents. She looked up to see Sally smiling at her, a secret, joyous, complicit smile.
* * *
EVE: Anastasia? Are you there?
ANASTASIA: I picked the thing up, didn’t I?
EVE: It’s just … you didn’t say “hello” or anything.
ANASTASIA: It’s a machine. I couldn’t know who would be there.
EVE: Well, it’s me. How are you? I mean, any news?
The Narrowboat Summer Page 4
