The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  After a few moments, she appeared in the doorway to his room as he rummaged for a spare work shirt.

  She said, "People having a conversation usually stay in the same building."

  He turned to her.

  "You really don't know what you're saying, do you?"

  "Tell me."

  "Forget your matchmaking. Don't even think about pushing me together with anyone because it isn't going to happen. It isn't going to happen because they look at me and they look at you and they put two and two together and what they come up with tells them, back off. You think you get to hear all the gossip down there but, believe me, there's talk going on that you obviously don't even dream about. I'm the kindest person you ever met? Yeah, well, so much for the good that it's done me. I'll tell you what, I'll have them put it on my gravestone. Here lies Mister Nice Guy, but who gives a shit anyway. I mean, look at you. You're out every night like fucking Dracula, or something. And me, I might as well have rabies. If that's where kindness gets you, I'm going to kick pigeons. Even Hitler had a fucking girlfriend, and who's got a good word to say about him?"

  He was sorry immediately, of course, but too much of the truth had come out for him to want to take any of it back; so he sat heavily on the bed and he looked away from her and he rubbed at his still-tired eyes, anything to avoid meeting her gaze and then having to concede his embarrassment. Now it was as if his anger had blown away into the air, like so much steam.

  She sat beside him, and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  "Oh, Peter," she said.

  She didn't seem to be offended. It was a voice of sadness, almost of pity. He looked at her then and her face seemed to be saying, I understand; and then he tried to speak, but the sense of it somehow skipped away from him like a stone across water.

  "Listen to me," she said. "I'm sorry it came to this, and I want to set it right. I'm going to leave you. I'm going to leave you soon, but first I want you to understand how much you've done for me."

  "I just blew up," Pete said, giving in to it as he'd known that he would. "I'm sorry. This isn't necessary."

  "Yes it is, and that's why I'm moving out. I don't mean this minute, probably not even today. But as soon as I can, I will. I won't even tell you, I'll just go. You'll see me around, but after a while I'll just be someone you once knew. I wish I could get out of your life forever, but I don't think that's possible any more. You see, I have to stay in the valley — I've started to make it my home, and every time you leave a home you die, just a little. And there's only so much life in any of us… use it all up and we're gone, even though we're still walking around. That could have happened to me already, if it wasn't for you — you brought me here and you set me up and suddenly I was in a place where I felt I could belong again."

  She stood up and, walking out of the room, left him there.

  Well. This was exactly what he wanted. Wasn't it?

  Wasn't it?

  He could hear her moving around elsewhere in the house. After a minute, he got up and followed the sounds to her room.

  Her door was open.

  "I appreciate what you're saying," he said, as she looked up from folding some of her clothes for the drawer. "But something about all this bothers me."

  "What do you mean?" she said, leaving the drawer and walking across the room toward him. She'd made almost no changes in here; with its bare walls and almost complete lack of ornamentation, the room looked almost as it had on the day she'd moved in.

  Pete said, "You once told me you were losing a battle. Inside."

  She didn't seem to understand.

  "I feel fine," she said, and closed the door on him.

  By the time that he'd reached the yard, Frank Lowry was already in and working.

  There was a Vauxhall on the hoist and a Land Rover half-inside the workshop with its bonnet already open. Five more cars already stood on the strip outside, and others would undoubtedly join them as the day went on. The phone was ringing. Hanging on its regular nail, the clipboard on which the boatyard worksheets were kept was well overloaded and straining at its spring. Pete flicked at the papers as he walked by, and the clipboard rocked like a pendulum. No matter how hard he worked to clear it, the backlog was getting bigger and bigger. The phone was still ringing.

  Ted Hammond came around from behind the hoist, and picked it up.

  He glanced at Pete as he took the call, something about a brokerage job, and he winked. The differences in him were slight, but immediately noticeable. His shirt was clean, he'd shaved, his hair had been combed. While he wasn't exactly back to normal, he had the bright, clear-eyed look of a lifelong drunk who'd just come to realise that there was something worthwhile in staying sober.

  As Ted was hanging up, Pete turned to Frank Lowry. He'd just emerged from the floor in the cab of the Land Rover with a length of broken accelerator cable in his hand.

  Pete indicated Ted and said, "Who's this?" And Frank Lowry shrugged.

  "His face is familiar," he said. "Didn't he used to work here, once?"

  "All right," Ted said with a gesture of pretended weariness, "I've got the message. I'm sorry, lads. What more can I say?"

  "Forget it, Ted," Pete told him.

  "No," he said. "You two have been working flat out to keep my business going, and I've just been dicking off around the house. I don't deserve it, but I'm grateful."

  "He's getting sentimental," Frank Lowry muttered, glancing around like a cat looking for a way to avoid an impending bath. "I'm off." And he wandered away into the depths of the workshop; under the levity, there had been a trace of real embarrassment. Lowry, a man who didn't show his own feelings, obviously didn't like to be around when others were showing theirs.

  But Ted didn't seem to be offended. He'd known Lowry for too long and, besides, there seemed to have been a rebirth of the spirit in him that wasn't going to be choked off so easily.

  Pete said, "You're looking better, Ted."

  But Ted sighed. "I wish I felt it. Life's finally shaping up in the best way you can hope for, and then something else just comes along and wipes the slate clean. Everything, bang. I wish it had been me, instead of Wayne. I could live with being dead, if Wayne was okay."

  This made perfect sense to Pete, and the two of them pondered it for a while before Pete said, "What got you going again?"

  "I'm a long way from that," Ted said. "What you're looking at now is only skin deep. But I never before spent one working day on the skive while others got on with the job, and I'm ashamed it ever came to that. I don't know how to thank you."

  "Big pay rises," Pete suggested as the phone started to ring again.

  "Get out of it," Ted said, "can't you see how far behind we are?" and went off to answer it.

  Angelica and Adele were in the restaurant kitchen when Alina arrived, later that morning. Adele was cutting salad, and Angelica was rewriting the evening menu.

  Angelica looked up from the corner of the table that she was using, and said, "Good morning, Alina. It's Wednesday."

  "I know," Alina said, hanging her shoulder bag over the back of one of the chairs.

  "And you know who always phones at around eleven on a Wednesday," Adele said, before the kitchen was filled with the five second roar of the blender as it swallowed a pound of carrots and extruded them as a mass of fine strands. Alina glanced at the clock. It was just after eleven thirty.

  When the blender cut out, she said, "I like my admirers to be predictable. It saves me from having to worry about how to keep them interested."

  Angelica, in the spirit of the running joke that they'd all been sharing for several weeks now, said, "We told him you'd taken a boat onto the lake and couldn't be reached for the rest of the day. I think perhaps he's starting to get the message. What excuse would you like us to give him next time?"

  But the young Russian woman seemed to have other things on her mind.

  "He's probably had enough excuses by now," she said. "Next time, I think I'd better speak to him.
"

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ross Aldridge stood in the empty caravan, feeling like an intruder in a place owned by strangers. In fact it was owned by strangers, a family who lived more than two hundred miles away; they used the caravan for about six weeks of the year, on and off, and they rented it out for some of the times in between. The van was an old one, and looked it compared to some of the sleeker units on the other lakeside pitches. The site owner had told him straight, he wouldn't be unhappy to see it go; it lowered the tone of the place, he reckoned, and he knew that he could easily re let the pitch a hundred times over for something bigger, something newer… he handled sales, as well, so he'd make a two way profit on the deal.

  Aldridge had disliked the man on sight. And the way that he talked about lowering tone and maximising profits hadn't made Aldridge like him any better, not when a five-year-old who'd probably last slept in one of these very bunks now slept dreamlessly in a mortuary cabinet.

  One of three kids, altogether. Their father a one-time shipyard welder, out of employment for nearly two years now, their mother working half days as a checkout assistant in a retail cash and carry. This had been the family's first holiday in ages; the boy's first holiday ever. Aldridge sighed, and looked around. He knew that he was taking this harder than he ought to, but he couldn't help it. The whole thing was just too personal for him.

  The curtains had been drawn against the world outside. They didn't fit too well. In the half shade he could see that the caravan was spotless, as if it had been scrubbed compulsively by whoever had occupied it last. He checked it over. There was a double bedroom at one end, a kitchen in the middle, and a lounge at the other whose uncomfortable bench sofas made up into equally uncomfortable beds. There was a chemical toilet in an adjoining shed, and for showers there would be the communal block at the other end of the site. He knew the kind of thing. Timer operated, and as cold and draughty as hell; a hook for your towel, and nowhere dry to put your clothes. It had been years since he'd done anything similar, but he'd been there. There couldn't have been many people who'd need to use the block, not these days; not when most had big vans with names like Mistral and Wayfarer with their own bathrooms and WCs built in. This van belonged to another, altogether less well appointed age. When he moved, the floor creaked and at one point he felt his head brush close to the ceiling.

  It was the personal touches that got to him the most. The ornaments, most of them broken and then glued together again. The home made curtains screening open shelves. Stuff that should have been in a junkshop, but instead it was here. Two weeks of this had been the best that the family had been able to afford.

  They hadn't even made it to the end of the first.

  It had been a night time accident. Out of a family of heavy sleepers the boy had always been an exception, but this had never caused them any serious problem before. He'd get up and wander around a little, play with his toys, and they'd find him the next morning lying wherever sleep had caught up with him. Because he was too small to reach the light switches, this had usually been on the floor in front the open refrigerator with its interior light burning and the milk slowly going sour. He'd be there with a jigsaw, his toy trucks, a storybook. But the refrigerator here was a tiny benchtop unit tucked well back alongside the sink, so Aldridge could only assume that the boy had been forced to look farther afield for some night-time entertainment.

  They were still arguing over who'd left the caravan's door unlocked. Both parents suspected each other and blamed themselves. The truth of it would probably never be established, not for certain, but when the one time welder had risen in the morning it had been to find the door wide open to the day and the boy missing. Also missing had been an inflatable crocodile that belonged to the caravan and which they'd stowed, fully inflated, in the space underneath rather than face the effort of pumping it up afresh for every lakeside play session. The crocodile, being bright green and buoyant enough to sit high in the water, had been spotted within the first half hour of the search. The child, floating low in his sodden pyjamas and looking more like a log in the undertow, had been found much later in the day.

  Aldridge moved to the door, the entire van trembling at his every step. There was nothing for him here. He took one last look back, and then opened the door to fresh air and daylight. Now he could tell the owners that he'd checked out their property and that everything was in order; he could finish his report and then file it and move on. As he stood on the wooden steps outside and locked up after him, he couldn't help noting that the door was a poor fit. The catch barely held it. One sharp tug, and maybe…

  He tugged.

  The lock held. But only just.

  But enough to keep in a five year old, he thought, and he turned and descended the steps. He walked down the dirt access track to the main paved avenue of the site, and when he reached the administration block he dropped the keys through the mail flap rather than talk to the site owner again. He could sense that the man was watching him as he crossed over to his car, but he didn't look back.

  The lake was calm. Many of the vans overlooked it and the site had its own beach, of a kind; several tons of sand that had been trucked in and dumped at the water's edge. This for the kids, a Country and Western club for the parents. It was modest and inexpensive and probably a five-year-old's idea of paradise. What had happened here was wrong, in a sense that had stirred Aldridge deeply; almost as if Death had slipped in and stolen the child and then led it on a dance, over the hills and far away like some shadowy, irresistible piper. He couldn't help thinking back to the stillborn form that they'd let him hold, all cleaned up and wrapped in a shawl, in a room next to the hospital's chapel for all of half an hour; half an hour of fatherhood, spent with a daughter who would never know of his love. Whatever jealous force took children in this way, whatever face it wore — disease, accident, ill intent — he knew that there was only one somewhat old fashioned word to describe it, and that word was evil. True evil. He'd looked into the faces of regular murderers and seen only the commonplace; but in the death of children, he saw ultimate darkness.

  He started the car. He had a thousand and one things to do, and not one of them seemed terrifically important to him right at this moment. Two days before he'd been giving his evidence in the Coroner's Court and his eyes had briefly met those of old Doctor McEnery up on the bench, and something had flickered between the two of them… nothing unprofessional that could have been seen by anyone else in the courtroom, but almost a recognition that they were occupying the same places and going through the same routines rather too often for comfort. The details changed, the form remained the same. The Hammond boy and his girlfriend. Walter Hardy, drowned in his own bathtub. The drunk who'd fallen overboard at a yacht party and whose disappearance hadn't even been noticed until the next day. The dinghy accident.

  The others.

  The verdicts of accidental death had come in, one after another, and nobody had known better than Aldridge how unavoidable these conclusions were. He'd checked out the scenes, he'd talked to the people. And yet…

  Death by drowning, or something like it, again and again. Inevitable when you considered how much of the territory was taken up by a lake that was virtually an inland sea, but disturbing in its frequency. Maybe there was such a thing as luck, and its bad luck counterpart; he'd noticed it with air disasters and rail disasters, how they seemed to hit the news in clusters, and he wondered if something similar might be an influence here. If it was, it made him uneasy. Such things were fine for the pages of downmarket photo magazines, tucked in between the horoscopes and the sob stories, but the thought of something so hard edged and yet unknown entering his life was something else.

  Coincidence, he told himself as he drove out through the site gates and rejoined the main road. Traffic wasn't too bad and, as ever, they all touched their brakes and slowed at the sight of his car.

  Coincidence.

  What else could it possibly be?

  TWENTY-NINE
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br />   Pavel checked the needle on the gauge. He was down to a quarter of a tank, and almost into the red-lined sector. The car had never let him down yet but, by God, it used up the juice.

  But then this was hardly surprising, given that he was now spending about eight to twelve hours of every day on the move. The times that he didn't spend in the car, he seemed to spend in public phone booths feeding the slots from endless bags of change. Now his cash was getting low again. Not crisis-low, but low enough to nudge him into action; he knew that rock bottom was the hardest place to get up from, and he didn't want to be there again. He'd only let it happen to him once since the very beginning, and he'd pulled himself out of that by shoplifting books which he'd then messed up a little and sold as secondhand. He hadn't liked it, but he'd done it.

  He shifted in the seat. A lot of the time he got sore, and his back got stiff.

  But he could ignore that.

  There was a gang of about half a dozen on the corner ahead. No good, but he slowed and took a closer look at them anyway. They all stared back; all of them black kids in their late teens, one or two of them with their hair in those long knitted caps that looked like overstuffed cushions. One of them broke away, and started to walk toward the car. It was a notorious part of town, and this was unlikely to be the local glee club. That didn't matter, but the numbers were too high; Pavel picked up speed and moved on.

  Of course, this had been a police car… and although it had no markings, there was probably something about the make and the year and the neutral colour and the lack of any personalisation that gave off a definite signal like a lowlife's version of a pheromone. But surely, he was thinking, the effect had to be a diminishing one. As the car was roughened up more and more, its driver became rougher still. Nobody now could take a close look at the two of them together and leap to the conclusion that here was a Mister Clean in his Clean Machine. Depending on where he cruised, they'd more likely offer him sex or drugs or perhaps even the services of an underage boy… at which point they'd get a big surprise, and Pavel would wipe out however much of the night's earnings they carried.