Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (14 page)

In the main square a young man dressed as a junkie was bellowing into a microphone. He seemed to be telling jokes. The French male normally converses at a full shout—give him a microphone and he goes nuts. The noise was reaching across Belgium. A dozen people were standing around looking the other way. There was a hot-dog stand and flags, but there were more flags on the
Phyllis May
than there were in Armentières. Now and again the young chap would sing a rap song, accompanied on keyboards by a man in a butcher’s apron and on bass guitar by a lady in a flowered dress and a forties hairstyle, who was quite good.

We walked past the war memorial. Marshal Pétain accepting a bunch of stone flowers from a little girl.

Rulers thrown up by chance, mindless of honour.

Back at the boat we heard artillery, and the crackle of machine guns. On the pontoon it was night and there was smoke and red and yellow fire over the town.

Then the maroons went up and the sky bloomed with chrysanthemums, and ran with silver rain.

Six

THE DARK TOWER

Courtrai to Waulsort

T
he dick and Jim looked at each other without enthusiasm. I used to have a dog, said the dick, and he died. I don’t blame him, I thought, but Oh hard luck, I said. We had tied up to our first pontoon in Belgium, at Wervik just over the border, and the dick and his wife banged on the roof and I went out on the deck and thought I know these guys and have forgotten who they are God how embarrassing.

Come in, I said—we’re just making some coffee—how have you been? The dick settled down and I realized I thought I knew him because he looked like Ronnie Kray, the famous murderer. His wife was slim and dark and looked like a girl who used to race in the Midland Veterans Cross-country League—the one called Barbara who had little black shorts. The dick was gathering speed.

We have been here six years, he said, and in the winter we go to Portugal. We have a Dutch barge, much bigger than yours. We know all about everything round here and you have just arrived and you will find boating in Belgium very difficult. Jim walked into the cabin and went to sleep.

Have you ever been conjoined? asked the dick. No, I said, I’ve been straight all my life. The dick did not laugh. The thousand-ton barges, he said—you can get conjoined. What happens is when they go through the water they leave a hundred-and-fifty-ton hole behind them and if you are an inch too close you get sucked down into the hole and you stick to the side of the barge and you cannot get off and you stay like that until the bargee notices you or until you are knocked off by a lock or a passing boat. It happened to me. I was conjoined and the bargee—he’s my friend now, old Gaston—saw me and left me there for ten kilometres and then just as we were going into a lock
whoosh
he reversed and blew me off. Goodness we laugh when we talk of it now. Very amusing, I said. Then there is the poison gas, said the dick.

It happens at Charleroi, he said, a week away, on the Sambre. Right in the middle of the industrial area there is a steelworks and the fumes are so bad you close all the windows or you die. We steer standing on the back in the open, I said. Ah, said the dick, so you do. There are very few mooring places round here, and they are full of Dutchmen. You have a long boat, though not as long as mine, and the Dutch will not move an inch to let you in. They become violent.

Can’t I moor on a wall? I asked. The dick laughed, and his wife laughed. Moor on a wall, with thousand-ton barges coming by? When you leave Courtrai your only hope is to go to Antoing which is ten hours away and when you get there it’s a small basin and the Dutch will not let you in.

I’ve got a washing machine and a dishwasher on my boat, said the dick’s wife.

NEXT STOP COURTRAI—
KORTRIJK
IN FLEMISH—designer shops for watches, designer shops for shoes, for underwear, for chocolates. Designer shops for corkscrews; designer shops for hamster cages. A bright square with a loony brick tower in the middle. Mercedes and BMWs, and designer cars you could slip in your pocket. The people were a foot taller than in Armentières. They wouldn’t speak French but some had English and they had their own quacking tongue.

We had a bad meal in the square. We can’t possibly do ten hours tomorrow with eight locks, said Monica, we’ll be exhausted—it’s not safe. We have never done ten hours in our lives—we do an hour a day if we are lucky. Remember our motto—
Start slow and then give up
. We’ve got no choice, I said. There are no marinas until Antoing. And if we do get there the Dutch will become violent and beat us up. I suppose we could go home.

When we got back to the
Phyllis May
, next door there was a fine old barge, a Hull keel, with a fine old British couple who asked us on board for a
digestif
. We’ve had a look at Belgium, they said, and we are going back to France.

IT WAS A LOVELY MORNING FOR EXHAUSTION and violence. The couple next door were holding a Welsh flag and waving. It was like leaving for the Falklands—I wonder if any of our lads will come back?

The river Lys had become the river Leie and soon we were on the Bossuit-Kortrijk Canal.

Like the British canals, the Belgian canals are the old work of giants, but these giants had machines. The canal was fifty yards wide and a fathom and a half deep—green verges, metalled towpaths, poplars in rows, all their green tongues talking. Grebes, ducks, cormorants, moorhens smaller than our own plump race. Herons, Canada geese, Greylag geese and little brown and white chaps I must look up one day. No coots. Plenty of water for everyone. Locks a hundred yards long; the
Phyllis May
sometimes alone, sometimes alongside a cruiser, sometimes crouched under a barge.

We had bought our boating licence in Flemish Belgium, but now we had crossed into French Belgium—Wallonia—where it was not recognized. So at every lock Monica had to put on her life jacket, climb up a slimy ladder in the lock wall, climb up the lock tower and have a form stamped. The Flemish and the Walloons might hate each other, but that is no excuse for taking the piss with the poor boaters.

I had never done a four-hour shift on the tiller before and I felt grand. Lunch on a lock mooring. Moor right at the end, said Monica, you never know what will come along. What came along was a container barge ninety-five metres long—it would have taken one of our nation’s noblest athletes, his blood frothing with performance-enhancing drugs, ten seconds to run past it. Its length was painted on the side, and a message pointing out that it carried the freight of sixty-eight heavy lorries and although it might not look much was a damn good thing in every way. It came by and it came by and I thought There is not enough room on the mooring, there is not enough room in Belgium, he will swing his back in and there goes the
Phyllis May
. But when he swung his back in, there was room.

A crewman threw a rope from the boat towards a bollard, a rope as thick as a lamprey, and missed, just like anyone else. He threw the rope to me on the bank and I caught it and put it over the bollard and the skipper of the barge levered the boat in against the rope, springing it in just like anyone else. He waved at me and smiled. I have done four hours on the tiller, I thought. I have been waved at by the skipper of a hundred-yard barge. Right, bring on the Dutchmen. I’ll knock the buggers into the cut.

Monica took over and I went to sleep and when I woke the poplars seemed a hundred feet high, marching for miles round sweeping bends. Some poplars were pillars and some were pompoms. They looked a richer green than they were, as things do when you are waking up.

We passed under Tournai’s thin stone arches and arrived at the little basin of Antoing. We had taken seven hours. On the quay five Dutchmen took our ropes and pulled their boats along to fit us in and asked if they could take pictures of the
Phyllis May
.

But in Tournai the canal had choked beneath us. No birds, no fishermen, no glassy cool translucent wave. Just stink, just dullness, just death.

NIMY IS A SMALL PLACE NEXT TO MONS AND the Nimy—Blaton—Péronne Canal runs between Nimy, Blaton and Péronne as it should, but the other way round, right to left as you read the map, if you follow me. Anyway what the hell it sort of goes across south-west Belgium. Péruwelz is a town to one side of the canal.

The
capitainerie
in the yacht basin looked like a chicken shed after the fox got in, and they had swept up a bit and put in a few tables and chairs and some leaflets in a rack and some Jupiler
en pression
. There was the
capitaine
, who was a jolly young chap, a couple of men of a certain age, a spherical woman in black leggings and a drunk. The little guys who live in the forks of the creeks. The weather was heavy, the canal smelt and there were flies.

Jim looked at me—At least make an effort, can’t you? There had been no scratchings since South Dock.
Monsieur
, I said to the
capitaine
, you have not a savoury snack for my dog? Some biscuits of cheese? Even some crisps perhaps? Sheep? asked the
capitaine
, for the dog? The French for crisps is sheep. He went away for twenty minutes and came back with a green and purple packet containing air and some white pads stained with rust. He may have driven into town. I offered the packet to Jim. He lay down and closed his eyes.

The woman took the drunk for a walk but he fell over and she sat with him on the grass. She lit a cigarette. Is it a greyhound? asked one of the older men. No, I said, it is a whippet, a racing dog, the dog of the English working man.

I went to England once, said the other—I walked along the pavement and then I came home. Go over again, I said, walk on some grass, build it up gradually. Then the next time, said his friend,
sortez le grand jeu
—buy some chewing gum.

My word Belgium is a hot country, I said. Ninety degrees—I don’t know how you get through the summer. No,
monsieur
, in Belgium it rains three days in five. This is a hundred-year heatwave—the dog days, the
canicule
. One of them bought me a beer. Where did you learn to speak French,
monsieur
? Hanging around in Lille with my penfriend and his mates, I said, when I was a boy. And my wife was a French teacher.

Can you explain to me about the Flemish? I asked. Why don’t you Walloons like them? Is it because they have the rich towns in the north and the money? We don’t mind them, they said, it’s the different language that’s all. But it’s crazy that such a small country is in two parts like this, I said. How did it happen? It was a long time ago, and it was your fault, they said—you were in charge after Waterloo, you made our nation.

I was in Armentières a couple of days ago, I said, and it was the national day there—not much celebration in Armentières. When is your national day? Today is our national day,
monsieur
, said the
capitaine
.

The drunk struggled back to the bar. As he passed he snarled at us. Jim does a bit of light growling, but I have not heard him snarl, and Jim is a dog. Is that gentleman often drunk, I asked, or is he celebrating? Alas,
monsieur
, they said, for him every day is a celebration. The spherical woman put her hand on the drunk’s shoulder and lit his cigarette. Jim snapped at the flies and I finished the bag of sheep.

THE CANALS OF BELGIUM WERE PLANTED WITH poplars and served by huge ports and wharves and boatlifts made of clockwork that would balance a
péniche
in each hand. Now the wharves are desolate and the springs of the boatlifts are broken. Soon enough the green poplars will fall, and only the loony towers of Belgium will be left. In little Antoing, in tattered Mons—medieval turrets, baroque belfries, a Fabergé egg in a spire; a princess looking out, combing her bright hair. And the new work of giants—silos and fractionation columns and twisted chimneys, smoking and defecating along the water. Towers with no princesses. We pushed on, urgent to escape, until Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

The boatlift at Strépy-Thieu is an intergalactic cockroach in the sky, a
War of the Worlds
spaceship on stilts. We passed between the concrete legs and tied up in a tank a hundred yards long in an avenue of cables a hundred yards high. Each hank of cables was gripped at wharf level by a robot soldier, his electric guts clicking behind a glass panel. We shared the tank with a cruiser and a thousand-ton barge—there was plenty of room.

A humanoid in blue across the water made a sign for the damfool paperwork. It took Monica a long time to walk round and a long time to walk back. A line of gongoozlers giggled as I took a picture of their heads against the sky.

We held our ropes and waited and nothing happened but after a while the fields and hills below had been pushed away. Give me a place to stand and I will move the world. It was a blank experience, like the Channel Tunnel, like having a tooth out under gas, like Shakin’ Stevens. Far away the gate opened and we sailed out two hundred feet higher, on to the top of a hill, the body of the cockroach tower behind us. Beneath the boat the water still lay dead.

From behind their smoked windows in the tower the aliens watched us leave. They are the size of sheep, but shaped like maggots, and so strange are their minds that they deal directly with the European Commission in Brussels—We will replace your missing billions and help restore order in your society and then we will clean up your canals—trust us—you have nothing to lose.

Ha ha ha, ha ha ha—the fools, we will swallow them up.

THE
PHYLLIS MAY
LAY UNDER THE WHARF LIKE a toy. Monica climbed the ladder in the wall. I caught Jim, snapped him into his life jacket, and hoisted him on to the roof. I climbed after him, using the brass step in the side of the boat. On the roof I had put the log-box, the one with
Phyllis May
on the front side and
Kiss Me Again
on the backside. I rested one end of the gangplank on the log-box and the other end up on the wharf. Then I chased Jim along the roof and picked him up like a handbag by the strap on the back of his life jacket. He dangled—not too tense, not too loose—he is a good dangler. I stood him on the gangplank and pushed him. Monica took hold of the handle of the life jacket and pulled him up along the plank on to the wharf. She unsnapped the life jacket.