Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (15 page)

Jim took a few steps along the wharf and pissed over his right front leg. Then we all went back by the same route.

What am I supposed to do, I said to Monica as we turned out the light, with an animal that pisses on itself?

AT CHARLEROI ON THE RIVER SAMBRE WE sailed through a steelworks, as the dick had foretold—twisted towers, hills of scrap, and all the fire and the bursting smoke. It was a bright day and the wind blew away most of the poison gas. The works groaned and clanged and grabs swung over the water, greedy to pick us up and drop our tasty steel hull into a furnace. When we went round a corner I could see they had got the boat in front, but I swerved and accelerated each time the grabs came near and we made it through.

That night we moored by a deserted coal-wharf and Jim ran away up the slag heap because he had not had a run for days. I brought him back covered in coal-dust and Monica stood him in the bath and washed him and rubbed him with a towel. He growled and grinned and wriggled against my chair and ran about the narrow floor. But in the morning he shivered and looked betrayed. I’m a whippet, I need green grass, I need pubs, people to love, something to chase, something to steal. Monica and I were tired and bored too.

We pushed away from the coal-wharf and under the hammer of the sun we followed the stinking Sambre through a waste of towers and turned south on to the river Meuse at Namur.

WE HAD STOPPED DRINKING FOR A TIME BECAUSE we were getting fat. We took this decision in the middle of a heatwave in a country famous for its beer. Having made our resolution we no longer had a choice—like nonalcoholics everywhere we were helpless in the net of our folly. We started running again, and left the
Phyllis May
under the seven-arched Pont des Jambes, attended by a grebe, which surfaced now and again to check she was still there.

In Namur the splendour falls on castle walls, the shops open, the Dutch in the motor launches along the quays fold back their canopies and start frying bacon, and machines arrive to dig up the roads.

We jogged past the lock, along the embankment by holiday apartments and old houses with mansard roofs and towers. I was going well, but I was having trouble with my shadow. It had lost some of its shape and was throwing the left hand and not getting much lift. I slowed down and it regained its form, though it seemed hardly to be moving. Monica and Jim had pulled ahead, and Jim came back to see what had happened, and then raced back to Monica. Soon after he reached her his shadow caught him up.

Hello hello—my boat is over there, come and have a beer. We went across the river and took a glass of fizzy water with an Irish couple who used to own a marina in Hull. I like your boat, said the gentleman—low in the saddle, long bow, open layout. You too have a very fine boat, I said, and four times bigger than the
Phyllis May
. Eighty years old, a Dutch Tjalk, said the gentleman. I found her rotting on a mudbank. Worked on her for five years. She’s lovely, said Monica—all curves, like one of those seaplanes, the Catalinas.

We sailed her across the Channel, he said—I still have bad dreams. My wife went by train—she said she wanted someone left for the grandchildren. You came across on a lorry? No, said Monica, we sailed.

Goodness, said the marina owner—you are very brave. Oh I don’t know, I said. But yes, he said—I am an engineer and I understand these things. It’s a question of the forces at play. A sixty-foot narrowboat is fine until you get two waves exactly sixty feet apart. Then the bow is on one wave and the stern is on another, and it snaps in the middle like a rotten carrot. The famous adventurer, whom I know personally, had a base plate made of twelve-millimetre steel, so it would not snap.

I said, I have not heard of this before, are you sure? Heavens yes, said the marina owner. Eleven narrowboats have gone down in the last few years. It’s in print in
Boating for Fun
magazine.

They were ever so nice, said Monica, back on the
Phyllis May
—but why didn’t you tell me about the breaking in the middle? We could have lost the boat, we could have lost Jim, we could have been drowned. You’re irresponsible—you’re a lunatic—I knew I should never have married you.

Some people said we were stupid, I said, and some said we were risking our lives, but no one said a narrowboat had ever been lost. Our base plate is ten-millimetre steel—the sides are six millimetres and the roof four. That’s normal. How can a tube like that break under its own weight? I drove her round the North Foreland in a force four and she was like a rock. Yes, there are eleven narrowboats snapped like carrots lying on the bed of the Channel, and there is a panther on Dartmoor, and a double-decker bus on the moon.

I TOOK A TANKARD DOWN FROM ITS HOOK IN the galley and it felt hot. I patted Jim and he felt cool.

Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square,

From the first point of his appointed sourse,

And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.

The air is thirty-eight degrees, I said, so everything we touch is hotter than our blood. It means the rules have changed—we have to lose heat all the time, and so does Jim, or we die. Thank you doctor, said Monica.

We listened to a news bulletin—the French Ministry of Health had been asked about the heatwave and said there was no problem. Then someone noticed that there were a third more corpses around than was usual at this time of year, and there were apartment blocks full of people who would not answer the door. It was the
canicule
, the dog days, the worst heatwave ever recorded. Jim lay near the engine-room, where the boat was deepest in the water, his bald belly hard against the deck.

For our last night in Namur we went out to dinner and had a pizza. The restaurant staff were charming and there were people at the next table eating pizzas like ours, full of water and tinned artichoke hearts and cardboard mushrooms. We were thankful for the four rows of teeth under the table, but we paid, smiled, and left a tip. I had decided before we left Stone that on the waterways I would be relaxed and cool, never standing on my dignity. I was doing well—apart from a rather good riposte to a vigilante dick on a lock in Leicestershire. The policy was working OK but I am not sure I recommend it—before I go to sleep I sometimes think of the bastards I should have pushed into the cut.

We walked down the main street. We could have gone straight to Paris, I said—we have lost a lot of time. The Belgians confuse me. The Walloons, the French ones, have that stupid paperwork at the locks and the Flemish speak English you can’t understand, addressing you like an escaped lunatic. Sometimes they won’t even say hello. The Flemish boaters in Mons smile faintly and look away, like some toff giving you the freeze. Was it my T-shirt? Perhaps
Stone Master Marathoners
is Flemish for
You Are a Belgian and Your Face Is Like a Bollock
. But think of the
capitaine
in Namur who wanted to drive us to the supermarket. Yes yes, said Monica, all very true—oh my word.

A thousand people came down the middle of the road behind us, sweeping along on Rollerblades. Some of the blades flashed and spun with electric lights in the dusk. The skaters made little noise, concentrating on speed. A couple fell down to show it was not as easy as it looked. There were pretty girls and hairy young men in black Lycra. Then a thousand cyclists, silent and intent, following the rest of the rout to the Pont des Jambes. Then the skateboarders. There were children following up in the rear, and a speaker van playing an American disco tune that had been huge twenty-five years ago. When we got to the bridge they had all vanished.

WE SLIPPED A COUPLE OF EUROS TO THE GREBE and headed south into the Ardennes. High hills covered with oak and beech and ash and birch and poplar and chestnut and rowan. It was hot and the Meuse smelt bad.

Please advise me of one thing,
monsieur
. Certainly, I said—my dear chap. While Monica was up in the lock towers there was time to chat to gongoozlers, who were rarer than in England. This one had spectacles with steel rims. Please tell me why you British will not commit yourselves wholeheartedly to the Single European Currency and the European Community, asked the gongoozler. You are not being reasonable and I wish you to explain.

Well, I thought, it’s a change from Is this your boat? The decision whether to enter the European Currency is not mine alone, I offered, but when my firm did research for the European Commission it was not an orderly house.

I have a herd of Charolais beef, said the gongoozler, the best in this region. Three times a week I take my daughters to piano lessons and come down and watch the boats. I cover the waterfront, I suggested. Yes, indeed, said the gongoozler, but tell me
monsieur
, why do you insist on siding with America all the time? They are imperialists. They will take everything and we will have nothing left. You are a European, why will you not stick with us? In ten years Germany will rise again and he will be your big brother and France and Belgium will be your friends, and together we will stuff the USA. Do you not want to stuff the USA,
monsieur
?

When I was a little boy, I replied, the Germans dropped bombs on me. They tuned the carburettors of the bombers so they roared in and out and frightened me and they put whistles in their bombs to frighten me some more. They drove us from our homes so we slept in the fields and they machine-gunned the cattle so they swelled up and lay with their legs sticking out.

When the American soldiers came they gave me chewing gum. It was the little red squares, with the cinnamon flavour—not so easy to get these days. I am a simple man—I go with the chewing gum.

Too simple, said the gongoozler—there are new generations, they will decide.

WE WOULD SPEND A FEW DAYS IN DINANT—THE jewel in the belly button of the Belgian Riviera. Churches under the cliffs, houses climbing between trees, and by the pontoons a street of restaurants. On the quay a notice—

Go away, tomorrow we are entertaining the jet-ski world championships.

A jet-ski is a motorbike that has been modified so it sinks more slowly. It is used for sexual display and to generate waves. We untied and sailed downstream a quarter of a mile to the Casino and drew the curtains and switched on the fan to sweat out the afternoon. We had bought the fan in a French supermarket—it has Bluesky written on it, which we pronounce Blueski, in the Russian way, and then we laugh. It is not easy to find things to laugh about when it is thirty-eight degrees.

The Casino was made out of red bricks and didn’t look much like a casino, or anything else really. A lady knocked and asked us for money for mooring and pointed to a notice on the back of a post—

Go away, tomorrow we are entertaining the jet-ski championships.

There is a mussel-house by the main quay, I said—they cannot mess up mussels and chips. We walked back down the riverside through tree-trunk men with ponytails and wet suits, and brownskin women with great breasts, and four-wheeled motorbikes, and vans painted with flowing devices, and roaring generators and cables, and we ate messed-up mussels and chips, and ice cream from a stall.

When you buy an ice cream Jim stares at you. He stared at me so hard I gave him my cone when it still had my scoop of pistachio inside and he wouldn’t give it back.

The next morning we sailed down to take some pictures of the town in the mist. The twenty thousand jet-skiers were not around. They were asleep in each other’s arms, in their vans and under their terrible machines.

HIGH, WOODED HILLS, WITH ROCKY BLUFFS and fields by the river. I’ll let that thousand-tonner go ahead into the lock, I thought, and follow him. Now I’ll put my bow alongside and tie up to him—oh the lock paddles are opening and the water is pouring in fast and his back is swinging into us—reverse, reverse quick! More rope, more rope, more rope! Are we clear Mon? Are we clear? Oh thank God. A thousand tons at one mile an hour is a lot of foot-pounds. One chap with a big steel launch was hit by a barge and lost the middle of his boat. When you hear these tales it makes you feel sort of hollow.

What are those guys like in the towers on the locks with their silly paperwork? I asked Monica. Are they polite? Some have epaulettes, she said, but some are really nice, like that chap who wished us
bon voyage
on the Tannoy as we went out. He visited England when he was a young man and he walked down Kensington High Street and Carnaby Street and he said he would never forget the girls’ flared trousers, the
pantalon
. None of us will ever forget the
pantalon
, I said.