Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (5 page)

Fifty years too late the university had laboured and brought forth a business school and we passed under the vacant stare of the new building—death’s mightiest powers have done their worst. But The Broad was still broad and The Turl was still not, and Jesus College was rather as it had been for the last four hundred years. The sun came out and the Japanese tourists fell like corn before the sickle of Jim’s lead.

We processed back to Folly Bridge and behold—a pub selling Fuller’s London Pride—

I often wonder what the Vinters buy

One half so precious as the Goods they sell.

As we settled by the river Jim began to snicker and we looked around. A chap nearby had put a basket on his table and was taking out a chicken. He stood the chicken on the table and he and his lady chatted with it as it stalked about and crowed and they all shared a packet of crisps. I’m so glad we had this walk, Monica said—the weather picked up, you liked the beer, and there was a chicken.

The next morning we went to the pensioners’ matinee at the Odeon. The grey ones were creeping in from all over the city like lichen across a damp floor. There was a long queue. Don’t worry, said Monica, some of them will have died before they reach the ticket office. I expected the ticket lady to say Sorry sir you can’t possibly be that old, but she was a trusting soul and let us in. For two pounds each we got a free cup of coffee, and a chocolate-flavoured biscuit as a further gift from a grateful nation.

The film was about the writer Iris Murdoch growing old and going mad and dying in Oxford. This happened very slowly. The audience took it well, considering. There was a choking and a commotion near the end, and I guess someone didn’t make it, but most of us pulled through.

WE NEEDED NEW FLOWERS FOR THE ROOF OF the boat and the garden centre was in Summertown. This is a stifling suburb in North Oxford, full of academics who hate each other, and go mad and die and have long films made about it like Iris Murdoch. You don’t get well from the Summertown blues.

Jim and I fought through the bawling Saturday tourists in the Cornmarket and headed north up the Banbury Road. Here the streets were empty, except for two Goths. They were big chaps: black-leathered, riveted and chained and tattooed, their hair like quills upon the fretful porpentine. They lurched towards us, staring, talking about us, laughing. Should I keep going, step aside, or just fall to my knees? They stopped. One of them, the one with pointed teeth, addressed me. Great dog, man, he said. Excellent dog, agreed the cross-eyed one. Peace, man, he added. Peace, I replied. Peace and love.

There were just enough geraniums in the garden centre to fill the planters, although some were bright mauve and if you looked at them too long you got fits. I needed a taxi and sometimes taxis won’t take dogs. I climbed in with Jim. Folly Bridge, I said, and waited to be put out on the pavement with my dog and my geraniums. But first gear was engaged, the left foot slowly raised on the clutch, and we moved forward.

The driver spoke. Lurcher, is he? No, I said, straight whippet—a better pedigree than I’ve got. I had a black Labrador, said the driver. Oh yes, I said, what colour? Black, he confided. She reached sixteen, then she died. A good age, I said. Yes, he said, cancer. I couldn’t take her to the vet, I couldn’t do it so my son did it and when he carried her out she turned and gave me a look just a look and she knew. His voice broke. They know, I said. Yes, the driver said, they know. Two years before that she had meningitis, he sobbed, cost me three hundred pounds, then she died anyway. This is the best place to put me off, I said.

The geraniums looked good on the roof and as we turned with the current, back towards Reading and the Kennet and Avon navigation, Jim stood up there with them, sniffing, seeing ahead.

Back in Abingdon, alongside the meadow, a candles and linen dinner from Oxford market, with wine from the
Phyllis May
cool cupboard, whose depths no man hath sounded. On the hi-fi Chet Baker was singing of love.

Would you have recognized her, if you had met her in the street? asked Monica. Fifty years is a long time, I said, but she wasn’t very tall and her eyes were blue—Monnie, I said, we’ll go down the Kennet and Avon, that’s fine, and then we’ll come back up the Kennet and Avon, like we said. But I’m not going up the Bristol Channel to Sharpness, it’s bloody mad, and that Channel business is madder. You forgot about the seasickness. I get seasick looking at postcards of yachts. And when I take travel sickness pills I get visions of universal love—I mean my judgement goes. I would try to get out and walk. That’s because when we got off the ferry you drank the free samples in the French supermarket on top of the pills, said Monica, and got pissed at half past eight in the morning.

But you can’t expect me to take you out to sea if I am an invalid, I said—it’s not me I’m thinking of, it’s you and the poor defenceless dog. Of course, sweetheart, said Monica, of course, you are the skipper. Try some of this jam with your ice cream—it’s still warm. I made it from the plums we shook down on Jim.

THE KENNET AND AVON NAVIGATION RUNS from Reading across Wiltshire to Bristol, and if you care nought for your safety, through to Avonmouth and on to the bounding main. The first fifteen miles run in part along the river Kennet. The navigation is the biggest of the waterway restorations. It is a hundred miles long with a hundred and twenty locks and rises three hundred feet and falls four hundred, and is not to be taken with a merry laugh.

In Reading we moored near an island with trees in the centre. A stone hit the boat, then after a while another, then another. We climbed out; I took a photograph of the kids on the island, and rang nine nine nine. The police were charming. They asked where I was, as they were not familiar with the town themselves. They explained that if the people of Reading stopped murdering each other, and returned each other’s cars, and the five-hundred shortfall in the Thames Valley Force was made good, they would be among us within minutes, truncheons flailing. How big were the stones? I don’t know, I said, about the size of eggs. Just a minute sir—have you got the stones table, Audrey? What sort of eggs did you say sir? Hen’s was it? Hen’s, oh well.

Two small children approached the boat. Please missus it wasn’t us threw the stones. Me and my sister are down from London and we are on your photo but it wasn’t us, really it wasn’t, please don’t tell. Come and meet Jim, said Monica, and don’t worry, darlings. They stepped down into the foredeck and Jim rushed off and came back with his rabbit of plush to show them, and jumped them and licked their spectacles.

Then a dozen more people arrived and stood around very close, shouting. They were kids, all shapes and sizes and colours. One of them said It’s because I’m black, isn’t it, that you hate me, so fuck you. Another boy was six feet tall, fifteen stone, with breasts. You took a photograph of me without my permission, he said. That’s against the law and I find it personally very offensive, and I am going home to fetch my big brother. Another said I will tell you who threw the stones, his name was Jason Salvadori. Another said No it was Colbert Aventura. A Spanish-looking boy said It’s a disgrace you coming here and behaving like this, so fuck you. A little girl of eleven with bleached hair and jeans said Fuck you both, coming here and causing trouble. Fuck you, they all shouted, fuck you both, and your boat, and your dog.

Pursued by stones, we cast off in the dusk and moored downriver opposite some houses with lights. A figure came along the bank. I saw the metal on his coat. Good evening officer, I said. Nice boat, said the stranger. He laid seven cans of Special Brew on the grass and settled down.

When a midnight duck came to manicure us, rat tat tat along the waterline, we started up in dismay, but we made it to the morning. Perhaps the wino was a plainclothes man. Audrey, is Gary free?—he likes a drink by the canal.

THE NAVIGATION TO NEWBURY IS A BASTARD. The main obstacles are twenty locks, designed by twenty madmen. They have earth sides barbed with stakes and rotting weeds, or scalloped sides to bang you, and they leak and they creak and torrents come at you as you try to moor up, and torrents fill your boat if you get inside the lock, and the beams stand at head height and none of woman born shall move them on his own. The locks are big enough to take your boat and alongside it the
Ark Royal
, should that happen along, and they fill at the speed of the church clock.

Then there are the boater-operated bridges, most of which work, but all in a different way. You halt the traffic on an arterial road, turn a key and wait while nothing happens. Economic life in the region comes to a halt and it’s
Hoot hoot
and Who do you boaters think you are eh?

We were hit with tropical heat, and flies that had escaped from a nearby biological warfare establishment. When the trees closed in the flies struck from the rear, biting my calves and thighs and my hand on the tiller. We met a lady with her swollen arm in a sling, and my wounds ached for a week. A mooring pin snapped and put us across the cut, and a bearded fool took loud offence because his dog wanted to bite Jim. Monica had sunstroke and I had stomach cramps.

Then came the rain, the Noah rain. It caught us off the boat and we were drenched and redrenched and it caught Jim off the boat and we found him lying sodden under a hedge, waiting for the end. We walked to the only pub within miles and it was flooded and I left our keys in a swing bridge.

We made it to Newbury and found the Nag’s Head—

Superior Wines and Spirits, Traditional Ales, Welcoming
Atmosphere, No Dogs, No Soiled Working Boots.

We woke to the sniggering of ducks, the mad laughter of geese, and the pigeons calling Fuck you two, your boat too, your dog too, boots too, boots too, boots too.

MY MOTHER CAME BACK AGAIN LAST NIGHT, Monnie, I said. I got up for a pee and there she was, standing in the shadow in the middle of the boat. When her own mother came back it was always a warning something awful was going to happen. Do you think this was a warning? Perhaps I should tell Clive we are not going to sail across to France or up the Bristol Channel or anything like that. Even if you make a promise, when someone from another world arrives and says Don’t do it then perhaps you are let off—perhaps it’s a special arrangement.

I shouldn’t think so, said Monica, you promised in this world not the next. How was your mum? I couldn’t see, I said, I was frightened and went back to bed. Frightened? said Monica, frightened of your own dear mother who loved you so much?

I know, I said, I loved her too. It’s just the way she keeps coming back from the dead.

AFTER A WORLD OF TOILS AND SNARES WE were now on the Kennet and Avon Canal proper. There was no break in the navigation but a new spirit of place. The locks worked; they had moved apart and our ten coach windows were filled with blue.

Most canals are enchanting at all times of year—let me count the ways—shall we say of Wiltshire that like Ophelia with fantastic garlands did she come, of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples. For a further blessing we arrived at the Long Pound, fifteen miles without a lock, at the summit of the navigation before you begin to step down to Bath, Bristol, and the sea. Bored?—read the names on the map. Draycot Fitzpayne, shouted Mannington Bruce, you Cuckoo’s Knob, you Clench, you Littleworth on your White Horse, how Dare you speak so of my Honey Street?

A nerd gongoozler had said to me You’ll have a busy day when you go down the Caen flight har har. We left Devizes early and picked up a little narrowboat with a couple who seemed to know what they were doing. The gentleman had a bike and whizzed up and down opening paddles. We got to know them a bit as we descended, as you do when jointly faced with a fearful ordeal. There are twenty-nine locks in the Caen flight.

Robert was a photographer who specialized in the Kennet and Avon. I cover the waterfront, I said. You like the old tunes? asked Robert. Yes, I said. We talked about jazz. We had both played a bit and Robert still went to jazz festivals. One of his friends had stood in a coffee queue next to Gerry Mulligan. Gone, said Robert, and not very old. And Chet Baker, I said, the marvellous boy; jumped out of a window—heroin. Mel Tormé sang ‘I Cover the Waterfront’, I said—he went into the velvet fog not long ago. Billie Holiday sang it better, said Robert—drugs, forty-five. We were speeding down the flight and at every lock another seat on the bandstand was vacant. Benny Goodman, Sid Phillips—It’s the wood in the clarinet that does it, said Robert—in the end it gets them in the throat. What did you play? Clarinet, I said. As we came to the end of the Caen flight Ken Colyer breathed his last, in a caravan, in France. We were down in four hours but it seemed less, because of the music.

In Bath the boater gets the best seats, looking out over the town, and the footlights come up in the morning on houses and spires. Robert came by on his bicycle and hammered on the roof. Humphrey Lyttleton is OK, he said. Thank God, I said, something beside remains. We’ll take you on a tour of Bath soon, he added. Fine, we said, and never saw him again. We guessed it was the hips—Robert played the sousaphone. He was not a big chap and in the end it gets them in the hips.