Narrow Margins (3 page)

‘Actually, yes,' Geoff grinned and blew into his cup. ‘OK, so we haven't found anything suitable yet but I'm sure something will come up.' He mooched across the sofa until, sitting almost in my lap, he put his arm round me and gave me a big hug. ‘You wouldn't be trying to wriggle out of our ‘big adventure' before it even starts now, would you?'

‘You make me sound like Pooh,' I grouched, disengaging his arm. ‘Of course I'm not trying to wriggle out of it. I'm just beginning to find the whole thing really scary.' I stared into my sadly empty wine glass for a moment then looked round at the big, soft sofas, our huge collection of books, the pictures and the piano, all of which would have to go into storage. Thinking back over our disastrous visit to Devon, I found myself helplessly wondering, if – when – we finally moved out, would we ever be warm and comfortable again?

Chapter Three
The ‘Perfect' Boat?

O
NE WEEK BEFORE THE
completion date for our house and we were in a complete panic. We must have seen every stinking, dented, sinking boat in a 300-mile radius and were beginning to lose heart. Some of them probably weren't as poor as they appeared but, surely if you are trying to sell something, don't you make it look its best? Three days worth of washing-up laid out for us to examine, filthy toilets, strange smells, damp patches and other nastier faults. It became glaringly obvious that these were also the boats that were very poorly maintained.

One particularly memorable vessel had the owner's entire tool collection spread over the engine room – obviously he was in the middle of some very major and prolonged repairs. This did not bode well for the future and Geoff hustled us out as quickly as possible.

We spent hours every night poring over increasingly vague websites advertising narrow boats for sale. One particular boat, ‘
Happy Go Lucky
', kept coming up on various sites but had been consistently dismissed due to her slightly strange shape.

One of a retired pair of hotel boats, she had been built to house seven cabins and two bathrooms, nothing else; her sister boat contained the kitchen, the communal lounge and the open deck space. At 70 foot, she was just the right size. However, to utilise as much space as possible, Happy's entire length, including what would have been the front deck on any other boat, had been fully built-in; she really was the most cumbersome looking boat I had seen yet. From the pictures, she appeared to resemble nothing more than a steel box with windows, and every time she appeared on the computer screen, I made irritated huffing noises and resolutely moved on.

Finally, after weeks of sleepless nights, eye damage and severe neck-ache, we had nothing left to view and decided to make the trip to Daventry to have a look at
Happy Go Lucky
.

The day we travelled down to Daventry, I have to admit, was not one of my ‘happy disposition', let's-look-on-the-positive-side-of-things, ‘Pooh' days. It was definitely more of an ‘Eeyore' day. The whole family was irascible and prone to argue at the slightest provocation. The weather wasn't helping matters, being overcast, airless and incredibly hot. The stress of the enforced move had finally gotten to Sam whose behaviour had taken a serious downward turn.

We had been expecting this sort of reaction from him and had discussed how to handle any outbreaks of bad behaviour or signs of stress that were bound to come along. We were going to go by the book: be honest, forgiving and set good boundaries. Using these techniques, we felt sure that we would get through any traumas with all our familial feelings intact.

Unfortunately when parents are also stressed, miserable, worried and under the threat of living with an in-law for the next six months, all good intentions go out of the window, along with any excellent parenting skills they may aspire to. Consequently, Sam and I had indulged in childish bickering all the way down the M5, until Geoff told us both to shut up. Still sulking, we arrived in Braunston, hot, tired, angry and certainly out of sorts with each other and life in general.

This mood was not alleviated by our first sight of Happy; she was as grey as the weather, covered in pigeon poo and listing gently to the left.

‘I told you we were wasting our time,' I grumped at Geoff, ‘let's not bother. Can't we just go home?' I pulled Sam off the safety railings as he tried to pitch himself into the marina basin, ‘Get down, Sam, for goodness' sake, this is not a flaming playground.'

Geoff frowned and, fed up with watching his wife and son indulging in a pulling and screaming match, reasonably suggested, ‘Look, we've come all this way, is it really going to kill you to just take ten minutes to get the keys and have a quick look inside?'

As there was no good answer to that without resorting to outlandish exaggeration, I ignored him and continued my attempt to heave Sam off the railings. He clung on, kicking and screaming, until with one good pull I managed to physically tear him away and set him, with a bit of a thump, back on solid ground.

We tagged along, arguing hotly about the need for safety and choosing an acceptable place to play. Geoff ignored us and amused himself by having a good look at all the other boats for sale; way out of our league of course, or all of 30 foot long. By the time we got to the office Sam had turned into a ‘wailing child' who told any passer-by that mummy had tried to break his arms.

He cheered up slightly as we went into the office which was situated behind a shop, and immediately fell in love with a large, badly coloured, plastic model of the duck from the
Rosie and Jim
children's television series. Its head turned and it went ‘quonk' in a slightly nasal tone.

While Geoff was sorting out the keys to Happy, Sam and I had another argument about his obsessive need for plastic rubbish, and by the time we left the shop, Sam was in full flood, telling everybody about his horrible, abusive mother, who not only tried to break his arms but never bought him anything!, ever!!!

Happy was moored between two other boats, under cover, in an open-ended shed type affair. After a sticky two or three minutes spent trying to manhandle a miserable and unhelpful child over the adjacent narrow boat, we finally stepped onto the rear deck.

Sadly, the smell of unloved and slightly damp boat was, by now, becoming almost welcoming and, sure enough, it wafted out in an effusive greeting as we opened the back doors and fell down a tall step into the gloom. Geoff decided that he was going to start at the bow (or the ‘pointy bit' as I always called it, much to his disgust) and disappeared down what appeared to be the inside of a large, round coffin lined with doors.

Sam, finally free of the clutches of his hated, criminally abusive and fiscally restrictive mother, trotted after him, and I was left to wallow in the expected yuckiness of my surroundings.

The internal decor of
Happy Go Lucky
was horrible; even if I had been in a good mood it would have been horrible. Unfortunately for the boat, I was in a foul mood and it was the most horrible thing I had ever seen in my life, but at least it seemed to be free of scary fungus.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the outlines of the kitchen from hell started to appear; it was the type of kitchen that usually sported the headline: ‘Misunderstood mother forced to live in purgatory'. Everything was covered in dusty old grease and had obviously been thrown together by some insane and untalented DIYer with a cheap Formica addiction.

There was a microwave, which strangely enough looked brand new, a fridge which just as obviously wasn't and a glass-topped hob. A sad collection of mismatched plates, chipped mugs depicting badly drawn, very kitsch cartoons (mostly of people falling into various locks around the country) and cheap cutlery were all stacked higgledy-piggledy on old, warped shelves that clung tenaciously at strange angles to the back wall of an open-fronted cupboard.

The greasy, beige, faded curtains, which, at one time, I imagined, were patterned and cheerful, now hung lank and miserable from the four remaining hooks still attached to a tarnished fake brass curtain rail. Fixed at only one end, it and its resident curtains drooped sadly toward a floor resplendent with greasy, pitted, beige and brown 1970s classic lino.

Happy Go Lucky
was built in 1994, so the seventies decor struck me as a little odd. The whole thing had a horrible similarity in both furnishing and smell to that in my grandma's flat just before she passed away. She had steadfastly refused to replace anything and had been living in the same surroundings for about 50 years.

I wandered through the kitchen – this took about four steps – and into a seating area furnished with more greasy curtains in the same material, a very straight and hard-looking settle upholstered in a knobbly grey material with frayed edges that allowed the grubby foam beneath to leak through. The settle could just be seen, skulking, embarrassed, behind a wobbly-looking folding wooden table.

To stop items sliding off the top, someone had fixed proud-standing strips of wood to each edge. As I couldn't imagine that
Happy Go Lucky
ever had occasion to battle manfully through huge rolling waves while travelling at four miles an hour down glass-still canals, I could only assume the proud edges of the table were either merely decoration or put there as an irritant to anybody trying to clean the wretched thing.

Trying to move the table out of the way without having to actually touch it, I lowered myself gingerly onto the settle and spent a couple of minutes studying the literature packed into the bookshelves on the opposite side of the boat.

I assumed that holidays on board had been so boring that the books were there to stop the passengers committing mutiny. There was certainly no book less than ten years old. A collection of Dickensian Classics cosied up to the
Great Book of Vampire Stories
– this, in turn, was wedged beside a set of well-thumbed Mills and Boon love stories; a book for every taste, obviously.

These packed shelves ran down the length of the boat; tens of feet of them, filled to overflowing with either novels or small books and pamphlets covering ‘Things to do on canals'. I was rather confused – as far as I was concerned, a canal holiday entailed getting on the boat; floating about a bit; getting off the boat; there couldn't be much more to it than that, surely? However, the sheer amount of literature cluttering the insides of Happy gave me a bit of an insight that I might be mistaken and that a canal holiday could be much more exciting than I had ever imagined.

Bored with looking at the books, and needing someone to pick an argument with, I went in search of Geoff and Sam. Choosing a door at random, I reached across the passageway and pushed it open to reveal a tiny bathroom.

There was a small cream-coloured and yellow-stained toilet lurking in the corner, next to it was a shower, half hidden behind a faded and mould-ridden curtain. At first glance I thought it strange that someone had decided to put a black carpet in the shower tray, but, on closer inspection, it turned out to be half an inch of stagnant water. A tiny sink attached at a slight angle on to the buckled and damp-stained wall opposite completed the ‘bathroom suite'. It made a perfect picture of decay and neglect which the smell did nothing to dispel. In fact, the whole thing presented the perfect site for a cholera-breeding program.

There were six cabins, each boasting a double bed filling the space wall to wall, and a vanity unit comprising a tiny sink, some shelves and an age-spotted mirror. The only way to get on to the bed was to take a flying leap from the doorway and hope that nothing collapsed beneath you.

I wandered back to the sad little seating area and, picking up one of the pamphlets on narrow-boat holidays, I decided to find out exactly what a narrow-boat holiday entailed and plonked myself back onto the demoralised sofa. Opening the leaflet at a random page, I alternated between reading it and waving it about in the air, hoping to dispel the cloud of stinking dust that had puffed up as I sat down. I was pleased to confirm that a narrow-boat holiday wasn't exactly for the thrill-seekers among the population, unless maybe you were over 105 years old and were fairly realistic about the type of thrills that you were seeking.

Finding nothing remotely of interest in the pamphlet, I shoved it back onto the shelf with a sigh and looked up as Geoff and Sam came grinning and chattering down the boat toward me. Both were alive with excitement and discussing Sam's new bedroom, how the rest of the boat would look and what they could do with it.

‘Uh-oh,' I muttered to myself, ‘this looks like trouble.'

‘What have you been doing?' Geoff bounced up to me with a huge grin and before I could start moaning about how awful it all was – how unhygienic, nasty and smelly – he rushed on with his thoughts.

‘Isn't this great? I'm pretty sure it's bone dry and just think with all the cabins and extra walls that would have to be removed, I might never have to buy any wood at all, what a saving.' He paused for breath and looked around. ‘Is this as far as you've got? What do you think?'

What I wanted to say was ‘I think it's horrible,
it smells
, I'd rather wee over the side than use that toilet, it looks as though it wants to eat you,
it smells
, and if I stand in the middle with outstretched arms I can touch both sides, where are we going to put everything, how are we going to live in this,
it smells,
it's tacky and epitomises all that was bad about the seventies, how am I going to cook, I miss my house and I haven't even moved out of it yet and I miss my garden even more, where are all my clothes going to go, there isn't even enough storage space for my shoes and that includes that ridiculous excuse for a kitchen,
AND IT SMELLS!!!
'

My traitorous brain, however, committed mutiny on the spot and, obviously taking pity on my poor, hopeful husband re-wrote the script and forced me to say, ‘Erm ... it's got potential?'

It was obviously the right thing to say, as, with a huge smile, he grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me toward the pointy end (sorry, the bow), excitedly explaining as he went along, ‘We'll have Sam's room here and the galley (the what?) will have to be moved to here; this will be the saloon (the what?) but we should be able to have a fair-sized head around here (a fair-sized what?); of course she will have to be surveyed and hopefully they'll accept an offer, but as long as all that goes to plan, I think we've found our home – what do you think?'

I looked into his eager, excited face and told another huge lie. ‘If you're sure you can make her lovely, sweetie, I'm with you all the way.'

Arrrgh! Nooooooooooooo! I
T SMELLS!