Revenge of the Tide (2 page)

M
alcolm and Josie were the first to arrive, at six. It was an unofficial arrival: they stopped for a chat and didn’t leave again. I was on the deck tipping the ice I’d just got from the cash-and-carry into a big plastic crate, and Malcolm heard the chink of beer bottles from his narrowboat. Seconds later he was chatting amicably from the pontoon about this and that, three bottles of French red wine tucked under one arm.

‘We’ve got loads more if you run out, Genevieve,’ Josie said, when they came aboard. ‘We went to France last weekend. Stocked up for Christmas, you know.’

‘I thought you didn’t drink wine,’ I said, handing the bottle opener to Malcolm so he could crack open his first beer.

‘Don’t, really,’ Malcolm said. ‘Dunno why we bought so much of it, tell the truth.’

I’d cleaned up as much as possible. It could have been better, but the worst of the mess was out of the way, and the galley wasn’t looking too bad. Maureen had given me a lift to the cash-and-carry and I’d taken a taxi home, with two crates of beer and several bags of ice, jumbo packets of crisps, and a large block of cheese that had seemed like a good idea at the time. I wasn’t very good at party food, to be honest – but at least there was plenty of alcohol.

Josie had brought garlic bread wrapped in tinfoil. ‘I thought it could go on your stove,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t going to light it. I think it’s going to be roasting with lots of people in here.’

Malcolm, the designated expert in the room who had provided advice on living aboard more times in the last five months than I could remember, snorted. ‘You’ll freeze in the night if you haven’t got your stove on.’

For a moment we all stood contemplating the wood-burning stove that sat on large tiles in the corner of the main cabin. It wasn’t cold now, but Malcolm had a point – not good to be lying in bed at four in the morning, freezing cold.

‘I’ll light it, if you like,’ Malcolm said at last. ‘You ladies go up on deck and admire the sunset.’

On the way past the galley I took hold of the bottle opener and, as I opened two bottles of beer, not as cold as they should be but cold enough, Josie said something about leaving the man to build his fire. ‘He loves it. We were going to have central heating put in at one point but he kept putting it off and putting it off. He even starts piling up logs in the summer, just in case it gets a bit on the chilly side. One of these days he’s going to chop down one of the trees on the rec.’

I looked down and along the pontoon to the
Scarisbrick Jean,
the narrowboat Malcolm and Josie shared with their cat, Oswald. Not long after I’d moved in, I had heard them talking about ‘Aunty Jean’ and for a while I’d thought they had a third person living on the boat with them, until I realised that
Aunty Jean
was their affectionate name for the boat itself. A friendly name. Maybe I should think of a pet name for mine.

The first time I saw the boat, I knew it was the one. It was above my price range, but my finances had seen a recent improvement and as a result I was looking at boats I’d previously discounted. It needed work, but the hull was sound and the cabin was bearable. I could just about afford to buy it and do the renovations for a year or so, provided I budgeted carefully and did the work myself.

‘
Revenge of the Tide.
Odd sort of a name for a boat,’ I’d said, the day I decided to spend the bulk of my savings on it. Cameron, the boatyard owner and the broker for boat sales, was standing beside me on the pontoon. He wasn’t a fabulous salesman; he was in a hurry to get on with the countless other tasks he had waiting. He was fidgeting from one foot to the other and was clearly only just managing to hold back from saying, ‘
Do you want her or not?
’ It was a good job for him that I’d already fallen in love.

The
Revenge of the Tide
was a seventy-five-foot-long barge of a type known as a Hagenaar, named for the canals of Den Haag, under whose bridges the boat was low enough to pass. It had been built in 1903 in the Netherlands, a great beast of a boat, a workhorse. The masts had been removed and a diesel engine added after the Second World War, and it had been used for transporting goods around the Port of Rotterdam until it was sold in the 1970s and moved across the English Channel. Ever since then, a steady stream of owners had been using it either for moving cargo, for pleasure trips or as living accommodation, with varying degrees of commitment and success.

‘The owner bought her just before his second divorce,’ said Cam. ‘He managed to con his missus because he bought the boat with all the savings he had stashed away. He wanted to call her just
Revenge
, I think, but it was a bit too obvious so he called her
Revenge of the Tide
instead.’

‘I might have to change the name,’ I said, as Cam took me into the office to sign the paperwork.

‘You can’t do that. Bad luck to change a boat’s name.’

‘Bad luck? What, worse than having a boat named after a failed marriage?’

Cam grimaced.

‘Anyway, the last owner changed the name, didn’t he?’

‘Yeah. And he’s just getting divorced for the third time, and having to sell his boat to pay for it. What does that tell you?’

So I left the name as it was, because I didn’t need any more bad luck in my life. Besides, the
Revenge
had character, had a soul; living aboard such a majestic, beautiful boat made me feel a bit safer, a bit less lonely. And it looked after me and hid me away from view. Boats were supposed to be female, but I always thought of the
Revenge
as male: a big, quiet gentleman, someone who would keep me safe.

‘So what time are your London mates turning up?’ Josie asked.

‘Oh, lord knows. Late, probably.’

Josie was like a warm cushion, fleecy and brightly coloured. There was barely room for the two of us on the narrow bench. Her greying hair was fighting the breeze to escape from the loosely tied ponytail on the back of her head. At least the sun had come out, and the early evening sky overhead was blue, dotted with white clouds.

‘What are they going to make of us lot, do you reckon?’

‘I’m more worried about what you’ll make of them.’

A few days after I’d moved in, I had poked my head out of the wheelhouse to be greeted by the sight of Malcolm sitting on the roof of the
Scarisbrick Jean
smoking a roll-up and wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. It was early, barely light, and the spring air was so cold that Malcolm’s breath came in clouds. His hair stood up on one side of his head as if it had been ironed.

‘Alright?’ he’d called across to me.

‘Morning,’ I’d said, and had almost gone back down below when curiosity got the better of me. ‘You okay over there?’

‘Yeah,’ he’d said, taking a long, slow drag. ‘You?’ As though it were entirely normal to be sitting on the roof of a narrowboat at five in the morning wearing nothing but your underwear. I hadn’t known his name then. I’d seen him coming and going, of course, and we’d exchanged nods and greetings, but it still felt a bit peculiar to be sharing the dawn with a man who was just a scrap of grey flannel away from naked.

‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘Oh,’ he’d said, with dawning comprehension. ‘Yeah. Fucking freezing. But I can’t go inside: Josie’s just had a shit and stunk the whole boat out.’

In the first few days and weeks of boat ownership, living in the marina had felt like being in a foreign country. The pace of life was slower. If someone was going to the shop they would shout at you and ask if you wanted anything bringing back. Some of them turned up unexpectedly and sat on your boat and talked about nothing for three hours and then went away again, sometimes abruptly, as though the flow of conversation had dried up or some other, more pressing engagement had surfaced. Sometimes they brought food or drink with them. They helped you fix things, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent that the thing in question needed fixing. They gave you advice about which chemicals you should use to keep the toilet working. They laughed a lot.

Some of the boats were owned by people who only turned up at the marina at the weekends, or less often if it was rainy. One of them, a narrowboat in a state of considerable disrepair, was owned by a man with wilder hair than Malcolm’s. I’d only seen him twice. The first time, I’d called a cheery hello on my way past his boat, and got a vacant stare in response. The second time, he’d been walking across the car park with a carrier bag that looked heavy and chinked as though it was full of glass bottles.

Then there was Carol-Anne. She lived in a cabin cruiser that should by rights not have been moored in the residential marina, but she got away with it because she did actually live there. She was divorced, with three children who lived with their father in Chatham. She would say hello and then try and talk to you for hours about how grim things were and how difficult it was to manage. All the other liveaboards tried to avoid her and, after a couple of weeks, I did too.

The rest of them were wonderful.

Joanna had turned up with a plateful of dinner once. ‘You eaten? Good, we made too much.’

We’d sat together at the dinette, Joanna drinking from a can of lager which she’d found in my fridge, while I tucked into shepherd’s pie and peas.

‘I’m not used to people bringing me dinner,’ I’d said when I’d finished.

Joanna had shrugged. ‘It’s no bother. Glad not to throw it away.’

‘People here are very friendly,’ I’d said, aware at the same time of what an understatement this was. It was like suddenly finding yourself part of a big family.

‘Yes. It’s the whole boat thing. You get used to it, after a while. Not like living in London, huh?’

Not like living in London,
I’d thought,
not at all.

Mixing London friends with marina friends had the potential to be a recipe for pure disaster: they’d have nothing in common, other than perhaps that Simone occasionally read the
Guardian
on a Saturday. Lucy would turn up in her vast, tank-like all-terrain luxury vehicle that did about twelve miles to the gallon and had never been outside the M25; Gavin would be wearing incredibly expensive designer shoes that would be ruined in the muddy puddles around the dock that never seemed to dry up.

And then there was Caddy. Would she even come?

At some point in the future, the
Revenge of the Tide
would be a fantastic party boat, big enough for lots of people to socialise in and crash out on – but not yet. If they all turned up, some of them would have to sit on the deck, and some of them would probably never even set foot below deck – there simply wouldn’t be room. They would all have a laugh about it and then they would walk back up to the main road and go to the pub. The other liveaboards would make some remarks about city dwellers, laugh a lot, drink more beer and end up going back to their own boats in the early hours.

They would be here soon. Josie closed her eyes against the low sun and breathed in, a smile of contentment on her face as though she were sunbathing on a yacht in the Mediterranean instead of an old Dutch barge on the Medway.

‘We’ll love them,’ she said at last. ‘We love everyone. Unless they’re real snobs.’

It had got to the point where I didn’t actually care what my city friends thought. At the start of this year I had cared very much. It had mattered what I thought, what I wore, what I said, what music I listened to, what pubs I drank in after work, and what I did at the weekends. London was a vast social network where you met people in bars and clubs, at the gym, at work and at events, in parks and at the theatre, at salsa dance nights in the local pub. You spent enough time with them to establish whether they were on your wavelength, and eventually decided whether they could be classed as friends. People came and went in and out of your life in a transitory fashion, and it never really seemed to matter. There was always someone else to go out with, always an invitation to some party or gathering. So I had plenty of people I knew, and in London they would generally be called friends, or mates. But were they? Were they people you could call on in a crisis? Would they stay with you if you were ill, or in danger? Would they protect you, if you needed protecting?

Dylan would. Dylan had, in fact.

‘They’re not snobs, not really. But to be honest I think it’s going to be a bit of a shock for them. I think they’re expecting some kind of gorgeous loft apartment squeezed into a boat.’

‘Rubbish, you’ve done a fabulous job.’

‘I’ve still got a long way to go. And there isn’t a single thing on my boat that I’ve bought new. Unfortunately that lot don’t really get the recycling ethos.’

‘Seriously? But your boat’s looking fabulous. And you’ve done it all yourself. Not many of us have done the fitting out on our own.’

‘At least the tide’s coming in.’

The hull was presently sitting comfortably on a cushion of mud, the boat steady. When the tide came in, it would rise on the water and, depending on the weather, rock gently for six hours or so, until the tide ebbed again. The boat looked much better when it was floating, and of course the mud didn’t always smell particularly nice.

Josie looked across the pontoon. ‘Who’s this?’

The sight of the shiny 4x4 pulling into the marina car park meant that some of the London lot had arrived, and in fact it turned out to be most of them. Lucy was first to jump down. She’d made an effort to dress down in jeans and boots, but the boots still had heels on them. Almost immediately she sank down into the earth and from our position on deck we heard her shout, ‘Fuck!’

From the back came Gavin and Chrissie, and someone else, from the passenger side – at first I couldn’t see who it was, and then he came round the front of the big bonnet and I could see him, in all his glory.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I murmured.

‘Ooh, he looks nice,’ said Josie.

‘It’s Ben.’

‘What, the gorgeous one?’