The Crossing, page 14
On deck she picks her way up to the pulpit rail, checks the rail, the forestay, the plate, the bow roller, cleats, fairleads, walks slowly backwards, touching everything as she comes to it, testing it. It is at first just an impersonation of purpose but by degrees becomes what it mimicked. At the mast she looks up, following the ascent of ropes to where they disappear into the sheaves like streams into the earth. Spreaders, reflector, the masthead light. She moves to the cockpit and uses her fingers to dig out leaf rot, dig out God knows what from the cockpit drains. She opens the left-hand seat locker and connects up the gas bottle for the galley stove. She stands by the tiller. The boat, lifted, is on course for the upper boughs of oak trees. She has hardly noticed that it’s raining, gusts of it crossing the river, beading her hair, the whole valley swallowed in a cloud.
Below her, the yard looks deserted. She wipes the water from her face, steps through the companionway, shuts the hatch and lies down on one of the benches, cold hands between her thighs.
When she wakes it’s late afternoon. Through the delicate crazing of the saloon window she watches the reinvention of colour, the low sun flooding the valley, the oddness of a day that grows brighter rather than darker at its close. A figure in red is crossing the yard towards her. She watches him then pushes back the hatch and steps into the coolness of the rain-cleaned air. He waves to her, and when he’s closer, standing at the foot of the ladder squinting up at her, he says, ‘Chris told me you were here. Want me to run a cable up?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Please.’
‘Tomorrow morning O.K.?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re down for a while?’
‘Yes.’
‘When do you want to get her in the water?’
‘I’m not sure. A week?’
‘Well, you’re ahead of the crowd. That shouldn’t be a problem.’
Silence.
‘I’ll see you in the morning then.’
‘Yes. O.K.’
He waves again and rurns back towards the boat shed. On the far side of the river the sun is dropping behind the hills. There are patches of gold on the bank behind her but the yard and the river are already being sifted into the first blue of twilight. She will need to find things before it’s dark—the lantern, the torch, the sleeping bag that has overwintered in the quarter berth. People are not supposed to sleep on the cradled boats but she has made no other arrangement. She can use the sink and toilets at the marina. There’s tinned food on board, a bottle of water in her bag. She will not be noticed. Other than the broker and Robert Currey, there’s not a living soul who knows she is here.
Twice during the night she comes to in the dark with all her senses alert. The first time she does not know where she is, can feel only the constriction of the bag, the nearness of unlit walls. It is the boat’s smell and the dank odour of the unaired sleeping bag that bring her back. Then again, hours later, opening her eyes to a glassy light and the sketched clutter of the cabin, the barometer’s brass edge like a setting moon. In between—between one waking and the next—hours of dreamless sleep and a rest truer than she has known in months.
At seven-thirty she’s in the cockpit dismantling a winch that does not, perhaps, really need dismantling. Robert Currey arrives waving a thermos and a white paper bag that turns out to have a bacon sandwich in it.
She comes down the ladder to him. The sandwich smells delicious. As soon as he passes it to her she takes it out of the bag and starts to eat.
‘I guessed you were going to sleep up there,’ he says. ‘No skin off my nose but it’s against the rules. And you don’t have a great record for knowing where the edge of a boat is.’
‘That was once,’ she says, her mouth full of bread and bacon. By quarter past nine she has power cable and a plan of work. By ten she’s wearing overalls and goggles and using the jet spray to sluice the bottom of the boat. What she can’t clean off with the spray she scrapes off with the edge of a palette knife then rubs down with wet-and-dry. The sun comes out and she steps from under the shadow of the boat, holds her face up to the warmth of it.
After lunch she begins to patch-prime the gel-coat, then crosses to the town on the chain ferry to buy anti-foul. The ferry has only four cars on it and a recycling truck, a few foot passengers. The money is collected by a man with a leather saddlebag. The crossing takes seven minutes and everything he does, the little conversations, the handing out of change, the stroll to the ferry gates, is timed to perfection. He cannot help it.
In the town the cafes and seafront kiosks are mostly shut, their flyers still announcing the previous summer’s fishing trips, the motorboat rentals whose prices will go up by a pound or two this year. A man on a stepladder paints the woodwork of his souvenir shop. A traffic warden sits on a bollard looking at the water.
The chandlery is smaller than the chip shop next door to it, but inside, over two floors (and on the edges of the stairs) is almost everything a boat, a boat-owner, even a boat-builder, might have need of. Snap shackles, ratchet blocks, battery boxes, hand flares, sea boots, fenders, tidal atlases, bilge pumps. Drums of coloured polyester braid, shock cord, PVC hose by the metre. Skin fittings, cable glands, grapnel anchors. The woman who works there—sometimes there is a girl too but the woman is always there—knows what you need better than you know it yourself, yet she looks as if she has no particular interest in boats, does not sail, does not perhaps much care for the sea. She points Maud towards the shelves of paint along the back wall then watches her from the end of the aisle, this young woman she has, she thinks, seen before. Quite what is wrong with her—and something is—she cannot say. Tempting to imagine she’s on the drink—boat people often are. But her skin looked clear, her eyes. Nor, when she comes back to the counter, does she smell of drink. She pays with a card, carries the paint, a pot in each hand, towards the door, but stops beside the charts, puts the paint down and stays for nearly forty minutes, her fingers walking to and fro across the tops of the plastic envelopes. With another customer, a different sort of customer, the woman might have offered some assistance, but this one either knows exactly what she’s doing or she hasn’t a clue. When she comes to the counter again she has Admiralty charts 4011 and 4012. ‘And these,’ she says, a little burr to her voice, not Devon though. The woman puts them in a bag. The North Atlantic Northern Part and North Atlantic Southern Part, respectively. It all seems clear enough now, and when she leaves the shop, steps into the street where two gulls are scrapping over a chip in the gutter, the woman leans by the window to watch her go and thinks we won’t be seeing you again, and this thought strikes her like a prophesy, so that for several minutes she does not know whether to make more tea or rearrange the footwear display on the first floor. And this is not like her. It is not like her at all.
2
The next morning Maud pulls on her overalls over jeans and jumper, brews coffee, eats a banana, eats a square of chocolate and goes on deck. She sits on the coach-house roof, looking upriver to where the water and the light meet. She rolls a cigarette from a pouch bought in the town. She is becoming better at rolling, better at smoking.
When she has finished her cigarette she goes down the ladder with one of the tins of anti-foul. Yesterday, in the late afternoon, she taped the boat’s waterline. Now she walks slowly around the hull, checking her work. When she is satisfied, she opens the tin and pours some paint into a tray, coats the mohair roller and begins to paint. She’s been at it for an hour, her eyes starting to smart, when Robert Currey comes over with a box of disposable gloves and a pair of plastic goggles.
‘There’s a reason it keeps stuff off the bottom of boats,’ he says.
In one of his pockets he finds a rag, finds a corner cleaner than the others and wipes a splash of anti-foul from the back of her right hand. It takes only a few seconds and during those seconds neither of them speak.
By lunchtime she has the first coat finished and steps away from the boat to get the smell of it out of her mouth. The yard is busier today though most boats still look unattended. On the slipway, Robert Currey and another yardsman are working on a pleasure boat, a converted survey boat once called Skagen, now called Tinkerbelle and strung with bunting. Robert Currey, disappearing down a hatchway, stops to wave and Maud waves back.
The second coat of paint goes on the following day. According to the instructions the paint should have the thickness of a business card, like those cards, mostly unused, she has in a box in the car—Maud Stamp, Senior Clinical Associate.
By mid-afternoon the paint is dry enough to peel off the tape. It’s not a perfect job but it’s good enough. She touches up, wipes away any unevenness with a rag dipped in solvent. She is booked in with the launching crane for next Monday. That gives her two more days to do whatever must be done in the dry. What is not done, what is missed, will have to stay that way. This she has already decided. On Monday the boat will go into the water and she will go into the boat. There are no alternatives, certainly none she can think of. Go back to the cottage? Go back to those things she spoke of to the dreamed head of Rawlins? Behind her the way has closed. She has closed it herself or something beyond her closed it. It hardly matters. She cannot wait any longer. The one thing that feels genuinely dangerous is stillness.
The night before the launch she goes down to the marina toilet block with her towel and wash bag. It’s late and there’s no one else in the block, no one she can hear. She undresses, puts her clothes in a locker, steps into the cubicle, puts a pound coin in the slot, turns on the shower. The water’s cold. It shocks her. Then it starts to heat up and the cubicle fills with steam and her skin glows pink. She looks at herself through the steam. A blackened thumbnail; three little bruises on each shin, a long graze high on her left thigh from some forgotten collision, perhaps with the edge of the saloon table while she manoeuvred in the dark. The timer ticks. The water slides in sheets of light over her breasts and belly and thighs. She remembers Camille showing her her tattoo, saying it meant fuck me until I cry and making a face like a girl crying. She has not had a single sexual thought in four months. Neither, in four months, has she bled. Are these things connected? She touches herself, very lightly, a ringless ring finger in the dark hair between her thighs, presses at the lips of her sex then lets the tip of her finger slide into the heat inside her. She leans against the wall of the cubicle, hooks her finger a little deeper, a little deeper. She’s not a fool; she’s not naive; she knows that desire, memory and grief are wound together like strands in a wire. What she does not know is what she should do about it. She slides her finger out. The ticking of the timer grows louder, then stops. She does not have another coin. She dries herself quickly, pulls on clothes over skin still clammy. When she comes out into the washroom she sees that she is not alone, though she heard no one come in. A woman is at one of the sinks, a woman of sixty or more, stripped to the waist and soaping herself under her arms. On the woman’s back, either side of her spine and running down from her shoulder blades, are two lines of scar tissue. The mirror shows a weathered face and eyes of narrowed gold. For a few seconds she studies Maud in the glass as if trying to decide whether or not she knows her. Then she nods and smiles. It might be taken for approval. It might be taken for ‘Keep going!’
3
The crane driver is a young man basking in the last of his youth. He has red-blond hair that will be blond entirely by midsummer, a face that is starting to talk about him, to give him away, though looked at casually he can still be whatever you want him to be. He lounges by the ladder to his cab watching Robert Currey and Maud make last-minute preparations for the lift. The morning’s rain has blown through. In a painted box outside the marina office a half-dozen awkward daffodils are dotted with the rain. On the road down to the yard one shade of green is slowly moving through another.
Chris Totten comes out to watch. Over the next few weeks many of the boats in the yard, those that are not forgotten, will find their way back into the water, but Lodestar is one of the first and he never tires, not quite, of that moment when a boat is settled onto its reflection. He makes remarks to Maud, compliments her on how the boat is looking (would, perhaps, like to compliment her on how she is looking, which is slightly better than she did when she arrived), then goes over to smoke with the crane driver. ‘Your busy time now,’ he says, and the crane driver nods.
On the boat’s topside Robert Currey is bolting shut the sling. He hangs off the shackle, swings off it, then calls, ‘All right. She’s yours!’ The crane driver climbs into his cab. He puts on sunglasses. All his movements are confident. He takes up the slack in the wire and for an instant the weight of the boat and the force of the crane are perfectly balanced. Then the boat lifts free and the sling creaks and everybody is perfectly still.
When it’s in the water and free of the gear, Maud goes on board to take it round to a visitor’s berth on the pontoon. This is where she will do the next phase of the work, but when she turns the ignition key there’s a belch of smoke, a brief thudding of pistons, then silence. She slides below, lifts off the companionway steps and looks at the colour of the fuel in the separator. Not clear red, not even amber. She drains the bowl, finds a spare filter in the locker of spare and useful things under the starboard berth in the forecabin, fits the filter, slacks off the bleed screw, works the fuel pump, tightens the screw, clambers up into the cockpit and turns the key again. The engine starts. She casts off and brings the boat round to the pontoon. Robert Currey takes her lines.
‘You’re good with that engine,’ he says.
‘I should have checked it before,’ she says.
‘Even so, you sorted it. And no one checks everything.’
She steps onto the pontoon, fusses with a bow spring. When she has it as she wants it she stands and says, ‘I need some things.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘A self-steering vane.’
‘O.K.’ He walks to the stern of the boat, examines it for a moment. ‘No problem getting a vane on there,’ he says. ‘Want me to source one for you?’
She nods. ‘And lazy jacks for reefing. And a new mainsail halyard.’
‘You’ll want a rigger then. Unless you fancy trying it yourself? I’ll give Mal a call. When he’s sober he’s about the best you’ll find on this piece of coast. What else?’
‘I’m going to take the guard rail off. Fit more U bolts.’
‘Clip on,’ he says, ‘rather than wait for the rail to catch you nicely behind the knees. O.K. And what about a jackstay?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Down the centre line.’
‘Wire or rope?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Wire will be noisy. You can get plastic-sheathed stuff but then you can’t see if there’s a problem with the wire.’
‘Rope.’
‘Rope it is.’
‘I can do a lot of it,’ she says.
‘I know that.’
‘I don’t have all the tools.’
He nods. ‘You’re going out on your own.’
‘I’ve done it before.’
‘But you’re going further this time.’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ Then, ‘yes.’
‘Can I ask you something? What’s the furthest you’ve been on your own?’
‘Cowes.’
‘The Isle of Wight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you sailed at night on your own?’
‘No.’
He nods again, looks upriver to where the tide is sliding from the mud flats. There are a few dinghies out, the usual comings and goings around the foreshore.
‘I’m no sailor,’ he says. ‘I can build most of a boat but that’s about it. The boats here, Maud, all these boats here, they’re basically sound. They’re not going to suddenly open up. They won’t go to the bottom the first time a wave breaks over the deck. The question is always who’s sailing them. And sailing alone, well, it’s a frame-of-mind thing, isn’t it?’
He waits, gives her a chance to reply, to reassure him. A chance even to tell him to keep his nose out, to back off. When she says nothing, just stands there on the slats of the pontoon looking at him in a way that makes it impossible to know if she has understood him, he says, ‘Can you be ready to start at seven tomorrow morning? I can do a couple of hours with you before I have to go back to Tinkerbelle. Maybe we can do some more in the evenings. There’s plenty of light now.’
‘I’ll pay you the proper rate,’ she says.
‘Let’s worry about that later,’ he says.
‘I haven’t lost my job,’ she says. ‘I’m on leave.’
‘On leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all right then,’ he says.
4
With Robert Currey beside her, nothing in the work feels too difficult, nothing overwhelms. The canvas tool bag, the pantomime fish—always seems to have what they need. Several times during these mornings and evenings with Currey she remembers working with Grandfather Ray, the pair of them in his garage with the pre-cut parts of the dinghy, the smell of glue and resin, the Calor gas from the heater. Her hair in a plait then, her small hands passing out the tools. The radio on. The old man quietly whistling. Some slung lamp on a flex they worked beneath.
She does not mention any of this to Robert Currey. When they talk it’s about the boat, the work in hand. They fit a new bow roller, a new samson post. They fit the U bolts—one either side of the cockpit, low down, so that she could, in theory, clip on before leaving the cabin; two each side going forward, all of them with steel backing plates and lock nuts.
