Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (10 page)

I TOOK JIM FOR HIS WALK IN THE LITTLE PARK near the Prospect of Whitby, and there were four barge trains and three trip boats, all throwing up Bondi waves, which crashed into the walls below us. The tide was coming in and the wind was kicking up the water and I thought Oh my God.

Because Greenland Pier is in the way I would have to go past South Dock marina and then turn to come in with the current behind me—in other words out of control. I could not moor and rope the boat in because the pontoon had been washed away. But I had told South Dock we were coming and we could use the experience of waves. Should I ring up and ask how best to get in? I lacked the courage to do that.

So at three o’clock that afternoon there we were again in the Limehouse lock. The gates opened and the fury of the waters was revealed. My heart went into spasm and I couldn’t breathe. We’re clear, shouted Monica, and we set off for the impossible landfall.

But the boat was steady because we were going straight at the waves and twenty minutes later we passed Greenland Pier and turned and crabbed into the lock without hitting the walls and rose up into the basin.

We could be here for months, said Monica. I’m nearly better now. Shame really—Southwark looks a good place to be ill.

THE POOL OF SOUTH DOCK IS GUARDED BY iron gates. They will open for boaters with the secret code, except sometimes. There are notices outside—
please do not feed the boaters
. Around the pool are apartments for people who can afford to live by the river. A few of these buildings have a crazed grandeur, but not many. Behind them are Southwark and Lewisham, where the pavements are broken and tower blocks gnaw the sky.

We walked for a mile along the river but saw no one. The boaters had forgotten the secret code and the rest of the population were frightened of each other. Imagine the terror for a teenager stopped in the street by a lady banker and asked about the Hang Seng Index.

It was a long way to the shops and a long way to any grass and we were bored and frightened. Jim got into a fight with a Staffordshire bull terrier and stood his ground like a fool and lost some velvet from his ribs. The wind changed and it became sunny and hot. A week passed in inches.

MY MOTHER CAME BACK LAST NIGHT, I SAID. What did she say? asked Monica. I’m not sure, I said, it wasn’t a very clear appearance, but it was something about the air intake. She was unhappy and it made me frightened. It may not have been your mother, said Monica. We are right next to Dead Man’s Wharf, where the bodies come in. It could have been somebody else’s old ghost. What else did she say? She said I must go to the lavatory before we set out, I said. It was your mother right enough, said Monica.

Bifel that, in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage…

An e-mail arrived from the Principal of the Dover Sea School—
Thursday morning, 10.30 to 11.
Tomorrow we’ll put on the storm deck, said Monica. And ring Cousin Ken, perhaps he’ll come and take some pictures.

On Wednesday I swallowed sea-sickness pills and we went to bed. I was hanging on to a buoy, the green tide ripping at me, Jim in my arms. We were losing our core temperature and my fingers could not hold. Two bitter breaths and we would faint and it would be over.

Thank God they got Monnie off, I said to Jim, and he licked my face for the last time.

Four

THE SEA CAT

England to France

T
he Thames was low, running up. It was a bright day and there were no waves. This will do for the money shot, said Cousin Ken—Canary Wharf in the background and you for the open sea. Then I’ll run down to Dead Man’s Wharf and catch you again with that rotting pier in front. Ho ho, he said, it’ll be a killer.

We walked on with Jim and I thought about fear. The slow fear in the corner of your brain, the fear that punches you in the stomach, fear of the
horla
—the empty human shape that passes across you in the mirror and then you go mad, the fear that dries your mouth and trembles your voice: the shadow in the dark room, the nightmares of death. A killer, said Cousin Ken—two centuries of photography, all leading up to this.

In Pepys Park we let Jim off the lead but it was hot and he was lazy and began to wander about. We walked on in silence. Ken shouted—He’s on the road! I ran hard and stopped Jim with a shout and caught his collar. Sweat ran into my eyes and soaked my shirt. My lungs burned, my heart stuttered, and the sunlight went off-key like a film badly developed. I thought—It was only a hundred yards and I’m supposed to be fit. I couldn’t speak and Cousin Ken held me up. You’re dehydrated, he said. Hot day, too much beer, too much coffee, too much walking the dog. No, I said, it’s the sea-sickness pills, or the fear, or a heart attack.

We walked slowly back towards South Dock and the day lightened. I was more frightened than at any time before. Not about the heart attack, nor the roll of waves, nor the panic of drowning, but whether the Principal of the Dover Sea School would turn up and take us to Ramsgate. I had met him only once; I knew he had a pending job for Norway, and he was not answering his phone. I had so much experience of arrogant boatyards and I remembered my last pilot. If the Principal did not come I would be helpless and defeated and the fear of that humiliation drove me into myself and shortened my breath.

When we got to South Dock he had not arrived, and it was eleven o’clock. Father Christmas, in jeans, came along the quay—They say you are going to Ramsgate. Yes, I said. But you haven’t got a keel, he said. They roll over. No they don’t, I said. Have a good trip, he said.

At ten past eleven two men stood smiling on the quay, and Monica rushed to punch in the secret code. The Principal was huge and black-haired and black-bearded and the pilot was huge and bald all over. I had just shaved off my hair after the fiasco of the ponytail and we were a murderous bunch. The Principal tied down everything on the roof. You want to keep the flowers up there?—why not, you are an inland boat, you show ’em. He jumped up and down on the storm deck. Monica gave Jim two sedative pills and shut him in his kennel. We put on our life jackets and harnesses and Monica put on her bush hat.

THERE WASN’T MUCH SPACE IN THE MARINA and I was off form and it took us half an hour to reach the lock gate. As we went out on to the Thames the sun went dark again and my heart revved up. This time it’s the fear all right, I thought, but I wedged myself upright at the tiller and dragged in enough air to talk to the Principal at my side. Death itself would not stop us now.

We began to punch the tide behind a couple of yachts motoring to the sea. We waved to Cousin Ken as he made photographic history on Dead Man’s Wharf and we worked out the only way three people could stand on the back counter of a narrowboat without having sex.

Long ago, in the first London Marathon, Monica and I had run past the sailing ship
Cutty Sark
and seeing it gave us courage. The voyage round the coast to Ramsgate would take all day and most of the night, sometimes out of sight of land, and could be the most dangerous part of the crossing. But when the starting gun has fired you are not afraid any more.

Our long meander round the Isle of Dogs brought Canary Wharf alongside again and we remembered how the towers looked at dusk from South Dock, green and transparent. Goodbye, Dead Man’s Wharf. With luck we would be in Ramsgate before morning and, should the weather hold, tomorrow we would pull out the big one.

THE NINE HELMET-SHAPED TOWERS OF THE Thames Barrier are fifty yards apart. They swelled up and they swelled up. They shone silver in the sun: clothed in white metal, mystic, wonderful. The engines inside roll titanic gates from the bottom of the river, turning them on axles, so when the North Sea is hounded up the Thames by an east wind London is not engulfed. Look, the yacht is going through the wrong way—he’s against a red light, no he isn’t, it’s changed, oh hell, just go through. We passed the axles of the gates on the waterline, and looked up and up, for each helmet is as high as a five-storey house.

What does she cruise at? asked the Principal, into my ear in our rough manly embrace. About eighteen hundred revs, I said. That’s fine, he said—keep a bit in reserve. I swung down into the engine-room through the back hatch and Monica took over.

In the saloon the pilot was asleep in my chair. Jim was whining in his kennel. I opened the door and he fell out, crying and fighting against the drug. I’m sorry Jim, I said, but I’m doped up too. I carried him on to the sofa and he tried to lick me and looked around dazed—he wanted to be on the scene. The water was rushing just below the windows and the engine and the wind said you are on an express train, but this one doesn’t sway.

I made a cup of tea. The pilot woke up. I’ve been across in worse than this, he said. See this lump hammer, I said—if we run into trouble chuck it through the window and go out after it. There’s no other way out except the back—it’s a tomb. Very handy, said the pilot—two sugars please. I took some tea up to the Principal and Monica, then I had a cup of tea, then I had a carton of tomato juice, then a bottle of milk, then a low alcohol beer, then a pint of tonic water.

Through the window an orange inflatable. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution, thinking we had been swept down from Richmond while making whoopee in the cabin, had arrived to suggest we return to quieter waters. The three young men in black wetsuits could have represented their country in any event needing beauty and strength and a full set of teeth. They recognized the Principal, who had taught most of them, and tagged alongside joking with him and wheeled away with a roar and a flourish of spray. The blue freighter that had shared a lock with us at Sharpness overtook us, or was this one a bit more rusty? We felt the wake, but hardly.

BELOW THE BARRIER THE THAMES ESTUARY IS industrialized, in which there is no shame, and the banks are flat and far away so you can’t see what is going on. It’s magnificent, but it’s not the Trent and Mersey Canal. No flowers, no green fields, no trees, no pubs, no families of fowl, no towpaths, no lockside chat. And no Moby-Dick heaves his body from the deep, no flying fish leap aboard, no dolphins frolic, no forests of weed under the glassy cool translucent wave. Just blue-grey water, with a fine smoky finish, but just water, miles and bloody miles of it. And you don’t get anywhere—nothing on shore gets nearer or further. It’s like waiting for a kettle.

The pilot suggested another cup of tea and said he had spoken with the Principal and the
Phyllis May
was steadier than they expected—too long to pitch and ballasted like one of those toys. I looked out of the window and a yacht lurched by. Yachts have keels but they are fat and plastic with rounded bottoms—they roll. And they have masts to tip them over. The
Phyllis May
is thin and heavy and hunkers down and each side is straight like a sixty-foot keel and she hardly rolls at all. Up yours, Santa Claus. The pilot went back to sleep.

Ah, here’s something. After three and a half hours the Queen Elizabeth Bridge across the sky. It was loaded with cars going very slowly. We could turn on the traffic report and have a laugh. A year ago such a bridge would have been one of our best moments. Now it’s a bridge. That’s right, Jim: sleep, my pretty one, sleep, my little one. Time for a drop of tonic water.

AFTER SIX HOURS WE WERE OPPOSITE CANVEY Island and out at sea. You couldn’t see Canvey Island, but the Principal said it was there and I am sure it is an excellent place. But we could see the chimney at the entrance to the Medway, and it took only a day and a half to pass it.

I held the tiller and struggled with the cramps in my hand. If I relaxed the muscles they hurt and if I squeezed them they hurt and I tried to think about something else. I had left my harness below—there was no need to walk the gunwale, because the front of the boat was closed and there was nowhere to go. And despite what they said in the books I had taken the crotch strap off my life jacket.
He is going to be all right, Mrs. Darlington, his crotch strap saved his life, but he is not the man he was. Oh, you want us to throw him back?

We passed the wreck of the American munitions ship
Richard Montgomery
, which went down in 1944. It held its arms out of the sea imploringly, but no one will blow it up. It is left as an ornament along the way, perhaps to save some sailor’s sanity.
Here Taff, look at the nice masts sticking up—can’t
be far from land now, nice masts, not boring like the old sea—oh God, take him back down
.

There were waves now—force three or even four, said the Principal. The boat climbed the swells and smashed down, but there was in the hull such strength, even grace, and from the engine such power driving us on, that I felt in control and exhilarated and looked for bigger waves to climb.

We had forgotten to take the wind generator down and the three-foot propeller screamed and fizzed. Steer by the shadow of the generator pole, said the Principal, like a sundial. This was a new skill and an hour passed as I learned it. The Principal kept tapping into a sort of mobile phone that told him where we were. We could have had a compass on the top here, he said, and I thought, That’s a good idea, a compass.

The sun was going down and the wind dropped and I began to steer from some clouds, which were high up so I hoped they were not moving too much. Then there was a ship but that was no good as a mark because it came and went across our horizon. Other ships were further out, cities of containers, slowly moving away. We were opposite Whitstable but out of sight of land.

Ah, there it is, said the Principal, the buoy. On the horizon was a speck the size of a flea’s earhole. Go for that, he said. I looked and it had gone. There was a cloud though way up in the blue, and I headed for the cloud, hoping it was not going anywhere in particular. I braced my legs against the sway of the boat, and enjoyed the waves, the pearly water, the setting sunlight, as we drove into the dusk.

SIT DOWN AND HAVE A PORK PIE, SAID MONICA. It was night, and the boat was bumping and moving sharply. We braced against the furniture. Jim slid off the sofa in a heap of legs and Monica picked him up and comforted him. The pilot slept in my chair, his forearms like marrows, his tattoos faded to pastels. The water under the windows was black, and there was foam. You could see nothing else.

At every wave the propeller was breaking the surface, grinding air and water, and the boat shuddered and the engine roared with pain. I sat in Monica’s chair and went to sleep. Monica curled up on the sofa with Jim and went to sleep. The boat rose and smashed and roared, and the booze in the cold cupboard tried to break its way out.

MIDNIGHT AND WE HAD BEEN GOING FOR twelve hours. I woke to the sudden death of a bottle of beer, put on my life jacket, stumbled back to the engine-room and heaved myself out of the hatch. The Principal handed over the tiller and we settled into a position that you would find in any reliable marriage manual. I put my weight on one leg then the other, leaning on the side of the hatch, riding the boat as it roared on. There was nothing but the night, and I can’t see at night.

Watch out for that buoy, said the Principal. What buoy? I said. We’re not there yet, said the Principal, but it’s a red one—it doesn’t show up because it hasn’t got a light. I strained into the darkness, looking for a buoy you couldn’t see, and wondered what it was like to run into a buoy at night. I worked out the chances of hitting it and felt they were low but found little comfort. It’s over there, said the Principal, pointing into the encircling gloom—we missed it by five miles—better steer a bit to port now. I swerved to the right then to the left. We turned on our navigation lights but our front light on a stalk blinded me, and I was shaken when a fishing boat came across us heading for the shore. I could just see the yellow oilskins and nets. We blacked out and charged on incognito.