Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (8 page)

He broke out a fresh needle. This will hurt—more when I draw the outline, and not so much when I am filling in. He pricked the tattoo into my arm. He was very gentle. It hurt, but not as much as running up a hill. One more of us, said Raymondo, one less of them.

Monica kept taking my bandage off to look. A couple of days later she went across the road. When she came back she had along her arm a Chinese dragon. Monica is small, and it was a big dragon. She looked like the sign for a Chinese takeaway. Raymondo wanted it done in two goes, she said, but I had it done in one.

In the showers at Stone Master Marathoners she went down a storm with the other girls. At every chance she wore a singlet, particularly among her middle-class friends, who pretended not to notice.

They’ll know us by the pictures on our skin, said Monica—and Raymondo said he’d do Jim. They’ll know Jim anyway, I said, and he’s already got the map of Indonesia across his belly and his privates.

I HOPE WE GET AWAY ON TIME, MONNIE, I SAID. I can’t go down the High Street. People keep stopping me and wishing me luck. I don’t know most of them. They shake my hand and look into my eyes, as if they are seeing me for the last time. I keep trying to explain that if it starts to look dangerous, it’s the lorry, and the ferry, and the crane, but they don’t listen. I don’t like being a public figure before I have done anything.

Perhaps that’s how it happens, said Monica. You know Roger Bannister, when he ran the first four-minute mile, I bet he never meant to. One day he turned up at Iffley Road running track and there was Chataway and Brasher and the rest of his mates, and they shook his hand and looked into his eyes and gave him his shoes. I bet he was scared stiff and would rather have gone to the pictures.

Can’t we make up our minds? Monica asked. Everyone says different things, I said. Half of them say it can be done and half say we are crazy. And everyone knows someone who has been across and I spend days tracking them down and when I speak to them they haven’t or they did it in another sort of boat. But it’s too early to decide. Let’s go to London—we’ve got four weeks to think about it on the way—we’ll get across somehow and get to Paris too.

WE DIDN’T MAKE MUCH OF OUR PARTING, on April Fool’s Day. We embraced Peter and his wife, who had brought the
Phyllis May
to the stage where they would almost have sailed in it themselves. The gentlemen who worked in the boatyard kissed Monica. One of them was crying—Monica had known his mother.

A couple of friends and our elder daughter came to wave us away. You’ll be fine, Dad, said Lucy—just send an e-mail that you would like me to have the Nepal carpet with the lotus flowers. Me, not Georgia. Georgia can have the wooden lion from Nigeria. But you’ll get across, don’t worry. And Clifford can have your watch, if they find you. It’s waterproof, isn’t it? You don’t know to what sort of depth, by any chance?

The Trent Valley was grey and green and brown, with willows, alder, poplars, and the blackthorn fired with white sparks. We moored at Weston and when we woke there was mist on the cut and the fields sifted with frost and the early sun in his glory.

Boating in the summertime is great, but it is not like the real thing. In the winter I pull branches out of the cut and fill the log-box that says
Phyllis May
on the front side and
Kiss Me Again
on the backside. Each log is handmade and I grieve for them when I open the stove, but you’ve got to let them go. They give heat you can hear, heat you can smell, heat you can see, heat that makes toast.

After breakfast I turn the key in the engine-room, rise like a centaur through the hatch, close the door behind my bum, put on my Russian hat with the flaps, and arrange my properties on the roof—map, binoculars, radio, boathook, camera. I push the throttle handle and the prop grips the water and I swing the tiller and the stern moves out from the bank. Straighten up, and Hurrah for the North-west Passage.

I like the heat from the engine warming my legs. I like the
Knock knock
Here Terry and the coffee passed up and the plates of ice vibraphoning quarter-tones along the hull and the sun and the snow on the banks, and the fields that climb out of the valley, outshining the bright clouds. I like the trees, veins reflecting no light, and the barbed wire of the bushes. One morning I saw a kingfisher scatter snow from a bush and head straight up. The sky was blue, but not as blue as the kingfisher.

At dinner we drink red wine and the sleet wobbles down the window and the radio croons and the stove roars and the wind generator moans and trees sigh and whistle.

We are in bed, warm in our steel Anderson shelter, when the Jerry rain machine-guns the roof. The storm rocks Jim in his cradle, and behind the stove Monica’s horse-brasses clink and glow—
the antique shapes of kings and kesars straunge and rare
.

IF YOU FALL UPON HARD TIMES, OR EVEN IF you don’t, you need not starve in Rugeley: a Lilliput town of squares and flowers. Every other shop is a charity shop, selling CDs of Milt Jackson playing upon the vibraphone, orphan volumes of the
Oxford History of England
, T-shirts from ruined car dealers and little glasses with Spanish dancers. In the indoor market they do all-day breakfasts for a pound. The tea, the tea—it’s made from the bits that are left on the factory floor, the bits with all the flavour. The eggs are sunny side up and so is the service. The bread is real bread, the white floppy bread we had in the war, and the margarine is made from boiled cows, none of your sunflower lite crap. The bacon is chewy and salty—excuse me, I must visit the fridge. Goodness, that’s better. South to Fradley, in light snow.

THIS SPRING WE WOULD TAKE A DIFFERENT route—the Coventry Canal and the Oxford Canal and down the Thames to London. At Fazeley Junction near Tamworth Jim and I went to the newsagent and when we came back Monica had gone ahead. Jim could tell she had not gone towards Birmingham, and pulled me down the Coventry Canal and at a fast walk we caught her up.

Sometimes when I follow another boat on a still morning I can tell if they are having tea or coffee—I can tell if their bacon is smoked. For a dog it must be like that all the time. Jim knows what has happened in the past because it leaves traces. He can hear things we can’t hear and he can see in the dark and he can see into the future. He knows what I am going to do before I know myself. He can tell where I am going to sit, and gets there first. He knows forty minutes before I take him to the pub. Dogs tell by changes in your brain waves, and by your quick, nervous movements.

At Polesworth we moored on the side of a hill and walked round to the main street, always seeing the canal a couple of hundred yards away across the valley. The big second-hand bookshop had gone—why it was ever there we could not guess, because Polesworth is a small village and poor. We walked on in the spring sun and saw Jim across the road. As he was on his lead at my feet and I was holding the lead this puzzled us. We looked again and he had gone so we followed the imposter up a lane towards the church.

There were two imposters, both fawn like Jim: the ears, the whip tail, the muscle, the delicate feet—two imposters just the same. And there was another whippet, a bitch. No potter could have caught her brindling in his glaze, no painter her sadness, no sculptor her grace. Jim greeted his fellows with enthusiasm. Their owner seemed unmoved. They are mine, he said—whippets.

Going back to the boat we saw whippets round corners, behind hedges, and just over the valley, nearly out of sight. By my troth, Monica, I said, this is a funny place. There are three dozen whippets in the world and most of them are here.

Back at the boat we let Jim off for a run. We don’t often let him off on his own, but there was a long field and no road nearby. We went into the boat and had a cup of coffee, musing upon the whippets we had seen, and on the whippets we had seen before them.

It was only a chap with whippets, I said. People have whippets. We’ve got one ourselves. I know they are not common but they exist—I mean where did Jim come from—there must have been at least two in Grimsby or he could not have taken place. It was just a chap with whippets and the others were imaginary—nervous whippets. It’s the Channel stretching our nerves. We didn’t really see them, they were round corners and things. I saw one, said Monica, a black one. He looked at me. He had a pink tongue—oh just a minute.

Don’t worry, said the lady on the phone, I’ve got him, he’s going to be all right. My God, said Monica, he has run off, I bet he was on the road, he could have been killed. Where are you? she asked the lady. I’m on the towpath, by a long grey boat, she said, the
Phillip Moy
. There’s a propeller on top and primroses. We looked through the window and there was a lady with a phone to her ear, and Jim held by the collar, wriggling.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable
, must be the truth, said Monica later. There is only one explanation, my dear Watson, that fits the known facts. The lady had been out for a walk and she met a chap who had lost a whippet. A fawn whippet. She promised to look out for him. Then she came across Jim by the boat. She grabbed him and read his collar and rang the phone number. It’s a question of too many whippets, really.

We sailed away and looked back and there were whippets running over the hills and fields: fawn whippets, black whippets, whippets broken in white and brown, or brindled in colours no potter will catch.

THE WATERWAYS GUIDE SAID ATHERSTONE WAS a pleasant town, with a strong eighteenth-century feeling. A wide towpath with mooring rings, coal barges, warehouses with broken windows, gardens of rubbish. A bed of narcissi coming into bloom. The local youth walked by and shouted and scuffled and went away. Jim and I walked into town.

The off-licences were netted in steel and the gutters were drifts of cigarette butts. In the newsagent’s the packets carried new warnings—

If you smoke you will die but first your sexual organs will wither and drop off—If you smoke one cigarette from this packet you are a fucking lunatic—If you smoke you will become incontinent and hair will grow out of your ears and you will be unable to put on your socks.

Does it make any difference? I asked the lady. No, she said.

Some youths charged by in a red car. They shouted abuse at Jim and me and pressed on to the next village to kill somebody. A young woman stopped me—A dog like that: would he be a good guard dog? He looks a nice dog but would he look after me? Would he keep me safe, I mean round here? Is he fierce? Does he bark? He can bark, I said, but he won’t. In fact he can talk, but he won’t. But he’s all boy, I mean he’s a spirited dog. Jim laid back his ears, looked up, and grinned abjectly. He’s not very frightening, is he? said the young lady.

We were inside the pedestrian area but a red car came thumping at us over the kerbs. This is it, I thought—no December years, no France, no Carcassonne—raped and eaten by the youth of Atherstone. But it was a different car. A pale gentleman with bad teeth leaned out. The dog, he lisped, I like that dog—how much would you have to pay for a nice little dog like that? There’s a pretty little dog, he said to Jim, and took out his wallet. Then a woman in the passenger seat started to hit him on his arms and shoulders and he let in the clutch and thumped back towards the road.

Jim and I strolled on, marvelling at the spherical women with black leggings and their cloned daughters, waddling like coots between the boarded shops. A brown lady offered a happy smile and a leaflet for a kebab house. We stopped for a pint. On the bar was the
Daily Stoat
. It didn’t take me long to read it and I wished I hadn’t.

What was Atherstone like? asked Monica, as we waited for our lamb shishka to come along the towpath. A pleasant town, I replied, with a strong eighteenth-century feeling.

That night the local youth let the coal barges off their moorings and drained the pound behind us. They ragged the bed of narcissi and threw the broken flowers across the towpath. Monica gathered them and put them in water and as we left Atherstone the sun shone through them and filled the boat with perfume.

THERE ARE PLACES WHERE THE CANAL IS crowded—Great Haywood near Stone, Little Venice in London, Braunston Junction on the Oxford Canal. But normally it’s the loneliness, doctor, the loneliness and the ducks. We sought a mooring at Braunston—the junk shop, the pub, the butcher, the church on the hill. Early communion on Easter Sunday—the new minister, her voice gentle, enough people there, not all old.

After deciding the width of the canals the eighteenth-century engineers chose to have as few locks as possible and to follow the contours. But contours do not go anywhere in particular and sometimes the navvies digging the cut found themselves back where they started or further away and the investors were writing letters.

The Oxford Canal around Fenny Compton is so tortured that I looked up from the tiller and saw the
Phyllis May
going round the bend in front of me. But perhaps I was distracted, because we had sailed past a moored boat called
Elizabeth Jane. Jane Howard was so beautiful that continuous problems arose
, wrote Robert Aickman, saviour of the waterways.
Little in the way of completely normal business was possible when she was in the room
. I set out backwards to have another look at the narrowboat
Elizabeth Jane
.