Revenge of the Tide (3 page)

I
t got better as the evening wore on, which was a relief. By the time I had done the first tour, Carla and Simone had arrived by train and taxi, and after the second tour the boat and the deck and the pontoon were full of people, most of them from the marina, outnumbering the townies and making the party come alive.

Joanna and Liam came with the lasagne and two whole cheesecakes, Maureen and Pat brought more beer, Roger and Sally brought a keg of their homebrew and a bag full of home-made bread. Diane and Steve came without their children but with a two-way baby monitor, which worked just fine given that their boat was only about ten feet away. Joanna had also brought a present of a couple of strings of fairy lights, which were duly strung up around the deck and made the boat look pretty and festive as the sun set at last and darkness fell.

There was no sign of Caddy. I wondered if I’d been enthusiastic enough with my invitation. For a long time she had been the closest thing I had to a best friend in London, and I missed her, I wanted to see her again. If I couldn’t invite Dylan, there was nothing stopping me asking Caddy. But she hadn’t made it.

I’d only spoken to her a few times since I’d left. She still hadn’t forgiven me properly for leaving in such a hurry. When I called her, it seemed to take her several minutes to thaw out before we could relax enough to have a laugh.

‘What sort of a party?’ she’d asked.

‘Oh, you know. Just a party. Maybe to show off the boat.’

‘Will there be any nice blokes there?’

A mental image of Malcolm had flashed through my mind. ‘Well…’

‘Oh, alright, then. I guess so. You’ll have to text me the address.’

‘How’s the club?’ I’d asked, the way I always did.

‘It’s alright. Quiet at the moment. New girls started last week, crap most of them. No real competition any more.’

There was a pause. She knew what I was really asking and she always left me hanging. Sometimes she made me ask it; sometimes she took pity on me.

‘Dylan’s not been in the club much. Fitz has got him doing something, I think.’

‘How is he?’

‘Grumpy, same as always.’

And she’d laughed.

Where
was
she?

I found myself penned into the corner of the dinette by Malcolm and Joanna, somehow involved in a protracted discussion with Lucy about the toilet system and how it worked.

‘But what about the shower?’ Lucy shouted above the chatter in the cabin. Joanna was heating up bread in the galley, banging cupboard doors open and shut in the vain hope of finding a baking tray.

‘What about it?’ Malcolm said, his voice challenging. He had a thing about his hair – he never used shampoo to wash it, which wasn’t a problem as far as he was concerned, but he got defensive if he thought someone was suggesting he was in some way grubby or unkempt.

‘Well,’ said Lucy, ‘not putting too fine a point on it, it’s a hose.’

‘I know it’s a hose,’ I said. ‘It won’t always be a hose.’

Oh, God, I’m drunk,
I thought.
I’m drunk already.

I looked at my watch. Caddy should be here by now. Why wasn’t she?

Malcolm said, ‘Most people have bathrooms on board but, just in case, there’s showers near the office. They’re kept really clean and nice.’

‘Oh, you mean like on a campsite?’ Lucy said, although the closest she had come to camping was two half-day visits to Glastonbury, and even then she had stayed in a hotel.

‘Yeah, kind of. But cleaner,’ Malcolm said.

‘Look, I’m building a bathroom at the end. A proper one with a bath,’ I said, anxious that she wouldn’t think I was intending to spend the rest of my life roughing it.

Malcolm coughed.

‘I’ll have it ready by Christmas, honest. It’s going to have a proper bath, and after that I’m going to install an outdoor shower in my conservatory.’

‘Your what?’

‘I’m going to put a sliding roof on, beyond the bedroom. There’s going to be about ten feet or so of deck that I can open up to the elements, with a shower. Then right at the bow I’ll put another room – maybe an office or a snug or something.’

‘It sounds like a lot of hard work,’ said Joanna with a sympathetic smile.

‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I can work at my own pace.’

‘How’s the money side of it? Five months without an income would kill me,’ said Lucy.

That’s because you spend all your money on clothes,
I found myself thinking. ‘It’s not going too badly. I’ve still got savings.’

‘I thought you spent it all on the boat?’

‘Not quite all of it.’

There was a pause. I was waiting for her to say something else – daring her. Malcolm was looking from me to Lucy and back again.

‘So what job was it you did in London?’ he asked.

‘Sales,’ I said, before Lucy could answer. ‘You heard of ERP software? It stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It’s a big software package: you sell the core system to multinational organisations and then after that you keep trying to sell them bolt-on modules. You know, accounting modules, human resources, that kind of thing.’

Malcolm’s eyes had glazed over.

‘It’s sales, basically,’ I went on. ‘Doesn’t matter what you sell, the same principles apply. Except in our case it was high-pressure because we were accessing buyers at boardroom level, and trying to persuade them to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds.’

‘And ninety per cent of the time,’ Lucy chipped in, ‘we were selling to blokes. And the rest of the sales team were all blokes. They try and say that sexual inequality is a thing of the past, but let me tell you it’s alive and well in the world of corporate ERP sales.’

Malcolm had stopped listening, but Joanna was still with us. ‘You were the only two women on the sales team? Out of how many?’

‘Twenty in total,’ Lucy said. ‘And we were the first two they’d ever had. It was like being the first girls allowed to play in the treehouse.’

‘I bet that was tough,’ Joanna said.

‘Still is,’ Lucy said. ‘Except I’m now the only girl in the treehouse, since Genevieve walked out.’

Joanna and Malcolm both looked at me in surprise.

‘I’d had enough,’ I said. ‘All I wanted was to save up the money for the boat. After that I didn’t want to hang around.’

‘Must have been a good job, though, to earn you enough to buy a boat.’

Lucy dived in before I could stop her. ‘Ah, well, Genevieve had two jobs, didn’t you, Gen?’

‘Most of the money was from sales,’ I fibbed.

‘Genevieve worked in a club,’ Lucy said. She was looking directly at me, her expression unreadable.

My face felt hot. Across the other side of the cabin I could see Ben talking to Diane; both of them were laughing. He was so tall that he was almost stooping slightly, even though the ceiling was above six feet. He looked beautiful, and unreachable.

Liam appeared at the top of the steps. ‘Joanna? Where’s that scoopy thing for this cheesecake?’

‘What “scoopy thing”? You mean a spoon?’

‘Yeah, spoon, whatever. You got one?’

She got up from the dinette and rifled through the drawer in the galley, banging things about.

‘There’s a big spoon on that hook there, look,’ I said.

Joanna unhooked the slotted spoon and, wielding it like a weapon, went up the steps to assist with the cheesecake.

‘You worked in a club? What, like bar work?’ Malcolm asked, animated.

I glared at Lucy, but either she didn’t notice or she chose not to.

‘Genevieve used to be a dancer,’ Lucy said, a note of triumph in her voice. ‘Didn’t she tell you? She was really rather good. That’s what I heard, though of course I never went in the club where she worked – more of a men-only place, if you get my meaning.’

Malcolm’s eyes were like saucers.
Bitch
, I thought. I wished I hadn’t invited her. And Caddy wasn’t coming, clearly, otherwise she’d be here by now. I hadn’t realised until that moment that I’d been looking forward to seeing her more than anyone else. And she would have been a useful ally against Lucy in any discussion about the moral or feminist aspects of dancing – nobody would have argued with Caddy.

‘Do you ever get that feeling,’ I said, more to myself than either of them, ‘I don’t know, sort of like impending doom? Like something bad is about to happen? I’ve had that all day.’

‘I get that sometimes,’ Lucy said. ‘Usually when it gets to after two in the morning and I’m still drinking and I’ve got to get to work by seven the next day.’

It lightened the mood a little, but even so I had no desire to sit here and make small talk with Lucy any more. If she wanted to share any more details about my past, she could get on with it without me. I excused myself and Malcolm moved to let me out of the dinette. Squeezing past all the bodies in the galley, I climbed up to the deck.

I looked across to the car park, half-hoping to see Caddy being dropped off by a taxi. But everything was quiet. Josie sat with her back to the wheelhouse with Roger and Sally and, of all people, Gavin, who had taken off his jacket and his handmade Italian shoes and was sitting barefoot and cross-legged, telling them the story of when he went travelling and accidentally sold his passport in Thailand. They had the keg of homebrew balanced on a bucket in the middle of their circle and were helping themselves to it.

‘Here,’ said Ben, at my shoulder. He handed me another bottle of beer.

‘Oh – thanks.’

The evening was starting to feel a bit surreal. We walked to the other side of the wheelhouse and looked to where the lights from the motorway bridge reflected in the water. The wind had dropped. From the opposite bank, the distant bass beat from the nightclub throbbed.

‘I’ve not been drunk for months,’ I said.

‘I’ve not been drunk for – oh, I don’t know. Days. Hours, more probably,’ said Ben.

We sat on the roof of the cabin.

‘I missed you,’ he said.

I laughed at that. ‘You big fibber,’ I said. ‘You never miss anyone, or anything.’

He looked a little bit hurt, but I knew it was an act. Despite all these people, despite everything that had happened between us in the past, he was just angling to stay the night.

‘You’ve done a great job with the boat,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘I like the bedroom.’

Here we go,
I thought.

‘I like the skylight. It must be wonderful to lie there at night and look up at the stars.’

I smiled. ‘Actually, it’s more of an orange glow. Light pollution isn’t just confined to London, you know.’

‘I was trying to be romantic.’

‘I know you were, Ben. But you forget I know you too well. It doesn’t work on me any more.’

‘Genevieve! What happened?’

‘You have to ask? I saw you with that girl when you were supposed to be going out with me. Did you forget that?’

The words were easy to say now. At the time it had broken my heart.

Ben shook his head. ‘Christ, you’ve got a long memory. I didn’t mean that. I meant, what happened to you in London? You left so suddenly. Nobody knew where you’d gone. Lucy thought you’d been kidnapped.’

‘Nothing happened. Don’t be so dramatic.’

‘Genny, you quit your job and walked out. You literally walked out.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Who do you think? Lucy, of course. She said it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in your office. She said you marched in to the CEO’s office while he was having a meeting and threw your letter of resignation on the table. Then you just grabbed your coat and left. She said she had to empty your desk for you, and when she took the box round to your flat you were all ready to move out.’

I didn’t speak for a moment. That feeling was back: the sense of disquiet. The tide had started to rise and in another few hours it would be at its highest point. Already the boat was moving, just slightly, the comforting feeling of the
Revenge
holding me up and cradling me. And yet, with the boat full of people, it didn’t feel quite right.

From the skylight next to us on the roof, I could hear genial conversation coming up from the galley below changing subtly into more heated tones. Joanna and Malcolm, by the sounds of it – and, on the other side of the exchange, Lucy and Simone.

‘All I said was –’

‘I know what you said, and I know what you meant.’ That sounded like Joanna.

‘You lot are all the same, you haven’t got a clue –’ and that sounded like Malcolm, the edges of his words blurred and slurred by cheap beer ‘– you think just ’cause we live on a boat we’re somehow inferior, just ’cause you choose to live in a house…’

‘I didn’t say anything of the kind!’

‘Well, why was you going on about the bathroom, then? I tell you, when this boat’s finished it’ll be palatial, and you lot will all be blinded by jealousy.’

Lucy laughed. ‘I don’t think so somehow.’

On the deck above, I put my head in my hands. ‘Oh, God. I knew this was a mistake.’

Ben took the opportunity and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘They’re just drunk, Genny. It’ll all be forgotten in the morning.’

‘Ben! Where the fuck are you?’ Lucy was coming up the steps into the wheelhouse, stomping with her high-heeled boots on the varnished pine. ‘Gavin? Let’s go to the pub.’

‘Want me to stay here?’ Ben asked me quietly. He still hadn’t been spotted.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You go with them, it’s fine.’

‘I could always come back later.’

His voice sounded so hopeful that for a moment I looked up.
It would be so easy to say yes,
I thought.
It would be easy to have him here, to share my bed with him tonight and put him on the train to London in the morning.
Would it hurt, one night with Ben? Five months since Dylan, five long months waiting for him to make contact with me again. He obviously wasn’t missing me as much as I missed him.

‘Where the fuck’s Ben?’ Lucy said.

‘What’s up, princess?’ Gavin asked, getting to his feet.

‘I want to go somewhere else!’

‘Have some of this,’ Roger said soothingly, ‘it’ll make you feel better, I promise.’