Revenge of the Tide (4 page)
Read Revenge of the Tide Online
Authors: Elizabeth Haynes
‘What is it?’ Lucy sounded suspicious.
‘It’s magic potion,’ said Gavin, giggling.
‘What?’
‘No, seriously, Luce. Give it a try. I’ve never had anything like it, honestly: it’s like drinking the earth and the moon and the stars…’
‘Gavin, you’re so crap, you’ve been smoking skunk again, haven’t you? I thought you said you hadn’t got any left?’
‘Rog here gave me a puff. But I tell you what, lovely Princess Lucy Loo, it’s not nearly as good as this stuff. Here.’
‘Eww! It tastes like shit!’
Laughter from the wheelhouse and the deck.
Ben was kissing me. He’d taken my face in his hands and kissed me, before I had a chance to protest, before I could say no, before I could move away. He was good at it. I could feel my barriers, my resolve and my resistance disappearing. It would be so easy to tell him to come back later on. Nobody would even notice. There was a good chance that the other liveaboards would all just disappear back to their own boats in the next hour or so. Once Lucy and the other London lot had gone to the pub, then on to Rochester or Maidstone or even, if they were desperate enough, back to London, the boatyard would be empty and quiet and nobody would even see him come back; nobody would ever need to know…
‘Ben! There you are!’
The kiss ended abruptly. Lucy fixed me with a hard stare, as though it was all my fault that she had been irreparably insulted by these river people, the man with the mad hair and the girl with the black eye; clearly now to find Ben down here in the semi-darkness, with his mouth on mine and his hand inside my top, was pretty much the final straw.
‘Are you staying here or are you coming with us?’ Lucy asked, her voice chilly.
Before he had a chance to answer, I stood up. ‘You should go,’ I said softly.
‘Why?’
Lucy had gone to herd up the rest of them, including Simone and Carla. Presumably they were expected to fit in the boot of the car.
I gave a little shrug.
‘You’ve got someone else?’
‘I’ve got a different life.’
He tried again, with his best cheeky smile to go with it. ‘I’m not talking about any sort of commitment, Genny. Just one more night. Go on. You want me really, don’t you?’
Despite myself, I laughed too.
‘Amazing as the offer sounds, Ben, I would rather be on my own than have you here, even for one night. But thank you.’
He gave up, at last. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, and turned his back on me to find Lucy.
They left, with promises to text or phone, hugs, professions of what a fabulous night it was and such a shame it had to come to an end, while I hugged them all in turn, and all the liveaboards carried on with the beer and the lively conversation and the last few bits of Liam’s lasagne.
As I waved them off and the motion sensors triggered the lights in the car park, Lucy tripped over something and fell on her face – fortunately on the grass. Malcolm let out a hooting laugh.
Diane and Steve went soon after that. The baby monitor gave every indication that the children had got out of bed and were playing some kind of console game on board their boat – either that, or the boat had been stormed by terrorists who were shooting everything in sight.
Downstairs in the main cabin the conversation had turned to milder topics.
Joanna handed me a beer.
‘Sit down and join us,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry they were such louts,’ I said.
‘They weren’t louts.’
‘I thought they were alright, on the whole,’ piped up Malcolm, who seemed to have forgiven Lucy already.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You lot are lovely.’
‘I think you should have shagged that Ben, though,’ said Josie with a chuckle.
‘What?’
‘You think we couldn’t hear you? He was begging for it. Absolutely begging.’
‘Yes, he was a bit, wasn’t he?’
She gave me a hefty nudge. ‘I wouldn’t have turned him down, if it were me,’ she said.
‘Oi,’ said Malcolm, ‘you old hussy. You’ll end up kipping on the roof if you keep that up.’
I laughed. ‘He’s not all he’s cracked up to be. Ben, I mean.’
‘Ooh,’ said Josie, ‘you’ve been there before, then?’
‘Been there, done that.’
‘And he’s no good at it? Blimey. Who’d have thought? He looks like a right one to me.’
I considered this for a moment. This wasn’t a conversation I’d particularly planned to have.
‘It’s not that he’s no good,’ I said. ‘It’s just that he’s not the sort of person I want any more.’
‘You got your eye on someone else?’ said Joanna.
‘Not really. I just think I’m better off on my own for a bit, you know? Busy with the boat, and all that.’
‘Ah, the boat,’ said Roger. ‘She’s married to the boat already. Happens to us all. You still haven’t shown me the new room.’
‘Help yourself,’ I said. ‘Go and have a look.’
Malcolm took it upon himself to act as a tour guide, taking Roger to see the newly clad room, while I stayed in the saloon and finished off another bottle of beer. Too many, I thought. The woodstove was burning low and the saloon was warm now that the door to the wheelhouse was closed. We all sat with our feet up, feeling the gentle rock of the boat on the water, lulling us to a doze.
I realised that I hadn’t thought about Caddy since Ben had started flirting with me. Where was she? Maybe she’d had to work after all.
‘We should do this more often,’ Josie said drowsily.
‘We always say that,’ said Sally. She was curled like a child into the big, soft sofa, a patchwork blanket I’d bought from a charity shop over her feet.
‘I like your boat,’ said Joanna. ‘Did you know that? You have one of the best boats out of all of us.’
This was a conversation we had regularly – who had the best boat and why. We never seemed to reach a conclusion.
‘The
Souvenir
is my favourite,’ I said.
Sally laughed. ‘You’re just saying that because you’re sweet and lovely.’
‘I like the
Souvenir
too,’ said Joanna. ‘I think the
Souvenir
is the best boat at the moment, but if Genevieve manages to pull off the conservatory with the sliding glass roof then the
Revenge
will be the best one.’
‘You’re right,’ said Sally. ‘We can’t top a conservatory. All we’ve got is three pots and an allotment in Rochester.’
‘What are you going to grow on your deck, Gen? Have you thought?’
I was wondering whether this was Josie’s roundabout way of asking me to grow some cannabis for her and Malcolm, but before I had a chance to answer Malcolm and Roger came back.
‘You do realise Liam’s asleep on your bed, Genevieve?’
‘Shit,’ said Joanna. ‘I wondered where he’d gone. I thought he’d fucked off back to the boat.’
She got up and went to try and rouse her partner from his beer-induced slumber.
‘We should go,’ said Malcolm. ‘Busy day tomorrow.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘What’s happening?’
‘We’re going to look at dresses,’ said Josie. ‘My niece is getting married soon, and Malcolm’s promised to take me shopping.’
‘And before you ask,’ said Malcolm, although none of us had said anything, ‘I’m having me hair cut before the wedding, alright?’
N
ot long after that they all went, off my boat and back on to the pontoon, swaying back to their boats and the warmth of their respective woodburners.
I stayed in the saloon once I’d shut and locked the wheelhouse, gazing unfocused at the glow of the fire and finishing off my last bottle of beer. I was trying not to think about Ben. I wondered where they were staying. I didn’t have his number, which was a good thing. I probably would have given in and texted him, and how desperate would that have looked?
The galley was a state – bottles and glasses and dirty plates everywhere. The floor was scattered with crumbs, from the garlic bread. Joanna and Liam’s empty lasagne dish filled the sink, burnt-on bits glued to the edge. I wondered how much soaking it would take before I could present it back to them, clean.
Something was digging in…
I reached into the back pocket of my jeans, and there it was. Dylan’s phone. I went through the menus again to the address book.
GARLAND
. Why that word, of all words? It was just a word, he’d said. It was supposed to be random. It was supposed to be something that nobody would suspect, if the phone got into the wrong hands.
‘What if I want to contact you?’ I’d said.
‘Why would you want to contact me?’
He had no idea, none at all, about how I felt. I wasn’t even sure of it myself, right then. I just knew that the concept of not seeing him was a difficult one to grasp.
‘What if something goes wrong?’ I said.
‘Nothing’s going to go wrong.’ He was getting impatient. ‘It will be fine, I promise you. Nothing will go wrong. When I’m ready, when I’ve got everything sorted out here, I’ll ring you and we can meet up somewhere. Alright?’
That had been more than five months ago. All that time, I’d kept the phone on me, kept it charged up, and I’d never used it. Not once.
I tossed the phone clumsily on to the wooden shelf behind the sofa. There was no point sitting here thinking about Dylan. Wherever he was, he certainly wasn’t thinking about me.
The toilet, which I’d emptied only this morning, was full and backed up. None of the liveaboards would have left it like that. I felt desolate, and alone. I should have said yes to Ben. It would have been nice to have just been here with him. He wasn’t Dylan, but he was someone.
I turned the lights off, and climbed into bed.
I dreamed about the phone, Dylan’s phone. It was ringing, the name
GARLAND
coming up on the display as if to emphasise further that this was it, this was the call; but every time I pressed the green button to answer, nothing happened.
I was half-awake and half-asleep for most of the night, opening my eyes to see the square of inky blackness above my head. Then Ben was in my dream, too. He was lying here with me.
‘You lied about the stars,’ he said.
I looked up to the skylight and it was full of stars, so bright that they blended together, just one dazzling light shining down on us.
Then I opened my eyes for real, and it was still just dark. There were stars – I could see them – but they were faint.
Alcohol always does this to me,
I thought crossly.
I was properly awake, because I needed the toilet. I remembered mine was backed up and I wasn’t about to go across to the shower block in the middle of the night, so I crawled into the storage space at the front of the boat and found the bucket I used to mix adhesive in. It was clean, which was a bonus. I left the bucket in the bathroom after I’d used it and went back to bed.
For a while I lay there listening to the lapping of the water against the hull. The tide must be going out by now. Before too long the boat would settle back into the mud and lie still, and then it would start to get light.
As well as the water, there was another sound. It started out as a gentle bump, distant, as though the bow had nudged the pontoon or one of the fenders had lifted in a sudden swell and fallen back against the hull. It was easy to ignore at first. But then it came again, and again, rhythmic now – part of the song of the boat, the percussion of the river.
The gentle bumping became a knocking, more insistent. A soft thud, a scrape of something along the hull. I was awake again, listening to the sound and trying to work out what it was. It sounded as though something was trapped between the boat and the pontoon, just outside my bedroom. And the tide was receding, which meant it was unlikely to be washed clear again. It would stay there, knocking, until the hull of the boat came to rest on the mud. Which was still hours away.
With a sigh, I sat up in bed, listening. It was coming with the rise and the fall of the water, a rhythmic bump. It was nestling against my boat, big enough to make a sound. What could it be? A plastic container, something like that?
Shivering, I pulled my jeans on in the dark, a sweater from the pile of washing. The boat was cold now; the stove had long since gone out. Just inside the hatch to the storage area was my torch, big and powerful and cased in rubber. I’d had a Maglite but I’d dropped it in the water during my first week on the boat and never got it back again. One of the first pearls of wisdom Malcolm had dispensed was: ‘Put a float on anything important.’
I opened the door to the wheelhouse, my teeth chattering. It was bitter up here, freezing, the sky above barely grey. I slipped on the trainers that were by the wheel; they were cold and damp, but better than bare feet on the wet boards outside.
No sign of anyone. The boats in the marina were all silent and dark, the ones on this pontoon still rising and falling gently on the outgoing tide, the ones nearer to the shore already sitting on their bank of river mud.
To my surprise, I heard a noise from the direction of the car park – a door shutting? Then the noise of an engine starting up, and tyres on gravel. A dark shape of a vehicle driving out of the car park. No rear lights, no headlights. Why didn’t they put their lights on? And why hadn’t the lights come on in the car park? They were motion-sensitive. I remembered someone complaining to Cam that the lights shone into their cabin when the foxes were out by the bins. Solution – the bins were moved. But surely the lights should come on if someone was in the car park?
Silence, apart from the lapping of the water against the bow. Even the motorway bridge was silent. Then it came again. A soft bumping, accompanied now by a gentle splashing as a little wave drifted over whatever it was. It must be something big.
I crept along the port side of the gunwale, holding on to the side of the cabin for support. I was still a little bit drunk, the gentle rocking of the boat making me nauseous.
For some reason I felt afraid. Out here, away from London, it felt wrong to be awake at this time of the night.