Cassie said no to meeting up with Archie that evening, telling him she was still feeling a bit drained after her dad’s zinc-overdose drama a couple of nights back – which was true, if not the whole story. Now and again, she just craved her own space, something that some of her previous lovers had found hard to handle. Her live-in girlfriend Rachel had said that when Cassie was in that mood it was ‘like trying to communicate with someone through perspex’.
And the bad-tempered spat with Flyte hadn’t helped. It was none of her business, of course, but the woman’s self-delusion about her sexuality, her all-consuming need to stay on the ‘right side’ of some unbreachable sexual preference line – it was exasperating. And yes, OK, Cassie couldn’t help but take it as a negative comment on her own love life.
A breeze was ruffling the water of the canal, which the setting sun had turned quicksilver-blue shot with lemon. She could feel the air temperature dropping a bit further as dusk fell earlier every evening. This time of year had always made her melancholic: the long months of winter yawning ahead like an endless tunnel.
When Gaz popped his head out of his cabin and asked if she wanted to come over she decided a bit of no-pressure company would be good for her.
They sat on Gaz’s deck drinking whiskey.
‘Gaz, can I ask you something?’ Cassie asked. ‘Would you ever live on land again?’
‘Like, in a flat?’
She’d been going over Archie’s idea of them getting a place together, and wondering whether she could ever hack being part of a conventional couple: arguing over how to load the dishwasher, going to B&Q on a Sunday, all that domestic crap . . . Shivering, she zipped up her leather jacket. On the other hand, with winter coming, central heating held an undeniable appeal.
‘Nah, I’m a free-range chicken.’ Gaz gave a wheezy chuckle. ‘I haven’t lived indoors since the early nineties. Walls freak me out.’
Remembering Archie’s report of someone peering in through the porthole – and the weird feeling she’d had the previous week that someone had been in her cabin, she asked, ‘You haven’t seen anyone hanging about around my boat lately?’ Both events had left her feeling more rattled than she cared to let on.
Gaz’s eyes disappeared into the rugged terrain of his face. ‘Nah. I mean there’s Copernicus but he’s harmless. Not a junkie tea leaf.’
Copernicus?
Seeing her expression, Gaz clarified, ‘He was a professor of cosmology.’
Cassie remembered the homeless tweedy guy sat on the edge of the towpath, waiting for Jupiter to rise, telescope clamped to one eye.
‘Seriously? Yeah, I’ve seen him around. How did he end up here?’
‘The word is he was a don at Cambridge, or Oxford, I forget. Won all kinds of awards till he went crackers.’ Spinning a finger at the side of his head.
High-flyers and geniuses who’d crashed and burned weren’t uncommon among the homeless.
Gaz topped up Cassie’s glass. ‘How’s your water holding up?’ he asked, tipping his head in the direction of Dreamcatcher.
‘About forty litres left.’ She was lucky that she could shower at work.
‘No problem, next week we can take her upstream to fill the tanks.’ He squinted at the sky. ‘If we don’t get some proper rain soon I’ll be running low myself.’
Gaz was like an unofficial outpost of the Met Office, keeping a daily weather diary recording rainfall, temperature and hours of sunshine.
He squinted over her shoulder, his eyes tiny bright spots in a sun-darkened face that reminded her of a vintage leather satchel. ‘They’re getting ready to blow that place up.’
She followed his gaze: forty metres upstream on the opposite bank the bright neon-yellow of two men in hazard jackets glowed through the gathering dusk like fireflies. They were stood on the blocked-off section of towpath that ran alongside the abandoned housing estate, next to the big ‘Hazard’ board warning off trespassers. As she watched, they appeared to tinker around with the mesh security fence. It was hard to tell but it looked like they might be making it more secure.
‘We’ll have a front row seat when it happens,’ she said, taking a swig of whiskey. ‘We should sell tickets.’