Zoe was sitting at the fold-out kitchen table on the boat, scrolling through her phone, looking at pictures of Adam and Kathryn’s wedding on Facebook. She flicked through them quickly, as though they were scalding. They seemed to be getting married in some kind of wood and Kathryn was wearing a daisy chain round her head. She was obviously pregnant and her dark red dress clung to her perfectly hemispherical stomach. She made it look sexy.
Zoe wasn’t quite sure what it was making her feel. It was as though she were watching an alternative version of her life, even though she knew that it couldn’t have been her, or if it could, it wouldn’t have been like that. She didn’t feel aching or aspiring; just uncanny. She didn’t even know why she had looked them up – maybe it was seeing Eleanor and Richard this morning. The eight months in Litchfield Road now felt like a distinct interlude, but they still burned bright somehow. She put her phone down.
After she’d left Litchfield Road, she’d only had to live at home for two months, before Laura told her she was moving in with Nick and she could take her room in the house. She tried living there for a few months and was relatively comfortable, but it confirmed something she already half knew: she wanted to live alone. There was no way she could afford even a studio flat by herself, and that was when she’d thought about a boat.
Living on the boat was miserable and exhilarating. Cycling along the canal path by herself at night terrified her and, at the same time, the glassy surface of the water made her heart burst. When she got into the marina and shut the gate behind her and saw the crammed rows of bobbing boats, she felt safe. Often, she spent the days she was not at work emptying the chemical toilet or sitting in a launderette on the Upper Clapton Road and wondered what the point was. But then on her way home, a flock of green birds would swoop across the marshes and she’d see her red kettle through the window of the boat. She still felt excited every time she looked out and saw the water inches from her face. She felt closer to the sky.
She was sometimes lonely, sitting in the tiny cabin by herself, but it was her own and it was cheap and although she was dependent on her landlord, it felt good not to be dependent on her job or Joe. ‘It’s hard work,’ the owner said, when he showed her the narrow space with its low panelled ceiling, fold-out bed and doll’s-house kitchen. ‘Not everyone can live like this. They can’t bear to get rid of all their stuff.’
‘I don’t mind – I don’t really have any stuff,’ Zoe said.
And it was making her draw, every day. She drew the boats and the river and the birds. She had whole sketchbooks full of them. She drew as resistance; she drew because she thought it might save her life. She was thinking about finding ways to introduce colour and was planning to go back to Evering’s to ask Duncan for advice. Joe kept asking to see what she was working on, but she didn’t want to show him yet. She thought she would let him at some point, but she wanted it to be entirely hers for just a little longer.
She got up – she was meeting Joe again later on. He made her so delirious, it was almost violent, as if her life had been dismembered. She’d forgotten about everything that was important to her; every other pleasure she’d ever known had been obliterated, apart from drawing. Laura had asked her what it was she liked about him and she couldn’t articulate it – even though she knew he was funny and kind and clever, none of that seemed to matter compared to the way it made her feel when he said her name. It wasn’t an answer: this kind of delirium couldn’t last and might not lead anywhere good. She shut her sketchbook and picked up her coat. On the other hand, it might.