Nell sits on her bench. Hair like duckweed and a coat the colour of bilge, textured like algae. She must be hot. Her little black dog dozes in the sun by her feet. She’s drinking from a can clenched in a fist, that chemical super-strength stuff that rots you from the inside out.
Two cyclists speed by, tight Lycra arses on their way to Walthamstow. I hear the hooting yelp of a moorhen from somewhere in the green at the canal’s edge. A bit further up, nestled in the gentle curve of the navigation, I can see PK and Jess lounging on cheap patio chairs by their scruffy boat, Ginny. I wave to them. PK, armed with a smouldering spliff and decked out in an aggressively political T-shirt, seems not to notice. Jess, her light brown arms rippling with sylvan tattoos, sips a bottle of Sol and waves back. It’s Sunday.
Tom climbs up onto the roof. Peg rocks gently, rippling the water. He extends a hand down to me, says, ‘Come up love,’ and as I half-climb and am half-hauled onto Peg’s roof, I watch Nell staring into the navigation, seeing nothing.
*
Think of the city in layers. Too often measured in urban sprawl, width, diameter, population density. Rarely in depth, in height. The vertical, the submerged, and all those bits in between. I live in a sunken city, a place interstitial with coots and cormorants and rats. Not Top-London or London-Under. London-in-between, neighbour to Canada goose and heron. But even here, we’re fighting for space.
There is London, its streets and bookies, pubs and gastropubs and caffs and bakeries. There is Top-London; the glassy point of the Shard, the thrusting glass cocks with cute names that hide their malice, the chimneys at Battersea, the upper reaches of the beautiful brutalist blocks, and the ever-present cranes. There is London-Under, a realm of Roman relics and burnt soil where the trains rumble, commuters crush and, I’m sure, troglodytes gather in forgotten tunnels performing rituals to obscene gods.
My London-in-between – there are so many – is the canal network, fighting mildew in winter, coaxing cherry tomatoes and herbs from plastic pots come summer. Sunken veins just below the dirty city streets, pleasant remnants from an industrial past that helped ruin the world.
I am mobile in a way that is somehow acceptable, even romanticised. It’s come as a surprise. If I tried this lifestyle on land they’d send the bailiffs in, before turning my life into a Channel 4 documentary. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before we get labelled water gypsies and the resentments begin to build. A strange mix, jealousy and contempt.
Still, that’s the future and that’s never been a very clear place to me. I never thought I’d be water-bound, watching the spear-strike of a grey heron whilst sipping instant coffee, listening to the splash of something heavy entering water as I try to sleep on our floating home. It’s just me and Tom on the boat, a cruiser we christened Peg Powler. A name I dredged from the depths of childhood. It seemed to fit. Tom wanted Ondine; I called him pretentious.
What we lack in space, I hope, we make up for in freedom. There is something to be said about waking up on a May morning by Markfield Park, poking a head out of the hatch to the screaming of swifts catching insects by the mouthful as they swoop over the reservoirs, drawn by boiling clouds of insect life. The sun on my skin, the splash of a landing mallard, the soft whir of passing cyclists’ wheels. I can sit up on deck rolling a smoke and simply be in the world for a while. A real pleasure in that.
People forget, though, the constant motion. A fortnight moored, then off again. We’ve got to know the city’s murky green veins so well, seen places we never knew existed. But in the dead of winter, as I wake by the necropolis under the looming gas towers of Kensal Green and realise, again, that work that week is out Tottenham way, it’s no picnic. It’s like anything. Ups and downs, right?
My mother thinks this is all one giant mistake. She can’t understand why people can’t afford bricks and mortar in which to live. Tom works, and so do I, but we don’t earn enough. Not enough to live properly in this city. I’ll choke myself in the weeds of the Lea before I surrender my wage to a uPVC nightmare, to junkspace new-builds built on the rubble of libraries. None of this computes with my mum. We must be lazy, inept, frivolous. She thinks marriage would somehow be a salve to what she sees as our problems. She spouts platitudes about the problem of young people today, only we’re not getting any younger.
A decision had to be made. We took, like many, to the water. Not quite necessity, but not exactly choice. Tom fancied himself as a man with a practical bone in him, but he and I were, at first, a fucking shambles. I laugh to think of when we first got on Peg, the boat pitching to the right and left in damp April rain as two grizzled canal-folk watched, grinning, as we tried to move in. Try lugging all your gear through a door straight out of Alice in Wonderland, in Converse shoes that slip on damp wood with the realisation that water isn’t as solid as earth and that this place that was going to become our home moved. Tom banged his head hard, a splinter sticking out of angry red skin.
‘Lisa, for fuck’s sake, stop laughing,’ Tom shouted. But I had to. Cooped up for so long in the rabbit hutches of the renters, no stake in any place we lived, we didn’t have a clue on how to do anything. I could barely tie a knot. The last time I’d painted a wall or, in fact, done anything practical beyond cooking and giving work-surfaces a wipe, was when I lived at home with my parents. The parents who bought their home for something like thirty grand back in the day. You know, when people with an unassuming job could afford to live in London. Words like ‘generator’, ‘motor’ and ‘moorings’ were opaque to me, from a lexicon that was other people’s business.
Now even the canals that have become home are becoming cramped, competition for space increasing almost monthly. Problems have a tendency to replicate themselves.
But we can’t leave the city, it’s our home. I won’t do it, not yet. I won’t abandon it to the Eton set and Russian gangsters, to the oil sheikhs and people with portfolios.
Being here on Peg, I am reminded constantly of my grandad, drowned in the eighties, a stupid boating accident out on the Thames near Gravesend. He was not an old man. I find it hard to push away thoughts of grasping algaed hands gripping ankles tight; tendrilled water plants choking and grasping, the colour of regurgitated spinach. It all seemed like such a waste.
I know I’m lucky compared to so many other countless millions who crowd the surface of the earth, but even here bobbing by Markfield Park with the swifts screaming around my ears and greylag geese poking their heads up above the reservoir’s parapet, life can feel like such a slog. Constant thoughts of where to move next. Worry about work. Unstable or freelance work gets you stuck in the present tense. Then there’s those deeper worries that the day-to-day stress pushes down, and in that pushing down to focus my own stupid shit, guilt builds, knowing that I am trapped in this system, even nestled within Peg. I don’t have it that bad, not by a long way. But I notice things. I’m seeing fewer birds in the skies – I know I am, I must trust my memories or everything falls apart. I’m seeing the boats multiply and jostle around us, watching old Nell sit on her bench by Markfield slurping down that corrosive booze. I can feel the seams of the city stretching. I smell exhaust in the air. I see a skyline become cluttered with buildings no one, surely, could want. There are too many of us. It’s as simple as that.
You make a life-changing decision, feel that burst of elation, then wake up the next day to a beeping phone realising work never ends, teaching the same bored and restless kids their proper nouns and prepositions. Having watched one round of the seasons, down here on the city’s waters, progress seems illusory and the spiral, the merry-go-round, is all there is.
*
I sit out on Peg’s deck, sipping scalding coffee that steams like a witch’s brew in the cool of the morning. I feel the slightest bob of the water as I stare up at the gas tower, looming above our mooring like the stripped skeleton of a coliseum. They look unfinished and I do not know how they work. It was five years in London before I even possessed the words to describe them. Saw them from the windows of chugging trains, the occasional walk along the waterways with Tom when the weather was right, but I never really saw them. Now I have more time to notice. Now I have pinned some meaning to them. Unfinished sentry towers for the would-be guardians of the waters.
Mist hangs above the water, will-o’-the-wisp clumps already melting in the sun. We’re here for two weeks. Close to the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s, absurd how its clean world of beeping tills and 2-for-1s juts right onto the towpath. Useful though; we need to eat, after all.
I hear a heavy splash somewhere out in the mist. Kids throwing stuff, perhaps a diving cormorant, the take-off of a swan or goose. I daydream that it’s an otter, an escaped European beaver, even a hated mink.
A man in too-short shorts and a tight black T-shirt jogs along the towpath, huffing ostentatiously, eyes locked on the middle-distance. White wires plunge from his ears into a device strapped to his waist. He drops suddenly, pumps himself up and down in a series of assured push-ups. The lives of the healthy make me smile. Back on his feet, he jogs off in the direction of Wormwood Scrubs.
Tom pops his head up from somewhere below deck. He’s wearing a misshapen jumper the colour of the canal.
‘Morning love.’ He squints, heavy eyes adjusting to the new day.
I hear the heavy splash again. This proximity to life.
‘You not working today?’ he asks with a half-yawn.
‘Not today. The job fell through. Back to the search.’
‘Sorry babe. We’ll be alright.’
I say nothing. I can’t bear these stock sayings, this padding in our language. Tom’s breath leaks, ghostly in the chill of the morning. What am I to say? That everything will be OK?
‘I’ve gotta go get ready,’ he says finally, and disappears.
*
I think of the city’s layers. What lies beneath. The canals, just one of many apt metaphors for the city, my city. Since I’ve lived here, the stories of the waters have started to grip harder and tighter. I hunt down books and articles about the lore of the Lea, the ghosts of the Grand Union. In the Oxfam bookstore in Angel, digging through paperbacks, I found a copy of C.L. Nolan’s collection Mucklebones. Written in 1912, but decked out in one of those lurid seventies covers, a cheap reprint with a bootleg feel. ‘Happy Birthday Jimmy!’ was written in faded biro on the inside cover. The cover depicted a grinning green hag rising from stagnant and scummy water with grasping, outstretched hands. Hair like rotten duckweed, mossy teeth.
On Abebooks I tracked down a guidebook published in the late ’80s by the defunct Malachite Press. Spectres of the Towpath: The Folklore of Britain’s Waterways. Tales of the phantom fishermen and white foxes of the Swale in Kent. The festering Weychester and Blackmore canal in Hookland. The skinned and headless bears found floating in the River Lea, back around the time of the IRA hunger strikers. The dead of Kensal Green Cemetery shuffling along the towpath beneath the gas towers. These waters, so full of life, are correspondingly flooded with death.
My small pile of books is placed in a spot inside Peg, aimed to avoid any chance of the damp seeping in. Though perhaps it would be appropriate.
*
Greasy summer rain drips down Peg’s windows. I’m inside, curled up on a beanbag reading Mucklebones. Tom is out at work. In ‘The Weed’ Nolan writes: ‘Green tendrils beckoned from below the scum of the cut; he had one option. Submersion.’
I flick idly through the other stories. ‘Ginny’. ‘The Heron’. ‘Flood Drain’. I can’t help but think of those seventies public information films voiced by Donald Pleasence, English children dying in creative ways as a warning to us, the lucky: stay away from the dark and lonely water.
Nolan had it right. That’s London life: sink or swim.
*
We’ve been arguing about money. Piloting Peg through the city, passing blocks of flats half-built that reach into the heavens, hearing the screech of green parakeets. Signage and boarded up patches of empty space recently acquired for development. My teaching work is still intermittent, never enough. But I try to save what little we have. Things can change, I’m applying for steady work whenever I can. That was the whole point of moving onto the waters, to save a little, to put something aside. To not have to live the life of the renters. But whatever we have just leaks away.
Tom earns more regularly than me but maybe Mum is right. He blows it, drinking it down the pub with his mates, snorting it up his nose at weekends. Smoking hash with PK and talking impossible politics while they sit by Peg and Ginny, passing judgement on the passers-by. If I can’t picture a future, then Tom’s given up trying.
So we argue. I hate myself when we do it, my voice sounding shrill, unpleasant, the shriek of a coot. I become the nag I never wanted to be. He pushes me into that role and I hate him for it. There’s no space. It’s just the two of us in cramped conditions, too much time together and in too-close proximity.
I’m going under.
*
We’re moored up by Markfield Park again. The sun has dimmed. Blackness is starting to colonise the water.
Tom is out, drinking at The Anchor & Hope with PK and I don’t care when he comes back.
A muted splash, somewhere out there.
I sit silently inside of Peg, malfunctioning dongle shoved into a laptop orifice, watching websites I don’t really want to look at buffer endlessly. Then there’s a knock at the window, and I see Jess’s smiling face at the window. I’m glad she’s here and invite her in. There’s the nagging sense we’re the ones left behind while the men talk and drink, even though I was half-heartedly invited. The so-called alternative lifestyles we lead.
Jess hands me a cold cider, I crack the can open, we say cheers and she settles down on the small sofa. I’m sprawled out on my beanbag, feeling suddenly sullen and childish.
‘You alright Lisa?’
And I want to tell her how nothing ever works out the way you’d imagine it and how I feel that the freedom of the water in my city has only brought different problems. How I feel I’m drowning in London, how there’s never enough work and enough money, or when I do have the work I resent it and wish I was back on the boat. How I feel claustrophobic now with Tom, too close all the time, how at night I dream of my grandfather being dragged down by watery women below the grey waters of the Thames. How I feel glad in a strange way that he never saw the new build flats and the demolished libraries and a franchise coffee outlet on every corner. How I envy the swifts above the reservoir and the glorious arcs of their wings that take them all the way to Africa. How at times I even envy Nell on her bench with her gutrot cider and a black dog sniffling among the discarded crisp packets.
I say, ‘Yeah not too bad.’
*
I haven’t had any work in two weeks. Stuck on the boat, just books to read and a radio that only imparts bad news for company.
Autumn has come. Chill in the air. The swifts have gone.
Tom is out at work. I didn’t even bother getting out of bed to kiss him goodbye. He’ll only be back again later. I want to leap off the boat and begin running, like all those joggers I see every day, just keep running and running until the canals run out and I have nowhere left to go.
Outside it’s misty, and drizzle patters my skin as I emerge from Peg to look at the navigation. I roll a cigarette and blow smoke clouds into the mist.
I decide to take a walk, up to Tottenham Lock, maybe a bit further, just stretch the legs and get myself calibrated for the day. Too much time spent curled like a cat on that dirty beanbag, reading Mucklebones and waiting for the internet to work.
So I walk, passing buggy-pushing Hasidic women, a young man shouting angrily down his phone as he looks over the water, dog walkers, other boaters like myself, glimpsed furtively through dirty glass. Nell sits on a bench by the bridge, motionless, and I think I should say hello or attempt some form of contact but I do not.
At the Lock things are still, hushed. Industrial warehouses crowd the bank opposite. I stand at the water’s edge, looking down into water where green plants sway slowly. I hear a laugh, a cracked chuckle, mirthless, malicious. I think of mossy and algaed claws, clutching and never letting go.
There is one choice in this city. Submersion.