Early spring, the new millennium, a young woman walks backwards along the deck of a boat. She goes slowly, is bent almost double, holds in her left hand a ladle and in her right a pot of hot pitch. From the spout of the ladle she pours a thin ribbon of pitch into the seams where all yesterday she tapped in lengths of oakum with a mallet and bosun’s chisel.
So it begins, simply, with work.
The boat is raised on wooden stilts, the deck twenty feet above the ground, that hard standing of rubbled concrete and brick where the warmth of the new season has brought out unlikely patches of pale flowers, their roots in shallow veins of earth. Around the boat is the yard, a place where ships were once built—ferries, coal-lighters, trawlers, a wooden minesweeper during the war—but now given over to the servicing and maintenance of pleasure craft, some on their stilts, others tied up at the pontoons. There is a sound of power tools, radios, the now-and-then rapping of a hammer.
She is alone on the deck. For the work, for ease of movement and access, the mast has been unstepped, and all the rigging, together with stanchions and guard rails, has been removed and stowed away. When she finishes one seam she immediately begins the next. In the pot, the pitch is cooling. As it cools it thickens. She will have to stop at some point soon to light the gas-burner in the galley and heat it again, but not yet.
Below her, standing in the shadow of the boat’s steel hull, a young man is dipping bolts into white lead and softly singing to himself. He is tall, blue-eyed, patrician. His fair hair, luxurious at a distance, is already starting to thin. His name is Henley but he is known and prefers to be known as Tim. There is some question, still unresolved, as to whether he and the girl on deck will sleep together.
He pauses, a bolt in his gloved fingers, calls up, ‘Maud! Maud! Where art thou?’ and getting no answer, grins and goes back to his work. He does not know her well but knows she does not do banter, does not in fact seem to understand what it is. This he finds funny and endearing, a trick of character, a benign absence, to be numbered among those things he most likes about her, such as the bluntness of her blunt brown stare, the curls of her hair that are flicks and half-curls because she cuts her hair short as a boy’s; the inked lettering on her arm (the underside of her left forearm), a surprise the first time you see it that makes you wonder what other surprises there might be. The hint of Wiltshire in her voice, the way she sucks on a cut but does not mention it, the way her breasts are not much larger than peaches and hard, he thinks, as peaches. Yesterday, when she pulled off her jumper, he saw for the first time two inches of bare belly above the waistband of her jeans and felt an entirely unexpected seriousness.
They are both members of the university sailing club. The two others who came down with them have driven back to Bristol, perhaps, thinks Tim, to give them a bit of space, a bit of privacy. Is that what Maud thinks too? That the scene is set?
He can smell the pitch she’s using. Also the faint sweet rotten smell of the river, the old piles, the mud, the amphibious vegetation. This is a drowned valley, a place broken to the sea, salt water heaving in and out twice a day under banks of dense woodland, at high tide lapping the roots of the trees, at low tide leaving little creeks of thigh-deep mud bare and glittering. In places, further upriver, old boats have been scuttled and left to find their way back to nothing—blackened staves, blackened freeboard, some so old and rotten they might have carried Vikings, Argonauts, the first men and women of the world. There are herring gulls, egrets, cormorants, a resident seal that rises without warning at the side of boats, eyes like a Labrador. The sea itself is not in view but it’s not distant. Two curves of the riverbank, then the harbour, the town, the castles on the headlands. Open water.
Outside the boat shed a figure in red overalls and welder’s goggles is standing like a boxer under a fountain of blue sparks. By the offices, a man in a suit is leaning against an iron pillar, smoking. Tim stretches—a luxurious feeling—but as he turns back to his work, to the boat, there is a movement through the air, a blink of feathered shadow, that is also a movement across the surface of his eye like a thorn scratch. There must have been a noise too—no such thing as silent impact—but whatever it was, it was lost in the hissing of his own blood and left no trace of itself.
He is staring at the ladle, which has come to rest by one of the patches of white flowers, pitch drizzling from the scoop. Maud herself is further off, face up, her arms flung above her head, her head tilted to the side, her eyes shut. It takes an immense effort to keep looking at her, this girl newly dead on the rubbled brick, one shoe on, one shoe off. He is very afraid of her. He holds his head between his gloved hands. He is going to be sick. He whispers her name. He whispers other things like fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck . . .
Then she opens her eyes and sits up. She’s looking, if she’s looking anywhere, straight ahead to the old boat shed. She gets to her feet. It does not appear difficult or painful though somehow she gives the impression she is reassembling herself out of the bricks and flowers around her, rising out of her own dust. She starts walking—bare foot, dressed foot, bare foot, dressed foot twelve or fifteen steps until, without warning, she crumples to the ground, face down this time.
The welder has been watching it all through the tint of his goggles. He shuts the valves on the tank, pushes up his goggles and starts to run. The other man, the one smoking outside the office, is also running, though more awkwardly, as if running was not really his thing or as if he did not want to be the first to arrive. The welder kneels beside Maud’s head. He puts his lips close to the ground. He whispers to her, rests two fingers on her neck. The man in the suit crouches, Arab style, on the other side of her, the cloth of his trousers tight over his thighs. From somewhere a bell has started to sound, high-pitched and continuous. Others are coming now, more yardsmen in red overalls, the woman from the marina office, somebody in salopettes who must have just come off one of the boats on the pontoon. ‘Don’t crowd her!’ says the welder. Someone, breathless, passes forward a green box. Three or four times the woman from the office says she has called the emergency services. She says emergency services rather than ambulance.
At some point they all notice Tim, the way he is standing there fifteen feet away as if nailed to the air. They notice him, frown, then look back at Maud.