The next morning Maud pulls on her overalls over jeans and jumper, brews coffee, eats a banana, eats a square of chocolate and goes on deck. She sits on the coach-house roof, looking upriver to where the water and the light meet. She rolls a cigarette from a pouch bought in the town. She is becoming better at rolling, better at smoking.
When she has finished her cigarette she goes down the ladder with one of the tins of anti-foul. Yesterday, in the late afternoon, she taped the boat’s waterline. Now she walks slowly around the hull, checking her work. When she is satisfied, she opens the tin and pours some paint into a tray, coats the mohair roller and begins to paint. She’s been at it for an hour, her eyes starting to smart, when Robert Currey comes over with a box of disposable gloves and a pair of plastic goggles.
‘There’s a reason it keeps stuff off the bottom of boats,’ he says.
In one of his pockets he finds a rag, finds a corner cleaner than the others and wipes a splash of anti-foul from the back of her right hand. It takes only a few seconds and during those seconds neither of them speak.
By lunchtime she has the first coat finished and steps away from the boat to get the smell of it out of her mouth. The yard is busier today though most boats still look unattended. On the slipway, Robert Currey and another yardsman are working on a pleasure boat, a converted survey boat once called Skagen, now called Tinkerbelle and strung with bunting. Robert Currey, disappearing down a hatchway, stops to wave and Maud waves back.
The second coat of paint goes on the following day. According to the instructions the paint should have the thickness of a business card, like those cards, mostly unused, she has in a box in the car—Maud Stamp, Senior Clinical Associate.
By mid-afternoon the paint is dry enough to peel off the tape. It’s not a perfect job but it’s good enough. She touches up, wipes away any unevenness with a rag dipped in solvent. She is booked in with the launching crane for next Monday. That gives her two more days to do whatever must be done in the dry. What is not done, what is missed, will have to stay that way. This she has already decided. On Monday the boat will go into the water and she will go into the boat. There are no alternatives, certainly none she can think of. Go back to the cottage? Go back to those things she spoke of to the dreamed head of Rawlins? Behind her the way has closed. She has closed it herself or something beyond her closed it. It hardly matters. She cannot wait any longer. The one thing that feels genuinely dangerous is stillness.
The night before the launch she goes down to the marina toilet block with her towel and wash bag. It’s late and there’s no one else in the block, no one she can hear. She undresses, puts her clothes in a locker, steps into the cubicle, puts a pound coin in the slot, turns on the shower. The water’s cold. It shocks her. Then it starts to heat up and the cubicle fills with steam and her skin glows pink. She looks at herself through the steam. A blackened thumbnail; three little bruises on each shin, a long graze high on her left thigh from some forgotten collision, perhaps with the edge of the saloon table while she manoeuvred in the dark. The timer ticks. The water slides in sheets of light over her breasts and belly and thighs. She remembers Camille showing her her tattoo, saying it meant fuck me until I cry and making a face like a girl crying. She has not had a single sexual thought in four months. Neither, in four months, has she bled. Are these things connected? She touches herself, very lightly, a ringless ring finger in the dark hair between her thighs, presses at the lips of her sex then lets the tip of her finger slide into the heat inside her. She leans against the wall of the cubicle, hooks her finger a little deeper, a little deeper. She’s not a fool; she’s not naive; she knows that desire, memory and grief are wound together like strands in a wire. What she does not know is what she should do about it. She slides her finger out. The ticking of the timer grows louder, then stops. She does not have another coin. She dries herself quickly, pulls on clothes over skin still clammy. When she comes out into the washroom she sees that she is not alone, though she heard no one come in. A woman is at one of the sinks, a woman of sixty or more, stripped to the waist and soaping herself under her arms. On the woman’s back, either side of her spine and running down from her shoulder blades, are two lines of scar tissue. The mirror shows a weathered face and eyes of narrowed gold. For a few seconds she studies Maud in the glass as if trying to decide whether or not she knows her. Then she nods and smiles. It might be taken for approval. It might be taken for ‘Keep going!’