It was the end of her final year in law and as a graduation present her aunt gave her the money to go trekking in Nepal. But she didn’t like it there: too cold, too steep, too dirty. She found she didn’t do well at high altitudes and in any case she had never liked camping. She liked comfort and above all she needed to be warm. She hated the feel of dirt under her nails, of small stones beneath her ground sheet and the sense of zipped enclosure within the fuggy padding of a sleeping bag. Nor did she like being in a group of backpacking Americans and Germans who had endless banal discussions about the best kind of walking boots or the merits of brand-name packs – or worse, sat around the campfire singing so-called ‘Rainbow’ songs or offering up recollections in sacramental tones of their own feats of abseiling. The nadir was reached when they drifted into tedious and shallow raves about Tibetan Buddhism. Nirvana? It was all just dirt and squalor to her.
Just three weeks after leaving Sydney she arrived, broke, in Amsterdam. There she hooked up with an English guy called Tom, who corralled her in a dark corner of a bar on the Zuyderzee. Before long they were bunkered in on the top floor of his cousin’s apartment overlooking one of the canals, and she found herself just a touch smitten. Tom was one of those big hunky men she had a weakness for. It was a particular kind of body she craved, almost independently of the person who inhabited it. He might be infuriatingly taciturn – an enigma – and bloody hard to talk to but with a body like that it didn’t matter. You could let it smother you until the breath stifled in your chest or you could fight back with abandon and get into a good heaving sexual scrap with just enough spite to sharpen the senses.
Tom invited her to return to London with him and she said yes. Though he appeared to be one of those stolid Englishmen who are unable to express their feelings it was clear that he was serious.
Within four weeks of having met they were crossing the English Channel. Almost immediately she found a job as a receptionist for a computer firm in Camden Town and moved into Tom’s flat, half of a bare-fronted, red-brick terrace in the East End, a block away from where he taught maths at the local high school. The school was a grim place, more like a gaol, with high wire fences, asphalt yards and bricks the colour of soot. The buildings even had wire mesh along the upper-storey walkways that made them look like cages. Sometimes on her morning walk to the tube station she would glance across at the school and thank God she didn’t have to work there.
One night Tom came home and told her that soon he would be going away. Every year the school had an Easter holiday programme for some of the most deprived and disturbed kids and he had volunteered to go along. At first she was piqued at this. Easter was her birthday, which meant he wouldn’t be there to celebrate it, and when she told him he apologised solemnly and said he was very sorry but it was too late: he had volunteered before they met and he couldn’t let the others down now. He and two other teachers, husband and wife, were to take some of the worst cases from Tom’s year (they were mostly twelve, though some were thirteen) on a ten-day trip along the old industrial canals of the English midlands. The husband and wife had been before and knew the ropes and they would be in charge of one boat and Tom would command the other. An unspoken invitation hovered in the air.
She ignored it. For one thing she had no experience with kids, she didn’t even like them. Shut up on a barge with a mob of rampaging feral children didn’t sound like a holiday to her, more like Lord of the Flies on water.
Then, just two weeks before they were due to embark, the married couple had a death in the family and dropped out. One of the boats would have to be cancelled but it was still possible for Tom to take a party of children on the other, though it would be unwise for him to go alone. He asked Kirsten if she would come with him, and in a moment of post-coital weakness she said yes – and almost instantly began to have misgivings.
But Tom was affectingly grateful, saying over and over again that it would be fine, it would be fine. It would be great, in fact. She’d see a bit of the English countryside and it might even be, well, you know, idyllic: punting along the glassy waterways in the mellow afternoon light, rolling green hills in the distance, trim hedges on either side, picturesque locks left over from the industrial revolution. And as for the boats themselves, she really must see them, they were marvellously decorated, all painted up in bright colours with romantic landscapes on the sides and elaborate scrollwork along the transom. ‘Like gypsy caravans,’ he said. ‘A lost art.’ He made it sound romantic.
Undaunted by lack of experience (he had, after all, been on a canal holiday as a child), Tom borrowed a stack of books from the municipal library. Every night he pored over maps of old canal routes (the locals referred to a canal as ‘the cut’) and studied diagrams of the many different types of lock and their iron workings until he could sketch the most common of them without reference to the originals. Sometimes he would read aloud to her. ‘A lock is an assemblage, a kit of parts, and no two locks are ever alike.’ Then he would look up with one of his deadpan stares. ‘Are you listening?’ he would ask.
‘I’m enthralled,’ she’d reply.
‘A typical old-style lock is a rectangular chamber of brick or stone, finished with flat stone copings. The heavy gates are balanced by wooden beams which also act as levers. Each gate is anchored by a collar and turned on a cast-iron pin in a pot. The whole thing is held in place by water pressure with hand-worked paddle gear mounted on a gate or on a stand set in the ground nearby. Sometimes the gates are of steel and occasionally cast iron. They are usually black with beam ends picked out in white. The use of paint, tar and whitewash preserves the gates and makes them visible in grey weather or the dark.’
‘Really?’ she would say. ‘How fascinating.’
But it was the boats he had fallen in love with. These low barges were known as narrow-boats and they harked back to the 1760s. Far from being dour they were covered in bright patterns that were positively gaudy, carnivalesque even. The highlight was always one idealised scene on the starboard side, which might be a cottage beside a pond but more likely a Bohemian castle set high above a mountain lake, some luridly crimson Shangri-La sunset flaming behind the turrets, and the whole scene encircled by an outer wreath of yellow and pink roses entwined in dark-green ivy. The overall effect was of a floating sideshow, crude but somehow enlivening, a diorama of the utopian.
Each day Tom grew more and more enthused while she, Kirsten, began to feel a secret, queasy reluctance. It was an English spring. She had been warned that it could be cold and there was no heating on the boats. It would almost certainly be wet. She began to meditate on excuses she might give for opting out, but could think of none that she wouldn’t be ashamed to utter.
In the end what swayed her was the photograph.
She found it in one of the books that Tom had brought home from the library, a large picture book about barges in the nineteenth century. Right at the end was a photograph that they both found peculiarly affecting, an old sepia print, dated around 1870, of a barge with the strange name of Gort. The boat was taken in long shot and the figure of a woman could be seen standing at the stern. In the long shot the woman was a faint image, like an apparition, but in the enlarged detail she was as solid and material, as mundane and domestic as any woman could be. This was the bargemaster’s young wife and behind her you could see the small wooden cabin that was her home and into which, astonishingly, she had crammed all her possessions. The curved wall at the back was hung with small pictures in ornate frames, while on a narrow wooden shelf to one side there was a lace doily, a teapot, a brass oil lamp and tiny porcelain ornaments. Often, said the caption, the living areas of these boats were like small shrines, and here at the centre of her dark, domesticated hollow stood the young wife, a kind of low-life industrial Madonna, her head compressed with tight ringlets, her body encased in a dress of drab grey serge that fell into a wide Victorian skirt, as wide almost as the door of the cabin. And in her arms she was holding a baby.
This baby was wrapped in a funnel of white swaddling clothes so that only its face was visible, and in this face – was it an effect of the sepia? – only the eyes could be discerned, just a few grainy markings, a shadow here, a smudge there, but somehow the effect was uncanny. The baby looked not as if it were being held in its mother’s arms but as if it were hovering there, like a ghost.
Kirsten had stared at this image for some time, gazing at it with a kind of horror mixed with pity. It was unbelievable that anyone could live in that dark, confined space, never mind make a home of it for a baby. Day after day, on the grey water, so flat and oily in its man-made channels; so dense with a sense of enclosure, of brick and tar and charcoal and smoke.
But what moved her was this. In the accompanying text it said that despite growing up on the canals, hardly any of the canal children ever learned to swim. Drowned children were registered in parish records and when canal children perished the name of the boat would be entered in the parish register as the child’s home. It shocked her, the idea that anyone would keep a child on the water and not teach it how to swim. But then for most of the year the water was freezing, and according to the text it was more than likely that the child’s parents were themselves unable to swim.
She had set the book aside and pondered this. She could not remember a time when she had been unable to swim.
The canal
They boarded the boat at four o’clock in the afternoon. The day was cold, the sky overcast, the canal so narrow she felt she could reach over and touch the sides. As for the boat – ah, what bleak irony! – the boat was indescribably drab; bare, shabby, with no colour or decoration save for a faded red heart that had been daubed on the sliding hatch of the cabin. And even that was cracked and beginning to flake.
As their car pulled alongside the mooring ramp, Tom stared at the boat in glum disbelief. For a moment he could scarcely conceal his disappointment, then pursed his lips and said nothing.
Soon the kids would be arriving in their chartered bus.
Tom climbed on board first and offered her his hand. Looking down to the decrepit transom, floating on a slick of oily water, she hesitated – and for a split second lost her footing and had to lunge across the gap. Above her loomed the grey hump of the cabin roof, its black tin funnel looking thin and worn, curiously fragile against a low charcoal sky.
Rain was beginning to fall as they entered the long cabin that took up almost the entire length of the barge, and she could see immediately why they had once gone by the name of narrow boats. At one end was a stack of bunks and at the other a primitive kitchen, with a table and benches in the middle. Tom set about inspecting the sleeping bunks while she stood haplessly in the cooking area, surrounded by wet patches on the floor where the roof leaked. When she looked up she found herself staring at a motley of pots on the kitchen shelf, all made of battered aluminium with scarcely a flat bottom between them.
The brochure had described the barge as having been converted into a comfortable holiday boat. The brochure, clearly, had lied.
‘Where’s the lavatory?’ she asked, and Tom nodded curtly in the direction of the bow where a narrow door had been cut into a wall. The door was ill-fitting and he had to wrench at the handle to get it open. Inside was a pokey little closet with a dead rat behind the cistern.
The place was a floating slum.
Worse was to come. Tom opened the cabin door and she climbed out after him. Together they edged their way along the narrow deck towards the stern and already there was a heavy weight in the pit of her stomach. What am I doing here? she thought. She was trembling from the cold. It was freezing. Could this possibly be spring?
When they reached the bargemaster’s cabin at the rear they found a dark little hollow of a shelter, curved like a big scallop shell and made of planked wood. Inside it was completely bare and smelled of damp. They had to stoop to enter the cabin – being tall, neither of them could stand up straight in it – and once inside they bumped awkwardly against one another as they dumped their gear onto the floor. Then they looked around them, aghast. Or at least, she was. Tom, as usual, was impassive.
‘This is awful,’ she said.
Tom turned away and she could see that he was angry; disappointed with the boat, yes, but angry with her for not pretending to a stoicism she didn’t feel. He stood for a moment at the open door, watching the grey drizzle fall while she kicked at the flap of her pack. She felt like kicking him.
Morosely they began to unpack, although there was nowhere to put anything, not even a narrow shelf (so much for the ‘small shrine’). She set down her torch beside the pillow and arranged her shampoo and face-cream packs so that they stood upright and ordered in the corner. Then they heard the bus pull in. Here they come, she thought; the hordes. Tom was waiting in silence for her to finish her adjustments, and when everything was in place she followed him back along the narrow deck towards the main cabin.
Just as they reached the door the kids began to clamber aboard, and they at least seemed happy enough: most of them were on the first holiday of their life. They scuttled about in jeans and parkas, looking ragged and half drowned, hair plastered against their foreheads by the rain. Tom marshalled them inside the main cabin and made a brief speech of welcome. Then he introduced them to Kirsten, who was trying not to stare at the damp patches on the floor where the roof dripped water onto the rotting wood. The children (they were no longer children but not quite adolescent) looked giddy with disorientation and glanced at her as if she were one of the fixtures. It had been a long coach trip and a few of them began to crowd around Tom, asking if there was anything to eat. He shrugged and looked uncharacteristically at a loss. Meanwhile the others were milling around the cabin, and around her; shiny, bedraggled, strange. I can’t bear this, she thought, and turned her back on them. In one quick, unobtrusive movement she opened the cabin door, climbed out onto the deck and retreated to the stern, back into the bargemaster’s cabin. Back into the bat cave.
There she sat on the air mattress, in the dark, in a stupefied state. Fuck, fuck, fuck! In five days it would be her birthday, and she was going to spend it in this hole! She had been looking forward to a club in the city, dressing up, going out with friends; a night of drunken abandon. And here on this rotting hulk she couldn’t even have a joint to console herself; Tom had made her promise not to bring any dope, and he didn’t smoke it even at home because he was allergic. Allergic! Sullenly, in the dark, she sat and stewed on her bleak feeling of being trapped, gnawing at her nails in bitterness and frustration. How could she have ended up here, on this miserable strip of water? This claustrophobic cupboard. This floating purgatory. What on earth would she do for ten days?
It was some time before Tom appeared at the door of the cave, carrying a plate of food which he offered, wordlessly. She took it.
All the next day she sulked in her dank little cabin, reading the one book she had brought with her which, at this rate, was only going to last her until evening. Some French novel, set in the nineteenth century. Madame Bovary. She was not the type to read much but she thought she’d better bring something and found this in a carton of books Tom had bought at the local flea market. One of the best books ever written, it said on the cover, but they all say that. If only it weren’t so cold – she had never known this kind of cold before, the kind that got into your bones and made you feel as if all your organs were shrinking and your kidneys were two dull stones dragging in your lower back … and it was worse here in the bat cave, because she had to keep the door open. To close it was like being sealed in a wooden tomb.
After a while she lay the book aside and dozed, as if in sleep she could somehow escape the boat, but when she opened her eyes in the dim cabin it was still there, an ugly hulk gliding along the flat, grey water. Every now and then she could feel the bump of the barge as it knocked against the walls of the canal. Outside was a world of stained brick and smoke but at least, for a while, she could immerse herself in the shimmering haze of the French provinces, where the sky is blue and the leaves still, where the heather is in bloom, where there are patches of violet beneath the bushes of russet and gold, where rooks caw softly among the heavy overhang of oak-trees … From time to time the shouts of the children penetrated her narrative fog; the sound of their boots clumping on the deck, their cries as they leapt onto the grassy bank and tugged at the ropes, or ran to see who could be first to grasp the turning wheel of the lock. At odd moments she could hear them close, just a damp timber-width away, remonstrating in a quiet fury.
‘Geez, you’re a stupid cunt, Sean.’
Madame Bovary. Quite a good read, better than she had expected. And in its way – a way that would make her smile later when she recalled it – it was the right book at the right time. Because there was a particular moment about four-fifths of the way through the novel – she was almost to the end of it – when suddenly she recognised this absurd, selfish, narcissistic woman, Emma Bovary. This drivelling romantic sensualist pining for the glittering life of the cosmopolitan centres. It was her! It was her, Kirsten, here on this hideous boat with these clamouring children whom she could not escape. And she felt a sudden surge of shame at her behaviour; her moodiness, her remoteness, her seething discomfort. All afternoon the boat meandered on, gliding its way along the narrow canal. It was late afternoon and beyond the bargemaster’s cabin where she had read all day in a half-light she could sense the grey English day deepening into its evening gloom. She read on for another half hour, until the final page, and then she put the book aside.
What am I to do now? she asked herself, and the answer came back to her, soundlessly. She got up and stepped from the bat cave onto the deck. Outside it was dark, save for the bright light from the main cabin which illumined the drab water.
The children scarcely registered her entry, though Tom did, looking suddenly alarmed, as if he suspected she might be about to throw a tantrum.
For a moment she stood there, taking in the scene. The kids appeared to be in the early stages of preparing dinner. There was a mysterious pale powder, a sickly mustard-green colour, spilled across the wooden table and in patches on the floor, and she realised, after a perplexed moment, that this was packet soup out of some giant caterer’s pack, a large circular tin that stood by the sink and was labelled ‘Asparagus’. The floor was still wet from the leaks in the roof and the powder had begun to congeal into little clots and stick to the boots of the kids whom Tom had rostered on for cooking. One of them, a girl, was measuring water from the pump into a battered old aluminium soup pot, and even this she was doing clumsily, somehow managing to spill even more water onto an already damp floor. Kirsten looked at this child, fumbling with her ladle, and realised there was no escape, nowhere to go, no way to leave the boat.
‘Here, let me do that,’ she said.
Over the next hour she marshalled them into some kind of order, giving them the simple jobs they could manage, like peeling things, setting the table, opening cans. The entire store of food for the trip had been bought by the absent husband and wife who had made the journey in previous years. To Kirsten it was almost unrecognisable junk but she read the instructions on the back of everything and because she could cook it wasn’t hard to figure out what to do with the base ingredients, even something so indescribably repulsive as a packet of Trix lard, a little square of paste-coloured suet encased in a garish foil wrapper. By seven she and the team under her supervision had prepared a three-course meal and belatedly they sat down at the long wooden table to packet asparagus soup with sliced white bread and margarine, sausages and mashed potato with tinned peas and tinned carrots followed by a huge jam tart with pastry made from the lard and thick, sticky ‘jam’ from a caterer’s tin in which no trace of fruit could be discerned. Oh, yes, and custard made from a bright yellow powder. The children ate with gusto and declared it one of the best meals they had ever had. She could scarcely believe this, but sitting with them and listening to their jeering, good-humoured jokes, watching them scoff and guffaw and poke one another, she found herself ambushed by a faint flush of well-being, somewhere around the first bite of jam tart – which, considering its origins, was better than might have been expected.
Later, in the bat cave, as they snuggled into the double sleeping bag, Tom turned his back on her and went instantly to sleep. Fair enough. She thought she might be rewarded with a word of praise, of mere acknowledgement even, or failing that, some kind of embrace. But no. Over the washing-up she had looked at him, sitting at the long wooden table, wearily playing blind poker with a group of them and trying to keep up with the boasting and the rowdy banter, but he was dog-tired, pale with exhaustion from the effort of the first day and the workings of a lock system he’d never before set eyes on. At nine-thirty he had risen and enforced a strict curfew, and because the kids were tired they had offered only token resistance.
She, of course, was wide-awake, having lounged all day in her cabin.
The next morning she got up at six-thirty and supervised the breakfast team. Soon her hair hung in damp tendrils from the rising steam, and the smell of hot bacon fat clung to her clothes. The plates were no sooner empty than the kids bolted outside, out into the grey English light. All morning a drizzling rain fell across their faces and the day seemed endless, but by eleven she was mustering the lunch team and before long it was dinner again. Tom supervised the working of the canals and operating the locks; she ran the kitchen with the kids on roster and they cooked up a storm.
On the morning of the third day they glided into the dock of a small market town, a grim settlement of iron footbridges and tall black chimneys, and she and a party went on a shopping expedition to buy fresh food and an adequate frying pan. With a decent frying pan, she explained, you could cook almost anything, and she found herself drifting deep into a relaxed discourse on the properties of heat and cast iron, and the kids humoured her by feigning interest. It was another dull, chilly morning with a threatening bank of grey cloud in the sky and they pulled their beanies down low over their foreheads so that they looked like a tribe of alien dwarfs. Soon they found a shop that sold cabbages, cauliflower and kale and, to her amazement, a small quantity of zucchini. At another she bought three bottles of chocolate sauce to be hidden away for a special occasion. The kids wanted to know why she bought so many vegetables and she told them it was an Australian custom.
One morning, as she stood at the sink bench with her back to them, unwrapping the sliced bread for the breakfast toast, she found herself smiling at the punchline of an obscene joke she was pretending not to have heard, and she realised that in just a few days she had become comfortable with them, and they with her. There were two especially, Yusuf and Ruth, who had become her lieutenants in the kitchen, both able to anticipate and direct the others. Ruth was black, had a wild falsetto voice and amused them all by yapping out an unending stream of profane commentary. She appeared to have no concentration whatsoever but her air of insouciant incompetence proved to be deceptive, for she exuded a natural authority that made the others jump. This meant she could be left in charge of the kitchen, or what passed for one, at least for short spells. Yusuf was a quiet, conscientious boy with sad eyes who worked with intense and methodical concentration, as if the least mistake would see him consigned to Hell. And then there was Terry. Terry was another black kid with whom she had struck up a kind of bantering camaraderie as he made sporadic raids on the kitchen, at Tom’s instigation, for supplies for ‘outdoors’. He was big for his age, a muscular boy with a swaggering demeanour and a dark glare of ferocity in his eyes which, in another place and at another time, might not be good news. Already, at thirteen, he had been up before a children’s magistrate on a charge of grievous bodily harm. But for now he was Tom’s lieutenant on the cut. One night Terry confided in her that his surname was Nelson and that his parents, in all seriousness, had christened him ‘Admiral’. ‘But anyone call me that, Miss, they get a buncha fives.’ At some point in his childhood – ‘dunno when’ – he had re-named himself Terry, and since he refused to answer to anything else the name had stuck. Thereafter she could not help but think of him as The Admiral, and it became a joke between her and Tom, a rare joke for the privacy of the bat cave.
As for the others in her kitchen, these were her foot soldiers. They worked with varying degrees of competence and liked to lose themselves in chopping and stirring or in trying to remember exactly how to set a formal table: ‘Which way do the knives go again, Miss?’ (meaning, do the blades turn in or out?). They were thirteen and still wearing the last traces of their childhood grace: in another two years – less – they would be fully in the grip of their hormonal demons. But as they worked now over the sink or the chopping boards they breathed in an oasis of calm. The girls gossiped about bands and fashion; the boys talked endlessly of football. They told her about their lives, about their custody arrangements and which parent they got on with best (those who were lucky enough to see both). Some boasted of older brothers with convictions, embroidering the feats of gangs in their area. There was a casual violence in their lives (‘Yeah, well, he gets a bit carried away, my dad’) which bled into the landscape of their jokey narratives, and they swore at one another with habitual venom. Tom had described them as little bastards in the classroom yet they were prepared to work hard on the locks, scampering from barge to embankment in their earnest efforts to assist him. They seemed almost touchingly determined to get it right, and on those occasions when they mucked up were abashed with contrition. Away from home they were surprisingly generous and forgiving, as if, in that temporary capsule on the water, they could suspend their grievances, pack away their resistances and sail on; enlightened pilgrims who had left their burdens behind in the old country. Of course, they were still in the old country, but they were on the water, and being on the water made it different. From Tom’s stories it seemed that in the classroom they were like caged animals; tormentors. Out of it they were gracious, mature, forgiving and funny – but only, she knew, on the boat. Off the boat it would be different – they would be skiving off for cigarettes and alcohol and any drugs they could afford, or steal. But the narrow boat was like a floating desert island. Here on the cut their space was finite, their roles were defined, their options few. And yet they were happy. And why? Because for a short time they formed a community; they belonged to the boat. For ten days they were water gypsies, living with a horizon that was always, but slowly, moving.
Often enough she escaped from the kitchen to amble with them along the tow paths, and when they began to bicker dangerously she would distract them with hair-raising tales from the Australian bush, a landscape they imagined as more perilous than any remote planet and teeming with lethal wildlife. Her shark stories went down particularly well, not that she had ever seen a shark outside of an aquarium – nor did she know anyone who had – and she realised that in her tales she was constructing a mythical landscape, like something from Gulliver’s Travels, or The Water Babies. Some other world that was hot, white and ferocious. She also guessed that this proximity to the monstrous would enhance her mystique, and with it her authority.
Sometimes the scene by the tow path was bucolic, with local boys fishing by the canal, a church spire in the distance or a quaint early pumphouse with dome and Ionic columns, and a water mill beside. In other parts they glided through a landscape of iron bridges and tall brick chimneys; the water stained a metallic orange from mine seepage, the dour Gas Street Basin in Birmingham and, later, the giant cooling towers of a power station flaring into the sky. She liked both landscapes, was entranced by their strangeness: so different from the wide plains and the diamond-white light of home. She even became resigned to the weather, the unexpected beauties of the English gloom. The gates and beams of the locks were painted in tar and white-washed to make them visible in fog. On one misty day their ghostly outlines loomed up ahead with a kind of eerie beauty that made her think of hobgoblins, and later that evening from out of the fog she saw the startling image of an eye painted on the bow of a strange boat, gliding into her vision like some disembodied Cyclops.
Not surprisingly, on the first night of fog the kids wanted to have a séance. At first Tom was dismissive and scoffed at them. Then to her surprise he relented and let them fiddle about with a glass for an hour, but they talked and fidgeted too much to be able to spook themselves, to generate any satisfying frisson. And because he had worked them hard, they were tired. At curfew they collapsed into their bunks with barely a murmur of protest.
Not long after, she and Tom embraced avidly in the gloom, their bodies rocking on the hard floor while the smells from outside wafted in over their skin … diesel from off the oily water … fresh-cut grass by the embankment … the dank, alluring smell of moss along the stone coping. In the early hours of the morning the wind came up so that the narrow boat began to knock against the brick walls of the canal … and she woke, and listened with a sense almost of enchantment.
On the Wednesday there was some kind of scuffle on the bank between Yusuf and a kid named Joel. She had taken an instinctive dislike to Joel, a weedy little smart alec who sniffed all the time. There was something about him that got under her skin, his ratty little body, his sour, acrid smell, the way his hair stood up in unwashed spikes. He seemed always to be following her around, mimicking her accent and forcing on her his clumsy attentions so that she had to restrain herself from giving him a shove. That morning Joel had spat on Yusuf and the two of them grappled and slipped together all the way down the grass to the edge of the water. Tom had to stop abruptly while halfway through turning the lock and in the act of looking away cut his thumb badly on a piece of loose tin. He swore and shouted at the two boys as he strode toward them, muttering as blood oozed from the gash. She half expected this incident to stir them all up into factional warfare, to render them seething and unmanageable. But no. Abashed at Tom’s discomfort, shamed by his stoic patience (wary, as well, of the black look in his eye that underwrote that patience), they tiptoed around for the rest of the day and tried to make it up to him.
Later in the bat cave Kirsten expressed her surprise at this display of contrition. ‘I thought they were supposed to be hard cases,’ she whispered as they lay on their sleeping bag in the dark.
‘They are.’ He sighed. ‘I think it’s the boat. They haven’t been half as much trouble as I feared they might be. The boat seems to be having a soothing effect on them.’
Yes, she thought. It was the flow. The endless flow.
‘Also,’ he added, ‘it’s their age. In another year, they’ll be impossible. Terminal cynicism will have set in.’
‘I won’t come next year,’ she said, laughing.
‘Neither will I.’
On Good Friday it was her birthday and, as it happened, Terry’s birthday as well. Tom had told the kids and they organised a surprise party. Tom bought a cake at the little town where they stopped the day before and they hid it under Ruth’s bunk. After dinner – spaghetti bolognese at Terry’s request and a Caesar salad (or what passed as one) for her – she and Terry blew the candles out together. There were ten candles, though he was fourteen and she twenty-three. Then the kids presented her with a gift bought from a whip-around of their pocket money. It was a small pyrex casserole dish with blue cornflowers on it because she was ‘such an ace chef’. At this point Tom allowed himself an ironic smirk and she knew exactly what he was thinking. Then one of the smallest and, at school, most troublesome of the boys, Patrick, a scrawny boy with protuberant ears, stood up from his bench and leapt onto the table. The cutlery went flying in all directions and a bowl fell to the floor and broke but no-one seemed to care, least of all Tom. With a half smile of anticipation he was looking up at Patrick, who had broken out into a wild patter, a kind of high ululating sound, half yodelling, half keening, as if he were speaking in tongues. In fact he was mocking them, mocking them all in a semi-coherent rant of cruel mimicry. It seemed he had prepared for this moment (with Tom’s collusion?) spraying his words over their heads like verbal confetti. And when this went down well he launched into his Elvis impersonations, and he was such a natural, so manically gifted in either mode, that they all surged as one to the edge of hysteria, drunk with laughter. Two of the rowdier boys scruffed one another and began to whoop and bray, while the more self-conscious boys like Yusuf shook quietly and blushed at their own mirth. Kirsten laughed so hard she had a coughing fit, while around her the exuberant girls, led by Ruth, clutched one another and shrieked so piercingly that the drab narrow boat seemed to vibrate into the stillness of the countryside. Even Tom guffawed into his beard.
Curfew was approaching and Kirsten wanted to do something; it was unthinkable that after such a good time they should all just fall into their bunks without ceremony. She stood up and rummaged around for the new frying pan, and the chocolate sauce she had stashed away, and she set about making flapjacks for supper. At the first sight of these the kids swooped on her, and the mixing and the pouring and the frying seemed to take forever, because of course there were so many of them, and they wanted to eat and eat and eat; wanted the night to go on and on until they were comatose with a fullness they rarely felt.
When Patrick’s turn came he dipped his fingers into the sauce and daubed his face in brown chocolate streaks, flapping his arms and legs and whooping around the cabin like a lithe little demon.
Their last night.
It had been a hard day on the locks and the kids were subdued, almost sombre. ‘They know they’re going home,’ Tom muttered, as he settled into the sleeping bag, ‘and they’re not looking forward to it.’
Jesus, I am, she thought. She was looking forward to a hot shower. But the kids seemed to be in another space altogether. A few of them were sullen, angry even at the prospect of having to leave the boat.
In the middle of the night she was woken by a tap on the door. Tom was a heavy sleeper. He didn’t stir. ‘Who is it?’ she called in a pronounced whisper.
‘It’s Ruth, Miss. It’s Joel. He’s acting all funny.’
When she entered the main cabin she couldn’t see the boy at first and shone her torch into the corner behind the table. There was Joel, curled up in a foetal ball on the damp floor, keening in a low, shivering moan.
In a dismissive gesture she patted Ruth on the shoulder and nodded in the direction of the bunks at the far end. Then she moved towards the boy.
‘What’s the matter, Joel?’
The boy looked through her.
Again she asked, and again, but he would not reply, nor would he respond to her requests that he return to his bunk. Even when she crouched beside him and looked directly into his eyes he continued to stare ahead with a glazed expression, his arms locked around his sides. It occurred to her then that she should wake Tom, that the situation might be beyond her, but Tom had a long drive ahead of him the next day and it was worth at least one more try. So she began quietly, so the others couldn’t hear, to talk coaxingly to Joel; about the trip, about what a good time they had all had and how it was a pity to spoil it now, about how, whatever was bothering him, he could talk to Tom in the morning and she was sure that Tom would be able to help in some way. All the while she could feel the chill from the damp floorboards rising up through the soles of her feet, through the thin skein of her thermals and into the small of her back. Her feet were turning numb. Damn this kid, she thought. She would try a more forceful approach and if that didn’t work she would have to send Ruth for Tom. Squatting on her haunches she grabbed hold of his arms and attempted awkwardly to raise him to his feet, but with a sudden jerk he twisted to one side and then fell back against the wall of the cabin so that his head made a dull thud against the wood. For a second or two he lay there and then, like a puppet, he sat up as if in shock, with one hand held gingerly to his head.
Kirsten was relieved to see that he was conscious. ‘Will you get back into your bunk now, Joel?’
The boy shook his head.
This was too much. ‘Ruth!’ she hissed. ‘Bring me the blankets off his bunk.’
Soon two outstretched arms were handing her a mound of grey blankets, disgusting army-ration serge for those without sleeping bags. She disentangled a blanket from the pile and laid it across Joel.
What now? She couldn’t possibly leave him here like this.
There was only one thing to do and that was to snuggle into the corner against him and draw the other blanket around her.
The boy made no resistance. Indeed, he had become calm. Before long his breathing slowed and deepened and she knew he was asleep.
Good, she thought, and allowed herself a slow exhaling sigh. Thank you. Thank you, God. It was their very last night and all they had to do was get through it without further mishap. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, and hadn’t, and she had played her part well, all things considered, all natural obstacles taken into account … and with this thought she settled beneath the blanket, her head drooped and she began a slow drifting into sleep, but not before she caught a glimpse of herself as a figure from one of those sentimental prints of the kind that had hung in her great-grandmother’s house. ‘Young maiden comforts orphan in the night’.
And she felt almost virtuous. She was cold, she was uncomfortable but she had done a good deed.
What woke her was the sound of the splash.
It wasn’t loud, but instantly she knew what that sound meant. She opened her eyes and glanced instinctively to her left where Joel had been sleeping, but the corner of the boat was empty. As she flung back the sliding door of the cabin she shouted, ‘Tom! Tom!’ and glanced hastily up and down the narrow deck. Then she saw him, a shadowy figure flailing in silence by the edge of the lock and seeming to sink before her eyes. ‘Tom!’ she shouted again, and at the moment of shouting leapt from the deck of the barge.
The icy shock of the water rose up through her blood like voltage.
Later it would seem as if at that moment she were lifted off the deck by some blind force, for she had no sense of agency, of any operation of will. She simply leapt into the black water and grabbed hold of the lump that was rising up to the surface. At first she thought Joel might be unconscious but the minute she grasped hold of him he began to howl and writhe. Fortunately he was puny, but he bit her on the left hand so that for a moment she lost her grip and had to struggle – treading water all the time – to lock her right arm around his skinny neck. And still Joel fought her, lashing out with his feet. It was a full moon, and an eerie lambent glow bathed the canal and surrounding fields in a ghostly sepia gloom. Those few moments when they thrashed around in the dark chill of the English countryside seemed like an eternity until, in a sudden moment of apprehension, she understood that the boy wanted to die.
By this time Tom and the other children were crowding onto the deck. Some of the boys had leapt onto the embankment for a better view and stood shivering in their pyjamas. Tom, meanwhile, was kneeling on the deck, preparing to grab hold of Joel as Kirsten manoeuvred him alongside the barge. Assisted by Terry, he managed to drag the dripping Joel onto the deck and by the time Kirsten had climbed aboard they had wrapped Joel in a blanket. ‘Hold onto him,’ Tom said to Terry, and a look of grim understanding passed between them. Then, turning in consternation to Kirsten: ‘Are you okay?’
It was a feeble question and she resented it. If it hadn’t been for him and his bloody excursion she would not now be standing here in a state almost of shock. ‘Go to the cabin,’ he began, ‘use my towel to dry off. I’ll deal with Joel and I’ll be along in a minute. I’ll get Ruth to make you a hot drink.’
‘You can’t just leave him there unsupervised.’ She was shaking violently.
‘True.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ll probably have to sleep in there for the rest of the night. On the floor. But I’ll come back to the cabin first.’
Without a word Kirsten returned to the bat cave. Her eyes felt as if they were coated in icy grit and she had a headache from the chill of the water. From the neck down she was numb. Standing, dripping, outside the door, she stripped off and bundled her sodden clothes into a nearby bucket. Inside she towelled herself down as briskly as she could and put on her warmest gear. The torch had disappeared. Too shaky and exhausted to zip the doona up into a sleeping pouch, she wrapped it tight around her and then, almost falling onto the air mattress, she lay there bent in a foetal arc and could not control her trembling.
After a while Ruth appeared with a tin mug and set it down beside Kirsten’s head. ‘Here you are, Miss,’ she said. ‘They put Joel to bed in one of the bunks and Sir is lying with him so’s he can’t move.’
‘You’d better go back,’ Kirsten whispered. ‘I’ll be okay.’ But when she sat up and took a sip from the mug it was full of a tepid and sickly cocoa that made her gag.
Tom did not return.
In the morning the kids were mute as they packed up their kits and went about cleaning the interior of the main cabin. Joel had been placed under Terry’s watchful eye but for the moment he appeared okay; he had eaten some toast for breakfast and would nod when spoken to by Tom. Mostly the kids ignored him, deep in their own reluctance to leave the boat. They had the air of mourners in the wake of a funeral procession. As the barge glided and bumped into the mooring dock they gazed with blank, resigned faces at the big green bus that awaited them. Then, hoisting their packs over their shoulders, they lined up by the cabin door and awaited Tom’s command to walk the plank.
Kirsten felt like death. Her head throbbed, her throat was raw, her limbs ached in every muscle and joint and she knew that some bug or virus had ambushed her in the night. All she wanted was to crawl under a blanket but she knew she must stand and say goodbye to the kids. She waved from the open door of the bat cave as Tom stood at the end of the plank and shook hands with each boy and girl as they trooped off, and she saw a gruff male courtliness in her lover that she hadn’t seen before … but was too sick to hold this thought for long.
After they had waved the kids off on the bus she fell into Tom’s car, aching in every bone. It was clear that Joel must travel back with them and Terry was delegated to the back seat to sit beside him and keep an eye out for sudden moves. Tom was afraid that the boy might open the door and attempt to leap out, but for most of the drive home he seemed almost normal, as if that nocturnal parabola of watery flight had purged him of his demon. At least for now. Kirsten was beyond caring. All the way back to London she drifted in and out of a painful sleep in which it felt as if her body were encased in a rotating drum of fire. Tom, exhausted, drove like a maniac.
She spent the next three days in bed.
It was the sickest she had ever been in her life. All day and all night she lay in her track pants and polar-fleece jacket under the thick doona and still she was cold. Her head felt as if it were being compressed by an iron weight while a current of raking pain tormented her back and joints. Her fever it seemed came and went, and came again, and with it a series of dreams so torrid that at times it was hard to tell whether she was dreaming or hallucinating. One late afternoon she dreamed that she was kneeling on top of the main cabin of the narrow boat and banging with her fist on the door, and the door was stuck so that she had to break in through the hatch. And there they all were, the children lying on their bunks like angels, their eyes closed beatifically while through the open hatch poured a torrent of milk so that in their sleep they were force-fed, their skin bathed in rivulets of cream, their eyelids glazed with a thick white coating. Not long after, Tom came home from school and sat by her bed, muttering about Joel who had gone berserk in the playground. Joel? Who was Joel? Then the doctor arrived; a shadowy figure, like an apparition in a cloud of warm pink fog.
On the third day, the fever broke. In the early morning she woke, feeling better. Instinctively she fumbled for the torch, but of course it wasn’t there. The book was there, Madame Bovary, looking much the worse for wear, mottled and wavy from where hot tea had been spilled on the cover. Poor Emma, she thought, poor Emma. Too young to be the wife and mother of a plain man in a small village; too constrained too early. Thank God that she, Kirsten, wasn’t married. She wouldn’t marry Tom, and perhaps not anyone. And with that thought, suddenly into her head came the image of a narrow boat, not the boat they had just returned from, which had no name, but the photograph in the book; that strange picture of the Gort. There in the gloom she could see the young bargemaster’s wife at the door of her dark hollow; could see the tightly wound ringlets that framed her head, the prim white collar, the neat cuffs and the wide serge skirt of dull grey, so wide it skimmed the sides of the doorway. How on earth had she borne it? And how solemnly she gazed back at her onlooker, though the seriousness in her eyes was an enigma. How steadily she held herself before the camera, because it took so long to make an exposure then, and it was impossible to hold a smile for long without feeling foolish. And perhaps, after all, she was not inclined. It was unbelievable that anyone could live in that dark, confined space, never mind make a home of it for a child. Day after day, on the drab water, so flat and oily in its man-made channels; so dense with the sense of enclosure, of brick and tar and charcoal and smoke. And in her arms, still, the white swaddled baby, its blank face all but erased save for those eyes like two sepia smudges, staring out in hope.
Kirsten sighed, and turned over onto her flank. Time to let the long night of water-sleep draw in on her, and burying her face she snuggled down deep into her padded cocoon. Now, once again, she could feel the buoyant curve of the narrow boat beneath her, rocking gently to the familiar slop, slop of water against the stern, while outside there hummed the deep stillness of the countryside. And all the while she was moving inwards, floating on a slow tide of surrender, floating towards the turning wheel of the lock. Sleep, she thought, savouring the word … sleep. And drifting off into the limp repose of the convalescent, she wondered if that baby had ever learned to swim.