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Chapter Seven
Why is My Kitchen a Cardboard Cut-Out?

A
FTER ANOTHER MUCH-NEEDED
cup of tea, I decided to make an attempt at dinner. Incredibly, Happy was equipped with a diesel hob, expensive things, but much safer than gas. Leaking gas tends to drop into the bilges and then explode at the least provocation, or so we had been told. It was one of the things Geoff liked about her, as every other boat we had looked at had gas installed.

To install just the hob alone would have cost over £500, hob and cooker together came to a massive £1200. So with budget restrictions in mind, we had decided that, for now, we would make do with just the already installed hob and the microwave, and the diesel oven could wait for our overdue lottery win.

The hob's controls were basic to say the least and, with a certain amount of trepidation, we had dragged the instructions out of Happy's collection of how-to booklets in an attempt to make sense of the wretched thing. Half-an-hour later, we had a pool of fuel in the cupboard space under the hob, the whole boat stank of spilt diesel and every time the hob actually lit, rather than just running through its array of flashing lights, it made this odd whistling, screaming noise before cutting out and dropping more diesel into the cupboard.

Tired and hungry, Sam had hit manic, I had got to the point of screaming and Geoff was talking slowly at me with slightly gritted teeth, a sure sign that he was approaching furious. I was voting to rip the whole thing out and throw it into the canal when Geoff dumped the instructions on the side and said, ‘Sod it, let's go to the pub, we can get something hot to eat and Mr Hyper there can run off some of that energy.'

We stared at each other and listened to Sam who had taken to bouncing on our bed, each creaking thump accompanied by rude songs of his own devising. Both the bouncing and the singing were enough to make any parent wince.

Holding Sam down with one hand, I made him eat a slice of bread and butter to tide him over until proper nutrition could be found and we took a walk down the tow path, in search of a peaceful beer garden, some alcohol and someone else to do the cooking.

It was a lovely evening and watching Sam tire himself out on the climbing frame in the pub garden we were happy. Geoff let the peace of the evening, a good meal and numerous cups of tea restore his equilibrium, and I let three-parts of a bottle of decent red restore mine.

The next morning dawned clear and bright. I, however, didn't. Too much wine and the overpowering smell of diesel from the kitchen were just too much for my delicate sensibilities so, deciding that both Sam and my headache would benefit from some more exercise and fresh air, I wandered over to the office with him to see if they had a list of handy diesel engineers that could come out in an emergency.

Sam and I left Geoff with his head in the electrics, muttering imprecations against whichever hapless soul had installed our, in his opinion, ‘stupidly small inverter'. What I gathered, from amid the swearing, was that we only had 1.5kW available to us at any one time, which meant that whenever we had the microwave on we couldn't use the kettle, as both together blew the inverter and cut out all the electrics.

There was also a problem with the fridge, which appeared to be completely non-functional, but Geoff couldn't work out whether the fridge was actually dead or if it was just another problem with the electrics.

This is one area where I neither get involved, nor make suggestions; I am terrified of electricity, so I just made him lots of cups of tea and kept Sam out of his way.

Despite Mary's taciturn personality, she was very, very helpful and spent a good 20 minutes trying to find us someone who could come at short notice; there are very few people who can deal with diesel cookers. Kuranda are the main suppliers of this type of cooker and hob but they are based in Yorkshire and although they were more than happy to fix it for us, we would have had to send it up to them.

Mary finally found us a couple of diesel heating engineers who were willing to have a look at it and would be going past in about an hour.

‘There you go then,' Mary growled, putting the phone down. ‘Anything else you need?' She bared her teeth at me in what might have been a smile, or a snarl to warn me that there'd better not be.

‘No, no, that's brilliant, thanks – you've been really helpful,' I stammered at her.

Narrowing her eyes at me in case I was being sarcastic (I wouldn't dare), she then looked down at her paperwork.

‘When they get here, I'll send 'em over.' I had been dismissed; I turned to go, resisting the urge to bow myself backwards out of her office.

Collecting Sam from the wonders of the shop, I spent a couple of minutes telling him that no, he didn't need the Rosie and Jim dolls to go with his duck, and, feeling Mary's steely glare on the back of my neck, I ushered him quickly outside.

Crossing the car park toward the river, the smell of cooking bacon wafted effusively past us and I decided to surprise my poor, deprived husband with one of Gongoozler's incredible bacon sandwiches. While they were constructing Geoff's breakfast, I let Sam coerce me into letting him have a second breakfast as well. My hangover gave my stomach a good talking to about the danger of seductive smells and I decided that coffee was all I was going to get away with.

The restaurant boat was small but nicely set up, with eight tables, some with four chairs, some with two, nothing fancy, but clean and very classic with castles and roses painted on every available surface. I never did find out the owner's name, but she was one of those people who always had a smile; she asked us how it was all going and then bustled off to cook.

Sam had obviously worked out that Mum was not 100 per cent up to par today and he had decided that some good behaviour might get him another chance to turn robots into chickens, so was quietly playing some complicated game with the crucible set. I basked in the sun coming through the window and was busy looking at the same group of young swans that we had been watching on our first night, mugging passers-by for titbits and musing that all they needed was a matching set of hoodies and they wouldn't be that much different from human teenagers, when a group of four well-dressed thirty-somethings stepped loudly into the boat.

They were that arrogant type that usually frequent trains, talking loudly into mobile phones and to each other as though their conversation is the only thing that matters. The owner came out to take their order and, after loudly condemning everything on the menu (your loss, people), they settled for three teas and a coffee.

‘Make sure the cups are clean,' one young man shouted down the boat toward the kitchen.

‘Isn't this small,' one woman giggled at the other, ‘I can't believe people actually live on these things.'

‘Well, for the type of people that live on them, it's probably a step up,' the clean-cup man, sitting next to her, lectured. ‘Don't forget, these people are basically river gypsies, there's just no space for them on the roads any more so they've turned to the waterways.'

‘Yah, well the sooner they bloody get off them the better,' clean-cup's mate sneered. ‘My friend's father had a lovely boat and one of these things ran into him, sank him outright, didn't do a bit of damage to the stupid, crappy narrow boat – then they had the cheek to say that it was his fault, pulled in front of them or some rubbish. Why they didn't just stop I'll never know.'

If my hangover had been just a little less aggressive, I might have been just a little more forthcoming and put my oar in there and then, but as it was, I was content to just sit and listen as clean-cup poured out more and more rubbish about the ‘type' of people that lived on narrow boats.

In the three months we had been searching for a new home, we had met and talked to possibly hundreds of boat dwellers, and the only thing they had in common was that they lived on a boat. We had met teachers, plumbers, office workers, writers, musicians, all manner of different people; all had different reasons for living where they did.

Our takeaway breakfast arrived just as I finished my coffee and just in time to stop Sam licking his plate clean. Giving one last look at the sniggering group, smug in their ill-informed superiority, my only thought was, ‘If your mate's dad was as big an arsehole as you lot, I would have run into him, too.'

As I wandered down the tow path, buffeted by Sam's normal erratic progress, I was struck by a sudden awful thought: was that how people would see me now? Would I be dismissed as a lowlife before people even took the time to find out who I was? It was a depressing thought, only slightly diminished by a short stab of guilt that I too, just a year ago, would have been exactly as biased as those that may judge me now. Ah karmic retribution, it's almost guaranteed to bite you in the arse just when you expect it least.

By the time Sam and I got back to Happy, Geoff had emerged from the electrics and was making another list; he looked worried and harassed but brightened up considerably when he opened the bacon sandwich.

‘So, what's the prognosis?' I asked, hunting for yet more coffee.

He sighed around a mouthful of bacon, ‘Not good. The inverter is just too small to cope with our power demands, so we need a new one. The electrics have been seriously bodged and added to over the years and now they just look like a big ball of multicoloured string. The fridge doesn't work, and it looks as though the battery bank could do with being replaced.'

‘Oh. How much is all that going to set us back?' I picked up his list and winced at the prices that he had guesstimated. ‘A grand for an inverter! What's it made of – gold?' Raising my voice had set my headache off again and reaching for my fourth cup of coffee of the day I used it to wash down a couple of paracetamol. ‘And what sort of battery costs £350?'

‘Six of them.' Geoff finished his sandwich, reclaimed his list and studied it again. ‘We could probably get a cheaper inverter but we use a lot of power and the computers will need a clean power supply. This inverter will give us 3kW which is double what we have at the moment. Yes, it's the top of the range but we may as well buy it while we have the money; in a year's time we may not.'

‘Good point,' I conceded. ‘On an up-note, Mary found us someone to look at the hob; they should be here any minute.'

In actual fact, Geoff had managed to finish his breakfast and we were well on the way to having a full-scale row with Sam about chickens before they arrived. In the sudden flurry of introductions, explanations and tea-making, Sam made good his escape. Blatantly exploiting the situation, he had worked out that I was now too busy to have a family discussion about the dangers of computer games.

Watching him hightail it up the boat, I managed to take cold comfort from the likelihood that his sneaky tendencies would stand him in good stead when he was older; maybe he would have a career in politics.

I never actually managed to remember the engineers' names, as they were immediately nicknamed Tweedledee and Tweedledum, but they were brilliant and an absolute cliché. On hearing about our woes, they set about wedging themselves into surprisingly small spaces for such large gentlemen; as they drank vast amounts of tea there was a lot of swearing and passing of strange tools about, but in due course the hob was disconnected and lay mournfully on the worktop in a puddle of diesel with its innards strewn about what passed for our kitchen. This is the point where the strange sucking-of-teeth noises started and, for every hiss and frown, the pound signs clicked up and up in my mind.

Eventually, Tweedledee extracted a copper something that had obviously snapped (even I could tell that it shouldn't dangle like that).

‘There you go, that's the bugger,' he grinned, waggling it to and fro. ‘Funny thing, though,' he continued, ‘this looks like it was like this when it was put in, it was snagged in the seal.'

Geoff frowned. ‘That doesn't actually surprise me,' he said. ‘This kitchen is weird, the hob's damaged, the fridge doesn't work, and the microwave is brand new. I've been wondering if this whole kitchen had been thrown in just for the sale of the boat.'

‘Why would they do that?' I asked.

‘Well, you think about it,' he leant on the wall. ‘This was one of a pair, all the cabins were on this one, and the galley and the saloon were on the other one. Why would anybody have a small kitchen taking up space in a boat where you need to sleep as many folk as possible? I don't have any proof, but I think this was a cabin, possibly for the crew as it's next to the engine room, and he has just slung a kitchen in for show and none of it actually works; mind you, we can't really complain, for the price he accepted we should count ourselves lucky that there was anything here at all.'

‘Bloody hell,' I fumed, ‘it's going to cost a fortune to replace all this lot.'

Obviously a married man, Tweedledee stepped in before I could go off into ‘rant mode'.

‘Don't worry, it's not that bad, all we need to do is give Kuranda a call and they'll have another one here by tomorrow. We'll pop in and fix it and you'll be on your way.'

I must have looked unconvinced because he continued, ‘No, no, really, they're very good, the part will be in the office by tomorrow morning, you watch.'

He looked so sincere I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wasn't Kuranda sending the part I was unconvinced about; it was them turning up again tomorrow to fit it.

The moaning and griping were interrupted at that point by a phone call from my mother to tell us that she and my father were bored and were coming down to see the boat; they would be with us in about an hour and a half.

Argh no, not in this state – hmm ... hang on a minute.

‘Great, we'd love to see you ... erm, Mummy darling, sweetie, lovey, most helpful mummy of all...'

Silence, then a sigh, ‘What do you want?'