Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (2 page)

Click click, said Mozza. Pardon? I said. Click click, said Mozza, let the water in click by click. Oh yes, I said, that poor chap last summer, two locks behind us. The lock filled too fast, knocked overboard by the tiller, engine in reverse, cut to pieces. Wife, two kids. Click click, said Mozza. What’s the hurry?

We want to go south to see if we can handle the big rivers, explained Monica. This year we want to go down to London and past the Houses of Parliament and up the Thames and along the Kennet and Avon Canal to Bristol. Next summer we want to go to Paris, and the summer after to Carcassonne. Never heard of it, said Mozza. It’s in France, I said, right down the other end. It’s sort of an adventure before it’s too late. They say at our age you are at the end of vigour.

Yes, said Mozza, of course you are, just look at you, but what can you do? What do you want to go south for at your age? Why don’t you drink yourself to death in the Star like a normal person? Narrowboats belong in the Midlands, in the narrow cuts. They don’t work in the big locks; they bang about, they get caught up. They don’t work on the rivers; they are too long, too slow, the currents turn them over. Don’t you like it here? He had started to wave his arms. We do, Mozza, said Monica, we do like it here.

Staffordshire is good enough for some, Mozza persisted—you can get oatcakes and pork scratchings and people talk to you and you can understand what they are saying. You don’t get the southerners here. You can go line-dancing. I go line-dancing all the time and do you know how many legs I’ve got? He rapped on his knee. And do you know how many legs my dog has got—my poor old Captain Ahab?

Next morning we passed an untidy white cruiser, and Mozza grinned through the window. Click click, he shouted, and threw out a black Labrador cross with three legs, which staggered about and fell sleepily back on board. Click click, cried Mozza, click click.

I’m glad you didn’t tell Mozza we are sailing across the Channel, said Monica, he gets upset. Who said we’re sailing across the Channel? I asked—we can’t even steer yet. We’d miss. We are not boaters, we are civilians. And the sea is not all limpet shells and sandcastles. Have you ever watched a spring tide go by at ten miles an hour? Christ Mon, enough is enough—we are supposed to be retired. You told Clive we were doing it, said Monica. He was drunk, I said, he won’t remember.

THE CANALS ARE THE OLD WORK OF GIANTS, and fifty years ago they lay desolate. It took heroes to save them and now the cuts seethe with fish and birds, and flow for thousands of country miles up slopes, down valleys, along mountains, through hills, and across the flats of the East Midlands. We muttered east down the Trent and Mersey Canal, on to the river Trent at Shardlow. It was April and every week they changed the flowers for something more seasonal madam.

At Trent Junction the Soar joins the Trent and you turn right for Leicester and London. On the ampler current you sway and go faster and you feel you are on a real boat. The new engine,
ma petite folie
, my pride, left the mornings as quiet and clean as we found them. Even the fishermen smiled. The engine was built in Bordeaux for the fishing boats that go out into the Bay of Biscay, and the people that make them don’t mess about. A great deal was going to depend on the engineers of Bordeaux.

We locked and drifted to Loughborough, without impatience, periscoped by grebes, and crowds of Queen Anne’s lace waved from the banks.

WHEN A BOAT ARRIVES MOST TOWNS SAY OH my God, you’re here already, I’ll just get a few things out of the children’s room. Others throw a stone or a curse, and some redecorate and wait for you in the parlour. Loughborough shows you to the garden shed, throws in a bun and locks the door.

Jim and I picked our way through a brickyard and on to the main road. The first pub turned us away without apology, and at the second there was no room for us in the inn. At the third I paused at the door and pointed down at Jim. A couple of people at the bar nodded furiously so we went in.

What is it? asked one of the nodders. A whippet, I said. The nodder was a small man, illustrated with tattoos and covered in white powder. I’m Ken, he said, and this is Mario—I’m a plasterer. What’s his name? Jim, I said. Gin? asked Ken. No, Jim, I said. My mother had a dog called Gin, said Ken, it’s a small world—why do you call him Gin? My wife likes a drop of Gordon’s, I said, giving up. I was a mercenary in Africa, said Ken, I saw terrible things.

Mario broke in. Why your dogga so thin? It’s a whippet, I said, it’s the breed. They don’t like food except pork scratchings—they live on them in the wild. I am waiter, said Mario. You not believe the food goes out the back. I will give you some every day for your dog and then he will not be such a small thinna dog. Jim looked up at him with starved and grateful eyes. I am sixty-five, said Mario. I was in the war in Italy. I saw terrible things. Can I have bagga scratchings? he called over the bar.

Clive rang when you were out, said Monica—he wanted to tell us about their new boat. He’s having portholes. Portholes? I said—portholes? For cheap good looks he gives away the world. Each of our windows can hold a full cloud. Is it for this that the canal hero Robert Aickman cruised the dying waterways comforted only by his beautiful secretary Elizabeth Jane Howard? Was it so generations to come could sail the silver highway in blind portholed poncing boats, full of washing machines and televisions, never to see the sunset canal incarnadine, and the fish rising like rain?

Clive says portholes are a good thing, said Monica, they are more secure. Let them steal all I have, I said. I wish them well—I shall not care if I can see the sky. That isn’t what he meant, said Monica. He said that when we are going across the Channel a wave would smash our big windows like an egg, and what are we going to do about it?

I’VE FOUND THE WHIPPET CLUB BREED STANDARD, said Monica.
Balanced combination of muscular power and strength, with elegance and grace of outline
. Goodness, Jim, who’s a pretty boy?

All forms of exaggeration should be avoided
. I never knew a living thing that exaggerated more, I said. He is a screamer. He can’t say hello without going for the Oscar. If he wants something he pretends he has broken his wrist.

Highly adaptable
, said Monica. Not on boats he isn’t, I said.

Free gait, hind legs coming well under body for propulsion. Forelegs thrown well forward low over the ground, true coming and going
. True at going, I said—he is no good at coming back.

Jim was by the door. It was time to go to the pub and he had broken his wrist.

LEICESTER IS FAMOUS FOR ITS VANDALS, SO IT’S a case of dive at dawn and keep going until you drop dead or get to Kilby Bridge. But Monica and I have been less worried about vandals since we visited the mouth of hell.

The mouth of hell is in Manchester, where hardly flows the filthy Rochdale through a waste of concrete. The address of the mouth is 111 Piccadilly—Rodwell Tower, which gropes the clouds and broods over its terrible secret. Under it the fire, the pit. This is the fault line, where the newly dead meet those soon to die, and trade in drugs and sodomy. As the boat slips under the tower they stand in the darkness and watch. If you are not currently in the drugs or sodomy business they let you pass.

One wraith, a boy in a white singlet, stepped forward to help Monica close the lock. He was frail, dying or dead already—his weight on the beam made no difference. Why don’t we go back, said Monica, and save him and bring him up as one of us? I know, I know, I said, but I have got enough on my hands with you and a sixteen-ton boat, not to mention a dog that knows no respect, without getting mixed up with the walking dead.

So we were not afeared when we moored at Leicester, by Abbey Park, gathering our strength for the six-hour leg the next day. Until there came a knocking and a huge figure in rainbow leathers sprang aboard, a spaceman helmet under his arm. Good gracious, said Monica, he’s come to kill us all. Showing no fear Jim leaped on the giant as he advanced down the boat, ready to bear him to the ground, lick him into submission, and take him to the pub to buy scratchings.

I am your ranger, said the giant. In fact I am your lone ranger—the other one is off today. I understand you have had your boat let loose. Yes, I said, we had to fetch it back from under the bridge. We have never had boats loosed before, said the Lone Ranger. Yes you have, I said, the security man opposite said it happened on Friday. Ah, said the Lone Ranger, there was Friday. And on Saturday, I said, they let a big barge loose and blocked the whole navigation. There is some truth in that, said the Lone Ranger, but you should not think badly of our city—look how secure this mooring is. But they stepped over the fence, I said. Yes, I suppose you can step over the fence, admitted the masked rider of the plains, but this vandal reputation is not fair. People expect trouble and the kids see the fear in their eyes and take advantage. It’s only fun, with a bit of theft and intimidation thrown in. You must take a positive attitude—ours is a peaceful and beautiful city. What time are you leaving tomorrow? Six o’clock, I said.

The sun rises at five, said the Lone Ranger, you don’t want to leave it too long.

TO STEER A NARROWBOAT YOU STAND ON THE back, look forward along the roof, and grip between your buttocks a brass broom-handle which is bolted to the rudder. Every ripple strikes to the roots of your teeth. A moment’s inattention and sixteen tons of steel and crockery smash into the scenery. If you hit another narrowboat you bounce off, and if you hit a fibreglass cruiser you pass through it, making practically no noise at all.

But boat-owners don’t go boating—they leave their craft where moth and rust do corrupt, and mink break through and steal, and sit at home watching
Star Trek
. So we laboured alone down the wide locks of the Grand Union. For days we hit no bridges nor knocked anything off the roof. Then we met the most fearful danger.

I was filling a lock and a gongoozler leaned over the side—Is this your boat, have you come far? A gongoozler is someone who stares at boaters. Monica answered from the tiller, trying to be polite, holding the boat steady with a rope through a ladder in the wall. But the rope had jammed and as the lock filled the stern of the boat was being pulled under. In seconds water would flood through the engine-room and the
Phyllis May
would sink. Jim was shut inside; Monica had no life jacket and she can’t swim. Last year four people drowned like this.

Time stopped and I seemed to watch myself from the outside. I engaged the lock key and dropped the paddle in the lock gate to stop water flowing in. Then I hurled to the other end to let water out. I was barefoot and there were stones and nettles but in my own dimension I was safe from harm. Returning to Greenwich Mean Time and working on my oxygen debt I watched the lock empty and the
Phyllis May
come level. The rope slackened and Monica pulled it free. The gongoozler had fled.

We hung a knife under the throttle so next time we can cut the rope, then I will take the knife and Jim and I will go and find the gongoozler.

NEAR DAVENTRY OUR SECTION OF THE GRAND Union Canal meets the main branch from Birmingham, and together they head south for Milton Keynes and London. The centre of Milton Keynes is black glass and concrete and does not allow dogs or people. Under the flyover the stalls of an outdoor market had sprung, like flowers between the tiles of a urinal.

We moored for a sunny fortnight among the parks and lakes. In the mornings the swans woke us, tapping politely as they cleaned the waterline. In the afternoons we dozed as the ceiling swarmed with light, and in the evenings the radio played the songs we used to know.

Before breakfast Jim would come into the cabin and fix us with his burnt gold eyes—Lazy buggers, what about the run? Your dog is taking over, said Monica, he’s gaining control, like it says in the books. No he isn’t, I said, he’s a whippet, they like to run, that’s what they’re for. I don’t like the way he stares at me while he does his stretching exercises, said Monica, and I don’t like the way he sits by the door, lacing up his running shoes and looking at his watch.

As we jogged Jim did fast interval work, then long slow distance, drifting an inch above the ground. He drifted straight, not sideways like a wolf. If we met other dogs he always raced them and he always won. When he met an obstacle he would take to the air, pausing in mid-flight like a dancer.

A DAY DOWN THE GRAND UNION TO LEIGHTON Buzzard. What a nice old-fashioned name, said Monica, and a supermarket right by the towpath. As Jim and I sat on a bench a girl in a leather miniskirt lowered herself alongside. Jim began to lick her blubbery knees lasciviously. Suddenly she rose and struck through the window of a passing car, punching and screaming as her victim fishtailed away. Then she swaggered by with a friend—a young man who had been thrown out of Hell’s Angels because of dress sense and body-fat ratio. Jim made a final pass at the knees, but his heart was not in it.

Later we set out through streets paved with chewing gum and kebabs, to look for a launderette. We found one, but there were people fighting inside.

Jim added to the sorrow in this strife-torn community by seizing a teddy bear from a gift-shop shelf and jumping on it. I mean, what do you say? What would you say in France?
Madame
, I am desolated, my small dog has ravished your bear of plush. But
madame
, I insist, I am going to buy it, because my small dog will amuse himself with it well—oh my God let’s get out of here.