Chapter 10 Ringworm and Rain

The ringworm was the reason I did it, and that is not the whole reason, but it is the reason I can stand behind on a bad day. We had the boat out on the Friday. Dev's crane, forty minutes, two hundred and ten pounds for the two of us because Marguerite Oyelaran went halves, and she was on the slip with a clipboard the whole time like a woman supervising a delivery of furniture. And when the boat came up out of the water she got underneath it on the second night and lay on a board with a torch and came out with her face wrong. "It's the garboard," she said. "And it's the aft deck, and I want you both to understand that I have been in this trade for twenty-six years and I have never once said a thing like this to a client while they were stood in front of me." "Tell us." "The garboard's gone at the bottom two feet of the keel aft. It's not rotten any more, it's gone. That's four seasons of wet with a heating pipe running along the inside of it." She put the torch down. "And the aft deck is ringworm. Now, ringworm in a deck is not a mould thing you can scrub off. Ringworm is what happens when a bracket fungus gets into the timber and goes round it in a circle, and when you cut across it you see the ring, and there is a ring on eleven of the twenty-two planks on that back deck, and where there's a ring the timber has lost about a third of its strength, and there are four planks where it's worse than a third." "Which is not a fault," said Dev, from the shed doorway. "It is not a fault, and I want that written down in the same breath as everything else I am going to say, and it is not a fault because the boat is nineteen years old and it has been kept outside on a canal in England for nineteen years, and a boat of that age with a sound hull and a ringwormed aft deck is a perfectly ordinary boat. But it is not a boat safety certificate boat, and it is not a mooring agreement boat, and it is not a twenty-year-lease boat, and there is no inspector in this district who is going to sign anything that puts a liveaboard family name on a boat with a ringwormed deck, and I have stopped saying things to people in front of them because I said one in 2019 to a man in Burnley and his wife read it on a form afterwards and I was not invited to the funeral." "How much," said Roz. "All of it," said Marguerite. "Garboard, deck, the two covering boards either side, the timber under the wheelhouse sole if it's been wet, new felt, new boards, forty hours of my time, and a good boatwright, and I am telling you as a surveyor and not as a friend that you are looking at between nine and twelve thousand pounds, and if you have that money, then this is the best boat you will ever own, because what you are buying is a sound hull for a third of the price of a sound hull." Neither of us said anything for about a minute. The boat was sitting on the hard in the rain with her bottom exposed and she looked, I have to say, about six years younger than she had the week before. There was red lead on her keel that had not been seen in twenty years. "I'm not doing it," said Roz. That was on the Saturday, in the office, and she said it standing up, with her coat on. "You're not doing it." "No. I've had the practice, Jonah. I've got the flat, I've got a mortgage on the flat, my mother is dying and I've got a hospice bill and a solicitor's bill and I've got about nine thousand pounds in the building society and it's got my mother's face on it. There is no nine thousand pounds for a boat. There is not a five-thousand-pound boat." "She'll have to have a survey regardless if you want a twenty-year mooring. The mooring's the reason the crane was worth doing." "I know what the crane was for. I've done the sums at four in in the morning this week, I've done them about nine times, and they come out the same every time, and every version of the sum ends with me living on a boat I paid for myself that I cannot afford, with a man in my phone that I have to ask permission from." She took her coat off again, which meant she was going to be here a while. "I'm not doing it because I can't. I want to be very clear that it's a can't and not a won't, because those are different and I'm a grown woman and I'd like the record to show which one it is." And I said, "Right," and went outside, and stood in the rain by the boat for about half an hour, and then I went up to my mother's and did her dinner and did not stay. Here is what I did on the Sunday, and I am putting it in this book because I have been putting things in this book since I was thirty-one and the whole trouble with me is that I have never once put a thing in a book that anybody was going to read. There is a form. It is a single side of A4, and the maritime registry is a building in a town forty miles away with a counter and a woman behind it who has been there since 2003, and the form is a transfer of registered ownership of a vessel, and it needs the vessel's number, and the date, and the signature of the registered owner, and the countersignature of a witness, and the new owner's full name and address, and it is not complicated, and it costs nothing. A registered owner is the only person with any right in a narrowboat. Not the owners, not the people with keys, not the people who paid. The registered owner. If you are not the registered owner then you are a guest, indefinitely, and there is nothing at all you can do about it, and I had been a guest on a boat for four years and had never once been able to say so. I went to the counter on the Monday morning with the certificate of registry in a plastic wallet and the bill of sale from 2016 in a plastic wallet and Bram's drawing in a plastic wallet, which I did not need and did not mention. The woman behind the counter said, "You're the registered owner?" "I am." "Anything outstanding on it?" "The registration's current." "Then it's a straight transfer, and I'll need the new owner's details, and I need the form signed in front of me or in front of an solicitor, and if you want to do it here it's forty-five pounds, and if you want to do it by post I need the deed of gift as well, and a gift is a different form and a gift stamp." "It's not a gift," I said. "It's a sale." "Then it's forty-five pounds and I'll need the bill of sale, and you'll want the two of you not in the same room, because I have to be satisfied that the sale is a sale." And I said, "It is a sale," and put the bill of sale down, and it was not a bill of sale, it was a share certificate from 2016, and the woman looked at it, and looked at me, and then she said the thing that a person in her position is entitled to say once and only once, which was: "Mr Pike. Is this person aware of what she's buying?" "She is," I said, and I did not look at the floor, and I did not have a speech, because I have never in my life had a speech. "She's been to a surveyor and she knows the ringworm and she knows the garboard and she knows the eleven thousand and she knows the nine she has, and she says it's a can't and not a won't, and that's her business and it's a good enough answer for me." The woman at the counter did not care about that at all. What she cared about was a signature, and a witness, and a date, and she was very thorough and very kind and very quick, and it took eleven minutes, and it cost forty-five pounds, and I paid it on a card, and I did not tell anybody for six weeks. What I had done, in the plainest terms available, was this. I had sold her the boat. For one pound, because a pound sale is a sale and a pound sale is what a man does when he wants the transaction to be real and cheap and unarguable. I had signed away the only thing in this whole arrangement that I actually had, which was the one word on one piece of A4, and I had done it on a Monday morning in a building forty miles away, alone, with a plastic wallet, while she was at work in a room in Anderry doing a crown on a man called Gordon. And I could not tell her, because if I told her she would refuse. That is the actual mechanism of my failure and I have never been able to improve on it. There is exactly one way I know of to do a thing for a person without their permission, and it is to do it in advance, quietly, at a distance, at a counter, in a plastic wallet, and then to wait for them to find out and be furious, and then to not have earned it. Bram's note in pencil, on the drawing, beside the light: *She will tell you.* Not *he*. Not *he'll tell you.* I have looked at that drawing probably four hundred times and it has taken me thirty years to notice the word, and I noticed it on a Sunday night in a flat in Anderry with a torch and a roll of wire and a boat I no longer own, and I sat on the floor of the flat and laughed out loud, out loud, alone, at a dead man's handwriting.