Chapter 11 A Boat Called Olive

I found out on the nineteenth of March, at about eleven in the morning, in a car park outside the practice in Anderry, in the rain, because I had come back from the practice out of hours for a crown delivery and there was a man in a waxed jacket standing by my car. Not in the rain, I want to be accurate. He was standing by my car and getting out of the rain in the sense that a man gets out of the rain by standing still next to a door, and he had one arm up on the roof of the car to keep it in the doorway. "Jonah." "Forty-five minutes ago you were in a car park in Buxton," said Jonah. "No. You've been in a car park in Buxton since half eleven because Ruth rang me, and I want you to know that I did not ask Ruth for that, and I would have come to you sooner if Ruth hadn't." I had not been in a car park in Buxton since the Thursday. I was about to say so, and then I did not, because I looked at his face. "What have you done," I said. He stood in the doorway of the car park next to my car with water coming off the waxed jacket onto the tarmac and did not answer that, and I have never in my life been as frightened as I was in that second, and I was not frightened of him. "You get in the car," he said. "I'm not getting in the car in a car park, Jonah, and you have just told me you've done something, and if you tell me in a car park I will be standing here in the rain in my coat in front of the practice, because the last time a person told me something in a car park in this town it was my mother about a mortgage, and I have never got over it and I'm not getting over another one." "Fine," he said. "Then here." He gave me a plastic folder, the kind that comes with a ring binder, and it was one sheet, and it was a transfer of registered ownership of a vessel, and I stood in a car park and read it, and I read it four times, and my own name was on it, and the date on it was the Monday, and the day before I had been sitting at a table with him on the wall above the wharf while my mother was on a phone that I did not have to think about. Forty-five pounds," I said. "Yeah." "Forty-five pounds and a pound sale." "Forty-five pounds and a pound sale," he agreed. "You sold me a boat. You *sold* me a narrowboat. In a counter. On a Monday. Without me. That's a deed, that's a *transfer*, Jonah, and I'll ring Prendergast and he'll tell me in about four seconds what you've done to me, and the answer is going to be that you're no longer the registered owner, and that means you can never be, and that means the man who did eleven miles in the rain to look at a bilge has just made himself a permanent guest on that boat, and there is no mechanism in the world that puts you back on it. You have done that. On a Monday. In a plastic wallet." "Yes." "Why," I said. And here is the thing, and I have gone over it many times, and it is the part I cannot get past. I asked why, and Jonah Pike stood in a doorway in a car park in the rain and looked at me and did not have a single answer that was about the boat, or the mooring, or the survey, or the ringworm, or the garboard, or the twenty-year agreement, or the nine thousand pounds I did not have, or the eleven thousand that I would need, or the woman in the booth who has told me things I was never supposed to be told. "That's the wrong question," he said. "It's not the wrong question, it's the *only* question, and I'd like the right one, and I can tell you now that if the right one is something about my mother's will, then you and my mother have been writing to each other about me, and if it is something about a sentence with a boat in it, then you are the second person in my life to put me on a boat without asking me and I'd like to know what it is about this family and boats." "Roz—" "Don't." I put the folder down on the roof of my car, and I had to put it down because my hands had gone, and I have a steady hand, I have had a steady hand since I was nineteen and I have never in twenty-two years had a crown go wrong because of a tremor. "Don't manage me. Don't arrange me. Don't do a thing for me and then not tell me and then let me find it out in a car park in the rain, because that is the whole of it, that is the entire thing that is wrong with us, and we have done it for five years and you did it again on Monday at forty-five pounds, and I would rather you told me something terrible than did one more thing like this." "It wasn't a thing for you," said Jonah Pike. "It was a thing for the boat." And then he stopped, and I could see him decide to go on, and I could see it cost him, and he is not a man who does things that cost him, and I have known him for twenty-five years and I have seen it twice. "It needed an owner," he said. "Not a person on a rota. Not an arrangement. Somebody whose name is on it. The surveyor won't sign, the mooring won't sign, the twenty-year lease won't sign, none of it signs on an arrangement, and the arrangement is the thing that's been stopping the boat being a boat for four years, and it's stopped it because of you, and I know that's a hard thing to be told by the man who came round on a bicycle." "It stopped it because of you. You didn't come round for three years. I sent you a card at Christmas and a text on your birthday and both of them were the same text, and I'm not telling you what it was." "I know what it was," said Jonah Pike. "It was the four o'clock reminder, and you sent it eleven times, and I read every one." I stood in the car park in the rain and there was a car behind me and a bus went past on the road and put water up the wall of the building behind Jonah and he did not move. "Then you tell me," I said, "what the last one said, and then I will tell you what happened in August of the year my mother wrote a will, and then we will both be standing in a car park having said two true things and we'll see what that does." "It said, don't put the carbolic in the freshwater," said Jonah Pike, "and I'll kill you if you forget the waste, and love J." And I said, "The will says the boat," and he said, "I know," and I said, "I know you know," and he said, "I've had a copy since the Monday," and I said, "You *what*," and he said, "Prendergast sent me a photocopy because you told him the boat was in it and he thought I'd want to see it, and Roz, I have read it four times and there is nothing in it about a person, there's nothing in it about me, and the only instruction in it is about a light on the front deck having a proper earth, and I have already done that, on the night after the funeral, and I did it because I saw your mother look at it in a garden in 1994 and I was eleven."