Chapter 12 Under the Engine Cover

The engine is a Vic 22 and it is a Kubota diesel of one and a half litres with a forty-five degree bend and a twenty-four volt starter, and it came in on the market in 2011 and it is still the best engine that anybody makes for a narrowboat, and there is not one thing wrong with it that money cannot fix and the wrong thing being the thing I have been putting off for four years. I had the cover off on the Sunday because it was a Sunday and it was raining and there was nothing else in the world to be doing with my hands. Here is what a Vic 22 is like. It is a vertical single, water-cooled, and everything is at the top and the side, which is the whole design philosophy. The injector is on the left and you can get a spanner to it without taking anything off. The filter is on the right and it is a cartridge and it is a two-minute job if the spanner is the right one and it is a forty-minute job if the spanner is the wrong one, which it was, and I bought the right one in 2019 and I still keep the wrong one on the board because the wrong one is a good lever. The lift pump is under the injection pump and it comes out with two nuts and if you have drained the tank properly it comes out without a fight, and if you have not it will come out with the whole fuel line attached and put diesel across the inside of a boat and into the bilge, which I have done once, in 2018, in front of a woman who was not yet my ex-wife, and which she told me about for four years afterwards in a restaurant and which I deserved. The injectors come out with a bar and a rocker and a very steady hand, and if you do it wrong you bend an injector, and a bent injector is a hundred and forty pounds and a fortnight waiting, and I have bent one, in 2017, and Roz paid for it out of a joint account without a word being said and I paid it back in cash over four months in twenty-pound notes so that she couldn't refuse it, which is the sort of man I am. I got the whole right side back, and the water pump, which is a belt-driven one and is twenty-two pounds, and the belt is a poly-f, and the tension is not something a man should be guessing at — 9 newtons on a span of 640 millimetres, and there is a tool for that, and I made the tool, out of a strip of aluminium, in the workshop in 2013, and it is in the toolbox, and I have never once used it on a customer boat because I have never told anybody it exists. That is what four years does. You do not stop being good at something. You just stop letting anybody see you do it. I had the manifold off and I was about to come up with the head nuts when I found the other job, and I found it by putting my hand on the deckhead with the spanner still in it, which is a thing Bram used to tell me was the only way to find anything in an engine bay, and then told me never to do it, and then did it himself every single time for forty-one years. The freshwater pipe runs along the inside of the hull, four inches up, the whole length of the boat, and it is clipped every eighteen inches to a batten, and it should not be there at all because the original was run above the sole and somebody in 2016, when it was stripped, ran it down the hull to save ten feet of pipe, and the whole of the two hot runs sit against the garboard strake in a wet compartment. Where the pipe touches the timber, the timber is wet. And where the timber has been wet, continuously, for seven winters, there is a ring. I got my torch and lay on my side with an inch and a half of light between me and the deck and I went up the boat from the engine, and there were five, and then nine, and then eleven of them, and about four of the eleven had gone soft enough to take a thumbnail. I lay on the side of a boat in the dark on a Sunday afternoon for about forty minutes and did not move. Because I know what this is, and I have known since I was thirty, and I have never once had to say it out loud to anybody: it is not the garboard and it is not the aft deck. The surveyor found the two I told her about because they were the two she was asked about, and I was the one who sent her up and down and I directed her attention, and I have been directing the attention of every person who has ever looked at that boat for four years in a direction that is very nearly the truth and stops exactly where the truth stops being useful to me. There is a pipe in the hull. It is a freshwater pipe. It is mine — I put it in, in 2016, in a fortnight, to save money, because we were saving money, because I was earning nineteen thousand pounds and she was earning thirty-one and we were twenty-nine and we had eight hundred pounds. And it has been rotting a boat for seven years. I got off the side of the boat. I sat on the sole with the torch in my hand and the pipe running over my knee and did the arithmetic, which is a thing I do, and which is the only thing about me that anybody has ever found useful, and which is also the reason I have never been able to say a simple sentence to a woman in a car park. Eleven rings. The timber under a pipe that is two inches of one-inch-and-a-quarter polyethylene with hot water in it most of the days of the year, in a boat that lives outside, on a canal, in England, in a wet country, above the waterline by four inches, right where the bilge pump is constantly cycling humidity. The surveyor will find it. Not now — she will find it in about two years, when the two ends of it have gone through, or in five, in the middle, whichever happens first, and it will be a five-figure job and it will be a job that cannot be done without lifting the engine out, which is a five-day job on the hard with a crane. And it will be my pipe. Not the boat's pipe. The one I ran. I ran it in a fortnight in the autumn of 2016 and I signed the boat over four years later and told nobody I was doing it. I put my hand on the pipe and it was warm, because the engine was still hot, and I said a word I have not said in front of a person since I was fourteen. And then, because I am a man who cannot do a thing by asking, and because there is only one other way I know of, I did the only thing available to me. I got the pipe off. I had it off the starboard run by half past six, and the starboard run out in four pieces, and I pulled the clips, and I capped the ends, and I carried four lengths of one-inch-and-a-quarter out of the boat and down the slip and put them in the workshop, and I came back in and got a length of four-inch from Dev's rack because he has a rack and does not mind, and I brought the four-inch in and ran it up above the sole, across the top of the bilge, on brackets, where it was in 2011 when she was new and where it ought to have stayed, and I did that until about nine, and then I went up to the yard office and Teddy made me a coffee and looked at me and said nothing at all about it, which was the single most generous thing anybody did for me that year. Then I wrote a note and put it in the log book, on the Sunday, in my own hand, dated, and signed and initialled at the bottom, which I had not done since November 2016. It said: *4th May. Starboard freshwater run removed and rerouted above sole, 4in, on brackets. Original run in 1.25in poly was laid in 2016 by me and has been wet against the hull. Timber under run shows ringworm at 11 points, 4 with loss. Engineer to be advised. Not previously reported by me. J. Pike.* And then I went home and did my mother's dinner and did not stay, and I did not telephone anybody, and I sat in the flat at midnight with Bram's drawing on the table and a ringwormed boat on the hard in the rain and a log book on a table in a cabin on a towpath with eleven words in it that I had put there myself, in my own handwriting, voluntarily, on a Sunday, with no possibility of it being found out by anybody but me. It was the first entry in a book in four years that I had not had to be asked about.