Chapter 15 What We Signed

There is a form called a Mooring Agreement and it is not a contract of friendship or a contract of anything else, it is a contract between a person and a district, and it gives you the right to lie in one place for twenty years, and it is the closest thing this country has to a marriage that the law recognises, and I have looked at a lot of them since the ninth of May. It wants a tenancy reference. It wants a boat that has a Boat Safety Certificate and a hull number and an insurance policy in the name of the person who is the owner. It wants, at clause four, a statement that the vessel will not be used as a sole or main residence without the written consent of the district, which is a clause I have read eleven times and laughed at eleven times, and which I have understood exactly twice, and both times it was at a kitchen table at two in the morning with a man I've been married to. Nobody lives on a narrowboat in England any more. That is the truth and it is not a sad truth, it is a fact about how we live, and the clause is left in from about 1974 because a district officer in 1974 was worried about a woman in a caravan. I got a tenancy reference. I got it from a letting agent in Anderry who has known me for eleven years because I have a flat through her, and her name is Priti and she was extremely good about it and asked me one question, which was whether I wanted the reference in the name of a person who was living on a boat, and I said no thank you, and she said "most people say yes," and I said, "I'm not most people, and also I don't live on it," and she said, "Nobody does, love, that's what I said." The insurance was harder. You cannot insure a narrowboat in the United Kingdom if you are not a registered owner and a named person, and I am now both, and that is entirely because of a plastic folder in a town forty miles away, and the man who put me in that position is the man who is currently the person in this story with the greatest problem, and I want to say that I have noticed the shape of that and I have not decided what to do about it. The survey is in July. The mooring office wants the whole file by the end of June. The file is: reference, certificate, insurance, registration, the log book. The log book. I have been round this for six weeks and I have got to the point where I cannot put the file in without it, and I cannot put the file in without it, and I know what that means, and I have been not-doing-it extremely effectively for six weeks. Marguerite Oyelaran told me in April that a book filled in by one person and signed by one person is a diary, and not a record of a shared custody arrangement, and that it will not support a twenty-year agreement because nobody in that office will sign it. Marguerite is right. That is the difficulty and it is the whole difficulty, and it has been the whole difficulty for four years, and I have spent those four years being extremely good at not arriving at it. Here is the sentence, and I am going to write it down because a woman in a booth told me to write things down and I have discovered that she is right and I am furious about it. In 2018 we had eleven weeks. The arrangement began as a kindness and stayed a kindness for about five of them and then it stopped being a kindness and became a test, and there was no test, and that was the problem, because a test you can fail and a kindness you can only be slow at. I was slow. I want to be exact about what I mean, because I have spent a lot of time on this in the last two months and it is a very embarrassing thing to be precise about. I was slow at saying things. Not at feeling them and not at doing them. There is a whole part of my life that is genuinely good and I have never once been able to talk about it, and I did that to him for five years and then I did it to a solicitor for eight months, and I did it to two men in a practice in Anderry who were extremely patient with me about it, and they were so patient that in the end I said a version of it that was not true, and it was not true in a way that was easier for both of us, and I have been living on the not-true version since 2019 and it is load-bearing. Ruth has been my partner for nine years. She knows. She has never once raised it, not in nine years, not in the worst of it, and once — once, in the February — she said, "You can talk to me about the boat whenever you want, and I am not going to ask," and I said, "Thank you," and she said, "Roz, I'm not being kind, I'm being practical, because you get about two seconds less patient every year and I would like to do the paperwork before that." I have not been in love with a person since 2016. I have been in love with a man, in the way that means something rather more uncomfortable, which is that I have been in love with the only person in my life who has never once made me be interesting, and I did not know that was available and I found it in about 2017 and then I did not say it, and then we separated in 2019, and then I did not say it, and then I did not say it for four years, and then a woman in a booth with a paper cup asked me what I wanted and I told her, and then a man who is not allowed to own a boat any more stood in a car park in the rain and told me about a light on a front deck in 1994, and the two of those things happened within nine days of each other in the March and the May, and that is how this happened, and there is no plan behind it, and I have never in my life done anything that was not planned except this. I got the file out on the table on the Sunday. It is on a low table in a flat in Anderry and it is eleven sheets and a book. I put the log book on top of it, which felt right, and then I sat down and looked at it, and I have to write down what the book looks like now, because I have not looked at it properly since the August. Two thousand and something entries in my hand. Long columns. The last twenty pages are almost entirely mine. And in the February, on the twenty-sixth, one line in a different hand, and one set of initials at the bottom, and nothing else in that handwriting anywhere in four years except the page of the fourth of May with a pipe in it. And in the June of 2022, which I had entirely forgotten, one line. I had forgotten it so completely that when I found it I sat on the floor of a flat in Anderry and laughed, out loud, at myself. I had forgotten because it was not in the log book. It was on a sheet of A4 in the cabin, in a plastic wallet, dated, and it said: *Noon. Roasting joint, two veg, Yorkshire, half bottle. I did the bins. J.* It is in the same handwriting as the pipe. It is the only other thing in four years. It is a shopping list from the eleventh of June, 2022, which is a Saturday, and which is the middle of the eleven weeks, and which I had entirely forgotten, and which I have now had to go and look at the kitchen bin diary for, because I still keep a bin diary, because I am a woman who keeps a bin diary, and I found it, and it said, on the eleventh of June, a roast joint, and the bin had a lot of paper in it, and I remember the Saturday. I remember the Saturday. I remember it perfectly. I remember a man cooking in a galley with the top open because it was June, and a woman sitting on the deck with her feet up on the wheelhouse side eating peas out of a dish with a fork, and a bottle of something cold, and the water going past, and nobody saying anything for about two hours. I have four years of a diary I keep and a husband I did not keep and one Saturday in June that I apparently thought was worth writing down and putting in a plastic wallet and leaving in the cabin, which I did, and which he found, and which he did not throw away.