第1章 The Handover

The rota was mine, because the rota had always been mine. That was in the settlement, in the schedule at the back, in Roz's handwriting, which the mediator had described as thorough and Jonah had described as aggressive and I had described as nothing at all, because I had spent the whole of the second hearing being surprised that I was still in the room. Three weeks on, three weeks off. Handover at the top of the Kelder Cut on a Saturday, or a Sunday if the water was up enough to get alongside, which it was not, ever, because the Marrow Wharf pontoon had been out of order since the previous August and the district had no money and no hurry. So: handover at the top of the cut, at the lay-by below the second lock, at eleven o'clock, and I got there at ten to eleven with the log book under my arm and a thermos and a bag of daffodil bulbs I was going to plant in the barrel at the bow because the barrel is the only thing on that boat that is entirely mine and I have been planting things in it for six years. He was already there. Of course he was. He was sitting on the bank with his back to me and a bicycle leaning against the fence, and he had a toolbox open beside him and was doing something to a length of copper pipe with a file, and he did not hear me come up the slope, and I stood there for a second and watched a man of forty-four file a piece of copper pipe on a riverbank in the rain, and I thought, in the way you think something you have no right to think: he has beautiful hands, and then I thought: he has always had beautiful hands, and then I thought about a dentist's hands generally, which is not a thought that helps. "You've cut the lock plate," I said. He turned round. He had a filing card in his teeth. "I haven't cut anything." "You've taken the top off the lock plate. That's the top off the lock plate. Jonah, that's a three-hour job with a cold chisel and I have watched you do it before, in our kitchen, on a different lock, for the same reason, which was that you were bored." He took the card out of his mouth. "It's seized," he said. "It was seized when you had it. I said it was seized in November and you said it was fine because it turns over, and it turns over, and it also sounds like a person clearing their throat." "It does not sound like anything. It's a boat." "It's a boat in a canal with forty tonnes of water pressing on one side of the lock and a difference of nine feet at the other end, and a lock that doesn't shut is a hole in the side of a boat, and you are asleep on top of it four nights in three weeks, and I have stopped being able to say that sentence in my head without getting up." I put the bag of bulbs down in the wet grass. I have to be fair here and I have been unfair about this exact sentence in my own head for four years, and the reason is that it is the only sentence in the whole of our marriage, and possibly the whole of our divorce, that he ever said to me without being asked a question first. "Handover," I said, and opened the log book, and handed him the pen, which is a thing we have done a hundred times, and which is the entire ritual. He did not take the pen. "What's this," he said. "Handover sheet. Same as always. Date, water, fuel, oil, condition notes, both signatures. You write your half, I write my half, we both initial the bottom, you give it back." He looked at the sheet, and then at me, and then at the river. "There's no condition notes," he said. "There's no condition notes because nothing's wrong with the boat." "There's no condition notes because you've been filling them in for me, Roz." That is true. I have been filling them in for him for four years, and I have been filling in the oil and the water and the condition notes in a neat hand in a book that is a legal document, and I have been doing it in the four weeks of my turn for four years, and I did it last April and I did it in August and I did it at Christmas, and the last entry in the log is the eleventh of this month and it is in my handwriting all the way down, and I did not think about it once. "The stern scuppers are weeping," I said. "Left side. Put it down." "The stern scuppers are weeping and I put it down in your handwriting and you signed for it." "Jonah—" "Read the last one out. The one from the eleventh." I did not have it open to the eleventh. It was a Tuesday in February and I had a filling at a quarter past four and the handover had been on the eleventh and the last thing I had done was drop the book in the drawer of the cabin under the chart table and shut it, and I could not now remember writing a single word of it. The rain came down on both of us. The bicycle leaned further over against the fence and he put a foot out and stopped it without looking, which is a thing his body does that my body has watched for twenty-two years and has never once learned to do. "There's a surveyor's coming," he said. "Who's told you that?" "Teddy had it off the noticeboard at the yard. Marguerite Oyelaran. She's doing the whole cut for the district, boat by boat, and she's booked the Tuesday." "A Tuesday is my day." "A Tuesday is a Tuesday." "A Tuesday is *my* day, Jonah, and if you have let her in for a Tuesday to look at our boat in my week then I would like to know what you thought that was going to do." "I didn't think anything." He stood up, and put the file in the box, and did not close the box. "I told her we couldn't do Tuesday. She said the notice says Tuesday, and that if we can't do Tuesday she'll come on the wrong week and that's not my fault either. Then she asked me a question." "What question." "She asked whether we were still both going up to the yard in the same week, and I said that was the arrangement, and she wrote something on her form, and I didn't ask her what." I picked up the bag of bulbs. I had a dentist's appointment in ninety minutes and I was on a riverbank in the rain arguing about a calendar with a man who had biked eleven miles to file a piece of copper, and I had a very good line ready, and it was the line about the arrangement, and I did not say it. "Put the lock plate in the log yourself," I said. "Properly. And if she comes on the wrong week, she's welcome to, and I'll be here, and you can be here, and we can both be extremely normal at her about it." "Normal's fine," said Jonah Pike. "I've been normal for four years, it's the one thing I'm qualified for." He put the pen in the box, and shut the box, and picked up the bicycle. Then he looked at the daffodils in the grass. "You're not going to plant those in the rain." "They're bulbs. They don't care about rain. That's the entire point of them." "They'll rot in that bag over a wet weekend." "They'll be fine." He picked the bag up, turned it over to look at the bottom, put it back down in the grass, and got on the bicycle, and then got off it again. "The barrel's leaking," he said. "There's water in the bilge under the engine that's coming from the deck, and I don't think it's the scuppers, and I've looked at the thing for four hours and I'd like to be wrong about it, but if you put those bulbs in a wet barrel over a wet bilge you'll lose the lot to rot before Easter." And then he got on the bicycle and went down the slope, and I stood on the bank of the Kelder Cut in the rain holding a bag of daffodil bulbs and watched him go, and the thing that arrived in me, about eleven seconds after he'd gone out of sight, was not a thought about the bilge. It was: he cycled eleven miles in the rain to file a lock plate, and he would not take the pen.