第13章 The Inspection

The surveyor came back on the ninth of May with the pipe off and the boat on the hard, and I had spent two days doing nothing but being extremely helpful to two different men who did not want to be helped, which is a thing I am good at. I want to record the two days properly because I have realised, writing this, that I have never once in five years recorded anything properly. The Friday: a man called Ozzie from the insurance company, because you have to declare a boat that has been off the water, and Ozzie was very decent and asked for four photographs, and I took eleven, and I showed him the one of the transom where the garboard is soft, because I had decided in advance that I was going to be a woman who showed people the bad thing first, and it worked, and Ozzie said, "Right, that's helpful, most people don't want me seeing that." The Saturday: Dev, who needed the boat moved to the north berth on the hard because the crane was coming Tuesday, and who wanted a hand with the bow lines, and who I love. And the Sunday, in the afternoon, I sat in the cabin of a boat on a towpath and read a log book, and the log book had my handwriting in it for two years and then had one entry in the middle of it in a completely different hand, dated the fourth of May, in which the man who had written it had told me that he had put eleven holes in my boat and that he had known about them for four years and had not said. I read that entry about forty times. I want to put on the record that it took me forty times, and that the reason was not that it was complicated. It was a Wednesday. I had a crown at nine and a patient at eleven and a surgery list. I was in the cabin of a boat at Anderry at ten past eight in the morning with a cup of tea going cold on the chart table, and I rang the practice and said I would be two hours late, and Ruth said, "Roz, you are at work." "I know what I am at work," I said, and I heard my own voice, and I put my hand over the phone for a second. Then I said, "I'm ringing in sick, Ruth." "You are not sick." "I have been awake since half past five and I have read something this morning that I would like to have an hour with before I put a drill in anybody's mouth, and I would like to do that at home, and I would like you to tell the four o'clock I am not well and I would like you not to ask me anything about it, and Ruth, I have been your partner for nine years and I have never once asked you for anything, so please don't make me explain." She did not make me explain. She said, "Right. Are you safe." That question took me about four seconds. It is not a question anybody has asked me since 2016. "No," I said. "No, I'm not safe, I'm extremely not safe, and I have been not safe for four years, and I have been extremely competent about it, and I would like to have a cup of tea and read a book." I took the morning. I read the entry again. I got a piece of paper out — a real sheet of A4, and a pen, not the ones from the practice — and I did a thing I have not done since I was nineteen years old, which is I wrote out a list. I wrote: 1. The boat. (2 lines. That took four minutes.) 2. Nan. (That took two hours and it filled two sides and I haven't read the second side.) 3. My mother. (The will. The August. The light. 2019. A drawer in a flat in Anderry.) 4. The man who wrote the entry. And then I sat and looked at number four on a piece of A4, and then I went downstairs and got my car, and drove forty miles, and parked outside a counter in a town forty miles away, and asked a woman behind a counter whether she could tell me who was in front of me on Monday the eighth of April at about eleven o'clock, and she looked at a book, and then she said a man's name, and I wrote it down, and then she said, "Are you all right, love? You look like you've seen him." I said, "I have. Thank you," and drove back, and did not go to the boat, and did not go to the yard, and did not telephone anybody, and sat in a car park in Anderry for two hours with the paper on the steering wheel. The inspection was on the Tuesday. It is called the Boat Safety Examination and it is done by an authorised examiner and it is a legal document and it takes two hours and it is the single most nerve-racking half-day in a boat owner's year. I passed. I want to say that first. I passed, with two observations and one recommendation, and the two observations were both about electrics and one of them was about the earth on the front deck light being very well done, which I did not tell the examiner about and will not tell anybody about, ever, and which I have decided is mine. I got through it because I had known, since half past eight that Wednesday morning, everything there was to know, and because a woman who knows everything about a boat is a completely different proposition from a woman who is managing a boat, and I stood in the cabin of that boat at eleven o'clock that Tuesday and answered every question before it was asked, and the examiner put his pen down at the end and said: "You're not an owner, are you." And I said, "No." "Bit of a mess, that," he said, meaning the arrangement, and then he said, "But whoever owns her loves her, and that's the bit that matters, and it's in the paperwork, and I only ask because I have to ask." Then I said, "There is a thing in the log book." I do not know why I said it. I have gone over it about nine times and the honest answer is that I said it because I had spent two days being a woman who shows people the bad thing first, and I had built the whole of a week out of that, and I walked into that examination with it loaded, like a gun. I told him about the entry. I told him about the eleven rings and the four soft ones and the pipe that had been in the wrong place since 2016 and the two-year delay in reporting it, and he wrote it down in a box on a form, which is where it now lives for ever in a county record. He said, "That's a disclosure. I have to pass that to the inspectorate and there's a form for it and it isn't a crime, it's a boat, but somebody's insurer will see it, and if she's insured and somebody's been negligent on a structural repair, they'll void it, and you'd have to re-insure her from scratch, and I'd tell you that straight because it's my job." "I understand." "And whoever wrote that entry did the right thing and it won't protect him." "He knows," I said. "He wrote it himself. On a Sunday. Nobody made him." The examiner looked at me over his glasses for slightly longer than was comfortable. "Then I'd say you've got a boat," he said, "and I'd say you keep that page."