第2章 Bolt and Nut

There is a particular kind of person who is not arguing with you, and Jonah Pike was doing it to me on the bank of the Kelder Cut, and I have known him since I was nineteen and I still cannot name it, and I have thought about it a great deal in the four years since, mostly at about four in the morning, which is when the thoughts about him used to arrive and which is now when the thoughts about the boat arrive, which I am told is a sign of moving on and which does not feel like moving on. Here's the thing about the boat. The boat is forty-one feet of flat-bottomed working narrowboat built in 1988 by a yard in Staffordshire that no longer exists, and it is not pretty, and it has a hull plate stamped into the forepeak that reads SOUTHERN TRADER and under that a number, and it is a perfectly good boat. That is the whole difficulty. It is a perfectly good boat. It will not sink. It has a Vic 22 engine in it that you can get parts for at any chandlery in the country. It has hot and cold water, a diesel stove, a fridge that works when it is not sulking, a bed you cannot get out of both sides of, and a stern deck that catches the sun from about two o'clock in April until the light goes off the wall of the house at Marrow Wharf. It is a perfectly good boat and it is worth nothing. That is the fact at the centre of the divorce. The boat is worth about eleven thousand pounds and I put nineteen thousand into it in 2016, and the equity argument went to a solicitor for eight months and came back with a number, and the number was a division of the boat, and the division of the boat is this: Roz has the boat for three weeks and Jonah has the boat for three weeks, and it lives at Marrow Wharf, and it is the only asset either of us can legally keep our name on, because a boat has to have one name and one address and you cannot have two families on one narrowboat at forty-one feet, and we tried it, in 2018, for eleven weeks, and I am not going to write down in this book what that was like. So the boat is a calendar. The boat is a rota. The boat is a device for the express purpose of two people who cannot live together having to be certain, three weeks at a time, to be in the same forty-one feet of boat, and of not being able to avoid it. I did the maths on it in the first year. Eleven weeks in 2018, when we tried. Then not, because it went wrong, and the divorce is a formal document with a date on it, and the maths is: if the arrangement holds, I will spend an average of six hours a day in a boat with the man who was my husband for five years, for the rest of my life, until one of us dies or the canal is dug up, whichever gets there first. That is not a divorce. That is a marriage with better boundaries and worse plumbing. Jonah came down the slope on the bicycle. He is fifty-one metres of towpath and I have been married to him and divorced from him and I still cannot predict what he will do with his hands. He did the thing he does, which is put both feet on the ground before he gets off, which is not a thing anybody taught him and not a thing he would be able to explain, and then he unloaded the toolbox — a black one, covered in the inside with the writing on it gone the colour of tea, which was his father's — and set it on the bank, and sat down on the lid of it, and did not say anything for about a minute and a half. Then he said: "What is it you actually want." I want to say that I answered him straight away, because that is what I would have liked to have written. What actually happened is that I laughed, which is what I do. "Do you want a list," I said. "Because I can do a list. I can do a list now, I could do a list in a train." "I'm not asking for a list. I'm asking what's wrong with the boat." "What's wrong with the boat is that it has forty-one feet of hull and no stern locker that shuts and a bilge pump that works when it feels like it, and it needs an engine service every two hundred hours, and the mooring is £1,850 a year, and the last survey came back with a list you could use to wallpaper a room, and it isn't going to be worth more than that in ten years, so we are both paying £900 a year for the privilege of a fight neither of us has." "That's not the question either." "You're asking me what I want and I'm telling you what the boat's got, which is the only subject the two of us have reliably had for four years, and I'm not going to be talked out of it into something worse, so if you've come down here to have a conversation about the boat, then let me tell you about the boat and we'll both feel better." "Fine," said Jonah Pike. "Tell me about the boat." I did not have a single thing prepared after that, which has never happened to me in a conversation, and I stood on a towpath in the rain with my hand in a bag of daffodil bulbs and had absolutely nothing. "The log book," I said instead. "You didn't sign it. And you don't get to not sign it. It's not a courtesy, it's a document. If somebody ever needs to prove that engine was serviced in a particular week, the person who can prove it is whoever signed, and last Tuesday the person who can prove the engine was serviced is a woman who doesn't remember doing it. Write it in the book, Jonah. I don't care about the lock plate. Write it in the book and initial it and give it back to me and we'll go home." He looked at the river for a long time. It was a grey day with no particular weather in it, the kind of day that doesn't commit to anything, and the water was two inches up on the cut and going nowhere. "I'm not going to write in the log," he said, "because as long as the log's blank, nobody's proved that this boat's ever been sailed." "It has been sailed. You sailed it in the summer. You took it to Burnley and you came back and the weed was on it and you told me about the weed." "I took it to Burnley. That's not the same as being a boat that's sailed. That's a boat that's been moved to a place and back." He was looking at me now. "If a boat's never been properly surveyed and registered and moored under an agreement and kept in a book, then it's a shed on the water. And if the thing gets to be a shed on the water, then it gets sold. In five years, when we're both a bit older, and the mooring goes up again, one of us will ring the other and say have you got eight grand, and the other one will say no, and that's the end of it." I want to write that I had an answer. What I had was the daffodils, and the fact that he had biked eleven miles in the rain, and the fact that the reason he had biked eleven miles in the rain was that he had offered to look at a bilge he did not have to look at, on a boat he does not legally own, in a week that is mine. "Marjuerite Oyelaran is coming on the Tuesday," I said. "Yeah." "She's a surveyor for the district. She's doing the whole cut." "Then she'll look at the boat properly, then." "Jonah—" "And she'll do it properly, Roz, that's the point of a district surveyor, they don't do it in an afternoon off the noticeboard. They'll do a hull survey, and a Mooring Agreement for twenty years, and a Boat Safety Certificate, and the whole thing gets a reference number on it, and then it's a boat. It's not ours. It's just a boat that we look after for a bit." It was a very good argument. That was the thing that undid me. It was a very good argument, delivered badly, on a wet towpath, by a man who had not been talking to me for four years and had come eleven miles to lose an argument I'd already won by not turning up. "That's not the whole reason," I said. "No," he agreed. "It isn't."