第4章 Waterline

There is a moment in a narrowboat engine where the water comes and you have about nine seconds to decide what kind of problem it is, and I have had that moment perhaps six times in my life, and the sixth was on a Tuesday in March on the Kelder Cut with a metre and a half of water in the sump and a boat that was not going anywhere. I had gone out to do two things. The first was to take the engine cover off, because Marguerite Oyelaran had been aboard on the Friday and had put her hand flat on the deck by the stern and said the word *weeping* in a voice that meant she had a number in her head, and I did not like the number. The second was to start it, because there is a way that a Vic 22 tells you about itself when it starts from cold, and I wanted to hear it. It started. It ran. I put the cover down and went forward and had a cup of tea standing on the foredeck in the sun like a man in a picture of a man doing this, and I sat down, and about four minutes later I noticed that the engine note had gone up a half tone and the boat had begun to move, in the wrong direction, at about a mile an hour. There are two reasons a boat moves when you have not asked it to. One is that the mooring line has chafed through. The other one is that there is water in the sump and the pump is losing. I had both of those in about the same second. I went back, got the cover up, and there she was: the sump was full to the top of the filler and the water was coming up round the pump housing, and it was coming in fast enough that I could see the level move while I watched it, and the boat was being pushed bodily downstream by her own weight. You are not frightened of this. That is what nobody tells you. You are not frightened, you are *extremely* busy, and the busyness is the same shape as fear and comes out the same way, and what came out of me, standing in a boat at half past ten in the morning in a wetsuit, was: right. Right. Right. Which is a word I say to myself on the boat about four times a day and which I have never once said to Roz. I got a bucket and a sponge and I got the pump, which is a manual diaphragm thing on a bracket and which I had rebuilt in 2019 with new washers because I am a man who will rebuild a pump rather than buy one. It did not help. It is not supposed to help. The pump keeps a bilge dry; it does not stop a leak. What it is for is to buy you time, and I bought myself eleven minutes with that bucket and sponge, and in the eleven minutes I got the engine shut down, which meant I lost the engine, which is the one thing on that boat you do not want to lose in a place with no passing traffic. Then I did the only other thing, which was the thing I have thought about every day since and which I have not told anybody about. I rang her. I want to be accurate about this, because I know how it sounds and I know what she thought. I did not ring her to ask her permission. I did not ring her to ask her if she knew what to do. I did not ring her because I had finished and needed somebody to know. I have been alone on that boat for four years, and there is nobody in this world I can telephone at half past ten on a Tuesday morning, and I telephoned my ex-wife from a sinking boat, and she picked up on the second ring, which means she had the phone in her hand, which means she had been sitting in a house in Anderry waiting to see whether the phone would ring, and I have decided to be the kind of man who does not point that out. "It's the pump," I said. "No. It's not the pump. There's water in the sump and the cover's up and I can't get to the thing and the engine's off." "Are you sinking." "Not sinking. Moving. She's got about a foot of steerage left before she's over the shallow end and if she goes over the shallow end the stern goes under." "Where are you." "Below the second lock. Thirty metres past the lay-by." There was a pause of about a second and a half, which for her is very fast, because Roz Hartley does not hesitate about anything except the two or three things in her life she is actually frightened of. "Right," she said. "Is it the deck or is it the seams? Because if it's the deck you've got the scuppers and you'll find water in the forepeak, and if it's the seams then it's the garboard and that's the aft bilge and that's the compression set the woman was talking about. Is the water coming in ahead of the pump or behind it?" "I can't tell from up here." "Then get in the bilge. Get in the bilge with a torch and put your hand flat on the garboard and tell me what it feels like." I got in the bilge. I got a torch. I put my hand flat on the garboard plate on the starboard side aft, where you can get a palm to it, and it was cold and wet and it was moving, in a slow swell, about a quarter of an inch, in and out, like breathing. "It's the seams," I said. "Aft. It's the seams." "Course it's the seams. It's a nineteen-year-old boat with a compression set in the aft bilge and you put nineteen thousand pounds into the inside of it in 2016 and nobody ever had the seams out." Her voice did something I had not heard it do in a very long time, and it was not sympathy, and I want to be exact: it went flat. It went the way a person's voice goes flat when they have stopped being a wife and started being extremely competent. "Right. Don't move her. Don't put the engine back on, you'll cook it. Where's your bow?" "Out." "Good. Bow out means she's being pushed stern first and the stern's deep, so the bilge is taking it. You've got one move and it's boring. Get the anchor out. Not the main one, the little one, the Cak, there's one stowed under the forepeak sole. Put out twenty metres of chain, seaward, to the outside of the channel, and shackle it to the towpath ring. Not to a cleat. To the ring." "There'll be nothing in the ring." "There's always something in the ring. There has been something in the ring on that cut since the year I was born, because every boater in England goes round with a shackle and a length of rope and hopes." I got the anchor out. The Cak was under the forepeak sole where it had been since 2016, wrapped in a piece of cardboard to keep the flukes from going dull, and the chain was stiff with three years of being in a bilge, and I got it out on the second attempt and shackled it to the ring on the towpath, which had a rusted ten millimetre bar through it of exactly the kind I had been hoping for. And she stopped. That's the thing nobody tells you. It is not dramatic. The boat was going and then the chain came tight and the water came up round the hull and the whole thing slowed down and stopped, all within about eight seconds, in about a foot and a half of water, four hundred metres below a bridge, on a Tuesday, with nobody looking. I stood in the water to the knee in a bilge with a torch in my teeth and a boat attached to a ring on a towpath, and I could not think of one single thing to say. Roz said: "Are you alright." "No." "Good," she said, and I actually laughed out loud, on a sinking boat, in a bilge, at eleven in the morning. "Right. Chocks under the hull, both sides, amidships, and then get off and walk back to Marrow Wharf and get a car and come back with a pump. The one at Wickes is a stupid little electric thing and it will do. Tell them it's for a boat. They do not care, Roz, I have been doing this for eleven years, they will sell you a pond pump and you will put it in a boat and it will work, that is the entire relationship between boat owners and Wickes." "Why are you on the phone with me right now." And there was a pause on that one that was a completely different length to the first one. "Because you're the only person I know who would answer," said Roz Hartley, "and because you rang me, and because you have never once rung me in four years, and I would like that on the record in whatever this is, even if what this is is a boat." Then she said, "Get off the boat, Jonah," in the voice she used in 2018 for the eleven weeks, which I have not heard since, and I got off the boat.