第6章 Petcock and Furl

The yard is called Anderry Boat Services and it is run by a man called Dev whose last name I am not going to write down because he would not thank me for it, and it consists of two sheds, a slipway, a hoist, and a yard dog called Rags who is seventeen and has no opinion on boat work and a strong opinion on biscuits. Teodora Vilar runs the coffee counter at the yard office, which is a plywood booth with a hatch in it and a kettle that is always on. I have known Teddy since about 2009, in the sense that Teddy has made me a coffee roughly four thousand times and I have never once asked her a personal question that she did not answer in the first four words. She is fifty-one and she has a voice like a man delivering bad news at a funeral, and on the Wednesday she came out of the booth with two coffees and put them on the bench by the slipway where I was grinding a cradle bracket and said: "Right, that's enough of that." "What is." "You've been on that bracket since Monday. It's a cradle bracket. It's four inches of flat bar. It either fits or it doesn't, and it hasn't fit since Monday, and you have taken more care with it than you take with anything that actually matters on this yard, which is the entire reason your ex-wife left you and I have thought about that a lot in the last four years and I have never said it, and I am saying it now because Teddy is fifty-one and has no time for being polite." I put the grinder down. That's the thing about Teddy: there is no way to argue and no way to deflect, because she isn't attacking you, she is just stating a fact with a time and a place attached. "She did not leave me because of a cradle bracket." "She left you because you were not there," said Teddy Vilar, and sat down on the bench, which is not a thing anybody does who intends to leave. "I've said it. That's it, that's the whole speech, I said it in four words and I've been sitting on it since the summer you told me about the arrangement, and I'm not sorry, and I'd do it again, and now I'm going to drink this coffee and you're going to drink yours and we're going to talk about the crane on Friday, and if you try to say thank you to me I will put the kettle on and we'll do this whole conversation again." I drank the coffee. It was, as ever, terrible. Then I said: "Tell me what you would do." "About the boat?" "About the boat, the yard, the ex-wife, the whole arrangement. You've got a better view of it from that hatch than anybody in this town. What's your advice." Teddy Vilar took her time about it. She has a way of looking at the slipway while she thinks, as though the answer is down there somewhere in the water. "There was a fella came in here in 2016," she said, "had a boat called the Petcock, and he wanted to sell her, and he wanted to sell her because of a woman in Wigan, and I said to him, Pete, you are not selling a boat, you are getting rid of a thing to be able to say a thing. And he said that's the same thing, isn't it, and I said no, and I got him a survey and it came back clean and it took him eleven months to sell her and eleven months in which he was still going round the cut at the weekends talking about the Petcock, and at the end of it he sold her to a man who did three things to her in the first year and burned the front deck, and Pete stood on the towpath and watched it happen and said to me, that was my roof, that, and I had to go inside." She turned the paper cup in her hands. "That's the whole of what I know about boats and divorce and it comes down to one thing, which is that the boat's the easy part." She looked at me. "The boat's easy. I mean that as a yard man. Boats are the easy part, they're made of wood and they're held together with screws and resin and if you don't like it you fix it or you sell it and there's a next one. It's not like the other thing. There's no next thing for the other thing. There's just four years of a Tuesday rota and a book with one handwriting in it, and a man who wouldn't take the pen." "He took the pen on the last visit." Teddy Vilar put her cup down. "Did he." "He wrote in the book. His own hand. He wrote that the lock plate was seized and he'd taken the top off it. And he did sign it, and he put the date next to it, and he initialed the bottom, and he handed it back to me and then he wouldn't take his coat off, which I put down to the rain." "And the day before that." "He did not sign it. For four years he did not sign it and last week he did, and I have been thinking about that for six days and I have not come up with anything." "Course you have," said Teddy. "You have just not said it out loud and you are not going to, because you're a good girl and you were married to him for five years and there's a boy up at the surgery that you'd have been at by now if you'd stayed with him, and I'm not being unkind, I'm being factual, and this is a yard and we are both talking about weather and gates." Dev came out of shed one at that moment and put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Pike, if you're going to stare at the boat, stare at her transom, she's taking water aft, I've had a look, and you can have the use of the small hoist on Saturday if you can work out how to work it, and you can borrow Dev junior for an hour if you ask him nicely instead of just standing there." He had gone before I could say anything. "That's the thing," said Teddy Vilar, to nobody. "That. He's been doing that for about eleven years. He told Dev junior to be ready on the Saturday and then he told me he doesn't know if he'll need him, because he can't do a thing by asking, so he does it by arranging and then standing near it." She picked up both cups. "Ring her tonight." "She's got a man at four o'clock." "It's a quarter to two, Jonah. And I don't care about your man's four o'clock. Ring her tonight and don't ring her about the boat."