The Best Australian Stories (49 page)

One night Tom came home and told her that soon he would be going away. Every year the school had an Easter holiday programme for some of the most deprived and disturbed kids and he had volunteered to go along. At first she was piqued at this. Easter was her birthday, which meant he wouldn't be there to celebrate it, and when she told him he apologised solemnly and said he was very sorry but it was too late: he had volunteered before they met and he couldn't let the others down now. He and two other teachers, husband and wife, were to take some of the worst cases from Tom's year (they were mostly twelve, though some were thirteen) on a ten-day trip along the old industrial canals of the English midlands. The husband and wife had been before and knew the ropes and they would be in charge of one boat and Tom would command the other. An unspoken invitation hovered in the air.

She ignored it. For one thing she had no experience with kids, she didn't even like them. Shut up on a barge with a mob of rampaging feral children didn't sound like a holiday to her, more like
Lord of the
Flies
on water.

Then, just two weeks before they were due to embark, the married couple had a death in the family and dropped out. One of the boats would have to be cancelled but it was still possible for Tom to take a party of children on the other, though it would be unwise for him to go alone. He asked Kirsten if she would come with him, and in a moment of post-coital weakness she said yes – and almost instantly began to have misgivings.

But Tom was affectingly grateful, saying over and over again that it would be fine, it would be fine. It would be great, in fact. She'd see a bit of the English countryside and it might even be, well, you know, idyllic: punting along the glassy waterways in the mellow afternoon light, rolling green hills in the distance, trim hedges on either side, picturesque locks left over from the industrial revolution. And as for the boats themselves, she really must see them, they were marvellously decorated, all painted up in bright colours with romantic landscapes on the sides and elaborate scrollwork along the transom. ‘Like gypsy caravans,' he said. ‘A lost art.' He made it sound romantic.

Undaunted by lack of experience (he had, after all, been on a canal holiday as a child), Tom borrowed a stack of books from the municipal library. Every night he pored over maps of old canal routes (the locals referred to a canal as ‘the cut') and studied diagrams of the many different types of lock and their iron workings until he could sketch the most common of them without reference to the originals. Sometimes he would read aloud to her. ‘A lock is an assemblage, a kit of parts, and no two locks are ever alike.' Then he would look up with one of his deadpan stares. ‘Are you listening?' he would ask.

‘I'm enthralled,' she'd reply.

‘A typical old-style lock is a rectangular chamber of brick or stone, finished with flat stone copings. The heavy gates are balanced by wooden beams which also act as levers. Each gate is anchored by a collar and turned on a cast-iron pin in a pot. The whole thing is held in place by water pressure with hand-worked paddle gear mounted on a gate or on a stand set in the ground nearby. Sometimes the gates are of steel and occasionally cast iron. They are usually black with beam ends picked out in white. The use of paint, tar and whitewash preserves the gates and makes them visible in grey weather or the dark.'

‘Really?' she would say. ‘How fascinating.'

But it was the boats he had fallen in love with. These low barges were known as narrow-boats and they harked back to the 1760s. Far from being dour they were covered in bright patterns that were positively gaudy, carnivalesque even. The highlight was always one idealised scene on the starboard side, which might be a cottage beside a pond but more likely a Bohemian castle set high above a mountain lake, some luridly crimson Shangri-La sunset flaming behind the turrets, and the whole scene encircled by an outer wreath of yellow and pink roses entwined in dark-green ivy. The overall effect was of a floating sideshow, crude but somehow enlivening, a diorama of the utopian.

*

Each day Tom grew more and more enthused while she, Kirsten, began to feel a secret, queasy reluctance. It was an English spring. She had been warned that it could be cold and there was no heating on the boats. It would almost certainly be wet. She began to meditate on excuses she might give for opting out, but could think of none that she wouldn't be ashamed to utter.

In the end what swayed her was the photograph.

She found it in one of the books that Tom had brought home from the library, a large picture book about barges in the nineteenth century. Right at the end was a photograph that they both found peculiarly affecting, an old sepia print, dated around 1870, of a barge with the strange name of
Gort
. The boat was taken in long shot and the figure of a woman could be seen standing at the stern. In the long shot the woman was a faint image, like an apparition, but in the enlarged detail she was as solid and material, as mundane and domestic as any woman could be. This was the bargemaster's young wife and behind her you could see the small wooden cabin that was her home and into which, astonishingly, she had crammed all her possessions. The curved wall at the back was hung with small pictures in ornate frames, while on a narrow wooden shelf to one side there was a lace doily, a teapot, a brass oil lamp and tiny porcelain ornaments.
Often
, said the caption,
the living
areas of these boats were like small shrines
, and here at the centre of her dark, domesticated hollow stood the young wife, a kind of low-life industrial Madonna, her head compressed with tight ringlets, her body encased in a dress of drab grey serge that fell into a wide Victorian skirt, as wide almost as the door of the cabin. And in her arms she was holding a baby.

This baby was wrapped in a funnel of white swaddling clothes so that only its face was visible, and in this face – was it an effect of the sepia? – only the eyes could be discerned, just a few grainy markings, a shadow here, a smudge there, but somehow the effect was uncanny. The baby looked not as if it were being held in its mother's arms but as if it were hovering there, like a ghost.

Kirsten had stared at this image for some time, gazing at it with a kind of horror mixed with pity. It was unbelievable that anyone could live in that dark, confined space, never mind make a home of it for a baby. Day after day, on the grey water, so flat and oily in its man-made channels; so dense with a sense of enclosure, of brick and tar and charcoal and smoke.

But what moved her was this. In the accompanying text it said that despite growing up on the canals, hardly any of the canal children ever learned to swim. Drowned children were registered in parish records and when canal children perished the name of the boat would be entered in the parish register as the child's home. It shocked her, the idea that anyone would keep a child on the water and not teach it how to swim. But then for most of the year the water was freezing, and according to the text it was more than likely that the child's parents were themselves unable to swim.

She had set the book aside and pondered this. She could not remember a time when she had been unable to swim.

The Canal

They boarded the boat at four o'clock in the afternoon. The day was cold, the sky overcast, the canal so narrow she felt she could reach over and touch the sides. As for the boat – ah, what bleak irony! – the boat was indescribably drab; bare, shabby, with no colour or decoration save for a faded red heart that had been daubed on the sliding hatch of the cabin. And even that was cracked and beginning to flake.

As their car pulled alongside the mooring ramp, Tom stared at the boat in glum disbelief. For a moment he could scarcely conceal his disappointment, then pursed his lips and said nothing.

Soon the kids would be arriving in their chartered bus.

Tom climbed on board first and offered her his hand. Looking down to the decrepit transom, floating on a slick of oily water, she hesitated – and for a split second lost her footing and had to lunge across the gap. Above her loomed the grey hump of the cabin roof, its black tin funnel looking thin and worn, curiously fragile against a low charcoal sky.

Rain was beginning to fall as they entered the long cabin that took up almost the entire length of the barge, and she could see immediately why they had once gone by the name of narrow boats. At one end was a stack of bunks and at the other a primitive kitchen, with a table and benches in the middle. Tom set about inspecting the sleeping bunks while she stood haplessly in the cooking area, surrounded by wet patches on the floor where the roof leaked. When she looked up she found herself staring at a motley of pots on the kitchen shelf, all made of battered aluminium with scarcely a flat bottom between them.

The brochure had described the barge as having been converted into a comfortable holiday boat. The brochure, clearly, had lied.

‘Where's the lavatory?' she asked, and Tom nodded curtly in the direction of the bow where a narrow door had been cut into a wall. The door was ill-fitting and he had to wrench at the handle to get it open. Inside was a pokey little closet with a dead rat behind the cistern.

The place was a floating slum.

Worse was to come. Tom opened the cabin door and she climbed out after him. Together they edged their way along the narrow deck towards the stern and already there was a heavy weight in the pit of her stomach. What am I doing here? she thought. She was trembling from the cold. It was freezing. Could this possibly be spring?

When they reached the bargemaster's cabin at the rear they found a dark little hollow of a shelter, curved like a big scallop shell and made of planked wood. Inside it was completely bare and smelled of damp. They had to stoop to enter the cabin – being tall, neither of them could stand up straight in it – and once inside they bumped awkwardly against one another as they dumped their gear onto the floor. Then they looked around them, aghast. Or at least, she was. Tom, as usual, was impassive.

‘This is awful,' she said.

Tom turned away and she could see that he was angry; disappointed with the boat, yes, but angry with her for not pretending to a stoicism she didn't feel. He stood for a moment at the open door, watching the grey drizzle fall while she kicked at the flap of her pack. She felt like kicking
him
.

Morosely they began to unpack, although there was nowhere to put anything, not even a narrow shelf (so much for the ‘small shrine'). She set down her torch beside the pillow and arranged her shampoo and face-cream packs so that they stood upright and ordered in the corner. Then they heard the bus pull in. Here they come, she thought; the hordes. Tom was waiting in silence for her to finish her adjustments, and when everything was in place she followed him back along the narrow deck towards the main cabin.

Just as they reached the door the kids began to clamber aboard, and they at least seemed happy enough: most of them were on the first holiday of their life. They scuttled about in jeans and parkas, looking ragged and half drowned, hair plastered against their foreheads by the rain. Tom marshalled them inside the main cabin and made a brief speech of welcome. Then he introduced them to Kirsten, who was trying not to stare at the damp patches on the floor where the roof dripped water onto the rotting wood. The children (they were no longer children but not quite adolescent) looked giddy with disorientation and glanced at her as if she were one of the fixtures. It had been a long coach trip and a few of them began to crowd around Tom, asking if there was anything to eat. He shrugged and looked uncharacteristically at a loss. Meanwhile the others were milling around the cabin, and around her; shiny, bedraggled, strange. I can't bear this, she thought, and turned her back on them. In one quick, unobtrusive movement she opened the cabin door, climbed out onto the deck and retreated to the stern, back into the bargemaster's cabin. Back into the bat cave.

There she sat on the air mattress, in the dark, in a stupefied state.

Fuck, fuck, fuck! In five days it would be her birthday, and she was going to spend it in this hole! She had been looking forward to a club in the city, dressing up, going out with friends; a night of drunken abandon. And here on this rotting hulk she couldn't even have a joint to console herself; Tom had made her promise not to bring any dope, and
he
didn't smoke it even at home because he was allergic. Allergic! Sullenly, in the dark, she sat and stewed on her bleak feeling of being trapped, gnawing at her nails in bitterness and frustration. How could she have ended up here, on this miserable strip of water? This claustrophobic cupboard. This floating purgatory. What on earth would she do for ten days?

It was some time before Tom appeared at the door of the cave, carrying a plate of food which he offered, wordlessly. She took it.

All the next day she sulked in her dank little cabin, reading the one book she had brought with her which, at this rate, was only going to last her until evening. Some French novel, set in the nineteenth century.
Madame Bovary
. She was not the type to read much but she thought she'd better bring something and found this in a carton of books Tom had bought at the local flea market. One of the best books ever written, it said on the cover, but they all say that. If only it weren't so cold – she had never known this kind of cold before, the kind that got into your bones and made you feel as if all your organs were shrinking and your kidneys were two dull stones dragging in your lower back … and it was worse here in the bat cave, because she had to keep the door open. To close it was like being sealed in a wooden tomb.

After a while she lay the book aside and dozed, as if in sleep she could somehow escape the boat, but when she opened her eyes in the dim cabin it was still there, an ugly hulk gliding along the flat, grey water. Every now and then she could feel the bump of the barge as it knocked against the walls of the canal. Outside was a world of stained brick and smoke but at least, for a while, she could immerse herself in the shimmering haze of the French provinces,
where the sky is blue and
the leaves still, where the heather is in bloom, where there are patches of violet
beneath the bushes of russet and gold, where rooks caw softly among the heavy
overhang of oak-trees
… From time to time the shouts of the children penetrated her narrative fog; the sound of their boots clumping on the deck, their cries as they leapt onto the grassy bank and tugged at the ropes, or ran to see who could be first to grasp the turning wheel of the lock. At odd moments she could hear them close, just a damp timber-width away, remonstrating in a quiet fury.