Revenge of the Tide Read Free Page A

air was so cold that Malcolm’s breath came in clouds. His hair stood up on one side of his head as if it had been ironed.
    ‘Alright?’ he’d called across to me.
    ‘Morning,’ I’d said, and had almost gone back down below when curiosity got the better of me. ‘You okay over there?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he’d said, taking a long, slow drag. ‘You?’ As though it were entirely normal to be sitting on the roof of a narrowboat at five in the morning wearing nothing but your underwear. I hadn’t known his name then. I’d seen him coming and going, of course, and we’d exchanged nods and greetings, but it still felt a bit peculiar to be sharing the dawn with a man who was just a scrap of grey flannel away from naked.
    ‘Aren’t you cold?’
    ‘Oh,’ he’d said, with dawning comprehension. ‘Yeah. Fucking freezing. But I can’t go inside: Josie’s just had a shit and stunk the whole boat out.’
    In the first few days and weeks of boat ownership, living in the marina had felt like being in a foreign country. The pace of life was slower. If someone was going to the shop they would shout at you and ask if you wanted anything bringing back. Some of them turned up unexpectedly and sat on your boat and talked about nothing for three hours and then went away again, sometimes abruptly, as though the flow of conversation had dried up or some other, more pressing engagement had surfaced. Sometimes they brought food or drink with them. They helped you fix things, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent that the thing in question needed fixing. They gave you advice about which chemicals you should use to keep the toilet working. They laughed a lot.
    Some of the boats were owned by people who only turned up at the marina at the weekends, or less often if it was rainy. One of them, a narrowboat in a state of considerable disrepair, was owned by a man with wilder hair than Malcolm’s. I’d only seen him twice. The first time, I’d called a cheery hello on my way past his boat, and got a vacant stare in response. The second time, he’d been walking across the car park with a carrier bag that looked heavy and chinked as though it was full of glass bottles.
    Then there was Carol-Anne. She lived in a cabin cruiser that should by rights not have been moored in the residential marina, but she got away with it because she did actually live there. She was divorced, with three children who lived with their father in Chatham. She would say hello and then try and talk to you for hours about how grim things were and how difficult it was to manage. All the other liveaboards tried to avoid her and, after a couple of weeks, I did too.
    The rest of them were wonderful.
    Joanna had turned up with a plateful of dinner once. ‘You eaten? Good, we made too much.’
    We’d sat together at the dinette, Joanna drinking from a can of lager which she’d found in my fridge, while I tucked into shepherd’s pie and peas.
    ‘I’m not used to people bringing me dinner,’ I’d said when I’d finished.
    Joanna had shrugged. ‘It’s no bother. Glad not to throw it away.’
    ‘People here are very friendly,’ I’d said, aware at the same time of what an understatement this was. It was like suddenly finding yourself part of a big family.
    ‘Yes. It’s the whole boat thing. You get used to it, after a while. Not like living in London, huh?’
    Not like living in London, I’d thought, not at all.
    Mixing London friends with marina friends had the potential to be a recipe for pure disaster: they’d have nothing in common, other than perhaps that Simone occasionally read the Guardian on a Saturday. Lucy would turn up in her vast, tank-like all-terrain luxury vehicle that did about twelve miles to the gallon and had never been outside the M25; Gavin would be wearing incredibly expensive designer shoes that would be ruined in the muddy puddles around the dock that never seemed to dry up.
    And then there was Caddy. Would she even come?
    At some