Narrow Margins Read online

  Surprised at being addressed during one of the many emotional hubbubs involving the girls, Sam glanced up from the brown soggy mess in his bowl. He looked completely blank. ‘What about?’ he asked.

  Ho hum.

  Chapter Two

  Big Ship, Little Ship, Bathtub

  TWO MONTHS LATER AND, not unexpectedly, our hastily hashed plan was being re-hashed. After a short flurry of cleaning and decorating activity, the house went up for sale and, thankfully, we immediately had a good offer.

  I am most definitely not going to discuss the evil surveyor, who admitted there was nothing really wrong with the house that couldn’t be put down to it being 300 years old. However, he felt that prices were too high in the area and was on a personal crusade to bring them down to a more reasonable level.

  Our estate agent let slip to the buyer that we had to sell quickly. In response to this exciting piece of news, the buyer... ‘in light of the “cheap kitchen” mentioned in the “poor survey”’ (cheap kitchen! Since when has seven grand and a new Aga been considered cheap?), blithely ‘adjusted’ their offer by £20,000, knowing that we had no choice at this point but to accept. Months later I was still sore about it and it only took one comment about house sales to set me off into full and furious auto rant.

  We had spent a wonderful, child-free weekend at the Crick Boat Show, wandering around in the sunshine. As happy as newlyweds searching for their first home, we were completely inspired by all the beautifully fitted-out boats and enthusiastic salespeople. We feigned knowledge we didn’t really possess and spent hours discussing plans and layouts with various boat builders and playing with all the fantastic gadgets that we’d surely need to fill our new life.

  At the end of a perfect day we staggered, light-hearted and laughing, back to the car, both weighed down by bags of advertising, catalogues and free samples of some very strange chemicals.

  This euphoria lasted for almost the whole week that it took for us to sift through all the paper, create a ‘plan’, work out a budget and discover that reality really, really sucks.

  We had expected to have about £100,000 to play with. This amount of capital would have given us a floating bungalow with all the extras you could wish for. However, by the time the rabid, evil surveyor and his hell-spawn minions had finished butchering our house sale and we had budgeted for some debts that we’d conveniently forgotten, our budget had been halved and our floating dream bungalow had become a garden shed.

  This, quite frankly, cramped our style somewhat, or to put it in my mother’s words, we were suffering from ‘champagne taste and beer money’ syndrome. Trying to keep our sadly depleted funds firmly in mind, we gave up on the idea of having the boat created professionally and started searching for something a little closer to our forlorn little reality. It had never been so apparent that those with money get the choice, and those without have to make do.

  Weeks went by, the house sale trickled on and even though we had already accepted a low price the buyers dropped the price further with every new ‘expert’ that was sent around. We eventually lost over thirty-five thousand on the original asking price. At that point it didn’t really matter any more, as, even if our ever-diminishing budget hadn’t been enjoying a starring role in our nightmares, the selection of boats that were on offer certainly was.

  Too small, too expensive, too old or, in one horribly memorable case, too mouldy, leaky and definitely way, way too smelly. That particular boat had small mushrooms growing in the angle between the walls and ceiling that were leaking a brownish, lumpy and stinking ichor that tumbled in staining trails down the walls; the smell of it stayed with me for days.

  We were still undecided about what type of boat to buy. We knew that with family and smelly ‘dog thing’ in tow, we would have to look for something fairly large and airy so, for a short time, considered seagoing. Our budget was now so small and insignificant we would have considered ourselves lucky to get our hands on a decent rubber dinghy. Something to live on was way out of our reach and we were pretty close to despair when an advert appeared that seemed too good to be true:

  Barge for sale

  120ft Humber keel

  Back on the market due to time-wasters and dreamers

  Beautiful – live aboard with idyllic mooring in Devon

  Many extras included in sale

  Needs some refurbishment, but basically ready to move on to

  All sensible offers considered, as owner moving abroad

  The excitement was close to fever pitch – this was ‘it’, we knew it, she sounded like just what we were looking for and Devon was lovely. OK, it wasn’t Cambridge, but we kept reminding ourselves that you had to be prepared to change plans when you were doing this sort of thing.

  I contacted the owner and he informed me that the price was low because, as he had stated in the ad, he was very keen to move out of the country quickly (there may have been a hint there of things to come) and he would be very sorry to lose her because he had put in a lot of time and effort and she really was a beauty.

  As we all headed down to Devon (minus Amelia, who had decided that, as she was determined not to live on a boat, she didn’t even want to look at them, think about them or talk about them), we were all so full of excited expectation that even Sam came out of his normal day-dream mode to join in the silly off-key singing and raucous mucking about that we all indulged in on the journey.

  Three hours of travel and we’d crossed the Devon border; it then took another two hours of backtracking down remote country lanes to locate the ‘small, secluded bay’ in which the boat was moored. By the time we actually found what appeared to be the right place, everybody had run out of ‘happy puff’ and was beginning to get a bit testy.

  We pulled up facing away from land. Our parking place really should have been described as facing out to sea, but, as the tide was well out, the expanse before us resembled nothing more than one of the legendary ship graveyards. Interred within a slimy field of grey-green mud, between pools of weed-filled, murky water surrounding large, slime-covered rocks, downright ancient ships leant sadly at impossible angles. We climbed out of the car in silence and stared over the mud flats, each trying to be the first to catch a glimpse of this advertised paragon of nautical beauty.

  Sam, as usual, was the first to break the increasingly worried silence.

  ‘Which one is it, Mum?’

  Good question, m’boy. ‘I’m not sure, Sam,’ I murmured and frowned at the poor selection of rotting wrecks, mired in the slimy muck.

  Geoff took the details page out of his pocket and held it up, comparing the picture to each of the boats; he finally settled on one. ‘That one,’ he stated in a firm tone, ‘look, it’s the only one with that shaped wheelhouse.’ He traced the outline on the picture and then again in the air, pointing toward a particularly odious-looking hulk, slumped sullenly at a 45-degree angle and cheekily showing a fair bit of bottom.

  There was a loaded silence as everybody took a long look. It is always very sad to be confronted with an item so far removed from its sales pitch that you have two options: laugh or cry. I seem to remember wanting to alternate between the two.

  The ‘beautiful’ barge was definitely large; she would easily have fitted a family of our size aboard, but that is where any resemblance to the advert ended. For instance, there was absolutely no mention that she had obviously run into or been run into by something. A dock probably, but it could have quite easily been war wounds from a volley from long nines – she looked that old and battered! There were several huge dents along the side closest to us and all around the front.

  Sam took one look at her pathetically sagging bulk and stated categorically, ‘We can’t live on that, we’d fall off!’ Pretty astute for a six-year-old. Charlie was less garrulous, but still perfectly damning, ‘Oh yuk,’ was all she muttered, then rushed off to see if she could find something slimy and alive in the pools of water dotted about.

  Still gamely hanging on to
our dream, which was rapidly becoming as dented as the old boat in front of us, we navigated our way through the mud toward the boat. It was necessary to play an odd lurching hopscotch as we leapt from one dryish patch to another. Maybe, just maybe, the inside was beautiful – finished – and the outside was just a cleverly camouflaged smoke-screen... We pressed on.

  The only access to the deck was via a very precarious-looking rope ladder that led to the wheelhouse. The owner had assured us it was safe and had given us permission to just ‘poke about as much as you want to’. Quite frankly, by this time, I didn’t really want to ‘poke about’ at all. Looking over the mud, I could see a pub in the distance; its whitewashed walls and flower-filled terrace gleamed in the sun. That looked like a nice place to ‘poke about’.

  The wheelhouse, once we were inside, pretty much set the standard for the rest of the visit. It had been added fairly recently and amateurishly either by someone with no skill in welding, or a dot-to-dot fanatic with obsessive compulsive disorder, it was hard to tell. The woodwork, what there was of it, was cheap, poorly fitted and water damaged. To get into the hold, where the living accommodation was situated, a large hole had been roughly cut into the middle of the floor and the stairs down comprised a ladder and a piece of knotted rope.

  With dampening spirits, we persisted in our search for something – anything – that could be described as ‘ready to move on to’. Maybe down in the darkness, beyond the big hole in the floor, a great surprise awaited us.

  Stepping into a foot of evil-smelling, ice-cold water in the pitch black is always a bit of a surprise. Over the years, my beloved, dry-humoured husband has revealed himself to be one of those people who can turn understatement into an art form – ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem,’ means he is in danger of losing a limb. So, when this dour, taciturn man disappears into a pitch black hole and all that floats back to you is a ‘splosh’, followed by more expletives in one breath than I’ve heard in 11 years of marriage, you tend to imagine the worst.

  I let go of Sam’s hand, needing both of mine free to lean into the hole and assess the situation. Thirty seconds of peering into the darkness enabled me to find out that Geoff was just wet and very annoyed, up to his knees in oily, stinking water. Thirty seconds was obviously far too long.

  The scream was so loud and shocking that if I hadn’t been backing away from the hole at the time it erupted, I would have joined Geoff in the wet bowels of the ship. Nobody, not even a professional, can scream like an enraged six-year-old.

  ‘I just picked it up to look at it.’ Sam was covered and I mean covered in oil. He had picked up a bucket to look inside, then, in spectacular Sam style, had tripped on some rubbish and fallen over backwards, emptying the contents of the bucket over himself.

  Geoff heaved himself, dripping, out of the hole, took one look at a wailing, equally dripping, Sam whose screams had now turned to loud complaints about the smell and just sighed. ‘Fancy some lunch?’

  I don’t know how many people remember the television show It’s a Knockout but descending a swaying rope ladder onto slippery mud with a wriggling child covered in oil should have been made into an international game. It is far, far more difficult than it has any right to be. After an incredibly slow and careful descent, we reached the ground relatively unscathed and, except for slightly elevated heart rates all round, all in one piece.

  Bringing up the rear as we began our second game of hopscotch back toward the car, I was (very quietly) amused that I was the only one of the three of us who was still clean. As Geoff put Sam on to his shoulders to forestall any more ‘incidents’, the oil was transferred from Sam’s legs onto Geoff’s hair, face and shirt. Being more ‘sure-footed’ than I, they strode off to open the car and find something to clean themselves up with, leaving me to pick my way carefully along behind.

  I very nearly made it; about ten feet from the steps up to the road, I took a single wrong step and my right leg disappeared up to the thigh into what could only be described as a miniature wadi. There was an unpleasant squelching sound as I tried to heave myself out, but I was stuck, well and truly stuck. Geoff had to come back and pull me out.

  Charlie, more sensible than the rest of us, had been watching our progress from a clean, dry, warm vantage point up on the rocks and was now laughing so hard she could barely stand.

  I suppose it could be described as a ‘Kodak moment’, but fortunately no one around had a camera: Geoff, soaked and muddy from the feet up, oily and sticky from the head down, Sam just plain oily and myself completely pristine except for one leg, covered from foot to thigh in thick, black mud; Charlie was almost hyperventilating, she was laughing so hard.

  As our mucky group stood around the car, futilely trying to get ourselves at least part-way respectable again, an elderly gent walking his dog wandered past us. Staring unashamedly at the bustle going on, his curiosity finally got the better of him and he meandered over, smiling.

  ‘Wot ’appened to ’ee then?’

  We explained that we had been out to look around the barge and the series of events that had led us to this state. He listened quietly, nodding every now and then. When we had finished narrating our sad tale, he looked us all up and down and nodded again.

  ‘A lot of folk coom aut tay see that barge,’ he informed us, still nodding sagely.

  ‘Do they all end up looking like this?’ I quipped, grinning.

  ‘No, lass – you lot are the first daft enough to go aboard,’ he said, ‘you’d better get that mud off, it smells terrible when it be drying.’ He smiled and, nodding one last time, carried on up the road, dragging his dog behind him.

  Four hours later we arrived home, stinking, miserable, hungry, depressed and more than a little ‘crispy’ where the mud had dried. My niggling little doubts had started to grow like Topsy.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked Geoff after we had managed to give Sam an oil change and get him and Charlie fed and into bed. Clean and warm, we were lazing about in big fluffy bath robes, I hanging on to a glass of red wine and Geoff with his usual cup of tea. ‘Every boat is just hideous; it’s either falling apart or it’s tiny or just plain horrible. I can’t see us living on any of the rotting tubs we’ve seen so far. Do you really think you can take one of these things apart and put it back together again in a liveable form?’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ Geoff grinned and blew into his cup. ‘OK, so we haven’t found anything suitable yet but I’m sure something will come up.’ He mooched across the sofa until, sitting almost in my lap, he put his arm round me and gave me a big hug. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to wriggle out of our ‘big adventure’ before it even starts now, would you?’

  ‘You make me sound like Pooh,’ I grouched, disengaging his arm. ‘Of course I’m not trying to wriggle out of it. I’m just beginning to find the whole thing really scary.’ I stared into my sadly empty wine glass for a moment then looked round at the big, soft sofas, our huge collection of books, the pictures and the piano, all of which would have to go into storage. Thinking back over our disastrous visit to Devon, I found myself helplessly wondering, if – when – we finally moved out, would we ever be warm and comfortable again?

  Chapter Three

  The ‘Perfect’ Boat?

  ONE WEEK BEFORE THE completion date for our house and we were in a complete panic. We must have seen every stinking, dented, sinking boat in a 300-mile radius and were beginning to lose heart. Some of them probably weren’t as poor as they appeared but, surely if you are trying to sell something, don’t you make it look its best? Three days worth of washing-up laid out for us to examine, filthy toilets, strange smells, damp patches and other nastier faults. It became glaringly obvious that these were also the boats that were very poorly maintained.

  One particularly memorable vessel had the owner’s entire tool collection spread over the engine room – obviously he was in the middle of some very major and prolonged repairs. This did not bode well for the future and Geoff hustled us out as q
uickly as possible.

  We spent hours every night poring over increasingly vague websites advertising narrow boats for sale. One particular boat, ‘Happy Go Lucky ’, kept coming up on various sites but had been consistently dismissed due to her slightly strange shape.

  One of a retired pair of hotel boats, she had been built to house seven cabins and two bathrooms, nothing else; her sister boat contained the kitchen, the communal lounge and the open deck space. At 70 foot, she was just the right size. However, to utilise as much space as possible, Happy’s entire length, including what would have been the front deck on any other boat, had been fully built-in; she really was the most cumbersome looking boat I had seen yet. From the pictures, she appeared to resemble nothing more than a steel box with windows, and every time she appeared on the computer screen, I made irritated huffing noises and resolutely moved on.

  Finally, after weeks of sleepless nights, eye damage and severe neck-ache, we had nothing left to view and decided to make the trip to Daventry to have a look at Happy Go Lucky.

  The day we travelled down to Daventry, I have to admit, was not one of my ‘happy disposition’, let’s-look-on-the-positive-side-of-things, ‘Pooh’ days. It was definitely more of an ‘Eeyore’ day. The whole family was irascible and prone to argue at the slightest provocation. The weather wasn’t helping matters, being overcast, airless and incredibly hot. The stress of the enforced move had finally gotten to Sam whose behaviour had taken a serious downward turn.

  We had been expecting this sort of reaction from him and had discussed how to handle any outbreaks of bad behaviour or signs of stress that were bound to come along. We were going to go by the book: be honest, forgiving and set good boundaries. Using these techniques, we felt sure that we would get through any traumas with all our familial feelings intact.

  Unfortunately when parents are also stressed, miserable, worried and under the threat of living with an in-law for the next six months, all good intentions go out of the window, along with any excellent parenting skills they may aspire to. Consequently, Sam and I had indulged in childish bickering all the way down the M5, until Geoff told us both to shut up. Still sulking, we arrived in Braunston, hot, tired, angry and certainly out of sorts with each other and life in general.