Drowned Lives

7

And now I see a seething of dark water as the sluice gates open at the tail of a lock. A woman stands on the counter of a narrowboat moored to the bank. Her arms rest on the hatch and her rough hands twist and clench as she stares into the gathering dawn.

A pair of Black Country joey boats are waiting to pass into the lock, and a ripe smell hangs on the morning air. The joeys are carrying night soil, smuggling the nauseous substance away from the towns under cover of darkness. Their planks are green with mould, clumps of moss grow on the black-tarred sides, and the gunwales are bent out of shape from repeated impacts on lock sides.

The woman’s own boat is scrubbed and clean, with the name Willow and a registration number smartly painted on the cabin. Inside, the wood is smooth and varnished, carefully scumbled to give the impression of wood grain. An oil lamp hangs on a bracket, its light reflecting from the wood, while lace-edged plates gleam on the brass rails.

At the boatwoman’s foot is a hot stove, its chimney leaking smoke as grey as the light now creeping over the roof of the warehouse beyond the lock. A coal box drawer is pulled open to form a step down into the tiny cabin. The box is almost empty of coal, but there are several tons of it beyond the back wall of the engine hole, where the hold is full of a cargo loaded at the Cannock pits.

A long skirt rustles against the cabin doors, and the woman’s black boots move uneasily on the counter. Below, in the cabin, a small white face turns up towards her and begins to speak, a plaintive sound like the mewing of a cat. The woman shushes it abruptly, the anxiety clear in her voice and the rigidity of her movements.

When the joeys have passed, they leave a wash that sucks the keel of the narrowboat against the bank. The woman continues to stare straight ahead, past the exhaust funnel, along the top planks and the box mast, to the triangular cratch at the stem of the boat, nearly seventy feet away. Her eyes watch the towpath for movement, but there is none.

She turns and looks behind her, where the sky is still dark. The butty lies close to the stern of the motor, deep in the water with several more tons of coal for the power station near Coventry. She can see the water cans on the roof of the back cabin, where two more children are asleep in the claustrophobic warmth. The curved wooden tiller has been tilted upwards, shipped out of use.

As I watch, I know the woman should have been standing in the well of the butty, not on the counter of the motor, which is usually her husband’s place.

Finally, the joeys are safe in the lock, and a boatman hauls on the balance beam to close the tail gate. The dark water heaves and churns again, releasing lumps of debris and blobs of foam that show white and ghostly in the grey light.

And something else is released too, as the massive gate moves slowly away from its recess in the wall of the lock. There’s something darker than the water, and oilier — something that bursts in a small slick on the surface. A metallic smell mingles with the stench of human waste, and the woman’s throat tightens as her hands grip the edge of her shawl.

Then a shape breaks the surface. It rolls and wallows, black and glistening, bobbing like a broken fender. It looks like a lump of rope, but it uncoils into the reality of human limbs and sodden clothes and floating hair.

The light of dawn is still too faint to make out the face that turns in the water, pale and gaping. But the woman knows the truth already. She’s looking at the body of her husband.