Ordinary Thunderstorms

32

THE TARGA CIRCLED THE small dinghy once and then Joey accelerated past it, downstream. The tide was ebbing and Rita heard the throaty change in the engine noise as the screws reversed and the Targa held itself immobile in mid-stream, stern to the tide, waiting for the flow of water to carry the dinghy down towards them. Rita took up position on the aft deck with a boathook poised. She saw a length of the painter that was attached to the bow of the dinghy trailing in the water and reached forward quickly to fish it out. She secured it to a cleat, hauling the dinghy in tight to the Targa’s side, making it fast.

They had been about to go off duty when they were alerted to the abandoned dinghy — it had been spotted floating past Lambeth Bridge — and they had cruised upstream, Rita in the bow with the binoculars, looking for it. She saw it emerging from the shadow cast by Waterloo Bridge — it was barely eight feet long, a stubby, beamy pram tender made of dirty pale-blue fibreglass, with low freeboard, designed for short ship-to-shore journeys or jetty-to-jetty work, with one thwart, two rowlocks but no oars, as far as Rita could see as she tied her final half-hitch. In the well was a bundle of grey polythene tarpaulin and two inches of brown water slopping about.

“Give me a second,” she shouted to Joey, picking up a length of dock rope. Feed out a little extra line, she said to herself, we can tow it in, don’t want this dirty old pram scraping our neatly painted sides. She knelt on the deck, reached down, slipped the end of the rope through the shackle in the bow and was about to knot it when the tarpaulin moved and she gave a short scream — more of an instinctive yip of alarm — but to her intense annoyance, all the same.

Something, somebody, was stirring under the tarpaulin and in a second it was flipped back to reveal her father.

It took only another split second to register that it wasn’t Jeff Nashe, at all — just another stubbly, gaunt-faced, elderly man with a frazzled grey pony-tail.

“What the fuck—” the man mumbled, in a daze, rising to a kneeling position, looking across the water at Somerset House, as if suddenly struck by the austere classical geometry of its river fafade. He swivelled round to stare at her and Rita caught the half-deranged gaze of a man near the end of his particular road. Rita stretched out her hand and helped him aboard, smelling that unique sour reek of the long-unwashed, the foetor of poverty.

“Thanks, darling,” he said, as she steadied him. Now she was close to him she saw that he wasn’t that old, really — late thirties, early forties — but toothless, the lower face squashed, jaws unnaturally close, lips making that unreflecting pursing and pouting that you see in very young babies. She sat him down in the cabin and re-rigged the towing-line, signalling Joey when he could safely move off. She took a blanket out of a locker and draped it round his shoulders, sitting down opposite him.

“I didn’t nick it,” he said. “Just crawled in for a kip. Stone the crows, got a shock when you woked me up.”

“Where was that, then? Where you started your kip.”

“Ah,” he thought, pouting his wet lips, rubbing his chin with the knuckles of his right hand. “Hampton Court.”

“You’ve come a long way,” she said. “Let’s save it for the station, shall we?”

“Ain’t done nothing wrong,” he said petulantly, hurt at the implication. He looked away from her, sniffed and tightened his blanket round his shoulders, freeing the rope’s-end of his pony-tail with one hand as he did so, a gesture that brought her father’s face back to her again. She felt a sudden worry-tug of melancholy in her chest, thinking of Jeff, old and vulnerable, then immediately consoling herself with the thought that she would always be there to look out for him, make sure he was safe and well. But that was no consolation, she realised, pondering the nature of this situation, as it spoke of a future she didn’t wish for in the slightest.

She stepped out on to the aft deck and needlessly resecured her towing-rope, looking at the tender lurching and sliding in the Targa’s wake. She didn’t want to think of herself getting older, still living on the Bellerophon. Thirty, forty…The longer she stayed the harder it would be to move out one day, however much she routinely threatened to do so when her father made her angry. Not being with someone, not having a relationship, inevitably brought these thoughts on. When she’d been with Gary she never fretted morbidly or fearfully about her future. Gary had asked her out on a date and she wondered whether she should go — things between them could start up again, she realised, as easily as she had brought them to a stop.

She turned and looked at the toothless man, now berating Joey with his troubles, a dirty finger jabbing at his back from between the blanket folds. Gary wasn’t ever going to be right for her, she realised, that much was clear, and she would make a big mistake going back to him just for some temporary security and confidence. She was young and attractive to men, she knew. Some lucky bastard was out there waiting for her and she would know it when he showed up — wasn’t there a song about that? She searched her memory for the words and the melody and the prospect of her inevitable future happiness cheered her up, suddenly. She looked at the toothless man with pity, now — what brought a person down to that kind of state? He had been somebody’s sweet little baby, once, dandled on a loving knee, repository of maternal and paternal hopes…What terrible mistakes had he made? What tricks had fate played on him? How had he fallen so low and helpless?

She turned away and looked back at the river as they swept under Blackfriars Bridge. Shakespeare had had a house in Blackfriars, she remembered, someone had told her that. Only one bridge across the Thames in those days — lots of boats, though, packed with boats. She smiled to herself, glad that her spirits were lifting again, happy to be part of the river and its timeless traffic.