Warlight(18)
We slipped out of the house. We had to be at work early. There was a man pacing up and down by the bus stop, watching us as we approached him, who then turned to look at the house, as if curious about why we had come out of it. He boarded the bus as well, and sat behind us. Was this just coincidence? Was he a wartime ghost from the building we had invaded? We felt guilt, not fear. Agnes was worried about her brother’s job. But as we got up to leave, he got up too and followed us. The bus stopped. We stood at the exit. As the bus started and began moving faster, Agnes leapt off, staggered, then waved at me. I waved and turned back past the man, and later, at some point in central London, I jumped off and he couldn’t catch me.
The Mussel Boat
Our first day on the Thames, Rachel and I and The Darter travelled west until we were almost free of the city. I’d need a good river map now to show you the places we passed or paused at, whose names I learned by heart during those weeks, along with the charts of tidal information, the intricate causeways, old tollhouses, draw-docks we entered and left, building sites and gathering places we learned to recognize from the boat—Ship Lane, Bulls Alley, Mortlake, the Harrods Depository, several power stations, along with the twenty or so named and unnamed canals that had been cut a century or two earlier like spokes fingering north from the Thames. I used to lie in bed repeating all the declensions of the river in order to memorize and so remember them. I still do. They sounded like the names of kings of England, and they became more thrilling to me than football teams or mathematics tables. Sometimes we travelled east beyond Woolwich and Barking, and even in the darkness knew our location by just the sound of the river or the pull of the tide. Beyond Barking there was Caspian Wharf, Erith Reach, the Tilbury Cut, Lower Hope Reach, Blyth Sands, the Isle of Grain, the estuary, and then the sea.
There were further hidden locations along the Thames where we paused to meet seagoing vessels that unloaded their surprising cargo, then walked the several animals that had hesitatingly disembarked, all of them attached to one long rope. In this way they defecated and relieved themselves after their four-or five-hour journey from Calais, before we coaxed them onto our mussel boat for another brief journey, to be collected later by people we saw only briefly, whose names we never knew.
Our involvement with these river activities had begun the afternoon The Darter overheard us talking about the approaching weekend. Casually, speaking as if Rachel and I were not in the room, he asked The Moth if we might happen to be free to help him out with something or other.
“Day work or night work?”
“Probably both.”
“And is it safe?”
This was said sotto voce by The Moth as if we should not be hearing it.
“Absolutely safe,” The Darter answered loudly, looking towards the two of us, offering a false smile and suggesting complete security with an offhand wave. The question of legality never surfaced.
The Moth murmured, “You can swim, can’t you?” And we nodded. The Darter threw in, “They like dogs, don’t they?” And this time it was The Moth who nodded, having no idea whether we did.
—
“It’s resplendent,” The Darter claimed that first weekend, one hand on the wheel, the other attempting to remove a sandwich from his pocket. He did not appear fully focused on the steering of the barge. A cold wind scalloped the water, gusting and shuddering against us from all sides. I supposed we were safe with him. I knew nothing about boats, but I immediately loved the landless smells, the oil on the water, brine, fumes sputtering out of the stern, and I came to love the thousand and one sounds of the river around us, that let us be silent as if in a suddenly thoughtful universe within this rushing world. It was resplendent. We almost grazed the arch of a bridge, The Darter leaning his body away at the last minute as if that would make the boat follow him. Then a near collision with a quartet of rowers who were left buffeting in our wash. We heard their yells and witnessed The Darter’s wave towards them as if it were fate, not anyone’s fault. That afternoon we would pick up twenty greyhounds from a silent barge near the Church Ferry Stairs and deliver them in silence to another location downriver. We had not been aware of the existence of such moveable cargo, did not know of the strict laws countering the illegal importing of animals into Britain. But The Darter appeared to know everything.
Our theories about The Darter’s style of walking in a crouch completely changed when he took us onto that mussel boat. Rachel and I moved cautiously down the slippery ramp, while The Darter barely watched what he was doing, half turning to make sure Rachel did not miss her footing while simultaneously tossing his cigarette into the four-inch gap between the embankment and the lilting boat. Steps that felt hazardous to us were an easy dance floor for him, and that wary crouch was now replaced by casualness as he moved along the foot-wide gunwales covered in rain and grease. He later claimed he had been conceived during a twenty-four-hour storm on the river. His ancestors were generations of lightermen and thus he had a river body that showed an accent only on land. He knew every tideway between Twickenham and Lower Hope Point and could identify docks by their smell or the sound of loading cargo. His father had been “a freeman of the river,” he boasted; this in spite of the fact that he also spoke of him as a cruel man who’d forced him into the boxing profession in his teens.
The Darter also had a mouthful of whistles, for every barge, he told us, had its own signal. You learned it when starting work on a new boat. It was the only signal you were allowed to use over the water as a recognition or a warning, and each whistle was based on a bird call. He’d met river people, he said, who walking in a landlocked forest had suddenly heard their own barge whistle though there was no river in sight. It turned out to be a kestrel protecting its nest, a breed of bird that must have once lived by a river a hundred years before, whose sound had been borrowed and learned by generations of bargemen.