The Boat -part 1

‘It began as a mistake.’ Was that how the great Bukowski started off his classic novel? She couldn’t remember. And Bukowski was one of Catherine’s favourite authors. Now she was feeling inadequate, again.

Anyway, she couldn’t start her book, the book she was going to write, with that phrase because Bukowski had got in first, and you couldn’t go stealing other authors’ lines.

The phrase, though, could have been made for what she intended to do, she pondered as she pedalled steadily down Croydon High Street in the direction of Surrey Street fruit and veg market, always a cert for a big bowl of cheap tomatoes and bananas just at that exquisite stage before they collapse into a brown, slushy mess. She could bore for England on Surrey Street market, frequently did. 

This was going to be a mistake, maybe a really big mistake, possibly the worst and last mistake of her life. Well, that was sort of the point; it would entertain the readers. If she survived.

Catherine had retired from being a freelance writer for the trade press two months ago. Her private pension would just about ‘stretch’, at least for the foreseeable future. She’d done the sums in her head dozens, hundreds of times - council tax, the gas bill, Lidl, water rates…

‘Oh stop it,’ she told herself. ‘I bet Bukowski didn’t fret about things stretching.’ His bar bill, possibly, but probably not even that.

She chained her elderly Peugeot bike with its fat, knobbly tyres to the stand outside Savers and joined the throng on Surrey Street.

 

Her on-off relationship with David, her ‘boyfriend’ of 30 years was currently ‘off’, though no doubt it would presently be ‘on’ again when he tired of listening to Augustine Trimble’s paranoid rants in her Bognor bungalow and came slinking back home to the semi in Purley that they jointly owned.

‘Bognor bungalow.’ A good phrase, worth trying to work into the book, perhaps, or just a cheap alliteration, a hack’s lazy trick? It would be a way of getting at David, though, Catherine thought slyly. Assuming he read her book. When it was finished. If it was finished.

Hadn’t King George, or one of the King Georges, said something like that? ‘Bugger Bognor’; that was it. His last words, according to legend. So ‘Bognor bungalow’ wasn’t too original then. ‘Bugger the Bognor bungalow?’

 

At the farewell party in the offices of her main client, George – the editor of Municipal and Urban Monthly – had asked: ‘So how are you going to fill your days?’

She liked George; silver-haired, distinguished, only a few years younger than herself. He’d once, after a couple of drinks at the office Christmas party, told her she was ‘a fine figure of a woman’, and she actually thought he meant it. George wasn’t given to irony, even in his cups.

His question was an obvious one, but a fair one. She had hobbies; reading, nipping up to London on her free Over-60s Oyster to explore exquisite Wren churches, or seeking out old pubs up and down the country with Nicola and the rest of the crowd. But was that enough to fill the days?

 

‘Well, what ARE you going to do with yourself?’ her elder sister Pat had asked her on the phone a couple of days before. ‘You know there’s always a welcome and a bed her for you in Little Ossington.’

And there would always be a routine starting at six in the morning, cleaning out the pigsties and the goats on your small-holding followed by a couple of hours collecting the honey from your uniquely vicious swarm of bees and then a little light cow-milking, with maybe a bit of muck-shifting for added interest, Catherine thought, but naturally didn’t say. She liked Pat, but she did have this habit of…of using people for her own ends. And she was the one who had decided to live the rural dream, in a particularly muddy and damp patch of Devon. ‘You’ve made your own mudbath. You lie in it’ she said, to herself.

 

She unchained the bike and started to push it down Church Street.

‘OI LUV! You’re losing all yer tomatoes!’

She glanced behind. Bumping the bike up and down the kerb at Frith Street had been enough to dislodge the contents of the yellow pannier, the one with the broken zip that you couldn’t close properly. She made a mental note to look on Facebook Marketplace for a replacement.

 

On the ride back home to Purley, builders were up on scaffolding on the big corner shop on the left hand side, just before the Selsdon turn-off. One of them wolf-whistled. Then another, and a third. She thought builders these days didn’t do that, had all been given strict instructions by management. Maybe they were self-employed. Maybe they didn’t care.

She gave them the finger, but was secretly gratified. She even hitched up the leg of her trackie bottoms to show them a bit of calf.

Of course, it was quite possible that the wolf-whistles were ironic. At age 65, irony was an ever-present danger.

---***---

 

Spot of sea fishing?’ said the bus driver as Catherine stumbled towards the exit, unbalanced by the weight of her big blue rucksack and the smaller red one that banged awkwardly around her knees. ‘Something like that,’ she mumbled, staggering off the bus. The multi-coloured double decker growled away into the distance, leaving just…silence, apart from the gentle, distant hiss of the waves on the shingle.

Catherine hoisted her large blue pack onto her shoulders; she held the other smaller red one awkwardly, hands outstretched. It banged into her knees. ‘Bugger!’ she said, softly.

Jury’s Gap Lookout was just a block of former coastguard cottages - now named ‘Coastguards’ according to the weathered driftwood nameboard sticking vertically out of the shingle - their bulk and small windows urban and out of place on the deserted coastline at the point where the road finally met the coast. Actually, almost anything looked out of place in this part of the world, apart from stones, sand and water.

A green palisade-fenced compound between the road and the foreshore with piles of rocks ready to be tipped into sea defences.

How would she write this? ‘The shingle stretched away, the ground looking as if it had been levelled by a grader. Grey-yellow-green grass, a few tufts of something green and a few splashes of bright yellow gorse.’ Too many adjectives? Would her readers expect her to know the names of plants and things? ‘Green stuff’ might not really cut it. ‘A cluster of windmills’ - wind turbines, maybe, she wasn’t sure –‘on the horizon, their blades busily circling.’

Most of the cottages had received a coat of white paint but one remained in the original yellow-grey render, along with an outhouse. The white painted gable wall of the cottage facing the sea was already showing signs of wear from the relentless wind and salt spray.

A ramp led up to the sea front, bleached ribbed white concrete. An official-looking notice board warned of a ‘Killing Zone’ (no, ‘Kiting Zone’, she’d misread) and MOD firing ranges. There were no red flags today, so the beach was open. An empty lookout tower, facing the sea.

There was a large heap of boulders dumped onto the foreshore. A wooden stairway led down to the water, but, as Catherine knew, the way to the shingle beach on the left would be cut off by the high tide unless you were prepared to scramble over the boulders; one slip and your leg could end up trapped in a crevice.

The sea kept up a relentless chatter, splashes, interspersed with gurgles, like a tiresome elderly relative.

Lots of writers went into long, involved riffs and raptures about water. That Jonathan Raban bloke – who she otherwise liked hugely – for one. To Catherine, the sea was just…water, wasn’t it? This water was cold, slightly choppy and the colour of used dishwater. Would her readers – if she had any – expect her to find yet more words to describe it. Especially if you were a British writer; the sea was supposed to be in your blood, or something.

 

 

Catherine trudged past them, clambered up the wooden staircase fixed to the large boulders that had been tumbled onto the shore as a costal defence. The red rucksack thumped into her knees again. She kicked it.

She scrunched along the shingle, the red rucksack by now having developed a rhythm of its own, periodically thumping her knees and bouncing off again. ‘Scrunch, scrunch, bump, scrunch, scrunch, FUCK!’ Catherine gave it another kick, harder this time. ‘Bastard!’

She descended the shingle bank, towards the water. The stones were smaller here, the going easier, just a little.

She marched along, the red rucksack banging against her knees.

Like most spots in the South-east of England, the remoteness of this stretch of coastline was a bit illusionary. The A259, with its frequent double-decker bus service, was, at most, a couple of miles away, but it was separated from the beach by an army firing range. From time to time, the beach was closed off for their war games. Signs warned of the dangers of picking up unexploded ordinance and a wrecked, rusting tank completed the picture.

Trippers and holidaymakers tended not to venture further than the end of Camber Sands; this beach was too far, and had little to offer, other than solitude.

Eventually, she decided she’d walked far enough. The Coastguard cottages had receded to little more than a dot on the horizon. She was alone as anyone could be in the south-east of England.

 

Catherine drop-kicked the red sack to a spot next to one of the groynes and heaved the blue one off her back. She started to unpack.

The beach, as usual, was completely deserted. That suited her. She didn’t want an audience for this trial – she nearly called it a dry  run. Ha! She hadn’t told anyone about this; not even Nicola. Nor her elder sister Patricia. Especially not Patricia. And David wouldn’t be interested anyway.

Catherine hated being given advice. People who hadn’t been in water deeper than an over-filled bathtub for years would be gagging to tell her about tides, and shoals and currents and things. And her choice of vessel would meet with universal disapproval.

This way, if she decided that kayaking the coastline and writing a book about it wasn’t for her, no one need ever know. And she certainly didn’t want an audience for her first floundering attempts at paddling. Jury’s Gap was a good place to come for that.

Then, she cursed. She’d been wrong. A family of trippers was marching across the sands, father, mother and three kids in tow. What on earth had possessed them to come here, of all…

She looked again. Her eyes, accustomed to the constant movement of city life were playing tricks. She expected things to move, so they did – even if they weren’t. The family was just the decayed uprights of an old groyne.

Catherine set up camp in the shelter of a bank of shingle. She removed the bright green inflatable kayak from its bag, attached the pump and set to work. The man who was giving it away on Facebook Marketplace had assured her that it pumped up ‘just fine’ as he’d demonstrated the craft, laid diagonally across the living room floor of his South Croydon terraced house.

On the beach, the kayak wobbled into shape as Catherine worked the pump. It had a floor section, that had to be pumped up separately, and, likewise, an inflatable seat. There was also a piece of webbing on the top for stashing kit, which made the craft look a bit more purposeful, less like something you’d pick up at one of those tacky beachside huts that sold plastic lilos.

Catherine had read up a bit about inflatable kayaks online and the universal verdict was that they weren’t to be trusted in any sea conditions more taxing than a mild breeze on a municipal boating lake. But the logistics of moving a proper solid kayak, made out of plastic or glass fibre or whatever they used were daunting. It would need a car, and that would mean getting Gertie, their 20-year-old VW Polo back from the Bognor Bungalow. David had appropriated Gertie on the grounds that they needed a car more, Augustine having been banned from driving after drunkenly wrapping her own car round a lamp-post once too often. Catherine had the spare keys and could have just gone to Bognor and ‘stolen’ Gertie – sod David and his Madwoman - but there would also be the complication – and expense – of getting a roof rack. And she wasn’t sure that Gertie would readily submit to the indignity of having a gaudily coloured kayak strapped to her roof anyway. So an inflatable kayak it would have to be, at least for the time being.

Still, she told herself, the sea looked calm, the offshore wind tousling up the grey surface into small wavelets. She wouldn’t go more than a few yards out; this was only a trial run, after all.

She’d looked at the BBC weather app. Sunny with some cloud for the first part of the day. Some raindrops with 55% next to them. A slightly better than even chance of rain? A black circle with 40 written in it and an arrow. Wind, in miles per hour? Was 40mph strong? Probably. Unless it was kilometres an hour, which might only be a stiff breeze.

Actually, Catherine’s plans, for both paddling and writing, were still unformed. She’d paddle around the coast (the WHOLE coastline? That would be rather a long way) and write about it. If it all went horribly wrong, it would entertain the readers, if she had any. Would she try and find a publisher? Did people still do that, or did they just blog online these days? Maybe she’d just paddle the Kent coastline, or perhaps a nice, calm river. Today’s trip was just to try the kayak out.

How long was a novel anyway? A hundred thousand words? Half a million? How many feature articles in Municipal and Urban Monthly was that? Twenty, a hundred? The longest thing she’d ever written was the preview for the Waste and Recycling Exhibition at the NEC. That had seemed to last a lifetime.

Catherine put on her battered maroon waterproof jacket and her dark blue nylon over-trousers, both veterans of cycling expeditions into the Surrey Hills. Then she removed the big yellow lifejacket from the rucksack, another Facebook find; the bloke in Brixton had wanted a tenner for it but she’d haggled him down to a fiver. It was of a type that had been issued to service personnel until a couple of decades ago when the military authorities, possibly fearing a mass-mutiny, had replaced the lot with something more ergonomic that didn’t make you look like you were being eaten alive one of those giant inflatable bananas that greengrocers used to have.

Finally, her helmet. Catherine wasn’t quite sure why you needed to wear one when kayaking in the open sea, but all the websites stressed its importance. Perhaps in case you hit bottom, in the literal, literary and metaphorical sense. She’d been aghast at the price of proper watersports helmets on the internet, but then she remembered the one she’d bought in Aldi a few years ago. It was actually a beefed up cycle helmet, obtained following a couple of bruising encounters with minicabs on Purley Cross. She’d only worn it a couple of times. ‘It makes you look like Wonderwoman,’ Bron, the Cardiff girl on the subs desk had said: ‘I wonder why you put that thing on your head?’ And she’d also got tired of the jeers from lads on street corners so had retired it.

Total expenditure so far: £5 for equipment, plus £26.50 train fare and £5 for the bus.

Continued in part 2

The Boat - part 2 | ABCtales