I was five when I fell into the canal. Waddling after my dad like a duckling in hand me down wellies, a circle of raw red skin on my calves where they had chafed and rubbed. Trotting behind the group of men, who were garlanded and weighed down with fishing tackle, rods and baskets, bait tins, wet keep nets still glittering with silver scales. I was invisible beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke and fragments of words like “piecework”, “foreman”, “foundry” and who had won the match and what they had weighed in. I do not think I minded being invisible. I remember I stopped to look at a dragonfly. Huge and iridescent with a space alien head, shimmering over the green, black surface of the cut. I wanted so badly to touch it. Stretching out my hand, leaning over the water. The shock of it took my breath away. The world turned green and liquid, a silver stream of tiny bubbles trickling upwards from my mouth. I don’t remember being scared. My long brown hair came loose from the band and snaked across my face like weeds. One hand touched the slick slime walls under the water before the surface split open and my father dived in to pull me out, gasping, onto the towpath. As the water poured out of my mouth, I tried to tell him about the boy I had seen in the water, a pale-faced boy with black hair, smiling at me with teeth as sharp as a stickleback’s spines. They thought it was the lack of oxygen that had made me see things. I was never sure. He seemed real. His fingers felt real. That same year, my mother told me that little girls couldn’t go fishing with the men, and I hacked off my hair with kitchen scissors so that I would look like a boy and be allowed to go where the men went.
I have always loved the canal. It reminded me of working men released from factory and foundry for a brief respite from fire and metal into the sound of green things growing. When I saw the boat was for sale, it felt like the answer to a question I had not asked until then. Her name was the Grainne Mhaol, and she opened her arms wide to me, offered the embrace I needed after a year in which the world had blown right through me, torn bits of me away, left gaps and spaces, raw edges and absences. The foaming frothing green and white edges of the towpath, the smell of wild garlic and then elderflower were consoling. I moved onto the boat in spring, loving the doll’s house neatness of it. Planted geraniums and lavender in old buckets, mint and sage in wine boxes rescued from the pub. Acquired a large black puppy who fell into the water three times in a week and had to wear an improvised yellow life jacket until he learned some sense. Waved at the gongoozlers who arranged themselves on the bank to watch the lock fill up or gazed into my window as they walked along. As the weather grew warmer, I sat on the edge of the deck and watched the mallard and his wife dip their beaks into the water, polite and precise. When they had passed by and the water was still as glass again, the tiny “Oh”’s of surprise from round gudgeon mouths as they kissed the delicate tension of the surface. The quiet popping of it. In the evening, bats flittered over my head and along the surface of the cut, scooping up an insect buffet before hurtling into the tunnel further along the path. The noise of the water passing through the lock was constant and comforting. As I lay in bed at night, I wondered if this was what we heard before we were born, the rush and gurgle of fluid passing under and around us? I wonder if this is what he heard before the world blew through us both. The knocking did not begin until the days started to become shorter. A tapping on the bottom of the boat just as I was drifting off to sleep, that was all it was at first. I mentioned it to the large, red-faced man who ran the chandlers. He did not answer straight away, carried on putting my paint and turpentine through the till, then said, without looking at me, that it was most likely just a log scraping on the keel. It didn’t sound like a log. It sounded like knuckles. When he heard it, the dog stirred, restless, growled a subterranean rumble, and then slept again. We both became used to it. The summer dwindled and slowed. There were more children around as the school holidays began. One morning, I woke to find two handprints on the window, small and perfect, as if a child sticky with dust and play had pushed their face against the glass, one hand on each side of their face as they tried to look in. Last night was the coldest of the year. The day had been glass clear, pale ice blue sky, black laser cut trees. The grasses along the bank brown and desiccated by the cold, rattling and whispering in the bitter wisps of breeze. The sunset ignited the sky, pouring molten light over the tops of the boats, the fields, the windows of the cottages. The dark sky blazed with stars, and the windows of the pub on the other side of the cut steamed and glowed. I banked up the stove, closed the curtains, picked up a blanket and began to read in the soft light of the lamp. I dozed in the warmth and the gentle light, started awake at the sound of footsteps; it wasn’t unusual to hear people walking home after the pub, taking a shortcut along the towpath, but these were small steps, light feet. Children’s feet, running and laughing. Then silence again. Just the rush and murmur of the water falling through the lock. I gave myself a shake and decided I had been dreaming. Not so strange to dream of children after the last year. The dog was sitting up, staring intently at the corner of the boat, at the window. Completely still, a low rumbling in his chest. I pulled back the curtain, expecting to see another walker. There was a handprint in the frost. A child’s handprint. Buying the canal boat was the best thing I ever did. I reminded myself of this as I shivered in the early morning cold, waiting for the kettle to boil and frost to clear from the windows. The winter moorings are deserted. The kettle started to whistle, and I made tea, stood by the window with my hands curled around the warmth of the cup, gazing out onto the towpath. At the other end of the galley kitchen, the dog had become still again. Black and shaggy, he was too big for a canal boat, and our evening walks along the towpath often caused consternation, he is too close to a folk memory for people to feel comfortable, even if they don’t know that what they want to ward off is Old Shuck, not my own very real black dog. It made me sad to see how people had lost the words they needed for the things that frightened them. The winter moorings are down away from the old lock keepers’ cottage. It has been turned into a holiday home, but it is dark and shut up now. I remembered reading that the first lockkeeper and his wife raised a family of eleven children there. The roof of the cottage is bowed, like the roof of the tunnel. The Grainne Mhaol is nearer to the tunnel under the motorway. In summer, the light playing on the curved concrete and the graffiti gives it a carnival air. In winter, the water is black and gives no reflection. The tunnel is a crossroads, heading up to Birmingham or across to Stratford. I saw a child there yesterday, not playing, just standing at the edge of the cut, looking at the water. I could not tell if it was a boy or a girl at distance. Dark trousers, a green jumper, boots, short brown hair. Nothing special. I raised a hand to wave, but they were not looking. They were throwing a ball against the wall of the tunnel, throwing, and catching. Throwing and catching. The wind must have been carrying the sound away. I turned away to re-tune the radio, and when I looked back, they were gone. There were footsteps on the towpath again last night. Tonight, the dog will not go through the tunnel. He turns around, pulls at the lead until I give in and we walk back towards the lock. Unnerved and irritated, I take him back to the boat, where he climbs onto my bed and looks at me reproachfully. The knocking begins again, and I am ready to explode, throwing open the door, determined to find out what it is. The child is there. Looking at the boat. Looking at me. He looks right through me. “Have you seen my mum, missus? I keep knocking the door but there’s no one there. There’s no one there and the lights are out. Do you know where she is, missus? I’ve been playing out for ages; I want to go home.” He moves through me, moves through all the gaps. I breathe in his smells of weeds and water and need. He moves through the space that had been my baby. I feel the boy’s hand in mine and my father’s hand on my shoulder and I smell cigarette smoke again and see a glimpse of dragonfly wings through my tears. He is running along the towpath now, towards the lock and the cottage. I leave the boat, door open, lights blazing, dog howling, and follow the child. He is standing on the edge of the lock, trying to look into the dark windows. He is leaning too far. I reach for him, stretch out my hand, tell him we will find his mum, but my hand goes through his and I am falling into the water, and I know that this time no one is coming to save me. I am sitting on the edge of the canal. Water runs from my hair, from my clothes. I can hear the dog still howling, but he sounds far away. Next to me sits the boy. He slips his hand into mine and asks, “Shall we go and find my mum?" |