Narrow Escape (17 page)

“There was some woman with a box of them on Christ's Piece,” she said. “She was giving them away to anybody.”

“Well that's just damn irresponsible.” I sighed. “I'm sorry, you can't keep him. You're going to have to find another home for him. It's not fair to keep him in your tiny boat and he can't come in ours because of the dog.”

“I had to take him, Mum,” she said. “He could have gone to someone horrible and he was the last one left, no one wanted him.”

“I don't want him either,” I said.

“But if I hadn't taken him she might have done something awful like just dropped him in the river or something.”

“So, instead he comes here and you terrify him by dropping him on me and then he gets attacked by a great big dog.” I shook my head. “I'm sure that wasn't what he was hoping for out of life.”

“I promise I'll take care of him,” she said.

“You can't.” I decided that, for once, I was going to spell it out for her. “You work full time, you go out at nights, you're never here, and you don't have any money.”

“I'll stay home more,” she said. “It'll be fine; look, I've already got everything I need for him.”

I looked around and sure enough there was cat food and bowls and a tray with kitty litter in it. Her boat already had a slightly funky smell to it but that could have been the piles of socks that were littered across the floor.

“All right,” I said. “I can see how this is going to play out, so here are the rules: I am not looking after him, this is NOT an animal that is going to be palmed off on me.” I held my hand out and the kitten immediately hissed and raised a paw. “And you can see why. You feed him, you spend time with him, you clean up after him, and he's your responsibility. You're a big girl now and I'd like to see you take care of something. He's not coming in our boat.”

“But …”

I held up my hand to stop her. “No, you got him without my permission so he's yours.”

Charlie looked mutinous.

“And here's the other thing.” I leant forward to make sure she was listening. “The minute I decide that he's not being taken care of properly or you ask me to look after him or he isn't fed, that will be the day that I find him a new home, one that can take care of him, OK?”

Charlie nodded. “Fine,” she muttered.

I managed to stick to my rules for about a week before I felt so sorry for the poor little thing stuck all alone in her boat that I relaxed the rules about him coming into ours.

It was, as I expected, complete mayhem.

Mortimer had quite a good memory but, like most Staffordshire bull terriers, was forever hopeful of finding a new friend. The kitten would sit on the sofa and Mort, wary and still scabby from their last encounter, would place his head on the sofa next to Zeus. The aptly named kitten would crack open one eye and watch the dog edging closer. When the animals were about six inches apart the low growling would begin. Mortimer, in an attempt to placate would try to lick the snarling little creature. At the first touch of a big wet tongue the cat would leap in the air and go straight for the dog's eyes.

Every time these encounters would end with the dog being put outside or the cat being put back in Charlie's boat. Charlie of course, with work and her social life was never around to see it.

By the end of June I'd had enough.

“I'm sorry, love, we need to find him a new home,” I said. I waited for the explosion. Surprisingly it didn't come.

“Yes, yes, you were right,” she said.

“Well I don't really take any pleasure in it,” I said.

“I did want to take care of him,” she said. “I just never seem to have any time.”

“I know. They take a lot more looking after than people think. You can't just put food down and that's it, they need play time and cleaning up after and stimulation,” I said. “I wouldn't have Mortimer if I wasn't at home so much.”

“My boat smells of cat poo.” Charlie studied her fingers. “When I come home I'm really exhausted and just want to sleep. Zeus is wide awake and wants to play. He's widdled in my clothes and eaten through the wires on my new skull candy headphones and the wires to my stereo, he's used my guitar as a scratching post and I feel just awful that I can't look after him.”

“So, can I find him a new home?”

Charlie nodded. “No more kittens.”

“No more animals of any kind.” I agreed.

Zeus went to a lovely family whose older cat had just passed away. They had no other animals and mum, who was very much a cat person, was at home all day while the kids were at school. It was perfect and, as I waved them off with kitten and all his possessions, I was satisfied that he'd be looked after beautifully.

It took Charlie a whole weekend to get her boat straight but she never did manage to get her stereo working again.

Chapter Seven:
In July The Sun Is Hot, Is It Shining? No It's
No ….
Well, Actually Yes It Is … Amazing!

“Your dog needs a bath.” Drew stepped into the boat and wrinkled his nose at the smell. “What on earth has he been rolling in?”

Mortimer looked slightly affronted as I rolled over on the sofa and sniffed his back.

“Mort doesn't smell,” I said. “It's the boat that smells and if you'd like to explain to Geoff that it smells I'd be very grateful. I don't think he believes me, he thinks I have olfactory psychosis.”

Geoff looked up from the book he was reading. “Oh all right,” he said. “The next time we go to pump out I'll look for the source of the smell.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I can tell you where it's coming from if you like.”

Geoff sighed. “I know where it's coming from, I just don't want the job of fixing it.”

I was slightly miffed. “You've been telling me that you couldn't smell anything.”

He coloured slightly. “Well, I only get whiffs of it now and again.”

“But … but … you made me think I was imagining it.” I was quite grumpy about the whole thing.

Geoff stuck his head back in his book.

I carried on glaring at him and eventually he looked up at me.

Closing the book he shrugged and gave me a slightly embarrassed smile. “I was clearing out our grot cupboard at the other end of the boat,” he said. “When I took all the coats and other bits and pieces out I got a really strong snort of it.” He sighed. “One of the pump-out tubes is in there and I'm fairly sure that one is completely blocked up.” He shrugged. “It's a horrible job to replace it though. I was sort of hoping the smell would just go away all by itself.”

Well, I could understand that. The one thing that all boaters and boats have in common is the age old problem of what to do with waste. Some of us have big tanks that have to be emptied once a month or so. Some have cassettes that they drag over the flood defences in wheelbarrows and know that they are going to be avoided while they empty them into an Elsan point and then wash them out with hoses. Some have sea toilets which whizz everything up and then dump it straight into the river. Thankfully, these are actually prohibited on a lot of waterways and unless they are coupled with a black water tank can restrict the boats movements quite extensively.

We were quite lucky in some ways. Because
Minerva
had been a commercial boat before we purchased her, we had two huge holding tanks. They took up quite a lot of space and had massively restricted the size of the bathroom we could build. It did mean, however, that we didn't have to pump out as often as a lot of other people.

The tanks are connected beneath the floor by a large cylindrical pipe and we have pump out points on each side of the boat. One of these had never worked and, even after owning the boat for over two years, fixing this problem was still sunk way down the list of urgent jobs.

Like the contents of the tanks, the problem was rapidly rising to the surface.

“Well, I'm sorry about your smell problem,” Drew said. He held out a white envelope with our names scrawled on the front. “But I think we have a bigger problem. Here, this is for you, I picked it up at the office when I was up there.”

Geoff and I looked at it, neither of us felt the urge to say anything. We'd seen these white envelopes before, they never contained good news. Eventually Geoff took it and opened it.

“What do they flaming well want this time?” I knew it was going to have to do with money.

Geoff sighed. “They're putting a service charge in place.”

“But they've only just put the price of moorings up again,” I said. “How much do they want this time?”

Geoff frowned as he read the letter. “Starting in 2013 they want another £550 per year.”

“So … what exactly are we paying for?” I had to scratch around in my brain to find out exactly what would be considered a service. I could see rubbish removal could be classed as a service but other than that ….

“Erm.. hang on,” Geoff read through the letter again. “Water, refuse removal and sewage removal.”

“But we don't use the sewage removal,” I said.

Geoff shrugged and then frowned again. “That's not good.”

I peered over his shoulder and he pointed at an underlined point in the letter – it said: Without the introduction of a service charge, residential moorings at the marina would not be viable.

We looked at each other and Geoff shook his head. Every time we had a letter from them it seemed that this was the threat they held over us. If we didn't do as we were told, they would have to get rid of the live-aboard moorings.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I take it I don't have to find five hundred and fifty quid between now and Christmas, do I?”

Geoff shook his head. “No; ten pound in September, twenty in October, thirty in November and forty in December. The full charge will come into effect next year.”

“So, if the surcharge is for …” I peered over his shoulder again and quoted, ‘“The sewage and the water and the …”' I spotted another line and read it with a frown: ‘To cover the shortfall in funds which has to be rectified,” it said. I snorted a laugh. “It appears that all the changes they've put in place have cost more than they expected. I think they may have overspent their budget and now we have to cover their mistakes.” I shrugged, “So, if the new surcharge covers all this, what exactly does our mooring fee cover?”

Geoff dropped the letter onto the sofa with a sigh. “I'm fed up with this,” he said. “Every month the price of things just goes up and up and the whole place doesn't get better. Everything just gets moved around, nothing new turns up.”

“What are you going to do?” Drew pulled his own letter from his pocket.

Geoff shrugged again. “There's nothing we can do, is there? We've got nowhere else to go, we're going to have to pay them.”

That weekend we pulled into the pump-out station and, as usual, we pumped out on the port side. (The left). After we'd finished, Geoff put everything away and we turned the boat around to have an attempt to pump out on the starboard side. Nothing happened; you could hear the hiss and gulp of the big pump as it pulled air from inside the tank. The smell was quite incredible. Eventually, after two fishermen had made loud gagging noises and, leaving their equipment on the bank, had gone for a walk, Geoff stopped and shook his head.

“Either that is blocked solid, or it's got a crack in it and we're pulling air from inside the boat,” he said.

I wandered over to stand beside him, dragging the water hose with me. I was attempting to beat the wretched thing into submission and get it rolled up neatly again. It was resisting me vigorously and I felt as though I was trying to stuff an octopus into a string bag, I'd just manage to get one loop settled when all the others would erupt out into a cat's cradle of green plastic. I was getting quite miffed with the whole thing.

“So what do we do about it?” Having a sudden bright idea, I grabbed the beginning of the hose and, turning slowly in a circle, began to wind it around my hips. At the end I merely stepped out of it and it lay in a neat pile of loops. “Ha! Take that.” I muttered at it. I looked up to find Geoff giving me one of ‘those' looks. “What?”

He shook his head. “We're going to have to get some more tube,” he said, “and I'm going to have to replace all the tubes.”

“Ack.” I couldn't really think of anything else to say. Each tank had one large-bore pump-out point and two vent tubes. It wasn't going to be an easy or cheap job.

We moored
Minerva
up and, leaving Sam and Mort playing ball on the green, we wandered up to the chandlers. We were lucky that there was one so close to the waterfront in Ely, it made carrying things a lot easier.

The assistant was very helpful and they actually had enough stock of pipe to hand.

“This is good stuff,” he said. He held up a length of white tube. “It's been specially treated inside so that nothing sticks, not even the smell.” He gave us a big smile. “Of course it's a bit more expensive than the normal green that people usually use.

Of course it was more expensive. Geoff and I glanced at each other, neither of us were surprised.

With a bank account now a distressing number of pounds lighter, Geoff and I wandered back toward the boat. The only way to carry the unruly material was to wind it around our shoulders. If we'd also purchased a couple of funnels we'd look like we were playing tubas.

Back at the boat I dug everything out of our grot cupboard. The smell was horrendous and I had trouble keeping my lunch under control. Eventually, I stepped out of the way as Geoff came past with some of the cut white pipe and a couple of Jubilee clips.

“Do you want a hand?” Holding my breath made it very difficult to talk.

Geoff laughed. “I think this might be a job for a man with no sense of smell, don't you?”

I nodded gratefully and backed away down the boat.

About an hour later and Geoff was, once again, making up new swear words.

“What's up?” I handed him a cup of tea.

“This flaming pipe is just a little smaller than the tube coming out of the pump-out tank.” Geoff glared at the offending piece of tube.

“Yes.”

“Well, the pipe's so slippery and runs so close to the side of the boat that I can't get a good enough grip to force the two together.”

I must have given him a blank look because he continued, “If I can't get it pushed on properly then there won't be enough of a seal to stop the contents leaking into the boat.”

“Oh yuck, that would be bad wouldn't it?” I'm not any sort of engineer but I can see the potential for disaster when I concentrate.

Geoff nodded. “Very bad.” Geoff held up a finger to make sure he had my full attention. “The bigger danger is that the pipes separate and the next time we try to pump out on the other side the back pressure will push the contents of the tank out and into the boat.” He gave me an evil smile. “You moan about the smell now? Just imagine what a couple of gallons of effluent cascading over the bathroom floor is going to smell like.”

I could imagine it and, feeling just a little sick, I held up a hand to stop him from labouring the point further.

“I just need to attach the new pipe to something solid so that I can push it down.” He studied the Jubilee clips in his hand and then his face brightened. “Do you know what, I think I have just the thing.” Handing me his mug he dashed off, coming back moments later with a short length of grey plastic tube.

Slipping the flexible pipe inside the rigid one, he added a Jubilee clip and forced the entire contraption on to the pump-out tube. Grinning triumphantly he then repeated the process to connect the pipe to the outlet. It looked a little odd, as the length of grey tube was left halfway up the white pipe, but I could see that he felt that the fix would hold. “There,” he said, “Captain Bodgejob saves the day yet again.”

“I promise I will get you a celebratory T-shirt,” I said. “Or would you like pink spandex? Captain Bodgejob, Righter of Wrongs.”

Geoff laughed. “Hey,” he said. “If it works let's not look too closely at the
way
it works shall we?” He reached down and gave the new pipe a wiggle. It stayed nice and firm. “Heath Robinson, this one's for you,” he said.

“Did you find any reason for the smell?” I gave an experimental sniff. The aroma was still there but it seemed to have dramatically reduced.

Geoff nodded. “The pipe had a split in it.”

“I wonder how long that had been there.” I didn't really want to rub it in that I had actually been aware of something intermittently horrible for a couple of months. “Hang on though, why did the smell keep coming and going?”

“Ah, well, as far as I could tell, the pipe was right at the back of the cupboard so the more stuff we piled in there the less we could smell it.” He gave me a big smile. “I didn't really need to fix this at all, we just needed to pile more grot up.”

I gave him a strained smile. “So is that it, it's fixed?”

Geoff nodded.

“So we actually didn't need to buy all that pipe, we only needed one short length?”

Geoff nodded and then shrugged. “I should really replace all the other pipes so we will need it. It's getting late so I'm not going to do any more today,” he said. “I'll store the rest of the pipe and do the others when I get time.”

“Ha, that job's back on the list then.”

Geoff just grinned.

We weren't the only ones doing some frantic work on our surroundings. Mr and Mrs Owner had decided that the toilet block not only needed to be moved but needed to be locked up as well.

We watched as the unit was mobilised down the hill and into the car park. It was now stuck in a dark place in the middle of the comings and goings of cars. I was glad we had a shower on board. At least I only needed to use the washing machine and that I could do in the daylight.

When it was all installed we'd all been given the code to get in and out. We amused ourselves for a little while attempting to get ourselves locked in but it wasn't much fun. There wasn't much in there to see. The washing machine wasn't working and only one of the showers would actually produce water. Outside, they had decided to put in new drainage, the smell was prohibitive and strongly reminiscent of our own recent problem.

Bill and I were standing in the car park chatting when we noticed that Geoff and Drew had disappeared around the side of the building. We followed them and found them studying the main drain from the shower unit.

“What are we looking at here?” Bill and I were used to strange behaviour.

“The wonderful workmanship on this plumbing.” Geoff laughed as he lifted a foot and used it to point at the big pipe that was coming out from under the floor of the Portakabin that acted as our toilet block.