Narrow Escape (21 page)

I nodded slowly. “Wow, the only thing we have to worry about is funny smells and the occasional bit of thievery.”

I realised that, in the time we had lived here, real life seemed to have passed me by and I was completely out of touch with what was happening in the world. The thought didn't really upset me. If that was the way society was going I'd be more than happy to stay on the sidelines.

Chapter Nine:
September's Weather's Cold And Strange. Looks
Like Things Are Going To Change.

September is a bit of an odd time for boaters. It's one of those months that's ignored as we all rush about getting ready for winter. With the first leaf to hit the ground, the first child in a new school uniform, and a decided lack of tourists on the water we all tend to turn into hoarders and spend every waking hour adding to our stockpiles of wood and coal.

“Can you order some coal today?” Geoff had his head in the cupboard trying to reach the last of the teabags.

“No problem.” I was hammering on Sam's door. After a long, warm summer holiday he was strangely reticent about getting out of bed and back to the hubbub of school life. “Don't forget I've got my interview today so I'll try to call them when I come back this afternoon.”

Geoff emerged from the cupboard and grinned at me. “Good luck for that,” he said. “Are you sure you want to go back to the hospital?”

I swatted him with a tea towel. He'd had to put up with my constant whining about working in the ‘normal world', as I'd put it, for most of July. He knew very well that there was no way I was going to work anywhere other than the hospital.

Working the short contract with the big drug company in Cambridge had been a very odd experience, certainly unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. The two ladies I worked with in the Accounts Department had been lovely, welcoming, and just happy that someone was willing to step in for a short time while they found someone full-time.

I'd been there about three hours before I could feel the general malaise setting in.

I stuck out like a sore thumb. The company was progressive, modern and decidedly ‘young' and those that weren't naturally young worked extremely hard at appearing to be. Although the working environment was intended to be casual and laid back, I found the whole thing extremely stressful.

The ‘casual' clothing that the staff wore seemed to be well beyond even what I would consider to be my best. Designer labels and stiletto heels, lots of make-up and high-pitched laughter followed the ladies around. The men wore those odd shoes that seemed to be six inches too long for their feet and end in a vicious point. The whole place stank of expensive perfume and aftershave and designer, fair trade, and recyclable fruit boxes littered the pristine canteen.

The longer I worked there the more irritated I became with the whole thing. The windows wouldn't open and the whole building was either freezing cold or boiling hot (obviously ‘climate controlled' meant the staff not the building. I would have agreed to anything if they'd promised to turn the heat down.) My new boss was ill the entire time I was there but there was no way she was going to take time off to recover. She seemed completely panicked that, if she let go of the reins for even one moment, she would be replaced. So, despite having a chest infection where she was actually coughing up blood, she would drag herself in day after day and stress herself into infinity that she wasn't getting enough work done. At the end of the day she would pack up her laptop and prepare to do at least another two hours at home. It was madness.

Moving some old invoices one afternoon, I was amusing myself by wandering around the huge filing room and opening the sliding shelves to see what was hidden there. Right at the back was an entire shelf filled with costumes and water guns. I pushed the shelves apart, curious to see what else was hidden from sight. Sequined cowboy hats, fairy costumes, cushions, glitter and right at the bottom were eight big bottles of champagne. Not your normal-sized bottles, these were huge, I think at 300cl, they're called Jeroboams and it wasn't a cheap supermarket brand. Oh no, there were three bottles of Moët, four bottles of Bollinger and one, normal sized, bottle of Dom Perignon. Out of curiosity I did a quick price check on the net. Over £1000 worth of champagne just stuck in a cupboard. It seemed to really epitomise the way the company worked. It's no wonder the NHS is struggling, now I know why companies charge so much for drugs.

The contract had ended the day Sam had finished school for the summer holidays. Although I'd miss the two rather put-upon ladies I'd been working with, I knew full well I wouldn't miss the other shallow, money-hungry members of staff at all. I left without one single regret and from then on made sure that getting back to the comfortable, budgetarily constrained, stressful environment of the hospital my number one priority.

Standing back in the hospital that afternoon I was attacked by the nervous stomach butterflies. I had been lucky to get an interview for this job, I wasn't really qualified to be a Physiotherapy Assistant but I could see the benefits of getting such a position.

Surprisingly the interview went very well and even my practical test, which involved a role play of helping someone with an injured leg negotiate stairs on crutches, went well. They went up the stairs and came down the stairs and neither of us ended up in a broken, crying heap at the bottom.

The very next day I got the telephone call I'd been waiting for.

“We'd like to offer you the position.”

The poor man on the other end of the phone must have been deafened by my whoops of glee.

“Shall I take that as acceptance of our offer?” He laughed at my ecstatic agreement.

So that was it. Back at the hospital I entered the strange and slightly stressful realm of the physiotherapy teams and it only took about two weeks before I realised these people don't get anywhere near the respect they deserve. Working with the elderly in the trauma ward I spent my entire day overseeing exercises, helping ladies to the toilet, and supporting them in every way after some particularly painful operations such as hip replacements. There was extensive and in-depth training in techniques that I was expected to use immediately and I was teamed up with either a senior assistant or a physiotherapist.

I watched as physiotherapists were slapped, shouted at, pushed away, or just ignored and wondered where on earth they got their incredibly positive attitudes from. I was just an assistant but they had been doing this for years. Each patient got their undivided attention, they changed their tactics to try and get people mobile, did nursing jobs that really weren't in their job description, and generally acted like little rays of sunshine.

It was like working with super beings and although I was incredibly proud to be wearing the dark blue trousers and light blue tunic that was the assistant's uniform, I was never sure I could ever live up to the way they worked. It was amazingly enjoyable and rewarding but totally exhausting and, after the first month, I could see why so many of them opted to only work part-time. The days were filled with small victories which balanced out the occasional sadness but at the end of every day I felt as though I'd been run over by a truck. Working full-time, I began to look forward to January when my hours would change.

As the weather changed once more to the cold and wet that we'd been enjoying before our brief glimpse of summer, I found it even more difficult to drag myself into work. Every night I slept for as many hours as I could possibly fit in and a lot of the time the day-to-day jobs that I'd been able to do before I went full-time were left uncompleted.

Charlie, of course, was the first to notice that things were beginning to fall apart.

“There's no food,” she said. She slammed the fridge door and frowned in my general direction. “What's for dinner?”

“I don't know,” I looked up at her from under a pile of washing that I'd managed to get into the launderette on the way home. “How about
you
cook something?”

Charlie shook her head and stared at the clock. “It's gone seven o'clock, I have to go to work in ten minutes.”

She'd recently taken a second job to get more money. She was slinging pizzas in Cambridge town centre. She was even more exhausted than I.

This was getting ridiculous, I was definitely falling down on the job. Travelling an hour to and from work, a full working day, trying to live a life that was activity-heavy, and dealing with children was just getting to be too much. I could feel myself fraying at the edges, there was just too much to do and no time to do it in.

It didn't take long before my shifts moved around to give me a day off during the week. I'd planned to catch up on the all the jobs that I hadn't managed to complete. My list was almost as long as one of my husband's.

“Did you order the coal?” Geoff asked.

I nodded. “It's coming today,” I said. “I ordered twenty bags, that was right, wasn't it?”

Geoff grinned. “Yeah, that'll keep us going for a while.”

The delivery was beautifully timed and as I staggered up the flood defences for the third time carrying clean washing and a week's worth of groceries the coal truck appeared in the car park.

I decided that, as I'd already spent a lot of time dragging things about, I might as well move the coal as well. It shouldn't take that long to move the bags up the flood defences and stack them next to our boat. Geoff always did the heavy lifting so I decided that it would be nice if I did it for once.

Sometimes I was really stupid.

Grabbing the trolley from the engine room I began moving the bags three at a time. After the first two trips I couldn't breathe, my legs felt like jelly, and I couldn't feel my arms at all. I decided that maybe more trips with less coal would be the way to go. Three trips with two bags on the trolley and I felt even worse. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other and I wanted to cry as I looked down the hill and counted that there were still eight bags to go.

The remaining bags came up the hill one bag at a time. By the time I was down to the last bag I was completely convinced I was having a heart attack. My chest hurt, my stomach hurt, but there was no way I was going to give up. The last bag was nearly my undoing, it took me nearly ten minutes to drag that one bag over a distance that would normally take less than a minute to walk. I tipped the bag of coal onto the ground and then collapsed, face down, on the grass. That was where Elaine found me.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

My mouth hurt, I couldn't speak so I just lifted one of my jelly arms and managed to give her a thumbs up just to prove I was still alive.

“Did you just move all of that coal yourself?” she looked around at the haphazard pile of bags that littered the top of the defences.

I gave her another thumbs up.

“I was asleep, Jake barking at you walking backwards and forwards woke me up,” she said.

“Sorry.” I tried to lift my head to look at her but my neck wouldn't work.

“Don't be silly,” she said. “I didn't mind being woken up. Why on earth didn't you come and get me? I'd have given you a hand.”

In all honesty I hadn't realised she'd got the day off otherwise I might have asked, especially after the first three trips.

I dragged myself to my knees and, spitting out some errant blades of grass, I rolled over to a sitting position. “I wanted to see if I could do it myself,” I said. Sometimes I say some really stupid things.

She looked at me as if I was insane.

She was probably right.

“Well done,” she said. “You look as though you nearly killed yourself doing it but you succeeded, well done you.” She gave me a huge grin. “You're going to need handfuls of pain killers later on, you do know that, don't you?”

I gave her a sad nod. The whole exercise now seemed like a fairly stupid idea. I hoped that Geoff would appreciate the effort but I knew that he'd probably just laugh. He'd have been able to move twice the coal in half the time. I really needed to raise my levels of fitness.

Giving me time to get my breath back and my limbs in working order again, she wandered off to make coffee. I was on my feet when she came back but only because Jake, who obviously considered anything on the floor as fair game, kept dropping his ball onto my head in an effort to entice me to play.

“So what do you think of the latest rumour,” she said handing me a big mug of steaming energy substitute.

Elaine makes the very best coffee so I took a long swallow before answering. “Oh that is good, thank you,” I said. “What rumour?”

“The marina is closing and we're all being kicked off,” she said.

I nearly choked on my coffee. “Where on earth did you hear that?” I said. “I haven't heard anything like that.”

She shrugged. “It seems to be the latest idea coming from quite a few people.”

“Is this about that email that got sent out?” I said.

“What email?” Elaine asked.

“You don't have email, do you?” I said. “Damn I forgot, I should have brought it round to show you.”

“What did it say?” Elaine looked worried.

“Basically it said that …” I stopped. “Hang on a mo and I'll get you a copy.”

I went inside and printed out a copy of the latest email. As I was downloading I noticed another had appeared from the same address. I printed a copy of that one as well.

The new email was short and succinct and very bad news.

Once I had managed to claw my way out of the boat, I handed the first email to my next door neighbour and stood quietly by while she read it.

“Oh dear,” she said.

I nodded. The tone of the email was petulant to say the least. In part, it read:

‘Due to ongoing resistance to the continued investment in marina facilities / infrastructure and to the introduction of a residential service charge, it has been decided that the latter shall
no longer
be introduced.

We maintain however that investment is vital for the future of the marina and we are therefore looking at alternative ways of continuing the improvements and giving the marina a proper foundation for a viable future.'

“We tried to pay the first instalment only last week,” I said. “But the lady in the office couldn't take it and would only say that the plans had changed.”