Narrow Margins (16 page)

With the tank finally evicted, we took stock of what was left behind and, unfortunately, although not unexpectedly, there was far more damage than we had originally expected. Over the years, water dripping out of the shower and probably other sources of wetness, upon which I don't want to dwell, had seeped through and rotted the floor beyond repair. The only course of action was to replace it. At that point I gave up counting both time and money as it was horribly obvious that we were going to end up way over budget on both.

Chapter Sixteen
It's a Floating Bathtub – 
No, Really, It's a Bathtub!

I
HAVE TO ADMIT
that taking out two bathrooms (luckily we only had to remove one pump-out tank, the other one was staying in use) had taken far, far longer than we had anticipated. What with puttering about putting in a new floor, blocking up holes and other such important (prevaricating) jobs, summer had become a cherished memory and we were now well into October.

On a crisp, chilly, autumn morning, with the central heating yet again refusing to work properly, despite me giving it its early morning kicking, we had finally finished building – or rather re-building – our first new room: our beautiful bathroom. This had been created from the one bathroom we had left and half a cabin; the original wall between them had been removed to create a large open space that stretched the width of the boat. The original cholera farm had been banished to the local tip, and a hygienic new sink unit, lots of shiny new shelves and a wonderful rainfall shower had been installed. With another new floor in place (both bathrooms had been similarly soaked through) and all the other bits and pieces in, we had only to situate, fix and plumb in the bath and we would be finished.

One morning, just as I was heading out to Tesco, once again leaving Geoff to swear at the plumbing, he called me into the bathroom.

‘Sit on the loo,' he said, pointing toward the toilet, balancing on top of the pump-out tank.

‘What?'

‘Sit on the loo.' He gave me a gentle push toward the tank. ‘Just sit down and tell me if you feel there's enough space.'

I climbed on to the box we were using as a step and sat down on the closed toilet seat. ‘Enough space for what?' I looked around, then leant on the wall. ‘It's a bit cramped I suppose, but come on, what do you expect?'

‘Hmm.' Geoff helped me down from the tank, then stood staring at the wall. ‘You off then?

‘Yes.' I watched him walk around the wall and listened to him tapping it gently on the other side. ‘I'll only be about an hour – do you want anything?'

‘Mars Bars,' came the prompt reply. ‘See you later.'

I shook my head at his odd behaviour and left. It was actually about two hours later that I arrived home. Having run into one of the other marina residents in town, we had decided to go for coffee.

‘Hello!' I called as I dumped the shopping.

‘Here,' Geoff called. ‘Come and sit on this loo.'

‘Déjà vu much?' I muttered at him as I climbed back onto the toilet. I sat and stared at him. ‘What were you expecting – that I'd have lost a couple of inches off the shoulders while shopping?'

Geoff grinned. ‘Yes, actually, doesn't it feel better now?'

I stared at him for a moment, wondering if he had completely lost it, then, sighing, I looked at the wall. How odd, it did seem further away, not very much, but certainly enough to make getting to the toilet-roll holder a lot easier.

Geoff's grin got wider.

‘How did you do this?' I twisted around on the toilet seat.

‘I moved the wall three inches to the left,' he leant on the wall. ‘It's surprising what a difference it makes.'

‘How did you move an entire wall?' I got up from the toilet and walked around the other side.

‘It's really easy,' Geoff laughed. ‘All you do is unscrew those battens, then just push it and, hey presto, the whole wall moves. Get it to where you want it, screw the battens back down in the new position and suddenly you have more space. He rubbed his shoulder. ‘It would have been easier if you'd been here though. Trying to hold a six-foot piece of wood up and then screw it in place on your own isn't easy. It fell on me twice before I wedged it up with ladders.'

He showed me how the side partitions were fitted into the boat – it was quite ingenious really, the wall was one piece of wood shaped to fit under the gunnels, battens were screwed to each edge and then screwed straight to the side of the boat, the floor and the ceiling. When we had taken out the first bathroom, we had only had to remove the front and that had been easy; I hadn't realised the whole boat was done in the same way, and it opened up a whole new set of possibilities of the size of rooms.

‘Ha, you couldn't do that in a house, could you,' I laughed. ‘What on earth is all that?'

In the empty space earmarked for the new bath lay a good eight foot of garden hose. It snaked backwards and forwards, fixed with little hoops to the bathroom floor, and had one end attached to a small contraption screwed to the floor, from which ran another small piece of hose and disappeared into the outside wall.

‘... and what's this thing?' I tapped the little silver thing with my foot. It had ‘Whale Gulper' etched across it.

‘That's my new pump.' Geoff tiptoed across the hosepipe, being very careful not to disturb any of it. ‘This is great; it can run dry and won't go bang.'

‘What's all the hosepipe for?' I nudged the snaking hose. Geoff immediately slapped my foot, fed up with me kicking things.

‘That's to get the water out of the bath. Do you remember all that black gunge in the shower? Well, that's because the old pump couldn't get all the water out and it just ended up sitting there.'

I wrinkled my nose and nodded – I still had nightmares about the black slime in the bottom of the shower tray.

‘Well, if you don't have all this hose, you end up with a small amount of water left in the bath every time you empty it. The hose acts like a sump.'

‘What?'

Geoff sighed and grabbed a watering can from the side. He lifted the loose end which had a funnel attached to it. ‘This end will be attached to the bath.' He began pouring water into the hose until he couldn't get any more in. ‘So, there's your bath full of water.' He waved at the wall, ‘Flick that switch, can you?'

I did so and immediately the pump began to make a distinctive, rhythmic, gulping noise. It sounded like a darts player downing a quick tenth pint before his next game. With every gulping sound, water bubbled up out of the funnel and, with a ‘blurp', exploded all over the bathroom floor.

‘Oh, that's good.' I threw a towel to Geoff who quickly mopped up the tide.

‘Yeah, it does that – whatever you do, don't have the bath too full.' He held the funnel upright and we watched as the water disappeared into the pipe. I could hear a faint ‘splosh, splosh' and the water evacuated the boat via one of our many outlets. After only a minute or so the tone of the pump changed and Geoff waved at the switch again. ‘That's it, the pipe's empty. Turn it off, can you?'

‘Do we have to go through this every time we want to empty the bath?' I looked at the now silent pump. ‘Why can't we just pull the plug and let it drain away? This rigmarole is going to take bloody ages.'

‘Marie,' Geoff looked at me with a slight frown. ‘The bottom of the bath is well below the water level. If you've found a way to make water run uphill please let me know, because we can negate all the laws of physics and make a great deal of money.'

I stuck my tongue out at him. ‘Nobody likes a smart-arse, you know.' I went to put the shopping away.

Putting the bath in last hadn't been ideal, as there were just too many opportunities for something to go horribly wrong, but we needed the space that the bath would occupy to move around while working, so it had been sitting out on the bank for the last two weeks. Geoff, unhappy with putting the bath in as the last item, had measured, re-measured and re-re-measured, so was as confident as he could be that the bath would fit perfectly within its allotted outline. I felt he was being a complete ‘old woman' about the whole thing and was supremely confident that the bath would fit in the gap.

Oh yes, we had thought of everything and, patting ourselves on the back, we manoeuvred the bath through the double doors at the bow and carried it smugly down the boat (I was just wondering where I had put my secret stash of bubble bath, a good hour in a hot bath with a large glass of wine and possibly half a pound of Thornton's finest would really hit the spot) and I was just about to ask Geoff how long it would take to plumb it in, when we hit a wall. This was not a metaphorical wall; this was a Geoff-built, over-engineered, bloody great, double-skin, wooden wall, complete with sliding door that, very cleverly, slid away out of sight on opening. It was the door that had stopped us dead, as it didn't quite slide all the way into the wall, needing a little bit left out to be able to grab it and close it. It was the ‘little bit' that had changed the dimensions of the doorway.

Geoff looked around the bath to see why we had stopped and a look of absolute horror dawned on his face.

‘That door ... wasn't there,' he muttered.

When? This morning? Just now? When wasn't that door there? I was confused by the existential mutterings emanating from my suddenly sweating and goggly-eyed husband.

‘That door wasn't there,' he said again and putting his end of the bath down, squeezed past me and began measuring up the dimensions of the bath and then the dimensions of the doorway – this did not look good.

Sure enough, the only way that bath was going to make it through was if the wall was completely removed or we could shrink the bath. As shrinking the bath would need an Aztec Shaman and suggesting that the wall should be removed would put my husband on an immediate course of Valium, we turned around and dragged the wretched bath back up the length of the boat, through the front doors and out onto the gangplank.

As usual in a crisis, I made tea while Geoff rushed around with a tape measure and tried to find a way to get a two-foot bath through a one-foot-eleven-inch doorway. My happy thoughts of hot bubble baths, chocolates, wine and a great book slunk off to hide behind that wretched, hated door.

Geoff picked up his tea and put a piece of paper in front of me. My heart sank; more diagrams.

‘OK ...' he muttered, ‘we can get it in through the back doors but we are going to have to be careful through the engine room. The wall between the bathroom and what will be our bedroom doesn't have the door in it yet and I reckon we can get the bath through there. It will be a bit tight, but we should be OK.'

‘All right.' I drained my teacup and gave him what I hoped was a confident and enthusiastic grin. ‘Let's do it.'

There is one thing that must be made clear before I explain the horrors of the next hour and a half, the back of a ‘Trad' styled narrow boat is small, very small – at its deepest you have about three foot – and the whole back is styled as a curve with the tiller at the apex. To have even half a chance of getting the stupid bath through the engine room, the plan was to balance our bath on that back plate and then attempt to manoeuvre it through small, metal double doors into the four-foot, low ceilinged darkness of the engine room, down a deep step into the space that was eventually destined to become the main bedroom, tip the bath on to its side and just slide it through the door space and into the bathroom. It wasn't the best plan, it left a fair amount to luck, but it was the only plan we had.

At the back of the boat, Geoff leant forward over the two-foot gap between bank and boat, grabbed the lip of the bath and hauled the tap end aboard; it promptly wedged itself under the tiller, but this was easily taken care of by just removing the tiller – ha, one problem surmounted.

At the angle the bath was sitting, with one end on the boat and the other on the bank, it was impossible to get it through the doors so we juggled the wretched thing up on end; now the end of the bath was higher than the roof. We needed to bring the back end down, and unless we suddenly discovered that we could walk on water, that looked like a very difficult prospect.

After a fair amount of shoving and swearing, we decided that the only thing to do was turn the bath on its side and hang a large amount of it past the back of the boat and allow it to ‘hover' over the water; we would then try to slide it into the engine room. To achieve this, Geoff, being river side, would have to balance on the four-inch gunwales as the bath was taking up the whole of the back of the boat.

I'm still not entirely sure what
actually
happened, but I have a horrible feeling that it was all my fault. With all the shoving and pushing, I finally lost tolerance and gave the bath an almighty push, no doubt thinking that as planning and manoeuvring were proving a waste of time, I was going to go with outright thuggery. I am pretty sure it was me that pushed Geoff off the back of the boat and into the river, and I'm fairly sure it was me, watching the bath slide off after him, who made no move to save either of them. I know for a fact that it was me who thought, ‘I wonder if that bath is going to sink?' I do remember thinking that I didn't want to fall into the river; one of us splashing about risking Weil's disease was more than enough, and I had a new pair of trainers on.

With a certain sense of relief, I realised that, as the plug had been firmly wedged into the plughole to stop us from losing it, the wretched thing was actually floating. Geoff, floating with it, had pushed it around the back of the boat, stopping only when the bath bumped gently against the bank. He then stood up in the scant foot of mud and water in which he had been trying to swim and, narrowing his eyes, looked up at me. I was desperately trying to keep a straight face and still leaning nonchalantly on the roof of the engine room.

‘Do you think,' he gave me his patented ‘I am just about keeping my temper but one more thing is going to make me lose it big time' face, ‘that you could possibly – if you have nothing better to do – come and get this on to dry land?'

I know that face, and, wincing slightly, I leapt off the boat and pulled the bath out of the river. Geoff hauled himself out and stood, shivering, dripping water, mud and weed all over my new trainers; somehow I felt that complaining wouldn't really get me any sympathy. Three hours later, the bath was finally in the bathroom and Geoff was dry and full of tea (which always puts him in a better mood). It transpired that dumping the bath into the river showed us exactly how to get it lined up for the back doors, we threw it back in the river and brought it around the far side of the boat, then (
both
of us dry and on the back plate this time), we dragged it aboard in exactly the right position, where it went through the doors with no fuss at all. There was one minor ‘hold your breath' moment when we were juggling it past the bedroom wall but although it scraped on both sides, it went through. I can only hope that no one ever wants to take it out because, with the later addition of the bedroom door, that bath is there to stay.