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  He wouldn’t go back to his boat. He walked the miles through Acton and Greenford to Bull’s Bridge and the dockyard. Got a lift back up to Stoke Bruerne. He passed Uxbridge, Marsworth, Bletchley and looked at these places without recognition.

  At home he went upstairs to the boy’s room; he lay down on the bed facing the wall. Ann followed him up and sat by him in the rocking chair. She pulled a blanket over and stroked his forehead until he slept.

  She went to the evacuation office every day hoping for good news, but no news came.

  FOUR

  Join Odeline on her first night in the boat. She has not yet managed to sleep, the newness of her surroundings has unsettled her. She tells herself it is anticipation. Look at her. Eyes wide open and hands clasped on her chest, she is lying in an antique nightdress flat on her back along the side of the bed closest to the wall. From the chest down she is a long thin column under the quilt she has brought from home, her large feet making a tent at the end. She forgot pillows, so her head is awkwardly back, and she lies straight, as if she has been arranged this way and told not to move.

  Odeline looks around her cabin. It is illuminated by streetlights from the road beyond the towpath. The porthole curtains are thin and don’t seem to keep out any light at all. Everything is cast in an electric hue and is either orange or shadowy. She follows the arch of the roof from above her head to the far end and clears her throat to see if the sound echoes as in a tunnel. ‘Ahem.’ It doesn’t.

  Her stomach gurgles and she puts a hand on to it over the quilt. She had the rest of the cheese slices on crackerbread plus tinned pears for dinner and still felt hungry afterwards, but didn’t want to use up any more of her provisions.

  She blinks. Her eyes do not want to close. Inside her there is an unarticulated feeling that she should be on the lookout. Not so much a sense of danger as an utter cluelessness regarding her new surroundings. She has no idea whether she is completely safe or completely exposed. Her mother’s toolkit is on the kitchenette counter and as she was getting ready for bed, she found herself putting the screwdriver under the quilt next to her. Self-defence, she told herself, a sensible precaution.

  She can hear noises from outside and tries to work out where they’re coming from: a soar of aeroplane overhead; the occasional lap of water – birds perhaps; voices moving along and away – people passing over the bridge; brief fade-ins and fade-outs of pop music – the door of the pub up by the bridge opening and closing.

  And suddenly a horrible tuneless hollering which makes her freeze, and she holds her breath to listen as it gets louder.

  ‘I’m an artist,’ it says, although the vowels are garbled and dragged.

  ‘Aaaartist,’ the voice says again.

  Odeline freezes; it is that grubby bearded warden.

  ‘Oooh my, I’m an aaaaartist!’ Closer now. He is wheezing with laughter.

  She makes an irritated face to herself and sniffs, but her heart is knocking against her chest. She reaches for the screwdriver handle and finds herself holding it downwards and tight in her fist, like a knife in a horror film.

  ‘I only thought it would be nice to welcome you to the community.’ He sounds angrier. ‘I only thought it would be NEIGHBOURLY,’ he ends with a shout.

  Then there are three knocks on the cabin roof. ‘Halloooo? Is her majesty in residence?’

  His voice has gone old-womanish now and she can hear him breathily stumbling towards the other end of the boat. The cabin walls are so thin! Maybe he can even see her through the flimsy curtains. She closes her eyes tightly, shrinks under the quilt. She has heard of these things happening in London: Rape and Murder. She finds herself thinking she is going to die the most alone person in the world. At this moment in time, there is no one alive to whom she is not a stranger.

  The warden is carrying on his chaotic rant, and it sounds like he has stepped on to the boat, shouting through the door.

  ‘No need to be so BLOODY UNFRIENDLY.’

  As she jerks upright in her bed with the screwdriver held high, ready to defend herself, she hears the door of the neighbouring boat burst open and a new voice, deep and well-spoken.

  ‘Enough. And get off her boat. Much more of this and they’ll take your licence.’

  ‘Licence! I’d like a close look at yours, bloody New Age Cossack.’

  ‘They will, they’ll have it off you. You’ll have woken half the street up there. People will complain again.’ The tone is relaxed, almost a drawl.

  ‘Crystal ball tell you that? Bloody gypo.’ She hears him trip over the side of the boat back on to the towpath. ‘You’re the one they should be getting on to, I might bring ’em along for a look at your dodgy boat. And that manky dog.’

  ‘Go home and let the girl be.’

  ‘Oh but she’s an artist, don’t you know? An aaartist.’ There is silence and then a few quick steps on to the towpath from the next-door boat and a low purr which Odeline thinks is machinery and then realises is a dog’s growl.

  ‘All right, all right,’ the drunk voice says, and she hears footsteps staggering off. They fade, and then she hears them again, echoing under the bridge.

  ‘Take no notice of him,’ her neighbour calls across. ‘He’s just a sad old boozer. Comes up here pestering people.’ He pauses. Gently: ‘Are you okay?’

  Odeline doesn’t answer; she is still upright with her screwdriver poised, too scared to move. Her head is shrunk into her shoulders, her eyes stare straight ahead at the cabin doors. Her mind is a flashing white screen. What would it be appropriate to say? The ease with which these voices travel through the boat makes her feel horribly vulnerable. She is sure this man can hear her breathing, so she stops.

  ‘Just let me know if you’ve any more trouble,’ he says, and she hears his cabin door click shut. She blinks and breathes out. Slowly she allows herself to fall back on to the bed but her heartbeat, it seems, is pulsating the whole cabin. She replays the scene in her head.

  ‘A Life-Threatening Encounter,’ she says to herself, in a breathy whisper. Whilst 99 per cent of her is still terrified, 1 per cent is secretly impressed by the drama of it. She feels like the heroine of an Alfred Hitchcock film. She thinks back to those few seconds and they are accompanied by orchestral bursts; high, jarring notes. She can see her silhouette in angular black against an electric orange background. A title in jagged white lettering.

  ‘A Close Call,’ she whispers.

  Gosh.

  But quickly the adrenalin drains away. She drops the screwdriver to the floor. She looks around at the narrow cabin, the tiny kitchenette, the fuzzy orange carpet. What kind of vessel is this on which to launch a life? She is yet to locate the feeling of nomadic freedom that was meant to come with living here, the urge to spread her wings. Just a dizzying sense of nothing being solid. This boat and I are the same, she thinks: unprotected, foundationless, sinkable.

  This is not winning thinking, Odeline.

  Staring at the ceiling, she flicks her mind on to the plan for tomorrow. She has her first London performance at 7 p.m. in the famous theatre district of Covent Garden. The thought of it brings a pinch of panic. She is excited at the idea of a new audience but also uneasy at not knowing what to expect. Will it be the London audience she has imagined all these years in her rehearsals? The open-minded cosmopolitan avant-garde, the still and attentive rows of faces in the darkness, watching silently and then erupting into applause at the end of her repertoire, rising to their feet one by one to pound their hands together. Encore! Encore! And will she be able to expand her repertoire here, from illusions – the tricks that are second nature to her now – to the purer art of mime? Mime has been her private passion up till now. In Arundel she was billed as an illusionist only. More commercial. But surely a London audience is ready for higher art forms? She has been rehearsing her mime routine fiercely in the last few weeks for just this moment, this evolution.

  The theatre is called ‘The Globe’. She can’t picture it. Whenever she
tries to, she just sees her old classroom at school with the gridded blackboard globe on the desk, and her fifteen-year-old self being asked to go up and chalk Great Britain according to the latitudes and longitudes. She had drawn it upside down and south of the equator and everyone had laughed, including her geography teacher, Mr Binwell. Ignorants. Why should the world be depicted one way up rather than another? Why should the shape of Britain be sitting comfortably on its haunches whilst Africa and India and Latin America wobbled uncertainly on their points? It was an imperialist depiction. She hopes her classmates felt threatened seeing their smug country destabilised and sent to the bottom of the map. Perhaps that was the source of their jeers.

  She checks her pocket watch next to the bed. It looks like half past eleven, but the antique glass makes it hard to read in this orange light. She is wide awake still. So she rolls on to her front and slides out the beige cardboard box from beneath the bed. From it she takes a pencil and the account book, opens the book, and begins to update her expense forecasts.

  Odeline’s mother taught her the importance of good accounting. She showed her how to balance a book, set profit against loss, detail a week’s expenses, how to mark off a page with ruler and pencil and set out the numbers in neat little columns and rows, down and across. These columns and rows provided for the Milks.

  Provincial England, genteel England. Nobody needed an unmarried mother in their town, or a dark-skinned girl in their child’s classroom, but everybody needed their tax bill minimised. Eunice Milk walked from office to office at the end of every month, waiting on doorsteps for secretaries to hand over boxes of receipts and invoices without looking her in the eye. Then she would sit all day at the kitchen table, with the battered brown boxes stacked at her elbow, tapping at her calculator. Her expression would be quiet but her fingers struck the buttons like little hammers. She was so fast it sounded to Odeline like a hailstorm hitting the window. Odeline used to imagine the numbers appearing as they were punched in, forming a cloud around her mother’s head that became denser and darker with figures, pound signs and decimal points. When she got up to stop work Odeline would picture them all dropping to the table and her sweeping them up and emptying the lot into the wastepaper basket.

  Odeline’s mother was the only female accountant in Arundel and though she had many clients she had few acquaintances. The Milks received no invitations. They were not acknowledged on the High Street, in the post office, or in the queue at the bank. They kept the shutters of their big red-brick house closed, to prevent townsfolk prying. They had no friends, but they did not want any. In the playground Odeline had her brush-black hair tugged, was chanted at and asked questions. ‘Mop-head,’ they called her, and ‘Odd-bod.’

  She would not respond.

  She always took a book out with her in the lunch break. She would sit on the school steps reading, and never look up. And so they left her to her own devices. Over the years she looked on thankfully as the other children tangled themselves in friendships. They were like the tiny ants she watched rushing relentlessly back and forth over the miniature muddy ups and downs of her mother’s garden. It all seemed such an effort, and so pointless. Odeline knew that she was different, that she breathed a rarer air.

  Her mother’s pale brown receipt box sits on the carpet next to Odeline’s bed now. In it are some of her mother’s personal items. Odeline’s mother was not attached to the material world, she paid little attention to it, but these are things she used or looked at every day.

  From her mantelpiece, all of Odeline’s school photographs from five to eighteen: Odeline, easy to spot, bigger and darker than the other children, in all of them unsmiling and standing a head taller than the rest of her year group. Also from her mantelpiece, an envelope of Odeline’s school certificates and a word-processing qualification from Arundel library. From the kitchen table, her mother’s Arnott’s biscuit tin containing the pencils (always HB blue) for working through those towers of account books. In the tin too are rubbers used down to the size of a pea, her folding ruler and two blue sharpeners. Everything in the tin is dusted with pencil lead. The lead that would coat Eunice Milk’s hand as it moved across the page, quickly, column to column, a rapid scribble followed by the abrupt swish of skin on paper. She used to press so hard that the lead splintered and her fingertips would be speckled with black. At the end of every page she blew the dust off the paper with a puff before turning over to the next.

  Underneath the biscuit tin are some of the logic puzzle books which Odeline’s mother received monthly, with page after page of number grids and mathematical scenarios. Most puzzles are completed tidily and with no written workings. She did one puzzle at 11 a.m. every day with her glass of fruit juice and plate of frosted sponge biscuits. It would take her five minutes to complete.

  On the blue account book which Odeline has just picked up, a business card taped to the front reads ‘Arundel Magic’. The company logo: a top hat and wand. This is the business that Odeline’s mother set up when Odeline was sixteen and had enough of a repertoire to work on weekends as a professional illusionist. Her mother ordered eight hundred of these cards and pinned them to noticeboards all over Arundel, in the post office, church and the supermarket, in the bank and the butcher’s, the doctor’s surgery and the town hall. Eunice Milk, who’d always seemed not to notice that anyone else existed, gave them out to people she passed on the pavement. She didn’t explain, gave no sales pitch, just pushed them into people’s hands and walked on. She’d include one in every box of accounts she returned, and even put them in the envelope with her cheque for the gas and electric bills. Arundel Magic was perhaps one of the most widely advertised small businesses in Sussex.

  Odeline was hired for several children’s parties around Arundel but her repertoire was too advanced for such a limited audience and these jobs were not successful. (She is an artist not a children’s entertainer. She is not a balloon sculptor or a whoopee-cushion prankster.) Her mother would have her costume ready the night before each job, freshly ironed and laid out on the armchair in the television room. She would polish Odeline’s brogues and inspect the suit with a needle and thread pressed between her lips, darning any parts of the old tailcoat and trousers that appeared to be thinning. She would admire Odeline as she left the house, fists squeezing with excitement. But as Odeline pulled her box of props down the slope of Maltravers Street on her way to each new job, she felt no such excitement. And when she rang the doorbell of another pointlessly pretty Arundel house and heard the children shrieking inside, there would rise in her a shaking anger at her mother for all the stupid excitement, for getting it wrong, for limiting her to this stupid town, for offering her only Arundel with its lack of imagination, its lack of opportunity.

  Sometimes she turned away before the client had even opened the door, pulling her prop box quickly down the street before she could be seen. But more often she stayed and performed, just to get paid her fee. Standing in front of a wriggling herd of children in someone’s sitting room, beneath bunting and paper chains, she would move half-heartedly through her repertoire, checking her pocket watch after every one until the forty-five-minute act was finally over. Sometimes she didn’t even bother getting all the props out. What was the point? Her audience were more interested in stuffing their faces with cake and jelly. So degrading.

  When she got home she would ignore her mother as punishment, going straight upstairs to her room and shutting the door. But her mother never seemed to notice. Even after hours had passed, she never came upstairs to make amends. When Odeline eventually came down for dinner her mother would smile at her brightly in the same way as she always did, pat Odeline’s place at the table as she always did, tip her head to the side and gaze at her as she ate her dinner, just as she always did.

  At Odeline’s last engagement, a child’s eighth birthday, she had been dismissed mid-repertoire by the child’s parents. It was another twee sitting room in another twee Arundel street. The parents must have spent a
fortune on the party, helium balloons filled the ceiling and there were trestle tables with plastic tablecloths piled with food. The children kept on getting up to wander to these tables, bringing back packets of crisps and rustling sweets. Even some of the adults were talking while she performed. So she told them to shut up. And then lost her temper, when the children began to heckle. They were a pack of bourgeois imbeciles! And so she told them that too.

  The clients had refused to pay, despite several subsequent claim letters, and Arundel magistrates’ court had refused to take the case.

  After this she received no more jobs.

  This is reflected in the Arundel Magic profits, which, no matter how hard her mother scribbled, rubbed and tapped, could not be balanced against the necessary expense of props, costumes and educational literature from which Odeline learnt.

  Yes, Odeline has come to London to find her true audience – but also to see this account book balanced. She bought the narrowboat and its mooring with the proceeds from the sale of her mother’s house. The remainder has gone into her Post Office savings account. But she will not be living off this. No. She will be successful and self-sufficient in her own right.

  She has itemised her deficit on the page as follows:

  Arundel Magic Deficit as of 1st August –£442.11

  Other Expenses [London, Narrowboat-related, Career-related, Provisions]

  Literature/Research [London] £16.20

  Literature/Research [Narrowboat] £8.47

  The Professional Magician [annual subscription] £12

  Stamps for Correspondence £16.60