Coasting by Jonathan Raban Read Free Book Online

been it was: “You always expect to see a bit of water in the bilges in a boat like this. It’s a good sign. It means she’s able to breathe.”
    In just a year to two, my double had turned himself into a Robinson Crusoe of the foreshore. He gathered samphire and knew how to fry seaweed. At low tide he set crab pots; at high tide he fished from the veranda of his back room. Once a week he collected his dole money. His postal address was care of John, or Eric or Hattie, whoever was landlord of the Old Ship, the Fisherman’s Rest or the Anchor on the quay.
    “But what will you do when you sell the boat?”
    “Oh … friends, you know. I’ll have to look around. I was thinking of getting a catamaran. A catamaran’s a very stable boat at sea.”
    For now, my double tinkered his days away. He caulked the leaks in his home, not often to much visible effect. He sat with the
Ashley Book of Knots
open in front of him on the saloon table, plaiting the frayed ends of a piece of rope into a monkey’s fist. He laid in driftwood for the winter. He made plans.
    All my doubles had plans. Lodged like hippos in their mud berths, they lived on dreams. Aboard every boat I was shown charts—as if the charts themselves were voyages as good as made. Charts of the Azores, of the Caicos Islands, of the Baltic, of the Turkish coast, of the French canal route to Marseilles … Every one was marked out with compass courses, distances, the likely landmarks ringed in soft pencil, the ports of refuge carefully arrowed in.
    “If only this bloody weather would change. Suppose that Azores High drifts north a bit, into Shannon, say, I’d go next week.”
    “I’m just waiting for an alternator. It was meant to be here Tuesday.”
    “When my girlfriend stops working—”
    “My only trouble is the dog—”
    In the meantime they scraped at the layers of old varnish on their spars, messed with paintpots and reread their way through their soggy paperback libraries of adventures at sea. When September came and equinoctial gales tore chimney pots off houses and made boats groan and shiver on their moorings, and the holidaymakers all went home, the doubles were still there waiting for their breaks.
    The margins of England are lined with these men and their rotting boats. Redundant in many more senses than one, they have crossed the seawall that defines the outer limit of society and live in a tidal no-man’s-land—Huck Finns going to gray, all talking in the accent of the same minor public school. The men from the Income Tax department have long ago lost touch with them. They are beyond support orders, electricity bills, door-knocking clergy on their rounds, colored circulars, credit cards and all the other privileges and interferences of civilized life. Visiting them—by dinghy, or in gum boots over a hundred yards or so of soft and smelly mud—I listened to them all telling me solemnly that they were “free.” But it was a freedom which they had all, with whatever little enthusiam or real hope, put up for sale.
    In Fowey I found a boat. It wasn’t a romantic discovery. The tide had gone out, leaving the flats of the estuary gleaming dully and riddled with wormcasts. The boat wasstranded, propped up between baulks of timber and secured to the ground with a dripping cat’s cradle of ropes and chains. With its masts gone elsewhere, its wheelhouse sticking up at the back and its high, bulbous front end, it looked in silhouette like a cracked army boot.
    Its owner had emigrated to Hong Kong, and for three years the boat had lain here untenanted and uncared-for. The local yard had given me keys and a warrant to view; and I slithered across the mud in city clothes, pushing past bait diggers forking worms into buckets. Each new footstep released another bubble of bad-egg air. The trees on the foreshore were speckled a dirty white with china-clay dust from the docks downriver and looked as if they had contracted a bad case of dandruff.
    There’s