Narrow Margins by Marie Browne Read Free Book Online Page B

his mind three times) and spent a happy couple of hours playing ‘tents’ in his quilt and unpacking boxes; I use the term ‘unpacking’ loosely, what he actually did was open all his boxes and, taking out each toy in turn, he would play with it inside his ‘tent’ and then discard it by just throwing it onto the floor.
    By the time we had, mostly, sorted ourselves out, his bedroom was a war zone, clothes, toys and quilt all mixed together in a big pile on his bed. However, we were so busy running backwards and forwards to the van carrying boxes that we didn’t actually notice until his happy chaos had started to seep into the corridor.
    We enticed him out with the promise of pizza and, kicking the detritus roughly back into his room, shut the door on the horror and headed out to eat junk food.
    Sitting in one of the local restaurants, Geoff poked at his pizza and stared off into the distance.
    â€˜Waf up?’ I enquired, around a mouthful containing an obscene amount of calories.
    â€˜What?’ he focused on me. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about our lack of piloting experience, and the little problem that neither of us is particularly confident about moving her around.’
    â€˜Confident?’ I laughed. ‘You mean neither of us has any idea what the hell we’re doing, she’s huge, and in our inexperienced hands she could be a lethal weapon to other river users or at the very least a snidely amusing inconvenience.’
    Geoff grinned. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.’ He rummaged around in one of his numerous pockets and dragged out a colour leaflet. ‘I was in the office earlier and these were on a stand.’ He handed it over to me. It was a leaflet for ‘Willow Wren Training’.
    I read through it, finding they had all sorts of narrow-boat-related courses, everything it seemed, from how to dismantle your diesel engine, to Inland Helmsman (whatever that was), and then handed it to Sam who was desperately trying to read it from under my armpit. ‘That seems like a good idea. Which course were you hoping to do?’ I went back to my pizza.
    Geoff leaned over the table and gently retrieved the leaflet. After wiping the tomato sauce and bits of cheese from it, he pointed to the inland waterways helmsman course. ‘This one seems to cover everything we need,’ he said.
    I struggled with a particularly large mouthful of pizza for a moment and could still feel it sliding down sideways as I pointed out that it was unlikely that we would get a space on a course for months.
    Geoff grinned and busied himself folding the leaflet and stowing it away in his pocket. ‘We got lucky,’ he said and picked up a slice of Hawaiian with extra pineapple. ‘There was a cancellation; he’s meeting us at the boat tomorrow.’
    The mouthful I was struggling with transmogrified itself into a lump of concrete, hit the pit of my stomach and lurked there. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more and spent the next half-hour poking at the rest of the contents of my plate. Geoff, however, having imparted his ‘good’ news, cleared his plate in record time and with obvious relish then started on what was left of mine.
    After leaving the restaurant, we stopped at an electrical store, picked up a tiny kettle and a small flat-screen television. Sam was suffering from PS2 withdrawal and the sooner we got him a fix the better for all of us. We then headed back to the boat. It took another hour to make some sense of the chaos and disaster that Sam’s ‘unpacking’ had created but we finally got him into bed, where he passed out in the middle of a sentence about how much he didn’t like his new bedroom and would never get to sleep.
    Making sure that our room was vaguely fit to sleep in, we took a last cup of tea out on to the roof. It was warm, dark and very quiet; the only sound was the occasional ‘splosh’ or an