It’s curious how different people notice different things. ‘What a freak,’ Joblard said, as soon as Kay was out of sight. ‘Did you clock his arms?’ I hadn’t dared go that far. I was still in shock after dealing with his face. We couldn’t, either of us, dodge that: the missing eyelid, the permanent wink. (The story came later, but I might as well throw it in. How Kay had sat on his dark glasses while watching a live sex show in Barcelona. How he’d superglued them together again, along with his eyelid. How his mate had hacked him free with a stanley knife. He never felt a thing.)
The narrow band of visible flesh above Kay’s wrist had, inevitably, been disfigured by the usual blue cartoons of flying fish and grinning skulls: epidermic graffiti too commonplace to merit Joblard’s attention. ‘The skin, eeeugh! Hanging in a nicotine flap. A wilted support-stocking. Bubbled up, percolated. He’s had it cooked. And the graft hasn’t taken.’ ‘Who could blame it?’ I thought; not caring to picture the events that lay behind this trivial deformity.
Joblard, in his turn, paid no attention to the detail I’d picked up on: the overpowering blast of the weed seeping through the deck-boards like compulsory nostalgia. Our captain was a dope fiend, and he was making an ominously early start. He stayed below for about thirty minutes and emerged, red-eyed and tooting, to search for a pair of wraparound shades. (O Save us from that Lidless Stare!) He wanted another shot at raising the ghosts from the aether of his pocket TV, the faulty snuff set. He was hooked on some fantasy of pre-pubertal jailbait, squealing Saturday-morning t-shirts: a mail-order catalogue for the Bill Wyman tendency.
We were drawn together now in what Conrad’s Marlow refers to, ambiguously, as ‘the fellowship of the craft’. The worst was surely over. We were Three Men in a Boat. ‘Three, I have always found, makes good company,’ remarked the jaunty Mr Jerome. But he was another J/K (JKJ), and not to be trusted. It struck me that we had embarked on a contrary statement of Jerome’s Thames journey. Our motives were not dissimilar. The trip was a rehearsal for the book that would follow. It was flawed therefore. Impure. Vulnerable. Upstream for Comedy, Downstream for… whatever it was we were involved with. We had wantonly chosen the wrong direction. We would never pull gently, at our own pace, back towards the river’s source; the spurting puddle in a Cotswold field. We sought dispersal, loss of identity: ‘moremens more… Lps. The Keys to.’ We were fleeing in desperation, in pieces, letting the water devils out of their sack. We could never implode through comic exaggeration into the mildest and most human of excursions. We would never be reprinted. Never repeated and abused on video. We had forgotten our striped blazers and our cricket caps. We were verminous, hounded from the society of men: a bottle of plagues, expelled like Lenin in his cattle car. We were escaping into an uncertain future.
But Jerome did not set out to provide raw material for institutional whimsy: books at bedtime, television pastiche, fat cats in Portobello blazers too boyishly enjoying themselves. He meditated a grander concept, The Story of the Thames (no less): a journey, limited in duration, which would cunningly open itself to episodic seizures by the son et lumière of history. He would be possessed by guidebooks, architectural jottings, myths gathered from waterside inns. But, as always, the fiction achieved an independent existence that overwhelmed him, tearing the publisher’s advance treatment to shreds. The feeble (premature heritagist) pageant collapsed. The vigour of the past ambushed him at every turn in the river. It was alive, unexorcized. And not hiring out for exploitation.
The Victorian boatmen were ‘real’ characters: George Win-grave (a bank manager), Carl Hentschel (who worked in his father’s photography business), and Jerome K. Jerome (an author?). It was once possible to visit them, to interrogate them on the degree of accuracy in the report of their adventures. Only the dog was a lie. He was the conscience of the quest. Without him, it was all meaningless. Our beast was alive — but we had betrayed him, left him imprisoned within the black Cadillac. Even now he was measuring its air, panting against the sealed windows. He had to survive. This was his story. The rest of us were wraiths, unsound fictions, diseased figments of the dog’s (oxygen-rationed) imagination. If the tale belonged anywhere… it was in his mouth.
Jon Kay felt our panic: my terror that our fate remained a prisoner on the Isle of Dogs. ‘That fucking animal!’he roared. ‘He’ll tear the seats to ribbons. He’ll throw up on the fur rug. He’ll piss into my restored leather upholstery.’ And he made this the excuse for another heavy session below decks, chainsawing the ship’s log into kindling. Now you could hear him draw the smoke to his lungs with hungry bronchial gasps. He was drowning in his own breath — mimicking the dog’s plight. Even Joblard, gripping the wheel like a length of chicken-neck, careering wildly over the river, realized something inadmissible was going on. Six inches beyond the reach of his sea boots.
The cabin door burst from its hinges. Kay was too far ‘out of it’ to work the bolt. He reeled towards us, holding the door in front of him like a barman’s tray. He was in the wrong script. He was looking for the head of John the Baptist. He pitched the door over the side and collapsed in a boneless heap; sprawled, face-down, in a puddle of what might once — at the kindest estimate — have been water from the bilges. We watched him closely, ready for anything.
He was silent for a few moments (the mercury tension leaping at the thermometer): he stared morosely into the ever-shifting depths. The surface was perilously smooth. The glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
Clinically, Jon Kay could be diagnosed as suffering, in one hit, all the symptoms of cannabis misuse/overdose/withdrawal. He was euphoric, relaxed, talkative, disorientated/fatigued, paranoid, irrational/hyperactive and crazy as a tick. A loose-tongued compulsion took him — a returning fever — and he began to rap.
‘We were bringing a couple of keys across the desert. No, Turkey. Was it? Istanbul. Early evening. I had the wheel. Really loose. Handle it with my eyes shut. Sheeew! Don’t ever go off the road there, man! Stay in town. Two wrong turnings and they’ve got you penned in a concrete pit, a ramp. Streets with no names. Dead ends. No way out. And hundreds, hundreds of these little kids… wow… out from the ground… skulls with rats’ teeth… climbing on the Land Rover. No, man! Smashing the lamps. Bending the mirrors. Slicing the canvas. I tell you, we were beating them off with tent poles. Give us cigarette. Fickyfucky. Suck your dick? I’m trying to reverse. Can’t see. Faces. Windscreen covered like a blanket. Termites. And then, then… the worst thing…the very worst…’
It was all too much, too far away. He aborted it. What did it matter? He ducked under; rattled around, searching helplessly for his misplaced stash. ‘Got to get some speed on, man,’ he burbled, on his return, ‘or we’ll never make Tilbury. I’ve handled real boats, boats with balls, boats that jumped from wave to wave. They had to, man. Give the horse his head, or get blasted out of the water.’ He swivelled, arms outstretched, demonstrating the Wall of Death aerodynamics he demanded. ‘Skidded, planed. Right? Sharp curve down the moving wall of noise? Dropping a cargo for the Aldeburgh fishermen. Then — whoooooosh! — away… before we’re even registered on the radar. Yeah!’
He barged Joblard from his perch and guided the Reunion, with unexpected delicacy, in alongside a rotting red hulk. The old ‘Powder Magazine’, he called her. And he made us fast to her chains, while he tinkered once more with the Evinrude.