I glance at her arm in mine – blonde hairs, strong tendons – checking her out in spite of myself, my reserve, my embarrassment. Christ, her skin! It glows.
She asks, ‘Has Michel told you about the boat?’
This is why I am here. This, by now, is obvious. They want someone they can show it off to.
Together we walk to their house along what, round here, passes for a street. It takes me a few minutes to see it as that. There are no walls, no fences, not even ditches worth the name. Just a few little gullies that may be property boundaries, but could just as likely have been scooped out year by year by the rain.
The houses, tar-paper shacks, cluster in unnecessarily tight groups that, for some reason, sit several minutes apart from each other. The road connecting them is made of cracked cement, reduced by infrequent traffic to parallel tracks. Between the tracks, bluish grass struggles to grow.
Not all the houses are fisherman’s shacks of tar-paper, sticks and prayer. One, made of concrete, apes the epic slab-work of the power station, visible in the distance. Less convincing are a handful of barn-buildings, painted black to ‘blend in’ with the locals. Their long, floor-to-roof windows and sliding patio doors are a reckless extravagance round here.
Hanna and Michel’s house is easy to spot – there is a thirty-eight foot ketch sat out in front of it on trestles. ‘Come and see.’
They escort me, Michel on my right, Hanna on my left. Their every anecdote, remark, gesture and glance is rooted to or through this boat of theirs.
I’m more interested in the house. It’s an old one. A tar-paper roof and plank walls – materials chosen to be easily mended and replaced. How much is left of the original structure? Round here, under a salt, corrosive rain, I imagine houses get by the way bodies do, by being constantly repaired and replenished.
It looks too small, too flimsy to be an all-year place. It is not black, unlike so many of its neighbours. Once upon a time it was green. Paint has peeled from the wood and hangs in fronds. The walls and window frames are smothered in this mineral, yellow-grey creeper.
Mick and Hanna crowd me, anxious, trying to fix my attention on the boat. The house, as though aware of their slight, rustles its lifeless foliage.
The boat, then, since there is no avoiding it.
They have parked it in front of their living room window to block their view – or, rather, so that they are confronted, morning, noon and night, with their beloved boat. They have knocked together those hefty trestles themselves. The boat sits upright, head-height above the ground. They’ve been working on the hull. ‘The hull is a mess!’ They stand either side of me, pointing out to me, in exhaustive detail, all that they’ve taken on. There’s a hole in the stern. The deck laminate crackles and pops when you walk on it. The fittings are corroded. The electrics are impenetrable. ‘The tiller and the forestay are sound.’
It’s a shell.
‘We figure it’ll be as easy for us to tear out the old bulkheads and begin again.’
‘Yes.’
‘If we’re going to live on the thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘We owe it to ourselves to make it comfortable.’
‘I suppose.’ What is it that they want me to say?
Michel struggles with the tarpaulins covering the cabin. He wants to show me their work. All through the summer, they have laboured on this hulk, chamfering and filling. The masks and goggles they’ve been wearing while they sand off the old gel coat are lying on the table in the cabin. ‘Still, the dust creeps in under your mask. Into the pores of your hands. Look.’ Michel shows me his hands. He tells me that he hardly recognises himself in the mirror any more.
‘And Hanna’s skin comes out in a rash. Look – like paint over wet putty.’
‘Maybe it’s not the fibreglass at all,’ she says, running her small brown hands over her arms. She sees me looking. ‘It could be the sand blowing in from the dunes,’ she says. She rubs her hands against her jeans, cleaning off imaginary grit.
Michel tells me that to wake sore and stiff from working long hours on the boat, to discuss practical things over a breakfast of coffee and processed bread, to come home sun-dazzled, their skins buzzing, and to work at their books silently and together – all this has added up to a life so clear-cut and so pure, it has begun to resemble a religious retreat.
Hanna reminisces, ‘The deck was so waterlogged we had to strip it back to the ply in places. Whoever had it last drilled straight into the deck. Every hole is a sponge.’
A stage laugh from Michel. ‘Thank God they never got around to resecuring the bulkheads! They’d have drilled straight through the hull.’
We go indoors at last. We try to. The front door sticks; salt has swollen the wood. Tough grey grasses have taken root in the sand collecting under the porch. The blades are sticky and scaly, as though coated with powdered glass. While Hanna struggles to open the door, I bend to pluck a stem. It won’t give, and my fingers come away bloody.
There is mould around the doorframe, damp in the corners of the ceiling, a mealy smell everywhere. The rooms have fibreboard walls. They give slightly if you lean on them. There are three rooms: bathroom, bedroom, living room. You step into the living room straight from the front door and at the back of the room is the kitchen. A thin brown carpet covers the living room floor. It peters out near the kitchen, where cork-effect vinyl floor tiles have begun to lift at the edges.
‘Would you like a drink?’ There is no shortage of drink. There are several kinds of gin. There is tonic, kept in the fridge, but no ice.
‘That’s fine.’ I take the G&T from her hand. ‘Terrific.’ It tastes disgusting, an extract of hedge clippings.
Michel cracks open a can of lager and sits beside me on the sofa. I move over for him, my palms chilling on the nylon-mix fleece they’ve thrown over it. I’m cold at the core in here. I’m not shivering. My hands and feet are fine. This cold begins on the inside, deep in the pit of the lungs. A tubercular chill.
Hanna sits opposite us on a seat made of cardboard boxes and polystyrene packing. Everything here is reused. Everything is repurposed. Gear fills their living room. Clothing in plastic storage tubs. Boots and waterproofs. Damp-bulged books and curling maps are piled on every flat surface. In this room as cramped as a cabin, heavy with gear, carefully organised yet still tipping into an unavoidable chaos, where the stowage succumbs to sheer weight and numbers, it is possible, I suppose, that they are conducting a dress-rehearsal for their voyage.
‘It’s American-built.’ Hanna fetches me yachting magazines from a pile on top of the fridge. Michel gets up and clatters about, ‘fixing some more drinks’. Hanna moves me to her chair made of boxes (‘the light is better here’) and drops the magazines into my lap. She hunkers down beside me and flicks from one dog-eared page to another, showing me pictures of boats similar to theirs, each with a slightly different rigging. We might be choosing shoes or handbags, except that the choices she makes now may make the difference between life and death. ‘This, you see; it’s a very heavy system.’
Michel comes back with full glasses. He wriggles into the sofa’s damp and Hanna joins him there. They tuck the felty orange throw around themselves. Their hands dance and couple in the gloom. They’ve learned to compensate for their discomfort; they’ve made it cosy, made it theirs. They’re living through a little Fall here, ‘saving on bills’, taking baby steps in readiness for when the lights go off for real, forever, and the telephones stop ringing, and the pipes go cold and brittle, and the only water’s rain which they must boil.
I should not have come. I seem to be gathering all the living room’s dampness into myself, pooling it behind my breast-bone – a big wet bag of phlegm I cannot even bring up. ‘I just need—Just a moment.’