Selected works / complete text

The Hand Miles

One

The boat was called Your Mother Was Right, which Kit considered evidence that their father had expected to die before either daughter saw it.

Mara stood on the towpath with the probate key pinched between finger and thumb. Behind her, a removal van idled beside the hedge, displaying a cartoon sofa with muscular arms. Ahead, the narrowboat leaned away from the bank as if pretending not to know them.

“Is that the legal name?” Mara asked.

“It’s painted on both sides.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Kit stepped aboard. The boat sank two inches beneath her boot, paused, and decided to continue existing. “Feels legal.”

Their father had moored badly. The stern rope ran through three separate knots and then around the trunk of a willow that had begun digesting it. A year’s worth of towpath leaves had collected in the well deck. On the roof sat a bicycle without a front wheel, two cracked plant pots and a blue tarpaulin pulled tight over something tall enough to be a body.

Mara looked at the tarpaulin.

“Solar chimney,” Kit said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m helping.”

Mara held out the key. Kit did not take it.

“You’re the practical one.”

“You’re the executor.”

“Joint executor.”

“Then unlock your half.”

The padlock opened on Mara’s third attempt. She had brought a folder containing the death certificate, the mooring contract, the insurance schedule, printouts of three boatyards and a spreadsheet titled TRANSIT OPTIONS. She had not brought oil for a padlock. Kit had brought oil but left it in the van.

Inside, the air was cold and sweet with damp timber. Their father had lowered the ceiling over the galley by hanging bunches of dried rosemary from copper hooks. On the worktop, a mug had been placed upside down over a dead mouse.

Mara stopped.

“Possibly ceremonial,” Kit said.

“Could you not?”

Kit lifted the mug. “Definitely a mouse.”

There were two labels on the cupboard above the sink. The first, written in their father’s block capitals, said TEA / BORING MEDICINES. Beneath it, in a smaller hand, someone had added BORING TEA / MEDICINES.

“Who wrote that?” Mara asked.

Kit was already walking toward the engine compartment. “No idea.”

This was a lie, but only in the way the boat was currently afloat: provisionally, through several hidden repairs.

Mara opened the folder on the dinette table. “The canal authority closes the western summit on the thirty-first of August. The berth at Fen Acre starts on the first of September. If we average twelve miles and eight locks per day—”

“On this?” Kit called from the stern.

“Yes.”

“With this engine?”

Mara looked down the corridor. “Is there a different boat you’ve inherited?”

Kit reappeared holding a strip of black rubber. “This was an engine belt on the morning it formed an independent political identity.”

“I have the number of a mechanic.”

“Everyone has the number of a mechanic. Mechanics have changed their numbers because of people like us.”

Outside, the removal driver sounded the horn. Mara checked her watch. They had hired him for two hours to take away anything without value. The solicitor had described the contents that way, and now every object seemed to be listening.

They began with the roof. Kit passed down the plant pots, the bicycle, a television aerial shaped like an extinct insect. Mara photographed each item before setting it beside the van. She had made an inventory form with columns for condition, likely value and agreed action.

Kit uncovered the tall object beneath the tarpaulin.

It was a wooden doorframe.

Not a door. Only the frame: two uprights, a lintel, scraps of wallpaper clinging to one edge. Pencil marks climbed the left side beneath a skin of varnish.

MARA 6 — 119 cm.

KIT 8 — 131 and a half.

Mara put down her phone.

Their father had removed it from the old house after the separation. Their mother had said the builders destroyed it. For twenty-three years Mara had imagined the marks under plaster, then rubble, then nothing.

Kit rested one hand on the wood. “He made it into a shelf.”

“You knew.”

“I helped.”

“When?”

“Years ago.”

The removal driver came along the towpath wearing orange gloves. “That going?”

“No,” both sisters said.

It was the first decision they made together.

Then Kit turned the frame over. The lower foot of one upright had rotted to brown sponge.

The driver prodded it with one gloved finger. A piece bearing MARA 5 fell into the canal.

Nobody moved quickly enough. The wood touched the green surface, darkened, and sank.

Kit lay down on the bank and put her arm into the water.

“It’s gone,” Mara said.

“Thank you, sonar.”

Kit reached to the shoulder. The canal accepted her hand, then her watch, then the sleeve of her shirt. She felt along the brickwork until something in the silt closed softly around her fingers.

“Got it.”

She brought up a bottle with a marble in its neck.

The removal driver looked impressed. “Worth anything?”

Kit threw it into his van.

They carried the frame back aboard. It would not fit through the stern doors until Kit took off the lintel, and it would not fit along the corridor until Mara moved the folder, the mouse and a brass coal scuttle which had not been on the inventory because she had not yet decided if brass was a material or a condition.

They laid the frame across the dinette. It occupied both benches and projected into the galley at shin height.

“Good,” Kit said. “Now we live here.”

“We’re not living here.”

“Then the frame is.”

At half past four the van left with the roof rubbish and almost nothing from inside. Mara amended the disposal total from sixty per cent to twelve. The driver made them sign beside client retained items contrary to estimate, which sounded like a diagnosis.

Kit fitted a belt she found coiled around the calorifier. It was an old belt. It had been labelled EMERGENCY ONLY, then crossed out and relabelled BETTER EMERGENCY ONLY.

The engine coughed awake. Cutlery trembled in a drawer. A cupboard opened by itself and released six tins of peaches.

Mara stood at the stern with TRANSIT OPTIONS clipped to a board. “We move to the winding hole, turn, and come straight back. That confirms steering and propulsion.”

“It confirms two hundred yards.”

“That is what a test is.”

“At school.”

“Everywhere.”

Kit untied the stern rope. The willow had incorporated enough of the bow rope that she cut it rather than attempting their father’s knots. Mara wrote new bow line in the margin.

“Ready?” Kit asked.

Mara looked at the water ahead. Their father’s mooring pins lay on the roof. The hedge concealed the road. Nothing held them to the bank except several sensible reasons.

“Ready.”

Kit put the engine into forward.

The engine became louder. The boat did not move.

She tried reverse. The exhaust spat a dark ring onto the water. Somewhere beneath them, metal beat three times against metal and stopped.

“Is it the belt?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“The boat is aground.”

Mara looked over the side. The water was water. It had reflections and insects and all the normal qualifications.

Kit took the boat hook from the roof and pushed it down beside the stern. Less than two feet disappeared before the hook struck mud.

“Canals are deeper than that.”

“You should tell this one.”

A bicycle bell sounded from the towpath.

The rider was a girl of seventeen or eighteen on a small red bike with a plastic jerrycan strapped sideways across the rack. She wore a yellow canal-volunteer vest over black school trousers. A bolt cutter hung from her handlebars, knocking against the basket.

“You’ve started your engine,” she said.

Kit looked at the vibrating stern beneath her. “We found it like this.”

“Engines pull silt into the cooling inlet.”

Kit took the boat out of gear.

“And you’ve cut the rope.”

“That was personal.”

The girl dismounted. Her vest said IMANI in marker pen above a logo that had mostly peeled away. “This pound dropped overnight. Culvert’s leaking into the field. We’re holding what’s left for the boats at Grady’s bend.”

Mara stepped onto the bank with her clipboard. “Who is ‘we’?”

Imani considered her. “People holding what’s left.”

“The canal authority?”

“They’ve got a meeting at six.”

“Then who authorised the restriction?”

“Gravity.”

Kit laughed, once. Mara clipped the pen back onto the board.

Imani leaned the bicycle against the hedge and looked along the boat. “You won’t get her off under her own power. If we let water down from Dockett she might float, but then the bend boats sit on the bottom. We’re waiting for two of them to come through first.”

“When?”

“One should’ve been here yesterday.”

“And the other?”

“Mine.”

Mara looked at the jerrycan, the school trousers, the volunteer vest. “Where is it?”

“Grady’s bend.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because the culvert’s here.”

She took the jerrycan from the bicycle and walked toward a narrow path in the hedge. Kit followed. Mara remained beside the boat for long enough that following became her own idea.

Beyond the hedge, the ground fell into a field of dry grass. At its foot, beneath a row of poplars, a dark patch widened through the dust. Water bubbled from a collapsed brick mouth and ran away in thin, delighted threads.

Three feed sacks had been packed into the opening. Each one pulsed.

“We put clay behind them,” Imani said. “It keeps washing out.”

“Who’s we?” Mara asked again.

“Me. Mr Vale off Dorothy. Two twins who left when their mum found out. Sometimes a terrier.”

She filled the jerrycan from the leak.

“You’re taking the water out,” Mara said.

“It’s already out.”

Imani carried it back uphill. Kit took the handle without asking. The two of them carried it between them to the towpath and poured the water over the side, into the canal.

The surface rose by no visible amount.

“That cannot be the method,” Mara said.

“It’s one of the methods.”

“How many of those have you done?”

“Forty-three.”

Mara calculated before she could stop herself. “That’s perhaps eight hundred and sixty litres.”

“Plus the terrier.”

Imani unhooked the bolt cutters from the handlebars.

“What are those for?” Mara asked.

“The meeting.”

It emerged, after Mara asked questions in an order Imani disliked, that the canal authority had chained the upper lock pending an engineer’s visit. It also emerged that Mr Vale’s boat had been caught below the bend when its gearbox failed, that Imani’s aunt had gone to find a tow, and that Imani had an examination at nine the next morning which everyone except Imani mentioned whenever they explained why she should leave.

“If both boats come through, you release the upper water,” Mara said. “Ours floats. We return to this mooring.”

“If both come through, the upper water gets us to Dockett before they close that as well.”

“You just said the gate was chained.”

“I showed you what I brought to the meeting.”

Mara looked at the bolt cutters.

“Those chains may be an offence to interfere with.”

“They’re an offence to look at.”

Kit had gone back aboard. She returned with the bicycle from the roof and set it upside down on the towpath. The rear wheel still turned. Its chain was orange but intact.

“Your boat’s got a tow?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“Mr Vale’s hasn’t.”

“Correct.”

Kit began removing the chain.

Mara said, “That bicycle is on the inventory.”

“Condition?”

“Incomplete.”

“Agreed action?”

Mara watched Imani watching the chain. The girl’s face had changed for the first time—not softened, exactly, but become young with want.

“Pending,” Mara said.

Kit handed Imani the chain and the bicycle’s rear sprocket. “Depending what failed, Vale might be able to rig a hand turn on the prop shaft. Not for cruising. Enough to get round the bend.”

“You haven’t seen his gearbox.”

“No.”

“He says it’s completely buggered.”

“That’s a feeling, not a diagnosis.”

Imani put the parts in her basket. “Come and look.”

Kit glanced at Mara.

Mara looked at the boat, the severed bow rope, the engine they had been warned not to run, and the doorframe obstructing the whole of the interior. The test journey had advanced exactly no miles.

She turned to a clean page on the clipboard and wrote:

1. Assist disabled vessel.
2. Attend unauthorised meeting.
3. Recover water.
4. Depart.

“How far is Grady’s bend?” she asked.

“Two miles.”

“Walking miles?”

Imani mounted the bicycle. “Hand miles.”

She pushed off, one pedal knocking uselessly where the chain had been.

“What does that mean?” Mara called.

Imani did not turn around. “You’ll know when you’ve done them.”

Two miles later Mara had learned that a hand mile was the distance a person could tow a dead boat before changing hands, except there was no boat, they were walking, and Imani had probably invented it to stop questions.

Grady’s bend announced itself by a queue of roofs above the hawthorn. First came a chimney, then a yellow watering can, then the wooden ears of a carved rabbit. The canal turned hard around a brick warehouse and narrowed to the width of a bad decision.

Mr Vale’s boat, Dorothy, had made the decision sideways.

Its bow rested in reeds on the inside of the bend. Its stern lay against the opposite wall. Between them, fifty-eight feet of green steel denied the existence of travel.

An old man in a white vest stood in the engine hole holding a kettle.

“You brought engineers,” he said to Imani.

“I brought beneficiaries.”

Kit jumped aboard. “What happened?”

“Gearbox.”

“What did it do?”

“Stopped.”

“What noise?”

“The stopping sort.”

Behind Dorothy, another narrowboat nudged the mud. It was shorter and painted the purple of cough medicine. Two women were on its roof feeding a rope through a pulley fixed to an ash tree. One wore hospital scrubs. The other wore a sequinned dressing gown and held a boat pole with both hands.

“My aunt,” Imani said. “And the tow.”

The woman in scrubs waved without releasing the rope. “We found half of one.”

Mara walked to the edge. Beneath Dorothy’s stern, the water was clear enough to show the propeller sitting in brown silt. On the other side of the bend, Imani’s boat had perhaps nine inches beneath it. The towboat behind had less.

“How much water do we need?” Mara asked.

“More,” said Mr Vale.

“How much is available?”

“Less,” said Imani’s aunt.

Mara opened her folder. She had printed the canal profile in colour. The sheet showed locks as neat blue steps, each one permanently full and emotionally stable.

Kit put her head into Dorothy’s engine compartment. “Shaft’s not turning. Give me that chain.”

Imani passed it down.

“Can it move?” Mara asked.

“Anything can move,” Kit said. “The expensive question is which part.”

The chain fit around the coupling after Kit knocked the bicycle sprocket flat with Mr Vale’s kettle. Mr Vale objected to this until she pointed out that the kettle had already lost its handle in 1996.

They rigged a bar through the sprocket. Kit leaned on it. The propeller turned a quarter rotation and carved a small grave in the mud.

“Again,” said Imani.

“It’ll turn,” Kit said, “but it won’t lift the boat. You need water.”

Above the bend was a low lock with two shallow pounds feeding it. A chain crossed the top gate. Behind that gate, water sat level and black, enough to shine. Mara could hear it touching the wood.

A canal officer in a green polo shirt was securing a laminated notice to the balance beam with cable ties.

CLOSED PENDING STRUCTURAL ASSESSMENT, the notice said.

Imani raised the bolt cutters.

The officer looked at her, then at Mara’s clipboard. “Are you responsible for her?”

“No,” Mara said.

It was the first useful answer she gave him.

He explained that opening the upper paddles would drop water into the bend pound. It might float Dorothy. It would certainly lower the pound above, where three occupied boats remained. If the leaking culvert worsened, those boats could list against the bank before morning.

“How much do they need?” Mara asked.

He pointed to a white chalk line on the lock wall. “Keep above that.”

“And these boats?”

“Different problem.”

“Same water.”

“Still different problems.”

The authority had ordered him to preserve the upper pound. He had no recovery crew, no pump and no power to make Mr Vale abandon his home. He did have twelve laminated notices.

Mara took the profile sheet and began writing figures on the back. Lock dimensions. Surface areas. Estimated loss through the culvert. She asked the officer for the paddle flow rate.

“I can’t authorise a release.”

“I asked for the rate.”

He gave her three incompatible numbers, one of which was in litres per minute and two of which were gestures.

Kit climbed out of Dorothy. “Stop trying to make the water confess.”

“I am trying to determine whether we can float both boats.”

“We can’t.”

Imani had gone very still.

Mara looked from Dorothy to the purple boat. She understood, then, that everybody had allowed her to use the word both as if there were only two. Mr Vale needed water to clear the bend. Imani needed the same water left beneath her hull. The towboat needed enough to pull. Upstream, three strangers needed a chalk line not to become a wall.

“Which boat goes first?” Mara asked.

No one answered.

Mr Vale found the kettle suddenly fascinating.

Imani’s aunt climbed down from the roof. “We tow Imani out, Dorothy stays across. We float Dorothy, Imani stays behind her. Pick your stranded person.”

“I have an exam,” Imani said, with disgust, as though reporting a mild criminal record.

“You also have a boat,” her aunt said.

“I know where both are.”

Kit walked around Dorothy, pushing the pole into the mud. At the bow she struck something solid. She pushed again farther out, then waded in to her knees and felt below the water with both hands.

“There’s a ledge,” she said. “Old coping stones, maybe. Her bow’s ridden onto it.”

“If we flush her, she’ll come free,” said the officer.

“And use the whole release shoving steel uphill.” Kit looked at Mara. “Or we make her lighter.”

Mr Vale folded his arms. “No.”

Kit had not yet said what would be removed.

“This boat is my home.”

“So move out of the kitchen for ten minutes.”

They took off the gas bottles, the coal, two full water cans, the rabbit, a toolbox heavy enough to have its own weather, and forty-six jars of pickled onions. Mr Vale supervised each item onto the bank and announced its replacement value. Mara recorded none of it.

The bow rose, but not enough.

Kit pointed through the front doors. “What’s under the bed?”

Mr Vale’s silence had weight.

It was an iron bathtub.

“Dorothy liked baths,” he said.

Imani said, “Dorothy died in 2011.”

“She remains particular.”

The bath had been installed before the cabin was built around it. It would not pass through the doors. Kit looked at the window frames, then at Mr Vale.

“No,” he said again, but differently.

Mara thought of their father’s doorframe laid across the dinette, already too large for every route through the boat. She thought of Your Mother Was Right sitting on mud two miles away, requiring water that did not belong to it.

“We have a reciprocating saw,” she said.

Kit looked at her. “We have Dad’s.”

“Then fetch it.”

“That’s four hand miles.”

Mara gave her the clipboard. “You’ll know when you’ve done them.”

Kit caught up with her after half a mile.

Mara heard the uneven slap of shoes and did not turn. She had already converted the return journey into forty minutes at three miles per hour, plus four minutes to locate the saw, plus an unknown quantity for finding the correct blade. The unknown quantity was offending her personally.

“You gave me the clipboard,” Kit said.

“Yes.”

“You walked off with the boat key.”

Mara stopped.

Kit held out the clipboard. “We can each be impractical for one trip.”

They walked together. At the culvert, the feed sacks had slumped. Water licked brightly around one edge. Mara set down the folder and pushed her shoe against the sack while Kit packed handfuls of clay into the gap. The clay accepted their effort, changed shape, and continued leaking at a slightly more insulting angle.

At the mooring, the boat had settled another fraction into the mud. They climbed across the roof because the doorframe blocked the corridor and found their father’s saw beneath the bed, in a case labelled PLUMBING / VIOLENCE. There were six blades. Four were for wood. One had no teeth. The last was marked CAST IRON in their father’s handwriting and had already been used enough to suggest either experience or optimism.

Mara took that one.

Kit took the saw.

On the return walk they changed hands at the culvert, the railway bridge and a dead badger. By Grady’s bend the saw weighed as much as a small informed child.

Nothing had improved while they were gone.

The canal officer had attached a second notice to the first. Mr Vale had put the coal, rabbit and pickled onions back aboard Dorothy. Imani sat on the balance beam with her examination folder open on her knees. Her aunt was testing her on renal function while holding the tow rope.

“Kidneys maintain fluid balance,” Imani said. “Unlike some public bodies.”

The officer said, “I heard that.”

“It may be on the exam.”

Kit set the saw case on Dorothy’s roof. Mr Vale looked at it as if they had returned carrying a priest.

“I didn’t agree,” he said.

“No,” Mara said. “You didn’t.”

She had expected Kit to argue. Instead Kit opened the case, fitted the blade and laid the saw beside the hatch. Then she climbed back onto the towpath.

Mr Vale looked from the saw to all the people who were carefully not looking at him.

“How much lighter?” he asked.

Kit pushed the boat pole down beside the bow. “Maybe three inches. Maybe we cut it and still have a bath in a stuck boat.”

“Could take the stove.”

“Could. Less weight, more work, and you freeze in October instead of standing up to wash.”

“The engine?”

“Then you own a floating shed exactly where nobody can pass it.”

Mr Vale went inside. Through the open doors they heard cupboard latches, a kettle lid and one long metallic complaint. He returned carrying a pink bar of soap furred white at the edges.

“Dorothy bought the bath in Stourport,” he said. “Said boats were designed by men who believed women could be folded.”

Nobody offered the sentence that usually followed a dead person’s name. The canal tapped the hull.

Mr Vale put the soap in his pocket. “Cut it lengthways. I want the feet.”

The bath occupied almost the whole rear cabin. Its enamel was the pale green of an institution that had once promised sea air. Blue flowers had been painted around the rim. Kit knelt inside it with the saw while Mr Vale held a wet towel against the first cut.

The blade screamed.

Every bird left the warehouse roof at once. The officer covered his ears. On the towpath, the carved rabbit fell over for the second time that day.

The cut advanced the width of a fingernail and stopped.

Kit released the trigger. “Blade’s gone.”

“We only had one?” Mara asked.

“We had one labelled for it.”

Mr Vale leaned into the cabin. “Your father label it?”

“Yes.”

“Then it may mean he intended to buy one.”

They examined the five remaining blades. The toothless one was not toothless; it was edged with black grit. Its printing had worn away. Kit fitted it and tried the foot of the bath. This time the sound was lower, like a tram braking underground. A red seam appeared in the iron.

It took an hour.

They cut the bath into three pieces because two would not turn through the cabin door. The painted flowers separated at their stems. Mr Vale carried out the first footed section himself, arms shaking, and lowered it beside the jars. He did not permit anyone to help with the second. The middle section stayed on the cabin floor because it contained no flowers and everybody was tired of honour.

Dorothy’s bow rose clear of the coping by half an inch.

Kit poled it. The boat rocked and settled back.

“Half a release,” she said.

The officer shook his head. “I can give you four minutes. That keeps the upper pound above the line on the calculation we have.”

“Whose calculation?” Mara asked.

“The one I’m authorised to have.”

Above the lock, an engine started. A woman in a red cardigan stood on the stern of the nearest boat, watching them. The water already showed a dark stripe beneath her hull.

“Four minutes,” Mr Vale said.

Imani’s aunt tightened the tow rope. Kit and Mara took positions on Dorothy’s bow line. Imani closed her folder and put both hands on the purple boat’s cabin rope. Mr Vale went to the improvised bicycle sprocket at the prop shaft.

The officer lifted the paddle.

Water did not arrive as a wave. It arrived as a number of small betrayals: reeds bending, mud vanishing, a bottle turning in place. The line in Mara’s hands tightened. Dorothy shifted an inch along the stone and stopped.

“Turn it!” Kit shouted.

Mr Vale hauled the bar. The propeller bit. The bicycle chain snapped, whipped the engine boards and disappeared into the bilge.

Imani made a sound Mara had not heard from her before.

At three minutes the bow slid off the coping. Dorothy swung with all the grace of a wardrobe falling downstairs. Kit paid out the rope. Mara did not. The line burned through her palm, and for one stupid second she tried to win against fifty-eight feet of steel.

“Let go!” Kit shouted.

Mara let go.

Dorothy struck the warehouse wall, straightened, and drifted through the bend. The channel opened behind it.

“Paddle down,” the officer called.

Imani’s aunt started the towboat. Its propeller churned black soup. The purple boat moved half its length before its stern dropped onto the mud.

The paddle closed.

Above the lock, the woman in the red cardigan shouted that her kitchen had tilted. A cupboard door swung open behind her and three plates fell out, one after another. They heard each plate break.

Below, Imani’s boat remained across the channel, no longer trapped by Dorothy and no longer afloat enough to tow.

Mr Vale stepped from his moving boat onto the bank and nearly fell. “Open it again.”

The officer locked the mechanism.

“Two minutes,” Mr Vale said. “One.”

“The upper boats are at the line.”

“We took the bath out.”

“And the water moved your boat.”

Mr Vale looked at the three green pieces on the towpath. The logic appeared to him not as logic but as theft with good grammar.

Imani’s aunt killed the engine. In the sudden quiet, Mara could hear water escaping somewhere it had not been assigned.

“You can still get to the exam,” her aunt said.

Imani looked at the chainless red bicycle, then at her boat. “That isn’t the same as getting us through.”

“No.”

The woman in the cardigan came down the lock carrying the three broken plates in a washing-up bowl. She placed them beside the bath sections.

“For the inventory,” she told Mara.

Mara’s palm had opened in two bright lines. She wrapped it with the first page of TRANSIT OPTIONS until the colours bled.

On the bank lay a bathtub, a bicycle chain somewhere under an engine, three plates, and four plans which had all worked except for the people in them.

“What happens to Dorothy now?” she asked.

Mr Vale watched his boat drift slowly toward the next shallow pound. “We bow-haul her to Dockett.”

“How far?”

“Three miles.”

Imani picked up her examination folder. “Hand miles,” she said.

This time nobody asked what she meant.

They found the harness in Dorothy’s front locker. It was made from a car seatbelt, two flour sacks and an optimism which had gone grey with mildew.

Mr Vale put it over his shoulders.

“No,” Kit said.

“I have hauled this boat before.”

“When?”

“Nineteen eighty-seven.”

“Then you’ve had a lovely long rest.”

The towpath narrowed beyond the warehouse. Brambles took one side and the canal took the other, leaving a strip of cracked earth with opinions about every ankle. Kit tested the towline, which ran from Dorothy’s bow through the harness and back to a short line she could hold as a brake.

Mara picked up the loose strap with her uninjured hand.

Kit looked at the paper wrapped around the other one. “You’re not pulling.”

“It’s superficial.”

“It’s a palm.”

“I’m aware of the location.”

Mr Vale climbed aboard to steer. His boat had cleared the bend but not the consequences. The bed stood on its side in the rear cabin. Green fragments of bath covered the dinette. The carved rabbit occupied the roof with the solemnity of an insurance assessor.

Imani’s aunt brought the purple boat against the bank. “Imani. Road. Now.”

“I can get Dorothy to the bridge first.”

“You can get half a nursing qualification if you stop volunteering for every object heavier than you.”

“It’s biology.”

“Then you can get half a biology qualification.”

Imani looked at the harness. She looked at her own boat resting in mud, then at the red bicycle without its chain. There were several ways to leave and none in which the thing she left came with her.

Mara said, “The bus from Dockett is at seven twelve.”

Everyone looked at her.

“The route map was in the stoppage pack.”

“The bus won’t take the bike,” Imani said.

“It has a front rack for two bicycles.”

“No chain.”

“It remains a bicycle for the purposes of the rack.”

Imani’s aunt smiled at Mara. It was the first expression anyone had given her all day that contained no request for water.

“Dockett, then,” she said. “You haul. She rides.”

“I can’t ride it.”

“You can coast the downhill parts and resent the rest.”

Imani put the examination folder into the bicycle basket. “If I miss it, they let me sit in November.”

“Do you want to sit in November?” Kit asked.

“That isn’t relevant.”

“It’s extremely relevant. It may be the only relevant bit.”

Imani stared at her. “No.”

“Right. Dockett.”

Kit put on the harness. The towline rose from the boat to her shoulders. Mr Vale took the tiller. Mara walked beside Kit holding nothing, which immediately became intolerable.

They leaned forward.

For several seconds Dorothy remained where she was and the world stretched around the rope. Then the bow moved. Mud released the hull with a private, digestive sound. The rabbit nodded.

They advanced at less than walking pace. Mr Vale steered by pushing the stern away from reeds with a pole. Imani walked the bicycle. Mara walked between them, her wrapped hand raised like a small surrender.

At the first bend, Kit stopped.

“Change,” she said.

“You’ve done perhaps two hundred metres,” Mara said.

“Congratulations on measuring pain.”

Mr Vale came off the boat and took the harness before anyone could stop him. It hung low on his chest. He leaned until his body made an angle no standing person should make. Dorothy moved because the rope gave her no dignified alternative.

Mara watched his shoes slide in the dust.

“Mr Vale—”

“Steer.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Neither does the boat. You’ll have something in common.”

She stepped aboard.

The tiller was warm from his hand. Ahead, the canal appeared broad enough. From the stern it became a corridor of imminent collisions. Mara moved the tiller left. The boat’s bow went right, after considering the proposal for several seconds. She corrected. The bow continued right with renewed conviction.

“Small movements,” Kit called.

“I made a small movement.”

“Then stop making six more to explain it.”

Mara held still. Dorothy straightened.

There was no place on the clipboard for the discovery that a boat obeyed the decision you had made before the one you regretted.

At the culvert, the towpath had softened to black paste. Water spread through the grass in a bright fan. The flour-sack harness pulled Mr Vale sideways. His foot went into the leak up to the ankle.

He swore and kept pulling.

“Stop,” Imani said.

“We lose the movement if I stop.”

“You lose a shoe if you don’t.”

The shoe came off in the mud. Mr Vale took two further steps in one sock before Dorothy slowed and settled against the bank.

Kit went back for the shoe. When she pulled it free, water filled the hole.

The feed sacks in the culvert mouth had collapsed completely. Their clay had washed into a pale tongue downstream. All forty-three jerrycans, plus the terrier, had become an anecdote.

Imani set down the bicycle. “If we repack it now—”

“No,” said her aunt from behind them.

She had followed with the towboat as far as the mud allowed. Now she stood on its bow holding Imani’s bag and a clean white shirt.

“The leak will still be here after the exam.”

“It’ll be bigger.”

“Yes.”

“The lower pound will go.”

“Yes.”

Imani waited for the third answer, the one that turned yes into permission. Her aunt did not give it.

Mara looked at the water escaping under the hedge. It was not a sudden emergency. That was what made it powerful. It could consume every available person forever in quantities just below rescue.

“The bus,” she said, “does not wait for canal infrastructure.”

“Nothing waits for canal infrastructure,” Imani said.

But she took the shirt.

They made a changing room from the open doors of Dorothy. Mr Vale stood in the mud in one shoe, guarding a blanket. Kit turned the bicycle upside down and adjusted the rear brake so the wheel no longer rubbed. Mara tried to unwrap her hand and was prevented by three people at once.

Imani emerged in the white shirt and school trousers, the volunteer vest folded into her basket. Without the yellow vest she looked less like the person in charge and more like the person everybody had allowed to be in charge because she was already doing it.

“Dockett is mostly downhill after the railway bridge,” Mr Vale said.

“You said you haven’t been there since eighty-seven.”

“Hills are dependable.”

“They built the bypass.”

“Then avoid that.”

Imani mounted the bicycle. One pedal drove nothing. She pushed with her foot and rolled three yards.

“My boat,” she said to her aunt.

“I’ll stay.”

“The stern line chafes.”

“I know.”

“The water tank’s nearly empty.”

“I know.”

“The exam finishes at eleven thirty.”

Her aunt nodded. “That I didn’t know.”

Imani looked as if this small new fact had betrayed them both. Then she pushed off. She coasted down the towpath with one foot held out, examination folder rattling in the basket. At the railway bridge she disappeared under the arch and did not turn around.

For a while they listened to the useless pedal knocking against the frame. The sound grew quicker as the ground fell, then stopped.

Mara took the harness from Mr Vale.

Kit said, “No.”

“I can use my shoulder.”

“You can steer.”

“I have steered.”

“You’ve begun learning to steer.”

“That is not a distinction you applied to yourself.”

Mr Vale, still in one sock, climbed aboard. “Let her pull.”

Kit looked at Mara’s hand. “Why?”

“Because she wants the pain to count as helping.”

Mara disliked him with an accuracy that felt almost restful.

She put the harness over one shoulder, keeping the strap clear of her palm. Kit shortened it and added a second loop around her waist. When Mara leaned forward, the weight arrived not as fifty-eight feet of boat but as a refusal in the middle of her body.

She took one step. Then another.

Behind her, water leaked from the pound they could not save. Ahead, Imani was leaving the boats in order to become someone who might return to them. Dorothy carried three pieces of bath, a dead woman’s soap and an old man who had briefly mistaken sacrifice for credit.

Mara pulled until her uninjured hand hurt more than the injured one.

At the next bend Kit said, “Change.”

Mara released the harness.

“How far?” she asked.

Kit looked back at the railway bridge, already hidden by hawthorn.

“One,” she said.

“One what?”

“Hand.”

It was an insult to every system of measurement Mara respected.

She accepted it.

Dockett announced itself with a garden centre, a church spire and a handwritten sign saying NO WATER BEYOND LOCK 14, amended beneath in another hand: NO WATER THIS SIDE EITHER.

The lock gates stood open on an empty chamber. Shopping trolleys lay on the bottom in attitudes of exhausted conversation. Above them, three boats waited in the pound with their sterns tied to trees and their bows pointing uphill, as if the canal had become too steep.

Kit and Mara brought Dorothy alongside the service quay by making the last hundred yards in changes of twenty paces. Mr Vale steered. Mara counted the changes until Kit noticed and began calling them colours instead.

“Blue,” Kit said, dropping the harness.

“You said blue two changes ago.”

“That was navy.”

“There is no operational difference between blue and navy.”

“Tell that to the theatre’s costume department and be found in several hampers.”

At the quay, a woman in orange waders was bolting steel mesh over the lock controls. Her waders were dry. This seemed boastful.

“Transit office?” Mara asked.

The woman pointed to a portable cabin behind the bins. “Closed.”

“It’s half past four.”

“Then it’s been closed for half an hour with unusual precision.”

“We need the status of the closure.”

“Closed.”

“The canal.”

“Also closed.”

Mara took out the remains of the stoppage pack. Its first page was still around her hand, now strengthened by dried blood and printer ink. “The notice says navigation will be suspended at eighteen hundred tomorrow.”

The woman in waders looked at Dorothy, at Mr Vale’s single shoe, and at the rabbit on the roof.

“Navigation,” she said, “is doing a lot of work in that sentence.”

Kit climbed onto the quay. “Can anything get through?”

“If anything gets through, I have to write a report about why the gates moved after we isolated them. So decide how much you want me to know.”

She went back to the mesh.

Inside the portable cabin, a sheet had been taped to the window. Mara read it twice. The first reading produced facts. The second produced consequences.

Lock 14 would be chained at noon. The lower flight had enough water for one supervised convoy if the boats assembled by eight. No craft would be admitted from the Grady pound after seven thirty. Owners of stranded craft should arrange secure mooring and remove valuables.

At the bottom, somebody had added in biro: CONVOY FULL.

Mara looked through the glass at the desk. A booking sheet lay beside a mug. Twelve boxes contained twelve boat names.

Kit read over her shoulder. “We can ask.”

“It’s full.”

“We can still ask.”

“What would asking change?”

“Possibly the answer.”

“That isn’t how capacity works.”

Mr Vale had come up behind them without his shoe. “Put Dorothy in my space.”

Mara turned. “You have a space?”

“Number eleven.”

“Since when?”

“Tuesday.”

“You knew there was a convoy.”

“I knew there might be a convoy.”

“You said we were hauling to Dockett.”

“And here is Dockett, exactly where I represented it.”

Kit leaned close to the window. Beside number eleven, in small capital letters, was DOROTHY VALE.

“Your wife?” she asked.

Mr Vale removed the tobacco tin from his pocket and opened it, although there was no tobacco in it. “The boat had the name first.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“No.”

Mara found that the harness had left a red stripe across her blouse. She pressed it with her wrapped hand. “Our boat is still above Grady’s bend.”

“I had observed its absence.”

“If Dorothy takes the slot, they chain the lock before we can bring ours here.”

“Yes.”

“You knew that.”

Mr Vale closed the tin. “I knew it more recently than you imagine.”

Kit walked back to the canal. On the opposite bank, the three waiting boats had washing strung between their chimneys. One displayed a child’s red jumper. The second displayed twelve identical black socks. The third displayed nothing, but its owner had tied laminated notices to every tree forbidding other boats to display washing.

Mara followed her.

“We could leave now,” Mara said. “Walk back. Start at first light. If we get Your Mother Was Right off the mud by six—”

“With what water?”

“The culvert feed.”

“The feed that was leaving through the field?”

“We could repair it.”

“With Imani sitting an exam and her aunt guarding a purple boat.”

“We have the chain.”

“The chain is under Mr Vale’s engine.”

“We have the saw.”

Kit looked at her. “Do you hear yourself collecting nouns?”

Mara looked away first.

On the service quay, Mr Vale was carrying pieces of his bathtub off the boat. He stacked them beside the bins: one curved side, the base with four cream feet, and the section Kit had cut into the shape of a country nobody could name. The rabbit came next. Then the mattress, doubled over his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Kit asked.

“Removing valuables.”

“The notice means if the boat is stranded.”

“All boats are stranded. Some have paperwork.”

He laid the mattress on the quay and returned for the bed frame.

Mara said, “If you give up the convoy space, what happens to you?”

Mr Vale did not answer until he had got the frame halfway through the cabin door and become wedged with it.

“My daughter has a drive,” he said from behind the brass rails.

“A driveway?”

“A drive. A hard standing. A rectangle beside the garage upon which she believes I can place the boat.”

“Can you?” Kit asked.

“No.”

“Does she know?”

“She owns a tape measure.”

Kit took one end of the frame and rotated it. Mr Vale came free.

“When does she expect you?” Mara asked.

“Yesterday.”

There were several answers available to a deputy principal when a person had failed to arrive somewhere. Mara had used all of them on children, parents and once a governor who had gone to the wrong school. None survived contact with Mr Vale carrying half a bed down a gangplank.

He set it beside the bath.

“Take the slot,” he said.

“We can’t get our boat here in time,” Mara said.

“Then fail quickly. It leaves the morning free.”

Kit laughed. It was not kind, but it helped.

The woman in orange waders finished fastening the mesh and locked the portable cabin. She was close enough now to have overheard everything and professional enough to show it only by tightening one glove.

“Seven thirty means seven thirty,” she said.

“If a named boat changes?” Mara asked.

“The office opens at six.”

“And if the substitute arrives?”

“The office opens at six.”

“Is that permission?”

“It is the opening time of the office.”

She handed Mara a key.

It was small, brass and labelled WINCH STORE.

“I haven’t given you that,” she said. “It was missing when I checked.”

“Where is the winch store?”

The woman nodded toward a brick shed at the end of the quay. “Also missing.”

Then she walked away in her immaculate waders.

Kit watched her go. “I like Dockett.”

Mara held the key in her paper hand. Beyond the dry chamber, the lower canal showed a narrow strip of water reflecting evening sky. Behind them were three hand miles, a leaking culvert, a grounded purple boat and their father’s boat with one childhood mark already gone.

Mr Vale sat on the cast-iron foot of his bath to put his rescued shoe back on.

“What’s in the store?” Mara asked.

“A winch, probably,” Kit said.

“I understand the naming convention.”

“Then you’re learning.”

The store contained a winch, but only in the sense that a dismantled horse contains a journey.

There was a drum the size of a dustbin, two iron handles, a coil of wire rope and six timber legs stacked against the wall. A laminated instruction card hung from a nail. Its diagrams had faded to pale blue ghosts. Every human figure in them wore a hard hat and possessed the same confident triangular body.

Kit lifted the drum by one handle and set it down again.

“How much does it weigh?” Mara asked.

“More than the bath.”

“Useful units, at last.”

Mr Vale appeared in the doorway carrying the rabbit under one arm. “You’ll want the sheerlegs.”

“The what?”

“The timber.”

“There are six.”

“Then you’ll want the sixlegs.”

Kit examined the ends. Three timbers had steel shoes. The other three were braces, drilled at intervals and painted with numbers which did not agree between sides. “It needs a fixed point.”

“The ground is mostly fixed,” Mara said.

“The boat isn’t on the ground. It is in the ground.”

They loaded the drum, rope and three longest timbers onto a flat handcart. The other parts did not fit until Kit removed the cart’s sides, at which point the parts fitted and the cart became less certain of its profession.

Mr Vale put the rabbit on top.

“No,” Mara said.

“He is a counterweight.”

“He is papier-mâché.”

“Then he is an economical counterweight.”

They left him.

At the edge of Dockett, Kit stopped beside a red telephone box whose telephone had been replaced by a village defibrillator. The evening light made the canal look fuller than it was.

“We cut the rear doors,” she said.

Mara took another step before the sentence caught her.

“No.”

“We need a bed for the winch. Something broad enough not to sink into the towpath and strong enough to bolt through.”

“Use the cart.”

“The cart is going back to the store.”

“The doors are original.”

“They are plywood.”

“Dad made them.”

“Dad made them after reversing into the water point with the old ones open.”

Mara gripped the cart handle. Her paper bandage had softened with sweat. “We have the chain.”

“Chain pulls. It does not make ground.”

“Use a cupboard door.”

“The cupboard doors are school desks. They are narrow and full of screws.”

“You always choose the part I say not to choose.”

Kit stood very still. “You haven’t said not to choose anything until after I choose it.”

A car passed on the lane. Its driver slowed to inspect two women arguing over an industrial winch, then accelerated with the relief of a person whose evening had become simpler by comparison.

Mara looked back toward Dockett. Dorothy was hidden beyond the bend, but its displaced contents stood in a neat line on the quay: bath, bed, rabbit, mattress. Mr Vale had given each object up twice, first from its place and then from its future.

“The doors,” Mara said. “Only if we need them.”

“We need them now. Cutting them at the boat costs us half an hour.”

“Then we’ll spend half an hour.”

Kit took the cart again. “That is a very expensive way to postpone being right.”

They walked in silence until the lane became towpath and the towpath became a rim of cracked earth above the pound.

The culvert crew had gone. Someone had planted their spades upright in the leak as if the field contained four very narrow graves. Water still slipped around the metal and vanished under the nettles. In the purple boat’s doorway, Imani’s aunt sat with a camping lantern and a paperback held close to her face.

“You missed her,” she called.

“Imani?” Mara asked.

“She came back. Left again.”

“Did she pass?”

“She came back.”

This appeared to be the available answer.

The aunt pointed with the book. Imani had left a length of chalk line tied around the nearest spade. It ran across the towpath, through the hedge and down toward the next bend.

Kit followed it. “What’s this?”

“Something she saw when she stopped looking at the questions.”

The line ended at an old drainage pipe half buried in the bank. A trickle entered the canal below it, so thin it could not have filled a kettle before morning. Beside the pipe, written in chalk on a stone, was: NOT ENOUGH WATER. ENOUGH MUD.

Mara read it aloud.

Kit looked along the bank toward Your Mother Was Right. “She’s marked the soft route.”

“For the boat?”

“For us.”

They left the cart by the purple boat and carried the gear along Imani’s line. The winch drum required both of them. Its handles bit into Mara’s palms through the paper. Each time they put it down, it settled farther into the towpath than seemed reasonable for an object that had only just arrived.

At the final bend their boat appeared in the dusk, listing slightly toward the reeds. The height-mark frame showed pale through the stern window. From this distance the childhood lines looked less like years than damage from a small, persistent animal.

Kit went aboard and opened both rear doors.

Mara climbed after her. “Wait.”

“I am waiting.”

“With the saw in your hand.”

“It makes the waiting credible.”

They tested the chain around the stern dolly. They laid the cart sides under the winch. They tried the six legs in four configurations, two of which resembled a gallows and one a table designed by enemies. The ground took every foot and gave nothing back. When Kit tightened the wire rope, the whole assembly leaned toward the boat.

“Stop,” Mara said.

Kit stopped. The drum sank another inch.

They tried the cupboard doors. One split at the old screw holes. The other carried a label in their father’s hand: TEA / THINGS WHICH BECOME TEA. Kit turned it over and put it back.

Dark collected first inside the boat.

Mara unhooked the rear doors. The hinges came out with a screwdriver, not the saw. Their father had painted the inside faces yellow, the same shade as the kitchen in the house before he left it. Mara remembered him insisting it was cheerful while their mother stood on newspaper with the roller dripping from one hand.

Kit set the doors side by side on the towpath.

“We don’t have to cut them yet,” she said.

“You said the bolts need to go through.”

“They do.”

“Then do it before I decide this is a memory.”

Kit drilled four holes. The sound travelled over the empty pound. They bolted the winch across both doors, yellow faces downward in the mud, and rigged the sheerlegs above it. The wire rope ran to the stern chain at an angle along Imani’s chalk line.

Mara fitted one handle. Kit took the other.

“On three?” Mara asked.

“No. On one. Three is where people discover they meant different things.”

“One.”

They pushed.

The drum turned. The rope tightened. The doors pressed a yellow rectangle into the towpath. On the boat, a cup fell from somewhere inside and broke.

Nothing else moved.

They pushed again. Mara’s injured hand slipped and Kit caught the handle before it struck her ribs.

“Change grip.”

“I can manage.”

“You can bleed. It is not the same skill.”

Kit wrapped the old harness around the handle and Mara’s waist. Now Mara could walk her side of the circle, pulling with her body. The winch clicked once, a hard internal sound.

At the stern, mud puckered.

The boat moved less than the width of a finger.

Mara laughed.

It surprised both of them.

“Again,” she said.

From the dark behind them came the rattle of a bicycle ridden much too fast over bad ground.

Imani stopped at the edge of the chalk line. Her school shirt was untucked, and a clear plastic examination ruler protruded from her back pocket.

“You used the soft route,” she said.

“We used your soft route,” Mara said.

“No. Mine keeps going.”

Imani pointed beyond the stern. The chalk line crossed the canal bed under the boat and climbed the opposite bank toward the leaking culvert.

Kit released the handle carefully. “What’s over there?”

“The thing your chain is attached to.”

Mara looked at the stern dolly.

Imani shook her head. “Underneath.”

The sisters looked at their boat, then at each other.

“How was the exam?” Mara asked.

Imani took the ruler from her pocket. “They gave us a triangle with no measurements and asked us to prove what it was.”

“Could you?”

“It was a triangle.” She leaned her bicycle against the hedge. “Move your winch. You’re pulling the boat against the old mooring cable.”

Kit took the examination ruler and held it across the chalk line as if the canal bed might be disproved.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because Auntie’s boat caught it in May. We thought it was a root until it took the paint off.”

“May had water.”

“May was showing off.”

Imani stepped down into the pound. The mud accepted one trainer to the laces. She pulled free and tried again on the white stones she had marked. Mara fetched the camping lantern from the purple boat’s aunt, who surrendered it without looking up from her book.

The chalk route crossed behind the stern in short, pale islands. Between them lay the cracked skin of the canal. Up close, the cracks were filled with black water.

“Stay on the marks,” Imani said.

Mara stayed on the marks. Kit did not, once, and went in to her knee.

“There,” Imani said.

At first Mara saw only mud. Then the lantern caught a strand of rusted wire as thick as her thumb. It emerged from the bank, disappeared beneath Your Mother Was Right, and rose again beside the stern where the chain had sunk from sight. The boat had settled over it like a coat hung on a nail.

Kit crouched. “We could cut it.”

“With what?” Mara asked.

“The saw.”

“The wood saw?”

“It hasn’t been enjoying the wood.”

Imani scraped mud from the cable with the ruler. “If you cut this side, it will pull through.”

“And take what with it?”

Imani looked under the stern. “Paint, possibly. Rudder, if you want a memorable evening.”

Dockett’s church struck seven. The sound arrived across the fields one bell at a time, each one using up a minute they did not have.

Kit stood. “We don’t cut it. We lift the boat off.”

“With the winch we just attached to the boat?”

“We attached the rope to the boat. We can attach it to anything.”

“There is nothing else.”

“There is always something else. Usually something you said not to choose.”

Kit followed the cable to the bank. Its end vanished beneath a square of concrete left from an old mooring post. She dug around it with the examination ruler until the ruler snapped.

Imani stared at the two transparent halves.

“I needed that.”

“You’ve finished the exam.”

“I have maths again next week.”

Kit gave her the screwdriver.

They moved the winch doors across the towpath and down the marked route. Each door had to be lifted, carried, laid over the next piece of mud, then recovered from behind them. It was less a road than a pair of yellow thoughts. At the opposite bank they rebuilt the sheerlegs against the concrete block and passed the wire rope under the mooring cable.

Mara saw the shape only when Kit tightened the line.

“You’ve made a sling.”

“We lift the cable. The boat slides over it.”

“The winch is below the boat now.”

“Yes.”

“And the boat weighs—”

“More than the bath.”

“Useful units, at last.”

Kit did not smile. The nearest sheerleg had split around one of its numbered holes. When Mara put her weight on the handle, the crack opened like a mouth.

Imani wedged the broken ruler into it.

“I need that,” Kit said.

“You’ve finished the winch.”

They pushed.

The drum took up the wire. Mud sucked at the doors and the doors sank until only their unpainted edges showed. The sling tightened beneath the old cable. For a moment nothing happened. Then the cable rose from the bed, shedding black weeds and a century’s objection.

The sheerleg split through the ruler.

Kit kicked the brace inward. “Keep going.”

“It’s breaking.”

“So is seven thirty.”

Mara leaned into the harness. Pain ran from her palm to her elbow. On the opposite bank, the cable lifted another inch. Beneath the boat came a long metal scrape.

Imani was already moving. She took the loose stern line, ran along the chalk stones and threw it to Kit.

“Pull sideways,” she said. “Not forward.”

Kit caught it. “That sends us into the reeds.”

“Yes.”

“The channel is there.”

“The cable is not.”

For the first time Mara understood the whole ridiculous geometry: the boat could go where they wanted only after it went somewhere they did not. She pulled the winch handle. Kit hauled the stern line. Imani braced behind her, adding all the weight of one unfinished maths education.

The stern slewed.

Mud released it with the noise of a giant opening a jar.

Your Mother Was Right slid sideways into the reeds. Branches went through the empty rear doorway. Somewhere inside, more crockery gave up. The old cable snapped upward behind the counter and dropped free, ringing once against the hull.

The sheerleg collapsed.

Mara let go. The handle spun. Kit caught Imani by the collar and pulled her clear as the drum rolled off the buried doors and stopped against the concrete block.

For several seconds nobody moved.

Then Imani said, “Seven fourteen.”

Kit was lying in the mud, still holding her collar. “Is that the time or another triangle?”

They abandoned the winch where it lay.

The yellow doors would not come out. Mara and Kit dug until their nails filled black, but the mud had closed over the painted faces. One edge surfaced briefly, bright as a warning, then sank when they pulled.

“The office opens at six,” Mara said.

Kit sat back on her heels. “What?”

“The woman said the office opens at six. She didn’t say the winch had to be in it.”

Imani looked toward Dockett. “The lock shuts at seven thirty.”

Mara stood. “Then we return the doors later.”

They poled the boat out of the reeds. Without rear doors the cabin shone open behind them, a lit corridor exposed to the towpath. The height-mark frame stood at its far end. Every time Mara looked back, the old lines seemed to be waiting for the next thing they would agree to lose.

Kit took the bow rope. Imani took the stern. Mara stepped into the harness.

“No,” Kit said. “Your hand.”

“My hand isn’t the deadline.”

“It is attached to you.”

“Provisionally.”

They began the three hand miles to Dockett at a run.

The first hand mile belonged to Mara.

She leaned into the harness until it crossed her chest like a second set of ribs. The boat followed at the speed of a cupboard being moved upstairs. Its bow wave was a wrinkle no wider than Kit’s palm. Along the exposed stern, cups and tins migrated toward the canal.

Kit ran the towpath with the bow rope and shouted instructions that arrived behind Mara after Mara had already done the opposite.

“More left.”

“There is no left. I am a person.”

“Towpath left.”

“That is still not a direction people have.”

Behind them, Imani poled from the open cabin. The pole struck the canal bottom every third push. On the fourth it found water, and Imani went forward against the roof with the composure of someone who would arrange revenge later.

At the first bridge the towpath changed sides.

Mara stopped. The boat did not. Kit ran the rope beneath the arch, let it go, crossed the bridge and caught Imani’s thrown stern line on the far bank. For eight seconds Your Mother Was Right travelled without belonging to anybody.

It scraped the brickwork hard enough to lift a strip of green paint.

“Sorry,” Mara told it.

Kit hauled the bow clear. “Don’t apologize while it’s useful.”

The church struck the quarter hour.

“That was only one bell,” Mara said.

“It means quarter past.”

“It could mean one o’clock.”

“It is dark.”

“That is not conclusive in this country.”

They ran.

The second hand mile belonged to Kit. Mara’s fingers had closed around the harness rope and would not open again. Kit peeled them loose one at a time, put Mara aboard and stepped into the straps.

“You said your ribs,” Mara said.

“I’ve upgraded them since Grady’s.”

“With what?”

“Bath.”

Kit pulled with her whole forward-tilted body. She had the look Mara remembered from childhood competitions: not someone moving quickly, but someone trying to arrive before the rules did. Mara took the pole. The open stern made the cabin impossible to ignore. Their father’s kitchen passed by behind her whenever she turned: cupboards, shelves, the yellow absence where the doors had been, the height-mark frame lit at the end.

They passed the bicycle chain fixed into the leaking culvert. Water still hissed through the clay, escaping the arrangement everyone had made for it.

Imani slowed.

“My boat’s below there.”

“We know,” Kit said without looking back.

“Auntie’s got the stove on.”

“We know.”

The rope pulled Kit sideways as the boat nosed toward the culvert mouth. She corrected, stumbled and recovered without stopping.

Imani planted the pole. “If I stay with you, yours gets the slot.”

Mara understood before Kit did.

“If you go back, ours still gets the slot,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Mr Vale offered it.”

“Mr Vale offers things when he is frightened. Then he has to live without them.”

Kit stopped pulling. The boat drifted against the bank.

“Go,” she said.

Imani climbed onto the towpath with one muddy trainer and one foot wrapped in a plastic shopping bag. She handed Mara the pole.

“You’ll miss the lock,” Mara said.

Imani looked at the bright open rectangle of their stern. “You’ll miss something.”

She ran back toward the culvert.

The third hand mile belonged to neither sister for long.

They changed at every mooring ring. Kit pulled until her breath became a whistle; Mara pulled until the harness turned her injured hand numb. At each change the boat lost the distance they had just won. They began leaving the harness clipped and exchanging it by climbing through its straps, shoulder to shoulder, a hurried garment with two owners.

Dockett’s top gates appeared beyond the final bend.

The convoy was already inside.

Six boats filled the lock and approach pound, roofs crowded with bicycles, fuel cans, folded chairs and people who had learned not to unpack hope. The official stood on the gate beam with one hand raised. Beside her, Mr Vale held Dorothy’s centre rope.

He saw the sisters and took off his hat.

The church began striking the half hour.

“One,” Mara said.

“Don’t count,” Kit said.

The official shouted, “Which boat is that?”

Mara kept pulling. “The one you gave the winch to.”

“The winch isn’t a registration.”

“Then we’re lucky, because the registration is painted on the side.”

“Two,” said the church.

Mr Vale let go of Dorothy’s rope.

The current in the approach pound took his boat toward the open gates. He caught the rope again, but too late to keep the stern from entering the lock mouth. People on the nearest convoy boat reached out with poles and drew Dorothy alongside.

“Three.”

“We can’t put seven in,” the official called. “Not with those levels.”

Mr Vale climbed across two cabin roofs. “Take mine out.”

The nearest boater stared at him. “We’re moving.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”

“Four.”

Kit dropped the harness and ran ahead. Mara felt the tow rope go light, then saw her sister at Dorothy’s bow, climbing aboard as Mr Vale climbed off. Between them they passed without speaking. Kit took Dorothy’s rope. Mr Vale took the empty harness from the ground.

“What are you doing?” Mara called.

“Finishing his offer,” Kit said.

Mr Vale stepped into the straps. He faced the open stern of Your Mother Was Right and pulled.

“Five.”

The official came down from the gate beam. “This isn’t a substitution desk.”

“No,” Mr Vale said. “It has water.”

Dorothy entered the lock. Kit stayed at her bow, looking back over the roofs. Mr Vale brought the sisters’ boat to the waiting bollards outside.

“Six.”

The official shut the gates between them.

For a moment Kit was framed in the narrowing gap, one hand on another person’s rope. Then the gates met and she disappeared.

The paddles lifted. Water began leaving the chamber.

Mara stood on the wrong side of the lock with Mr Vale and the boat they had saved. Through the gates came the descending voices of the final convoy and, once, Kit laughing at something Mara could not hear.

“Seven,” the church said, although it had finished half a minute ago.

The official examined her clipboard. “Vale’s booking went through.”

Mr Vale removed the harness. “Good.”

“His boat went through,” Mara said. “He didn’t.”

The official looked from Dorothy’s name on the page to the roof sinking beyond the gate. “We track craft.”

“How restful.”

“There’ll be a volunteer crew here at six. If the level holds, we can send one work boat down before the closure plates go on.”

Mr Vale looked at the exposed stern, the missing doors and the height marks visible inside.

“This is not a work boat,” Mara said.

The official drew one line through VALE, DOROTHY and wrote something beneath it.

“It is if it wants the water.”

From the lower pound came a burst of engine noise. Kit would travel three locks with Dorothy before anyone could bring her back. Mr Vale had no boat on this side, no bed on the other, and a hat that had ceased to be adequate equipment.

Mara touched the harness with her good hand.

“Imani’s boat is still at the culvert,” she said.

“The purple one?” the official asked.

“Yes.”

“Won’t float on tomorrow’s level.”

Mr Vale sat on the bollard. “Then we’ll need the winch.”

Mara looked back into the dark three hand miles.

“And two yellow doors.”

Two

Kit slept in Mr Vale’s bed because there was nowhere else to put it.

The bed had travelled through Dockett lock in pieces: a metal frame lashed to Dorothy’s roof, a mattress folded against the rabbit shed, and one pillow inside a black bin bag marked NOT RUBBISH. By the second lock the mattress had unfolded itself and was trying to enter the canal. Kit climbed onto the roof to sit on it.

“You’ll go through the bridge,” called the woman on the next boat.

Kit lay flat.

The bridge went over her nose with an inch to spare. Somebody in the convoy cheered. Kit raised one hand without knowing whether she was waving or checking that she still had it.

Below, Dorothy’s cabin looked less cleared than interrupted. Pale rectangles marked the walls where Mr Vale’s shelves had been. The cast-iron bath had left four black commas on the floor. A saucer remained on the draining board, although no cup had survived its owner’s generosity.

At the second lock Kit found that the engine would move the boat forward but not backward. Mr Vale had said gearbox because old men were allowed to name a whole machine after the part that frightened them. The actual failure was a bent selector arm held to the cable by fencing wire and, lately, by optimism.

The official below Dockett had already locked the tool store. Kit repaired it with the rabbit.

The carved animal’s left ear was oak. She removed it, drilled two holes using a nail heated over the stove, and made a lever short enough to miss the deck boards. When she selected reverse, the engine gave a violent cough and Dorothy moved backwards six inches into the boat behind.

“Reverse!” called its owner.

“Confirmed,” Kit said.

She left the rabbit with one ear and no sense of proportion.

At the third lock the convoy divided. Four boats went on toward the reservoir before the midnight restriction; two tied up in the lower pound. Dorothy had no owner, no destination Kit knew, and a booking that had already been spent. She moored beside a warehouse whose broken windows reflected the canal in separate black pieces.

Her phone had no signal. It had three per cent battery and eleven messages from Mara, all unsent drafts visible only because Mara had accidentally put them in the shared probate notes.

Are you safe

Where are you

I have the keys

Mr Vale says there are spare keys under the biscuit

This is not sufficiently precise

Kit looked in the galley. There were seven biscuit tins. The first held screws. The second held biscuits and therefore seemed suspicious. Beneath the chocolate digestives was a brass key taped to the picture of a digestive.

She opened the stove, found yesterday’s ash, and understood that Mr Vale had expected to sleep here tonight. His toothbrush was in a mug by the sink. A pair of slippers waited beneath the absent bed. The boat had passed the gates because he had not.

Kit carried the mattress inside and put it on the floor over the bath marks. She could have slept on the bench. Instead she assembled the metal bed around herself, one bolt at a time, until the frame stood in the empty cabin and she was trapped beneath it.

Her phone died while she was laughing.

Three locks uphill, Mara woke at four forty-seven because rain struck her face.

She had slept across the dinette beneath the height-mark frame. With the rear doors gone, the corridor had become a weather system. Rain entered at the stern, reached the galley as mist, and condensed on the folder containing the boat’s insurance schedule.

Mr Vale was awake on the towpath in a deckchair borrowed from the official. He had covered his white vest with a canal-authority fleece three sizes too small. Across the back it said A FUTURE IN WATER.

“Good news,” he said. “Water.”

The rain was too light to alter a pound and heavy enough to damage paper. Mara shut the folder.

At five, Imani arrived on the chainless bicycle. Her aunt rode behind her on a second bicycle and carried the camping lantern in one hand. Neither had brought the purple boat.

“The culvert dropped another inch,” Imani said. “Auntie says leave it.”

Her aunt parked the bicycle against the lock office. “I said leave everything that won’t float. She has edited me for drama.”

“The winch will lift it.”

“The winch will lift a cable. Boats are larger than cables because of commerce.”

Imani ignored her and looked into Your Mother Was Right. “You need doors.”

“We need to recover the authority’s winch,” Mara said.

“You need the doors to recover the winch.”

Mr Vale stood. “We could use the shelf.”

“No,” Mara said.

The answer came so quickly that everyone looked toward the far end of the cabin. The frame crossed the dinette like a barrier at a border no country recognised.

Imani’s aunt stepped aboard. She touched the rotted foot, then the varnished marks above it.

“It is already not a door,” she said.

“It is not a winch bed either.”

“Strong opinion for a shelf.”

The volunteer crew arrived at five twenty in a white van. There were three of them: the official from the night before, a man carrying closure plates, and a woman named Sal who examined boats by striking them with the wooden handle of a lump hammer.

Sal struck the exposed stern. “Work boat needs deck space.”

“It has an entire roof,” Mara said.

“Roof’s for crew. Deck’s for kit.”

“There was deck space yesterday.”

“Yesterday it was a leisure boat.”

“It was not leisurely.”

Sal climbed aboard and opened the first cupboard. Tea fell out. She opened the second. Six tins of peaches fell out.

“Clear the stern cabin to the bulkhead,” she said. “Plates, pump, ropes, two crew. Anything loose comes off.”

Mara looked at the galley their father had built into every available inch: the school-desk cupboards, the narrow shelves, the folding table whose underside he had covered with handwritten conversions because he distrusted metric when cooking. Clearing it was not moving possessions. It was removing the shapes that told the possessions where to be.

“How long?” she asked.

“Gate shuts at six. If the pound still covers the sill.”

The official checked the gauge. “It’s dropping.”

They began with the tea cupboard.

Kit had put it back after using the other door beneath the first winch attempt. Mara removed the screws. Behind the cupboard, written directly on the bulkhead in their father’s block capitals, were the words KIT SAYS THIS WALL ISN’T SQUARE.

Beneath them, in Kit’s hand: WALL DECLINES TO COMMENT.

Mara carried the cupboard onto the towpath.

Mr Vale took down the peach shelf. Imani removed the folding table. Her aunt stacked tins in the authority van while Sal loaded closure plates into the space they made. Each grey rectangle came aboard with a number painted on it and the solemnity of a headstone.

The height-mark frame remained across the dinette.

Sal measured from the open stern to the bulkhead. “That comes out.”

“It’s beyond the stern cabin,” Mara said.

“It projects fourteen inches into my pump route.”

“It can be turned.”

“Turn it.”

Four people tried. The frame caught the ceiling, the stove and Mr Vale. To turn it flat they would have to remove the lintel again. The screw at the rotten foot had swollen overnight and would not move.

Imani handed Mara the wood saw.

Mara held it without taking hold.

“Not through the marks,” Imani said.

“I know where the marks are.”

“Then you know more than the saw.”

The lock gauge dropped below its chalk line.

Mara cut the rotted foot from the frame. The blade went through sponge, then sound wood, then the lower half of MARA 6. She stopped. The pencil line ran onto the piece in her other hand by less than a finger.

“Keep that bit,” Mr Vale said.

He meant kindness. Mara put the offcut with the tins for the van.

Without its foot the frame turned. They slid it forward beneath the dinette, marks downward, and laid the pump hose over it.

At five fifty-eight Your Mother Was Right entered the lock carrying three closure plates, a pump, Sal, Imani, Mara and half of Mr Vale’s kitchen in the authority van. Mr Vale stood at the top gate wearing the future-water fleece. Imani’s aunt stood beside him with both bicycles.

“Where will you go?” Mara called.

Mr Vale looked down through the open stern at the pale spaces on the walls.

“After my boat,” he said. “Apparently it has become practical.”

The gate began to close.

Imani stepped onto the roof. “The winch is the other way.”

Mara looked at the pump hose lying across the hidden marks, then at the lower pound opening ahead.

“So is Kit,” she said.

The first closure was at Cowper’s Stop, one mile below Dockett and two locks above Dorothy.

There was no breach. There was a fisherman.

He sat on a red box at the centre of the channel, although the box was actually on the towpath and his fishing pole was what occupied the water. Its carbon sections crossed from bank to bank with the calm authority of a barrier installed by a person who had bought bait.

Sal sounded the horn.

The fisherman lifted one finger. Not the rude one. The administrative one.

“We’re closing the pound,” Sal called.

“I’ve paid for the day.”

“So have the boats.”

“They haven’t caught anything.”

Mara expected Sal to argue. Instead Sal put the engine into neutral.

“Plate One,” she said.

Imani and Mara carried the first closure plate along the roof. It was wider than Mara’s shoulders and had handles positioned for two people who agreed about speed. They did not. At the bow Imani stopped, forcing Mara’s end into the handrail.

“What?” Mara said.

“Listen.”

Beneath the engine idle came a thin mechanical knocking from downstream: three beats, a pause, then three again.

“Pump?”

“Boat.”

Around the bend, smoke lifted over the reeds.

Sal looked at the gauge board beside the stop. “Plate in. Then we investigate.”

The stop grooves had been cut into the narrows in 1911 and filled since then with stones, bottle caps and a small silver car whose wheels still turned. Mara put her arm into the brown water to clear the left groove. The cold reached her elbow. When she drew her hand out, she had the car and a black thread of oil around her wrist.

The knocking downstream stopped.

Then an engine raced hard enough to shake birds from the hedge.

Mara dropped the car.

“Kit.”

“You can’t know that,” Imani said.

“Yes, I can.”

She could. Kit had always repaired a noise by making it louder until it disclosed its location.

They lowered the plate. Its bottom edge found the grooves, descended a foot, and jammed diagonally. Water pressed through the triangular gap and turned the plate into a blade.

“Up,” Sal said.

The fisherman had reeled in and was watching them with the pleased resentment of a man whose interruption had become entertainment.

Mara and Imani hauled. The plate did not move.

“Pump it down,” Imani said.

“Pump’s for the lower culvert,” Sal said. “If we spend it here, the second stop goes dry before we can seat anything.”

Downstream, the engine raced again. A horn gave two short blasts.

Mara climbed onto the roof.

“Where are you going?”

“To see whether my sister is exploding.”

“You’re closure crew.”

“I was sister crew first.”

Sal caught the back of Mara’s raincoat before she could jump ashore. It was not an aggressive grip. It was the grip used for equipment that had begun to roll.

“If the plate lets go while we’re lifting, Imani loses a hand. If we don’t close this stop, every boat below takes the level from the culvert you’re supposed to recover. Go when it’s safe.”

Mara looked at Imani’s hands on the iron handles. One still had blue exam ink in the crease beside the thumb.

She climbed down.

They rigged a rope from the plate to the stern T-stud and eased the boat backward. The plate rose an inch and threw a sheet of water into Mara’s chest. In the groove below, something white rolled.

“There’s a bag in it,” she said.

Sal passed her the boathook. Mara pinned the bag against the masonry and pulled. It came up slowly, distended with mud, advertising a supermarket that had closed before either sister left home.

Inside were six smaller bags.

The plate dropped cleanly into place.

The fisherman applauded once. Sal restarted the engine and nudged the work boat through before the stop sealed the channel behind them. Water already began to fall on the upstream face.

“You’ve closed Mr Vale out,” Mara said.

“For four hours,” Sal said. “If he arrives before then, he’s early for tomorrow.”

The smoke came from Dorothy.

Kit stood on the counter with a saucepan in one hand. The carved rabbit sat on the roof beside her, its remaining ear blackened. Dorothy was pinned across the approach to Little Cowper lock, bow against one bank and stern against the other. Behind her waited two boats from the convoy and a man in pyjamas holding a windlass.

Relief reached Mara first. Anger caught it before she could show any.

“You’re sideways,” she called.

“I had noticed the additional landscape.”

“What did you do?”

“The repaired selector selected both directions.”

The work boat could not pass. Sal brought it alongside Dorothy’s bow, where the two hulls touched like people refusing to acknowledge a queue.

Kit looked into the stripped stern of Your Mother Was Right. Her face altered as she counted what was absent: doors, cupboards, folding table. The pump hose lay over the frame beneath the dinette.

“Where’s the kitchen?”

“Going by van.”

“Where are the marks?”

“Under the pump.”

“Why?”

“Because the pump is on top.”

Kit put down the saucepan. “Excellent. I worried there might be a reason.”

Sal stepped across to Dorothy. “Can she move?”

“Enthusiastically. Not selectively.”

“We tow her straight, put her on the lock landing, and close the lower stop before the pound drops.”

“The gearbox cable—”

“Can be repaired when she isn’t the width of the canal.”

Kit looked at Mara. “Mr Vale?”

“Coming after you.”

“On what?”

“Hope and two bicycles.”

“He left the keys under the biscuits.”

“I know. He told me.”

“You had signal?”

“No.”

“Then how—”

“He told me yesterday, Kit.”

The sentence was ordinary. It struck with an old accuracy. Kit turned toward the empty cabin. Mara had been there for a conversation. Kit had been inside the engine.

Imani was already making a tow bridle. “We need your rabbit ear.”

“It is currently a selector arm.”

“We need a pin for the shackle.”

“It took me an hour to make.”

“The closure takes forty minutes,” Sal said.

Kit picked up the rabbit. Without the carved ear it would no longer be a rabbit, only a wooden animal surprised by speed.

Mara said, “Use the height-mark offcut.”

Everyone looked at her.

“The rotten piece?” Kit said.

“The top inch is sound. Mr Vale put it in the van.”

“The van is above the stop plate.”

“So is Mr Vale,” Imani said.

Downstream, the level marker at Little Cowper gave a wet click and exposed another white line.

Kit pulled the oak ear from the selector linkage. She pushed it through the shackle and hammered it home with the saucepan.

“You owe me a rabbit,” she said.

Mara took the towline. “We own half each.”

“That is not how ears work.”

The work boat pulled. Dorothy’s bow came away from the bank while her engine, still engaged in both directions, churned the pound into beige cream. Kit jumped aboard Your Mother Was Right to fend off. For one moment the sisters stood at the same exposed stern, shoulder to shoulder, with neither boat under its own control.

Then the rabbit ear sheared.

The shackle opened. The towline snapped across the water. Dorothy began turning sideways again, this time toward the open lock gate.

Kit reached for the boathook.

Mara reached for the pump.

The hose was already coupled. She kicked the coil off the frame and the height marks vanished under green rubber.

“Intake over,” Sal said.

Mara threw the metal basket into the lock. It struck the heel post, bounced, and sank with a gulp.

“That pump is not a bow thruster,” Kit said.

“Then fend.”

The diesel caught on the second pull. The hose stiffened in Mara’s hands. Water came out of the delivery nozzle with enough force to lift it from the roof and strike Dorothy across the cabin side.

Nothing happened.

The man in pyjamas lowered his windlass. “Are you washing it?”

“Not intentionally.”

“Aim at the bow,” Imani said. “Not the boat. The water beside it.”

Mara dragged the nozzle forward. It took both hands and one knee. She forced the jet into the narrowing wedge between Dorothy’s bow and the open gate. The first blast came back over her face. The second dug a white hole in the brown water.

Dorothy stopped turning.

Kit planted the boathook against the lock wall. The pole bent. For three seconds the boat appeared to consider its options.

Then it moved backward.

The waiting boats sounded their horns. Not celebration. Information delivered at volume.

“Neutral!” Sal shouted.

Kit jumped back aboard Dorothy. The engine hatch was still open and smoke climbed around her legs. She reached into it without disappearing, which meant the repair was near the top and therefore, Mara thought irrationally, safer.

“Both cables off!” Kit called. “It’ll idle.”

“Will it explode?”

“Not selectively.”

The propeller stopped. Between the pump and Kit’s boathook, Dorothy slid clear of the gate and touched the landing with the soft, expensive sound of paint being transferred.

Mara released the nozzle.

The pump continued running.

The delivery hose whipped sideways, knocked the remaining rabbit from the roof, and sent it into the lock. Imani caught the hose. Kit caught Mara by the hood. Neither caught the rabbit.

It floated once, pale back uppermost, then went through the gate.

Kit watched it enter the chamber.

“Half each,” Mara said.

“Shut up.”

Sal killed the pump.

In the quiet, water ran from the hose across the stripped stern and out through the place where the yellow doors had been. The marks on the frame reappeared one by one as Imani pulled the coil away: KIT 4, MARA 6, the sawn edge below them.

The gauge board clicked.

Sal looked at it. Then at the lock. Then at Mara.

“How much?” Mara asked.

“Nine inches.”

“Of the pound?”

“Of the hour.”

The first waiting boat came alongside. The steerer was a woman with silver hair tied at the crown of her head and a red line of sleep across one cheek. She did not look at Dorothy. She looked at the water running from the work boat.

“You pumping through?” she asked.

“We had to move an obstruction,” Sal said.

“You said the lower culvert would have a full head.”

“It did.”

“That’s my garden below it.”

Mara had not been present for whatever Sal had promised this woman. She waited for Sal to explain that Dorothy had nearly entered the lock sideways, that two people might have been crushed, that the pump had been used for less than a minute. Sal did not.

The woman brought her boat into the lock. “My tomatoes don’t care what was in the way.”

Kit stepped down onto the landing. “It was me.”

“Were you growing there?”

“No.”

“Then it wasn’t.”

The lock gates closed between them.

Mara began recoiling the delivery hose. Her hands made each loop too small and the next one too large. Kit came to the edge of the landing but did not step across.

“Your pump sent my rabbit into the lock,” she said.

“Your boat spent her tomatoes.”

“My boat didn’t start the pump.”

“It started in both directions.”

“That was a repair.”

“It was a wrong repair.”

Kit looked at her. Mara felt the ugliness of the sentence before she knew whether it was true. Kit looked away first, toward Dorothy’s open engine hatch.

The lock below began to empty. Somewhere inside it, the rabbit would be pressing against a gate or turning in the sluice water with its one surviving ear.

Imani handed Mara the intake basket. It held three leaves, a sweet wrapper and a little black fish no longer than a finger.

The fish moved.

Mara dropped the basket into a washing-up bowl. Imani poured in the last of her drinking water. The fish righted itself and remained there, gills working, an additional task nobody had requested.

Sal tapped the exposed bottom of the gauge board. “Lower culvert now.”

“Can the pump still clear it?” Mara asked.

“The pump can clear anything. The pound can’t supply it.”

“What happens if we try?”

“We draw the landing dry before the lock refills. Those two wait here until tomorrow.”

The man in pyjamas looked at his boat. The second waiting steerer looked at the sky, as if tomorrow might be stored visibly in it.

“And if we don’t?” Kit asked.

Sal pointed beyond the lock. “The culvert stays choked. When they open the upper paddles, the water goes over the bank instead of down the cut.”

“Into the garden,” Mara said.

“Among other things.”

The silver-haired woman was rising from the lock now, climbing the ladder while her boat settled below. She had heard them.

“You spent the head saving that tub,” she said. “You can spend the boats.”

“June,” the man in pyjamas said.

“You have a toilet.”

“Not tomorrow I haven’t.”

Mara looked at Kit. Kit had grease to both elbows and a wet line across her shirt where the tow rope had struck. Their reunion had lasted eleven minutes. Already they had spent water belonging to a woman named June, lost Mr Vale’s rabbit, and discovered that the wrong repair was not made less wrong by preventing it from killing anybody.

“There is another way to feed the pump,” Imani said.

Sal shook her head immediately.

“There is,” Imani said. “The lock chamber.”

“Which is carrying June’s boat down.”

“After.”

“Then we empty the chamber twice. The second boat waits.”

“Only if we return the water to the pound.”

Mara understood before Sal answered. The pump could take from the full chamber, drive water through the blocked culvert, and discharge it below. The repair would spend the lockful.

One boat could go through.

The other could not.

The man in pyjamas and the second steerer looked at each other. Their boats were the same length. Neither contained a visible reason to matter more.

Kit said, “Which one was booked first?”

Sal’s eyes closed briefly. “That is exactly how we got Dorothy.”

Nobody answered Kit.

The second steerer was a narrow woman in a green fleece. She took her windlass from her belt and set it on the balance beam.

“I was,” she said. “Booked first.”

The man in pyjamas made a short noise through his nose.

“I was booked yesterday,” she added. “He was booked last Thursday. Different stoppage.”

“That booking was cancelled,” Sal said.

“By the canal. Not by Trevor.”

Trevor leaned over his roof rail. His pyjamas had small blue anchors on them. “I am comfortable with the record showing that I have now been defended by Denise.”

“I’m establishing that the record is useless.”

“Less comfortable.”

Mara looked from Trevor’s boat to Denise’s. Trevor had three plastic crates strapped to his roof, a bicycle without a saddle and, tied to the tiller, a supermarket bag containing what appeared to be onions. Denise had solar panels, four blue fenders and a small brass bell. If either boat carried medicine, a baby or the last breeding pair of something, it had been put away.

“What happens to the one that waits?” Mara asked.

“No pound until morning,” Sal said. “Assuming the closure above holds and nobody pumps another boat out of danger.”

Kit folded her arms.

“Sorry,” Mara said.

“No, you aren’t.”

“Not sufficiently.”

June stepped off the lock ladder. Water ran from her boots onto the landing. “My boat’s below. My garden’s below. You can apologise to either when one of them is alive.”

Sal opened the stop-plank store and took out two lengths of suction hose. “One boat in. Chamber full. Pump from chamber through the lower culvert. The boat goes down on what’s left. The other stays.”

“How much is left?” Denise asked.

“If the blockage shifts quickly, enough.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then the chosen boat sits in a dry lock and both of you stay.”

Trevor considered this. “I preferred it when the unfairness was efficient.”

Mara went to the edge. The water below was almost level with the black mouth of the culvert. Beyond the lock, June’s stern line led down the towpath and disappeared behind nettles. A line of wet earth marked where the canal had already crossed the bank once.

“We choose Denise,” Mara said.

Denise stared at her. “Why?”

Mara had expected anger from Trevor. Denise’s question was worse.

“Your boat’s nearest the chamber.”

“It isn’t.”

It was not. Trevor’s bow was half a length closer.

“Your engine is off.”

“So is his.”

“Your centre rope is already out.”

Denise looked down. It lay in a perfect coil on her roof.

Mara felt Kit watching her fail in real time.

“Because I chose you,” she said.

The four words did not improve when spoken. They only became hers in public.

Trevor nodded once. “There we are.”

“You don’t have to make it sound noble,” Mara said.

“I was making it sound located.”

Denise picked up her windlass. “If the chamber grounds me, I’m staying in it.”

“Yes.”

“And Trevor goes tomorrow.”

“If there is water.”

“There will be water,” June said. “It is currently in my beans.”

Trevor pushed away from the landing. He reversed thirty yards to the reeds without looking at any of them. The supermarket bag swung at his tiller. One onion fell through the handles and rolled along the roof until it stopped against the chimney.

Denise brought her boat in.

Its name, painted low on the bow, was Reasonable Notice.

Kit saw it at the same time as Mara and laughed once, unwillingly.

“Don’t,” Mara said.

“I didn’t name it.”

They closed the gates. Sal raised the upper paddles only far enough to fill the chamber without sending more water toward the bank. As Reasonable Notice rose, Denise stood at the tiller and watched Mara as if she intended to be able to identify her later.

The pump would not sit on the lockside. Its delivery hose was twelve feet short.

They put it on Mara and Kit’s boat.

Of course they did.

Your Mother Was Right came alongside the lower end of the chamber, naked at the stern, the pump frame strapped across the place where the cabin had been. Mara fed the intake over the lock wall. Kit held the boat against the masonry with the boathook.

“You chose Denise because she looked less likely to forgive you,” Kit said.

“No.”

“You always did that.”

“When?”

“Dad’s red mug.”

“I was nine.”

“You gave it to Mum after you cracked it because she shouted and Dad went quiet.”

“That is not choosing Denise.”

“It is choosing the person whose anger lets you finish being wrong sooner.”

Sal pulled the starter cord. The pump coughed, refused, then began to shake the stripped boat from underneath them.

Mara held the delivery hose against the culvert mouth. The jet went in and came back black. Leaves, a tennis ball and a rope of pond weed blew across the pound.

“Still blocked,” Sal said.

June stood knee-deep below the bank with a rake. Each time debris came through, she pulled it from the channel before it could settle again. She did not thank them. She worked faster than all of them.

The chamber gauge fell past six inches.

Denise called down, “How quickly is quickly?”

Nobody answered.

At nine inches the intake began making a throat noise. Kit lowered the basket. Mara leaned farther over the culvert, bracing one boot against the sawn height-mark frame.

Something struck the nozzle from inside.

“Again,” Imani said.

“It came back.”

“That means it moved.”

They pushed the jet in again. A black branch emerged, stopped, then bent around the iron grille. It was not a branch. It was a length of carpet rolled tight with roots, fishing line and two wire coat hangers.

“We need to pull it,” Mara said.

“From where?” Sal asked.

A bicycle bell rang from the reeds.

Trevor was coming along the towpath carrying his saddleless bicycle. He had removed the rear wheel. The inner tube hung over his shoulder and the brake cable was coiled in one hand.

“Booking cancelled,” he said. “Cable remains available.”

He passed it to Imani.

They threaded the brake cable through one coat hanger and made a loop. It slipped twice. On the third attempt the pump jet caught the carpet from behind while six people pulled from the bank: Sal, Imani, June, Trevor, Mara and Kit, the sisters on adjacent lengths of wet cable because neither would move aside.

The carpet came out by inches. It had once been cream. A colony of pale roots hung from it like hair.

When the last roll cleared the grille, the culvert took the pump water with a noise like a bath emptying in another room.

Below, the canal lifted against June’s boots.

She dropped the rake and ran.

The wet mark on the bank stopped rising a finger below the bean rows.

Sal killed the pump. The chamber held fourteen inches less than when they had begun.

Denise looked down at the cill marker. “Enough?”

Sal did not answer immediately. She walked the length of the chamber, looking at the stern of Reasonable Notice, then at the lower gate.

“Enough if you take everything off the roof and four of us lean on the bow.”

Trevor put the bicycle wheel down.

June came back carrying the little black fish in Imani’s washing-up bowl. She tipped it into the moving water below the lock. It vanished at once.

“That’s one,” she said. “My tomatoes are not yet fish.”

Denise began passing her fenders up.

Trevor climbed onto the balance beam to take them.

Mara looked at him. “You don’t have to help.”

“No,” he said. “I have to stay.”

He put Denise’s blue fenders beside his bicycle wheel. The distinction appeared important to him.

They took the roof off Reasonable Notice.

Not literally, although Kit began by testing one corner as if the distinction might be negotiable. They removed the plank, the chimney, the folded chairs, two bags of coal, the solar panels, the brass bell and a terracotta pot in which Denise was growing one furious rosemary plant. Trevor arranged everything along the towpath in a line.

“You don’t need to inventory it,” Denise said.

“I need to know which things I have not stolen while assisting your preferential passage.”

“You can have the bell.”

“I don’t want the bell.”

“Good. It’s not an apology.”

They opened the lower paddles by one tooth each. The water went out reluctantly. Reasonable Notice descended until its stern skeg touched the upper cill and stopped.

Sal closed the paddles.

“Bow,” she said.

Mara, Kit, Imani and Trevor climbed onto the foredeck. Denise stayed at the tiller. June remained on the bank beside her rosemary and watched the level below the gate, which had begun to move cleanly through the cleared culvert.

Four bodies at the bow lowered it perhaps an inch. The stern lifted nothing Mara could see.

“Another four,” Sal called.

There were not another four.

June stepped aboard without speaking. The boat rocked. Sal joined her. Kit took the coal bags from the bank and dropped one at Mara’s feet.

“That’s roof weight,” Denise said.

“It has changed departments.”

They moved the bags forward. Then the chairs, the panels, the rosemary, the plank, the fenders and Trevor’s bicycle wheel. The brass bell arrived last in Trevor’s hand.

“You said you didn’t want it,” Denise said.

“I don’t. It is very dense.”

The stern rose from the cill with a soft iron scrape.

“Now,” Sal said.

Denise put the engine into reverse. Nothing happened.

Into forward, Mara thought, then understood the tiller and said it aloud with everybody else.

Denise pushed forward. The propeller sent the last water back beneath the hull. For a second Reasonable Notice remained held between its own weight and the gate. Then it slipped, bow low, through the opening.

All six people on the foredeck sat down at once.

The boat entered the lower pound carrying its roof load and most of the lock crew in a heap around the rosemary. Denise rang the bell once.

Trevor stood.

“That was not forgiveness,” he said.

“No,” Denise said. “It was navigation.”

They unloaded his bicycle wheel before anything else.

By the time Reasonable Notice had its roof again, the lock chamber was wet brick around mud. Trevor reversed his boat out of the reeds and tied below the landing where morning, if it arrived with water, would find him first. Mara went to him with the words she had been arranging.

He held up one hand.

“You chose,” he said. “You said you chose. That is already more useful than a reason you found afterwards.”

“I am sorry.”

“I know. It changes none of my toilet arrangements.”

“No.”

“If the pound comes up, I go first.”

“Yes.”

“If somebody arrives in labour, I still go first.”

Mara looked at his three crates and the bag of onions. “I cannot promise that.”

“Excellent. You are recovering.”

He turned away to tie a second spring.

The closure team had to go back uphill. Four hours had become three hours and twelve minutes while they saved Dorothy, spent June’s water and passed one boat through a lock that should have carried two. Above Cowper, Mr Vale was sealed beside the borrowed winch. Somewhere farther up, the purple boat remained in reeds with no rear doors, and Mara’s own boat had become the place where machinery was put when the bank refused it.

Sal looked at the stripped stern of Your Mother Was Right.

“Pump stays,” she said.

“It came from the closure store,” Mara said.

“So did the winch.”

“The winch is above the stop plates.”

“Then your boat can collect both examples of our confidence.”

They put June ashore at her garden. The beans stood in a black fringe of silt, their lowest leaves wet but attached. She walked the rows without looking back.

Kit started the engine. Mara coiled the delivery hose across what remained of the cabin floor. Imani sat on the sawn end of the height-mark frame with the washing-up bowl between her shoes.

They travelled uphill through the reach they had just closed, alone in water reserved for work. Houses and moored boats passed behind hedges. People saw the blue board on their bow and assumed the boat contained authority.

Mara found this worse than being mistaken for competent.

At Cowper the stop plates were holding. Water pressed against their upper faces and seeped in bright threads around the rubber seals. Behind them, Mr Vale sat on the borrowed winch eating something from a paper bag.

He raised the bag when he saw them.

“Cheese straw?”

“You’re supposed to be keeping people back,” Sal said.

“I have. I kept myself back with considerable success.”

Behind him the stopped reach held seven boats nose to tail. The nearest was the wedding boat, its white ribbons grey at the ends. Beyond it Mara could see Dorothy. Kit stood up at once.

Mr Vale looked past them to the pump, then to the empty notch at Dorothy’s reverse control where his carved rabbit had been.

“Did it work?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kit said.

That was not the question he had asked, but he accepted it.

The plates could not simply be removed. The upper reach had gained three inches while they were away; the repaired lower culvert was taking water, but not fast enough to receive the whole stopped pound at once. Sal sent Imani down with a chalk and put Mara at the gauge.

“We crack the centre plate,” Sal said. “One inch. Hold until the lower mark rises two. Then another inch.”

“And the boats?” Mara asked.

“Remain boats.”

“The closure window ends in forty-eight minutes.”

“The window is for the contractor.”

“I am the contractor.”

“No. You are the person holding the number.”

They rigged the winch to the centre plate. Its cable ran over the temporary frame and across the naked stern of Your Mother Was Right. Kit checked the anchor points, then checked them again with her hand on each knot.

Mr Vale climbed down from the winch.

“I had expected to get that back before lunch.”

“We’ll return it,” Mara said.

He looked at the boat. Yellow doors gone, stern cabin gone, pump where the bed had been, childhood marks ending at a fresh saw cut.

“Of course,” he said.

Mara took her place at the gauge. Sal gave the signal. Kit engaged the winch.

The centre plate rose an inch.

Water came through black and muscular. It struck the lower face of the barrier, found the gap and became a white rope down the empty reach. The whole frame shuddered. Kit kept one hand on the brake.

“Hold,” Mara called.

Below, Imani’s chalk mark disappeared.

The plate wanted to rise. The pressure lifted it against the winch as if the reach had found a shoulder under a door.

“It’s running,” Kit said.

The brake cable was paying out one click at a time.

Mara looked at the winch bed: two planks laid across the sawn stern, already bowing. The boat had supplied the bed at Dockett and lost its doors. It could supply another bed now, but there was almost no stern left to give.

Mr Vale climbed aboard Dorothy and came back with the cast-iron bath feet they had saved when the bath went into Grady’s mud.

“I wondered why I kept these,” he said.

“Because you keep everything,” Kit said.

“No. That would be a criticism. I wondered because I wanted there to be a reason.”

They bolted the four feet beneath the winch planks as short iron props. The nearest pair stood on the cabin floor. The far pair had nowhere sound to stand.

Kit looked at the height-mark frame.

Mara put her hand over the numbers.

Not to protect them. To feel where the wood was solid.

“Below my shoulder,” she said.

Kit measured with her palm. “Your shoulder then or now?”

“Now.”

They cut two pieces from the unmarked lower rail and wedged them under the bath feet. The winch bed stopped bowing. The centre plate held.

At the gauge, the lower reach rose its second inch.

“Another,” Sal said.

Kit released one click.

Above the barrier, seven boats moved forward together by the width of a hand.

The wedding boat’s horn sounded.

It was not a complaint. Its steerer had leaned over to see the gap and pressed it with her stomach.

Nobody laughed until the centre plate rose another inch and the horn sounded again, longer and more matrimonial.

“Tell them reverse,” Sal said.

Mr Vale walked along the roofs of the seven boats, delivering the instruction one cockpit at a time. The wedding boat reversed first. Its ribbons entered the propeller wash and stood straight out. Behind it, Dorothy reversed late, then too enthusiastically, and tapped the next boat with one of her saved bathless corners.

The pressure on the plate eased. Kit took in two clicks. Imani called from below that the lower mark had risen.

They lifted the plate by inches until inches became a hand, and a hand became room enough for the water to stop behaving like an escaped animal. The seven boats separated from one another. People started engines. Exhaust lay blue over the stopped reach.

“Not yet,” Sal called.

The contractor’s window ended.

Mara watched the minute change on her phone. Somewhere an office had just become entitled to believe the canal was open. The canal remained divided by two steel plates, one half-raised, a borrowed winch, four bath feet and two pieces of her father’s boat.

Her phone rang.

She answered because it was the office.

“Cowper open?” a man asked.

“Opening.”

“Is that open?”

“No.”

There was a pause in which he consulted a category.

“Estimated?”

Mara looked at the gauge. “When the lower reach can take the upper reach.”

“I need a time.”

“Water doesn’t.”

Sal looked at her, almost approvingly.

The man said he would record twenty minutes. Mara said nothing that could become consent and ended the call.

They raised the centre plate clear. Then the bank plate, then the towpath plate. Each lift changed the pressure and required the boats above to reverse, idle or edge forward. The wedding boat came first because it was nearest, though its booking was last. Its steerer removed her veil to see beneath the temporary cable.

“You’ll have to take the decorations down,” Kit said.

“Those are the decorations we could afford.”

“The cable cannot see your budget.”

Six people lowered a wet arch of white bunting. The bride held one end and Mr Vale held the other. The wedding boat passed through the opening undecorated, received its ribbons back below, and became a wedding boat again.

Dorothy came next. Mr Vale stood at the tiller in the empty space where the bath had been. When he drew level with Your Mother Was Right, he handed Mara the cheese straw bag.

There was one cheese straw in it, broken into three pieces.

“You’ve been displaced from your home twice today,” she said.

“Three times. I had become attached to the winch.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I. Humour is not the opposite of inventory.”

Kit walked along their gunwale while Dorothy moved past. She kept her hand on Mr Vale’s cabin side until the boats separated. He did not say when he would get his booking, his rabbit or his bath back. None of those things had a useful answer.

The remaining boats passed one at a time. Each carried a version of the hours they had lost. A woman in a red fleece had missed a veterinary appointment. Two men had eaten the cake intended for a birthday at Dockett. A hire-boat family cheered because obstruction was the only part of boating they had learned to recognise.

When the last stern cleared, Trevor was still below Little Cowper beside his onions.

Sal looked at the emptied reach. “Now we can open.”

They removed the plates.

The canal took an hour to become continuous again. It did so without a ribbon, category or noise beyond the ordinary sucking at the brickwork. Water entered the grooves where the steel had been. A leaf passed through.

Mara phoned Little Cowper. June answered because Trevor did not own a phone with sufficient battery.

“Pound’s coming up,” Mara said.

“His toilet sends its regards,” June said.

“Tell him he goes first.”

“He heard. He’s standing close enough to invoice you for breath.”

When the winch was finally free, Mr Vale had already taken Dorothy downhill. Sal left the borrowed machine on Your Mother Was Right for them to return at Dockett.

“That is not on our route,” Mara said.

“It has not been a rewarding day for routes.”

The pump occupied the stern cabin. The winch occupied what had once been the bed. The cut rails, coal dust, cable grease and cheese-straw crumbs occupied everything else. Mara and Kit stood in the surviving middle six feet of their inheritance.

Imani collected her chalks.

“My aunt says our boat floated half an inch,” she said. “She says not to hurry because it may change its mind.”

“We can take you back,” Mara said.

“I know the towpath.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“I know.”

She left with the washing-up bowl tucked under one arm. At the bridge she turned and rang the bicycle bell she had taken from the reeds. Then she was gone.

Kit started the engine. The boat moved north beneath the blue closure board, carrying both machines that had been required because machines had not been enough.

They reached the reservoir notice at dusk.

CROSSING CLOSES 20:10. NO ENTRY AFTER SIGNAL.

Mara checked the time. Nineteen fifty-three.

Beyond the stop lock, the canal widened into a long sheet of hammered copper. The reservoir wind had room to acquire opinions. On the far bank, the channel narrowed again between two white posts.

A keeper was already winding the red signal board across the entrance.

“Seventeen minutes,” Mara called.

“Sixteen,” he said. “And that’s for empty boats.”

Kit looked back at the pump, the winch and the exposed stern.

“We are emotionally empty.”

“He means equipment.”

“We can make it,” Mara said.

Kit did not answer. She went below to check the bilge.

The keeper held the board halfway across while Mara signed the crossing sheet. In the box marked CARGO she wrote CLOSURE EQUIPMENT. In the box marked CONDITION OF VESSEL she began to write SERVICEABLE, saw the yellow doors missing in the keeper’s glance, and wrote AFLOAT.

“That isn’t one of the options,” he said.

“It is the condition that matters.”

He considered the water, the clock and the boat. Then he lifted the board.

They entered the reservoir at nineteen fifty-eight.

The first three minutes were easy enough to prove Mara right.

The engine held a steady note. The white posts on the far bank separated from each other by degrees. Behind them, the keeper lowered the red board and became a dark upright stroke against the copper water.

Kit came back up with the bilge torch in her teeth.

“Dry,” she said around it.

“Good.”

“That was an observation, not a forecast.”

The reservoir wind struck them broadside. With the rear cabin gone there was nothing to catch it except the blue closure board, which shuddered in its brackets and tried to turn the boat into an official weather vane. Mara increased the engine. The pump shifted half an inch across the floor.

Kit went to wedge it with the cheese-straw bag, discovered the bag’s engineering limitations and used one of the cut rails instead.

“You’re left of the posts,” she said.

“I know.”

“You’re becoming more left.”

“The wind is from the right.”

“I had suspected weather.”

Mara pushed the tiller over. The bow moved back toward the channel, slowly enough that the correction felt insulting. Their wake lengthened behind them. It was the cleanest thing the boat had made all day.

At eight minutes past eight the red signal horn sounded from the entrance.

“We’re in,” Mara said.

“It means the crossing is closing.”

“We’re already in.”

“Yes. That is the excellent part.”

Something tapped the hull under Mara’s feet.

Not struck. Tapped: a small, courteous knock from below.

Kit turned her head.

The second blow arrived beneath the stern and lifted the tiller from Mara’s hand. The boat climbed sideways onto something it could not see. For an instant the engine screamed without load. Then the propeller bit again and Your Mother Was Right slid off with a tearing sound that travelled the whole length of the floor.

The pump tipped. The winch moved six inches and stopped against the surviving cupboard.

Water came through beside the bookshelf.

It did not gush. It made a bright horizontal mouth between two planks and began speaking very quickly.

Kit was below before Mara had brought the engine to neutral. She pulled the mattress pad from the floor, folded it and put her knee against it.

“Engine off.”

“We’ll lose steerage.”

“We have gained reservoir.”

Mara killed the engine. The wind took the bow at once. The far posts began travelling sideways.

Kit shone the torch behind the fitted bookshelf. Water beaded through three screw holes, then joined the main stream. She put two fingers into the gap and felt along it.

“Long split. Plank edge has opened.”

“Can we pump?”

“The pump is for moving water between pounds.”

“It moves water.”

“It weighs more than the water currently in us and needs a hose run over the side. Hand pump first. Give me the short boards.”

They had used the short boards under the winch feet.

Kit looked at the iron bath feet, the bowed bed, the machine that belonged at Dockett, and the water spreading over the cabin floor.

“The shelf,” she said.

“No.”

“Mara.”

“We can use the cupboard doors.”

“School-desk laminate. It will split at the screws.”

“The closure board.”

“Too thin.”

“The floor.”

“Already assisting.”

Kit put the hand pump into the water and passed Mara the handle. “Keep this going.”

Then she opened their father’s fitted bookshelf.

It occupied the port wall from the stove to the old rear cabin, narrow enough for paperbacks and deep enough at the bottom for maps. He had made its uprights from the salvaged doorframe after the separation. The pencil lines ran along the inner face, protected from sun and grease: K 6, M 10, a ruled line without a name, K SHOES, M SHOES NOT FAIR, dates written in their mother’s narrow capitals and their father’s later block numbers.

Kit took the saw from beneath the step.

Mara stopped pumping.

“No.”

Water reached the heel of her boot.

Kit did not begin. She held the saw against the lowest shelf, waiting for Mara to look at the water rather than at her.

“Those came out of the house,” Mara said.

“I know.”

“He saved them.”

“I know.”

“They’re the one thing he didn’t remake.”

Kit’s expression changed—not softened, but opened in the wrong place.

“He remade them first.”

Mara pumped once. The handle made a wet cough.

“What?”

“The frame was too wide for the boat. He planed the plaster side off in the yard. Then the hinge side. Then he asked me which pencil lines were yours because the bottom six inches had rotted.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I was holding it.”

“You said you hadn’t seen him that year.”

“I said I hadn’t stayed.”

The distinction left no room in the cabin at all.

Kit turned the shelf with her free hand. On the hidden back of the upright were parallel plane marks, pale and regular. One pencil line ended at the edge of a glued insert. The handwriting continued across it in a harder graphite.

Mara touched the join.

“He copied it?”

“We copied three. Your ten, my shoes, the one Mum wouldn’t label because we were both standing on the same book.”

“You helped him fake them.”

“I helped him fit a piece of our house through a boat door.”

“You let me think—”

“You wanted untouched. He wanted grateful. Between you, there wasn’t much work left for true.”

The hand pump lost suction. Water had covered its base and was now flowing aft into the exposed stern.

Kit set the saw’s teeth against the shelf.

Mara put her hand over M 10.

Kit moved the blade below it.

“That piece is too short,” Mara said.

“Yes.”

“If you take the whole upright—”

“Yes.”

“You knew I would make you do it.”

“No. I knew the water would.”

Kit cut.

The saw jumped in the first stroke because the wood was oak and the boat was moving under them. Mara braced the frame. With every pull the pencil marks trembled against her palm. Sawdust fell into the reservoir water and became dark immediately.

They took both uprights and two shelves. Kit laid the mattress pad against the split from inside, put the longest oak piece over it and drove screws into sound ribs above and below. The copied height marks faced the hull and disappeared. The second piece went beside it. The bright mouth of water broke into several stubborn threads.

“Pump,” Kit said.

Mara pumped. The level fell enough to reveal the floorboards, the screws, and the school-desk cupboard doors they had not used.

Kit ran the delivery hose from the closure pump over the stern. They started its engine. It coughed black smoke, then began throwing their reservoir back into the reservoir in an impressive arc.

The boat had drifted almost broadside to the white posts. On the far bank, a second keeper was waving both arms in a manner too distant to contain instructions.

Mara climbed to the tiller.

“Can she move?”

“She can leak somewhere else.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“It is the condition that matters.”

Mara restarted the engine.

The propeller vibrated. The tiller pulled right, then kicked in her hand. Whatever they had struck had bent something below, but there was thrust. She brought the bow around without looking at the clock.

Kit stayed by the repair with the screwdriver pressed to the last screw. The pencil marks were gone from the cabin. Their absence was cleaner than damage.

“Far post first,” Kit called. “Then turn in.”

“I can see them.”

“You saw the timetable too.”

Mara steered past the nearer post.

The reservoir horn sounded again behind them. She did not know whether it was warning, instruction or merely a category for boats which had become a problem after entry. The far channel took hold of the bow. Reeds closed around them. The wind lost its reach.

At the emergency landing, Kit stepped off with the centre rope.

Mara kept the engine in gear until the rope came tight. Then she stopped it and listened to the pump emptying the boat beneath the place where their heights had been.

“We made the crossing,” she said.

Kit tied a second line.

“No,” she said. “We arrived on the other side.”

The keeper arrived in a white van containing three traffic cones, a dog lead without a dog and the expression of a man whose emergency landing had developed an emergency.

He looked into the cabin. The closure pump was still throwing water over the stern. Each revolution of the propeller shaft knocked once beneath the floor, as if a smaller boat were trapped under them and asking to be let out.

“You’ve bent it,” he said.

“We had narrowed that down,” Kit said.

“Could be blade. Could be shaft. You won’t know till she’s lifted.”

“Where?” Mara asked.

He pointed to a hand-painted sign beyond the hedge: BOAT LIFT — 1¼ MILES. Underneath, in newer lettering, somebody had added BY WATER.

“There.”

Kit crouched beside the repair. A thin line of water had found the bottom corner of the mattress pad and was gathering itself into drops. “She can be towed.”

“Not through Halfacre today. Pound’s six inches down and I’ve got eleven boats waiting above.”

“We brought you a pump.” Mara indicated the machine presently pumping their boat into the canal.

“You brought me my pump.”

“That seems ungrateful to grammar.”

The keeper stepped aboard and read the label wired to the winch. “And Dockett’s winch.”

“Temporarily diversified assets,” Kit said.

He examined Mara’s paperwork. The damp had joined three carbon sheets into one purple confession. The reservoir-entry form bore a thumbprint in grease where the time should have been. Under VESSEL CONDITION, somebody at Dockett had written proceeding under own power; Mara could not look at the words without feeling personally accused by the past tense.

“These have to go to Halfacre,” he said. “Keeper there needs the key set and the closure order. Radio’s out. Cable got cut when they put the new culvert in.”

“I thought Halfacre was shut.”

“It is. That’s why he needs the order saying to shut it.”

Kit sat back on her heels. “You people have achieved paperwork independent of events.”

“Events are unreliable.” He took a ring from his belt. Four iron keys hung from it, each long enough to be an implement in a less bureaucratic murder. “Towpath’s three miles. Road’s nine, with the diversion. If these get there before nine, he can start drawing the stranded boats into the side pound one at a time. Otherwise they spend the night nose to tail above the road bridge.”

Mara took the keys. Their weight pulled her injured hand open.

Kit looked up. “No.”

“You just heard him.”

“I heard him offer you a route away from this boat.”

“Someone has to stay with the repair.”

“Correct.”

“And someone has to take these.”

“Also correct. You are making the arrangement sound like weather.”

The keeper inspected the horizon with professional care. There was no weather yet, only a yellow shelf of cloud above the west bank.

Mara put the carbon forms under her jacket. “Can you keep it afloat?”

“Yes.”

“Can I?”

“You can pump.”

“The machine pumps.”

“Then you can supervise an accomplishment.”

Mara took the ignition key from the ring at her belt and held it out. Kit did not take it.

“If I stay,” Mara said, “the Halfacre boats wait.”

“If you go, you get to become useful where nobody knows what you did here.”

“That doesn’t make the boats less waiting.”

“No.” Kit stood. Her wet knees had printed two dark squares on her trousers. “It merely makes your reasons difficult to invoice.”

Mara put the ignition key on the cabin roof. Beside it she placed their father’s key, the small brass one that no longer opened anything on the boat because Kit had replaced both rear-door locks at Dockett.

Kit picked up the ignition key only.

“Check the lower screw every ten minutes,” Mara said.

“I put it in.”

“That is not the same as checking it.”

Kit looked at the blank wall where the shelf had been. “I am aware.”

Mara stepped onto the landing with the closure order, the iron keys and nothing that belonged to sleeping. The keeper gave her a fluorescent vest whose back said VOLUNTEER in cracked silver letters.

“I’m not,” she said.

“Neither was it. Came off a litter crew.”

She put it on.

The towpath left the reservoir between nettles higher than the water. After half a mile, the pump’s engine disappeared behind her. Without it, the keys were loud. They struck her thigh in four different notes and made her sound like a cutlery drawer escaping on foot.

At the first bridge she found a boat wedged diagonally beneath the arch.

It was not grounded. It had simply become too wide. A roof box had shifted sideways, catching the brick on one side, while a bicycle handlebar held the other. The steerer was an elderly woman in a transparent rain cape, although no rain had begun. A boy on the towpath held the centre rope and a violin case.

“Halfacre?” Mara called.

“We were,” the woman said. “Now we appear to be infrastructure.”

Mara looked at her watch. Eight thirty-six.

The boy said, “She won’t reverse because the boat behind is touching us.”

Beyond the arch, boats filled the channel bow to stern. Their engines idled in a combined complaint. The nearest man shouted that he had a booking. Someone farther back shouted that everybody had a booking. A dog barked with the confidence of an unregulated authority.

Mara climbed onto the woman’s foredeck. The roof box was plastic, almost empty, and trapped by one corner. The bicycle was chained through the centre rail.

“Key?” she asked.

The woman produced a ring containing approximately the history of metalwork. None fitted the bicycle lock.

“My son installed it.”

“Where is he?”

“Canada. It seemed safe there at the time.”

Mara looked at the closure keys in her hand. One had a flat bow and a long square shaft. It was not a bicycle key. It was, however, steel.

“Everybody stop engines,” she called through the arch.

Nobody did.

She put on the fluorescent vest properly, found the whistle clipped inside its pocket and blew it once. Eleven engines dropped away in startled sequence. The silence reached the rear of the queue more slowly than the instruction.

“You,” she said to the boy. “Take slack off their stern line. Not tight. Just stop the boat behind giving advice with its bow. You—” She pointed to the booked man. “Get onto this roof and lift when I say. If you tell me your booking time, I will use it as ballast.”

He got onto the roof.

Mara put the square closure key through the bicycle’s brake-cable loop, twisted until the handlebar turned along the boat, then used the slack to drag the roof box inward. It moved two inches and jammed.

“Again,” the woman said.

“That was the first again.”

Mara braced one boot against the gunwale. The booked man lifted. The boy eased the stern line. Brick dust fell into Mara’s hair. The box cleared the arch with a noise like a cupboard being forgiven reluctantly.

The boat moved forward.

So did every boat behind it.

“Stop,” Mara shouted.

The boy sat down on the rope. The line went taut. The nearest following bow kissed the stern fender instead of driving them all under the bridge together.

Mara held up the Halfacre keys. “The lock is closed. These are the keys that let the keeper make somewhere for you to wait. I can take them now, or I can remain here explaining why eleven boats cannot occupy one bridge hole.”

The elderly woman turned to the queue. “Vote carefully. She has a whistle.”

They made a gap along the towpath.

Mara climbed down. The boy handed her the violin case.

“Not mine.”

“I know. Could you take it to Halfacre? My audition’s in the village hall tomorrow. We can’t get the boat through tonight.”

The case was older than he was and repaired at one corner with silver tape. Mara weighed the keys in one hand and the case in the other.

“Name?”

“Ash.”

“Is the violin in it?”

“Mostly.”

She took it.

At eight forty-two Mara continued toward Halfacre carrying the means to close a lock, the means to open four pieces of it, and a musical instrument in uncertain percentages. Behind her, the queue began reversing one boat at a time under the woman’s whistle instructions.

Ahead, the first drop of rain struck the violin case and remained there, too large and separate to count as weather.

Halfacre announced itself by refusing to be where the map said.

The towpath climbed over a new concrete culvert, crossed the road twice and delivered Mara to the wrong side of a locked gate. Beyond it, the lock chamber stood empty. A row of boats waited in the upper pound with their bows turned slightly toward the bywash, as if listening to bad news travelling underground.

The keeper was inside the side pound up to his chest.

He wore waders, but one brace had slipped from his shoulder and the whole garment had folded inward. He was trying to lift a stop plank while also remaining taller than the water in it.

“Closure order,” Mara called.

“Excellent. Put it somewhere dry.”

She looked at the rain. “Where?”

“Under a previous closure order.”

A blue folder lay open beneath an upturned bucket. Mara added her pages to it, set the violin case on top and tried the gate. The padlock accepted none of the four keys.

“Other gate,” the keeper said.

“The map brought me to this one.”

“Map predates spite.”

Mara climbed the stone wall. The fluorescent vest snagged on the coping and left its silver VOL behind, so that she landed in the compound as an UNTEER. The keeper had one hand under the plank and the other on a chain running to a wooden gantry.

“Key with two teeth,” he said. “Paddle stand.”

She found the stand behind nettles, opened its cover and stopped. The gearing inside had no handle. A square spindle waited in the middle of a nest of grease.

“Windlass?”

“With the radio.”

“Where is the radio?”

“With the cable.”

Mara took the bicycle-marked closure key from the ring. Its square shaft fitted over the spindle but the bow gave no leverage. She threaded the whistle cord through it and pulled until the first tooth moved.

“Slow,” the keeper said.

“I am using a whistle.”

“Then extremely slow.”

The side-pound paddle rose. Water took the plank’s weight and the keeper wrestled it upright into its grooves. Another man appeared on the upper gate carrying two mugs. He watched for several seconds before saying, “You shouldn’t be in there, Phil.”

“I have reached that section of the training independently.”

Mara wound until the whistle cord cut a red line across her palm. Phil got one shoulder beneath the plank and shoved. It dropped home with a noise deep enough to be felt through the coping stones.

Water began to gather in the side pound.

“Close it,” he said.

Mara reversed the key. The spindle kicked once, unwinding wet cord around her fingers. She let go before it could take them, caught the metal bow against her wrist and turned the last quarter by hand.

Phil climbed the ladder. One wader was full enough to require separate navigation.

“Nine minutes,” he said, looking at the order. “They’ve given us till midnight.”

“There are eleven boats at the bridge.”

“There are nineteen here.”

“The road keeper said one at a time into the side pound.”

Phil looked at the stop plank, then the short basin behind it. “Three if they’re friendly. Two if they own chairs.”

The other man handed him a mug. Phil gave it to Mara.

It contained tea the colour of a recently emptied lock.

“I need to go back,” she said.

“Road keeper wants his keys.”

“The boat has his pump.”

“Then he knows where they are.” Phil examined the violin case. “That rainproof?”

“It’s an instrument in percentages.”

They moved it into the lock hut. Mara opened the case because Ash had said mostly and she had learned to distrust proportions. The violin lay under a green cloth with its bridge loose beside it and one string coiled like a hair. A handwritten card had been tucked beneath the neck: ASH ROONEY — 9:10 — BACH, THEN OWN CHOICE.

The corner repaired with silver tape was wet inside. Mara found a roll of foil-backed pipe tape in the hut and sealed the split. When she pressed the case shut, the repaired corner became rigid and the opposite hinge lifted.

“You fix boats?” Phil asked.

“No.”

“Good. Hate to see your confident work.”

Mara took the tape off and did it again, this time in three narrow strips that allowed the case to bend.

At the reservoir landing, Kit had stopped the leak twice.

The first time she tightened the lower screw until the timber crushed around its washer. The drip became a thread farther aft. The second time she loosened it again and pushed a folded corner of mattress pad into the opened seam. The thread divided into three polite drips.

She put a saucepan beneath them. It overflowed while she was checking the shaft.

The rain reached the reservoir all at once. It erased the far bank and turned every old impact in the cabin roof into a separate drum. The pump coughed, found another speed and began walking itself toward the stern on its rubber feet.

Kit tied it to the bed frame.

The frame had held Mara’s marks. With the shelf gone, it was the only piece of bedroom furniture still attached to the hull. The pump line tightened. The top rail bent against the wall and a pencilled date emerged from beneath the wallpaper: K — FEVER — DON’T COUNT.

Kit stopped the pump.

Water immediately climbed over her shoes.

“Fine,” she told the date. “We will count something else.”

She cut the frame free at the bottom, not through the marked upright but through the blank rail beside it, and laid it flat across the cabin. The pump could pull against the boat’s steel ribs instead. She restarted the engine and watched the pencil date disappear under rain running down the wall.

The road keeper returned carrying two tarpaulins and a length of scaffold pole.

“Halfacre got the order,” he said. “Phone call from the pub. Eleven boats reversing away from a woman with a whistle.”

Kit put the saucepan back beneath the three drips. “That will be Mara.”

“Will it?”

“She improves rapidly when issued authority that isn’t hers.”

They rolled the boat onto its side against the landing. The scaffold pole passed beneath the stern as a lever, its end bedded on the sacrificed blank rail. In the next flash of clear water, Kit saw the propeller: one blade curled backward, the shaft pulled sideways through its bearing.

The keeper whistled. “Lift’s not towing that.”

“It doesn’t need to tow the propeller.”

“Shaft comes out, water comes in.”

Kit looked at the pump, the blank rail and the cut shelf screwed over the reservoir split. Everything keeping the boat afloat was now attached to something her family had mistaken for permanent.

“Then we leave the shaft,” she said. “Take off the blade.”

“With what?”

Kit opened Mara’s tool drawer. The good spanner was gone. The adjustable had been used on the selector rod and still wore a semicircle of rabbit fur in its teeth.

She selected the hacksaw.

By the time Mara reached the road bridge again, the rain had become weather. The eleven boats had reversed into a long, disordered line. Ash and his grandmother waited beneath the arch, their boat now clear but facing the wrong direction.

Mara held up the repaired case.

“Halfacre has it,” she said. “Lock hut. Nine ten.”

Ash stared at her empty hand.

“You left it?”

“Somebody will take it to the hall.”

“Who?”

Mara thought of Phil inside his waders and the other man arriving with tea after the lifting was over.

“I don’t know yet.”

Ash began to cry without changing his face. Rain made the fact deniable to everyone except his grandmother.

Mara turned back toward Halfacre.

Phil was no longer in the side pound. He had acquired dry trousers and an argument.

The argument stood in the lock hut wearing the orange coat of the waterways authority and holding Ash’s violin case at arm’s length.

“This cannot travel on the closure van,” she said.

“Why?” Mara asked.

“Not insured.”

“For violins?”

“For anything described to me as mostly a violin.”

Phil pointed through the rain. “Nora’s taking the tea urn to the village hall at six.”

“Who is Nora?”

The man who had brought the mugs raised one hand.

“You’re Nora?” Mara said.

“No. Married to her. We share a kettle but maintain separate names.”

Mara put both hands on the case. “I need the person.”

They looked at her.

“Not a vehicle. Not somebody’s wife. A person who says yes and knows what they are saying yes to.”

The orange-coated woman shifted the case to her other hand. “Nora Bell. Runs the hall kitchen. I can ring her.”

She did. Mara listened while Nora Bell was told about the bridge, the rain, the audition and the violin’s incomplete status. Then the phone was passed to her.

“Ash Rooney,” Mara said. “Nine ten. Bach, then his own choice. The case leaks at the taped corner if you leave it on its side.”

“I’ll put it beside the urn,” Nora said.

“Not under the urn.”

“I have transported cakes through three divorces, love. Give me the boy’s grandmother’s number.”

Mara did not have it.

She went back into the rain, ran the quarter mile to the bridge and got it. Ash’s grandmother made Mara repeat Nora’s name, then wrote it in biro across the transparent sleeve of her rain cape. Ash did not stop looking doubtful. Mara was relieved. He kept watching the adults, which was more useful than trusting the van.

When she returned, Nora herself was in the lock hut. She was small, grey-haired and dry in a way that suggested private engineering. She opened the case, touched neither the violin nor its loose bridge, read Ash’s card and put her own card beneath it.

NORA BELL. I HAVE THIS. 07700 900 214.

“Yes,” she said.

Mara let go.

Outside, the upper pound rose over the top of the first stop plank.

It did not seep. It arrived.

Water folded across the timber in a brown sheet, struck the empty chamber and woke every loose chain on both gates. Phil ran for the paddle stand. The orange-coated woman looked upstream, where the rain had erased the line between canal and towpath.

“Reservoir spill,” she said.

Mara had been waiting for water for two days. Now there was too much of it and it was travelling without a booking.

The first boat in the upper pound lifted against its mooring pins. One came out of the soft bank with a sound like a bottle being uncorked. The boat swung toward the closed gate.

“Open the chamber,” Phil shouted.

“Downstream gates are chained.”

“Then it becomes a bucket.”

Mara took the key ring from her belt. “Which key?”

“All the wrong ones first.”

They ran.

At the reservoir landing, the damaged propeller blade came away on the hundred and eighteenth stroke of the hacksaw. Kit knew because counting was preferable to imagining the shaft moving in its bearing.

The blade dropped into the shallows. The boat lurched off the scaffold pole and settled hard enough to throw the saucepan over.

The road keeper reached for the stern rope. It was already underwater.

The reservoir had risen to the landing’s top brick. Rainwater came down the access road in two silver tracks, carrying leaves, a drinks can and one child’s red sandal. Beyond the boat, the spill channel changed from an empty concrete slope into a white strip.

“Lift’s called,” the keeper said. “They can take you from the service quay if you can cross. They won’t come to this edge in the storm.”

“How far?”

He pointed through the rain. The opposite quay was not visible.

“No propeller,” Kit said.

“You have an engine.”

“For morale?”

The pump changed pitch. Water was no longer merely entering through the split and stern bearing. It was running down the cabin steps from the towpath.

Kit pictured the straps tightening under the hull. Out of water, the cut shelf would carry the split instead of the canal carrying it; the shaft would hang from the torn bearing. The crane might rescue the boat by breaking it.

The road keeper said, “We can hold her for the crane.”

“And the pump?”

“Comes off first.”

“Then she fills before the straps take.”

He looked toward the hidden quay. “Your sister has the closure keys.”

“My sister has a great many keys to things that are not here.”

Kit picked up the severed blade. Its edge was bright where the saw had passed and black everywhere else. She set it on the cabin roof, untied the pump from the bed frame and moved it to the bow.

“What are you doing?”

“Making the stern light enough to tow sideways.”

“With what tow?”

The answer came from the access road wearing half a fluorescent word.

Mara reached the landing bent double, one hand on the rail and the other holding the keys under her vest as if they were susceptible to rain. Behind her, water crossed the road in widening ribs.

“Halfacre is overtopping,” she said. “They need this pump.”

Kit laughed once. It was not a happy noise, but it was accurate.

“This pump is the boat.”

“The chamber fills in seven minutes. There are nineteen boats above it and the downstream gate has no balance beam.”

“This hull fills in four if I stop pumping.”

Mara looked at the three drips, the wet steps, the fitted shelf screwed over the split, and the severed propeller blade on the roof. She did not ask which object had been their father’s. The question had become too easy.

The keeper said, “Crane can lift one boat from the service quay before wind shuts it down.”

“One?” Mara asked.

“One safely.”

Across the reservoir, invisible in the rain, a horn sounded twice. The lift crew, announcing either readiness or impatience.

Mara took the closure order from beneath her vest. Its ink had run at the edges but the printed route remained: reservoir landing, Halfacre, lower flight. A line made by somebody in an office where water progressed mainly through pipes.

She folded it once and put it in the saucepan.

“We don’t cross,” she said.

Kit stared at her.

“The spill is going to Halfacre. If we put the boat in it, the current takes us toward the lock. We keep the pump aboard until we’re close enough to rig it ashore. The lift takes whichever boat cannot survive the flood without it.”

“This boat cannot survive the flood without it.”

“Then we don’t leave it to be a boat.”

The rain struck the roof between them.

Kit looked along what remained: no yellow doors, no shelf, the cabin wall opened around the cut frame, a pump where the table had been and a propeller with only two useful blades. Nothing left aboard expected to arrive intact.

“Working platform,” she said.

Mara nodded. “For everyone downstream.”

“You hate phrases like that.”

“I hate them on funding applications.”

They pushed the boat off the landing.

The spill took the bow before either sister was aboard.

Mara had one foot on the gunwale and one on the landing when the gap opened. Kit caught the back of her fluorescent vest and pulled. For a second Mara hung over the water, still trying to keep the closure keys inside her shirt.

“Let go of the keys,” Kit said.

“They are the closure.”

“You are currently the closure.”

Mara released the ring. It struck the roof and stayed there by luck, which offended her more than losing it would have.

The road keeper paid out the stern rope around the scaffold pole. The hull swung across the flooded access road, broadside to the spill. Water climbed the lower rubbing strake and came through the open cabin in one clean slap.

“Bow out!” Kit shouted.

They had no engine that could move them and no rudder the current respected. Kit jammed the severed propeller blade between the scaffold pole and the bow dolly, making a square of leverage from parts that had ceased to belong where they were made. Mara leaned on the pole. The blade flexed.

“If that snaps—”

“It was already broken.”

“It can improve.”

The bow turned. The current found the hull lengthways and dragged it off the last brick.

The keeper let the rope run through his gloves until smoke rose from one palm. Then the bitter end whipped free and he stood on the flooded landing holding nothing.

“Halfacre!” Mara shouted to him.

“I know where it is!”

“Tell them we’re coming!”

“They’ll infer it!”

The spill channel had concrete sides built for water that did not care about paint. Their boat entered it with half a cabin, no propulsion and the closure pump kicking at the bow like an animal brought unwillingly to market.

Kit tied the pump again, this time through the exposed ribs. Mara recovered the keys from the roof and clipped them to the waistband of her trousers. The saucepan slid past, carrying the closure order in an inch of brown water. She caught it with her boot.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“Keep us straight.”

“How?”

Kit handed her the scaffold pole.

The channel curved left below the trees. Mara planted the pole against the right wall and felt the whole weight of the boat arrive through her shoulders. The pole skipped, struck again and drove her backward through the missing rear doors. Kit caught her by the belt.

The stern hit concrete. The bookshelf patch groaned.

Water squirted through the screw holes in six bright needles.

Kit dropped to her knees and put both hands against it, as though the shelf might be persuaded by touch. The pump hose jumped on the roof. Its outlet still trailed over the side, throwing most of the cabin water back into the spill, but the intake had swallowed a strip of wallpaper.

“Straight enough?” Mara called.

“Define enough.”

Ahead, something red rolled in the water.

The child’s sandal struck the bow, spun once in the eddy and went ahead of them toward Halfacre.

The next bend opened onto the lock pound.

Halfacre no longer had banks. The upper pound spread across the towpath and through the hedge into a field, where sheep stood together on a green rise and watched nineteen boats become a problem with roofs. The first six had broken loose from their pins. Two lay sideways above the lock, pressed together by the flood. Ash’s grandmother’s boat, still facing the wrong direction, was trapped between them with its stern against the balance beam.

Phil stood on the lock wall waving both arms.

“Not here!” he shouted.

“We brought the pump!” Mara shouted back.

“Still not here!”

Below him, the upper gates had opened six inches. A bicycle, several willow branches and a blue plastic chair were jammed in the gap. Water fired through it into the chamber. The chained lower gates held, making the lock a rising box.

The working platform was travelling directly toward the blue chair.

Kit came up from the cabin with the mattress pad in one hand and the hacksaw in the other.

“We can’t stop,” Mara said.

“Useful observation.”

“Can we turn into the side pound?”

Kit looked. The side pound where Phil had been standing an hour ago was now a wide brown mouth beside the lock. A stop plank lay across it at an angle, one end lifted by the flow.

“If the bow clears that plank.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then the boat becomes a stop plank.”

Mara drove the pole against the coping. Kit crossed to the other side and threw the stern line.

Phil missed it.

The orange-coated woman caught it one-handed. The rope snapped tight around her waist and pulled her to her knees. Phil seized the tail. Together they dragged the stern toward the wall while the current kept the bow aimed at the lock.

“Cut the roof rail!” Kit shouted.

Mara looked down. The rail ran along the cabin top, bolted through the last uncut section of their father’s painted lining. Kit had already put the hacksaw into her hand.

“Why?”

“Because the pump has to cross something.”

The bow struck the lifted stop plank. Timber climbed the stem, scraped over the roof and tore away the chimney collar. The boat rolled beneath it. Mara fell against the rail she had not cut.

On the wall Phil and the woman hauled. The stern came round. The current swung the bow into the side pound, where it struck mud instead of stone and stopped with such force that the pump broke one of its ropes.

Kit landed on it chest-first.

For a moment everything held: hull in mud, stern rope around the woman and Phil, pump beneath Kit, water above all reasonable places for water.

Then the cabin floor lifted.

Not the boards. The whole sheet of plywood on which their father had painted tiny white labels for the battery switch and water cock rose from its joists. Brown water breathed through the seams.

“Four minutes,” Kit said.

Mara began sawing the roof rail.

It was hardwood and had been painted seven times. Under the latest green were blue, cream, red, another green, a colour like old teeth, and the first narrow strip of varnish. Each stroke made a different year.

Phil climbed aboard. “Where does the pump go?”

The orange-coated woman pointed below the lock. “Lower apron. We get its suction into the chamber and throw over the bank. That buys the gates.”

“The downstream gates are chained,” Mara said.

“Chain’s under load. We can’t lift it.”

“Then don’t lift it,” Kit said. “Lose a link.”

Phil looked at the hacksaw.

Mara kept cutting.

The rail came free in a strip longer than she was tall. Kit and Phil laid it from the cabin roof to the lock wall. It bowed at the centre.

“That’s not rated,” the orange-coated woman said.

“Neither are we,” Phil said.

They could not lift the pump. It had acquired the moral density of a safe. They walked it instead: tilt, block, shove; tilt, block, shove. Mara fed pieces of the blank bed-frame rail beneath its rubber feet. Kit took the weight with the scaffold pole. Phil pulled from the wall.

At the bridge of roof rail, the pump stopped.

“Too narrow,” Mara said.

Kit removed one rubber foot with the adjustable spanner. The pump leaned. They turned it sideways and sent it up the board.

The hull dropped an inch for every inch the pump rose.

Halfway across, the roof rail split along the old varnish line.

Nobody moved.

Below them, the floor rose another fraction. A white label floated out of the cabin: BISCUITS — NOT TOOLS.

“Of course,” Kit said. “Now he clarifies.”

Mara put her shoulder beneath the split board. The pump pressed down through it, heavy with fuel and all the water it had failed to become.

“Move,” she said.

Kit moved it.

The board opened against Mara’s shoulder with a noise she felt in her teeth. Phil dragged the pump onto the wall. The moment its weight cleared, the boat rose crookedly, freed itself from the mud and tried to rejoin the spill.

Kit was still aboard.

Mara caught her wrist. The orange-coated woman caught Mara’s belt. Phil dropped onto the pump to keep it from rolling back. The boat slid out from under Kit’s boots and turned slowly into the lock approach.

For three seconds Kit hung against the wall, kicking above the water. Then they pulled her up.

Their boat struck the blue chair.

The chair folded. The bicycle turned in the gate gap. The bow entered the six-inch opening and stopped.

Water ran through the boat and the boat held the gate.

Kit lay on the coping, coughing.

Mara watched the roof sink until only the severed propeller blade remained above the flood, bright edge upward. The boat had become a stop plank after all.

“Can we get it back?” she asked.

Kit rolled onto one elbow and looked at the chamber, the jammed gates and the nineteen roofs shifting in the rain.

“Which part?”

Below them, the pump started.

The chain across the lower gates had gone beyond looking like an obstacle. It looked surveyed.

It passed twice around the shortened balance beams and through a padlock the size of a fist. The chamber water had climbed until the chain ran perfectly straight between them. Every link shivered. On the far side of the gates, the lower pound was black and almost empty.

Phil brought the hacksaw down from the upper wall.

“Blade’s finished.”

The teeth had become a polished suggestion.

Mara tried the closure keys anyway. None entered the padlock. One entered the housing beside it and turned through half a circle with no result except a small official click.

“Maintenance release,” she said.

“Maintained by whom?” Kit asked.

The orange-coated woman—Nadia, Mara finally learned when somebody shouted it from a roof—had the pump suction in the chamber. The discharge hose bucked across the lower apron and threw brown water over the bank into the flooded field. The level stopped climbing.

It did not fall.

Above the lock, the first two loose boats had become one shape. Their cabin sides ground together with a noise like cupboards being dragged through a house. Ash’s grandmother leaned out between them with the violin case strapped to her chest.

“That is not where I left it,” Mara said.

“The hut flooded,” the grandmother called. “Nora gave it back.”

Mara felt absurdly pleased. Then the upstream boat tore out a fender and the pleasure was replaced by work.

Kit crouched over the chain. “We don’t need to cut it.”

“You said lose a link.”

“I was wet.”

She traced the chain to the left balance beam. It had been shortened years ago after rot took its end; the closure crew had wrapped the chain through the remaining square of oak because the ground anchor was under repair. Beneath the chain, between oak and iron, somebody had inserted a steel spreader plate.

“Take the plate out and the chain gains six inches.”

“It’s under load.”

“Everything interesting is.”

The plate had no handle. Mara looked back at the lock approach. Their boat’s roof had vanished. The bright half of the propeller blade still showed above the water like a knife laid on a table.

“No,” Kit said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You looked at it in your paperwork face.”

They went after the blade with the stern line.

The boat had sunk just far enough to become stable and not far enough to become simple. Phil hooked the line around the blade while Kit lay flat on the coping and reached into the water. When she pulled, the blade came free from the roof with a bolt and a round green flake of paint.

Mara held out her hand.

“It’s sharp on one side.”

“So am I.”

“Intermittently.”

They drove the blade under the spreader plate. Mara and Kit took the scaffold pole together, slid it over the blade’s broken hub and leaned down. The metal complained. The chain tightened until rain sprang from it in a silver line.

“More,” Nadia said.

“That was more.”

The first loose boat struck the upper wall. A window cracked. Ash’s grandmother put both arms around the violin case and shouted advice no one could hear.

Kit moved her hands inward on the pole. Mara copied her. They leaned again, their shoulders touching because the tool did not have room for estrangement.

The spreader plate spat out.

The chain dropped six inches. One loop fell from the right beam and struck the gate walkway. The lower gates sprang apart by the width of Mara’s thumb.

Water cut through.

“Pump off!” Kit shouted.

Nadia killed it. The sudden quiet made the storm enormous.

The gates opened another inch, then stopped against the chain’s remaining turn. Phil and Nadia lifted the slack clear. The chamber began to empty into the lower pound.

“First boat!” somebody called.

“Not first anything,” Mara said. “The upper gates are blocked by ours.”

Kit looked at the submerged hull in the gap. “It doesn’t have to come out. It has to go through.”

There were still things inside it. The painted saucepan. Her father’s labels. Three drawers, one mattress pad, the small cupboard door with the foxed mirror, and the height-mark frame, screwed into the open side of the cabin above water that no longer respected sides.

Mara climbed down onto the upper gate.

Kit caught her vest. “Where are you going?”

“To make it narrower.”

The gap was full of current and fragments. Mara crossed the gate heel-first, holding the handrail, until she stood over the bow. Water ran through the cabin beneath her. She could see the frame under it: pale wood, black marks, the rotted foot already cut away. The last long piece they had refused to turn into equipment.

Kit came behind her with the spanner.

“We could take that out,” Mara said.

“Yes.”

“I mean intact.”

“I know what out means.”

They worked underwater by touch. The bottom screws came reluctantly, swollen into the battens. Mara held the frame while Kit leaned on the spanner. The top fixing tore free with a strip of cabin wall, and the whole length rose between them, suddenly buoyant.

It was lighter than Mara remembered being.

They passed it to Phil without ceremony.

Then they took the cabin apart.

Not the historical cabin. Not the meaningful components. The cabin. Kit cut through two ribs with the blade while Mara knocked out the opened lining with the scaffold pole. Nadia and Phil pulled pieces onto the wall. The cupboard door went. The labelled plywood floor went. The mattress pad came up like a drowned animal and was dragged aside. Each removal let the current seize more of the hull.

At last the bow folded at the cut ribs.

The boat went through the six-inch gate gap without becoming six inches wide. It turned, broke, and was persuaded.

The stern caught once on the blue chair. Kit kicked it loose.

What remained slid into the chamber and settled diagonally against the wall.

The upper gates closed.

Above them, nineteen boats lifted and fell in the flood. One by one, their ropes came tight.

Mara looked at the height-mark frame lying on the lock wall. Rain filled the pencil cuts until every measurement was dark.

“Put it across the stern dollies,” Kit said.

“Of which boat?”

Kit pointed to the first two jammed boats. “Both.”

The frame made a temporary bridge between them. Phil crawled across it and separated their crossed bow lines. Nadia took the nearer tiller. Ash’s grandmother, violin still strapped on, took the other.

“Which one goes first?” Mara asked.

Both roofs erupted in opinions.

The shallower boat drew less and had a child aboard. The deeper one had no reverse and was being pushed sideways onto the cill. Behind them, a fuel boat had begun to drift, and behind that a man in pyjamas was trying to fend off with a garden rake.

Mara reached for the damp closure order in her mind and found the saucepan empty.

“The one with no reverse,” she said. “Child’s boat stays tied to it until the bow clears, then drops behind. They enter as one and leave as two.”

“That’s not an order,” Phil said.

“Good.”

They brought the pair into the lock.

The deeper boat entered first with fenders squealing on stone, its stern held by the shallower boat’s bow line. Mara stood at the top gate with the line around a bollard, taking strain in wet increments. Kit went below to the shortened balance beam. Nadia restarted the pump only long enough to keep the chamber from rising faster than the boats could settle.

The broken hull lay underneath them against the wall. As the chamber emptied, pieces of its cabin appeared: green rib, bare shelf edge, the foxed mirror reflecting nothing but water.

“Stern!” Kit called.

The deeper boat had begun to hang on the remains.

Mara let out rope. The shallower boat surged forward and struck it. The two roofs touched. Somewhere below, wood cracked.

Ash’s grandmother played one long note inside the violin case by falling on it.

Everyone stopped.

“Instrument intact,” she called after a moment. “Grandmother less certain.”

The child on the shallower boat began laughing. It passed roof to roof until even the man with the garden rake had to sit down.

Kit did not laugh. She had seen the problem. She climbed along the gate walkway, dropped onto the deeper boat’s stern and put the propeller blade between its counter and the exposed rib of their boat.

“Mara. Two inches.”

“Of what?”

“Your kind.”

Mara hauled. The bow line shortened by two inches. Kit levered. The broken hull rolled away from the wall and sank into the centre of the chamber, clear of the counter.

The boats descended.

When the lower gates opened, the pair moved into the dark pound still connected by one rope. Then the child’s father cast it off, and they became two boats again.

Above Halfacre, eighteen waited.

Below it, for the first time that night, there was a route.

The second locking took forty-three minutes. The third took nineteen and broke the garden rake.

By the seventh, no one could remember which boat had originally owned which rope. The height-mark frame moved up and down the queue: bridge, gangplank, stretcher for a battery that had begun smoking, then straightedge across the mouth of a leaking water tank. Each time it came back to Mara it had acquired another colour of paint.

The storm did not reward practice. It changed the job.

Halfacre’s upper pound stopped rising and began running. Boats that had waited all summer in weed now arrived too fast, towing their mooring stakes and portions of garden. A yellow cruiser brought half a rose trellis through the bridge hole. Trevor’s purple boat appeared behind the fuel boat, bow high under everything he had declined to throw away, and struck the lock approach sideways.

“I have a booking,” he called.

“For another lock,” Mara called back.

“It doesn’t say that in large print.”

He was smiling. Not forgiveness. Not even friendliness. Just the discovery that the sentence could be used for something else.

Kit caught his stern line. “You can wait or you can work.”

“Those have been my choices since Cowper.”

He worked.

At one in the morning the pump swallowed a rag. Nadia shut it down and opened its basket. Inside was one of their father’s paired labels, the one that had said CLEAN on the cupboard side and NOT YET on the wall side. The water had lifted it from the broken cabin and carried it through the suction.

Mara rubbed the mud from the lettering with her thumb.

“Keep it if you’re going to keep it,” Kit said. “Don’t make us all watch.”

Mara put it in the lockside bin.

At two, the fuel boat fouled the lower gate with its hose reel. At three, Ash’s grandmother discovered that the violin had survived but every dry sock on her boat had not. At four, the man whose garden rake had broken produced a coal shovel and was treated as a specialist.

At dawn there were four boats above Halfacre.

Their own hull had become smaller each time the chamber emptied. The current worked at it below the other boats and delivered pieces to the lower gates: a drawer front, a strip of green rib, one brass hook. Kit retrieved the hook. Mara retrieved nothing.

The last four were the fuel boat, Trevor, an unoccupied hire boat, and Imani’s boat.

Imani stood on its roof in her school blazer, holding the tiller with one hand and a transparent document wallet with the other. The boat rode lower than Mara remembered and wore fresh mud to the windows.

“You sat the examination,” Mara said.

“Some of it.”

“How much is some?”

“The part before they evacuated the sports hall.” Imani lifted the wallet. “I brought my answers. In case the canal authority marks by salvage.”

Her aunt was at the bow, working a pole. Behind them the hire boat came on without anybody aboard.

“Where are its people?” Kit asked.

“Left at the road bridge,” Imani said. “They said somebody official would collect it.”

Everyone looked at Mara.

“I am somebody official only when holding the correct keys.”

The empty boat struck Imani’s stern.

They could not lock all four. They could not leave the hire boat loose above. The fuel boat had to go first because six boats below were waiting for it. Trevor’s load made him deepest. Imani had spent the night rescuing her own boat and had no reverse because the propeller was thick with weed.

Mara began arranging them in her head and stopped.

“Imani,” she called. “What do you need?”

“Not a turn. A blade.”

Kit looked at the broken propeller blade in her hand.

It had opened the gates, levered boats off ribs, and taken a thumb-shaped notch from its bright edge. It was the last functional part of their engine that had stayed with them.

Kit threw it.

Imani caught it against her chest, climbed down to the weed hatch and cut the propeller clear.

The fuel boat and Imani went in together. Trevor held the empty hire boat against the wall until the chamber returned. Then he took both boats in the final locking, his purple roof scraping the hire boat’s white one all the way down.

When the lower gates opened, he did not leave immediately. He looked into the chamber at the low black remains against the wall.

“You coming?” he asked.

Kit stood beside Mara on the lock wall. Between them lay the height-mark frame, wet, painted, intact except for the foot they had cut at Dockett.

“Yes,” Mara said.

Behind her, their engine was still under black water.

They borrowed the fuel boat’s portable pump and raised what remained of the stern enough to reach the engine. The engine had been drowned, struck, dragged and filled through its exhaust. Kit turned it over by hand. Brown water came out. She changed the oil with fuel-boat oil, turned it again, changed it again, and wired the starter to a battery from the smoking-battery stretcher.

On the fourth attempt it fired on one cylinder.

The sound was so disproportionate to the boat that everyone below the lock cheered.

“Don’t,” Kit said. “You’ll encourage it.”

The hull that left Halfacre had an engine, six feet of stern, two buckled side plates and no bow. Phil made a towing bridle through the engine beds. The fuel boat pulled. Their engine pushed when it felt remembered. Mara and Kit sat back to back on the exposed steel, the height-mark frame lashed above the bilge.

The convoy spread out after the storm. Boats turned into marinas, gardens and pounds that had water again. Names vanished from roofs ahead. At each lock somebody handed on a rope that did not belong to them.

Three days later the canal entered their mother’s town behind a supermarket and a row of garages.

There was no ceremonial mile. There were shopping trolleys in the water, a delivery van blocking the towpath and a sign at the visitor moorings that said MAXIMUM STAY 48 HOURS. Mara was still looking ahead for the arrival when Kit threw the town’s first mooring rope.

Their mother was waiting beside the bins.

She wore a red waterproof coat and had brought a cake in a square plastic box. She looked first at Mara, then Kit, then at the object behind the fuel boat.

“Where is it?” she asked.

Mara pointed.

Their mother watched the stern section bump the wall. The engine coughed once and stopped. On the open steel, rainwater moved around the feet of the height-mark frame.

“That,” she said, “is a motor with grief attached.”

Kit laughed before she could stop herself.

Their mother gave her the cake to hold. “You said half a cabin.”

“We had half one yesterday,” Mara said.

“And you brought it to me.”

“The berth is here.”

“A berth is not a mother.”

She climbed down onto the stern without asking permission. Kit steadied her. Their mother touched the height marks, not tenderly but as a person checking whether timber is dry.

“Your father took this out of my house,” she said.

“We know,” Mara said.

“No, you know he kept it. That’s a different story.”

She turned the frame over. Under the lowest marks was a pencil line neither sister had noticed. Beside it their mother had written, in small hard capitals, FRIDGE 1680.

“He marked everything,” Kit said.

“He measured everything. Marking is what happened when the number wanted witnesses.”

Mara looked at the wet engine, the two plates, the mooring sign. “We thought we could sell it here.”

Their mother looked around as if a buyer might be concealed in the recycling enclosure.

“You thought returning your father’s wreck to my town would count as an apology from somebody.”

Neither sister said whose.

“It doesn’t,” their mother said. “But I brought lemon cake.”

They ate it sitting on parts of the boat that had no agreed names.

Their mother ate standing up. She had put the plastic box on the engine cover and objected whenever the engine shook crumbs toward the bilge. When Mara tried to explain Halfacre, she said, “I know where Halfacre is.” When Kit tried to explain the propeller blade, she said, “I know what a blade is.”

“You could let us finish a sentence,” Mara said.

“You could bring one with an end.”

The fuel boat needed its bridle and pump back. The visitor mooring allowed forty-seven hours and twenty-six minutes. The stern would not survive a crane lift without a cradle that cost more than the engine, and the engine, once it had cooled, declined to restart.

Their mother wiped lemon icing from the dipstick.

“There is a council yard behind the old arm,” she said. “They store benches there in winter. And things nobody admits are rubbish.”

“Do you know somebody?” Mara asked.

“I know a gate.”

The gate was blue, chained, and attended by a man named Len who said no before their mother had asked anything. She let him complete it.

“Absolutely not,” Len said.

“That is Len,” their mother told the sisters. “He saves time by giving the final answer first.”

Behind him were stacks of stop planks, three broken picnic tables and a council mower with a sapling growing through its seat. Beyond them, the old canal arm ended in mud beside a roofed work bay.

Len looked at the six feet of stern being nudged along the towpath by four exhausted people and a borrowed trolley.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said.

“You said absolutely not,” Kit said.

“That was before I saw it was worse.”

They stayed eleven days.

Proper dismantling took eleven days. Kit drained the engine into labelled cans and removed it whole. Mara found a training college that wanted it, then discovered they wanted a working engine, then found an instructor who preferred one that had failed interestingly. Len took the side plates for patch stock. The council took the steel only after Mara proved, twice, that it was not a vehicle.

Their mother brought sandwiches on the second day and a pry bar on the third. She never said she was helping. She removed nails from the salvaged boards, straightened them on the concrete with the back of the bar, and sorted the bent ones into a jar.

“Dad kept those,” Kit said.

“Your father kept bent nails because straightening them made an audience.”

She put the jar in scrap.

On the fifth day Mara found the blue chair under the stern deck. One leg was missing and the seat carried the pale outline of everything that had rested on it. She put it beside the skip.

Kit moved it under the work-bay roof.

Their mother moved it back beside the skip.

Len sat on it to eat his lunch, after which nobody could establish whether it was rubbish or council furniture.

They unlashed the height-mark frame last.

“It isn’t going in my house,” their mother said.

“No one asked,” Kit said.

“You transported it a hundred and nine miles in my direction.”

Mara measured the longest boards. Len had been talking about reopening Halfacre with volunteers once the emergency works were inspected. The lock crew needed a table that could hold drawings, tools and six mugs without becoming any of those things exclusively.

“We could make the frame the rear bearer,” she said.

Kit turned it over. The pencil marks would face down. She turned it back.

Their mother ran her thumb over FRIDGE 1680. “Useful surfaces have two sides.”

They built the table too high because Mara used the frame’s full width and Kit refused to cut another measurement. Len corrected it by digging two holes under the front legs. The result listed toward the canal and trapped rain in one corner. It was ugly, solid and immediately occupied by a dismantled paddle gearbox.

On the eleventh day a scrap lorry lifted the final stern plate. Mud fell from it in the shape of the canal bed. Len found the missing blue-chair leg underneath and held it up too late. The three of them watched the lorry turn out of the yard.

“Well,” Mara said.

“Don’t,” said Kit.

Their mother handed each of them half a sandwich.

In March, Halfacre reopened on a morning too cold for ceremony.

The canal authority supplied a banner with the wrong lock number. Trevor supplied a thermos and denied supplying the biscuits. Ash played three notes on the repaired violin before the E string broke. Imani arrived late in a boat whose reverse now worked and with examination results folded into the transparent wallet above the sink.

“How much is some?” Mara asked.

“Enough,” Imani said.

The worktable stood below the lock hut on its two buried legs. Its top was scarred by pump feet and hot mugs. Someone had fitted a rack underneath for windlasses. To take one, a person had to put their hand past the height marks without necessarily seeing them.

Nora Bell saw them. She was tightening a loose bolt under the rear bearer when she stopped.

“Is this yours?” she asked Mara.

Mara crouched. The pencil cuts ran above Nora’s knuckles: mother, daughters, fridge, the copied lines and the real ones indistinguishable without the story.

“It’s the table’s,” Mara said.

Nora considered this and tightened the bolt.

There were seven boats waiting above, though the notice allowed six. Nobody could discover which boat was seventh because two claimed to be sharing a booking and Trevor claimed not to have one. Mara had the opening sheet, a radio and the old impulse to make the queue become correct.

She put the sheet under the thermos.

The repairs had changed Halfacre. New oak showed pale in the lower gates. The upper balance beam had a steel sleeve where the roof rail had failed. Their pump was gone to another stoppage, but its hose marks remained on the wall. At the chamber bottom, nothing of the hull was visible.

Kit stood across the lock beside the top paddle. She wore Len’s orange jacket, which said EVENTS on the back. Mara wore no official clothing and had the correct keys.

“Ready below,” Nadia called.

The first boat entered. It was not important which.

They shut the gates and lifted the paddles by halves. Water pressed through the culverts and began climbing the stone. Mara watched the wet line rise past the first pale course, then the second.

“Twenty-eight inches,” she called.

Kit leaned over her gate. She held one hand above another against the balance beam, measuring the remaining fall.

“Three hands,” she called back.

“That’s not twenty-eight inches.”

Kit looked across the chamber.

Mara could have explained that hand spans varied. She could have asked whose hands. She could have found the table, fetched the tape, established the actual distance and made the water wait for the number.

Instead she put the key in the gate chain.

Kit put both hands on her beam.

They opened the lock.