‘Let’s go to the boat,’ she said.
No longer trailing behind, I walked along beside her like Tim. A wreck called Drago lay aslant on the foreshore in a muddy creek long silted up with effluent, reached only by a sideways climb along a slimy black wall. There were hooks here and there, and if you took your shoes off and slung them round your neck and didn’t breathe in too deeply, it was easy.
The Drago had once been a proud little fishing craft, big enough for three or four men at most, with a canvas roof flung over the half of it, and a box at one end where they’d stowed the fish. We put the beer there now. The benches were gone, but if it wasn’t too wet you could sit on the floor and crumble the old wreck’s wood between your fingers and watch the quick black beetles emerge from its soft depths. We used to play games here when we were younger. He father, she mother, me kid. He captain, she first mate, me cabin boy. And the best one: me robber, she posh lady, he policeman. These games had given way to flights of fancy, stories we conjured between us of monsters and beasts stranger than any we ever saw at Jamrach’s. We scratched pictures of them on the insides of the boat, and gave them names like mandibat and camalung and koriole, and we knew all their habits and natures and peculiarities. Great humped beasts came up from the mouth of the Thames, slow, hot, darting forked tongues. We shared a mind’s eye that saw these things from the bow of the Drago, facing out across the river.
But we hadn’t been for ages.
She had four strawberries wrapped in a bit of wet cloth. ‘Get the beer, Jaf,’ she said.
We sat in the bow and shared the spoils. I don’t know where the strawberries came from. She didn’t have them when she went into the seamen’s bethel but she did when she came out, so perhaps she’d stolen them from someone in there.
Two each, ripe and squashy, gone in a flash.
‘Wonder where Tim went,’ I said.
She shrugged, passing the beer. ‘Do you think we’ve upset him?’ she asked.
‘Probably.’
‘He’ll get over it.’ She licked her strawberry lips.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t care when he upsets other people.’
She smiled and said, ‘He doesn’t mean to be a pig.’
‘I know. He just is.’
We laughed.
‘He’s always been a jealous boy,’ she said simply.
The bottle was wet from her mouth. I took a good long swig.
‘I’m not going to work tonight,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel like it. She can’t make me, can she?’
‘You’ll catch it.’
‘So?’
‘She’ll wallop you,’ I said.
She did this sometimes, just couldn’t be bothered with all the palaver of dressing up. Much spoilt and fussed over, she was also much slapped and pushed. Once she said she’d only get ready if her mother brought her a cake, and when she got it she smeared it on the pretty dress hanging over the back of the chair, waiting to be slipped over her head ready for a good night’s work.
‘You evil little bitch!’ her mother had shrieked. ‘Do you know how long I worked on that?’ and thwacked her hard on the side of her head and made her cry.
Tim never got hit though.
‘I don’t care if she does wallop me,’ said Ishbel, reaching for the bottle.
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make any difference; I’m not going. I’ll stay here till it’s dark.’
‘You can’t do the wall in the dark,’ I said. ‘If you stay here till dark, you’ll have to stay all night.’
‘I will!’ she cried, jumping up with a grin. ‘All night!’
‘Me too!’ I stood up.
She gave me the bottle and did a funny dance, all flailing arms and tapping feet. I was afraid the rotten boards would collapse underneath her and we’d both go plunging through to the filthy, freezing water.
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘If you want to dance you might as well go to work.’
She stopped. Her shoulders heaved. ‘We can’t,’ she said, ‘it’s too cold.’
‘What?’
‘Can’t stay all night. We’d freeze.’
That was true.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘we’ll just walk around all night till it’s really late.’
She was assuming my company.
‘Let’s go west,’ I said, ‘past the Tower. Let’s just keep walking that way along the river all night and see where we end up.’
‘We can sleep under hedges,’ she added, ‘and beg. You can be a gyppo and tell fortunes. I know a girl at the Siamese Cat that tells fortunes, it’s dead easy. You look like a gyppo anyway.’
Tim came whistling along the wall. He was a good whistler. First we heard him, then his dirty bare feet appeared over the canopy and he dropped down beside us, frog-fashion, pulling his boots from round his neck and tossing them up the boat. ‘What’s the fun?’ he asked.
‘We had strawberries,’ I said. ‘You missed them, but there’s some beer left.’
Ishbel tossed the bottle and he caught it and took a swig. The sky had that look it has, as if it’s about to settle down for the night.
‘I’m not going to work,’ Ishbel said.
‘Don’t say.’ He smacked his lips and swigged again, wiping the bottle top considerately with a big, grimy palm before handing it on to me. It was as if nothing bad had happened between us. A great flapping of birds’ wings crossed the river.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said, ‘I could eat a horse.’
‘That’s a thought,’ said Ishbel.
‘Any boodle?’ asked Tim.
She shook her head. ‘Spent it.’
‘Ah well,’ he said and took a pipe out of his pocket. We sprawled in the bow, smoking as the evening cooled and dimmed. Ishbel lay on her back with her feet resting on Tim’s knees.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘Should I go?’
‘Up to you.’ He watched coils of smoke stalk and twine in the still air and sang ‘Tobacco’s but an Indian weed’, a song Dan Rymer taught us once when we were roaming about and met him on the Wapping Steps.
Grows green in the morn, cut down at eve …
Ishbel kicked him. ‘Miserable,’ she said.
He laughed and continued and I joined in. We’d sat on the Wapping Steps with Dan. Dan smoked a long white pipe, it stayed in the corner of his mouth while he sang:
The pipe that is so lily white,
Wherein so many take delight;
It’s broken with a touch,
Man’s life is such …
And we’d all joined in the chorus:
Think of this when you smoke tobacco.
We sang it