Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

It was almost midnight when Ted found the fault.

The fault was in the new set of contact breakers that Pete had fitted as part of the routine service. If he'd left everything alone, he'd have had no trouble. Nobody, fortunately, was unkind enough to say so out loud, or they'd have received a look that a laser would have been hard pressed to match.

They put everything back together, and Pete tidied himself up again. Because there were no chairs around the workshop, they opened up the Zodiac and all three of them sat inside as they finished what remained of the party can. Or rather, Ted and Wayne took care of it, seated in the back of the car; Pete turned around the rearview mirror in the front and tried, without much success, to make a decent job of knotting his borrowed black tie.

Ted said, "Wayne can take the van up to the cottage every now and again, check on it for you while you're away." And Wayne raised his styrene cup, and burped loudly in assent.

"Don't worry about it," Pete said. "If anybody's desperate enough to steal my stuff, they're welcome to it." He gave the knot a final check in the mirror before half turning himself to face the two in the back. They were sitting there patiently like a bleary eyed jury, Ted looking like a Toby Jug in a frayed old sweater and Wayne slumped into the corner with the skull on his Judge Death T shirt grinning out of the shadows.

Pete said, "How do I look?"

"You want the truth?" Ted asked.

"Not necessarily."

"You look fine."

"You look like they just let you out of prison," Wayne added helpfully.

"Oh, thanks," Pete said. "Just what I need." And then, to signal that the brief and sober goodbye party was over, he got out of the car and went around the back to close the open boot lid on his suitcase. The drive ahead would take most of what was left of the night. His brother had promised to fix him up with a borrowed flat for the stopover, but now he'd have to skip it and catch up on his sleep sometime later. Big brother Michael — the respectable one in the family, who'd taken it upon himself to make all the funeral arrangements — probably wouldn't be pleased at the change in schedule, but that would cause Pete no extra grief at all. Mike was so uptight, he probably couldn't even fart without the aid of a shoehorn.

Ted Hammond and Wayne climbed out and then Pete walked all around the Zodiac, slamming and checking the doors. Wayne followed him, looking doubtful. No denying it, the car was a rustbucket; in the past Pete had welded so many pieces onto the underside that he could have driven over a landmine without personally suffering a scratch.

"Think you'll make it?" Wayne said.

"Are you kidding? She's running like a dream."

Wayne stepped back, so that he could take the whole car in at once; the pitted grille, the yellowing headlamps, the small chip crack in the windshield that had never quite become bad enough to star, the wrapping of black tape that held the radio aerial into the bodywork.

"Yeah," he said, finally and with distaste. "I had a dream like that, once." And then he moved to open the workshop's big double doors as Pete got in behind the wheel.

Ted bent to speak to Pete through the car's half open window. "Anyway," he said quietly and seriously, "I'm sorry about your mother."

"Yeah," Pete said. "We could see it coming, but…" And he shrugged; it was a thought that he'd been unable to complete in any satisfactory way since the news had first come through, in a phonecall from Michael three days before.

Ted took a step back; Wayne now had the doors open to the darkness, standing just inside the workshop and trying not to shiver in the March night's chill. Pete nodded to Ted and smiled briefly, and then he reached for the key to start the engine.

The Zodiac eased out into the lake-misted night, smoothly and in silence.

It moved in silence because Ted and Wayne were pushing it; Pete's earlier attempts had run the battery down, and the jump-starter was way over on the marina side of the yard. Grunting and wheezing, they got him across the dusty forecourt and onto the stony track that went on to the main road, and after a few yards the engine kicked and turned over and coughed into a ragged kind of life. On came the lights, making sudden and bizarre shapes out of the boat hulls, trailers, and half-dismantled cruisers that were crowded in along the trackside verge, and then the car was out from under their hands and pulling away as the two of them stopped to catch their breath.

They watched his tail lights all the way down the track, until they started to flicker as he made the turn around behind the trees. A few moments after he'd gone from sight, there came a faint singsong vibration of tyres on metal as the Zodiac crossed the iron bridge that was their link to Three Oaks Bay, the lakeside resort which brought the yard most of its business. The sound lasted less than a second, and left silence behind.

Ted put his hand on Wayne's shoulder as they turned to go back inside.

And then he winced as, somewhere far off, there was a loud backfire. The high valley sides caught and echoed it, like a gunshot deep in some vast, empty building.

"Don't worry," Wayne said. "Think of it as advertising."

"In what way?"

"If he can keep that old heap on the road, he can probably fix anything on wheels."

Wayne closed the big workshop doors, and turned the handle to lock them from the inside. Ted stood by the smaller back exit, his hand ready on the light switch. He was thinking that things were going to seem strange around here for a while, with Pete away. He had another mechanic, a quiet, intensely private man named Frank Lowry, but their relationship wasn't the same; in the four years since he'd joined them Pete had become more like another son to him, and almost like an older brother to Wayne. Maybe it wasn't your standard family unit, but in a world where it seemed that just about everyone was damaged goods in one way or another, they'd made themselves a fairly happy corner of the junkheap.

It wouldn't last forever, of course, because nothing did. Wayne was starting to spread his wings a little, swapping Custom Bike for Playboy and getting into a relationship with a girl named Sandy which seemed to consist mostly of baiting each other and trading insults and playing music somewhere around the pain threshold. And Pete; Pete, eventually, was going to hook up with someone who really appreciated him, and then it would be goodbye to those evenings of beer and popcorn and frozen pizza and rented videos, and all those other little touches that made up a uniquely masculine view of the Good Life. Both of them would leave him, and then he'd be alone.

But maybe not this year, was his consoling thought as they moved out into the main part of the yard and he closed and locked the door behind them. It wasn't much of a lock, but then it didn't need to be; Chuck and Bob, Ted's two German shepherd dogs, were let to run free in the yard on all but the coldest of nights. Survivors will be prosecuted , Wayne had once chalked on the main gate, but then Ted had made him clean it off.

Wayne Hammond was a likeable boy, much as his father had been at the same age. He wasn't academically bright, but he was sharp in all the ways that counted. He was taller than his father, with a lithe swimmer's body and an averagely pleasant face that wouldn't break any hearts — but then it wouldn't stop any clocks, either. Ted would look at him sometimes and, just for a moment, he'd see the boy's mother again.

As the two of them crossed the yard to their unlit house — Wayne going along to raid the fridge before returning to his two-roomed teenager's den above the workshop — the woman who would bring disaster to their lives and to the valley was making a crossing of a different kind, more than two thousand miles away.