William Boyd - Ordinary Thunderstorms

“Any time, mate,” Ivo said, gracelessly.

“Meredith, we have to go,” Ingram said quietly and Meredith stood up at once.

“Aw, the party-poopers,” Ivo said in a bad American accent.

“Don’t say another word, Ivo,” Ingram said, squeezing his shoulder very hard. “You just carry on enjoying your lovely evening.”

THE ‘NEW ANNEXE’ OF the Marine Support Unit in Wapping, as it was rather grandly termed, consisted of four large Portakabins on a patch of waste ground off Wapping High Street, at Phoenix Stairs, where there was now a gleaming steel jetty, recently constructed. The Phoenix Stairs jetty was situated some 100 yards downstream from the MSU police station at Wapping New Stairs, almost equidistant from Wapping High Street’s two pubs, the Captain Kidd and the Prospect of Whitby. The MSU had recently acquired four new launches, Targa 505, slightly smaller, slightly faster but with the same custom-built roomy wheelhouse as the current fleet of older Targas. Hence this expansion to new premises and a new jetty, and hence, Rita supposed, her fast-track into the division. There was no point in having a bigger budget and the fleet increased by four new boats if there was nobody to man them.

She still felt something of the new girl at school — the MSU was small and close-knit, there was hardly any turnover of personnel (once you arrived at MSU you were there until retirement, more often than not) — and there were very few women police constables. So far in her few days at Wapping Rita had only met two other WPCs.

She stood at the end of the new jetty, pausing before she headed back along it to the Phoenix Stairs passage, and looked down river to the clustered towers of Canary Wharf, watching a jet soaring up from City Airport, and then turned her gaze across the river — it was high tide — to the vast modern blocks of St Botolph’s Hospital. It was like a small, complete city, she thought, everything you needed — heating, food, transport, sewage, life-support systems, morgue, funeral home — was there: no need ever to leave…

Morbid thoughts, Rita thought — ban them. She wasn’t in the best of moods, she knew. Her father had been aggressive over the breakfast cornflakes this morning and she’d snapped back at him. Then he had counter-accused her of sulking…They were beginning to argue like an old married couple, she thought, and she realised she wasn’t happy being on her own — she’d always had boyfriends and lovers and being single didn’t suit her. She hadn’t enjoyed her party either, her mood had soured when — retouching her make-up in the ladies’ lavatory — she had heard two men in the corridor outside talking about her. She had recognised Gary’s voice but couldn’t place the other’s — the music from the public bar was warming up, half obscuring it.

She heard Gary say: “—No, no. We, you know, broke up.”

Then the other man: “Shame, yeah…(something inaudible) lovely girl, Rita. Just my type.”

“Yeah? What type would that be?” Gary said.

Rita was now at the door, ear to the jamb.

“Full breasts, thin frame,” the man said. “You can’t beat it. What a fool you are, Boland.”

They laughed and she heard them wander off. Rita came straight out of the ladies and went into the bar to see that Gary was standing on his own. She looked around: the place was full. Had it been Duke? She just couldn’t be sure. But it aggrieved her and it cast a cloud over her farewell. Every man she greeted, chatted to, let buy her drinks, said goodbye to, swore to stay in touch with and kissed on the cheek might have been Gary’s interlocutor. It made her wary and awkwardly self-conscious of the tightness of the T — shirt she’d chosen to wear. She’d drunk too much to little effect and woken up crapulous with a mighty day-long hangover.

Get a grip, she said to herself, disgusted with her self-pity, it’s hardly the end of the world, girl. For god’s sake — just blokes talking, nothing new there. Still, it was never nice to eavesdrop on conversations about yourself. Just as well she hadn’t been able to see their faces or any gestures they had made…

Routinely, she checked that the mooring ropes were made fast on her boat, a brand new Targa 50, re-tightened one, and turned her back on the river and went briskly along the jetty through the passage, across the narrow cobbled roadway that was Wapping High Street and into the operations Portakabin. Joey Raymouth was already there, still diligently writing up his notes from that morning’s intelligence briefing, and they greeted each other, perfunctorily but warmly — she liked Joey. He was assigned to her, seeing her through her first month on the river, ‘mentoring’ her. His father was a fisherman in Fowey, in Cornwall, and he had a West Country burr to his voice.

“You all right, Rita? Look a bit under the weather.”

She forced her face into a wide smile. “No, no probs at all.”

He rose to his feet and together they went to receive their instructions from Sergeant Denton Rollins — ex-Royal Navy, as he constantly reminded his charges — with the heavy implication that he still could not understand how he had come down so low in the world.

Their duties for this shift were all very straightforward — checking mooring permits at Westminster and Battersea, investigating a fire on a boat at Chiswick and some thefts from pleasure cruisers in Chelsea marina.

Raymouth took more notes as Rollins read out the details. Rita looked round as more colleagues came in and the swell of banter grew.

“Oh, yeah,” Rollins said. “One for you, Nashe. Reports of a man killing a swan at low tide by Chelsea Bridge yesterday morning. Your neck of the woods.”

“A swan?”

“It’s illegal. Don’t die of excitement.”

“I’m in it for the glamour, Sarge.”

She and Joey went back out to their boat and put on their buoyancy vests. Joey went through the checklist and started the engines while Rita undid the moorings, cast off and then stepped aboard as the Targa pulled away from the jetty into mid-stream.

Because the tide was high the Thames looked like a proper city river — like the Seine or the Danube — the river broad and full, perfectly apt and proportional to the embankment walls and the buildings on either side and the bridges that traversed it. At low tide everything changed, the river fell between twelve and twenty feet, walls were exposed, weed draped the now visible piles of the bridges, beaches and mud flats appeared and the river looked like the Zambezi or Limpopo in times of drought. Correspondingly, the city suffered aesthetically, but this morning the river brimmed and Rita felt her moodiness begin to disappear and her heart quicken with pleasure. This was why she had transferred to MSU, she realised, hauling the fat rubber fenders on board as Joey accelerated off, the two big Volvo diesels firing up with a bass roar, heading up river, Bermondsey to the port side, Tower Bridge up ahead, the clear morning light making the windows of the City’s office blocks flash brazenly, the breeze whipping her hair. HMS Belfast coming up, then London Bridge, Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre. What a way to earn a living, she said to herself, widening her stance on the deck, gripping the guard-rail with both hands as Joey speeded up, the spume of their bow wave almost indecently white, drops of river water bouncing off her uplifted face. She held herself like this for a second or two, breathing deeply, feeling her head spin before she went down below to the forward galley to brew up two mugs of strong tea.

♦

The Chiswick fire had been intriguing. A barbecue on deck of a Bayliner cruiser had been left untended, sparks from which had set small fires going on the boats moored alongside. Lawsuits for damages were pending. Joey and Rita interviewed angry boat owners and took down details — but there was no sign of the careless cook. His Bayliner was now semi-burnt-out, sunk to the gunwales from the weight of the water from the fire brigade’s hoses. Piecing together the various accounts witnesses supplied, it seemed he had lit the barbecue, had a violent row with his girlfriend, she had run off and he followed, forgetting about their soon-to-be-chargrilled Sunday lunch. Joey was pretty sure it was illegal to have a barbecue on a moored boat anyway — no naked flames. Anyway, they had the man’s details — the Chiswick police could track him down while they would serve notice to remove his burnt-out boat within seven days or face further penalties.