All stories

The hail lashed at my naked skin, searing against my bruised and broken body as I stumbled down the canal path. Blood tears and rain entwined like rivulets. I clenched the package in my hand tightly and pressed ahead. The wind picked up; another of times cruel comrades conspiring against me. My enemies converged this night. But I will not be stopped. I have come to far and given too much. The normally calm black waters beside me seemed to froth now in the power of the storm. The canal pulsed and throbbed like the veins of a heart about to rupture.

Finally my eyes straining ahead caught a glimpse of The Smiling Terrapin, still moored where I had left it only days ago, but what felt like a lifetime.

The cabin was always locked tight. New windows. Tighter security . All measures I had put in place when I took the boat over from my sister. But I had kept her gnomes, as crazy and quirky as they were they reminded me of her and warmed the bitter coldness of my grief. She would have laughed at my insecurities and my hypocrisy if she knew I had also kept a spare key under the smallest; A grumpy looking chap pushing a wheelbarrow. I always called him the barrow boy, though he had a fine beard of course.My secret little emergency chap that no one knew about. My saviour tonight.

Every strange noise in the wind made me start with fear. Where was he now? Behind or ahead? I knew his intent but not his plan and what little time I had bought my self seemed far too little against his cruel but brilliant abilities. Pain flooded by body with each step but my cracked and crooked feet plodding forward. My back hunched forward in determination now against the driving wind. I was so close.

As I approached closer to the boat my nerves stretched thin. I hovered at the edge looking for signs of anything suspicious but it was too dark, too difficult to tell. I slowly climbed aboard the dark bobbing mass. Then my stomach lurched. My strength began to falter. The cabin looked secure still but the deck and gnomes were missing. This was not horseplay or thievery. This was malicious intent. He knew. He must have been watching me for weeks. Months even.

I looked at the damp bundle in my hand. Now what I thought as I huddled beneath the semi sheltered parapet above the cabin door. Locked. Sealed by my own security. No point trying to break this glass or Jimmy a lock. I had never imagined thus bloodied broken and naked scenario. Where next? Another boat maybe? There were others not too far. Perhaps…

And then I heard footsteps calmly approaching. I looked around wildly for a weapon.

“Thank you, John.” A thin voice cut through the wind. Barely audible yet heart stoppingly clear. I could not see him still. I did not know what to do. I glanced at the dark water. Then the thundering crack of his pistol and I was thrown backwards moments and forever later the searing pain tore through my chest.

I saw his shape then approach from the dark. I gasped for breath. I knew then I had only one moment. As he climbed aboard I felt rather than saw the briefest detachment of his laser like focus. I lurched to my feet and threw myself over the side. Down into the deeper depths of the canal blackness.

“The water’s up near Christopher now,” called Jack from the living room window.

Nana moaned. Christopher was her favourite and the last man standing; the others had been submerged hours ago, the tips of their little red hats disappearing under the rising water.

“I could nip out and grab him,” dad volunteered. “He’s not too far down…”

“It’s not worth risking for the sake of a gnome.” Even in the dark, I could hear the eyeroll in mum’s voice. “Christopher will be ok, Judy. After the storm we’ll fetch him out and give him a new coat of paint.”

Nana didn’t answer.

It was astonishing how quickly the stagnant canal had become a rushing torrent of filthy water, sweeping old bicycles, traffic cones and trolleys past Nana's window at unnerving speed.

We’d called 999 when things had started to get worse, before the power had gone completely. Because Nana's house was at the top of the hill, they'd asked us to sit tight and wait it out.

Since then we’d watched the canal water inch its way up the steep slope of Nana’s garden. Now water encircled her hill like a moat.

I cast the beam of my torch around the room. Dad was playing on his phone, Nana was knitting a terrapin-green jumper, fingers nimbly working stitches in the dark. Mum chewed her lips.

“Where’s Jack?” I asked.

He’d taken up his post at the window when the storm had really kicked off and had been offering a running commentary. But now his seat was empty.

Panic hit immediately.

Mum snatched my torch and dad leaped up, their feet stumbling as they searched the house for my stupid, reckless brother.

I looked at Nana, cold eyes determinedly down, fingers clenched around her knitting.

I imagined it; the touch of her cold, papery hand in the dark slipping a five pound note into his greedy little paw.

“Jack’s outside. He’s fine. He’s getting Christopher.”

“Bloody stupid boy,” roared dad, pelting downstairs and throwing open the window. “Jack!”

Perhaps if dad hadn’t shouted, Jack would have seen it coming. But he’d looked up at dad’s voice, knee deep in water and triumphantly holding Christopher aloft.

The tyre hit him in the back of the knees and threw him off balance. He fell into the surging water.

Mum was out the window in a flash, pelting across the ruined lawn in her socks. I could see Jack trying to stand but the water was too fast and too full of debris for him to manage it.

In the end it was Christopher who saved him. Jack managed to wedge him into a cluster of branches and used his bulk to stabilise himself. Mum walked him back up to the house, hugging him and shouting by turn.

At our window, mum took Christopher, looked directly into Nana’s eyes, and threw him onto the concrete patio. He smashed into a thousand red and blue fragments.

When Jack walked into the living room, before mum could whisk him off to warm and berate him, he placed a soggy fiver on the table beside Nana.

Wordlessly, she slipped it back into her purse.

The community fell apart after the gnomes were found. The same gnomes that had pulled it so tightly together. It didn’t happen in an explosion of emotion. It happened quietly. A collection of private choices. Nobody was blamed. Nobody had the energy to solve the crime. It was all just too disappointing. Too deflating. Too sad.

People drifted away with little pause, and even less discussion. Jess had no opportunity to confess, explain, salvage, or sacrifice. She wasn’t sure she could anyway.

Jess felt like an intruder when she first took the empty mooring. A floating home was expected to be a way of life, not a flight of fancy. It wasn’t for tourists, or teenagers. Jess didn’t see herself as a tourist but thought the others would. She was just someone who could get a bank loan but would never have a deposit.

Any relief Jess felt at learning it wasn’t her against them was chased away by the disappointment of realising it was everyone for themselves. The canal was no more a community than the flats she’d moved out of. The only difference was a committee rather than a landlord set the rules.

The lines of ‘them’ and ‘us’ needed to create a community were only drawn after accusations of ornament pilfering were levelled at the village’s waterborne residents by those whose gardens backed onto the towpath. Little in this life bonds a group faster than being treated as ‘other’. Every unfounded assumption brought the community closer, and Jess loved it.

Only, it was them. At least, it was one of them.

Jess stole her first gnome after an unexpected lock-in at The Bridge. Its big eyes had winked in the moonlight and the rum inside her had responded. She separated the little fisher from its friends, carried it home, placed it on the bow, stumbled inside, and passed out.

She woke after a few hours, the same night but a different Jess, consumed by the torment of a clenched pelvic floor. She rushed to the head and released. As the pain flowed out, guilt rushed in. In fuzzy-headed panic, Jess gave her diminutive figurehead a maritime burial and returned to bed.

Fergus the Fisher was Jess’ first victim, but far from her last. More than a dozen clay characters were sent to sleep with the fishes by Jess’ nocturnal cycle of theft and fear. If it hadn’t been for the search and rescue operation when Bert’s granddaughter dropped her pet terrapin into the canal, Jess might have drowned the entire population.

The first boat sailed away the day after the underwater cemetery was discovered. By the end of the month, only Jess and Bert remained. Bert was too old to make changes and his grandkids lived too close. The final pair sipped homebrew under the stars, their Sunday night tradition. Jess felt as though she’d swallowed an anchor.

“You made it special here, for a while,” Bert said without looking at Jess. “And I always hated those gnomes.”

There are surprisingly few places to piss discreetly along most towpaths in the daylight, and John was running out of time. He clenched whatever he could between his piss balloon and piss tube and raged at the sun for refusing to fuck off. He’d been drinking for eight hours, it should be dark by now. John fucking hated the summer.

You know what else he hated? Gnomes. Aloof little shits. Dungarees and Santa hats? Fucking ridiculous. He pitched his empty bottle into the garden and knocked one of the beardy little bastards straight into a pond.

“Ha!” he spat into the air. “Not bad for a pissed fucker!”

John’s joy loosened the resolve in his groin, almost causing a leak. He squeezed hard and felt a sudden movement. The focus of his problem was suddenly quite different. He wasn’t turtling, but it might be a terrapin. Some vicious little fucker snapping to get out. Desperate times. John tried to blink clarity into his blurry world. That’s when he saw the open door.

Dignity had been tied to the towpath for as long as John could remember. He’d always enjoyed the reference. It never moved. It wasn’t moored on the other side of the water like the houseboats. He’d never seen anyone on it. The lights were never on at night.

Four heartbeats later, John sat pantless in the dark as every foreign object in his body plummeted into what he hoped was a toilet. Bliss overwhelmed his body with an intensity even morphine couldn’t match. Surrounded by beautiful silence, John exhaled, let his head fall against the wood behind him, and passed out.

He woke because somebody coughed. It could have been seconds, it could have been hours. His trousers were still around his ankles and the upright coffin around him was thick with an ungodly miasma. He retched but choked back the sound.

John shook his head and tried to put his thoughts in order. The cough didn’t sound deliberate and hadn’t been repeated. The fact he’d been left undisturbed suggested he hadn’t run past an unsuspecting occupant and released six feet from where they sat. The person now in the boat had either been asleep or elsewhere when John had mounted his emergency trespass. John wasn’t caught yet but, somehow, he needed to make a dignified dismount.

Gently, John pushed the porthole open to dilute the air and make space for a plan. He pushed his head into the hole. The towpath bobbed directly beneath his nose. His heart filled with opportunity, John yanked his head back to check if the porthole was big enough to push his body through. His ears wedged tight against the metal ring of the window. “Fuck!” he spat.

“What the…. who’s there?!”

“Fuck…” John sighed, his eyes locked with those of a gnome whose friend had recently gone missing.

On the towpath north from Oxford station the moored barges give way to the backs of long gardens often containing rotting wooden dinghies and exotic grasses. Ducks wander up and catch sight of their reflections in the conservatory windows behind the houses, which are mostly owned by University Professors.

In one of the kitchens, two professor’s wives were opining about their husband’s trysts with postgraduate students. “It’s not the bloody affairs” said Bella waving a bucket-sized glass of merlot, “it’s the joyless transactional nature of it.” “It sucks us all in.” agreed Sylvia, her next-door neighbour, refilling her own glass.

“And the fucking collections! My garden has over 100 gnomes in it! He says they’re priceless but they look like they’ve come from Homebase to me! I caught him talking to them about his latest floozy last night!” shouted Bella.

“At least they don’t move!” cried Sylvia. “Mike’s turtle collection is distressingly mobile! Last night I found two of them in the bath with me. They care more about them than us!”

The wives had been cleverer than their husbands as students 50 years before, but had given up their careers as their men were promoted. As 70s feminists they would have considered a big kitchen and local Waitrose to be poor reasons to preserve the patriarchy and a sham marriage but here they were with only wardrobes full of well-made clothes, holidays in Tuscany and an inexhaustible wine cellar as consolation.

“If we can’t divorce them lets teach them a lesson” said Bella

Sylvia looked at the garden with a cunning, inebriated smile.

Later that evening Sir Michael Handiford- Gregg (Head of Testudine studies at Fitzwilliam college) and Jeff Sullivan (Author of “Structural Marxism and Garden Figures in Postwar Britain”), arrived home to discover what looked like a burglary had taken place.

Their wives were hiding beneath an upturned dinghy waiting for the moment the ruined collections were discovered. The ensuing anguished screams, delivered in unison, were they agreed, definitely worth the effort.

The Dons immediately called the police and the entitlement of their voices, plus an invite to a college dinner for the chief of police meant that a young probationer, PC Liam Potts of the Oxfordshire Constabulary was despatched to discover and arrest the perpetrators. It didn’t take him long to follow the sound of drunken snickering from under the upturned boat.

Bella and Sylvia were released at 3 AM, when the Professors reluctantly agreed to drop the charges. By this time, 17 damaged gnomes had been recovered from the canal and a liberated tortoise had been spotted on Banbury Rd. (It was spotted again the next morning, 8 inches further on). PC Potts was relieved to get rid of the “old bats” who had been singing “we shall not be moved” in the lock up for most of their incarceration. They had now fallen fast asleep.

Having, with great effort, delivered them to their doorsteps, he was about to leave when he felt movement within his cap. He took it off and a tiny terrapin leapt from his head and into the gleeful hands of Professor Handiford-Gregg. “Shakira!” cried the doting academic, “I thought you were lost forever. Thank you, young man!”

“No problem” said PC Potts “and if you want my opinion you’ll keep your possessions firmly under lock and key from now on!”

“Don’t worry we intend to” said the professors in unison.

They were as good as their word. Locking the doors to both their spare bedrooms as soon as they had carried their snoring wives in.

Dannel was born on the canal bank, in amongst the long grass and cow parsley, just a few hundred yards from the Barge Inn. Topper Sandford found him, as he told it, “swaddled in newspapers, ‘e were screaming with all the breath in his lungs, ‘im fists balled as tight as a badgers ass’ole”. There was nothing to show where or who he came from, so Topper took him straight back home to Pamp, handing him over with a shrug, “there you go girl, found a littl’un by the cut needs tending”.

Sure enough, Pamp tended him. They called him Dannel because that was the name given to the runt of a litter of pigs, unnurtured by it’s mother. In an act of almost wilful defiance Dannel grew awful big and not anything like a runt at all, fed as he was on Pamp’s fatty roasts and suet puddings. Dannel lived with Pamp and Topper but inhabited the villages around, navigating tracks and meadows, railway lines, and most often the canal paths, he came to be known by everyone. Dannel was made strong lifting stooks of straw at harvest time for the farmers and fetching whole carcasses off the van for the butcher down the road.

He went to school but didn’t seem to settle, unsure what use it was knowing the names of creatures he would never see like Terrapins and Capybaras, or why he needed to count further than his fingers.

Dannel’s favourite spot by the canal was near Three Ladies bridge, under Woodborough Hill. He would sit there for hours making musical instruments of the wide bladed grass. This way he became familiar with many of the regular narrowboat folk that came by, travelling to or from Bristol and Reading. He chatted with many of them, doing small jobs for them where he could, but his favourite boat was small, brightly painted and called the Dragonfly. It was decorated with plastic flowers, enamel pots and a parade of garden gnomes.

There was a small blonde girl who travelled on the boat, along with an elderly man and a sad looking younger woman. The Dragonfly came past every month and Dannel would always shout “hello”, but with no response. Sometimes he would run alongside, hoping that the girl would wave or smile, but she never did, she just watched him. Sometimes he made her gifts, a small corn dolly, a whittled stick, a daisy chain, and dropped them onto the boat from the bridge. He would watch her quietly retrieve them with no acknowledgement and stow them in a small box on the boat roof.

Then one day it was war and nothing seemed the same. The boats on the canals were different, there were planes overhead at night, soldiers with strange accents in the villages, and even a bomb dropped in a field in Beechingstoke. The Dragonfly’s journeys became less frequent, until the last ever time Dannel saw it, down the canal having passed by before he got to the bridge.

Nestled in the grass at the bottom of the bridge was something wrapped in newspaper. Dannel opened it to find a gnome with a fishing rod and a stem of plastic flowers, and as he looked along the canal, in the distance, he saw the young woman and the girl waving.