The Borribles - Larrabeiti Michael - Страница 17

The wide curve of the river was empty and still. The ripples of the heavy green water were frozen and dirty. On the Fulham shore squatted the oil depots, faceless places waiting on faceless roads that led nowhere and where nobody lived. Just before dawn Wandsworth Bridge passed over the Battersea boat, casting a darker shadow than the night, and all that the rowers saw were the powerful and unmoving waves that stood and gnawed at the stone piers on which the bridge was built.

They were now into Wandsworth Reach and along the southern side stretched a great wasteland, and although the Adventurers saw nothing they could sense the existence of a wild space from the shapeless whistling of the wind. On the northern bank stood the Cement Marketing Factory and the Trinidad Asphalt Company but the Borribles could not see where the buildings touched the sky because the sky was as black as roof-slate.

It was so murky that Napoleon was convinced he would never find the mouth of the Wandle and his companions began to despair. After several fruitless attempts he went to the front of the boat and knelt down to peer into the blackness. There were dozens of barges here, deeply laden with the old lumber of all Wandsworth, for the land around the estuary was a vast rubbish dump and somewhere amongst the hillocks of refuse meandered the slimy river.

An overpowering stench was brewing by the bank, a mixture compounded of rancid sewage, mouldering waste-paper and the rotting flesh of dead sea-birds. The water dripping from the raised and expectant oars of the rowers made no sound, so thick and oily was it. The Borribles coughed and retched, drooping on their benches, only just able to obey Napoleon's commands as he made the boat nose this way and that, his torch stabbing at the fearsome night.

At last he turned and in a whispered shout, sharp with tired excitement, said, "I've got it."

The boat drifted. The rowers twisted on their seats to look and their hearts shrank to the size of peanuts. In the flat wall of the Thames embankment, hidden behind a flotilla of barges, a gap appeared in the feeble light of Napoleon's torch.

"This must be Wandle Creek," said Napoleon. "Anyway, there's only one way to find out, and that's go up the thing." It was obvious to the others that he was tense, that he didn't really know.

The boat swung slowly round until it was knocking against the solid current of the Wandle and as soon as he was on course Napoleon ordered his crew to paddle upstream. He ran quickly down the middle of the boat, freed Adolf's hands and told him to lift out the rudder.

"If you try to escape, I'll catapult you right up the back of the bonce."

Adolf looked surprised. "Escape? This is what I came for, I'm not leaving you now."

Napoleon ran back to the bows to direct the progress of the boat in a low voice and the Borribles pulled steadily, only too glad they couldn't see where they were in the fetid gloom.

They had gone only a short distance when the creek forked and after a moment's hesitation and drifting Napoleon steered them to the left and they rowed on, levering their oars with difficulty out of water that seemed as tenacious as treacle. After ten minutes they heard Napoleon swear loudly and then call out urgently for them to stop. He struck the boat in anger. "Dammit, I forgot the weirs."

The boatload of Borribles was utterly dismayed. Across the quiet of the night came a sound from beyond their experience, a rushing and a roaring of the elements. Swivelling again in their seats they saw a foaming slope of water slanting towards them in the torchlight; racing yellow suds forced themselves up through a black and shiny surface which slid, unstoppable, towards them, like the most precipitous moving staircase in the London Underground. Polythene containers, empty paint-cans and plastic bottles surged and danced around the boat, buffeting against its sides, like evil spirits on the river to hell.

"W-what is it?" asked Bingo, trying to keep his lips steady.

"It's an effin' weir, that's what, too high to get round. We'll have to take the other fork. There's another weir but it's not so steep." Napoleon's voice was dispirited and exhausted. He felt at the end of his tether, worn out by the responsibilities of the river trip and now this at the end of it.

"If we're caught out here in the daylight, we'll be sussed by the rubbish-men and caught by the Woollies for sure." He thought for an instant and the others waited, the boat still staggering under the onslaught of the swirling water.

"Ship yer oars," he said at length, and as soon as the oars were on board he took one of them and began to punt the boat back the way they had come, while his crew sat uselessly on the benches of The Silver Belle Flower, squinting hard to right and left but seeing little. It was all too silent and ugly.

"Keep your eyes peeled for that fork in the creek," growled Napoleon, "otherwise I'll miss it and we'll be out on the Thames again. We must be hidden by dawn. This place is lousy with adults in daytime."

His fear was shared by the others. Already the high banks of the Wandle, held in place by slimy green sleepers and sheets of pitted iron, were taking on a shape and the black sky was not so black as it had been. "The fork, the fork," sang out Adolf. Napoleon let the boat drift round into the other branch of the Wandle.

"Get those oars going quick," he commanded, wrenching his own from a mud-bank that was reluctant to let it go. There was a nasty squelch as the oar came away and large dollops of sludge rolled begrudgingly down the wood and slunk back into the river.

Napoleon urged his crew on. The flow of the tide was less strong here and they soon went under a railway bridge, the boat bashing through floating atolls of muck like a trawler in pack-ice.

Another fork came up before them but Napoleon did not hesitate this time.

"Bow side paddle," he called, "stroke side rest, one, two, paddle," and the boat veered to the left.

"We went left last time and it was wrong," said Torreycanyon, loudly with some edge to his voice.

"Yeah," said someone else.

Napoleon's face became so white with anger that it glowed phosphorescent in the dark dawn. "Well, we're going left this time and it's right."

Suddenly there was a clang and a boom and Napoleon was knocked forward and thrown down in the scuppers. The boat stopped moving with a jolt and a scraping was heard as the bows made contact with something. Napoleon jumped to his feet rubbing his head.

"Damn you, don't talk to me when I'm navigating," he shouted. "We've gone and run into a pipe, could have drowned us."

Slung low over the water a huge pipe-line spanned the Wandle near a foot-bridge and it was this that had flung Napoleon to the deck.

"You at the stern, row hard," he cried. "This pipe's so low over the water that we'll have to force the boat under it. Don't fall in any of yer, there's eels in here will have yer leg off."

Those at the rear of the boat leaned on the oars while those at the front got down on their backs and tugged and shoved The Silver Belle Flower under the pipe-line. When they emerged on the far side it was easy enough for them to push the boat through, while those behind ducked under in their turn.

"It's not over yet," said Napoleon, "there's a real waterfall here, ten foot high, right under The Causeway. To get round it we've got to pull this boat up and out and over this bridge."

Above their heads was a high fence that had been made by the rubbish-men, using old bed frames, bedsteads and strips of metal. Napoleon took a pair of wire-cutters from his pocket and got Bingo to give him a leg-up. He clung to the bankside and cut all the springs out of one of the bed frames, making a gap large enough to get the boat through.

"Throw up the painter," he ordered next and when he had the rope in his hands he told the crew to jam their belongings firmly under the seats and then to climb up the bank to join him.

"We've got to get this bleeder up here," explained Napoleon, whose weariness had dropped from him under the excitement of leadership, "and drag it across this island we're on, then we'll be above both weirs, but we've got to hurry."

The Adventurers gathered around the painter and hauled and hauled and slowly The Silver Belle Flower came up from the water to hang vertically above the Wendle. Napoleon looped a couple of turns of the rope around a notice board which said, "Wandsworth Borough Council. Danger Keep Out." The others seized the bows of the boat and manhandled her to The Causeway. They puffed and they panted and waited a while to regain their breath.

"Right, four each side," said Napoleon. "I'll pull, the Jerry can push." "Not half," said Adolf.

They dragged and pushed the boat across a littered roadway where splintered glass and the debris from long abandoned houses made a crunching sound under the keel. Fifty yards they had to go; it was hard work and they slipped and stumbled and cursed, but at last they came to the main branch of the Wandle, well beyond the two dangerous weirs.

It was pale daylight now and the danger of being spotted in this open and desolate country was increasing every minute. Hurriedly they balanced their boat on the river bank and Napoleon grouped them together.

"When I give the word, we've got to push like hell. She should land flat on the water. If she don't, she'll sink."

Oh his command they all heaved together, and The Silver Belle Flower flew out into the air and belly-flopped onto the water, with a sound that reverberated like a gunshot across the no-man's land of the empty estuary. Before she could float away Napoleon dived down after the boat, sprawled between the benches, scrambled to his feet and threw the painter upwards into the hands of Torreycanyon.

"All back in," yelled the Wendle, "quick as yer like."

As the others embarked Knocker looked back the way they had come, and now in the weak light he could see.

Two black steam cranes guarded the mouth of the Wandle, square and ugly, covered in sheets of flimsy metal, and they had iron wheels which ran on iron rails. These machines it was that loaded the barges with rubbish, scratching patiently every day into mountains of garbage that were always replenished, never diminishing. Scattered lorries waited to go scouring across Wandsworth in search of more waste; huge tipper trucks and skip-carriers stood idle between piles of discarded stoves and gutted refrigerators. Far off, between the Wandle and Wandsworth Bridge, was a mile of undulating mud-coloured barrenness, relieved only by the blobs of white that were seagulls, big as swans, tearing at offal with beaks like baling-hooks.