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  ‘Why aren’t you playing?’ he asked no one in particular.

  ‘Don’t know how,’ replied Bathsheba.

  ‘Why don’t you try, it’s fun,’ said the little boy, taking her hand and pulling her towards the sandpit.

  ‘It’s only fun because you know you are going to be allowed to do it again,’ said M. ‘Otherwise it’s a punishment.’

  *

  Sonja and Batty Sherman had been trying to sell 20 Venison Chase even before the boat project was conceived, living as they did in a property adjoining that of a man who regarded a night pitched face down in their rose bushes wearing clothing whose fibres were held together by DNA and excrement to be ‘a nice little soiree’. Efforts to interest buyers were hampered by the skip full of whisky bottles in their neighbour’s drive and the philharmonic cacophony of crapulous abuse issuing from next door at random times of the night and day. They sought resolution through the courts, the council, even the local scout leader was approached in a last desperate throw of the dice, but Dorritt would always intervene, committing once more to tame her savage spouse. Everyone was charmed by Dorritt. When the screaming ended and the sawing commenced, their objections were moribund – they were defeated, they removed the ‘For Sale’ board, quadruple-glazed their windows, wore surgically implanted wax earplugs and learned sign language.

  *

  On an ultramarine Saturday morning, nearer to August than any other month, Sonja was peering out of her kitchen window when her eyes fell upon something which caused her no little perturbation. She turned momentarily – Batty was sitting at the kitchen table, enthralled in the freshly ironed Times and Sonja gained his attention by lovingly throwing a half full coffee mug at his head.

  ‘Outside,’ she signed. ‘Big. Really big.’

  ‘A bus,’ signed Batty.

  ‘Not a bus, bigger, swings – like a –’ Sonja grabbed for the signing dictionary. ‘Like a giant apple on a rope.’

  ‘A giant orange on a rope?’ signed Batty imaginatively.

  Sonja glanced nervously back at the window, ‘not a giant orange you moron – how many giant oranges have you seen? They use this when they build, it’s made of steel, it swings and smashes.’ She searched forlornly for the sign but there was nothing like it…

  Batty put down his paper, sighed, parked his reading glasses and joined Sonja at the window.

  ‘A wrecking ball,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sonja. ‘At last, a – ’

  *

  Bathsheba, sister of Clive and M, had never driven a crane before nor wielded a wrecking ball but she did both with gusto and not a little flair. Sonja and Batty’s home quickly resembled the ruined heart of Stalingrad in 1942, which allowed Bathsheba to concentrate on gently demolishing 22 Venison Chase without damaging the glorious craft which lay within.

  *

  ‘Now what,’ said M, standing in the steaming rubble of Dorritt and Clive’s former abode, staring at his embracing siblings.

  ‘Now we tow it to the Thames,’ replied Clive.

  ‘It will fit down all the main roads – I’ve measured them,’ said Bathsheba.

  ‘It may fit down all of the main roads if there are no cars parked on them,’ replied M. ‘But there are going to be parked cars. What then?’

  ‘We destroy them,’ said Bathsheba, walking back down the street where she had, much earlier that week, under the cover of darkness, casually concealed under an ill-fitting tarpaulin 33.4 tons of Sherman tank and a boat trailer.

  *

  M had formed the view, after some deliberation, that turning his sister, whose connection to reality was at best euphemistic, loose on the streets of London with a fully armed Sherman tank was a little bit, well, dangerous. Furthermore, he reasoned, association with said Sherman tank towing, as it did, a giant wooden amphibious potato might not, in the eyes of The Metropolitan Police, his albeit forward-thinking employers (who were, when all was said and done, generally risk-averse when it came to acts of wanton carnage), represent conduct which was likely to enhance his already wafer-thin career prospects.

  ‘Who suddenly appointed you the arbiter of reason?’ asked Clive. ‘You pose more of a risk to society than any giant weaponised amphibious root vegetable as far as I am concerned. We always knew where we were with dad. You did something wrong, you were punished, you did something right, you were punished more; with Bathsheba and me, each slap was like a nail driven into a tree branch. We were split, warped, degraded; but it was as if you became all the more impregnable.’

  ‘I have fathered Saul with none of our imperfections,’ replied M.

  ‘You think he can’t see what his father is? He sees. We all see. My crutch is the bottle, Bathsheba’s is the pharmacy, what’s yours? Your son? Have you ever asked yourself what the world would look like for you, for all of us, if that crutch was kicked away?’

  It was not a question which M had posed to himself. Like all those that love one person with blind and absolute devotion he could not imagine what he might be capable of doing to the person he held accountable for their loss.

  M agreed to rendezvous with Clive and Bathsheba at Shad Thames, where the ‘Pool of London’ meant that the river was at its deepest. He had been listening in to the police radio as the tank weaved its path of destruction through the streets of London, writing off innumerable vehicles and threatening an over eager traffic warden in West Finchley with extreme prejudice. A task force of five police attack helicopters, three hundred officers in riot gear and a battalion of the Royal Scottish Dragoon Guards had been poised to intercept but had been stood down in a dispute over overtime pay. The union representative for the Metropolitan Police Officers Federation described the eventual financial settlement some twelve weeks later as ‘a momentous development in the landscape of the future calculation of productivity incentive payments,’ although he regretted the resultant 500 fold increase in crime during this period of “creative police inactivity”.’

  *

  Once it was launched on the Thames, M was concerned that ‘El Patata de la Redención’ (The Potato of Redemption) might be something of a deathtrap, however he had sworn to himself as a child that if he could not protect his younger siblings then he would, at least, perish with them and it was with this glowing endorsement that he stepped on to the bow of the boat.

  ‘Where now?’ asked M, expecting perhaps a quick foray over to Canvey Island, which would get him back in time for the dinners he had planned for 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, 9pm and 11.30pm that evening. He had noticed that the area of deck where they stood was at once convex and concave – it was not a vessel which was exactly streamlined.

  ‘Chia Daakwokweyeh,’ replied Clive, as if M would obviously know where this was, without need for further explanation.

  ‘North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean,’ said Bathsheba with unusual clarity. ‘The only island on the planet which has never been explored or influenced by Western civilisation.’

  ‘Populated by the Sentinelese – who have greeted all previous visitors with extreme and relentless violence and whose society is believed to be replete with adultery and sudden death,’ explained Clive.

  ‘So I won’t need my passport then,’ said M.

  *

  Clive showed M to the cockpit of the La patata de la Redención and proudly took him through the various empty square and round holes in the instrumentation panel where the complex equipment required to navigate and control the boat would have sat if he had purchased it.

  ‘Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the Indian Ocean about nine thousand miles away?’ asked M.

  ‘Ten thousand miles,’ replied Clive.

  ‘And how do you hope to get there?’ asked M.

  ‘We have a steering wheel and a big sail and a tractor engine and a rudder,’ replied Clive.

  ‘And maps,’ added Bathsheba. ‘We bought some nice maps.’

  ‘And we have this,’ said Clive, taking off his right shoe and showing M the small compas
s concealed within the heel.

  ‘Just in case you do actually get this thing out of the Thames and on to the open sea, do you actually have the quantity of food and fresh water you need for a journey of this…’

  M could see his brother was beginning to lose the sheen of confidence which had illuminated his face since M had first seen him earlier that day. Clive’s hands were beginning to shake again as the ache for the bottle was returning to his gut.

  ‘You never share our vision, M, you never see the world through our eyes,’ said Clive.

  ‘Why must we always be defeated?’ asked Bathsheba.

  M knew nothing of the sea or of how the world might appear through the eyes of his siblings but he knew all about destination. He thought about Saul, now at home, playing in the peripheral presence of M’s wife. He wondered if his son experienced their symbiotic relationship in the way that M did. Was he too reliant on this young child to maintain his structural integrity against the screaming hordes circling and shooting flaming arrows towards the crumbling edifice of his sanity? He could not bring himself to accept that he was. But, all the same, M found himself yearning to have Saul by his side again to restore his equilibrium.

  A student of calculus, he decided that a purely mathematical approach was required in order to objectively assess the risk that his siblings would indeed circumnavigate the globe:

  h (x) – 3 + 29 = x

  h (giant floating militarised tuber) (x) (bollocks-for-brains siblings) – 3 (navigating 10,000 nautical miles of cruel and unpredictable ocean using only the compass in the heel of a pair of Clarks Pathfinder shoes) + 29 (reality) = x (not a fucking prayer)

  ‘Carpe shitting diem, bruv,’ said M.

  Chapter 4

  Nightingale Fleeertch (pronounced like the noise that cats make when they are coughing up a fur ball) had been working on the Thames flood barrier as deputy assistant operations manager for just over two years. In that time he had calculated the mean average level of neap tides from 1899 to the present day, accidentally killed a swan with a remote controlled helicopter and learned to speak Volapük, a language invented in 1879 and to his knowledge spoken by no one else in the entire world. It had been nothing but a roller coaster of near death thrills and spills. Away from work, he had watched the film Flood, in which an Armageddon-sized tsunami engulfs and destroys the Thames flood barrier, one hundred and fifty-eight and 1/8th times. On the commencement of the one hundred and fifty-ninth viewing his girlfriend had picked up the DVD player and wordlessly Frisbeed it out of her flat window without opening it, along with his toothbrush, underwear and shoes. There was every chance that if she had caught him he would have been next, but he was not sorry about this denouement. She had recently confided in him that she would rather her lungs were ripped from her chest by a pack of rabid hyenas than become the next Mrs Fleeertch, so he had suspected that the relationship had lost something of its original sparkle.

  Standing on the barrier’s central observation deck, Nightingale picked up the high powered binoculars through which he was expected to survey the Thames for possible signs of ‘a threat to the security and operational integrity of water displacement systems/resources’.

  He inspected the stains on his brown(ish) tie through the long-range precision lenses – chilli chicken Tung-rymbai, stuffed eggplant, loft drip, goat intestine and woad, and that was only in the last seven days. He inhaled for what felt like a month, sighed languorously and turned his attention with huge reluctance to the Thames – the vapid shit streak that trailed its fetid intestines through the heart of the glorious city of London. What water-related wonderment awaited him this fine day? A seagull with a cyst on its arse? A barge full of slurry that had strayed minutely off route? A giant wooden potato headed directly for them on a collision course? He dropped his binoculars and fumbled for his radio transmitter.

  *

  ‘We have entered the Straits of Messina and we must defeat Charybdis and Scylla or perish where we stand,’ shrieked Bathsheba, grabbing the lank wire wool which hung apologetically from her skull and pulling it out in bloodied clumps.

  ‘It’s the Thames barrier,’ said M, ‘not a giant armour-plated fish sucking down boats and eating their passengers whole – if the City of London Corporation had tried to install one of those it would never have got past the planning stage.’

  M could see that Clive was focusing and refocusing his addled pupils upon the distant silver fingertips of London’s flood defences. His mind was trying to identify what way up he was, and was not exactly functioning as a precision instrument. Residing within the four walls of Clive’s skull was a landscape replete with unfettered torment – the tiny flame that his father lit and fanned had become a forest fire that had engulfed reason. He was agony, he belonged to mania, he was owned by fear. This was the defeat his father had engendered.

  M reached out and took Clive’s face in his black leather-gloved hands, squeezing just a little bit harder than necessary. ‘Cut out the low resolution thinking and concentrate. You and Princess Leila over there couldn’t navigate this thing to the end of my prick, let alone traverse the globe. Let’s empty the bilge, secure the forecastle to a cleat with a lanyard, park this pile of shit by the side of the river and start again – there will be other dreams, brother, other horizons.’

  Clive flinched out of M’s grasp, batting his hands away with archaic wrath. ‘Listen you glutted fuckmaggot, this is the dream – this, nothing else. Don’t you dare, don’t you dare have the audacity to pretend that you understand me, you don’t have the moral compass. You have the empathetic capacity of a dung beetle. You stood there while our father stamped and stamped on anything that Bathsheba and I could have called an aspiration. You watched him abbreviate our childhoods into no more than a footnote.’

  ‘I was a child myself.’

  ‘You were never a child, M, not close to it.’

  ‘I couldn’t have stopped him – he couldn’t stop himself,’ said M with unaccustomed defensiveness.

  ‘You could have tried, M,’ replied Clive. ‘Just that and no more and we would have seen that someone cared just a tiny bit, that we were children who had some intrinsic value. He swallowed us whole, he taught you rage and that’s where you escaped to, but all we learned was submission. We were vacated – voided. So don’t talk to me about dreams, M – I could not function as an adult – I was goaded by my wife and her fucking forgiveness, it made me sick – the worse I behaved towards her, the more she forgave and I detested her for that and disgusted myself. I flagellated our marriage until it was a blood-soaked corpse. This boat is all I am – it is all your sister is, and if she says that the Thames is blocked by a giant sea serpent then I see it too and if it is in our way then we will attack it and destroy it.’ He pushed M aside and held Bathsheba – her arms stuck out like a scarecrow which slowly, stiffly, fell around and about her brother, her right hand remaining, as ever, in a fist. Human contact stung her, she was not constructed to accommodate it.

  ‘Will you use the weapon?’ she asked Clive, whilst staring fixedly forwards.

  ‘We have no choice,’ he whispered.

  ‘Then I will fetch the sheep,’ she replied.

  *

  ‘Either there is an imminent threat to security or there isn’t, Fleeertch. I would have thought that even you…’ The voice of Mr Grobe, the operations manager, struck out at his subordinate through the walkie-talkie.

  ‘Well, Sir, there appears to be some kind of medieval catapult device that has been erected on the top of the giant floating potato,’ replied Fleeertch.

  ‘Your job is hanging by an imperceptible thread at this point, Fleeertch, I just wanted you to know that,’ said Grobe, ‘no pressure.’

  ‘They seem to be loading the device with…’ Fleeertch adjusted his binoculars. ‘For the love of God, this cannot be happening.’

  *

  ‘You absolutely, categorically, are not going to launch a sheep at the Thames flood barrier,’ shouted M, a
fter Clive had uncovered a giant catapult on the top deck of the potato, ratcheted it back into a loading position and Bathsheba had emerged from the lower decks with half a dozen sheep on dog leads.

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Clive, ‘using sheep like this as ammunition’ – the sheep stared up at him plaintively, not enjoying all these references to sheep being used as projectiles – ‘would be quite futile.’ A wave of relief fell upon the sheep and they sighed collectively.

  ‘Which is why we need to set them on fire first,’ said Bathsheba.

  *

  ‘You say you are being bombarded by burning sheep?’ said Grobe.

  ‘That’s what I just said,’ screamed Fleeertch, ducking as a lamb fizzed past his ear and exploded through the window of the observation deck.

  ‘Right, meet me on the war bridge,’ said Grobe.

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Fleeertch as a flaming sheep bounced into the central flood barrier, turning it into a volcano. ‘I didn’t know we had one.’

  ‘It’s the room between the coat cupboard and the men’s toilet,’ said Grobe.

  ‘I thought that was the women’s toilet,’ shouted Fleeertch.

  ‘That’s right, the government have militarised a women’s toilet,’ replied Grobe. ‘Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?’

  *

  Grobe, and Grobe’s face, set permanently into a contemptuous jeer, opened the door to the women’s toilet, which was now illuminated in red light as if it had been rehoused between his quivering, disparaging lips. One of the cubicles had been converted into a ready room and in the second, a panel had been lowered just above the cistern to reveal a radar screen, two keyholes and an extensive selection of toilet ducks.

  Grobe had worn the same green corduroy trousers to work since the early nineties when his previous pair were ripped asunder whilst he was dangled by them over the side of Waterloo Bridge. Short of a similar subordinate-driven debasement he would be wearing this current pair until he carked. He delved into a pocket which was used to a good degree of delving and, removing two important looking keys, he placed one into Fleeertch’s quivering fingers.