Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [11]
“We’re on the move, Boss,” I cried joyously down the phone. “Work starts tomorrow morning and I guess I’ll be bringing the boat down sometime next week.”
“Well, hot lickety dogspittle, I knew all along you were the man for the job. Well done, dear Chris, and thank you, thank you.”
A WEEK LATER, AS I waited disconsolately and alone on the wreck of my summer command, a disreputably shabby old three-wheeled tin van, known by the Greeks as a trikiklo, wormed its way among the potholes, rusting iron, and nautical detritus of the Kalamaki boat graveyard. I watched it with interest, and the smallest shred of hope kindling in my heart. Could this really be the manifestation of Ecstaticos’s promise? It pulled up uncertainly. The incumbents extricated themselves from the little cab and looked up at me.
“You Jane Joyce?” said the shorter of the two, squinting against the sunlight.
“No, I’m Chris.”
“I’m Nikos.”
We shook hands. The other one emerged from the other side of the boat, which he had been inspecting.
“Hi,” he said—they both spoke English with a strong transatlantic accent—“Nikos.”
“You’re both Nikos, then?”
“Yup,” they chorused. Not that you could confuse the two of them: one was tall and dark with an aquiline nose, the other slight with a close red beard.
“Y’know, Chris,” said red-beard-Nikos, “I would say that this ain’t so much a yacht like we was led to believe, more a boat, no?”
While he was making this observation tall-dark-Nikos was dragging a heap of junk, which might once have been tools, out of the trikiklo. “Right, let’s look see what we gonna do.”
They crawled all over the boat, poked it and tapped it and scraped it and confabulated unfathomably in Greek.
“Got some osmosis and it don’ seem to have no engine,” announced red-beard-Nikos. “The engine we can get a noo engine an’ put ’er in, the osmosis we gotta take the whole outer coatin’ of the hull off and give ’er another coat. Then we oughta clean up the spars a bit an’ touch up the woodwork … take about a week, I guess.”
A week … just a week! The scales of gloom dropped from my heart, and I skipped inwardly with sweetest delight. Ana was coming over for a holiday in a week—and the thought of having the Crabber to cruise her round the Greek islands before the boss turned up … well, I could scarcely contain my happiness.
And then I remembered I didn’t have the boat’s keys. I put this to the Nikoses.
“Keys, man?” laughed tall-dark-Nikos. “Keys are for engines. You got no engine. We get a noo engine, noo keys. No problem.” And having sprung me free in one simple phrase from the hold Weare had over me, he pulled the cord and started the generator. Each Nikos then connected up an angle grinder and laid into the hull.
I was jubilant and would have gamboled like a lamb and sung like a lark except that the whining and screaming of the grinders and the evil-smelling black dust of vaporized paint and glass fiber were choking out every impulse. The sun had risen and was hot as hell, too. But the Nikoses were young and tough, and it seemed like they knew what they were at.
“You wanna grinder?” asked tall-dark-Nikos.
“Sure, if it’ll make things quicker.” I tied a handkerchief over my nose and mouth in imitation of my new friends and got stuck into the other side of the hull. It was an awful job, the noise and the smell and the filth and the heat, and it had not been a condition of our agreement that I would have to work on the boat. But anything to expedite the process and, besides, I might learn something.
I was lulled into a sort of a trance by the roaring of the generator and the screaming of the three grinders. Every now and then the note of the generator would rise, as a result of one of the grinders being turned off, and one of the Nikoses would appear around the side of the boat, watch my work for a bit, and offer an observation on some subject not necessarily connected to the business in hand.
“Y’know Chris,” red-beard-Nikos addressed me one morning, “it seems to me that English medieval history is very poorly