Free The Narrowboat Girl by Annie Murray Page A

She felt her way to the side of the path and laid Tiger in the undergrowth, covering his body as well as she could with grass and cold leaves, then she wiped her hands down the front of her coat.
    ‘Goodbye, Tiger,’ she sobbed. ‘I loved yer, that I did.’
    She walked back, still crying, beside the black water, towards home. Where else could she go? The cold sliced through her now, and under the bottomless winter sky she felt more alone and lost than ever in her life before.

 
    Eight
    May 1928
    ‘Where’re yer going? Oi come on – wait for me!’ Nance trotted imploringly along beside Maryann.
    ‘Down the cut.’
    ‘Can I come with yer?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, sod yer.’ Nance stopped, hands clasped to her waist as Maryann strode off between the rows of terraced houses without even a glance back in her direction. Bloody charmed, I’m sure, Nance thought. What a pal she’d turned out to be. There was no getting near Maryann these days. Nance turned back towards home. She’d come out specially to see her friend after school. Now she’d be stuck playing with all her brothers again, if they’d have her.
    ‘Still – better than that mardy little cow any’ow.’ But she was hurt. She missed Maryann and the days when they’d been able to tell each other anything. Best pals they’d been, ever since they were knee high. But nowadays Maryann was just closed in on herself and they saw rather more of Sal at the house, hanging about, making eyes at Charlie. She’d never much taken to Sal though. She was older than Nance and she’d never been such a laugh as Maryann.
    Nance stopped for a moment, almost changing her mind and following Maryann down to the cut. She’d had a few things to tell her about Charlie and Sal and what they were getting up to. But her pride got the better of her again. She’d keep it to herself. She wasn’t going where she wasn’t wanted. Maryann could stew if that was the mood she was in.
    Kicking an old Woodbine packet irritably into the gutter, Nancy slouched back towards Garrett Street.
    Maryann climbed through the fence and down through the scrubby trees at the edge of the cut. The leaves were bright green, crumpled and newborn-looking and even with all the various pongs in the air from the factories – metallic, chemical, getting in your throat – down here just in this scrubby little patch you saw some green and got a whiff of spring, which lifted her spirits. She spent all the time she could down here now, drawn to the back-to-front magic of the canal, the way it felt like another world when you were down there, closed in from the rest of the city, somewhere where, for her, the normal troubles of life no longer existed. You saw everything from the other way round down here: the rear ends of buildings, the low level of the path making you look up at things, the watery veins of the canals flowing round and through and under the heart of Birmingham like its secret circulation. It smelled of the murky, bitter water and of the trees, it smelled of a root to the country and of freedom.
    ‘Did you know, children,’ Maryann’s teacher once told them, ‘that Birmingham has more canals running through it than Venice? By length that is, I assume.’ She had smiled. ‘That’s quite something, isn’t it, when you consider that Venice is built only on canals instead of roads.’
    ‘What’s Venice, miss?’ one of them asked.
    ‘Well, I was hoping you’d ask . . .’ She had grainy pictures of black and white poles edging canals in front of grey and black houses, gondolas tilting across expanses of dark water towards churches.
    ‘Venice,’ she said. ‘ Venezia .’
    ‘Bet our canals are a darn sight muckier,’ one of the boys said and the others laughed.
    ‘Well, perhaps. But they’re very dirty in Venice too, when you consider that everything gets tipped into them.’
    Everyone sniggered and made revolted noises. Venice didn’t really sound like a real place. Real life was