Free Narrow Margins by Marie Browne

The fridge doesn’t work, and it looks as though the battery bank could do with being replaced.’
    â€˜Oh. How much is all that going to set us back?’ I picked up his list and winced at the prices that he had guesstimated. ‘A grand for an inverter! What’s it made of – gold?’ Raising my voice had set my headache off again and reaching for my fourth cup of coffee of the day I used it to wash down a couple of paracetamol. ‘And what sort of battery costs £350?’
    â€˜Six of them.’ Geoff finished his sandwich, reclaimed his list and studied it again. ‘We could probably get a cheaper inverter but we use a lot of power and the computers will need a clean power supply. This inverter will give us 3kW which is double what we have at the moment. Yes, it’s the top of the range but we may as well buy it while we have the money; in a year’s time we may not.’
    â€˜Good point,’ I conceded. ‘On an up-note, Mary found us someone to look at the hob; they should be here any minute.’
    In actual fact, Geoff had managed to finish his breakfast and we were well on the way to having a full-scale row with Sam about chickens before they arrived. In the sudden flurry of introductions, explanations and tea-making, Sam made good his escape. Blatantly exploiting the situation, he had worked out that I was now too busy to have a family discussion about the dangers of computer games.
    Watching him hightail it up the boat, I managed to take cold comfort from the likelihood that his sneaky tendencies would stand him in good stead when he was older; maybe he would have a career in politics.
    I never actually managed to remember the engineers’ names, as they were immediately nicknamed Tweedledee and Tweedledum, but they were brilliant and an absolute cliché. On hearing about our woes, they set about wedging themselves into surprisingly small spaces for such large gentlemen; as they drank vast amounts of tea there was a lot of swearing and passing of strange tools about, but in due course the hob was disconnected and lay mournfully on the worktop in a puddle of diesel with its innards strewn about what passed for our kitchen. This is the point where the strange sucking-of-teeth noises started and, for every hiss and frown, the pound signs clicked up and up in my mind.
    Eventually, Tweedledee extracted a copper something that had obviously snapped (even I could tell that it shouldn’t dangle like that).
    â€˜There you go, that’s the bugger,’ he grinned, waggling it to and fro. ‘Funny thing, though,’ he continued, ‘this looks like it was like this when it was put in, it was snagged in the seal.’
    Geoff frowned. ‘That doesn’t actually surprise me,’ he said. ‘This kitchen is weird, the hob’s damaged, the fridge doesn’t work, and the microwave is brand new. I’ve been wondering if this whole kitchen had been thrown in just for the sale of the boat.’
    â€˜Why would they do that?’ I asked.
    â€˜Well, you think about it,’ he leant on the wall. ‘This was one of a pair, all the cabins were on this one, and the galley and the saloon were on the other one. Why would anybody have a small kitchen taking up space in a boat where you need to sleep as many folk as possible? I don’t have any proof, but I think this was a cabin, possibly for the crew as it’s next to the engine room, and he has just slung a kitchen in for show and none of it actually works; mind you, we can’t really complain, for the price he accepted we should count ourselves lucky that there was anything here at all.’
    â€˜Bloody hell,’ I fumed, ‘it’s going to cost a fortune to replace all this lot.’
    Obviously a married man, Tweedledee stepped in before I could go off into ‘rant mode’.
    â€˜Don’t worry, it’s not that bad, all we need to do is give Kuranda a call