“Coriander!” Mae shouts, in the way you might shoutDuck!orOpen fire!
“Coriander!” Zeke responds, with similar enthusiasm. “Amazing. Wow.Lotsof coriander.”
His eyes soften as he smiles at me, offering me a hand as I step over heavily from the bank. It’s midsummer, and the morning sun is already glancing off the water and catching in Mae’s new glasses. Behind me, Ryan and Penny are setting up the chairs on the canal bank; Penny is detailing exactly what was said in her last therapy session, and Ryan is making supportive, Ryan-likemmnoises, lifting our blue folding chairs one-handed while he eats one of Zeke’s special breakfast sandwiches with the other.
As I step aboard, I feel the weightlessness that comes with being on the water. Technically, I still live in the flat two stories down from Penny and Ryan’s place in Gilmouth, but I’ve spent less and less time there over the last year. Zeke used the rest of the money he inherited from his grandfather and theMorning Cuppafee to buythis two-bedroom narrowboat just months after we returned from sea.
It’s more than a home to him now: it’s also our place of work.Eugene the Traveling Seagullcan usually be found on a stretch of the Tyne, dishing out a menu built from whatever the local market has on offer. We’ve made a bit of a name for ourselves, thanks mostly to Zeke’s cooking, but also to my Instagram page for the boat. We set out our next week’s travel every Sunday on there, so everyone can follow our journey, and we will often find that when we reach our mooring spot there’s already a queue waiting. My Instagram feed looks totally different these days: it’s filled with latte art, vegetarian food ideas and tips on houseboat life, and it brings me nothing but joy.
“Sit down!” Penny barks at me from the bank. “If youmustbe on the boat, will youpleasesit down?”
I obediently lower myself into one of the striped deck chairs, trying not to laugh. Penny has tackled “working on herself” with such fervor that we’ve all inevitably been caught up in the process; for the past six months she has been trying to become less co-dependent, which has manifested as her aggressively turning the tables and micromanaging the rest of us. She’ll swing back the other way soon, and end up somewhere around healthiness—that seems to be how it goes.
I shade my eyes and watch as Mae unpacks the bag of vegetables from the market for Zeke.
“Celeriac,” she says, very seriously, holding it up for him. “I only found one.”
“It’s a beauty,” he says, inspecting it with a level of interest that you might think is to humor his child, but is in fact entirely genuine.
“And eggs,” she says, then shrieks as Zeke fumbles the box when she hands it to him. “Dad! Don’t break them!”
I smile. Mae is so at home on the boat—she shrugs on her life jacket the way she slips into her favoriteFrozenrucksack (Frozenstill hasn’t got old. I think every member of our very modern family now knows the words to all the songs). The second bedroom on this narrowboat is hers, and she loves her adventures on the water almost as much as her father loves taking her on them.
“I think we’ll have…spiced scrambled eggs with fresh tomato and coriander,” Zeke says.
“And?” I say. “Tell me you didn’t forget.”
Mae grins at me and pulls the last item out of her bag. “I didn’t forget! Here you go. For the baby,” she says, pointing at my swollen belly.
Chocolate digestives. My number one pregnancy craving. I reach for the packet, already salivating, and Zeke laughs. He always comes alive on the water, and I do, too. It took me a little while to overcome the fear—and we areverycareful with our moorings these days—but over the last two years, I’ve realized what Zeke’s father meant when he described liveaboard life as true freedom. It’s nothing like the raw terror of our stint onThe Merry Dormouse, but it does have some of the simplicity and truth we found in that time. Life onEugeneis stripped back to the purest things: good food, fresh air, love.
I lever myself up from my chair, digestive in my mouth, as the first customers begin to arrive on the bank and Zeke ducks into the kitchen, shoving open the hatch with one hand and reaching for his frying pan with the other. Then a heat slides through my belly, a convulsive force like a squeezing fist. Not painful, but strong enough to bring a gasp from me.
“Zeke?” Penny calls from the bank, her eyes on me.
“Yup?” he shouts back.
“Zeke…”
Penny points to me as I lean forward against the railing with a low, slow breath.
“I think your next adventure’sstarting.”
