Hot Air and Cold Water

Stoke-on-Trent has just held its second literary festival, and I missed it.  To be fair, there was only one of the invited authors I would have liked to hear speak, and by the time we got home from our narrowboat trip around Birmingham and the Black Country, the tickets for Michael Palin had gone on sale - and promptly sold out. 

The other big names - 'spin doctor' Alistair Campbell and politician Alan Johnson - didn't appeal, and I couldn't really justify buying a ticket just to thank them for their part in persuading me to join the Green Party, though I'm sure my fictional rebel councillor Daphne Randall, lead character of 4mph thriller Grand Union would have elected to do just that!

I also failed to get an invitation via my short story entry - again!  I haven't seen the shortlisted entries, so don't know whether sulking is in order or whether I should graciously concede defeat to a better wordsmith, but either way I can't complain because despite my previous grumbles and despite 'Daphne's' merciless critique of the Six Towns Gazette a few pages into Grand Union, I was lucky enough to get a photo and article in The Sentinel, its non-fictional counterpart and festival sponsor, a couple of weeks ago.  If you've read Grand Union, you'll appreciate that Richard the journalist might have wondered what he was letting himself in for when he made contact, and probably considered himself fortunate to have escaped without being invited for a beer or boat trip!

Still, here's the 'also ran' short story.  Expect to see it recycled as the foreword to another Daphne Randall story one day - but probably not the next one!

Lock 37

The Trent and Mersey Canal takes a varied course south from its shadowy summit in the ferrous depths of the Harecastle Tunnel, past Westport Lake with its vociferous wildfowl, modern and Victorian potteries at Steelite and Middleport, the wasteland that was Shelton Bar and the soulless regeneration of Festival Park, before dropping through five locks that nestle in the heart of the Six Towns.

Etruria deep lock and its shallower companion are numbered 40 and 39.  They form part of the picturesque industrial scene beside a boatyard and a bone mill, still supervised by master engineer James Brindley, his statue retired to a sheltered housing scheme and his wig powdered white by disrespectful pigeons.  Twyford Lock - number 38 - is unremarkable, though below it the waterway passes ominously between the living and the dead.  Modern housing faces a graveyard; long-dead generations sleeping beneath their marble covers a sombre reminder of mortality as the flat-dwellers rise and draw their blinds to each new dawn.

At the neglected southern boundary of the cemetery you reach the unlovely and unloved lock 37 where, crushed beneath iron girders straining under the main line to Manchester, the canal descends from a landscape of dereliction into darkness.  Corroded railway bridges bleed rust through faded, blistered paint, tattooed with mindless daubs of vandalism unworthy of the name ‘graffiti’.  Livid green algae cloaks the walls of the lock chamber, flaying away in sheets of slime as the water level falls and the tattered wooden gates open to the unquiet waters ahead.  A seething by-wash boils and hisses in the gloom and thin, bony stalactites reach down from the blood red girders of the bridge while, too close above your head, trains howl and screech like angry demons.   It is always a relief to be through this dismal lock; to duck carefully under the skull-splittingly low railway bridge while peering through the dank gloom beneath, before motoring briskly away into even the dullest wet day’s light. 

Mr and Mrs Entwhistle’s first attempt on lock 37 unexpectedly ran into trouble.  A shuddering and clanking from their narrowboat’s propeller and the realisation that though the water level was falling steadily and levelly, their vessel was not, caused a moment of panic before Mrs Entwhistle loyally followed her husband’s instructions to close all the paddles and then carefully refill the lock.  With the prop still sluggish, they towed the boat backwards through the grey morning’s light spring rain and moored in the pound above.  The skipper delved about in the weed hatch, removing a quantity of fabric and fluff that might once have been part of padded jacket, but a second attempt took them no closer to the bottom of the lock, before the propeller snagged and the boat began to tilt again. 

Surmising that there must be an obstruction beneath the surface hindering the boat’s descent, they refilled the lock, reversed again and called out the Canal and River Trust, whose lads made the gruesome discovery that lock 37 had been the portal to Purgatory, if indeed there is such a place, for one Mickey Mulligan.    

In death, as in much of his forty-seven years of life, the fates had conspired against Mickey Mulligan.  Lock 37 usually leaks to empty through its moth-eaten mitred bottom gates, but the crew of the last boat ascending on the final evening of his life must have left one of the top paddles raised in their haste away from this God-forsaken spot, allowing the lock to stay full.  Mickey might yet have found a full lock less deadly than a drained one, had his tattered rucksack and the pockets of his ragged anorak not been stuffed with stolen goods, but these had dragged him to the bottom without even a brief scrabble for freedom; the post mortem revealed none of that lurid slime from the lock’s cold walls under his nicotine-stained nails. 

But gold is a remarkably heavy element and Mickey Mulligan was drowned in possession of a substantial quantity of it.  In fact, once the items retrieved from a pains-taking fingertip search of the reeking mud at the base of the lock were reconciled with those still in the dead man’s pack and pockets, the police could account for all but one item stolen in the armed robbery on Mohammed Zia’s jewellery shop, eight days before Mickey was dredged out of the lock.  What they couldn’t account for was how the proceeds of that crime came to be in Mulligan’s possession, when both the witness statements and CCTV suggested the suspects were two young men of Asian origin, a description which in no way matched the corpse in the canal. 

Most likely Mulligan, a persistent but incompetent thief with addictions to fund and debts to pay, had stumbled across the haul when scouting his neighbourhood for unlocked doors or ill-fitting sash windows, and had stumbled again as he tried to short-cut across the lock on his get-away.  Apart from where the boat had struck his already lifeless body, there were no wounds to suggest foul play, and his fall had surely been an accident; had anyone helped him into the water, they would certainly have searched and emptied his bag and clothes of the loot first.  So the police publicly ascribed Mulligan’s death to ‘misadventure’ and privately attributed the shortfall between what was found and what was reported missing to an over-zealous insurance claim by Mr Zia, despite his most earnest protestations that the missing necklace was a precious heirloom, purchased as a wedding gift by an important customer.

Delayed in the Potteries for a couple of days, Dennis and Marjorie Entwhistle completed their third and final descent of lock 37 on a bright spring evening, chugging on in their trusty Maisie Joan to the grim concrete of lock 36, where an angry dog barked them down onto the drain-like channel to the Trent aqueduct, and so on to Trentham and the sixth lock out of the city.  Whichever route Dennis plotted to get them from there to Birmingham, the long-suffering Marjorie knew she would have to wind the paddles up and down on at least thirty more locks, and then the same again from there to Stratford, before she had to wrestle with those massive river locks on the Avon all the way to Tewkesbury and back up the Severn.  It would perhaps have eased her labours if occasionally he showed that he appreciated her hard work; their ruby wedding anniversary had passed without card or present a week before as she had slogged up the Marple flight in biting sleet, windlass in hand, for no more reward than the offer of a nice cup of tea.

Dennis had in fact belatedly remembered the occasion, a little while after they first reversed out of lock 37.  While groping about in the weed hatch, removing the remnants of poor Mickey Mulligan’s anorak, a glint that was not the brass of the propeller had caught his eye through the murky waters.  The clanking noise he had heard in the lock was explained as he carefully and nervously disentangled an intricately formed necklace of thick golden chain that had wrapped itself around the prop-shaft.   On a whim, and quite out of character, he slipped it into his pocket.  It was hardly Marjorie’s usual style, being rather ethnic looking, but when he had the chance to examine it more closely, while his wife was getting the groceries, he decided it could be worth a stroll into the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter to get the dents and scratches repaired. 

It would make a perfect if belated anniversary present for ‘the Missus’, and she need never know it had cost him next to nothing and was only second-hand.