A Boy and a Bear in a Boat Read online

  The bear looked around him, squinting and frowning.

  “To see what he could see, see, see …” sang the boy.

  The bear looked confused.

  “But all that he could see, see, see …” sang the boy, jabbing a finger towards the water.

  The bear closed his eyes and shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a thought that had got stuck somehow.

  The boy sang louder.

  “Was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea.”

  He was almost shouting by the end, leaning forward and staring hard at the bear in exasperation, pointing at the water with one hand and miming a wave-like motion with the other.

  “Sea?” said the bear uncertainly.

  “Yes,” said the boy, slumping where he sat as if exhausted. “Well done.”

  “Oh goody! My turn again,” said the bear. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with S.”

  “Sky,” said the boy.

  “Crikey!” said the bear. “You really are very good at this, aren’t you? Have you played a lot before?”

  “A bit. Look, Bear, do you think, if we’re going to play, that we could maybe change your rules a bit so we can spy things inside the boat as well as outside?”

  “Ooh no, that would make it much too hard. Besides, I don’t know how to spell most of the things in here. Come on. Your turn.”

  “But …”

  “Come on, just a few more rounds. I really think I’m starting to get the hang of it now.”

  “But … Oh, OK.”

  The boy looked around, just in case, but all he saw was sea and sky.

  “I spy …” he said.

  He leaned over the side of the boat with his arms up on the edge and his chin resting on the backs of his hands.

  “… with my little eye …” he said.

  His head slumped forward, as if he no longer had the energy to hold it up. He gazed down along the side of the boat to the water.

  “… something beginning …” he said.

  There was something written on the side of the boat, painted neatly in delicate joined-up writing, clear enough to read even upside down.

  “… with H,” he said, a note of surprise in his voice.

  He looked at the bear. The bear was smiling.

  “Harriet,” said the bear.

  The Harriet

  “Why is your boat called Harriet?” said the boy.

  He wasn’t really all that interested but at least it stopped them having to play I Spy any more.

  The bear kept rowing and turned his head to look over his shoulder at the way they were going.

  “I named her after … a friend of mine,” said the bear out of the corner of his mouth.

  “There’s a Harriet in my class at school,” said the boy. “Harriet Bailey.”

  “Oh yes,” said the bear. “Is she nice?”

  “No,” said the boy. “Not really.”

  “Oh,” said the bear.

  “At least not so nice that you’d name a boat after her.”

  “Oh,” said the bear.

  “What’s your Harriet like then?” said the boy.

  “Well, I don’t really know any more. I haven’t seen her for a while.” The bear stopped rowing to scratch his nose. “But she used to be all the things that I hoped the boat would be.”

  “Like what?” said the boy.

  “Well,” said the bear, “she was very strong and very reliable …”

  He was looking up and away now, into the distance and the past, and smiling.

  “… and very buoyant,” he said. Then he grinned broadly, directly at the boy, and pulled on the oars once more. Then he started singing again, a little more loudly than before.

  The boy took a new look around the boat. His first thought was that it wasn’t much of a compliment to have a battered little boat like this named after you. But on closer inspection he changed his mind. She was an old boat, clearly, but well looked-after. Loved, even. Although the waters had washed and worn her timbers over many years, it was clear that they had been freshly painted, and with considerable care. And the metal fittings gleamed, even if some of them were held in place by as many as three different sizes of screw. There were signs of any number of repairs if you looked for them, but you really did have to look for them. They had been carried out with such patience and care that they were barely visible. It would be impressive work from a skilled carpenter, let alone from a bear who could barely fold a map.

  “She sounds very nice,” said the boy, but the bear showed no sign of having heard him, he just kept smiling and rowing.

  The Comic

  Lunchtime came and went, but there wasn’t much lunch involved.

  The boy watched the horizon and waited for land to appear. It didn’t. Then he closed his eyes and counted to a hundred as slowly as he could, then opened them again. Still no sign. Then he closed his eyes, started to count to two hundred, got bored at 124, and opened them again. Still nothing.

  He reached under his seat for the chocolate, but when he tugged at his bag it didn’t move. He tugged harder, but still it wouldn’t budge so he got off the seat and crouched down to take a closer look. Some sort of booklet had got caught and crumpled up between the bag and the side of the boat and jammed it into place. He took hold of the bag with one hand and pulled it sideways to make a little space, then worked the booklet free with the other hand. It was a comic. Brilliant! The boy loved comics. It wasn’t one that he recognised and it was very badly creased but that didn’t matter. He laid it on the seat and did his best to flatten it out. Then he read it.

  Only he couldn’t.

  “What language is this?” he said, flapping it about in frustration.

  He had only meant to say it to himself, but the bear looked up at him.

  “Oh that,” said the bear. “I’m not sure. Get all sorts on board in my line of work, but never been any good with languages. Nice young fella though, the chap that left it behind.”

  The bear looked up and sideways, remembering.

  “Nervous type but very pleasant. Big tipper too. Very generous. Or else he didn’t really understand our money properly, I’m not sure.” Then he shook out the thoughtful crumples in his forehead, smiled broadly and began to sing again, back in his own happy world of rowing and paying the boy no attention at all.

  The boy flicked quickly through the comic, hoping that he might be able to make out some of the story from the pictures alone, but it was no good. It seemed to be just one episode of a longer story so it didn’t have a proper beginning or ending, it was all just part of the middle. There was no way of knowing what had gone on before or what would happen after. And, actually, the boy didn’t have much of a clue about what was going on now.

  It wasn’t just that he didn’t understand the words (although he did notice that “Aaargh!” was spelled the same way), the pictures seemed foreign to him too. The drawings were weird, all angular and ugly and a little bit scary, and the colours didn’t fit inside the lines.

  He didn’t like it at all. But he went through it a second time just the same (after all, he had nothing better to do). It still didn’t make much sense, but he did find a couple of bits quite exciting.

  Early on, a young girl (who seemed to be the heroine) escaped from the clutches of an evil villain with a scary hairdo and a big black coat. On the last page she was facing seemingly certain death at the claws of a gigantic slimy monster with a million teeth and, so far as the boy could make out, supernaturally bad breath. Most of what came in between, though, remained a mystery to him.

  He gave up on it. It was stupid. But he was careful not to get it creased again when he put it away next to his bag.

  Teatime

  The boy was doing nothing very much, and had been for quite some time. He thought perhaps now he would do nothing at all for a while, just for a change.

  The bear had rowed for all that time and so, presumably, they had travelled quite a long way, even though y
ou wouldn’t know it from the view. The boy had spent a long time gazing at the sea. He had counted waves for a while but lost interest after the first four hundred or so. He was roused from his bored daze by the bear suddenly freezing, mid-stroke. His oars hung motionless above the water, a strange wide-eyed expression on his face as if something had just struck him.

  “What is it?” said the boy.

  “It’s four o’clock!” said the bear.

  The boy had no way of knowing any different.

  “And …?” he said.

  “Time for tea,” said the bear.

  He stopped rowing and pulled the oars part-way into the boat. Then he stood, turned, leaned down and pulled out his suitcase, and placed it on the middle seat. With dainty precision he removed from the case a small gas stove, a box of matches, a small battered and blackened kettle, a china teapot and a cup and saucer. Then he filled the kettle with water from a large plastic bottle. Then he lit the stove.

  This was no simple matter, as the bear appeared to be, quite simply, afraid of fire. First he opened the box of matches. Then he took out a match. Then he closed the box of matches. Then he put the matchbox down, with the match on top of it, next to the stove on the seat. Then, his face screwed up in concentration, he held the blue canister of the stove steady with one paw (at arm’s length) while he grasped the knob to turn the gas on with the other. He was panting, just a little, the boy noticed. And very slightly quivering.

  Then he turned the knob the tiniest fraction of a turn, grabbed quickly for the match and the matchbox, struck the match and held the flame to the burner, his face turned away and his free paw shielding his face.

  Pft. The gas ignited pathetically into the tiniest blue flame. The bear let out a deep breath. Then he placed the kettle on the stove and turned up the gas so that the flame grew with a small roar. There was a whistle shaped like a bird at the end of the kettle’s spout that sang shrilly when the water boiled, but not for long as the bear was watching closely and quickly turned the gas off. He used a little of the water to warm the teapot, swilling it around and then discarding it into the sea. Then he heaped in three teaspoons of leaf tea from a scratched and rusty tin, filled the pot from the kettle, replaced the lid and lovingly clad the pot in a pink woolly tea cosy with a pom-pom on the top. Then he reached beneath the seat and brought out a strangely-shaped black case. He opened it up and took out something that looked at once familiar and odd to the boy.

  “What’s wrong with your guitar?” said the boy. “Did it get wet and shrink?”

  The bear gave him a stern look.

  “It’s not a guitar,” he said. “It’s a ukulele. I time my tea with a song.” He plucked at the strings and adjusted the tuning. Then he began to play and sing.

  When you are all at sea

  You’ll have a friend in me

  We’ll have a cup of tea

  And keep on go-o-o-ing

  The weather may be poor

  With rain and wind and more

  What fun! We just adore

  It when it’s sno-o-o-wing

  You fear that you’ll be drowned

  The shark fins circle round

  So what? We’re homeward-bound

  And we’re not slo-o-o-wing

  And if the current’s strong

  And the dark, cold night is long

  Who cares? We’ll sing our song

  And just keep ro-o-o-wing

  Mostly the bear strummed a very simple accompaniment to his singing, but between the final two verses he played quite a long complicated instrumental section. This wasn’t something that he found easy, judging by the faces that he pulled. He was obviously concentrating very hard. And the boy had to concentrate quite hard not to laugh.

  When it was over, the bear put the ukulele away, removed the tea cosy and poured tea into his tea cup.

  “Would you like some?” he said to the boy.

  “No thanks,” said the boy. He had never been able to see the point of tea. Even if you added loads of sugar, it was still boring.

  Then the bear lifted the delicate china cup to his mouth, blew gently over the surface of its steaming contents and took a tiny sip.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” sighed the bear.

  And he smiled and stared into space, wearing an expression of deep contentment that he retained for the next quarter of an hour as he consumed, one small (and loudly appreciated) sip at a time, the rest of the contents of the cup. When he was done, he used the last drop of water from the kettle to rinse out his cup, emptied out the teapot into the sea, put everything neatly away and took up his oars again, beaming with happiness.

  The boy watched him and tried a smile himself. He just about managed it but it was a bit of an effort.

  Trust

  Even by the end of the day, as he huddled under the blanket in the space between the rear and middle seats, the boy felt no doubt in the bear’s abilities. The bear had explained that there had been “further complications” (though, out of kindness, he did not burden the boy with the details), and so there was a “regrettable additional delay” to their journey. But his jolly, confident manner was genuinely reassuring, and it was a mild night, and they would surely arrive early next morning.

  The boy was sure that the bear knew what he was doing.

  But by the end of the next day he was beginning to have doubts.

  And by the afternoon of the day after that he was starting to get really quite worried.

  The Maps

  The boy was reading the comic again, as he had done the day before and the day before that. He still couldn’t work out what was going on. He’d read it over and over, and the same things happened again and again, and none of it made any sense. A bit like the last three days, really. He gave up (again) and put the comic away under the seat.

  Splish, splish, splish …

  “Bear …?”

  The bear carried on rowing and looked at the boy grumpily.

  “Don’t you dare,” he said, “say ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ ”

  “Oh. OK.”

  The bear said nothing more but made a point of huffing and puffing effortfully, despite rowing at the same even pace as ever, pushing the boat along at impressive speed without undue strain.

  The boy stared out to sea and up into the sky, slowly taking in the view in all directions. He found nothing there to surprise him. He looked around the bottom of the boat, tidy as ever except for a bottle at the boy’s feet containing the last couple of mouthfuls of ginger beer.

  “Do you want some pop?”

  The bear looked up, with a more kindly air this time. “No. Thank you. There’s not much left, is there? I think we’d better try to make it last. But you have it if you like.”

  “No. It’s OK. I’ll wait a bit.”

  Splish, splish, splish …

  “Bear …?”

  “Yes.”

  “We will …” The boy hesitated, trying out the question in his head a few times. He wasn’t sure it would go down too well.

  “What?” said the bear, not too impatiently. Maybe it would be OK.

  “We will be all right, won’t we? I mean … we won’t run out before we get there?”

  “Of course not. Don’t worry. We just need to be a little bit sensible with the supplies. Careful. Just to be on the safe side.”

  “Sensible,” said the boy. “Yes, of course. And we’re not …” Again he hesitated.

  “What?” said the bear, evenly. He still seemed calm.

  “We’re not … now, don’t take offence but, um …”

  “What?”

  “We’re not lost, are we?”

  The bear stopped rowing. For as long as it took for the boat to drift to a stop, he didn’t say a word. Then he carried on not saying a word. And then after that he was silent for a while. And all this time he stared the boy straight in the eye.

  “How dare you?” he said at last, slowly and quietly. “What do you take me for, some kind
of incompetent?”

  “No. Oh no. Not at all. It’s just …”

  “Well?”

  “Well, it’s been a long while, hasn’t it? Even with anemones in the currents.”

  “Anomalies,” said the bear.

  “Anomalies, yes,” said the boy.

  “Yes,” said the bear, his head still held in a defiant pose. “Anomalies in the currents. Yes. Tricky things, currents, you know. Nothing I could do. But everything’s under control.”

  “So, we’re not lost then?”

  “No!”

  The bear sounded defiant and angry, but somehow he didn’t look it. Something in his expression was wrong, unsure, unconvincing. He was almost looking at the boy, but not quite. The boy saw it at once. He rose from his seat and stared into the bear’s eyes. The bear stared back. They stared at each other. For a long time.

  The bear blinked first.

  That clinched it.

  “We are, aren’t we? We’re lost!” said the boy.

  He felt triumphant as he said it, but not for long. A bear, after all, can’t be expected to remain sheepish for long.

  The bear growled as he stood. It was the first time the boy had heard him growl. It wasn’t a loud growl, but somehow that just made it scarier. The Harriet rocked as the bear stepped towards the boy, shading him from the sun. The boy’s confidence deserted him along with the light, and his stomach lurched. He was a small boy in a small boat with an angry bear. This did not seem ideal.

  “WE …” said the bear.

  The boy wondered about jumping overboard and swimming for it. He was quite a good swimmer.

  “… ARE …” shouted the bear.

  The water looked really quite inviting. It wouldn’t be that cold anyway. And so far as he knew there were no sharks about.

  “… NOT …” bellowed the bear.

  The boy wondered if he had time to take his shoes and socks off first.