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they were staying. I didn’t have his number, which was a good thing. I probably would have given in and texted him, and how desperate would that have looked?
    The galley was a state – bottles and glasses and dirty plates everywhere. The floor was scattered with crumbs, from the garlic bread. Joanna and Liam’s empty lasagne dish filled the sink, burnt-on bits glued to the edge. I wondered how much soaking it would take before I could present it back to them, clean.
    Something was digging in…
    I reached into the back pocket of my jeans, and there it was. Dylan’s phone. I went through the menus again to the address book. GARLAND . Why that word, of all words? It was just a word, he’d said. It was supposed to be random. It was supposed to be something that nobody would suspect, if the phone got into the wrong hands.
    ‘What if I want to contact you?’ I’d said.
    ‘Why would you want to contact me?’
    He had no idea, none at all, about how I felt. I wasn’t even sure of it myself, right then. I just knew that the concept of not seeing him was a difficult one to grasp.
    ‘What if something goes wrong?’ I said.
    ‘Nothing’s going to go wrong.’ He was getting impatient. ‘It will be fine, I promise you. Nothing will go wrong. When I’m ready, when I’ve got everything sorted out here, I’ll ring you and we can meet up somewhere. Alright?’
    That had been more than five months ago. All that time, I’d kept the phone on me, kept it charged up, and I’d never used it. Not once.
    I tossed the phone clumsily on to the wooden shelf behind the sofa. There was no point sitting here thinking about Dylan. Wherever he was, he certainly wasn’t thinking about me.
    The toilet, which I’d emptied only this morning, was full and backed up. None of the liveaboards would have left it like that. I felt desolate, and alone. I should have said yes to Ben. It would have been nice to have just been here with him. He wasn’t Dylan, but he was someone.
    I turned the lights off, and climbed into bed.
     
    I dreamed about the phone, Dylan’s phone. It was ringing, the name GARLAND coming up on the display as if to emphasise further that this was it, this was the call; but every time I pressed the green button to answer, nothing happened.
    I was half-awake and half-asleep for most of the night, opening my eyes to see the square of inky blackness above my head. Then Ben was in my dream, too. He was lying here with me.
    ‘You lied about the stars,’ he said.
    I looked up to the skylight and it was full of stars, so bright that they blended together, just one dazzling light shining down on us.
    Then I opened my eyes for real, and it was still just dark. There were stars – I could see them – but they were faint.
    Alcohol always does this to me, I thought crossly.
    I was properly awake, because I needed the toilet. I remembered mine was backed up and I wasn’t about to go across to the shower block in the middle of the night, so I crawled into the storage space at the front of the boat and found the bucket I used to mix adhesive in. It was clean, which was a bonus. I left the bucket in the bathroom after I’d used it and went back to bed.
    For a while I lay there listening to the lapping of the water against the hull. The tide must be going out by now. Before too long the boat would settle back into the mud and lie still, and then it would start to get light.
    As well as the water, there was another sound. It started out as a gentle bump, distant, as though the bow had nudged the pontoon or one of the fenders had lifted in a sudden swell and fallen back against the hull. It was easy to ignore at first. But then it came again, and again, rhythmic now – part of the song of the boat, the percussion of the river.
    The gentle bumping became a knocking, more insistent. A soft thud, a scrape of something along the hull. I was awake again, listening to the sound and trying to work out what it was. It sounded as though