Read Wolves for Free Online Page A

through mine, as though we are old friends, and she is telling me about the dryness of the summer and how her skin, rashed with glass dust spilling from the sander, has tightened across her bones.
    I glance at her arm in mine – blonde hairs, strong tendons – checking her out in spite of myself, my reserve, my embarrassment. Christ, her skin! It glows.
    She asks, ‘Has Michel told you about the boat?’
    This is why I am here. This, by now, is obvious. They want someone they can show it off to.
    Together we walk to their house along what, round here, passes for a street. It takes me a few minutes to see it as that. There are no walls, no fences, not even ditches worth the name. Just a few little gullies that may be property boundaries, but could just as likely have been scooped out year by year by the rain.
    The houses, tar-paper shacks, cluster in unnecessarily tight groups that, for some reason, sit several minutes apart from each other. The road connecting them is made of cracked cement, reduced by infrequent traffic to parallel tracks. Between the tracks, bluish grass struggles to grow.
    Not all the houses are fisherman’s shacks of tar-paper, sticks and prayer. One, made of concrete, apes the epic slab-work of the power station, visible in the distance. Less convincing are a handful of barn-buildings, painted black to ‘blend in’ with the locals. Their long, floor-to-roof windows and sliding patio doors are a reckless extravagance round here.
    Hanna and Michel’s house is easy to spot – there is a thirty-eight foot ketch sat out in front of it on trestles. ‘Come and see.’
    They escort me, Michel on my right, Hanna on my left. Their every anecdote, remark, gesture and glance is rooted to or through this boat of theirs.
    I’m more interested in the house. It’s an old one. A tar-paper roof and plank walls – materials chosen to be easily mended and replaced. How much is left of the original structure? Round here, under a salt, corrosive rain, I imagine houses get by the way bodies do, by being constantly repaired and replenished.
    It looks too small, too flimsy to be an all-year place. It is not black, unlike so many of its neighbours. Once upon a time it was green. Paint has peeled from the wood and hangs in fronds. The walls and window frames are smothered in this mineral, yellow-grey creeper.
    Mick and Hanna crowd me, anxious, trying to fix my attention on the boat. The house, as though aware of their slight, rustles its lifeless foliage.
    The boat, then, since there is no avoiding it.
    They have parked it in front of their living room window to block their view – or, rather, so that they are confronted, morning, noon and night, with their beloved boat. They have knocked together those hefty trestles themselves. The boat sits upright, head-height above the ground. They’ve been working on the hull. ‘The hull is a mess!’ They stand either side of me, pointing out to me, in exhaustive detail, all that they’ve taken on. There’s a hole in the stern. The deck laminate crackles and pops when you walk on it. The fittings are corroded. The electrics are impenetrable. ‘The tiller and the forestay are sound.’
    It’s a shell.
    ‘We figure it’ll be as easy for us to tear out the old bulkheads and begin again.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘If we’re going to live on the thing.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘We owe it to ourselves to make it comfortable.’
    ‘I suppose.’ What is it that they want me to say?
    Michel struggles with the tarpaulins covering the cabin. He wants to show me their work. All through the summer, they have laboured on this hulk, chamfering and filling. The masks and goggles they’ve been wearing while they sand off the old gel coat are lying on the table in the cabin. ‘Still, the dust creeps in under your mask. Into the pores of your hands. Look.’ Michel shows me his hands. He tells me that he hardly recognises himself in the mirror any more.
    ‘And Hanna’s skin comes out in a rash.