Narrow Minds by Marie Browne

Author:Marie Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2011-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Nothing’s so Scary Second Time Around

LATER THAT DAY I found out that Braunston tunnel hadn’t changed at all. It was still drippy and horrible and, being a Saturday, there were a lot of boats making a run for home territory before the weather changed for good. We met four boats coming the other way, one in particular, was a little trying. A hire boat with a group of twenty-somethings aboard. Drunk twenty-somethings, guiding a large narrow boat badly through the dark was a bit worrying. They came haring through the tunnel going far too fast, their lights were off and the only way I knew they actually even existed was by the echoes of screaming and yelling that drifted to me on the tunnel air flow, so luckily I had slowed down, confused by the fact that I couldn’t actually see any lights.

I finally worked out that, to frighten the girls on board, one bright spark kept turning off the tunnel light and plunging them into darkness. This made the girls scream and must have made the macho intellectual feel great.

Slowing right down I hugged the tunnel wall, I could see the light flashing on and off but couldn’t really work out how far away they were, so to give them a good idea of where we were I hit the horn, hard.

There were more screams but from the sound of the engine they didn’t bother to slow down and as their lights flicked back on I could see that they were about twenty foot away and heading right for us.

Laughing at all the screaming, the driver swung the tiller over and then began to panic as he realised it wasn’t having much of an effect. Up to that point their speeding boat had only been required to go in a straight line, now being asked to turn in a confined space and at speed it was behaving as a normal narrow boat does and ignoring him completely.

His facial expression changed from one of fairly drunk amiability to sheer panic and he hauled the tiller over as far as he could. Luckily, and I still think it was a mistake, he grabbed the throttle and poured on more power, I think it was a mistake because he only did it for a moment before he screamed and then pulled the throttle back, killing the engine completely. Luckily that burst of power turned the nose just enough, enabling the boat to skid down the side of ours. Knowing how this works, I grabbed the top of the roof and just held on.

For a moment there was nothing but the sound of scraping and grinding metal then they were gone, their screams and shouts echoing back down the tunnel toward me. I waited until silence was regained and a normal heart rate was restored then, taking a deep breath, I began to think about continuing down the tunnel.

Charlie leapt out onto the gunwales and tottered across to the back deck where she proceeded to scream things like ‘Morons’ and ‘Slow down you drunken Twits’.

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