Foreign Land by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Psychological Fiction, British - Africa, Africa, British, Fiction, Psychological, Reverse Culture Shock, Sea Stories, England, General
ISBN: 9780708983478
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 1985-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

Diana felt wounded. She didn’t figure in the story at all.

“Someone,” said T. Jellaby, “is getting his leg over.”

“So long as it’s not you,” Vic Toms said. Vic had come into the shop, after hours, to swap “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for “The Return of the Jedi”.

“Captain Birdseye.”

“Oh?” Vic was reading the label on the cassette. He was a careful man. Most people just looked at the title and the names of the stars. Vic went for the small print. He wanted to know the directors and the cameramen and the people who did all the costumes and make-up and stuff. His lips moved when he read.

“Yes,” T. Jellaby said. “That old reverend’s son. Up the hill.”

“The one that’s got Dunnett’s boat?”

“That’s the one.”

“I could have told him a thing or two about she, if he’d have asked. But he didn’t ask me. He got a surveyor down. From Plymouth.”

“Old bugger’s knocking off Screwy Julie. You know. Down in Harmony Bay. Took her out today on that boat of his for a spot of jig-a-jig at sea. I watched them come in. Shagged out wasn’t the word for it. He must have had her from Christmas to breakfast time.”

“She’s getting past it,” Vic Toms said, putting a pound down on the counter. “I went over she last fall. There was rot in the stempost. I told old Dunnett to get an X-ray on them keelbolts. Then he gets this surveyor in from Plymouth. He comes along with an itsy-bitsy hammer … Won’t find nothing that way. Dunnett said to me how much he ought to ask for she. ‘Not a lot,’ I said. ‘Not a lot.’” He laughed.

“Eleven grand,” T. Jellaby said.

“That’s what Dad told him. But Dad didn’t know nothing about the rot. He only knowed she when she was Tremlett’s boat.”

“He only wants a floating knocking shop.”

“He better not knock too hard, then. Not with all that soft wood in the stempost.”

T. Jellaby snugged the pound note down in the till.

“What was the name of the bloke that directed “2001”? Has he made any more?”

“Search me,” T. Jellaby said.

After Vic Toms had gone, T. Jellaby realized that Captain Birdseye had given him an idea for a video. He often got ideas for videos, but if you wanted to get into the video game seriously, you had to have a gimmick. Nobody, so far as he knew, had used a boat before. Suppose there was this boat … with three girls … One of them would be very fat. She’d be called “Skipper”. And they’d run it as a regular floating knocking shop. For old blokes, why not? One at a time. Like ocean cruises. The girls would dress up like sailors, in striped jerseys and bell-bottom trousers, then they’d strip off as soon as they were out of sight of land, and the old blokes, who thought they’d signed up for a trip round the bay, would go bananas with fright and lust.

It had definite possibilities. You

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