The job paid four hundred a week to live in a cottage on a disused canal and write down every boat that went through the lock.
I found it on a council website filed under Seasonal Waterways, no photos, a phone number instead of an application form. I was twenty three and I'd failed out of a degree and I wanted very badly to be somewhere nobody I knew could see me for a while. When the woman on the phone asked if I had any questions I asked if there was internet, and she said no, and I said I'll take it.
She posted me a contract and a laminated card. The card had nine rules on it. I'm going to put them down exactly as they were written because the wording matters and I didn't get that at the time.
LOCK KEEPER, STANDING INSTRUCTIONS.
One. Log every vessel. Time, direction, number of persons visible. Log it even if you are unsure.
Two. The lock gates are operated by hand. Do not use the winch after dark.
Three. If the water level in the chamber changes and you did not change it, log the time and do not investigate.
Four. Between the hours of 11pm and 5am, do not open the cottage door for any reason. There is a chemical toilet in the back room for this purpose.
Five. You will hear knocking. It is the gates. The gates knock.
Six. If a vessel arrives at night and requests passage, you will open the lock for it. Do not look at it. Do not speak to it. Do not count the persons visible.
Seven. Under no circumstances is the lock to be left open at dawn.
Eight. If you see a light on the towpath moving away from you, follow it with your eyes only, until it is gone.
Nine. There is no rule nine. If you have been told there is a rule nine, telephone the number on the reverse of this card immediately.
I read that on a train and I laughed. Actually laughed out loud, the way you do at a haunted house at a fair, and the bloke opposite me looked up. I thought it was a bit. I thought some bored council officer in the seventies had written a joke and it had survived every reorganisation since because nobody ever reads the paperwork on a job that pays four hundred a week.
I want to be clear about where I was starting from. I thought it was funny.
The first three weeks were the best three weeks of my life and I mean that with no irony whatsoever.
The cottage was one room downstairs and one up, wood stove, hand pump, a bed that was too short for me. The canal was green and completely still and the towpath was so overgrown that in places you had to walk in the water. There were herons. I read forty books. I lost most of a stone without trying because there was no shop for nine miles and you had to actually want food enough to walk for it.
And there were no boats. Not one, in three weeks. The canal's closed to navigation above the lock and has been for decades. The log book I inherited went back eleven years and had seventeen entries in it, all maintenance craft, all daytime.
Rule five was true though. The gates do knock.
It's a real thing with a real explanation. The lower gates don't seal any more so water gets past them, and the pressure moves the timber against the stops, and every fifteen or twenty minutes you get a knock like somebody rapping a knuckle on a door. Once you know what it is it's nothing, it's the fridge. Within a week I couldn't hear it any more.
Rule three happened twice. Both times I logged it and didn't investigate, and honestly that was because it was raining and I had a book, not because I was scared. The chamber gained about a foot overnight in a canal that hadn't moved in forty years. There'll be a sluice somewhere with a rotten paddle in it.
I never broke rule four or rule two, there was no reason to.
The one I broke was seven. And I broke it because of six.
On the twenty third night something asked for passage.
I need to describe how that happened because beforehand, in my head, I'd imagined a horn. Something obvious. A shout.
What actually happened was that at about half one in the morning the knocking changed rhythm.
That's it. The gates had knocked every fifteen or twenty minutes for twenty three days, and at half one they knocked four times, evenly, about a second between each, and stopped, and then did it again.
I was lying in bed listening to a sound I'd stopped hearing three weeks earlier and I sat up in the dark with my heart going, because your body works out rhythm a long time before your brain agrees to.
Water doesn't do that. Water isn't regular. Water knocks the way rain hits a window, clustered and random and alive. This was a hand.
Four knocks, pause, four knocks. Patient. Not urgent at all. It went on for eleven minutes and I know that because I lay and watched the clock and did nothing, and then I got up and put my boots on and went out to the lock.
I'll be honest about why. It wasn't bravery. It's that rule six exists, and rule six says you WILL, not you may, and somewhere in three weeks of quiet that card had stopped being funny and started being the only instruction I had.
There was a boat in the lower reach.
I didn't look at it. I've thought about that a lot since and I'm glad, and I want to say that plainly, because I know how a story like this is supposed to go and I'm not going to give you a description. I kept my eyes on the balance beam and put my shoulder into it and walked the lower gate open the way you do, in a circle, leaning into it. And I heard the boat come in.
It didn't have an engine. There was no wash. There was a long slow sound of something moving water out of the way and then the hull touched the chamber wall with a sound like a knuckle on a table and stopped.
I closed the lower gate. Raised the paddles on the upper. The chamber takes about nine minutes to fill and for nine minutes I stood with my back to the water and looked at the towpath and listened to the level come up.
Nobody spoke to me. Nothing threatened me, I want to be clear about that. Nothing happened at all except that at one point, quite distinctly, from the chamber below me, I heard a child ask a question.
I didn't hear the words. I heard the shape of a question. That rise at the end that a little kid does when they want an adult to confirm something for them. And I heard nothing answer it.
Rule six says do not count the persons visible. I understand rule six now. Rule six isn't there to protect the boat's privacy. Rule six is there because if you count you'll find out how many there are, and then you'll know, and there's no version of knowing that helps you.
I opened the upper gate. Whatever it was went through. I heard it go for a long time, further up a canal that doesn't go anywhere.
And then I did the thing I did wrong.
I sat down on the beam and put my head in my hands and stayed there, and it was freezing and I had no coat because I'd come out in a jumper, and at some point I stopped being able to feel my hands and went inside to put them under the pump.
And I fell asleep at the table. In my boots. With the upper gate stood open.
I woke up at twenty past six with light in the room.
Rule seven is the only rule on that card with no reason attached to it and I've come to think that's deliberate.
When I got outside the lock was empty. Not drained. Empty. Both gates open, no water in the chamber at all, which is not a thing a canal lock does, because a lock with both gates open finds the level of the lower reach. There was a foot of black silt on the floor of it and the silt was smooth, undisturbed, like a made bed.
And in the middle of the chamber floor, stood upright, pressed down into the silt, there was a single wellington boot. Adult size. Green. The kind everybody has.
No footprints around it. No second boot.
I rang the number on the back of the card, which I'd never used, and I was expecting a council switchboard and a woman with a headset.
A man answered on the second ring. He didn't say the name of any organisation. He said, "Which rule."
I said seven.
He went quiet for a second and then he asked me, and he asked it in this very tired way, like a bloke asking whether you'd checked the plug was in. He asked me whether I'd counted.
I said no. Said I hadn't looked at it and I hadn't spoken to it and I hadn't counted.
And he said, "Then you're fine. Fill the chamber, close both gates, and leave the boot where it is. Someone will come for it."
I asked what would have happened if I had counted.
He said, "You'd be in the boot."
I finished the contract. Nine more weeks. Nothing else ever asked for passage.
I left the boot exactly where it was and on the ninth day it was gone, and the silt round it was still smooth, and I've chosen not to think about that too hard.
There's one thing I never resolved and it's the reason I still think about all this, eleven years and a wife and a mortgage later.
When I handed the laminated card back at the end of the season the woman in the office turned it over to check it against a list, and she frowned, and she said the card was wrong. Said mine was an old one, they'd reprinted them in 2004, I should have had a reprint.
I asked what was different.
She said the reprints have ten rules.
I asked her what rule ten was.
And she looked at me, and she looked at the card, and she said, "Well. It's the same as your rule nine. It's just numbered right."
Rule nine on my card says there is no rule nine, and if you have been told there is one, telephone the number immediately.
I've thought about this for eleven years. Somebody reprinted that card, and when they did they added a rule above it and pushed the warning down one. Which means that for twenty two years every keeper in that cottage has been holding a card that quietly tells them there's a rule they must report having been told about.
I never found out what rule six is on the new cards.
I have never wanted to know less about anything in my life.