Finally he could turn his attention to the boat. He knew he should paint over it, for practical reasons as well as cosmetic. A proper paint job would protect it from the elements and stop the saltwater from warping it. But he didn’t want to captain another bright-splashed, garish thing up and down the river. Picturing that made him twinge, filled his mouth with acid. He wanted something that would not declare itself so loudly. Something that would not crash through the world, but slide into it.

He kept looking at the timber beneath the flakes of the paint. Its colour followed him everywhere. A hazy straw, so unlike hard gum or dark oak. It would need to be treated. It might be of a type unsuitable for saltwater; perhaps that’s why it had languished in Falmouth’s yard for so long.

Yet the wood kept at him. In it Ned saw gold, saw nature, saw heaven. Wider possibilities seemed within reach in a boat that refused to hide a colour like that. He imagined it melding into the river’s morning slate, its blondness playing against the soft notes of dawn. It didn’t feel like he made the decision, the wood just insisted, and then he was holding his breath and scrubbing sandpaper down the boat’s flanks, tearing paint away in flecks and strips, an olive cloud speckling the air.

~

It took him a single long day to remove the paint. With an old shirt tied around his nose and mouth he attacked the hull, the stern, the bow, the decking, the centreboard, the oars, the space where a rudder would sit. He tore through his first length of sandpaper within an hour and was lucky to find another roll of it in his father’s toolbox. By the end of the day more than half of it had been eaten up by the work. His shoulders hurt, his back hurt, his arms hurt. His fingers were clawed up with ache. The floor and walls of the boatshed were smothered in the clinging dust of dead paint. His skin was a mess of green marks, his hair was matted with green drippings, his clothes were a scene of green ruination. Even the light was stained green by the particles in the air.

But beneath that verdant cloud, the boat was free. Ned circled it, appraised it. When he was sure that every smear of paint had been stripped from every plank, he stepped back into the doorway to view the vessel in its naked entirety.

As he felt a huge, red-sparking emotion flow through him, as he felt a tremble and a jitter, he told himself: maybe it was just exhaustion from the day’s labour. Or it was the plan he’d obsessed over for so long finally coming together. Or the romantic slant of the low sun’s light.