“Because you do shit like this all the time,” I said, gesturing to the kayaks behind him. “I’ve got ineptitude on my side.”
“I’ll have you know, I haven’t used this kind of kayak since I was a kid,” he said.
“I’m sorry, is that supposed to make me feel better?!”
Now he was laughing at me, a full-bodied, head-back laugh that carried on the wind towards the river. I was certain people miles downstream could hear him.
“You’ll be fine,” Jack said, tentatively reaching out to place one hand on the car just above my shoulder. The proximity this created caught me off guard, and I swear my whole body responded to the way he was suddenly hulking over me. I desperately tried to regulate my breathing and tried to remember what I’d had for breakfast, and if my breath would smell.
“First of all,” he said, “there probably is debris, but people swim and paddle in this river every day. It’s likely at the bottom in the middle. Which you won’t find, because it’s a lot deeper than the one we were in before. And you won’t get pulled down, because that’s not how river currents work without white water, which you won’t be encountering today. And you won’t wash out to sea, because there’s like a hundred miles of river between here and the Severn, and I promise I would rescue you at some point before then.” He smiled endearingly at that last point, the epitome of believability. Dammit, I was going to get in that awful water, wasn’t I?
I tried to maintain my pouty expression, but it was a real effort. I could feel the weight of Jack’s presence as if he were pressed up against me. It wasn’t so much claustrophobic as just close. Really close. Close enough, in fact, that if I just lifted slightly onto my toes, this outing might take a very different turn.
“Fine,” I relented, and Jack smiled victoriously.
“Good, now, let’s go,” he said, pushing away suddenly.
We put our phones in the dry bag, grabbed the oars – sorry,paddles, he’d insisted – from the boot and waded into the water once more. I followed after him, stopping every couple of strides to shake pebbles from the riverbed out of my sandals. Jack waited for me to catch up, then pointed to the empty kayak. I gave him one last reluctant look, then obediently pulled myself into the hard green plastic, though not without some manoeuvring I was sure had been thoroughly unflattering. Once I was situated, Jack handed me the paddle, then flipped it for me since I was apparently holding it the wrong way around.
“Okay, now what?” I asked, looking around, finding Jack just staring at me from the back of my kayak. “Which way?”
He shook his head, a strange expression on his face as he pushed me further into the middle of the river, trailing his own kayak behind him. Was he annoyed with me for being so inept? No, that wouldn’t have been like Jack. So why was he frowning? What was that look on his face? He looked at me almost … almost apologetically.
“I’m so sorry, Morgan,” he said, sounding almost tortured, as his hand reached under my kayak. “It’s a safety thing. You need to know how. My dad did the same to me when he first taught me…”
The penny dropped when it was way too late.
“Jack, nonononoNO— Jack!!!”
By the time I shrieked his name the second time, I was already tipping into the water, flailing to hold onto the sides even as my arm and then face made contact with the surface.
Somehow my hand stayed gripped on the paddle as I spluttered quickly to the surface. It was actually helping me float a bit, thankfully. I used my free hand to clear my eyes, realising with horror that I was floating quite quickly down the river. I swivelled my head left and right and saw my kayak floating just a couple of feet behind me, upside down. I reached back and clung to its side. I was a perfectly fine swimmer, at least by local lido standards, but I didn’t want to get separated from the kayak, and holding onto it allowed me to lift my legs, bringing my knees to my chest, avoiding all the hypothetical debris.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of bright orange – Jack’s kayak. I snapped my head to the side to see him paddling towards me, then overtaking me, then spinning around to face me so he was floating down the river backwards. He dipped his paddle expertly on either side, keeping himself perfectly aligned with me.
“What the actual fuck, Jack!” I spluttered.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again, and from what I could see of his face through my hair, which had matted down across my field of vision, he did look rather guilty, or at least concerned.
“Fat lot of good that’s doing me,” I said. “A little help here?”
“You’ve gotta be able to get yourself back up,” he said. “Flip the kayak first.”
I actually screamed out loud in frustration, but I did what he told me, shifting the paddle into the hand holding the side of the kayak so I could reach the other one over, grasping for the other side. I had to haul myself up a couple of times, which was difficult whilst managing the paddle, but eventually my hand caught the opposite edge, and I cried out “Yes!” as my momentum pulled the kayak over easily. I nearly lost hold of the paddle, but I managed to grab it and haul it up into the seat.
“What now?” I shouted to Jack as I examined the kayak, wondering how I would get back into it without any leverage. It had been hard enough when I’d had the riverbed to launch myself from.
“Really good, Morgan!” He sounded a bit like a summer camp counsellor looking after idiot children, and I vowed to exact vengeance just as soon as I got back up on the damned thing. “Just place your hands like you did to flip it, one on this side and one over the top onto the other. Then launch yourself kicking, and pull down with both hands at the same time so that your bottom arm goes straight and you’re laying stomach-down on the kayak.”
I tried to picture what he was telling me to do, and it took a moment for me to understand logistically how that was going to work. He started to talk again, but I held up a hand to shush him, and he complied. The least he could do was let me think. After all, apparently we had a hundred miles to deal with this.
Eventually it clicked in my mind, and it only took one try to salmon-flop up onto my kayak. Jack was yelling out instructions again, but I didn’t listen, instead just rolling backwards on the kayak so my bum was in the well, then sitting up with my feet hanging on either side until I could scoot into the right position. The paddle went briefly overboard, but helpfully it floated down the river at the same speed as me, so it was easy enough to rescue. I held it up the wrong way around again at first, but I remembered Jack telling me to make sure I could read the logo, so I flipped it before he could correct me.
“Well fucking done!” Jack called, and I looked up to see him pumping his paddle in the air excitedly.
“Fuck you!” I said, burying my paddles in the water over and over to try to catch him. He saw me coming and did the same, only he was paddling upstream towards me, so I overshot him and had to spin myself around, which took an embarrassingly long moment that resulted in a bit of an anticlimax to my charge.
“Wrong way,” he said over his shoulder as he passed me, giving me a taunting grin and raising his eyebrows repeatedly. So I dug deep and paddled after him, every ounce of me intending to send him overboard as soon as I got to him.
