NARROW BOAT

We’d seen each other on Glastonbury High Street. I saw her with another woman and a crowd of children about to go into the cafe next door to the bookshop I’d just come out of.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello.’
‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘I know. Must be eight years.’
She was one of the Essex Crew I did a few jobs with back then. Once she and I went out for a meal and ended up in what was the Brewhouse on Stokes Croft and discussed the relative virtues of having a hairy chest.
‘They yours,’ I said of the children, ‘or you working?’
‘Two of them are mine,’ she said as she stood there holding the hand of a young girl was staring up at me. ‘This one and one gone in there with the others.’
‘Well done,’ I said remembering she’d said she wanted children.
‘I’ve been busy since we met last.’
‘Oh yeh?’
‘Married divorced and two kids.’
‘That is busy,’ I said. ‘You still on the boat?’
‘I had to leave,’ she said. ‘I was eight months pregnant with that one in there and I couldn’t carry this one and turn around at the same time I was so big, out here I was...’ she showed me with her spare hand.
‘...it was a narrow boat,’ I said.