The painted boat

Source: an original fiction extract.

At ten on Tuesday morning, Ada reached the boat shed carrying a tin of green paint. She was helping her uncle repair a small rowing boat for the summer hire fleet. He asked her to paint the inside of the boat while he replaced a damaged seat. Two brushes and a folded cloth lay on the workbench. Ada chose the narrower brush and put the paint beside the bow. Through the open shed doors she could see three ducks moving across the canal. Her uncle said they would stop for lunch at one.

The old paint came away in curling flakes. Beneath it were blue and red layers, each recording an earlier version of the boat. Ada scraped until she found a name near the bow. Only half the letters remained. Her uncle said it had once belonged to a family who kept it at the far end of the canal. They had called it something grand, though he could not remember what. Ada tried to complete the faded word. Every suggestion she made seemed too large for a boat that could hold only four people.

While the first coat dried, her uncle showed her a photograph from the hire company's opening year. Boats crowded the bank, bright enough to look newly invented. The one in front was theirs. A woman sat in it wearing a hat with a broad brim, and a child held an oar almost upright. Ada asked whether they could find the family and learn the name. Her uncle said the photograph was older than he was. On the back, in small writing, somebody had recorded the date and the weather, but nothing about the people.

After lunch, Ada worked around the pale outline where the letters had been. Her uncle noticed the unpainted patch. She said she did not want to lose the name completely. He looked at it for a while, then suggested that they photograph it and put the picture with the boat's repair record. The wood still needed protecting. Ada took several photographs, including one with a ruler beside the marks. Then she drew the brush across them. The green spread unevenly at first, leaving little islands of the older colours before the next stroke joined them.

In June she saw the boat leave the hire landing with four people aboard. A boy trailed his fingers in the canal until an adult asked him to stop. The new paint shone in the sun. Ada knew exactly where the lost letters lay beneath it, though nobody in the boat could see them. In the office, her photograph remained in a folder beside a note about the replaced seat. She had left a blank after the words Former name. There might never be an answer, but there was now a place to put one.

Refer only to the first paragraph. Choose one answer for each item. Write the four letters in order, labelling them 1 to 4.