Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Ferry Road ·
Sorry About the Delay
A letter arrives at the Ferry Road night office in a hand that died two years ago, and the woman it is addressed to has never dared to read the draft in her drawer.
The night office at Ferry Road is a hut of rivetted iron at the landward end of the queue railings, with one electric bar heater, one counter, and Debra Sennett. Two years next March in the postwoman's job, nineteen years before that on the same pier as a booking clerk. She knows every hand that uses the terminal, and the hands that used to.
It was the third night of rain and the 03:10 boat had been pulled off for weed on the screws, so there was no post due and no boat due, and the hut was quiet except for the tube heaters of the car park ticking as they cooled. At 03:12, in the Thin Hour, she heard the rain stop. Not ease. Stop, all at once, the way a tap is turned off.
She went to the door. Fifty metres away, coming up the access road, a woman was walking toward her with the particular walk of someone carrying weight on one hip: a canvas postman's bag. No bicycle. No cap issued in the last forty years. The coat was post-office blue gone grey, and the bag was full — she could see it was full by the way the shoulder sat — full of envelopes, none of them stamped, all of them warm-looking in the sodium light.
The woman stopped at the counter hatch. She did not knock. She held out one envelope, flat, dry in all that rain, and Debra took it before she had decided to.
It was addressed to her. Not to the office, not to the post-holder, to Debra Sennett, and the hand was her husband's. Wilson had been a bosun on the Winnowing, and he had died at his own table in the spring two years ago with a pen in his hand, mid-line, and she had found the unfinished page in his desk drawer the week after the funeral and turned it face down and shut the drawer and not opened it since. She could not have said why. She could have said exactly what the drawer smelled of: tobacco, leasehold papers, brass polish.
"No stamp," Debra said, uselessly, holding it. The envelope was warm the way bread is warm. Not blood-warm. Bread-warm. "There's no stamp."
The postwoman looked at her with enormous patience and said, once, in a voice like a radio turned low, "Sorry about the delay." Then she stepped back out of the hatch light and the rain started again, mid-fall, all at once, and the access road was empty.
Debra stood with the envelope in the hut for eleven minutes by the office clock. She knew she was being waited for. You do not work nineteen years at a ferry terminal without learning what a person looks like when they are waiting for a gate. Through the rain on the glass she could see, at the end of the queue railings, a figure standing quite still, not under shelter, getting wet, making no move to leave.
She opened the envelope with the paperknife she uses for manifests.
Two lines, in the hand she had married. No date. No signature, because she would not have needed one.
*It was not your fault about the ice that year. I never once thought it was. I should have said.*
She had not been told this. She wanted that written somewhere official, that nobody had ever told her, not Wilson at the end, not his brother at the funeral, not the crew guild's letter of condolence. She had spent two years not being told it, and here it was, delivered, dry, warm, unstamped, in the middle of the Thin Hour with the weed-bound boats lying quiet along the wall.
When she looked up, the railings were empty. The rain took up the whole road.
She has the envelope now, filed in the drawer of a cabinet that is supposed to hold nothing but tide tables, and she has answered it. Last night shift she carried her reply to the corner post box, the old one that faces the harbour wall, and she has not taken the reply out again, and the collection plate on the box still shows the last emptied date before the Misprint.
What she cannot settle is this. The reply asks a question. It is a fair question, and she wrote it in the winter and addressed it in the spring, and she has carried it in the same drawer as the draft she has never read. But she knows the way the roads run between here and wherever the bag goes. She knows that some things you write are delivered, and some things you write, when the time is wrong, are simply carried.