Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Ferry Road ·
The Ferry That Remembered Me
A night clerk files a paid docket with no name on it and watches the crossing keep answering a seat he never saw filled.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Dennis Hale, night booking clerk"
There was a booking on the morning sheet at the Ferry Road terminal last month with no name against it, and the docket is still filed in the day book behind the kiosk. I have kept that counter on nights for nineteen years. I will set this down plainly, because other people checked pieces of it, and I would rather be corrected than laughed at.
The sheet is ruled in columns: time, party, vehicle, fare, name. The new line read the 06:15 crossing, one foot passenger, fare paid, and under name a blank with a tick in the paid column, made with the counterfoil pen. Our tickets run off a numbered roll. The first number out of the machine that morning was one higher than the nightly count, and the stub belonging to the gap, numbered 114913, sat in the tray already printed, timed 03:17.
The man on the middle shift signs off at midnight. I do not open the machine again until the ten past five stocktake. Between those hours the shutters are down and the floodlights are on, and there is a camera over the forecourt, except that the camera was being serviced that week, which I know because I complained about it myself. Two keys open that kiosk. I keep one. Nobody has told me who keeps the other.
I went through the stock book twice with the runner. Rolls in, rolls out, one stub missing from the printed range, one stub extra in the used tray: not two oddities but the same oddity counted two ways. The nightly count is initialled in three places. It initialled clean, exactly as if a fare had been sold at that counter at 03:17 by a hand that then went home up the fire stair.
By the rulebook a paid fare travels, so I sold the seat forward as booked: forward lounge, seat 14, out with the crew on the six fifteen. I stayed ashore; that side of the water is not my watch. Everything after is what the crew brought back, and I will keep to what they were willing to sign. The steward set the lounge for twenty-two. The tally came to twenty-two, twice, on two separate head counts, while the gangway counter taped twenty-one both times. Across the crossing the crew kept answering that one seat: tea held warm at 14, a rug offered out, a remark or two acknowledged that nobody among the twenty-one admits to having made.
The purser-mate, Walter Crisp, signed the tally of twenty-two and let the counter disagreement stand on the clip, which is the proper procedure. The mate saw the docket before the boat went out and again after it came in. The steward brought the tea things back from the lounge himself, two cups and two saucers, and sent them through the galley washer with the rest.
The paper side is not in dispute. The docket exists: cream card, PAID in the corner, 03:17 in the time box, countersigned by the mate after the crossing, filed under the day's date where any auditor could find it. The fare went through the till and the till balances to the penny. On the issued-by line there is a signature. I have studied it longer than I ought to admit. It is very like my hand. It is not my hand; the middle stroke is wrong. The office cannot match it to any clerk on the roster.
So it is corroborated, after its fashion: two crew names at the foot of the tally, the mate's counter-signature on the docket, the counterfoil in the file. But a man can only sign what he saw, and what I saw was a glass screen, a shutter, and the small hours of my own shift with nothing moving in them. What nobody has been able to balance for me is the seat. If nobody crossed in 14, who put the second cup back on the galley shelf the right way up?