Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Ferry Road ·
The Fog That Came Into the Lobby
A bookings clerk at the Ferry Road terminal heard the fog horn sound inside the sealed lobby, twice, a minute apart, and both times it stopped when she stopped counting.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Maren Foyle, bookings clerk"
The terminal faces the water and the water is always there, so you learn to ignore the horn the way you learn to ignore the clock. It sounds out on the reach when the fog comes in off the northern swash, and it has one note, and I have heard that note for eleven years through glass, through walls, through rain, and it always comes from outside, from out on the water, small and far away.
On the night I want to talk about it had been raining sideways since four in the afternoon and the last ferry had gone at nine. My shift ran until the fish trains cleared, which is bookkeeping work, mostly, at a desk behind the ticket rail. The lobby is a concrete hall with a rubber floor and two sets of doors, kept shut from the outside at close. Sealed. I checked them both because the flaps stick and the night porter always says I left one open when I did not. I counted the takings on my desk and did not look up when the first one came.
The horn did not come through the walls. It came into the lobby. There is no other way I can put it. It was the same single low note, but it was inside the room with me, in the air between the desk and the doors, the way a voice is in a room. Under it my chair creaked and my pencil rolled a little, so I know my ears were not the only thing working. I stopped counting. The note stopped at the same moment. Not faded. Stopped, the way a tap shuts.
I did what you do. I stood up, said nothing out loud, and walked the lobby with my torch. Dry floor, doors latched, flaps down. I went back to the desk and I had almost got my count back where it was, at sixty-two in tens, when the second one came, a minute after the first, near enough to the minute that looking at my watch after the fact I could not split them. Again inside. Again it ended when I stopped. It was like something on the far side of the room was waiting for me to quit adding, and it paused every time I did, out of some politeness, and then thought better of it and went.
What I want set down is this. I counted nothing aloud. I said nothing. The only thing I was doing both times was tallying the takings, and both times the note died the instant my hand stopped. I did not like the word I found for that, so I will not write it here, except to say a horn on the water counts nothing. A horn has a schedule. This had attention.
I locked the takings drawer, signed the sheet, and walked out through the staff door without looking at the lobby, and the lobby was quiet, and stayed quiet, and the walk home along the road had wind and rain and one normal horn at the very end, so far off it was nothing.
The porter went in for his rounds at ten past, after me. Fog came up the reach around midnight and he heard the horn from the mooring, normal, outside, distant, same as it ever was. He heard nothing in the lobby. But he is also the one who goes back through the closed till and he entered the takings at sixty-two in tens, which is what I had written, and he initialed beside my name without asking, because we do that.
So it is confirmed, in the only way that matters to him and to me. Two takings counts, one signature each, the same figure, no note missing. What the two of us cannot confirm is whether the room counted with me or against me, and he says there is no difference and I say there is, and neither of us will put it to the test.