Short story · 4 min read · Set in Hesselby ·
The Last Boat That Boards
At the Hesselby terminal the boat that makes fast after the final boarding is announced takes whoever is tired of waiting, there is always someone, and the paperwork has agreed not to mind.
The last scheduled boat of the night out of Hesselby boards at 03:00 and sails at 03:33. The loudspeaker handles the announcement the same way every night, this is the final boarding, and then the ramp goes up and the gate chain is padlocked through itself, out of habit, so that it can never be padlocked wrong. The shift clerk reconciles. Stubs against manifest, manifest against tide. On a usual night the figures are 214 stubs against 214 names, and the tide tables agree, and at Hesselby the tide tables are never argued with.
There is a standing minute for what happens next. Commissioners' minute 14(c), renewed every year without discussion: should a further vessel make fast after the final boarding, the gate is to be reopened for passengers presenting themselves; no announcement by loudspeaker; the walking announcement will serve. The walking announcement is one sentence with no numbers in it, kept short so any clerk can say it evenly up one row of benches and down the other: final call for anyone tired of waiting.
The second boat makes fast sometimes at quarter past, sometimes at the full half hour, at the berth ladder. It is the length of the island boat, the crews wear the same coats, and it carries two more mast lights than the island boat is rated for, which the ramp man notices and the log does not. It does not hail the bridge. It does not blow. It waits with the engines turned down to a murmur you feel in the soles more than hear in the ears. The pilotage book shows no movement for that watch, before it or after it; the page is simply unsigned, and unsigned pages file as blank in the monthly audit, and blank files as nothing, and at Hesselby nothing has never once been queried at ministerial level.
There is always someone. In nine years of the second sheet, Maureen Petrie's smallest boarding was one tick, a man who had come to the terminal nightly since 1971 to wait for a night service withdrawn in 1971 and never quite believed the notice; her largest was nineteen, the cold snap of February when the heating at the old men's home failed and the home's matron gave the whole bench over. The second sheet has no column for names, by design. It has a time, a tick, and a remarks line that always ends up carrying the only words available: carried forward.
Those who go say they were told. Those who stay recall the clerk's boots passing and nothing said to them. Everyone agrees about the boots. The boots were counted on both sides, and the words, on the evidence, went only one way, and no form exists for asking a tick why.
The refusals stop at the foot of the second boat. Mrs. Dora Skelton was turned back from the 03:05 for eleven years on a discrepancy of one letter, the register holding D. Skelton against a ticket that read D. Skilton, refused and initialled every night, the refusals filing cleanly in their orange folder. One night in October she went at the second boat, which does not read. The refusals stop mid-folder, and that night's reconciliation balanced first to last for the first time in eleven years, and the audit's auditor initialed the margin with what the form calls satisfaction.
Staff may avail themselves of any boarding. Minute 14(c) permits it as far as the second. The absence must then be rebooked like anyone else's, which is the joke among the ramp men, and no one has ever rebooked one. The pier clock, wound weekly on schedule, has stopped at 03:33 twice, both times in the first week of November, once in 1978 and once in 1987, and both times the clockmaker's chit has come back in a plain steady hand: nothing worn. The chits are pinned in order next to the minute book, and the pin rusts around them a little more each year.
Maureen has walked the benches herself for three winters now, when the rota puts her hand to it. She says the sentence evenly to every bench, as trained. She has not gone, and cannot put the reason in a column, tiredness having no heading on her sheet. The Commissioners ask yearly for anomalies, if any, and every year she copies the same remark forward in her own hand, because it is the only line that stays true: there is always someone. Beneath it the form has never grown a space for the question she carries back up the stairs on the first of November with her coat over her arm, past the unlit berth ladder, without looking down it: on the night there is finally no one on the benches, will the boat still come?