Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Ferry Road ·
The Second Low Tide
A ferry steward testifies that a morning low tide paused for exactly 33 minutes, an account she first retracted and then signed again.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Leah Marsh, ferry steward"
I have worked the Ferry Road slip for nine years, and the last run is mine. The 22:40 out across the sound, one steward, the green lamp on the pier, the deck light drawn down to a cone so the water keeps the rest. On the return I collect the pass-fares by hand. We do not take coins on the night crossing. Each passenger is handed a paper fare on boarding, printed plain, undated, and I punch it somewhere past the channel marker and drop it in the tin.
On the night I am filing about, I tore a fare for a man in oilskins at the aft rail, and while my fingers were still on the torn edge, two more fares rose out of my breast pocket.
I want to be exact, because nobody on the pier believes the exact part. They did not fall out. They did not blow. They came up out of the pocket the way things come up out of water, unhurried, and hung over the brass of the rail at the height of my cuff, turning slowly, and the boat was under way and moving and they did not drift with her. They stayed with me over the rail while the channel light went by on our left. I did not call out. I remember deciding not to, and remembering that deciding felt like the loudest thing I had done all night.
When we were inside the marker I took them down off the air. Two plain fares, stock numbers beside each other in the book, the torn edge of neither matching the one I had punched. I did not punch them. I clipped them together with my brass pin and put them in my inside coat pocket, and the man in oilskins said, in a voice I would not swear to, that the sea does that on the second low tide, and stepped off at the slip before I could ask which low tide he meant. The list that night had him, and the manifest for the last run — I checked next morning — does not. It has the lamp trim, the wind, the tide.
The fares went to the office for reconciliation, the way found fares do. Two stock numbers, missing without a break in the sequence, which the book does not allow. I signed a witness line and expected a reprimand and forgot about it.
Then, the following quarter, a fare turned up filed. Not a copy: one of the two, or indistinguishable from one of the two, with my brass pin's bite still in the corner. The harbour-master's office had it, in the drawer for estates of persons unclaimed, folded around a list of names in a hand none of us recognised, dated the night of my crossing. The second one surfaced the year after, in a filing room of the weigh-house registry, in a schedule of salt tubs, married to a weight column so that the fare reads in the ledger like a weight. Both offices stamped it received months apart, and both stamp dates were Tuesdays.
I have stood it at the inquiry twice. Nothing I say is out of order — the hang, the turn, the tide — but there is no second witness. My deck light was on me alone. The reconciliation clerk can confirm the stock numbers, and does, and the harbour-master's clerk can confirm the drawer, and does, and between them what I saw stays a thing with no edges, because the papers were found and what I saw was a lifting.
I still work the last run. I keep my fares in a closed canvas satchel now, and I keep the satchel inside the collar of my coat through the channel, and on nights when the second low tide and my crossing fall together I count the papers twice before the pier. Some nights I hold the satchel and it holds more paper by the flat of my hand than the book says I gave out, and then the pier lamp comes up green and I go and count again, and by the time I reach the tin, the count is right. It is always right by the tin.
I have begun to believe the count is right before I count it, and that what moves between the slip and the tin is only finding out which way it was filed.