Night Ferry

I

The last ferry across the river leaves at twenty past one, and for eleven years I took it three nights a week, going home from the hotel. It is a small boat with a lower deck for bicycles and an upper cabin with wooden benches, and at that hour it carries the same people every night: two cooks from the restaurants on the far bank, a security guard with a thermos, a man who sells lottery tickets and never seems to have sold any, and me.

The crossing takes eleven minutes. In eleven years I must have made it more than a thousand times, and I can tell you exactly what happens in each of those minutes. The engine note rises as the boat leaves the jetty. At the third minute you pass the red buoy. At the fifth, the lights of the old town slide into view behind you and you can see the cathedral, lit from below. At the eighth, the boat slows for the current in the middle. At the eleventh, the ramp comes down with a bang and everybody walks off without saying goodbye.

I liked it. I liked that nothing happened. After a night of guests locked out of their rooms and taxis that did not come, the ferry was the only part of my life that ran exactly as it was supposed to.

II

The woman with the cello case got on in October. She was in her forties, I think, with grey in her hair and a raincoat too thin for the weather, and she carried the case on her back like a turtle carries its shell. She sat on the bench opposite mine. The cooks looked at her, and then at each other, and then went back to their cigarettes, which they were not supposed to smoke in the cabin and always did.

She took the ferry on the same nights I did for the rest of that autumn. We did not speak. She looked out of the window at the dark water, and I looked at the lights of the old town, and sometimes, at the eighth minute, when the boat slowed in the current, our eyes met in the reflection on the glass and we both looked away.

I made up stories about her, the way you do. She played in an orchestra and had just moved to the city. She was a teacher who gave lessons late at night to people who could not afford the daytime rate. She was leaving someone and carrying the only thing she owned. I preferred the last one, and I am not proud of it.

III

On the first night of December the ferry broke down in the middle of the river.

It happened at the eighth minute, in the current. The engine made a noise I had never heard it make, a sort of cough, and then stopped altogether, and the boat turned slowly sideways and began to drift downstream. The lights in the cabin flickered and stayed on. The pilot came down from the wheelhouse and told us, quite calmly, that he had radioed the harbour and that a tug would come for us, and that we should stay in our seats. Then he went back up and we heard him start swearing.

We drifted for forty minutes. The old town went past the window in the wrong direction, then the new bridge, then the dark warehouses on the south bank where nobody lives. The security guard opened his thermos and poured coffee for everyone into its lid, passing it around. The lottery man told a long story about his brother-in-law that nobody followed. One of the cooks fell asleep.

The woman with the cello case sat very straight on her bench with her hands on her knees. After twenty minutes she stood up, unbuckled the case, took out the cello and sat down again with it between her knees. She did not ask anyone if they minded. She tuned it, briefly, and then she began to play.

IV

I know nothing about music. I cannot tell you what she played. It was slow and low and it went on for a long time, and at some point the security guard stopped pouring coffee and the lottery man stopped talking and the cook who had fallen asleep woke up and did not move.

The cabin was cold. The boat was turning in the current, so that every few minutes the lights of the city passed across the window from left to right, like a very slow lighthouse. She played with her eyes closed. When she reached the end of something, she paused, and turned a peg, and began again with something else. Nobody clapped. It would have been like clapping in a church.

The tug arrived after forty minutes, a small red boat with a searchlight, and threw us a line, and towed us slowly back upstream to the jetty we had left. She played the whole way. When the ramp came down, with its usual bang, she stopped in the middle of a phrase, put the cello back in its case, buckled it, lifted it onto her back and walked off the boat without looking at any of us.

V

She did not take the ferry again. I looked for her on the next night, and on every night after that until Christmas, and then I stopped looking, although I did not stop noticing that the bench opposite mine was empty.

I left the hotel two years later and I have not taken the night ferry since. But I think about that crossing more than any of the other thousand. I think about how long eleven minutes can become if the engine fails. I think about the coffee in the thermos lid, passed from hand to hand. And I think about the story I made up for her, about leaving someone, and how wrong it was.

She was not leaving anybody. I understand that now. She was going home from work, like the rest of us, on the last boat of the night. The only difference was that when the boat stopped, she had something to give, and she gave it, and then she went home.