SHORT STORY
The Ferryman
HELLO! has invited acclaimed writers to entertain readers in these testing times. This week, an encounter gives a new chance of happiness in a touching tale from Kate Riordan
At the end of the summer, when the high tide of tourists had gone out but autumn proper was still a few weeks away, the foot ferry still ran on the August timetable.
It was always dead quiet when he made the first run over to Fowey from Polruan; even the boatyard workers who put in 12-hour days didn’t get going until later. As he puttered out across water as still and viscous as oil, his eye was always caught by the trawlers that came to be repaired from all over: Denmark and Ukraine and Russia. They looked like toy boats in dry dock: a stubby 80ft bow to stern and the same in height once they’d been hoisted up by the lifts, the deep keel that kept them upright in tall seas revealed after years below the waterline. He liked watching them emerge from their chrysalis of rust and salt as they were welded and winterised, spray-painted in scarlet, apple-green and pristine white. They were always back down t
There was one girl he would have married. He’d have given up the fishing in a heartbeat for her, turned his back on the sea
He’d worked on the same kind of vessel as a young man, bringing in pilchards to Polperro when there were still pilchards to catch in British waters. He’d loved the camaraderie of the crew like they all did, but he never got a thrill from the storms that made you feel like you were the only people left undrowned in the world; that the heaving, boiling Atlantic was the world. Floundering in the trough, engines straining to pull them up a wave that was more wall than liquid, the rake of it so steep it seemed miraculous they didn’t topple backwards into the abyss, he hated the sea. He watched the others as the boat groaned like it was dying, water squeezing iron like it was rubber, and though some looked like he felt – pulling too hard on their cigarettes, hands shaking as they lit up a new one before stubbing out the last – there were those who truly loved it. As though death’s dank breath on their necks was the only time they felt alive.