23 September 2026 · fiction: 2030

2030: What He Got Wrong About the Ferry

Fiction. The people and the places in it are invented; the arrangements they live inside are the ones this site argues about. One instalment a day, a longer one on Fridays, and the story carries on.

She brought the poem back. She had ironed it, which was mad, between two tea towels on the lowest setting, and the coffee stain had dried brown at the edges and the last line was still his line, in the printer's type, correct.

He was there first. There were two flat whites on the table and he pushed one across before she'd sat down.

"You owe me nothing," she said.

"You saved a poem." He looked at the ironed sheet and then at her with open delight. "Did you iron this?"

"I work with documents."

"She'll think I've gone mad. She's learnt it anyway. She does it with actions." He did one of the actions, small, with two fingers, a boat going over a wave. "She's better at it than me. She says the last line properly."

He was in a talking mood. He said Thursday was the one day of the week he didn't have to be efficient, and he spent it being inefficient on purpose. He told her about a hospital in Ghent that had needed a kidney machine at four in the morning, and how the routing system had found three trucks and a boat and he'd rung a man called only by his initial, who owned a van.

And then, because she asked nothing, he told her about the ferry.

"I nearly didn't get on it," he said. "I sat in the car park at Harwich for forty minutes with the engine off. I was going over to end something. With someone. I'd been not-ending it for a year and I thought, one night on the water and I'll know." He turned the cup. "And I talked to this woman all night, and in the morning I knew all right. I drove off the boat and went straight back round to the ticket office and came home and didn't end it."

M. held her cup in both hands.

"We had my daughter the next spring," he said. "So." He laughed at himself. "Whoever she was, the woman on the boat, she's the reason I've got a kid who does poems with actions. I should send her a card."

She had imagined, in eleven years, a great many versions of that night going on without her. She had not imagined this one: that she had been the thing that sent him home.

"It rained the whole way over," he said. "I remember that. Sheeting."

"It didn't rain."

It came out in her court voice, level and exact, the voice she used to correct a witness's date. It was out before she knew it was coming, and once it was out it stayed out.

He looked at her.

"How would you know?"

Somewhere in her was the professional who had spent a decade covering for other people's mistakes in real time, and it stood up and did its best.

"It never rains on the North Sea in March," she said. "It's too cold."

He stared at her for a long second. Then he laughed, properly, head back, and a woman at the next table looked up from her soup.

"That," he said, "is the least true thing anyone's ever said to me."

"Yes," M. said.

He went on looking at her, still smiling, but with something else behind the smile now, the look of a witness who has just heard his own statement read back and isn't sure it's his. At twenty past, his phone made the small sound that meant his daughter was out of the water. He stood, and picked up the bag, and the whale.

"It was March, though," he said, at the door. "How did you know it was March?"

The door opened for him. He went through it before she had to answer, which she would realise later, walking home, had been a kindness.