26 September 2026 · fiction: 2030

2030: The Crossing

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.

"The Esbjerg boat, wasn't it," said P., sitting down, answering for her. "Before we met. She went to Denmark to learn to swear properly."

He set the orange juice in front of her. It was the small bottle with the drawn orange on the label, a drawing that hadn't changed since she was a child, a fruit with a face that knew nothing.

The Esbjerg boat had stopped running years before she ever went anywhere. She had taken the Hook. P. had it wrong, and he almost never had anything wrong, and she held the cold bottle and let his answer sit on the table between the three of them. In the half-second she didn't correct it, it became the crossing she'd taken.

T. looked at her. She knew its weight to the gram, that look. He'd had it at three in the morning on a deck.

"I did the Hook," T. said to P., easily. "Night boat. Years ago."

"Oh, lovely. Was it rough?"

"No. It didn't rain." T. said it to P. and didn't look at her at all. "There was a cabin I didn't use, with a porthole. I was up on deck all night."

"Why didn't you use the cabin?"

"I was talking to someone."

P. nodded, delighted, sipping his hot chocolate through the good side of his mouth. P. loved other people's stories the way some men love football, loyally, with no need to win. He asked about the ship, the bar, what you could see at night, whether it was true about the phosphorescence. T. answered every question. He was a good witness. He said nothing false and nothing complete.

M. drank her juice. It tasted, as it always had, of a tin.

Then P. did the thing she had not seen coming, which in all their years was a short list.

"Look," he said to T. "Come to supper. Saturday. Bring your daughter, if she eats fish. I do a hake with butter beans that M. has been politely eating for eight years. We've got far too much wine. Our flat's forgotten how to have people round, I'd like to remind it."

T. looked at M. M. looked at the orange with the face.

"We'd love to," T. said.

"Good." P. stood, and went to pay, and tapped his wrist to the reader, and checked the amount before he moved on, as he always did, a man who had never in his life been overcharged without noticing.

T. put his coat on. At the door he turned back.

"Next Thursday?"

It was addressed to the table. Either of them could have picked it up.

"Probably," she said.

Outside, it was properly cold, the first cold of the year, and P. put his hand out without looking and she took it without thinking. They walked towards the High Street. He didn't ask about T. He asked whether they still had the big dish, the oval one, for the fish.

"Under the sink," she said.

"Good," said P. "He looks at you like you owe him a book."

He said it in the voice he used for the weather, and squeezed her hand once, and went on talking about the dish.