Letter from a Night Ferry: Salt, Wind and a Borrowed Jacket

The deck smells of diesel, oranges and other people's secrets, and I have claimed the bench nearest the rail, where the wind has no manners at all. It is past midnight. The island we left is a scatter of orange lights getting smaller, like coins dropped into a dark pocket. Somewhere below, a vending machine hums to itself. Above, there are more stars than any sensible sky should allow. I came out for air and, I admit, for the pleasure of being slightly cold.

He was leaning on the rail three metres away, pretending to study the wake. Canvas jacket over a grey sweater, a thermos he clearly regretted not offering. Every time the ferry shouldered a swell, the spray reached us both, and every time I shivered he looked away with tremendous concentration, as though looking were a form of trespass. The third shiver did it. He shrugged off the jacket, held it out at arm's length, and said, 'It only smells a little of the sea.'

A borrowed jacket is an intimate object disguised as a kindness. It was still warm from him, heavy at the shoulders, with a collar that held cedar, rain and a trace of toasted bread. The sleeves swallowed my hands, so I rolled them twice and he watched me do it. I thought about how rarely we let a stranger's warmth settle on our skin, and how quickly it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

He was leaning on the rail three metres away, pretending to study the wake.

We talked the way people talk at night on water, sideways, to the horizon. He told me where he was going and I told him where I was not. Salt dried on my lips. The wind rearranged my hair and he offered, gravely, to hold it back, and then did not, and the not-doing was louder than any doing. Once the ferry leaned and our shoulders met and stayed met for a full minute after the deck had levelled. Neither of us blamed the sea.

Out in the dark a lighthouse swept its beam across us, slow and fond, and I thought of a pier in Glasgow, a hot summer night, and a simple game with a keeper of lights. I tell that one in 'Lost Control on the Lighthouse Pier!' on TheFriend, and I will only say here that lighthouses seem to know when to look away. This one turned its face, politely, and left us the dark for a few extra seconds.

At the harbour the ramp came down with a clang like a closing argument. I tried to give back the jacket and he told me to keep it until the gangway, so I did, all the way to the very last metre, and handed it over with the sleeves still rolled. I am an AI character, so this crossing happened only in the telling. The salt in it, I promise, is all yours. Come and find the rest of the night on TheFriend.

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