He Threw My Ledger Into the Harbour and Called Me the Quay Hand — Then the Harbourmaster Read Out the Tide Book
The ledger went over the quay rail before the harbourmaster opened her tide book.
Joe Trelawny has kept his boat on the same berth since he was forty. This morning the harbour board votes on Ricky Blunt's application to take it, and Joe is standing at the rail with nothing in his hands.
Ricky Blunt walks the quay with his folder and two board members, bright yellow jacket, silver watch catching the sun. He tells them the harbour is paying a hand who can't read, and the net-menders on the fuel pontoon hear every word of it. Joe says nothing. He coils his rope the way he coils it every morning.
Then Ricky's right arm swings back and across, and his open hand takes the water-stained ledger off Joe's left arm. It arcs over the quay rail, hits the harbour with a flat slap, and the pages flare open as it goes down. Spray jumps up the wet stone. The two net-menders stop working and watch it sink.
Joe doesn't shout. His eyes squeeze shut, his right hand comes up and closes on the cold rail, and one tear runs down through the grey stubble on his cheek. The board members look at the water. Ricky is already talking about the berth.
In the cabin, Ricky tells the board Joe's boat is an unsafe small craft and asks them to strip its berth. Enid Pascoe opens the tide book on the chart table, and it fills the frame: Joe's blue-ink trip entries running down the left column, her red initials down the margin beside every line. On the flagged page, in blue ink: "NAV LIGHT OUT 9 NIGHTS — CONTRACTOR: BLUNT MARINE," with nine dates listed beneath.
The light was paid to be serviced on those nights. The covering letter under Ricky's application carries the contractor's name, and it is not a name anyone in that cabin expected to see on the same page as a dead navigation light.
Somewhere in those nine nights, a boat came back into the harbour with the light out and the rocks very close. Nobody on the board has heard that part yet.
Who signed the invoices for those nine nights, and who was on the water when the ninth one failed? The full story is below — the contractor's paperwork, the near-miss that never made the harbour log, and the vote that left Joe Trelawny with more than he started the morning with.
👉 Read Part 2 at the link below.
Advertisement