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At Sable Quay, fare clerk Tamsin Vale keeps one hand on the manifest and the other on a family that never quite fits the paper. Between a soup stall, a cracked brass seal, and the last legal crossing before the east-bank market turns over, the quay runs on wet rope, hot broth, and rules with teeth.
Three permits sat under my wrist. The brass seal beside them still held its heat, and the paper had curled at one corner where river damp had reached it. Orla's kettle ticked on the stall board. The handle was wrapped in wire, because the old bone one had split last winter and the wire had stayed. On the busiest mornings, everything in our stall acquired a second life if it survived one. I pushed the permits into a neat stack and aligned their corners with my thumb. That was the trick at Sable Quay, or one of them. Straight paper made people believe straight answers would follow, and I had spent enough years behind a fare desk to know how easy it was to use a clean edge as a kind of mercy. Orla slid a bowl under the kettle spout and the broth went dark and oily against the white glaze. "You can stop counting your way through hunger," she said. "The board has not fled." I kept the seal on the top page instead of pocketing it. That was the habit I hated least and trusted most. If the family could see the seal, they would ask what I planned, and if they asked, I could keep the answers in order. Problems behaved better on paper. Aunt Brina arrived with the waiting list tucked under one arm and a tin whistle tied to her apron string, though she had never blown it in her life. "For the record," she said, "the queue has begun behaving like a crowd, which is how accidents start in municipal literature." Perrin came in carrying two crates with one hand and a loaf with the other, which meant he had already done the part of the day likely to go wrong. His missing fingertip made the bread look larger than it was. "Could be worse," he said. "One crate is only pretending to be heavy." He set both crates down with a grunt and then added, "I have not broken anything yet, so this is a clean start." Nobody answered that. The quay answered for us instead, with the scrape of boot soles on wet boards and the short, flat knock of ferry rope against a post. I slid my own name to the top of the stack, then moved it back under the others. We were not going to waste a seat on vanity. Not today.