“Not tonight she isn’t. She’ll have to go the long way round. Got your hand brake on?”
Flora got out of the car, although the ferry only took ten minutes to cross The Pinch, to the curl of land shaped like a beckoning finger where she had grown up. She stood at the front barrier, pelted by slanting rain, while the engine strained and vibrated as it pulled the ferry across the short stretch of water on its chains. Flora’s stomach pitched and rolled with the boat. This night there were no lights on the opposite bank and they might have been sailing out to sea. She had never been the last passenger—the only passenger—and she wondered whether her mother had recently stood here to cross The Pinch, and whether they would recognise each other when they met. As the boat juddered and struggled, Flora imagined that each clank was the chains snapping, setting the little car ferry free to follow the rushing tide. The waves would roar over the ramp until the car deck was awash and the water flowed through the gap in the window of Richard’s Morris Minor. She would climb the ferry’s steps to the viewing platform and lean over the railings as the boat listed and its lights were extinguished one by one until the last, beside the navigation station, stuttered and was swallowed by the sea. Black waves would lift the boat up and roll it with the swell, like mountains rising where there had been no mountains before. The air would escape from each of the cavities and pipes and human lungs, and bubble to the surface while the ferry upended, nose first into the water, and she and Richard’s little car and all the yellow-jacketed men would sink to the bottom.
It took two or three goes for Flora to start the car while the man waited impatiently on the ramp. He took a couple of steps towards her, but Flora swore, pulled the choke out, and with a jerk the car started and kept on going. The tollbooths on the road were unlit and the barriers were up; a free ride. The car’s headlights appeared to be weaker than when she had set off, and the rain drummed on the thin roof. The wipers were unable to cut through the blur fast enough, so Flora leaned forwards over the steering wheel to where the dim beams showed the road disappearing in black and white. Even with the heater going full blast, every few minutes she had to swipe at the windscreen with the side of her arm.
The road from the ferry to the village cut through a nature reserve: salty wetlands crisscrossed with tracks, swampy in the hollows, rising to dusty dunes near the sea, and rocky outcrops inland. The sandy trails sliced through fields of marram grass and heather, skirted Little Sea Pond, a brackish lake lying low between the road and the sea, and passed by stands of wind-humped trees huddled together for protection.
Darkness didn’t stop Flora from knowing every bend and sway of Ferry Road although she had never driven it, had always been the passenger, either in the front beside her sister or in the back, when they were children, in her father’s car. She had been almost ten when her mother had disappeared, and Flora couldn’t remember ever having been in a car with her, although that must have happened. She fiddled with the radio, sliding the dial, but only got static and an occasional faraway voice.