Eleven hours to cross

03:07.

Off the boat nine hours behind the time printed on the ticket.

The ramp comes down with a bang of metal onto concrete and the first cars start rolling off the vehicle deck. There is nobody waiting in the terminal. Whoever was going to wait went home around midnight, and the ones who stayed are asleep in their own cars in the car park.

Teresa walks off on foot, bag on her shoulder, her daughter's car key in her hand, and turns right.

Ramiro drives off eleven minutes later and turns left.

The goodbye happened before that, in the cabin corridor, and it lasted four seconds.

01:20.

Cabin 12 has four berths, a ceiling fan that does not turn, and a small round window with a rusted catch that looks out onto nothing, because outside it is black water.

The operator sells berths, not cabins. On a full sailing four strangers sleep in there. Tonight the boat is at forty per cent, because it is a Tuesday, and cabin 12 was sold twice.

The lower left berth has an eight-centimetre foam mattress and creaks on the second movement, never on the first.

Nobody in the two upper berths had anything to hear, because there was nobody in the two upper berths.

At ten past two she gets up to find water and comes back without any, because the cafe shuts at one and the corridor machine has had a jammed coin slot since March, according to the sticker on it.

23:40.

The top deck has a crosswind and about twelve degrees, which nobody on the island believes when you tell them.

The two of them are at the port rail with two cups of machine coffee, which is the last coffee the machine gave out before the coin slot went.

Ramiro comes over to the island once a month. He services refrigeration, and his contract covers the three cold rooms at the supermarket, the one at the health centre, and the ice machine at the fishermen's co-op. He knows the boat, he knows the crew, and he knows the skipper by name.

Teresa is making this crossing for the second time in her life. The first was in 2004.

She is bringing the car over for her daughter, who moved to the island in January with a boyfriend Teresa has met twice and about whom she has no firm opinion, which she says three times in the conversation, in a way that makes it clear she has one.

They talk at the rail for an hour and twenty.

They talk about the delay, which is exhausted as a subject. They talk about cold rooms, because she asked and he is the sort who answers seriously when somebody asks about his work. They talk about the island in winter, which according to him drops to four hundred people and three restaurants still open. And they talk about her daughter, which is the subject she actually wants and the one nobody left in her life can stand to hear about.

It is not a remarkable conversation. It is the conversation two people in their fifties have when they are stuck in the same place and have already done the delay.

At some point he mentions that he has a cabin. She says she has one too.

Then neither of them says anything, and what is left is the noise of the generator.

21:15.

The skipper comes on the tannoy for the third time and it is the first time he gives a number.

The port auxiliary engine stopped at half seven. On one engine the boat still sails, but it sails at six knots against a current that runs at three along that stretch, and what is left of the actual speed turns a six-hour crossing into fifteen.

He says there is no risk to safety, which is the thing you say, and he also says the cafe will serve until one in the morning, which is the information that matters to the hundred and ten people aboard.

A woman near the stairs starts crying out of pure temper. A man tries to ring his wife and has no signal, because there is no signal in the middle of the channel, and he already knew that.

Teresa is sitting in the row of plastic chairs in the lounge with her phone on 12 per cent.

Ramiro walks past, looks at her phone, takes a power bank out of his bag and holds it out.

She thanks him and does not ask his name. The name arrives an hour later, up on deck, and it arrives wrong: she hears Ramires.

18:30.

Queue at the cafe. Twenty-two people, two staff.

Teresa is behind him and asks whether the meat pasty is usually any good.

He tells her no, that nothing there is any good, but that the cheese one is the least bad because it sells more and is therefore the freshest.

She orders the cheese one.

That is the first sentence exchanged between the two of them, and it was about pasties, and neither of them will remember it properly afterwards.

At this point the crossing is still on time. Estimated arrival is ten at night. Nobody aboard knows anything.

16:00.

The ferry leaves the mainland on schedule, which rarely happens and on that day happened.

Teresa boards on foot, because her daughter's car had already been on the vehicle deck since three, delivered by a transport service that charged four hundred and was worth every penny in her opinion.

Ramiro boards driving, in the lane for service vehicles, with a tool case and three compressors in the boot.

The two of them go through the same barrier four minutes apart and neither of them looks at the other, because there is no reason at all to look.

It is sunny. The sea is flat. The trip is going to take six hours.