The deck is wet under your boots, dark in patches where the morning's rain has pooled against the low steel lip at the rail. You rest your hands on the painted metal. It is cold, a little tacky with salt, and the paint has worn through to grey in the places where other hands have rested before yours. The loch is flat. Not glassy — there is a slow breathing in its surface, a long low swell that lifts and settles without breaking — but flat enough that the hills on the far side lie doubled in it, dim and inverted. The engine holds a low note somewhere beneath the deck, steady as a held breath.
A gull draws level with the stern, wings set, barely moving. It rides the boat's own weather, the slight upward push of air off the wheelhouse, and tilts now and then to correct. Another gull joins it, then a third, strung out behind the ferry at careful intervals. They do not call. They watch the wake, or the water at the edge of the wake where small things are turned up by the propeller, and every so often one peels away and drops and lifts again with something pale in its beak. The sound they make against the wind is a dry small rustle of feather, so faint you catch it only when the engine dips.
You walk the length of the deck toward the bow. The boards are ridged steel, painted grey and worn to silver along the centreline where feet have gone for years between the benches and the rail. At the midships bench you pause and put your palm flat on the wood. It is damp, but warmer than the metal. A little lichen has taken hold in the seam between two planks, pale green, frilled at the edges. The rivets that hold the bench to its iron stand are domed and dark, and the paint around each rivet is lifted in a small crust, as though the paint has been pushed slowly outward by what lies beneath. You move on. The bow is empty. The wind, such as it is, comes straight at you, cool and carrying the smell of the loch — peat water, wet rope, a trace of diesel, and under all of it something mineral and cold, the smell of deep water that has not been warm this year.
The far shore is closer now, though only a little. It is a long low line of hills, dark at the base where pine plantations run down to the water, paler as the land climbs, and along the top edge a band of gold where the failing sun has caught them. The gold is not bright. It has the quality of something handed on and handed on, the last of the day's warmth resting on the upper slopes before it lifts off entirely. Below the gold, the hills are slate-blue and plum, and below that, where the trees begin, they are almost black. A single white house stands at the water's edge, too far yet to make out clearly, showing only as a pale square against the darker ground. A thread of smoke lifts from it, straight, then bends sideways above the roofline, then is gone into the hill behind.
The engine changes its note for a moment — a lower hum, as if the ferry has passed over something, a difference in the water beneath — and returns. You feel it in the soles of your boots before you hear it. The vibration travels up through the deck and into the bones of your feet, and you become aware of standing, of the small adjustments your body makes against the shift of the hull. The swell is long and unhurried. You rise with it and settle. Somewhere to starboard there is a slap of water against the hull, the shallow smack of a wave folding under the curve of the bow, and then another, and then a long silence in which only the engine and the gulls are audible, and the occasional tick of a halyard against a mast somewhere behind you.
A cormorant sits on a marker buoy a stone's throw off the port side. Black, hunched, wings half open to dry. The buoy is rust-streaked, its white paint gone to the colour of old bone, and it tilts with the swell, and the cormorant tilts with it, and neither the bird nor the buoy seem troubled by the tilting. As the ferry passes, the cormorant turns its head, just that, and follows the boat with one yellow eye, and then turns back to face the way it was facing before, which is out toward the open loch. You watch it until it is small and then only a shape and then not visible at all, and when you look forward again the shore has come nearer still, and you can see the shingle beach now, a pale strip at the foot of the hills, and the dark peg of a jetty running out from it.
The light is beginning to go. It does not go all at once. The gold on the ridge narrows, is pressed thinner, becomes a pale wire laid along the hilltop, and then the wire is only in places, broken by the shapes of trees at the skyline. The sky above the hills is still lit, a cold clear blue deepening toward the zenith, and a single cloud hangs over the loch ahead, underlit faintly pink on its belly, grey above. The water has lost its doubling. The hills no longer stand in it. Instead the surface has gone to pewter, and the long swell shows only as a slow darkening and lightening, a breath you can see but not hear. A few midges come up out of nowhere and hang near the rail, and then the cool air takes them away.
You move back along the deck toward the stern. The bench there is cast iron, green, with the paint flaking at the armrests in small curled leaves. You sit. The wood of the seat is cold through your coat but not unpleasant, and the iron of the armrest has been smoothed at the curved top by a long succession of hands until it shines dull and warm-looking even now. A ticket stub, old, faded to the colour of tea, is wedged in the gap between two slats. You leave it. The gulls are still there behind the ferry, fewer now, two of them, drifting in the air as though pinned. The wake spreads out behind the boat in a long pale V, and at its edge the water is dimpled and busy, and further out it is smooth again, and the loch closes over the path the ferry has drawn through it without trace.
Somewhere in the wheelhouse a radio murmurs and is turned down. A door opens and shuts. Footsteps cross a metal plate above you and recede. The engine holds its note. The hills on the near shore, the one you are leaving, have gone blue-black now, and a single light has come on among the trees, a yellow window in the darkening slope, very small. The far shore is close enough that you can hear, or believe you hear, the water moving on the shingle there, a slow dragging sound under the engine, though it may only be the sound of the loch against the hull repeated and softened by the dusk.
The cloud overhead loses its pink and becomes only grey, then a grey a little darker than the sky. The pewter of the water deepens. A second light comes on at the white house, then a third somewhere up the hill, and the hill itself goes on quietly giving up its colour, slate to charcoal, charcoal to the colour of the water. The gulls have gone. You did not see them leave. The jetty on the near shore is clearer now, its dark pegs standing in their own still reflections, and a figure is walking out along it with a rope coiled over one shoulder, unhurried. The engine begins, very gently, to ease. The note drops by a tone, then by another. The ferry slows, and the long wake behind it softens, and the swell lifts you once, and again, and the water goes on darkening, and the last of the gold is gone from the ridge, and the loch is only the loch, holding what light is left