Before pagers, a lifeboat crew was called by two maroons, rockets fired from a mortar on the boathouse roof that burst over the town with a bang everybody heard. The mortar came down in 1990 when the pagers came in. Every night at ten to three two maroons go up. The bangs are on the town's noise camera, the flashes are on the harbour webcam, the roof has the scorch marks, and the mortar is in the museum.
I am the station's press officer, which at a lifeboat station means I am the one the town rings, and the town has stopped ringing about the maroons.
The maroons.
Before pagers, two rockets, fired from a mortar on the boathouse roof, burst over the town with a bang you felt in your chest, and that was the call. The crew ran to the boathouse. Everybody else went to their windows. Two maroons meant the boat was going out and somebody was in trouble off the coast, and the town had heard them for a hundred years.
The mortar came down in 1990. It is in the town museum with a card.
At ten to three every night two maroons go up.
The bangs.
The town has a noise camera for the seafront bars, and it records them: two reports, eleven seconds apart, from the direction of the boathouse, at the decibels a maroon made. The harbour webcam, which looks along the front, catches two flashes in the sky over the station, red, bursting, the way a maroon burst, and the smoke drifting on whatever the wind is.
The boathouse roof, where the mortar stood, has a scorch on the lead every morning, fresh, the size of the mortar's base, and the lead is warm.
The mortar is in the museum, behind glass, and the museum's alarm has never gone.
What has been checked.
The roof, at ten to three, by me, on it, beside the scorch mark, in the cold. At ten to three the lead under my feet shook and there was the sound a maroon makes going up, the rush, from the place beside me where there was nothing, and the flash above, and the bang, which I felt in my chest as I had been told you did, and eleven seconds later the second, and I stood on the roof of a boathouse with two maroons bursting over me from a mortar in a glass case across the town, and the smoke came down round me, and it smelled of the stuff they were made of, which I have never smelled before and knew.
And the town, below me, lit. Windows. A dozen, twenty, along the front, lights coming on, people going to the glass, the way they did, the way the old ones still do, because two maroons at ten to three means the boat is going out, and they looked at the sea.
Who.
The maroons were fired by the coxswain, or by whoever had the key to the mortar, and in 1981 it was the cox, and he fired two maroons at ten to three for a fishing boat off the point, and the crew came, and the boat went out, and two of the crew did not come back.
He never fired them again. Nobody did, much. The pagers came in the decade after and the mortar came down and the last two maroons this town heard for real were his.
He is firing them. Every night. For the same shout. And the town, which knows what two maroons mean in the way a town knows things, wakes, and looks at the sea, and goes back to bed, and does not ring me, because they know what it is, and would not say.
What is done about it.
The bangs are on the council's noise log as an unidentified nightly report and the council has asked whether the station is firing maroons and I have said we do not have a mortar, and they have said the museum does, and I have said, go and look at it.
What I do.
I am the press officer.
Two maroons were a message. The town heard them and it meant: the boat is going out, think of them. And the town did. And then the pagers came and the boat goes out in silence and the town does not know until it reads it in the paper.
So I have given the town the rest of the message. There was always a second part, which nobody fired because you could not fire a rocket for it, which was the boat coming home. The station's old practice, before the maroons, before anything, was that the boat's return was rung on the church bell, once, and that had stopped before anybody now alive was born.
I asked the church. They said yes, as long as it was only once. So at twenty past three, every night, which is about when the boat from 1981 would have come back in, the church bell rings, once, over the town, and it is rung by me, because I am the press officer and it is a communication, and the windows along the front that lit at ten to three go dark at twenty past, because the town has been told the boat is home.
The maroons still go up. I do not think he can stop firing them. But the scorch on the roof is cooler in the mornings, and there is something on the harbour webcam now at twenty past three, after the bell, which is a figure on the boathouse roof, by the place the mortar was, standing, looking at the sea, and then going in, the way a cox does when the boat is in and he can go in too.