Visitor moorings at the wharf are by the ring, numbered, and the boats sign the book in the office with the ring and the nights, and the rings are counted on the wall, eight of them, because nine was cut off when the wall was rebuilt. Every night the book has a boat at ring nine. A name, a number, one night. And the water at the place on the wall where nine was has a patch of calm on it the length of a narrowboat, with the ripples going round it, and in the middle of the calm, at cabin height, a light.
I am the wharfinger at a canal wharf, which is a word nobody uses and a job that mostly means the moorings book, and the book has a boat in it every night at a ring I cut off myself.
The moorings.
The wharf wall has rings, eight, and visiting boats tie up and come to the office and sign the book: boat name, registration, ring, nights. The book is the income, and the book is how I know who is on the wall.
Ring nine was cut off in 1994. The wall was rebuilt and the last ring, the one nearest the bridge, was in the way of the new coping and I cut it off with a grinder and put a plaque there instead, because the canal society wanted one.
Every night the book has a boat at nine.
The entry.
A boat name. A registration number, the old kind, from the working boat register. Ring nine. One night. In a hand that is not mine and not any boater's I know, a hand that writes a boat's name the way it was painted on the cabin side, with the flourishes.
The water at the place on the wall where nine was has a boat on it. Not that I can see one. The water is still there, in a shape, seventy feet by seven, the ripples from the bridge going round it and not through it, the way water is round a hull, and at the stern end of the calm, at the height of a cabin window, a light. Yellow. The kind a lamp gives. From about ten till dawn.
What has been checked.
The book, locked in the office. The entry is there.
The wall, at ten, by me, at the plaque. The water stilled. I watched it still, from the bridge end, a hull's length of calm arriving on the water like something being set down on it, and the light came on, at the stern, at cabin height, in the air, and there was the smell of a coal stove, and the sound of a rope being made off on a ring, and the ring was not there, and I put my hand on the plaque, and the plaque was warm, the way a ring is that has a rope on it that has been in a hand.
From the cabin, from the air, somebody was singing. Low. A woman. A boat song, I would think, the kind the boat families had, and I do not know it, and I stood at the plaque until she stopped.
Who.
The plaque has a name. The canal society chose it. A working boat, the last one to trade into this wharf, in the fifties, and the family on it, and the boat's name, and the plaque says the family moored at this ring for forty years, and the boat was broken up in 1961.
The name in the book is the boat's name. The registration is the boat's. The family, the society's history says, were a man and a woman and the woman outlived him and stayed on the boat, moored here, at ring nine, because the wharfinger of the time let her, until the boat was condemned and broken up, and she was moved to a house, and she did not, the history says, last long in the house.
She is on the boat. Every night. At her ring. With the stove lit and the lamp on, singing, and the ring was cut off in 1994 by me, and she ties up to it anyway.
What is done about it.
The book has a boat a night at a ring that does not exist and the moorings income is reconciled against the book and the reconciliation has a line every night for a boat that did not pay, and the company has asked me why a boat moors at ring nine for free, and I have said, she's on a long term agreement, and they have asked to see it, and I have shown them the plaque.
What I do.
I keep the wharf.
A boat on the wall at night has the wharfinger walk past it. That is the job, or it was: you walk the wall at ten and you say goodnight to the boats, and they say goodnight back, and that is how a wharf sleeps. Nobody has walked past ring nine since 1961, because there has been no boat at it, as far as anybody could see.
So I walk past. At ten, when the calm comes and the light comes on, I walk the wall, the eight rings and then the plaque, and at the plaque I stop and I say, goodnight, and the boat's name, which is what you say, and I wait, and from the cabin, from the air, the singing stops, and the woman's voice says, goodnight, and my name, which she should not know, and which she has said every night since the first, and the light in the cabin window turns down, the way a lamp does when somebody is settling.
I have put a ring back. Not on the wall, the company would not have it. On the plaque. A brass ring, bolted through, the size of the old one, and in the morning there is a rope on it. Hemp, old, wet, made off in the knot the working boats used, which I had to look up, and it is gone by the time the first visitor comes, and the book has her in it, at nine, one night, paid, which it never said before, and I did not write that either.