The crew are volunteers with pagers, and the pagers are set off by the coastguard, and every activation is logged at both ends. Every night at ten to three the pagers go. The coastguard has not paged. The crew come down, because you do, and the boathouse doors are open and the boat is on the slip, ready, and the launch log on the wall, which is a book, has a new line in it, in a hand that is not ours, for a shout in 1981.
I am the coxswain at a lifeboat station on a cold coast, and the pager on my belt has gone off at ten to three every night for a year.
The pagers.
The crew are volunteers. We live in the town. The coastguard, when there is a shout, sets off our pagers from their operations room, and the activation is logged there and on our system, and we run to the boathouse, and the boat is launched, and that is the whole of how a lifeboat works.
At ten to three the pagers go. All of them. The coastguard's log shows no activation. Ours shows one.
The boathouse.
We come down. Fourteen of us, in the first months, and then fewer, because you cannot do that every night and hold a job, and now it is me and three others who come every time and the rest come when they can.
The doors are open. The boathouse doors, which are locked, which take a key and a code, are open to the slip, and the boat is on the slip, on the carriage, at the top, ready, with the tractor hitched, and the tractor is warm, and the crew room lights are on, and the kettle is on, and on the wall the launch log, which is a book we still keep by hand because the station has kept one since there was a station, has a new line.
The line.
Date, a night in 1981. Time, ten to three. Service, a fishing vessel, by name, in difficulty off the point. Wind, weather, sea, the crew's names, in a hand that is the hand of the coxswain of the time, which I know because his lines are in the same book, eleven pages earlier, and they stop in 1981.
The line is written fresh. Every night. It is the same line, and in the morning it is there, and the next night another one is written beneath it, identical, and the book has a year of them.
What has been checked.
The pagers, reprogrammed. They go at ten to three.
The boathouse, at a quarter to three, by me, inside it, in the dark, with the doors locked and the boat in the house. At ten to three the pagers went on my belt. The doors opened. The boat moved, on its carriage, down the house to the top of the slip, with the sound it makes, the tractor starting and the carriage rolling, and there was nobody on the tractor, and at the top of the slip it stopped, ready, and the crew room lights came on, and the kettle, and I went to the book and the pen was moving.
I stood beside it and watched the line being written. The vessel's name. The crew. And at the end the pen stopped, where the column for the outcome is, which on every other line in the book has a word in it, and the pen did not write one, and has not, on any of the year's lines, and that is the column that is empty.
The shout.
The station's history is on the wall in the crew room, and 1981 is on it. A fishing boat off the point, at night, in weather, and the lifeboat launched, and the lifeboat did not come back with everybody. Two of the crew, in the sea, off the point, and the coxswain had brought the boat in with the fishing boat's men and without his own, and the book, on the page from 1981, has the line, in his hand, with the outcome written, and the outcome is the two names, and then his lines stop, because he did not cox again.
He is launching. Every night. For that shout. And he does not write the outcome, because the outcome is the thing he is going back out to change.
What is done about it.
The activations are on our log and the coastguard's are not and the two logs are reconciled monthly and the reconciliation has a year of lines in it that say, spurious activation, crew stood down, and the coastguard has asked if our pager system is faulty, and I have said it is not.
What I do.
I am the cox.
The boat is ready on the slip and nobody launches it, because there is nothing to launch for, and the tractor idles, and the kettle boils, and at about twenty past three the boat goes back up the house and the doors close, and that is a crew that has been stood down, which is the worst feeling a lifeboat crew has, and he has had it every night for a year.
So I stand him down properly. At the top of the slip, at ten to three, when the boat is ready and the line is written, I go to the book and I write in the outcome column what you write when a shout is cancelled by the coastguard before launch, which is, stood down, no service required, all safe, and I sign it, and under my signature I write his name, because it was his boat.
The pen writes under mine. One word, every night, since I started. In his hand. It is the word a cox says to a crew when they have been stood down and he wants them to go home and not think about it, and I am not going to write it here, because it is his, but the tractor switches off when he writes it, and the boat goes up the house slower, and the kettle, when I get to it, has been poured, and there is a mug out for me.