The slipway runs from the boathouse to the sea, and how far up it the tide comes is in a table to the centimetre. Every morning it is wet to the top. Not spray. Wet, the way a slip is wet when a boat has come up it, with the two lines the carriage wheels leave in the weed, and the winch, which hauls the boat up, has logged a recovery, at the hour the tide was lowest, from a sea that was two hundred metres away.
I am the station mechanic at a lifeboat station and the slipway is the piece of the station I walk first every morning, and it is always wet.
The slip.
Concrete, from the boathouse doors down to below the low water mark, and the boat goes down it on a carriage behind the tractor and comes back up it on the winch. The tide comes up the slip to a height the tables give, and the slip above that height is dry, and the weed grows to the line and not above it.
Every morning the slip is wet to the top.
The wet.
Not spray. The top of the slip is forty metres from the highest tide and the boathouse is dry. The slip is wet in a pattern: two lines, the width of the carriage wheels, coming up from the sea to the doors, with the weed pressed flat in them the way weed is when a carriage has rolled over it, and between them the drip line a boat leaves, and at the top, at the doors, a pool, where a boat stands and drains.
The winch log has a recovery. The winch logs every haul, the time and the load, and the load is the boat's weight, and the time is the low water, when the sea is two hundred metres down the beach and the slip ends in sand.
Something came up the slip at low water, out of a sea that was not there, and was winched into the house, and was gone by morning, and the boat in the house was dry and had not moved.
What has been checked.
The winch, serviced, and the log is the log. The tide tables, against the marks on the slip, and the marks are right. The slip, at low water, at night, by me, at the top, in the doors, with the house dark.
The sea was a long way out. I could hear it. The slip went down into the dark and ended at sand. And then the winch started, behind me, on its own, the drum turning, the cable paying out down the slip, the hook going down into the dark, down past the weed line, down past the end of the concrete, onto the sand, where there is nothing to hook, and it stopped, and took up, and the drum turned the other way, and the cable came taut with a load on it, the boat's weight, and up the slip in the dark came the wet.
The two lines. The weed going flat. The drip line between. Coming up the slip towards me at the winch's speed, with the sound of a carriage on concrete and water running off a hull, and I stepped back into the house and it came past me, the wet, the cold, the weight of a boat that I could not see being hauled into the house and stopped where the boat stands, and the winch stopped, and the pool spread on the floor of the house, and I stood in it.
Whose boat.
The station has had two boats lost. Not the crew: the boats. One in the nineteenth century, and one in 1953, which went out in a storm to a coaster and did not come back, and the crew were saved by the coaster, which is the wrong way round, and the boat was never found, and the station's history on the wall has a photograph of her, and the carriage in the photograph has the wheel spacing of the lines on my slip.
She is coming home. Every night, at low water, up a slip that was hers, from a sea she has been in for seventy years, and she is winched into her house, and she is not there in the morning, because she cannot stay.
What is done about it.
The winch log has a recovery every night and the station's honorary secretary, who signs the logs, has asked what is being recovered, and I have said, the old boat, and he has looked at me, and he has signed it.
What I do.
I look after the station.
A boat that is recovered is washed down. That is the first thing. Salt off her, hose on the slip, and the mechanic does it while the crew go up for tea. Nobody has washed her down since 1953.
So I do. At low water I am at the top of the slip with the hose, and when the wet comes up and the winch stops and the pool spreads where she stands, I hose her. The place where she is. The air above the pool, the length of her, bow to stern, the way I hose our boat, and the water runs off something and onto the floor and out of the doors, and when I have finished I turn the hose off and I say what the mechanic says, which is, she's washed down, cox, and I hang the hose up.
The pool is smaller in the mornings now. The lines on the slip are fainter. She is going, I think, the way a boat that has been properly recovered and washed down and put away is allowed to go, and I will miss her, and the night she does not come up the slip I will hose it anyway, because it is a slip, and they get salt on them.