Clayton cupped his face in his hands, six times, rinsing the last of the night away with water from the wash-stand basin that sat before his bedroom window. He shivered briefly, sponging down his chest and neck as had done every day for thirty years; a routine which he believed had kept his mind clear and freed him from colds and lost working days in all that time.
Towelling himself briskly, he listened to the simple orchestration of the willow-clogged steps of fish-dock labourers as they headed home having landed the catches delivered by smacks on the midnight tide. He drew back the curtain to watch their progress along the street, trailing shadows following behind in the early morning light.
He filled his chest with early morning air, held it to the count of sixty, hands resting on his hips, surveying the Kent Street terraces.
Clayton loved the symmetry in the ordered grid of the East Marsh streets where he lived; the regulated terraces of houses with their uniform doors and sash windows, the black slate roofs, the perfect terra cotta arches above narrow ginnels that led to tiny courts set behind the main street. Squares with simple paving slab tessellations and three cottage blocks with worked panels identifying the buildings’ owners. Even the stand pipes in the centres of the squares from which folk took their water had about them an admirable central focus that pleased his analytical mind.
His own bedroom window was above a passageway to such a square. He liked to look down upon the comings and the goings of those that lived behind and beneath him; to reflect on their curious lives.
He preferred to go out into the world by these narrow ginnels, rather than the commonly utilised cobbled alleys with their untidy clutter of cottages, lock-ups, lofts and smoke-houses even though the paved way took him slightly out of his way. Emerging from the ginnel into light had something of a daily birth as he went about his business, be it social or professional.
Though Baptist by upbringing, Clayton preferred to worship at the plain and uncomplicated Bethel Mission. The Tuesday services were held at the Temperance Hall. The non-denominational nature of Mr Mason’s preaching appealed to what he liked to think of as his intellectual spirituality. He believed that the cleanliness and strength of the straightforward Neo Grec architecture of the building did the same. He much preferred it to the picturesque aesthetic of the Baptist’s Italian style chapel on Freeman Street, where has had worshipped as a child and his parents still did.
The Bethel services were conducted in the Temperance Hall’s Navigation Room. Instructional courses for seaman were also held in that space. This fact further satisfied his own ideas of social progress, particularly of those types in need of improvement.
It was after such a service that Clayton made his way down Cleethorpe Road to the Misses Crowther’s Temperance Ribbon Hotel where he would take a glass of dandelion and burdock before setting out for his night-duty on the dock where he was proud to serve as an Outdoor Officer of Her Majesty’s Customs’ Service.
The sole occupant of the bar, from his table at the rear, he watched the pair of young scallywags slip silently in through the street door. He smiled as they ran their fingers quickly through the plate-glass window condensation, leaving the impression of a family of pigs, before leavin , quickly, holding their laughter until the door fell shut.
Clayton took a last sip from his glass, stood, hitched up his trousers, pulled down the jacket of his tunic, brushed the bright buttons and tugged the cuffs of his starched shirt, then threw a semi formal salute to the barman and half-marched to the door where he paused for a while to consider the work of the fleeting artists. Good representation, he said to himself, good enough to attract the eyes of passing fishermen, some of whom would no doubt use the experience as excuse to to abandon their journey to the dock, to justify not going to sea on the coming tide, he thought, before resorting instead to the cosier confines of the Prince of Wales or the The White Bear, to beer and to dominoes and brasses.
Clayton liked to reflect upon the superstitious nonsenses of his neighbours, priding himself on a more rational view of life. He saw the design behind the way life revealed itself. The scientific power of nature made so much more sense to him than the fanciful imaginings of circumstance to which so many of his neighbours subscribed.
As he set out that evening, he had witnessed the charming ritual of his neighbours’ child racing down Church Street to overtake her father as he made his way to his ship; to halt him and to hand to him what looked like a tobacco pouch, rather than calling after him, risking the turning of the head that might become his last glance homeward.
Clayton knew that there would have been no waving-off or saying of goodbye when the man left home. And he knew before the man went further, that the child would leave him, speedily, heading straight home, without a second look. How often had he seen that ritual before?
And he knew that the child’s mother would not attend to her husband’s laundry before tomorrow, because, she believed, it contained the essence of her man; and to wash it was to imitate his drowning or anticipate his being washed away.
Clayton was comfortable in his dismissal of all this. Had his own mother not been a keen subscriber? When he had been born, her own mother had said how his arrival on the ebb-tide had been a bad omen. And yet the caul with which he had been born, more precious than gold, was guarantee that he would never be ship-wrecked or drowned. His father had persuaded his mother it was all contradictory and ridiculous. That the moon was not her midwife.
A fisherman’s wife had bought the veil from them for £20.0.0d And more fool her, his father had said. Apparently the man had kept it sewed inside his cap for luck. And what if the cap flew off in a gale, his father had said when this was told to them. Clayton favoured his father’s stance. What good would the caul have served anyway, he often thought, for a man who’d made his way through life in the employment of the Manchester and Sheffield Railway and Her Majesty’s Customs Service.
Clayton reached the docks and left the town behind, humming the Moody and Sankey tune recently learned by the congregation, wondering how many of them struggled to square holy scripture with the follies of superstition, or if the contradiction occurred to them at all.
In the black sky, a fleet of clouds were caught in moonlight that hung over the docks estate. The railway track glistened, disappearing into darkness where the coal wagons were; and each step Clayton counted echoed, soft, in the still air as he paced along the quay toward the Tower, checking every bonded warehouse door. He admired the tidy wraps of rope on the black and white bollards that aligned the wharf. He took pleasure in the neatness of the patterns cast against the cloud shapes by the masts and rigging of the barques and steamers in their berths; taking comfort in the easy gentle slap of water against their hulls.
Half-way along the quay he caught sight of what seemed an unusually large figure, perhaps a hundred yards away, a crewman perhaps from one of the berthed vessels. A giant of a man. Six-feet nine or so, he thought. Clayton stood, watching him come toward him.
Good evening, Sir. Have you items to declare, perhaps?
The figure did not speak but continued to approach. Perhaps he was from the Emigrant’s Home that was set on the edge of the dock, awaiting transport for Liverpool and America beyond, a soul in transit, caught ,temporarily, between worlds, passing from one to another.
Are you English, Sir? Do you understand me? Still the man was silent.
He was a mariner, Clayton now saw. He wore a broad top-cap and a blue Guernsey. And yes, he was, indeed, significantly tall. Norwegian perhaps. His leggings dark, his stockings also, though strangely, he wore no shoes.
Still the man did not speak and looked to be intent on ignoring Clayton Jenkins, officer of the crown about his appointed duty.
Clayton reached out a hand to delay the man’s progress but the figure continued, moving through his arm like a vacant, insubstantial thing.
What…hold back there…
Clayton, unsettled, watched as the figure continued toward the quayside, stepped over the edge, and disappeared from sight.
No splash followed. Clayton moved to the edge, looked down to where the water was undisturbed but for the normal wash between berthed ships.
He stepped back from the quayside, unsettled by what he had witnessed. He looked up and down the dock, wondering at where the man had come from, and where he had gone.
Nearby, a single herring-gull stood, unmoving, as if it had lost its bearings, uncertain about the where abouts of its perch or of it’s nest? But no, it was looking him directly in the eye, with a certainty that Clayton could not match.