THE FERRY

Someone told me (a solitary kid traipsing most weekends through the endless wet fields behind the Garsington house, the same year Neil Cross’s grandad died while we were off camping in the safari park, all his mail jamming the door, his gelid egg staining Sunday’s newspaper, my dad pretending he had friends) that four decades on I’d ferry a daughter through blizzards to Howe Island, would live other side of the planet, drive an electric car, flog houses set in granite’s shade. He leaned on his moped end of the street near the old orchard, this guy did, describing all our futures, and we laughed, even Treacher, who one day would revive stilled hearts, apparently, but also drive himself with the top down one Friday into seas greyer than steel, and harder, and be lost.