The Night Ferry Read Online Free PDF Page A

can and cannot fix.
    In the midst of an ordinary evening, on a quiet street, a couple are hit by a car. One is dead. The other has horrific injuries. What happened to Cate’s other shoe? What happened to her baby?
    A policeman arrives to interview me. He is my age, wearing a uniform with everything polished and pressed. I feel self-conscious about my appearance.
    He has a list of questions—what, where, when and why. I try to remember everything that happened. The car came out of nowhere. Donavon yel ed.
    “So you think it was an accident?”
    “I don’t know.”
    In my head I can hear Donavon accusing the driver of running them down. The policeman gives me a card. “If you remember anything more, give me a cal .” Through the swing doors, I see Cate’s family arriving. Her father, her mother in a wheelchair, her older brother, Jarrod.
    Barnaby El iot’s voice is raised. “What do you mean there’s no baby? My daughter is pregnant.”
    “What are they saying, Barnaby?” his wife asks, tugging at his sleeve.
    “They’re saying she wasn’t pregnant.”
    “Then it mustn’t be our Cate. They have the wrong person.”
    The doctor interrupts. “If you’l just wait here, I’l send someone to talk to you.”
    Mrs. El iot is growing hysterical. “Does that mean she lost the baby?”
    “She was never pregnant. She didn’t have a baby.”
    Jarrod tries to intervene. “I’m sorry but there must be some mistake. Cate was due in four weeks.”
    “I want to see my daughter,” demands Barnaby. “I want to see her right this minute.”
    Jarrod is three years older than Cate. It is strange how little I can recal of him. He kept pigeons and wore braces until he was twenty. I think he went to university in Scotland and later got a job in the city.
    In contrast, nothing about Cate is remote or diffuse or gone smal . I stil remember when I first saw her. She was sitting on a bench outside the school gates at Oaklands wearing white socks, a short gray pleated skirt and Doc Martens. Heavy mascara bruised her eyes, which seemed impossibly large. And her teased hair had al the colors of the rainbow.
    Although new to the school, within days Cate knew more kids and had more friends than I did. She was never stil —always wrapping her arms around people, tapping her foot or bouncing a crossed leg upon her knee.
    Her father was a property developer, she said: a two-word profession, which like a double-barreled surname gave a man gravitas. “Train driver” is also two words but my father’s job didn’t sound so impressive or have the same social cachet.
    Barnaby El iot wore dark suits, crisp white shirts and ties that were from one club or another. He stood twice for the Tories in Bethnal Green and each time managed to turn a safe Labour seat into an even safer one.
    I suspect the only reason he sent Cate to Oaklands was to make him more electable. He liked to portray himself as a battler from “Struggle Street,” with dirt under his fingernails and machine oil in his veins.
    In reality, I think the El iots would have preferred their only daughter to attend a private school, Anglican and al -girls rather than Oaklands. Mrs. El iot, in particular, regarded it as a foreign country that she had no desire to visit.
    Cate and I didn’t talk to each other for almost a year. She was the coolest, most desirable girl in the whole school, yet she had a casual, almost unwanted beauty. Girls would hang around her, chatting and laughing, seeking her approval, yet she didn’t seem to notice.
    She talked like someone in a teen movie, smart-mouthed and sassy. I know teenagers are supposed to talk that way but I never met anyone who did except for Cate. And she was the only person I knew who could distil her emotions into drops of pure love, anger, fear or happiness.
    I came from the Isle of Dogs, farther east, and went to Oaklands because my parents wanted me educated “out of the area.” Sikhs were a minority, but so were whites,