The ferry chain had rattled across the river at six every morning for forty-three years. Nobody heard it anymore.
When the ferry stopped, people began taking their kettles off too early. The baker arrived downstairs in his socks and stood there, uncertain what he had forgotten. A woman who had wanted to leave her husband for eleven years woke him to ask whether he’d heard something.
“No,” he said.
They listened together.
By Thursday, the council had received nine complaints about the quiet. One used the word industrial.
The retired ferryman was asked whether a recording might help.
“Possibly,” he said, enjoying for the first time his position as a consultant.
But the chain had sounded different in rain, and different with a lorry aboard, and different on those mornings when he was angry with his brother.
They would need, he explained, quite a lot of recordings.
Across the table, the council secretary put down her pen.
“Is your brother still alive?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “There’s no shortage of material.”