The boat that is always last in

The jetty is not much. Three planks wide, a rail on one side that a man painted blue about a decade ago and nobody has painted since, and a light on a pole that comes on when it feels like it. I go down there some mornings when I cannot sleep and the writing will not come, because there is nothing to write at a jetty at half past five, and that turns out to be exactly what I need.

The boats come in between five and six. You hear them before you see them, a small patient engine somewhere out in the dark, and then a shape, and then the shape is a man you know standing in a boat you know, throwing a rope you have watched him throw two hundred times. The first ones in are the eager ones, the young men with fast boats who want the good price at the market and are gone again before the light is properly up.

The last one in is old Pak Long, and his boat has never been fast, and he has never once seemed to mind.

There is a boy who waits for him. Grandson, I think, though I have never asked and it is not my business. Nine, maybe ten. School shoes already on. He sits on the blue rail with his heels drumming against the post and he watches the mouth of the channel the way you would watch a door you knew a friend was going to walk through. He does not look at a phone. I have noticed this and been quietly amazed by it, because I cannot manage it myself and I am forty years older than he is.

When the boat finally shows, the boy does not shout or wave. He just stops drumming his heels. That is the whole of it. The stopping is the greeting.

Pak Long brings the boat alongside, and the boy takes the rope without being told, and loops it, and the two of them lift the box of fish up onto the planks together, the old man taking most of the weight and pretending to take less, the boy taking less and pretending to take most. Then they sit. They do not rush to the market. The good price has gone to the fast boats and they both know it and neither of them is chasing it.

They share a flask of something. They watch the water do nothing. After a while the boy stands, and shoulders his bag, and goes off up the road to school, and the old man watches him the whole way until the road bends, and only then does he start sorting the fish.

I have never spoken to either of them. I do not need to. I already know the most important thing about them, which is that a boy who is not the fastest, being met by a man who is not the fastest, in the grey hour after the fast ones have already gone, is one of the safest things I have ever watched. I go home after that and the writing usually comes.