The Day Return

The meeting about the ferry tax was supposed to take twenty minutes. It had been going for an hour and ten when Yara finally stood up.

The plan on the paper was simple enough. One pound on every ferry ticket to Kilhaven, and the money would go to the covered market on the harbour, which had lost four of its eleven stalls since the fish factory closed in February. Eighty-three people had worked at the factory. Most of them were still unemployed, and most of them were in the room.

Everyone who had spoken so far had spoken about tourists. Tourists could afford a pound. Tourists wouldn’t even notice a pound. The chair of the council had said the word tourists so many times that it had started to sound like weather.

Yara sold bread and eggs at stall nine, so the council expected her to be grateful.

“The tax pays for my roof,” she said. “I know that. And I’m against it.”

The room went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when it was expecting a thank-you.

“The ferry isn’t transport for tourists,” she said. It’s transport for us. My daughter is on the seven o’clock to the mainland four days a week for her course. The men from the factory are on it every time somebody over there puts up an advert. A pound each way, twice a day. Work out the month. You’d fill the market by making it harder for us to reach the market. That’s worse than doing nothing.

Somebody at the back worked it out loud, and got it wrong, and somebody else corrected him.

“So charge it,” Yara said. But charge it on the day return, the ticket you buy in the morning and come back on at night. Nobody who works here buys a day return. We travel on the resident book — twenty crossings, bought once — so nobody who lives here buys one either. And every single person off the eleven o’clock boat in August buys one.

The chair looked at the paper, then out at the harbour, then at the paper again. He asked her, in a voice that was trying to be light, who had worked that out.

“The man who used to drive the forklift at the factory,” Yara said. He did it on the back of my market list. He isn’t here tonight, because coming over costs three pounds, and he counts pounds now.

The vote was moved to the following Tuesday.