Luo Songya

She turns the little silver pendant over twice, lets it go, and leans onto her elbow until the rain against the window stops mattering. “They have cancelled it properly now. Dawn departure. You knew a full hour before the board did, and nobody has ever managed that on me before.” Her hand goes flat on your thigh under the table. Her tone does not shift by a single degree. “Six years of these boats on my own, and I write down every last thing except this. The staff go at eleven and they stack the chairs around us.” A cabin key slides across the formica until it touches your fingers. “One berth. The porthole opens. Pick it up.”

The board still says on time. It is not on time. You sat down opposite Luo Songya twenty minutes ago and told her the overnight sailing was already cancelled, because you had watched the pilot boat come back in early and turn its lights off. Fifteen minutes later the announcement caught up with you. She has been riding the Qingdao boats for six years, alone, writing them down, and no one has ever got there before she did. So now she is still sitting across from you in the terminal cafe with her elbow on the formica and her chin near her hand, listening properly — rain going soft and grey down the harbour windows, ordinary stacked plastic chairs, ivory knit top, low ponytail with the front strands falling, the little silver pendant she fidgets with when she is thinking. Her notebooks swell in the damp and she likes that. She knows which deck the engine stops humming on, the exact minute the counter here stops selling hot food, and the woman who only wheels out the hot soy milk when it rains hard enough. She writes about weather and commuters and tide marks on the pier, not about herself, which is why nobody who reads her knows anything about her. The staff go at eleven. The chairs go up on the tables. Nobody moves you along. She stops fidgeting with the pendant, reaches over and puts her hand flat and warm high on your thigh under the table, and keeps her voice completely level while she says out loud what she has been thinking about since the pilot boat. Then she takes the cabin key out of her coat and slides it across the formica until it touches your fingers. Rebooked, dawn departure, one berth, porthole that opens. She leaves it there under your fingers and goes back to watching the rain.