By eleven the line at Marrow Quay runs past the fuel depot and doubles back along the seawall, coats zipped against the wind coming off the strait. Families sit on stacked duffel bags. A vendor sells fried dough from a cart with one working wheel. Nobody is in a hurry, because the boat will not leave until it is full, and lately it fills fast.
The ferry, an old roll-on car carrier converted for foot passengers, makes the crossing to Brackwell twice a week, leaving Marrow Quay a little after one in the morning and landing at first light. The route has carried freight and the occasional worker for a decade. This year the passenger manifest tripled.
“We used to get forty, fifty people a sailing,” said dockmaster Iyabo Tench, who has logged the ferry’s departures since the terminal opened. “Now we turn people away at three hundred and tell them to come back Thursday.”
Most are leaving the Verrow Plain, where a third dry season has cut irrigated acreage by nearly half and idled the packing sheds that used to hire seasonal labour by the hundred. Brackwell’s construction sites and warehouses pay by the week and do not ask where a worker slept the night before arriving.
Selim Ardakan, twenty-six, has made the crossing four times since March, working a run of contracts that rarely last past six weeks. “You get here, you find the crew boss, you work until the job ends,” he said, sitting on his bag near the ramp. “Then you wait for the boat again.”
Waiting is the job
Fatima Loewe runs a card table near the ticket window where she photocopies identity papers for a small fee and keeps a list of which crew bosses in Brackwell are hiring. She has never made the crossing herself. “I know the route better than the sailors,” she said. “I just don’t get on the boat.”
The wait can run past midnight into the small hours, through rain, through the one checkpoint where a port officer checks papers against a list of banned labour brokers. Two brokers were struck off the list this year after workers reported being charged for jobs that did not exist.
Aboard, the crossing takes five hours. There are no cabins, only rows of bench seating and a canteen that sells tea and instant noodles until it runs out, usually before Brackwell’s lights appear on the horizon. Some passengers sleep sitting upright. Others stay at the rail the whole way, watching the plain recede and the port cranes of Brackwell rise ahead of the sun.
By the time the ferry ties up, the dock at Brackwell has its own queue: crew bosses with clipboards, calling names, sorting the crowd into vans bound for sites across the city. Selim Ardakan found his boss inside twenty minutes. Others waited past noon.
“Nobody promises you the crossing was worth it,” Tench said. “They find out on the other side.”
