The Barge Date

So there I was, standing on the landing stage at Pier Head at seven o'clock on a Thursday evening, holding a bottle of wine my sister Ellen had made me buy, seriously regretting every life choice that had led me to that moment. I'm Thomas, I'm thirty-four, and I sell software to people who don't want it. Ellen had worn me down over three weeks of phone calls. Three weeks! All because I mentioned, one time, one single time, that I hadn't been on a proper date in over a year.

"It's a boat cruise, Thomas," she'd said. "How bad can it be? Seventy minutes, drinks, nice views. If she's awful you just look at the river."

That's the sales pitch I'd gotten. And honestly, the river part was true. The Mersey Maiden was moored right there past the Royal Albert Dock, a big old cargo barge somebody had gutted and rebuilt with a glass-walled salon on top, all warm light and wooden beams. Strings of fairy lights along the rail. It looked like a wedding venue that had given up on weddings.

I walked up the gangway, gave my name to a bloke with a clipboard, and stepped into the salon. Maybe forty people aboard, all of them clearly on dates, all of them clearly arranged by meddling relatives, if the nervous laughter was anything to go by. There was a bar at the far end. I made straight for it.

That's when I saw her. She was standing off to the side in a blue blouse and a dark skirt, dark hair pinned up with what looked like an actual hatpin, which I later found out was exactly what it was. She was bent over a glass display case near the entryway, the kind with a brass frame, squinting at whatever was inside with real concentration. Not pretending to be busy to avoid talking to someone. Genuinely absorbed.

I did the loop to the bar, got a beer, and came back, because I am a coward and needed a prop. She was still there.

"Sorry," I said, "but I have to know. What's in the case that's that interesting?"

She looked up at me and laughed. "Oh, thank God, someone else sees it! Come here, look at this."

In the case, on a bed of faded velvet, sat a brass thermometer the size of my forearm, mounted on a wooden plaque. Engraved on the plaque were the words Mersey Tug Atlas, 1921.

"It's a ship's thermometer," she said, tapping the glass. "From a tugboat! This barge used to be a working vessel, you know, and they kept little relics like this from the old days. Do you see the gauge on the side? It's got both Fahrenheit and Celsius, but the Celsius scale is wrong. Look at where freezing is marked."

I leaned in. "That's... not zero."

"It's not zero! It's off by degrees all the way up. Whoever etched it either couldn't do arithmetic or didn't care, and it's been sitting there reading wrong temperatures for a hundred years." She was delighted. Actually delighted, about a thermometer in a case. Her name tag, I noticed, said Saoirse, hand-lettered.

"That's a fantastic name," I said. "I'm going to say it wrong, aren't I?"

"Everyone does. It's Sur-sha. Like inertia, sort of."

"Saoirse. Right. I'm Thomas."

"And let me guess," she said, narrowing her eyes at me with a grin. "Someone sent you here. Your mum? A sister?"

"Sister. Ellen. She bought the tickets and told me the time and address twenty minutes before I had to leave, so I couldn't wriggle out. Why, did an aunt do this to you?"

"My aunt Maura." She pressed a hand to her chest. "Oh no. Oh no, Thomas. Do you think we're each other's date? Please tell me we're not the setup."

I looked around at the salon full of other awkward pairs, then back at her. "What's your aunt's connection? Ellen does a lot of charity stuff."

"Maura does the whist drives at St. Brigid's and knows absolutely everyone."

"That's her. That's the woman. Ellen volunteers at the whist drives."

"So we ARE the setup!" She said it like she'd won a raffle. "Oh, this is brilliant. Maura is going to be insufferable. She'll have us married by Christmas in her head."

"Should we be offended? Should we go find other people to talk to out of spite?"

"Don't you dare," she said, and then caught herself and laughed. "I mean, only if you want. But I'd rather talk to you than do the thing where two strangers compare commuting routes for an hour. I've done that one twice this year. Once the fella just listed his gym routine at me. Twenty minutes. Sets and reps."

"Well, I'd never do that," I said. "My routine is crying in a premier inn in Warrington after a client says they'll circle back."

She laughed properly at that, hand over her mouth. "What do you do, then?"

"Software sales. Enterprise. It's exactly as glamorous as it sounds, which is not at all."

"A salesman. Oh, I should be wary of you."

"Absolutely you should. I can make anything sound good. This beer, for example, tastes like a decision I'll regret at two in the morning, but I could sell it to you as artisanal."

"And what would you actually sell me on it?"

"Fast delivery and a free pen."

She giggled and picked up her own glass from the rail. Wine, white, half gone already. "I'm a milliner," she said. "I make hats. Actual hats, in an actual workshop, in the Baltic Triangle. And before you ask, no, nobody under forty buys them, and yes, I am mostly kept afloat by weddings and one racing family who order fascinators like other people order pizzas."

"That's a real job? I thought milliners were like, historical. People in paintings."

"Rude. But also, yes, fair. It's a small world. I do maybe two hundred hats a year. Ascot keeps me alive every June. Do you know there was a woman who paid me four hundred quid for a hat with a whole stuffed pheasant on the side? Not feathers. The bird. Wings out."

"There's no way that's legal."

"It's legal. I checked. She wore it to a wedding and the bride reportedly didn't speak to her for the whole service, which I consider a triumph of the craft."

I was, at this point, having a genuinely good time, which threw me completely. The cruise horn went, the barge pulled away from the landing stage, and we drifted out into the river with the whole waterfront lit up gold and white behind us. The Three Graces, the Liver Building and the Cunard and the rest, all glowing across the water. Tourists were taking photos along the rail. I'd lived here eleven years and I still stopped to look.

"Come out on the deck?" she asked. "It's getting warm in the salon and I want to see the lights properly."

So we took our drinks out onto the narrow wooden deck, which was maybe four feet wide, all of it, and stood at the rail with the river sliding black and slow underneath. Her shoulder was a few inches from mine. I noticed that and then aggressively thought about something else.

"So the pheasant hat," I said. "What's your personal record for strangest commission?"

"Oh, loads. A man ordered a top hat with a working till roll inside it, so he could pull receipts out of the brim at his own retirement do. Took me a week. The mechanism kept jamming." She sipped her wine. "What's yours? Sales. Worst client."

"Where do I start. I had a client who made me do a demo, a full two-hour demo, then asked me to do it again the next week for a colleague, then bought from a competitor because his brother-in-law worked there."

"NO."

"True story. I had to write him a polite email about it. I wrote four drafts and the final one said, and I quote, 'We appreciate the opportunity.' I wanted to say so much else."

"You should've sent the first draft," she said. "I'd buy that draft. Frame it."

"I keep it in a folder called Never Send. It's a big folder."

She laughed, and the wind caught her hair, and the fairy lights swung a little on the rail, and I realized I hadn't thought about work or my empty flat or anything else in twenty minutes. Just this. It had been a long time since a conversation did that to me. Over a year, if I was honest with myself, and I tried not to be honest with myself much.

"Can I ask you a rude question?" she said.

"Those are usually the best ones. Go on."

"Did your sister tell you anything about me? Because Maura told me precisely one thing about you, and I've been sitting on it all evening like a cat with a bird."

"Now you have to tell me."

"She said you were 'a good lad who doesn't know it.'" She grinned over the rim of her glass. "Which, frankly, made you sound like a spaniel."

"That's Aunt Maura all over. Ellen told me you were 'creative and a bit sharp.' Which I took to mean you'd eat me alive."

"And have I?"

"Not yet," I said. "I'm still assessing the danger."

"Smart salesman," she said, and clinked her glass against my beer bottle. "Keep assessing. I'll be here all cruise."

"You know what's funny," she said, after a while. "This is my first date in three years that hasn't been a disaster. Three. Maura kept saying, Saoirse, love, you cannot marry your workshop. And I said, watch me." She was thirty-two, she told me then, and she said it like it was evidence. "I went on two dates this year. Two. One man talked about his commute for forty minutes. The other one had a whole routine about his gym schedule. A routine. Like a radio segment."

"What was the routine called?"

"He called it 'the split.' As in, 'so I do legs, and then, the split.' I left at pudding."

"That's terrible."

"Isn't it. And you? When was your last one?"

"A year and change ago," I admitted. "It was fine. We had a nice enough evening and then neither of us texted. That's been the pattern. Nice evenings. No follow-up. I'm like a client who says they'll circle back."

She turned her head slowly toward me. "Did you just describe your entire love life as a stalled procurement process?"

"I did, yes."

"And you wonder why you're single."

"I never wondered. Ellen wonders. Loudly. She's the planner in the family, and I'm the one who gets texted the address."

"That's actually very sensible. I'd have shown up at the wrong river."

We looked at each other then, and it was one of those looks that goes on two seconds longer than a look should. The lights from the shore were doing something to her face, all gold on one side. My mouth was dry in a way beer wasn't fixing.

"Well," she said, and looked away first, out at the water. "At least we're both disasters. It's nice to know."

"Efficient, anyway. No pretending either of us is smooth."

"God, no. Imagine. What would we even talk about, if one of us were smooth?"

"The split."

She laughed so hard she had to put her glass down on the rail.

* * *

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the seventy-minute cruise, the boat turned at the bend past the Cunard Building and the wind died off completely. We'd drifted back inside to the salon, mostly because my fingers had gone stiff around the bottle and she claimed her wine had gone warm, which I don't think was true, I think she just wanted to sit.

We took the corner bench by the window, from where we could still see the brass-framed case by the entryway and the old yellowed thermometer in it, the glass tube gone brown at the edges.

"Nineteen twenty-one," she said. "It's older than both of us put together."

"Look at the scale, though."

Her knee bumped mine and stayed there, and I want it noted that neither of us moved it. "The Celsius is wrong. Look, thirty is nearly at freezing. That's not a rounding error, that's a whole different philosophy of temperature."

"Somebody etched the numbers and nobody checked."

"Some poor apprentice in 1921 is still haunted by this. Do you think anyone's noticed in a hundred years?"

"I noticed. You noticed. That's two of us in a hundred years. We're the whole market."

She sat back and looked at me with an expression I couldn't place at first, and then I could. It was mischief. "Right. Challenge."

"Uh oh."

"I dare you to find out if that thing actually works. The mercury, I mean. Is there mercury? Does it read anything? Somebody has to know. Somebody has to check. Two people in a century, Thomas, we owe it to the Atlas."

"It's in a locked case, presumably."

"So find out. Go ask. There's a bar man, a whole staff, one of them must know." She flapped her hand toward the bar. "Go on. I'll watch our drinks."

"I'm not asking a man about a thermometer."

"You absolutely are. You sell software for a living. This is nothing. This is the easiest cold call of your life."

"It's not the asking, it's the answer. What if the answer is weird? What if it's a whole story and he tells me all of it?"

"Then you'll have a story and I'll have entertained myself enormously. Everyone wins." She picked up her wine again. "Go. I believe in you. Good lad who doesn't know it."

That got me up off the bench, I'll admit.

The bar man was a big lad called Dev, polishing glasses that were already polished. He was very happy to talk about the thermometer, as it turned out, and I got the whole story whether I wanted it or not. Yes, it worked, sort of, the mercury had settled forever at one mark and would never move again, dead as a doornail, but the one in the wall was a replica, the real one lived below decks, and the family who owned the boat liked people to hold it, an old superstition from the tug crews, you hold the Atlas's glass for luck before