I can see that the bus is full but the driver pulls up
anyway. The queue of commuters ahead of me is slowly absorbed until the vehicle
is packed tight enough for it to feel like we have been poured into a mould. There is
a thick scent of Monday morning, cigarettes, coffee, breakfast and the poison
created when all are mixed with the miasma of competing perfumes and aftershave.
It
is still a little before nine when we reach the city centre.
I get off the bus a
couple of stops before the terminus to avoid being swept into an office job by
the wave of workers that will eventually crash through the doors as the bus
finally draws to halt. A few people followed me and then disperse amongst the
glass doorways anointed by brass plaques. When I reach the docks I am alone save for a
man wearing a captain’s hat and carrying a brief case, he descends a set of stone steps and boards what looks like a large sailing
barge before disappearing below deck.
By the time I reach the Pier Head and the ferry terminus the
rush hour is over and I am the only passenger to board from the Liverpool side of
the river. In the lounge bar an oversized child of man is returning back over
the water having just come along for the ride, he paces needlessly clutching a
plastic bag as if it held some indescribable value.
Facing into the
flooding tide the boat growls its engines to make headway from the landing
stage. The course is set over the narrowest gap between the shores lines a
little under a mile, but what a mile. The water here runs near constantly at
speeds over five knots pausing briefly as the tide turns and with it the direction
of flow. Apart from the speed and
movement the colour of the river is a little more daunting varying between soft
grey and muddy brown. This isn’t dirt in the dirty sense of the word but silt stirred
up by the surge of the tides.
The ferry lands clumsily and I leave the man-child to ride
out the day on the river and make my way to the East Float part of a vast dock
network that was once an natural inlet of the Mersey, the river I have just crossed.
I last fished here when I was kid using garden worms for
bait. Today I am spin fishing even though the water is too murky and my lure
would probably only hook into a fish by pure fluke. Even so it is not long
after nine and I am holding a fishing rod while decent folk are at work. A lot has
gone from here the docks are no longer enclosed by warehousing and cranes but
by naked concrete pads as vast as the water. I move freely where the cancer of
fencing and barbed wire has yet to gain a foothold but it is to no end. I leave after a couple of hours empty handed
but proud that I had kept a promise I had made to myself to fish on Monday mornings
at nine am.
On the landing stage again an old guy spots my fishing rod
and asks if I had had any luck. And so we fall into talk about fishing, the
docks, the river, cod, dabs, and a sea trout he caught off the dock wall. I
tell him about the fishing on the island I used to live on and that the water
that was clean down until the light ran out. As the ferry moves down the river
on its longer route to take in another landing stage he points out fishing
marks and the routes of the shipping channels, and where he moored his boat
before his wife made him get rid of it.
