The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout 2026. For November, we are delighted to publish a new piece, ‘The Boats’ by Neal Alexander.

The bell rang once and a hand clattered the letterbox. Then the smell, filling the hallway.

I was sitting on the sofa rolling a fag and thinking about taking Bella for a walk in the docks. There’s a patch of grass with benches, and we like to watch the ships on the lough. Sometimes trawlers returning from down the coast, or oil tankers headed for the refinery. Often, the ferry with its red funnel trailing diesel smoke. Bella sits by the bench with her ears cocked until the wind or the rain gets the better of me.

I could hear birds, sparrows maybe, making their noise in the hedge and the radio talking in the kitchen. The clock on the wall read five past eleven. I paid it no mind. It had stopped weeks before.

As I heaved up from the sofa, footsteps pelted away from the door and into the road. Two of them, by the sounds of it. Wee lads, probably. On the doormat, a parcel of dog shit spilling from chip papers, some of it smeared on the door. The stink rose in my nose and throat, like it had been rubbed in my face.

It was years since I’d worked in the docks, driving a forklift for McGurk’s. On lunch breaks, I’d watch the gulls wheel and dip over the water, throw them a few crusts. Or I’d think about what lives people were living in shops and pubs and terraces on the far shore. Dolan the foreman would tell me to catch myself on. Get back to work.

I had to lift the parcel out of the way to open the door, and of course I got shit on my hand doing that. The wee fuckers. By the time I got out the door and into the road there was no-one there. Just cars and a cyclist passing, a man in a dark jacket walking with his head down on the other side. Did you see two wee lads running, pal? He walked on, head down. Didn’t hear me, probably, with those things in his ears.

What could I do? So, I went back to the house and Bella, who was barking in the doorway. Next door’s curtain twitched as I was walking up the path and I caught Mrs Sayeed’s eyes at the window for a moment. I thought to myself, aye, I suppose you know something about this sort of thing. Britain first and unite the kingdom. Flags on the lampposts, the kerbstones painted. Stop the boats. Foreigners out. If you think about it, though, my name’s near as foreign as yours, round here anyway. Nowak. Polish for ‘newcomer’. At least, that’s what the old man used to say.

Stop the boats. Did you ever hear the like? Where would we be without the boats coming and going? Sure, how would we do without them?

I stepped past Bella, and the dog shit on the mat, and reached for her lead. I wiped my hand on a piece of kitchen towel, rinsed quickly in the sink. Then we headed out along the road, past warehouses and shuttered shops, making for the docks.

Neal Alexander grew up near Belfast and lives in Aberystwyth, where he teaches at the university. He is the author of two books, Late modernism and the poetics of place (2022) and Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (2010).