The Maritime & Anchor, An Establishment In Ongoing Negotiations With Its Own Water

The Maritime & Anchor stands four streets back from a harbour it references constantly, and it is fair to say that water is the defining theme of the property, though not in the manner the brochure intends. Water is present throughout the Maritime & Anchor. In several rooms water is the principal feature. The difficulty is entirely one of location, and to a lesser extent of timing.

The shower in Room 6 offers two temperatures, selected by a lever bearing no markings of any kind. The first is cold. The second is also cold, but arrives accompanied by a sound from within the wall, a long descending note rather like a large animal being told bad news. We stood outside the cubicle and let it finish, out of respect.

The basin drains, but slowly, and only while being watched. Left to itself it holds the water in a manner best described as thoughtful. By the second morning we had begun brushing our teeth while maintaining steady eye contact with the plughole, and that is not a habit one carries proudly back into ordinary domestic life.

In the breakfast room there is a bucket. It sits beneath a stain the colour of weak tea and roughly the shape of a county. The bucket has been there long enough to have acquired a mat beneath it, and the mat has been there long enough to have acquired a shape. The ceiling did not drip so much as keep time: once every eleven seconds, through the toast, through the coffee, through the whole of the local news.

The young woman serving breakfast moved around the bucket without ever looking down at it, the way you step over a sleeping dog in your own house. She told us the roof had been reported. She told us it had been reported for two years, that the reports go to a management company in another city, and that she had long since stopped being told what becomes of them.

We asked at checkout whether the plumbing was being seen to. We were told, with total sincerity, that a man is coming. We did not ask when. There is a moment in every stay at the Maritime & Anchor when you understand that the man is not a plan but a belief, and that the building has been running on it for some time.