Chapter 14 The Boy on the Strand, Thirty Years On

The letter to Silas Teal was written by Hester Kowal, in a room over the harbour office, on the back of a tide order, at two in the morning, with two attempts thrown in the wastepaper basket. She read it out to Tove and Piet before she posted it. It was eleven lines and it said nothing about the money and it did not once use the word father, and at the end it said: *I am not asking you for anything. I am telling you that there is a woman in this town who has arranged for you to be told nothing, and she has been doing it since I was six, and I have found her out in three months, and you have had thirty.* "He will not come," Piet said. "He will come," said Hester. "That is everything I have learned about people who have been not told. They come. They come fast." He came on a Tuesday, on the half-past four coach, and he stood on the pavement outside the library for eleven minutes before he came in, because Tove was watching from the second bay of the mezzanine with the microfiche off, and she counted them on the same clock she had counted everything on since September. Thirty-six years old. Tall. Wire glasses. His hair had gone early at the front. He had a rucksack and a school bag and he was holding the strap of the school bag with his left hand, and Tove noticed that and thought about it for the rest of the day. Iona Pratt saw him from the desk. She did not make a sound. She put down the card she was stamping, took her glasses off with both hands, and sat down in her own chair, and stayed sitting in it for about two minutes while the whole reading room watched the back of her head and thought nothing much of it. "Mr. Teal," she said. "Will you come through. All of you. And bring the door." They took him down to the strand, because Tove wanted him on the sand, and because it was the only place in this town where a conversation could not be overheard, and because the boy in the photograph was six years old on this beach in June of 1996 and had been taken off it nine weeks later at eleven at night, and Tove wanted to say that out loud on the shingle and hear how it sounded. He listened to the whole of it standing on the split rock at the low-water line, with his hands in his pockets, and he did not interrupt once, and when Tove finished he did the thing she had been hoping he would do, which was to go and stand in the crack in the rock where the bags come over, and look at it, and then look back at her. "Six bags," he said. "Six." "Mine and his." He held up a hand before she could answer. "No. Listen to me properly for one minute and then you may ask me whatever you like. I did not come here because a girl wrote me a letter. I have been putting those bags in that pool since November, one at a time, at the top of every spring tide, for eleven months, and every single one of them I wrote in a room two hundred kilometres from here in a building with four hundred children in it, and I chose the pages, and I chose them because I have been sitting in a staffroom in the north of that city for nine years with a timetable on the wall and thirty years of a story in my head, and it turns out a man can get very far on that." "You have never met the man upstairs." "I have never met the man upstairs. I have had four letters from a postbox that does not exist and a handwriting that is not his own, which is the funniest thing that has ever happened to me and the only thing I have been frightened of this year." He crouched and picked up a stone and turned it over. "Fold one of them out for me. Any of them." Piet had the first note in the card wallet they had started using in September. Tove gave it to him and he smoothed it on his thigh and worked a fingernail along the third fold. "That is not a fold," he said. "That is a crease from a rule. He laid it against the edge of a set square and pressed. Nobody folds a note that way unless they are measuring it, and nobody measures a note unless they have a reason to know how big it is going to be when it is wet." He looked up. "You did that so you could watch it from the top of the beach with a glass. That is a physics teacher and not a man in a bait shop, and I will put that to you as the reason, because I think it is the reason, and I think you would rather it was the reason than the other one." Then he took the foolscap sheet out of his school bag, the one that had come through the broken window, and the letter that had brought Hester to Selkie Cove in April, and put them on the dry shingle above the water line side by side. "Watch my hands," he said, and picked up a stone in his right hand, and wrote six letters on the flat shingle in a neat schoolroom capitals. Then he picked up the second stone and wrote the same six letters with his left. "The right one is a right hand's capitals. The left one is a left hand writing capitals. It looks like nothing. It looks like a child writing. It is the single most common forgery in the world and it is taught to fourteen-year-olds in the first term, and when you copy it faithfully you copy the defect as well." Hester had gone very quiet. "You did my handwriting," he said. "Perfectly. Which means somebody showed you his, and you copied it, and you copied the mistake he makes, and the mistake is the thing that is lying in my coat pocket telling me somebody in this town has been practising." "It was the only thing I could think of," Hester said. "It was the only wrong thing you could have done." He put the stones down. "And he does it because his hands are going. He writes with the wrong hand on purpose now, so that anybody who compares the two will say the letters were done by a person who did not want to be recognised, and not by a person who could not help being recognised." "You are talking about a man in a flat." "I am talking about a man in a flat who has been frightened since 1990," Silas Teal said, "and I know what frightened looks like, because I have watched it in a mirror." He stood up and brushed the sand off and looked out at the water for a while, and Tove let him have it, because she had spent two days in September watching this sea and she knew that a person could not hurry it. "You put them in on the dates," she said. "I put them in on the dates." "Not the birthdays. The page numbers." She had done this herself with a pencil and a tide order at two in the morning the week before. "The margin on the back of mine said twelve, forty-four. The first note you put in was in November, so it is not a birthday, and it is not an anniversary anybody has told me about. It is the date of the thing. Every one of them has a date on it, and every date is the ninth of October, and the ninth of October was the day after the boat went." Silas Teal stood on the shingle and looked at her, and his face did something that Tove would think about for years. "I wrote the first one in my classroom at ten past eleven at night," he said. "On a Tuesday. And I chose the ninth of October because it was the day after, and I have told myself for eleven months that it was for the anniversary. It is not for the anniversary. I put them in on the day after so that they would land on a working day, and so that whoever found them would have to come to a town and knock on doors." He stopped. "I have wanted somebody to knock on a door for thirty years and I have never once in my life admitted it, not even in a staffroom, not even to a colleague, not in a marriage that lasted four years." "You are not the villain in this," Hester said, rather loudly. "I know what I am." He picked up his school bag. "I am thirty-six years old and I teach physics to thirty-one children in a school in a city where nobody has ever heard the word Arawak, and twice a month I post a letter to a stranger in a fishing town about a page in a register, and I have never once walked into this town, and every single part of that is cowardice and every single part of it is mine." He went up the bank with the three of them, and at the top of it he stopped and turned round. "One condition," he said. "The carbon. The one out of the typewriter." "You have heard about the carbon." "I have been sent a shopping list of this town since March. Somebody described a tin of biscuits with a lid pried off, and I have been thinking about that tin for six months." He held Tove's eye. "I will read it. I know what a document is, I know what a typewriter ribbon does to a capital B, and I know what a man who has looked at a page too many times over thirty-six years has done to the page he is looking at. But I will do it in a room, with the people who were in the room in it, and I will do it with all of them watching, because I have spent thirty years being told by an entire town what I am by people who were not in the room." "Three is a room," Tove said. "You have not been given the key to it yet." "Then give me the key," said Silas Teal. "I am extremely tired of being a number in somebody else's handwriting." --- ---