Chapter 9 The Tide Log

They made it official on a Tuesday, because a rota needs a pen. Iona Pratt wrote it out on the back of a library reservation card and pinned it inside the door of the reading room, and under her name she wrote *tea, and do not let P. touch the urn*, and under Ole Ostrand's name she wrote *bring the boxes down, whatever anybody says*, and under her own she wrote *I am sixty-eight and I am doing this because I did not do it in 1996.* "There are rules," Tove said, standing on a chair to straighten it. "One. Everything that comes in gets logged before it gets read. Date, time, where it was found, and how. Two. Nobody takes anything home. Three. If it is addressed to one of us, we do not open it alone." "Who is meant to keep the log?" "Piet." "That is a mistake." "It is not, because you read the numbers and I read the people, and between us we are extremely annoying." She got down off the chair. "Also he will do it because he has been doing it in his head since June." It ran for eleven days and it filled a page and a half of the library's old stock book, ruled in inches, with a column Ostrand had ruled himself for the tide heights. Nine tides. Nine blanks in the *what came in* column until the fourth night, when at eleven minutes past one a bag came over the shelf and Piet's cork lifted and the bell rang and Tove was on her feet before it finished. Tide watching turned out to be mostly not watching the tide. The first night a plastic bottle came in and wedged in the crack, and they logged it, time and colour and the maker's mark on the base. The second night there was a single scuffed wellington, size seven, and Piet spent eleven minutes establishing from the sand inside it that the foot had been small and had worn a sock with a hole in the toe. The third morning there was a bucket. Yellow, dented, KETTLEBY SAILING CLUB stamped on the side in a font from 1994. "Kettleby sailing club closed in 1997," Iona Pratt said, writing it into the book. "The clubhouse went in 2001. That bucket has been in somebody's garage for a quarter of a century and it has come out to sea, and this is precisely the sort of thing that goes in the log, because in thirty years somebody will open it up and decide the sea was silent." She was not joking. She had brought a vacuum flask and a folding chair and a tartan blanket folded into four, and she sat at the top of the bank with her hands round a mug and watched two teenagers and an old man work in the dark, and on the fourth night she said, "You are going to want hot food, and I have thought about it, and the answer is no, because the moment this becomes a picnic somebody will only come on the nights when it is pleasant." Somewhere around two in the morning on the third night, with the wind coming round the point and bringing rain in flat sheets, Piet said, "Why are you doing this?" "You ask me that as though it is a riddle." "I ask you because you are seventeen and you could be doing anything at all. You could be doing a column about the dog." He shifted on the wet rock. "I have been at this since June because I am good at it and because if I am good at something then people have to be interested in me, which is what my father believes he is paying for. That is a stupid reason. I would like a better one off you before December." Tove looked at the sea for a while. A mile out, the light on the end of the harbour wall went from a solid orange to a long thin line and then nothing. "My grandmother typed a page," she said. "Twice. And my mother stood on a slipway at eleven o'clock at night and watched a boat go out and said nothing, and then she went and married a man in a city and had me and taught me how to go quiet in a room, and I have been quietly good at it my whole life." She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "I am not doing this for the story. I am doing it because I would like to have one single thing in my life that I looked at instead of walking away from. That is not a better reason. It is a true one, and I have noticed that true reasons are much smaller than the reasons you have when you have not seen anything yet." "Right." He was quiet for a while, and then he said, "It will do." And then the fourth note came in over the shelf, and neither of them said anything else for a long time. That one was shorter still. Forty-four groups, and a key book that took Piet nine minutes to find, because it was not a register at all. It was the 2010 parish correction list, which lived in bay nine and had never been read by anybody. "It's a corrections list," he said, up on the steps, with the torch in his teeth. "Name, date of birth, date of correction, authority, and the old value struck through and the new value written in. Two entries for this town in thirty years, and one of them is March 1990." He read the note out twice and then a third time to himself. "Read it out. Slowly." "The second trade was made in 2010. It was a girl born at Norhaven in the February of that year. The father's line was left blank. She came back in April." Tove sat down on the step. Behind her, the sea came up over the shelf and did nothing, and went away again. "Left blank," she said. "So somebody went to a hospital in a city a hundred and eighty kilometres away and got a clerk to leave one line of a birth certificate empty, and that is not a thing you do for free, and it is not a thing you do for a boy who is twenty years old and asking questions. It is a thing you do about a baby." "Or about a baby's father," Piet said. "Or about a baby's father." She got up. "April. She came back in April. It is the twenty-ninth of September. Somebody who came back in April of this year is in this town right now, and there are eleven hundred people in this town, and half of them leave for the mainland in October." "They also go to school," Piet said. "Or to the school in Kettleby, on the bus, if you are the sort of sixteen-year-old who would rather be somewhere else." He said it lightly. Tove did not let it go lightly. "Which sort are you?" "I have been here ninety days and I have spoken to eleven people, and eight of them were the ones who speak to everybody." He was folding the note back into its square with great care, lining up the corners, and he did not look up. "My aunt has a guest book. She keeps it because she is a person who keeps things. It is a hardback book with a leather spine and she writes in it in green ink and she has kept it since 1998." "Piet." "Room three has been let since the eleventh of April. I have known that since the day I arrived because I have to walk past it to get to the front door." He squared the note one more time. "I did not think it was the same. I did not put it together, and I want you to believe me, because I could have." ---