Chapter 16 The Second Reading

Lowri Collow kept the record in a room over the customs house at Collow Ness that smelled of cardboard and cinnamon and the damp of a hundred years of salt air, and she had agreed to meet Tamar on the Saturday, and when Tamar came in she was not alone. The Ashenholt signal was on the wall of the archive, on a monitor that had been bought for something else, running the tidal compression noise off a six-figure analyser that had come out of the harbour authority two years ago when the authority decided it did not want it. "Sit down," Lowri said. "I'll put it on properly." "You ran it." "I ran it," she said. "In 2023, on a laptop, at night, in this room, because I could not sleep. I've told four people in eleven years and all four of them were the wrong four people." She ran it. It was the same two hundred hertz sweep, the same strike at eleven seconds, the same partial at 156, and there on the wall of the archive with the window open it did not sound like a bell at all. It sounded like a rope. A heavy rope, strained and knocking against something in a swell, six hundred metres away, twice a minute. Tamar listened to it four times. "That's not the bay." "No." "That's not water. That's a vessel." "No," Lowri said. "I've known that since 2023." She stopped the file and wrote the time on the board in her hand, and then she wrote below it the cross-reference, which was the ledger entry for the afternoon of the fourth of March, 1962, and the column that said: two pm, heard at Bellrigg, the horn on the wreck, and again at four, and nothing after. "That's a steam trawler on the Bellrigg ground," she said. "She came apart on a spring tide in 1962 with the fog on the top, and they got the men off and then nobody found her until the Tuesday. There is a bell on a wreck at Bellrigg because there is a bell on every wreck. It's a thing that's on boats. It hangs where it hangs and it knocks where it knocks and the sea does the rest." "You could have told me this on Monday." "I could have told you this at any time in the last three years. I did not, because every time I tried to explain it to someone they explained it back to me." Lowri sat down on the edge of the table. "That's the whole of my job. People come into this room with something they heard, and I hand them a mechanism, and they go out and use the mechanism, and the mechanism is always correct and it never once has been what happened." Tamar stood up and went to the shelves, because she had spent three days with a mechanism and had run out of things to say about it. The shelving was floor to ceiling and held the parish record in tin-tied packets and blue boxes, and among them, in a board box with a broken corner, were four hundred and eleven index cards, one for each night of the bell, going back to 1899. "These are yours." "They're not mine. They were here when I came in 2017, in that box, with a note on top saying please keep dry, which is my handwriting, so I must have written it at some point." She took the box down and set it on the table. "And they're the Sounding list, which isn't a list of people at all. It's a night-by-night log. Somebody stood on the Hard at Bellrigg with a clock and a pencil and wrote down when they heard it, for fifty-six years, on index cards, and never told a soul." "That's not a list of hearers." "It got turned into a list of hearers in nineteen ninety-nine," Lowri said, "by a man in an office who needed it to be a list of hearers, because a list of hearers can be circulated and a night log can't. He's the one who put the five names on the front and the memory and the object. Those are his. He invented those columns. There was one column and it said yes, and then it was eleven, and then it was nine." "Who was he?" "I don't know his name," Lowri said. "It's on the transfer form and the transfer form's gone. I know he was from the water board, because he came and looked at the ledgers first and came back and looked at the Sounding box second, which is the wrong order, and anybody who does that is looking for a story to fit a thing he's already decided." Tamar went through the box. The cards were in three different hands over fifty-six years, and the first hundred were all in one, and one of them, for the eleventh of December, 1911, said: heard 4.10, 4.21, 4.32, 4.43, 4.54, 5.05. She turned it over. On the back, in pencil, in the same hand: went up. came down. don't tell mam. "He came down," Tamar said. "He came down," Lowri said. "They all come down. I've never had a card in fifty-six years that said he didn't." She put the box down between them on the folding table. "You're going to want to know whether I think it's real," she said. "Yes." "I don't know," said Lowri Collow. "I have a recorder that came out of a cupboard in 2023 and a box of cards that came out of a cupboard in 2017, and neither of them is evidence of a bell. They're evidence of somebody standing on a beach in the dark for fifty-six years and writing it down." "And you believe that." "I don't believe anything," Lowri said. "I keep it. There's a difference, and it's the same difference your man has got on the wall, and if you can hold two of those in your head at once you'll do this job better than he will." ---