Chapter 18 The Walk, and What It Cost

She walked it on the Sunday morning, at half past five, on the ebb. She went down the Nine Steps barefoot because she had not been able to make herself put boots on, and the water was four inches deep over the flat and cold enough to make her breath go, and she walked out along the nave wall to the plate and stood over it. Eleven seconds. Eleven seconds, and it came up out of the ground through the soles of her feet and into the bones of her knees, and there was no low frequency in it at all, and no partial, and it was not a recording, and she had brought no equipment down the beach and there was none in the cottage she had not already ruled out. She stood on the tithe plate for six minutes and forty-four seconds and then she went back up the steps and got into the car and drove to Bellrigg and took her boots off and walked out over the shingle to the wreck ground, and there was nothing there, because the Bellrigg ground is shingle, and the Bellrigg wreck is under eleven metres of water at the bottom of the tide, and there was no bell and no horn and no rope, and the wind was doing what wind does on an exposed shore. She walked the length of the Hard, which is half a mile of graded stone with the tide out on the left of her and the sea wall on the right, and she counted the bollards, because she had to do something with the four minutes it took to walk half a mile. Forty-one bollards. She counted them twice. She got forty-one both times. She sat down on the last one, at the seaward end, with her feet in the stones, and did the thing she had done on the tithe plate, which was to stop and give the whole of her attention to it and wait. Nothing came. She sat there for eleven minutes and nothing came, and she counted them, and she was still sitting there when the water got to her boots. "So that's how it works," she said out loud, to nobody, to the sea. "It's not for everyone and it's not every day and it's not here." Then she stood up and walked back up the Hard past the forty-one bollards and did the second thing she had not told anybody she was going to do, which was to get the Ebb Ledger out of its tin in the hall and sit down on the floor with it and a pencil and read the third column from the beginning, all of it, which takes about four hours if you do not hurry. The third column says: went, came back, left. Three hundred and nine entries in green ink. Two hundred and eighty-six of them read some variation of went, came back, left. Twenty-three say nothing after came back. Tamar read the twenty-three twice and then got her camera and photographed the pages, and it was nine at night when she drove eleven miles to Collow Ness and knocked on the door of the customs house, and Lowri Collow let her in in a cardigan with her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and did not ask a single question, and stood behind her chair and looked at the pages over her shoulder. "That's new," Lowri said. "That's what I want to know." "It's been there since I came," Lowri said. "I've read those pages four hundred times and I've never once known what to do with them, and you have, which is why you're the one who comes into this room." "Did I?" "You've got green ink on your thumb," Lowri said, "and it's the green out of that ledger, and there's no other green ink in this parish." Ruan was at the top of the hard with the boat on the trailer. "There's no tenth step," he said. "I've looked." "You've looked at the top of it." "I've stood on the bottom of it," Tamar said, "with my feet on it, and it came up through me, and I have four hundred and eleven events in the Ashenbilt record that say it's a rope on a wreck, and I have two independent analysts telling me the same thing, and it is the best explanation anyone has ever given me for anything in my life, and I believe all of it, and I still felt it." Ruan did not say anything for a while. He took a cigarette out and lit it and smoked half of it. "Nobody ever believes it," he said. "That's not a thing I say to be clever. Forty years of it, and the answer is always the same, and it is never believed. Because it doesn't work. A thing that's explained doesn't stop being true at the bottom of your feet, and there is not a single person alive who has got that far and still wants to be told about compression noise." "Who does?" "Whoever's walking," Ruan said. "And they've stopped talking about it. That's the part I can't get past. Not that they believed it in the first place. That they believed it and then they stopped, and then they started again, and then they stopped, and the last time they walked they didn't say a word about it to anybody." He dropped the cigarette in the wet shingle. "I'm going to ask you for the one thing," he said. "What?" "Take me out on the day the sluice shuts." Tamar looked at him. "That's eleven months." "Yes." "The weir won't be passable for a fortnight after that." "I know what I'm asking." "Why?" "Because my grandfather did it and his father did it and none of them wrote anything down, and because somebody has to be the one who comes back from it this time, and I have never once been able to find out what happens to the ones who go." He put his hand on the trailer rail and left it there. "My whole life I've been told a thing goes up there. You go up, and you come down, and you don't remember it, and the not-remembering is the price. And I've never met a single person who went up and came back talking. Not one. In four generations." "That's not evidence." "No," Ruan said. "It's a story I want to end. I know which of the two those are." "And if you come back and you remember?" "Then you'll be the first," he said, "and I'll be sorry for you, and I'll say so at the time." "I heard it once off the water," Ruan said. "That's the one time I've had it, and it was the summer I was twelve, and I was out on my own, and I put the oars up and sat there with the boat going sideways and counted four of them, and then I went home and told my mother there was a wire on the water." "And?" "And she told me not to bring it up. Not in those words. She said, there's a lot of wire in the water, and don't you be bringing me trouble. And I was twelve and that was the end of it. I've had forty years since to work out that she was frightened, and not of the wire." He turned round and looked at the boat. "There's a thing I never told anybody," he said, "and I have never told you, and I am not going to tell you, so don't ask." "I wasn't going to ask." "You were going to ask." "I wasn't," Tamar said, "but if I had, what would you have said?" "That I'd have lied," Ruan said, "and I'd have lied well, and that's the end of it." ---