Chapter 3 The Hydrophone Rig

The array case weighed forty-one kilograms. She had carried it up the narrow stair twice before she unpacked it. The kit was a standard coastal hydrophone rig, four elements, omnidirectional, rated to four hundred metres, sampling at twenty-four kilohertz, twelve bits, with a calibration standard that came from a factory in Bristol and had been on a shelf since two thousand eight. Tamar checked the serial numbers and the firmware and the battery health and wrote each number in a column of her own, because the log supplied had a column for serial number and a column for calibration and no column for the thing that mattered, which was that the kit had not been used in three years and that three years is a long time for an old microphone. She took the rig apart on the kitchen table, and put it back together, and took it apart again, and checked the seals, and checked the seals again. The house had a dead doorbell and a broken window latch and a coal fire that went out if you looked away from it for more than a minute. She did the work with a torch and a multitool and a pair of rubber gloves that did not fit her hands. At half past seven a knock came on the door, and Deveril stood in the yard with a thermos and two cups. "You're the one who came," Deveril said. "I don't know why I said that. You are the one who came. There's only one of you." She made tea anyway. "Are you going to drop the thing in the water tomorrow?" "I'm dropping it in the water Thursday. Ruan said the tide was wrong today." "Ruan's the boat family. He tells you the water when the water tells him something. It's not a fault, it's a habit. He'll take you out when he can, and he'll refuse you when he can't." "Did he refuse you?" "He refused your grandfather in eighty-four. That's how he works." Tamar set the thermos down. "What did he tell you in eighty-four?" "He told me not to go up the steps." "What did you do?" "I went." There was a pause, the size of the space between two breaths. "What did you find?" "What I found, I can't tell you." "Can you tell me what you didn't find?" Deveril poured the tea and pushed the cup across the table. "No. I can't." She sat in the chair by the window and watched the tide go out of the bay through the glass. The flats were grey and pink with the last of the light, and out past the narrows the water had gone that same flat pale colour it had had in the car. She could not see the steps from the window. She could not see anything from the window that she had not already seen from the boat. "Did you come back?" "I came back." "Did you bring anything?" "Nothing." "Did you leave anything?" "Nothing." Tamar put the cup down. "That's the third column. What they left behind." "That's what I said when I was asked." "What did you actually leave?" Deveril looked at her with the patience of a woman who had been asked a question forty times and had decided, today, to answer it once. "I left the way I remembered the walk. That's it. That's the thing I've carried for forty-two years. I can't tell you what it was, because I can't remember what it was. I can only tell you that I went up and I came down and there is a gap in the middle of my life the size of a walk, and the gap is shaped like a walk, and I have built my whole adult life around not falling into it." She stood up and wrapped the thermos in her scarf. "You're doing this job to file a report. That's fine. I did this job once and I filed a report. The report said the scheme was viable. Nobody has built the scheme. Nobody builds it. That's the trick of it. The report says it's viable and the water says it isn't, and the water has always been right and the report has always been filed." "Did you file it?" "I filed it." "Who else read it?" "Myself." "Why?" "So it would be filed." She went out to the yard and stood in the cold a moment with her back to the cottage, and came back in. "If you photograph the ledger, don't photograph the green page." "Why?" "Because the green page is the one that's still writing itself." She went to the hall and locked the door behind her. *** She came down to the kitchen at eight, wrapped in her coat, with the photographs on the drive. Six hundred and forty pages, at two exposures a page for the ones that had been marked in green. The camera she had used was a compact digital that came with her kit bag, rated to twelve megapixels, and she had shot the pages in a single light from the desk lamp, and the lamp was a halogen one, warm-white, at three thousand kelvin, and the colour cast was yellow, and she had corrected it in the software to neutral. The ink, though, the ink had not been corrected. She had looked at the histogram after the shoot and seen that the green sat at a channel level the camera had rendered as red, and she had not touched it, because she did not want to touch it, because she wanted to see the green, the way it was, the way the child had laid it down. The drive was in her coat pocket. She put the coat on the hook by the door. She took the drive out. She put the drive in the laptop. The laptop was a surveying tablet, rugged, MIL-spec, with a glove-friendly screen, and she had been using it for two years, and it had a scratch across the top corner from a fall on a pier in Dorset, and the scratch was gone pale, and she had stopped noticing it three months ago. She opened the folder. The photographs came up on the screen, page by page, at full resolution. She scrolled to the last page. She looked at the last page. The last page was the one with the green ink, and the green ink was at the bottom of the page, in the third column, and the third column was the one headed what they left behind, and the green ink was in the column, and the green ink was the walk. She looked at the walk. The walk was written in a hand she had seen before, in the margin of the nineteen forty-four drawing, in the tide table, in the ledger, and the hand was the hand of a child, and the child had been nine, and the child had written the walk down in the spring of eighty-four, and the child had written it down in green ink, and the green ink was newer than the red, and the green ink was newer than the blue, and the green ink was newer than the black, and the green ink was the newest ink in the book. She closed the laptop. She put the laptop in the drawer. She put the drawer in the cupboard. She put the cupboard in the hall. She went to the yard. She sat on the step. She looked at the bay. The bay was going out. The flats were grey and pink with the last of the light. Out past the narrows the line of stones was there, and the line of stones was nine, and the line of stones was running out into the water and stopping, and the line of stones was nine, and the line of stones was nine, and the line of stones was nine. She did not count them. She got up. She went in. She made the fire. She made the tea. She drank the tea. She sat back down. She put the cup on the table. She opened the notebook. She wrote one line at the bottom of the page: Observation one: datum under revision. She put the notebook away. She went to the yard. She sat on the step. The tide was out. The bay was flat. The steps were in the air. She did not count them. She went in. She turned off the light. She went up the narrow stair. She lay in the bed. She did not sleep. ---