Chapter 5 Ash on the Rock

The spring tide came on the fourteenth and the lowest of the year came with it, and at eleven minutes past five in the morning the water in Carrowen harbour was lower than Nell had ever seen it, and she was standing on the harbour wall in the dark with the sound of it going out. It was not dramatic. That was the thing she had not been ready for. The sea did not roar or surge or do anything. It simply went, evenly, for about a quarter of an hour, the way a bath goes out, and left behind the thing it had been standing on. By half past five the harbour floor was dry for ninety metres. By ten to six the road was up. She did not go down. She stood on the wall for two hours and eleven minutes and she watched it come, and when it was fully up it lay out from the north-east end of the bay in a long straight line, black stone, wet and shining, the width of two men, and it ran from the harbour mouth out past where the water usually stood to a point she could not see because the light was not yet on it. It was level. It had no doubt about it anywhere. It was the most obviously made thing she had ever seen. Emmett came at twenty past six with a lamp and did not say anything when he saw her, and came and stood beside her, and they watched it for a while, and then he said: "There's your geology." "There's my geology," she said. It was fully light by seven. They were both in waders and both in the water to the thigh, and the water was so cold that Nell understood at once why this was a thing people did four times a year and not more. The sea had left weed lying flat on the road in long tongues, dark brown, and every few metres there were the deeper cuts where the water always found the low place first, and running through the whole length of it, at intervals of about a fathom and a half, there was a line of cuts that were not water and not weed. The old marks. They were man-made, or something had made them, and they ran from the harbour mouth out along the centre line of the road in a series of shallow paired grooves, and where the road was widest there were more of them, as though the thing that had cut them had been working in the same place for a very long time and had got wider as it went. "Those aren't natural," she said, and was already kneeling, and already had the rule out, and was already measuring, because the reflex was the only thing she had that was faster than the rest of her. They are not," said Emmett. She got the depths. She got them twice, from both ends of a pair of cuts, and she wrote both numbers in the book, and she was aware as she wrote them that she was writing the numbers of something she had not believed in two hours ago, and she kept writing, because the instrument did not care what she believed and she had spent her whole life being grateful for that. "Forty-one and a half," she said. "And there's a difference of a foot and a quarter between the pairs, consistently, all the way out. Emmett, that's a design. That's a road with a kerb." "Aye." "Built by somebody who knew the tide better than anything built on this coast." "Aye," he said, and turned and looked at the way the light was coming up behind him, and Nell could not see his face at all. "Emmett. How long have you known about the kerb?" He did not answer for a while. The water was coming back, not visibly, but Nell could feel it in the ground under her feet, a slow push, the way you feel a train through a wall. "I brought you out here to show you a channel," he said. "I didn't bring you out here to be asked about a kerb." "That's not an answer, that's a door closing, and I'm not nine and I told her that already tonight so I'd say it again to you rather than to her—" "You said that to her about nine years ago and you left anyway," he said, "and she let you, which is the thing about your grandmother that nobody in this village will tell you, and I have watched you work that out about forty minutes in a car park, so I will spare you the rest of it." The water came up another twenty centimetres, all at once, and the weed lifted and lay back down in a different direction, and the kerb went under, one pair of cuts at a time, going out. Then they were on the road itself, the two of them, standing in the middle of it, and the last of the pairs of cuts was under water at Nell's knees and the fourth marker was somewhere out in the grey ahead of them where the light had not got. "I wasn't going to take you past the first one," he said. "I want that on the record from me, because in about four minutes I'm going to be the one who does it and you're going to be the one who watches, and I have thought about which of us ought to." "Emmett—" "Don't." He was already walking. "You can write it down afterwards or you can not write it down. But you're going to stand there and you're going to see whether the black ones are still black ones when I come back, because that's the only part of this I have never once been able to stop wanting to know." Nell stood on the road in the rising water with the notebook shut in her hand and the rule in her pocket and watched a man she had known when she was nine walk out along a road that was coming apart under both of them, and she understood, some considerable way after she had started, that she had not come back to Carrowen to be told about a channel.