第15章 The Waking Town

The Hales went out in the first week of March with a noise Wren had never heard before, a long grinding knocking down the reach that made the kitchen window rattle in its frame, and her father put his hand flat on the counter and said, "There it goes," and neither of them said anything else about it, because there was nothing to be said by a man to a girl about a river losing its ice. The thaw did the rest of the work for the town. Within ten days the mud on the south bank had gone from a sealed black pan to a brown porridge that took your boots off at the ankle, and by the third week of March the whole of Merrow was in it, and the place where the road came down to the mill had become a set of ruts that four cars were taking in turns to avoid. The thing that woke Merrow up was not the river. It was a queue. It started at the feed store, because the feed store has a bench and the bench faces the door and there is nowhere else to put your elbows in Merrow. Somebody said in the third week of February that there were two teenagers sleeping on the bend, and the person who said it had been on the water board, and the person it was said to had a daughter at the school who had been seen coming off the old coach on the Friday nights. By the first week of March the story had grown a plank, a lantern, and a dog. Wren heard the first real version of it at the bus stop at half past seven in the morning, from two women in coats, standing the way people stand when they are not speaking to each other. "They have been down there all winter." "Since August, my girl says." "On what? There is nothing there." "That is what I said." And then one of them said the thing that turned it, and she said it to the air, the way people deliver a verdict they have been carrying: "Well, my Ron went down on Sunday with the dog and there is a bridge there. I have seen it from the boat. I have been past it a thousand times and I have never once seen it, and it is there, and it has a lantern hooked under it." Nobody said a name. Wren stood at the end of the bench with her school bag between her feet and understood that this was the only reason she was still standing in that queue. For three weeks the whole of Merrow had been arguing about a rumour with no names in it, and a rumour with no names in it can be a rumour about the bridge, or about a weir, or about nothing, and every single person in that queue had privately decided which one it was, and had said nothing, and had gone home and looked at the map on the wall. The board at the square finished it. On the twenty-second of March there was a notice under glass, typed at the council office, and it said that the bend below Cold Spring was to be inspected on the fourth of April by the water board and the council, and that any person with information as to structures on the township's watercourse was invited to attend. Underneath there was a list of eleven names. Her father's name was the fourth one on the list. She came in from school at half past four and he was at the table with the radio on, and she put her bag down in the passage and came into the kitchen and stood in front of him, and he looked up. "The fourth of April," Wren said. "Yes." "Your name is on it." "My name is on it," her father agreed. "I put it there on the twenty-second at about half past two in the afternoon, at the counter, in front of a man from the water board who told me there was nothing down there." He turned the radio down one notch, which he had never done in his life. "Sit down, Wren." She sat down. The kitchen was very quiet, and outside the window the Hales was running brown and fast with the whole winter in it. "Turn it off," she said. Her father reached over and turned it off. It was the first time she had ever seen him do it. The room got much bigger. "Your grandfather took me down there when I was nine," he said. "I remember it as a long walk and a bad smell. There was a girl and her mother in a house with a garden, and they were packing, and I was not told what for. He did not talk on the way home. He never talked about it. When I was thirty I found the photograph in his box, of the two of them standing on the deck, and there is a bridge in it that I had walked over a hundred times as a boy and never once saw, because by the time I was ten your grandfather had decided that I was not to." Wren put her hands flat on the table, the way she had learned to do it from watching somebody else do it. "Who was she?" "Rose." Her father said the name and then stopped, as though the name had come out of a room he had not opened in thirty years and the draught from it had gone straight through him. "Her name was Rose, and she married a man from the north, and they went in the autumn, and my father never said her name to me again, and I have not said it in this kitchen until just now." "She is in the book," Wren said. "The logbook. Miles found it. There are twenty-six entries with an R in them, and the R is a hand leaning the other way. He wrote that she said the middle plank was a liar." Her father looked at the window for a while. "The middle plank is a liar," he said. "It has been on that bridge since before I was born. Your grandfather used to rope it off at both ends and leave the rope up for a week, and the rope is not up, and it has not been up since the winter, and I have known that since February." "He was my grandfather too," Wren said. Her father put his hand over his mouth, and took it away, and picked up his tea and found it cold and put it down again. "The report came back on the sixth," Miles said. He had come up the mill road behind her without her hearing him, which he could do, and he was standing in the doorway in his coat with his hands in his pockets and his hair wet from the rain that had started while she was arguing with her father. "How long have you been there," she said. "Since the radio went off." He looked at her father. "I am sorry. I know that is not a thing you can be sorry for." Her father waved him in, and Miles came in and sat down at the far side of the table from Wren, which put him in the middle of the room, which seemed to be where he needed to be. "Sixth of April," Miles said. "Three of us and a man with a clipboard. They went over it with a tape. The old man with the clipboard was the one who had the map made in the year of the big water and he kept the map in the boot of his car and he brought it out and laid it on the tailgate and it is a good map, Mr Corfield, it is a four-inch to the mile survey, and there is nothing on it but water where the bridge is." "How much water is there on a four-inch map," Wren said. "About an inch and a quarter." Miles took his hands out of his pockets and put them on the table. "He said it himself, twice, to make sure we had it. If you want to argue with a four-inch map you argue with an inch and a quarter of printed water, and he was very pleased with himself about it, and then he read out the second bit." "And the second bit?" "The second bit is that a structure on the township watercourse that has been out of use and is not on the record has to be either brought up to standard and recorded, or taken out." Miles looked at the radio. "There is no third option. It is in the second bit. He read that out as well." Nobody said anything for a moment. The rain was coming down hard enough now that it was audible on the slates over the porch. "So they have given you a month," Wren said. "They have given us until the fourth of May." Miles turned his hand over and looked at it, at the ridges, the way he did. "Which is nothing. Because a month of Saturdays with a hand saw and a jar of nails gets you a deck. It does not get you a stringer, and it does not get you a post, and it does not get you anything you could put a load on. We could do it in wood. We could do it in wood and nobody would find out for about eleven years, and I am not spending six years of my life building something a man can pull out of the water in an afternoon." "Mend it or pull it out," Wren said. "Mend it or pull it out." "My father has eleven signatures on a notice about a bridge that four inches of map says is a foot and a quarter of water," Wren said, "and it is now the fourth of March and the paper at the square says the twenty-second, and I have read the small print, and the small print says anybody with a truck." She stood up. "The mill has a truck. And the mill has two hundred feet of oak in a rack behind the shed from a job that got cancelled in March, and the man who bought that job has been letting his men take home a plank a month ever since to keep the racks from going bad in the damp, and he does not care what it is used for as long as it leaves the shed."