第7章 The Boy on the Strand

Iona Pratt kept the photograph between two sheets of acid-free board and carried it to the counter like a woman carrying a plate she had dropped once. "Matt Teal," she said. "Britta Kowal. And the boy. His name is Silas. He would be six in this photograph, because it was taken in June of 1996, and Silas Kowal was born in March of 1990." She looked at Tove over the top of the board. "I know that because I was twenty-six and I typed the baptism, and I typed it twice, because the first one had the wrong year on it and I did it again without asking anybody why." "So why is he a Teal?" "Because in September of 1996 a woman came to this desk and asked me what it would take to change a child's surname." Iona Pratt put the board down. "I told her a magistrate, a lawyer, and the cost of both, and she said she had none of any of those, and I said then it cannot be done, and she said, Miss Pratt, I am not asking you to do it, I am asking you what it is called when a town decides a thing together and writes it down afterwards." The library shut at five and the four of them sat in the staff room with the photograph propped against a jar of drawing pins, and Iona Pratt told it in the wrong order, the way people do when they have been holding a thing for thirty years. "Britta Kowal came to Selkie Cove at twenty from the Aran islands with her mother and worked eleven seasons on the cannery line. Matt Teal was thirty-four, a widower, no children, the best deckhand on the Arawak, and in debt to a man who owned half the boats in the harbour and did not like being reminded of it. In the spring of 1990 Britta had a son, and the boy's father was not Matt Teal, and the parish page that said so was cut out of the register with a razor in a single stroke, and there is not one person alive in this town who will tell you who did it, including me, including now." "Then how do you know he was not Matt's?" "Because I stamped the envelope." She said it evenly. "Ostler asked me to post a registered letter to the county registrar in 1996, and I did not read it, and a week later the same envelope came back with an envelope inside it, and the county envelope said that a correction had been made to a baptism of March 1990 and that the original entry had been cancelled on the authority of the parish, and there was a parish reference number on it, and I have carried that number in my head for thirty years and I have never once written it down." "What was the name on the second envelope?" "That is the part I did not look at." She put her hands flat on the table. "In April of that year the boy was six. In September a woman came to my desk about a surname. On the third of October the Teals took out a paper adoption, and on the sixth the debt against the Arawak was cleared by a payment from an account at Norhaven, and on the eighth of October a boat left the cove at eleven at night with a woman and two children on it, and I watched it go from the library window, because I could not sleep, and I have never in thirty years worked out why I was awake." "Two children," Piet said. Iona Pratt looked at him. "Two," she said. "The boy, and a child of about three who is not a Kowal, whose name I have never been able to learn, because that child was not at my desk that week and the 1996 papers do not mention him at all, and this town has not asked about him once in thirty years." Tove put her hand flat on the photograph board so that her fingers were touching the boy's face, and then took it away again because she was not sure she had the right. "He is thirty-six," she said. "Where is he now?" "Norhaven. He teaches physics at a school in the north of the city and he has never set foot in this town as a man, and I have never told a living soul that, and there is a reason." Iona Pratt stood up and moved the jar of pins an inch to the left for no reason at all. "If you put four hundred words in your school paper, that boy reads it in a staffroom in Norhaven with a timetable on the wall. If you find him first, and you go to his house, and you knock, then he is a person who has been found." "He is a person who has been taken," Tove said. "He is a person who has been *not told*," Iona Pratt said, "which is a different thing, and the difference is thirty years long, and it is not yours to shorten for your own convenience." She sat back down. "You will find him first. Or you will not run this at all. Those are your two." That night Tove Vinter walked the eleven minutes down to the strand and back with her hands in her pockets, and the third note was waiting for her in the crack in the rock, dry, with the sand still dry in the bottom of the bag. Piet read it against the 1996 register in the car park and it took him four minutes, and then he said the sentence out loud twice to make sure. "The town made a trade in 1990 and it made a trade in 1996," he said, "and the second one is worth more to them than the money. Ask the man with the broom. He was there in 1990. Ask him twice." On the Monday morning they asked him twice, in the basement, with the 1990 volume open on the table, and Ole Ostrand stood with his hand on the shelf and told them the whole of the rest of it, and the last thing he told them was this. "There is a stub. In the parish register, in box forty-four, the page for March 1990 has been cut out along the line of the entry, not through the middle of it, and if you hold it up to a window you can still read the beginning of the line." He went and got box forty-four, which took him twenty minutes and a folding stepladder, and inside it there was a bound parish register and a plain carton and the parish register had a pale rectangle in the middle of it with a torn edge. "Here," he said, and put it in the window light. Baptised the fourth day of March, one thousand nine hundred and ninety, the child of Britta Kowal and — and then the paper ended. "It stops there," Tove said. "Somebody cut off the father's name." "Somebody cut off the father's name and left the mother," Ole said. "I have had this page in a box under my feet for thirty years, and I have read those words about four times, and I have never once been able to read them without wanting to put my hand over them." The library bell rang eleven. Tove went up to the staff room to collect the photograph, and found her grandmother standing in the middle of the room with her handbag in both hands and her coat still on, staring at the quarter-plate propped against the jar of drawing pins. Berta Vinter did not say hello. "That is Britta," she said. "And that is Matt, and I have not seen that boy since I carried a banner at the choir parade with him on my shoulder in 1991, and I have told nobody I remember the colour of his hat." She came forward and put one finger, not touching, an inch from the wool hat. "Tove. Look at me. I was two afternoons a week at this library in 1996, typing on Mrs. Dunphy's machine in the back room, and I typed the adoption, and nobody asked me to check a single thing about it. And I want you to understand that they did not have to ask. I did not want to know." "You are the fourth witness." "I am the one who typed it." Her hands had begun to shake and she put them on the table. "And in 2006 they came back to the same machine in the same back room and they asked me to do it a second time, and I did that too, and I have never once said so, and I am saying it now because you are going to find out and I would rather you found out from me." She straightened up. "There was a girl in it. Born at Norhaven in the February of that year and registered with no father in the world, and the correction put a man in that line who went down at the point in October 1996, and that was a lie, because the man was alive in Selkie Cove on the day she was born and is alive today. And I typed it. And I have known every day since that I have put two lies into a book of births in this town, and both of them were mine." ---