第19章 The Sluice Shuts

The ninth of July was a Tuesday and there was no wind. The mouth of the Long Ebb had been filled by the fourth of July and the engineers drew it down in three days, and by the eighth the basin behind it was down to minus three point four, and on the ninth of July at ten past nine in the morning the sluice came down. It came down slowly, on a handwheel, in the presence of two witnesses from the trust and one from the fisheries board, and it took eleven minutes, and everybody who was on site stopped what they were doing for the eleven minutes, which Tamar thought later was the single most remarkable thing she ever saw a construction site do. Tamar was on the wall above the outfall with a survey wheel, a prismatic level, a total station, a laptop, three cameras, a hydrophone kit, and eleven years of professional habit. She had also brought a thermos and a flask of coffee and had not slept, and had not said why she had not slept, because there was no version of it that would make sense to a person on a scaffold in a hi-vis. Cragmere had driven out at seven and had been standing at the top of the ramp the whole time with his hands behind his back, and he had not come up, and Tamar was grateful for that in a way she would not have admitted to him. "Right," she said, when the handwheel stopped. "Let's have it." "Levels," she said. Ruan read them. "Minus three point four, holding, steady." "Piezo?" "Holding." "Inclinometer?" "Two point one degrees, steady, and going the right way." "Both are holding," Tamar said. "Eleven seconds." It came up through the wall. She felt it in the hand that was on the wheel and in the tripod leg that was on the stone and in the flat behind her teeth, and it was not a sound, and eleven seconds later it came up again. "Stop," Ruan said. "What?" "Stop, stop." The inspector on the scaffold below had stopped too, with his hand on the ladder, and nobody had said anything to him. "Ruan, there's men on the frame." "I know there's men on the frame," Ruan said. "Do you want them to come down on their own or do you want me to say it." "Say what?" "Say get off the steel," Ruan said. "Because I have been on that steel since eight and I have felt every one of those, and the men on it are feeling them, and one of them is going to put a hand out to hold himself up and he is going to put it out in the wrong place." He leaned over the wall and shouted it. Get off the steel. Everybody off the steel, down the ladder, now, and don't run on the walkway. They came down. It took four minutes. There were fourteen of them and they all came down and they all stood on the mud in a line, and the site went quiet in a way that Tamar had heard twice in her life and never wanted to hear again. Cragmere came up the ramp then, and went along the wall, and looked at the fourteen men standing in the mud, and did not say one word about it. "Sorry," one of the men said to Tamar, about forty minutes later. "I did want to say. I know you had nothing to do with it." "You were on a frame in an unventilated steel box above a hard ebb," Tamar said. "You were never meant to stand in it." "Yeah," he said. "But you knew and you said." "I didn't say anything. The boat man said it." "He wouldn't have, if you hadn't set the wheel up there first," the man said. "You were stood there holding on to it like it was a handrail." Then Ruan said, "There." She looked. At the outfall, where the culvert takes the sea back, there was a woman standing in the dry. She was perhaps sixty and she was wearing a wet coat and sea boots and she had grey hair down to her jaw, and she was standing on the invert of the culvert with the water four inches below her and the tide four hundred metres away, and she was looking up the estuary, and she did not appear to have come from anywhere, and there was nowhere for her to have come from. "Debbie," Ruan said. "Who is Debbie?" "My mother's." "Did you tell her you saw her?" "I told her I saw her," Ruan said. "On the eleventh of July, at ten past nine in the morning, with fourteen men standing in the mud and a woman standing in the culvert. And she looked at me and she said, don't you be bringing me trouble, and then she went up the bank. And then she died in 2019, and I sat in that room and nobody would tell me one thing about what I'd seen, and I have never told anybody, not one person, not my wife, not the woman at the shop." "Then she's the only one of the five who ever told anybody," Tamar said. "Yes," Ruan said. "That's what I'm afraid of." The tide came back at eleven twenty-two and it came back over the woman, who was still standing there, and Tamar went down and got a line off the trailer and went down the steps into the basin, and when the water was back to minus one point one she put her hand on the crown of the crown head block and the stone was warm. And on the beach, four hundred metres away, a nine-year-old boy came out of the fog with his hands in his pockets, and Tamar took a photograph of him, and her hands were steady and the shutter was set wrong so the photograph is white. She stayed on the wall until the basin had filled and the outfall was running, which took until four, and then she took the instruments down and packed them in the cases and got in the car and sat in it. Then she went back and filed her covering note, two pages, with four hundred and eleven events attached and one sentence on the top of it, and countersigned it, and the consent application went up to the MMO the following Tuesday with minus two point one metres on it, and the wall that had never been built was built on a number that had been sitting in the record since 1922, because a woman had refused to file a number she had got in a sound. The line was opened on the twentieth of January, the day after the commemoration, by a schoolgirl of eleven from Harnsey Wick who had won the naming competition and did not want to be near the water. The Tidewarden came back to the Council a month later, in Tamar's name, and was not used, and she has never learned who bought it. She stayed to the end of the spring and then moved to a flat inland with no window in it, and she never went back to Harnsey Wick. ---