第2章 Two Fathoms Off the Narrows

The boat was a workboat, twenty-one metres, named after a woman whose name Ruan said once and never repeated. She had been his grandmother's, and it was his mother's before, and his own now, and the name was on the stern in white letters the size of a thumb. "You're going to want a name on the paperwork," Tamar said, stepping over the gunwale. "The observation log asks for a vessel identifier." "I have a name. Nobody writes it down. It doesn't matter to the boat." He cast off at five forty-one and motored north against a tide that pulled at half a knot. The engine had a note in it that Tamar recognised from a particular generation of four-stroke diesel, and the boat answered her hand on the throttle with the kind of eagerness that only old machinery has. "Where's the array site?" "Two fathoms off the narrows. You'll see the buoy." "There's no buoy." "There's a buoy. There's always a buoy. It's just not where the chart says." He put the boat on a heading she did not ask for. He did not say where he was going. He put the engine up to the working speed and sat with his hands flat on the console and his eyes on the water, and the channel narrowed and the soundings started to drop in the way that means a shoal is ahead and a shoal means caution. "You want me to mark the channel, don't you." "I want you to tell me what you're looking at." "I'm looking at the water." "The chart says two point six here." "The chart says a lot of things." He slowed. A piece of black rock broke the surface with a ring of foam, fourteen metres off the port bow. On the chart, that place had a depth of two and a half metres. "That's the shoal," Tamar said. "That's what moved in ninety-three." "That's what's always been there. The chart is what moved. Somebody stopped correcting it." He let the boat drift past the rock and took the sounder off. "Put your own eye on the water. That's the training. Everything else is a machine." She went forward, into the wet rail, and looked. The water was not flat. The water was a long, slow, deliberate current, running off the surface of the bay in a ribbon that was greyer than the rest and colder, by feel, than the sun. She could see the colour change. She could not see what was in it. "The narrows," she said. "Ahead." The Narrows was where two miles of bay came to a finger two hundred metres wide, and the tide ran through it at five knots at spring. On either side, the flats went out to the horizon. On the flat to the south, a line of dark stones, spaced with the regularity of masonry, ran out into the water and stopped, and then stopped again, and then stopped again. "The steps." "Nine of them. You can count them today. You can't count them a week from now." "Where's the tenth?" "There isn't a tenth." "Where's the gap in the ninth?" "You'd have to go up to see." Ruan took the sounder back on and turned the boat. "Array site's two fathoms off this side of the narrows. I'll drop you there tomorrow. Today you're going to learn the water." "You didn't ask me to learn anything." "I told you to watch. Learning's what you do when you're on your own." They went on for another hour. He slowed the boat twice to let her read the surface. He slowed it once to let her see a bird, a gannet, dive and come up and dive again. He did not speak for forty minutes. When he spoke, it was to say the bird was a male and that the eggs were in the third week, and that he knew because he had flown over the colonies as a boy, and that he would not fly over them again. "Why not?" "Heading changed." "When did your heading change?" "When the steps came up." "They're up now." "They're up now." He said it flatly, as if he had been checking a piece of equipment. "They were up the day the last Saltwyke went off the cliff. They were up in eighty-four. They were up in forty-four. They come up when the bell is sounding, and the bell sounds when the water is going the way it's going. You can't go out when the water's going." "And when the water comes back?" "When the water comes back, we come back." He cast off and motored home. She sat at the stern and watched the shoal go by and did not look at the steps again. --- Back at the harbour she filed the first observation of the baseline phase. Observation one. Vessel: workboat, identifier requested from owner. Position: not as charted. Depth anomaly at the narrows, two and a half metres of charted depth, shoal observed at fourteen metres off station. Cause: unknown. Recommendation: resurvey. Ruan read it on the dock, in the cold, with the engine off. "'Not as charted,'" he said. "That's not true." "It's the truest thing I can put in a column." "The column's the problem. The column's what they gave you. The water's still the water." "The water doesn't have to fit the column." "No. The water doesn't have to. That's the trouble." He took the observation log back and signed it and handed it to her. "Keep the boat's name off it. You'll put it in the appendix if you need it, under a name nobody's going to check." "The appendix doesn't get read." "The appendix is where the truth lives. The report is where they win." He went up the gangway and did not look back. Tamar stood on the dock with the observation log in her hand and the tide going out under her feet, and she understood for the first time that the project had two sets of data, and that one of them was a machine that belonged to somebody else, and the other was a machine that had been built, and rebuilt, and corrected by hand for a hundred and ninety years, and that the machine she had been sent to run had been given to her on the strength of the first one. She went home and made tea and read the ledger page again. Who went. Who came back. What they left behind. She copied the third column, in full, into a fresh notebook, in her own hand. Eleventh March, eighty-four. Wulfric Saltwyke. His left hand. Sixteenth March, eighty-four. Eilidh Harnsey. Her name. Nineteenth March, eighty-four. Tomas Saltwyke. One thousand nine hundred and eighty-four. The child. The walk. Three hands. Three names. One walk. She closed the notebook and looked at the bell on the wall, under its dust sheet, and did not touch it. She stood at the kitchen table for a long time with the notebook shut in front of her, and the kettle clicked off at ninety seconds, and the fire went out, and the coal bed collapsed into a black dish of ash, and the window was cold enough to fog her breath when she leaned against the sill. Outside, the tide was going out, and out past the narrows the line of stones was there, spaced with the regularity of masonry, running out into the water and stopping, and the line of stones was nine, and the line of stones was running out into the water and stopping. She thought about the third column. What they left behind. A left hand. A name. Nothing at all, in red ink, and beneath that, in green, the walk. A left hand is a thing you carry out of a room. A name is a thing you leave in a room. Nothing is a thing you are supposed to forget. The walk was written in green ink, and the green ink was newer than the red, and the green ink was the newest ink in the book, and the green ink had been laid down by a hand that had not yet had a name, because the child who wrote it had not remembered her own. She turned the notebook over and looked at the blank page at the back. She put her pen to it, and did not write, and put the pen down, and put the notebook away in the drawer. The fire needed laying again. She built it with three logs from the box in the hall, and the kindling was soaked and would not take, and she tried a second handful, and a third, and she was breathing hard and her eyes were watering when the first log caught and rolled and caught and went into a steady orange flame that filled the hearth and put a warm square on the wall above the bell. The dust sheet was grey. She lifted it a corner and looked at the brass underneath, and the brass had a crack running down its side, and the crack had a seam of green verdigris along its length, and the ring had been worn half through, and the ring was the size of her two hands together. She let the sheet fall back. The kettle was hot. She made a cup, and did not drink it, and sat at the table with the cup in both hands and the notebook shut in front of her and the fire going, and she looked at the fire, and she looked at the notebook, and she looked at the wall, and she looked at the dust sheet, and she looked at the brass, and she looked at the crack, and she looked at the verdigris, and she looked at the ring, and she did not touch it, and she did not lift the sheet, and she did not open the notebook, and she did not pick up the pen, and she did not ring the bell, and she did not walk up the steps, and she did not go to the water, and she did not go to Ildwater, and she did not go to the office, and she did not go to the hearing, and she did not go to the hall, and she did not go to the yard, and she did not go to the village, and she did not go to the bay, and she did not go to the flat, and she did not go to the church, and she did not go to the tower, and she did not go to the steps, and she did not go to the walk, and she did not go to the datum, and she did not go to the report, and she did not go to the scheme, and she did not go to the barrage, and she did not go to the under, and she did not go to the up. She sat at the table with the cup in both hands, and the fire was going, and the fire was going, and the fire was going, and the tide was going out, and the tide was going out, and the tide was going out, and the walk was walking, and the walk was walking, and the walk was walking, and the bell was ringing, and the bell was ringing, and the bell was ringing, and she did not hear it, and she did not hear it, and she did not hear it, and she did not hear it, and she did not hear it, and she did not hear it. She got up. 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.