Chương 24: Shallow Water

Abe got down to the boards at twenty after five, which was forty minutes earlier than anybody needed to be anywhere. The shed was lit and half awake behind him. He walked out to the end of the boards on his own, where the planks went down into black water, and stood there with his boots on the last dry thing in Calder. Then he got quiet, and the world stopped. He couldn't do this out there. He'd known that since the drain. A still needed him calm and alone, and a boat had four people in it and something under it.

So whatever use he was going to be today, he had to have it in him before six o'clock. Abe stood on the frozen boards and read the water, the same as he'd read a stairwell in October. He couldn't see under it. That part hadn't changed and it never would; the surface holds and everything below it stays guesswork. Everything above it, though, was sitting there in the dark waiting to be looked at for nothing. So he looked. He looked for two hours, and it took eleven minutes off the morning.

The tide line on the harbor wall, and the second, older line above it. Where the water had cut a bright channel past the third roof out and left the weed standing on either side. Four punts tied up, and the different heights they sat at, and what that said about what was in them. Bird mess on one roof ridge and none at all on the next one along. He didn't know what any of it meant.

He wrote down what he saw anyway, in his head, in order, and came out of the still with his ears full of gulls and half an hour still in front of him. Crew nine was Dobbs, a wide silent man called Cottle, and a woman called Purnell who talked from the moment she arrived until the moment they got in the punt.

"You're the school one," she said.

"Sefton says you did three sacks."

"He did," said Fenn, going past with his slate.

"On his first morning?"

"On his first morning."

"Well," said Purnell, and looked at Abe with her head on one side.

"You can do the pulling then, can't you." That was the entire welcome and it was the best one Abe had ever had. Dobbs handed him a hook pole and a line and did not explain either of them. He looked at Abe's boots, and then at the sky, and then said the only thing he said before they were out on the water.

"Wind's coming round by noon."

"Off Mullen's hip?"

"Off Mullen's hip," Dobbs agreed, and Purnell laughed like a gull. Abe had lived his whole life a mile from the drowned districts and had never been out on them. They went out at six with the sky going gray, past the last of the harbor, and the roofs started coming up out of the water on both sides. Then the sun got over the wall, and the water lit up, and Abe forgot he was at work. It was clear. Nobody tells you that part.

Amrit had said between one and four meters and made it sound like a filing cabinet, and here it was green and lit right through, with the old world lying under it looking up. A street. An actual street, with two rows of shopfronts, and the shutters still down on half of them. Painted lines on the road underneath, still yellow. A mailbox. A car sitting on four flat wheels with weed growing out of the windows and nothing whatever inside it.

Further out, past where the roofs gave up, something much bigger stood out of the water. Four floors of it were clear of the surface. It was square and flat on top and every window in it was gone.

"What's that one?"

"The Barn." Purnell did not look up from her pole.

"Shops. My grandma says four floors of shops and the cars parked on the roof." She leaned them past a chimney.

"We don't go in it." And a traffic light, on its pole, leaning about ten degrees, with its glass gone and its three empty eyes pointed up through six feet of water at a boy going past in a punt.

"That's a traffic light," said Abe, out loud, to a working crew.

"It is," said Purnell.

"That's a traffic light."

"He's off," said Purnell, delighted, to Cottle, who did not react in any way. Abe leaned over the side with both hands on the rail and put his whole face nearly in the water, and he was grinning so hard it hurt his cheeks, and he did not care in the slightest what any of them thought about it. There was a sign on the corner. He could nearly read it. Three letters and then the weed, and the letters were in a shape somebody had chosen, a hundred and something years ago, because they thought it looked nice.

People had walked down there. People had come out of that door with a bag of shopping and complained about the weather and gone home. Amrit had read the whole thing off eleven cards in a flat voice and the class had gone to sleep. Abe wanted to go back to Wednesday and shake all of them.

"Four hundred and twenty streets," he said. Dobbs looked at him, and then went back to the water.

"Longmarket's the wide one," he said.

"We're not going near it. Bring your pole in, you'll lose it." The work turned out to be simple and horrible, which Sefton had told him and he hadn't believed. You go along the roof lines with a hook pole. You find what the tide has moved since last week. You get it up, and if it will not come up you mark it, and if it comes up wrong you let go of it and get your hands back. It was cold enough to get into his teeth by half past seven. Everything weighed twice what it looked like.

Purnell talked the entire time, mostly about a boat with a fridge in it, and Cottle said one word an hour and it was usually "left." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. And Abe was good at it. He was not clever at it. He was slow and he did everything twice and Cottle had to take a line off him and redo it without saying anything. But he was strong, and by the middle of the morning he still wasn't tired.

After four hours Purnell stopped asking him if he wanted a rest. The real thing came at nine. The wind swung early, so Mullen's hip was a liar, and the water went from flat to shoving in about ten minutes. Everybody in the punt got shorter and wider. Abe went over the side into three feet of moving water to walk a line around a chimney stack, because somebody had to, and Purnell was already telling him which way to fall. He didn't fall. The water came at him hard from the left and he stood in it and it went past.

He walked the line round, and came back, and got in, and it had honestly not occurred to him to fall over. Nobody clapped. Purnell said "all right" in a different voice from the one she'd been using all morning, and Dobbs looked at him properly, which he had not done at six o'clock. Abe sat down on the thwart with his hands going numb and worked something out. His father's book had a whole chapter on standing in water. Page thirty one, with a diagram of a man at an angle.

Abe had read it nine or ten times and skipped the diagram every time. He'd been eighteen and in a hurry, and there was no water in his yard. The build his father had drawn on that page was made for exactly this work. It was the wrong road for the life Abe wanted and exactly the right one for a Sunday on the water. So on a Sunday he was doing his father's work with his father's build, and every other day of the week he was trying to become something his father never got to be.

Abe could not make the two of them fit together. Then Purnell got a tin out from under her seat, and there was a whole meal in it wrapped in paper, the sort of thing a person packs the night before. Fenn had one too. Cottle ate standing up. Abe had a heel of bread in his coat pocket, because that was what the apartment had on Saturday night and he wasn't going to be the one who took more of it. He ate it with his back to the rail so nobody had to watch how fast.

"Sefton," said Purnell, without looking up.

"Give the school one half of that."

"He's all right."

"He's not all right, he's been pulling since six on a heel of bread. Give him half of it." Sefton handed it over and went back to his slate. Nobody in that boat watched him eat it. The puller came up at about eleven. Cottle said "Puller," flatly, the way he'd have said a bus was late. Then he took two steps back from the rail and everybody stopped what they were doing. It came out from under a collapsed roof about four meters off.

Abe only ever saw parts of it: a long gray back, a great deal of arm, and something that got hold of the punt's stern line and pulled. The boat went round hard. Purnell went down on one knee and stayed there. Cottle grabbed the far rail.

"Line," said Dobbs. Abe already had it. He got both hands on the stern line and set his feet on a wet plank in a boat that was being dragged sideways. Then he found out what he had hold of. The rope tore out through his fists before he could shut them, and it took the skin off both palms on the way past. His boots slid down the wet plank until his heels hit the bench behind them and stopped, because there wasn't anywhere else for them to go.

He'd walked three sacks across a shed the morning before and put them down without breathing hard. Nothing he had was enough for this. His arms went straight and stayed straight. There was nothing else they could do. Every hour he'd trained since October was in his two hands, and the rope was still going out. Page thirty one. The diagram he had skipped every time.

So Abe stopped trying to pull and got his weight back over his heels instead, and let the thing haul on his whole body the way the wind had hauled on it at nine o'clock. The line stopped going out. Then it pulled again, and that pull was a worse one, because now the thing on the end of the rope knew he was there. The stern swung again, further this time. Purnell was saying his name somewhere behind his left ear, and Abe heard it and could not spare anything to answer her with.

Behind him, Dobbs came up the punt with a boat hook, and he did not hurry. Abe heard every step of it. There were nine, and he counted all nine, and wanted every one of them to be quicker than it was. Something knocked the hull under his boot, once, from the outside. Then there was a sound like somebody hitting a mattress with a spade. Twice. Then a lot of water, and then no more pulling on the line.

"Let go," said Dobbs. Abe let go. His hands took a while about it. Purnell got up and dusted her knee off. Cottle went back to what he'd been doing before, exactly where he'd been doing it, as if somebody had pressed a button.

"Small one," Purnell said.

"They come up in the wind. You'll get bored of them."

"Was that dangerous?"

"That one? No." She thought about it and looked at him properly.

"Nine years I've worked this water. Nothing in it has ever laid a finger on me." She picked her pole back up.

"The water put me in the hospital in August." Dobbs stowed the boat hook and dipped his hands over the side to wash them.

"Good hold," he said. They came in at four with the light going and the wind still in the wrong quarter. The wind-down happened on the boards, and it was mostly complaining. Cottle sat on a bollard and drank tea and said nothing. Purnell asked Dobbs how deep the cut past the third roof was running.

"Deeper than last week," said Dobbs.

"I looked at it this morning." Abe looked up when he said it. He'd looked at that cut this morning too, from the end of the boards, for two hours. Purnell told the story of the puller twice, and it got bigger both times.

"Four meters of arm on it," she said, to two men off crew six who hadn't been there.

"And the school one's got both hands on that line before anybody's said anything. Never moved. Dobbs is walking up the boat with the hook and the boy's just stood there holding a monster on a rope."

"I was going to fall in," said Abe.

"He wasn't going to fall in," said Purnell. Dobbs was leaning on the shed wall with his jar, out of the wind. He let her get to the end of it, and then he said something to Abe without taking his eyes off the water.

"Don't get ideas off that," he said.

"I'm layer eight. Twenty years out here, layer eight." Nobody in the shed reacted at all, because everybody in the shed already knew.

"Twenty years of it," he said. Then he took the tide sheet off the wall and went inside, and Fenn came out and paid everybody. Forty five marks. Abe stood on the boards with them in his hand and did not want to put them away yet. Riddell paid fourteen marks a shift and Abe had never thought that was mean. One day. Two of these a weekend, near enough, and the tin over the kettle stopped being a thing that happened to Peg.

He got home at half past five smelling like the inside of a rope, and June made him take his coat off outside the door, and then she sat him down and collected. He gave her all of it. The traffic light first, because that was the part he'd been carrying up the Corn Road for an hour. She made him do it twice. Then she stopped talking and looked at the water instead.

"Mom used to say that," said June.

"About it being pretty. She'd say it and then she'd go all quiet and say she shouldn't have said it." Abe hadn't known that. He liked knowing it. He did the bad bits too. The cold, and the puller, and the boat going round. While he was telling it she took hold of his wrist and turned his hand over, and then the other one. She looked at both palms and put them back down and did not say one word about them.

"You held a rope while a grown man killed a thing with a stick," said June.

"That's what happened."

"Right," she said. She put her book face down on the arm of the chair.

"I'm proud of you. Don't look pleased yet, I'm not done. I've been sitting here since six. Proud. Then furious. Then proud again. It keeps swapping over and I want it to stop." Late that night, in a stopped yard, he checked all of it at once.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 4 Foundation: 2, 061 / 2500 (Body Layer 5) Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind Layer 3 Foundation: 1, 183 / 1600 (Mind Layer 4) Meditation · Novice Lv 2 (104 / 200) Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 6 (3, 140 / 7200) Study · Novice Lv 7 (470 / 2450) Swordsmanship · Novice Lv 9 (4, 038 / 4, 050) Ten hours of hauling in that, and about a minute and a half of holding a rope with something on the end of it. And the minute and a half had done as much as the last two hours of the day had, or near enough.

He couldn't prove it. He'd been counting rough all day and he'd bet the tin on it anyway. The board was eight days off. He'd spent one of them on a boat, and the boat had moved his numbers further than the yard would have. The sword sat where it had sat since Tuesday, twelve points short, in a yard with a stopped sky over it. He'd sent Croft one line on Saturday night. Sundays are gone, I'm on the water. Croft had written back inside a minute. Saturdays then. Two o'clock.

Don't be late, I've reorganized my entire life. Abe put the practice blade back on the wall and stood in the cold and thought about a thing with a very long arm.