The Listening Tide

The tide came in at a quarter past four, and Nell heard it before she saw it, the way you hear a cat on the stairs before it reaches the door.

It was thinking about the harbour wall. It usually was. Tonight the thought had a shape to it, long and patient and faintly amused, like an old woman watching children build a sandcastle in the wrong place.

Not yet, the tide thought. But soon.

Nell pressed her palms flat against the cold stone of the quay and made herself breathe the way her father had taught her: in for the swell, out for the ebb, nothing on her face for anyone to read. Three fishing boats were tying up below her. A customs officer in a blue coat was counting crates. Nobody looked at the girl on the steps, because there was nothing to see. That was the whole trick of it, and the whole danger.

In Saltglass they drowned tidewrights. They did it on the first morning of every month, at slack water, from the end of the long pier, and people brought their children to watch.

The tide knew. Nell sometimes thought it was the only thing in the city that was sorry about it.

She stood, brushed the salt from her skirt, and walked home up Ropewalk Hill with her basket of mussels and her ordinary face. The lamps were lit in the windows of the chandlery. Her father would be at the back table with his charts, pretending to mend nets, listening as she listened, and between them they would say nothing about the shape in the water.

But when she turned the corner into Marrow Lane, the shop door was open, and the lamps were out, and there were wet bootprints on the step that were far too large to be his.