Viewpoint: Vic
Owen met them at the slip, ran his thumb along the two pale furrows in his boat’s paint, and said he would rather have her back scratched than not at all, and that he would hold Vic to filling them.
They ate in Priya’s kitchen. When Kate said where they meant to go next, Priya put down the bread knife.
‘Then you’ll be back on Saturday. Five o’clock, before Owen’s big tide. Promise me, or I’ll send him after you in a boat with one arm.’
‘Saturday,’ Vic said. ‘Five.’
Gordon called from his window to ask whether he could come too. Kate said not yet. By mid-afternoon of the same Tuesday they had packed bedding and were on the high road, a long way above the barred stair.
By the time they reached the changing recess, Vic had begun to hope Kate had copied the entrance wrongly. He could see the first few steps through the reflection beneath the stone lintel, but the water touched the roof beyond them, leaving no gap through which he could imagine keeping his head. The fixed line ran down beside the steps and disappeared into the dark. Kate stood beside him with her paper folded back to the little figure at the ledge, comparing it with what lay in front of them.
‘There really isn’t a bit above it,’ Kate said. ‘I kept thinking it would look different when we got here.’
So had he. Small ripples broke against the stone.
Four days had seemed a generous amount of time in Priya’s kitchen. Now he looked from the submerged entrance to the bench beside it, where the figure she had copied was carved into the wall. It wore a band round its neck.
Under two wooden covers lay the bands themselves, each in a fitted wrap with two spare cartridges: hinged bronze with white ceramic contacts, and a hollow beside the latch worn comfortable by other thumbs.
‘That looks unpleasant,’ Kate said.
‘It opens easily enough, at least.’
‘So does a mousetrap.’
He fitted it against his lower neck. When he swallowed, its sprung contacts moved with him.
‘It says I can breathe down there. With this round my neck.’
Kate looked from his neck to the strip of water under the lintel, then lifted the smaller collar from its wrap. She fitted it round her neck and waited, keeping one hand on the latch.
‘Mine too,’ she said, and read enough aloud for him to hear that the offers agreed. A binding took a night’s sleep to settle, the way glue took a night to cure; neither collar would work until then.
Kate undid her latch. ‘We could try them where there’s no roof.’
Outside the recess, a line followed a submerged ledge round an open basin and back to the steps. Someone had provided a place to practise, with clear water above it if they needed to come up.
‘We’ll stay here and try them tomorrow,’ Kate said. ‘After we’ve slept.’
At the dry end of the recess, a door sheltered a raised floor large enough for their bedrolls. Vic put his bag down there, glad to take its weight off his shoulders, while Kate laid her collar in its wrap on the bench with the latch open.
‘I want to try mine,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying I’ll go through.’
Vic nodded and laid his collar beside hers.
The sun was low when Kate called him to the mouth of the recess. Beyond the inlet the coast climbed away from the sea, and the last light lay along its highest slope.
‘It’s doing it again.’
High on the slope, far beyond anything the folio had drawn, the white fleck from the island went dark and came back. One long dark, two short, and the long white again. Kate counted under her breath until it repeated, and it did, in the same order.
‘Something loose in the wind?’ Vic said.
‘The wind doesn’t count.’ She had her copy out and was adding strokes beneath the square she had drawn on the landing. ‘Somebody’s doing that on purpose. Up there, on its own.’
They watched until the slope went grey and the fleck with it. Vic could not have said how far away it was, only that nothing he had seen of the road went near it.
‘I want to know who,’ Kate said, and went back in to her collar.
That evening Vic sat on the raised floor with the station glass across his knees, working grit out of its grip. Kate pulled her blanket clear of his boots and opened her paperback.
‘What is it?’ he asked, working a grain free with his thumbnail.
‘You asked me that at the bakery. And whether it was any good, before you ask again.’ She turned the cover towards him. ‘You could try reading some of it.’
‘Let me finish this first. There’s only a little left in the hinge.’
She kept the book on her knee while he brushed out the last grit and locked the grip open. An offer appeared.
‘Sounding Glass,’ he said. ‘I’d been calling it the station glass. I nearly got it right.’ He was already choosing stones beside the bench to try it on.
‘How much of the passage would that show you?’ she asked. ‘Could you tell where it comes out?’
‘No, it doesn’t reach far enough. But if the ledge goes on beyond the light, I might be able to follow it along the wall.’
There was room for both bindings. They laid the instruments beside their bedding for sleep to finish the work.
‘So,’ Kate said, without looking up from her page. ‘A Vocation is what you do. A skill is a trick inside it. A binding is something you’ve married. Effort is what you pay out of your own pocket, and charge is what the things run on.’
‘That’s better than anything it’s told me.’
‘I’m writing it in the back of the book.’
She did, and then held the paperback out to him. ‘Now will you read some?’
He took the book and opened it at the bus ticket someone had left a third of the way through. The ticket was soft at the folds, with print he could no longer quite read; he put it carefully back and began at the first page. Beside him Kate was eating the bread he had set aside for himself. By the time he noticed how little was left, she had buttered the last piece and put it into his hand.
‘You’ve turned four pages,’ she said. ‘I take it that’s a recommendation?’
‘He’s gone back for the dog. I was hoping he’d have more sense.’
‘You’d have gone back before him.’
‘Yes. I’m objecting to how much I want him to.’
She settled against her rolled coat while he finished the scene, letting him keep the book until he knew what happened. When he passed it back, she found her place without needing the ticket and drew the lamp a little closer. Its light reached the paper and the edge of her blanket, leaving the steps beyond the bench in shadow. Vic could hear water moving against them whenever she stopped turning pages.
‘Martin would have liked telling me what they should have brought,’ she said. ‘He’d have had something to say about us sleeping here, too.’
Vic glanced at their bedding, wondering what Martin would have made of the water just beyond the door.
‘He asked me twice about Saturday,’ Kate went on, pressing the bus ticket flat. ‘I said yes both times. Then when I cancelled, he said he’d put some in the freezer.’
Vic rested the last of the bread on its cloth. He could picture a covered plate in Martin’s kitchen, although he had never been there and did not know what the room looked like.
‘I keep wondering whether he ate any of it.’
Helen kept things for him too, pushing them to the back of the fridge so nobody else would take them. He had often let her remind him twice before coming round, and even then she would have to ask whether he had seen what was behind the milk.
‘I could have been there,’ Kate said.
‘You couldn’t have known.’
‘I know that.’
He stopped. After a little while she closed the book and put it by her shoes.
‘If there are people up there, I want to ask them about messages before you find a workshop.’
‘I’ll bring the book out first. The one with the names in it,’ he added as she looked at him. ‘I did mean that one.’
She smiled, and he passed her the exercise book so she could put it in the inner dry bag herself. He turned the lamp off. In the dark, she asked him to move his boots again.
He moved them, and lay listening to her breathe. Eight years. They had been friends through two of her jobs and one of his, a flat move and a funeral, and he had never been sure that friends was the whole of it, and had never once been brave enough to ask.
Before dawn on Wednesday, Kate’s alarm brought Vic upright before he remembered the low roof. He had slept through every sound from the water, only to wake to the same noise she used for work. While she felt through her bag for the phone, he lowered himself onto his coat again and waited for the ringing to stop.
‘Very effective,’ he said.
Kate sat up with a hand over her eyes. ‘Wait. Mine’s changed.’
He lowered the lamp while she read aloud.
‘It counted my drawing. Both drawings.’ Her smile widened as she read on. ‘I thought it was only keeping a record, but it’s raised Perception. And I can choose Nerve for the free point.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘With all that water outside? I’d like to find out what it does.’ She made her choice, then looked towards the opening. ‘Still frightened. I was rather hoping it would take care of that. More effort, too, and still nothing to spend it on. If somebody lives up there, I’m asking how they got theirs.’
When he reached for the Glass, its grip settled into his hand with a familiarity it had lacked the night before. His collar fitted as comfortably when he turned his head to fasten it; both bindings had taken while they slept. He lifted the Glass towards the lamp, and a new line appeared before he could try it against the wall.
‘The lamp belongs with these. We’ve been carrying a set.’ He lifted it, delighted, turning the clogged seat towards her.
A set. Two pieces of three, and already the Glass reached further than either piece should. He thought of the armour under its cloth at the Arsenal, three pieces verified of a set he knew ran to nearly twenty, and what a whole one might do when it woke.
Kate leaned forward. ‘Can you get the lamp working with them, then?’
‘I’d need a bench to clear this properly. But the other two already give the Glass more reach.’ Kate was folding her blanket. He put the Glass into its sleeve and reached for his towel.
Sitting on the first submerged step, Vic kept trying to take a breath large enough to begin. Each attempt made the next seem smaller.
Their rule was simple: nobody went under the lintel, from either side, without enough charge in their collar for three crossings.
Kate caught his forearm before he could reach for the line. ‘If I do that, stop. Even if you think you know why, just wait for me.’
‘All right.’ They rehearsed the signal too: a closed hand, and an acknowledgement before moving again.
Vic found the breathing switch with his thumb and waited until Kate nodded before lowering his face.
Cold closed over his ears. He held the air he had brought down, listening to his pulse, Kate’s sleeve at the edge of his vision. He let a little breath go, then tried to draw it back.
His chest filled.
For a moment he could do nothing but repeat it. The air at his mouth felt confined, as though he had leaned close to a narrow opening, and tasted faintly of metal. Warmth brushed his upper lip as he breathed out.
Kate touched his sleeve and pointed to the practice line, and they went round it together. She gave the stop signal once, and he waited, and she went on. By the third lap his fingers were so clumsy with cold that he had to look to be sure he had closed his hand.
On the upper step he switched his collar off and sat with his teeth knocking together. When they were warm again, they fitted the fresh cartridges and left them to settle.
‘I hated waiting for the first breath,’ she said. ‘I knew I had to let the air out, but I kept thinking I might need it.’
‘So did I.’ He looked at the lintel, and back at her. ‘Do you want to go?’
‘Yes. It worked, even when I was frightened.’ She looked down at the folded route sheet. ‘I want to see those trees.’
She handed him her jacket for the dry bundle and knelt to take the line.
As Vic passed beneath the lintel, the surface above his head gave way to stone. He kept his left hand on the line, with Kate at his right shoulder as she had been during the tests. Beyond the next fixing and the pale ledge below it, there was no daylight. He drew more air than he needed. The collar still worked under a roof.
The sealed bundle lifted against his shoulders. At a projecting stone the ledge narrowed, forcing him to draw his feet together before pushing along the line. The water resisted each movement. The urge to hurry made him clumsy, and the clumsiness made him grip harder.
Beyond the projection the lamp found nothing but water, and the line went slack in his hand.
He pulled, and it came to him, a loose wet length of it, floating. Somewhere ahead in the dark its next fixing had torn out of the wall. Behind him Kate’s hand clamped on the same line and felt it give, and he heard her breath go ragged through the water.
There was no surface to rise to. There was only the ledge under his feet, the dark ahead, and a line that went nowhere. He drew the Glass from its sleeve, put it against the wall and paid for it.
For half a minute he could trace the worked stone beyond the lamp’s reach. The ledge continued for the Glass’s full five metres. Someone had stood along this wall to cut it, leaving room to turn a shoulder and draw an elbow back, and at the very end of the trace, where the stone held a bronze eye, a stub of old line still hung from it. The fixing had not torn. Only the line had worn through.
He gathered the slack in his fist and went along the ledge by feel to the eye, five paces that took longer than the whole crossing so far. He knotted the loose end through it blind, a hitch he had tied a thousand times round crates and never once with his life in it, and hauled. The line came taut. Behind him, through the water, he felt Kate feel it.
Kate’s hand closed on his forearm.
Vic stopped.
Her other hand stayed on the guide line while she looked up at the roof, where a fringe of weed moved beneath a joint. Her grip tightened on his arm, pressing the wet sleeve against his skin. He could hear his own breathing strangely through the water, but nothing that told him how she was managing hers.
He wanted to turn the lamp towards her face. She would see him nod; he could point ahead and show her that the ledge went on. But the beam would leave their hands and the line. He kept it where they had practised and waited.
Her boots lifted from the stone. She drew her knees in and set them down again, searching until both soles rested. Vic kept his arm loose beneath her hand. His bundle tugged upwards, and he lowered one shoulder to stop it pressing against the roof.
When she looked back, he turned towards the entrance too. It was still visible, a pale opening much smaller than he had expected. If she wanted to return, he could follow her. They stayed where they were, with cold finding the gap at his wrist beneath her fingers.
Kate turned towards the next fixing in the beam. Her hand opened. She gave the acknowledgement, shifted her grip forward and moved.
He followed her pace.
At the bend the lamp ceased to reach the roof, and for a moment Vic thought the passage had deepened. Then he saw the line rising towards a flat patch of daylight. Kate turned towards it at the same time, though neither of them hurried until they reached the first step and could feel the ledge climbing beneath their feet. His mouth came clear of the water, and the next breath tasted of stone and the open recess. He followed Kate onto the dry ledge, careful of the weight returning to his legs as she switched her collar off.
She covered her head with the towel from her bundle while he checked their time.
‘Six minutes,’ he said. ‘That was with the stop, too.’
‘I know. Give me a moment.’
At the bend, where the passage dipped lowest, he had felt the water press in his ears. Three metres, he guessed, perhaps a little more, and the collar was good for four. Owen’s springs had four more days to run.
He sat beside her, his legs trembling now they were out. Beyond the recess a stair rose into daylight, with a grey-leaved plant growing over the coping. Water gathered at one pointed tip until a drop fell, and he watched for the next one while she stayed beneath the towel. They had come out where the drawing said they would. He could look up the stair for as long as he liked.
Kate lowered the towel and looked back towards the water.
‘I wasn’t sure whether you wanted to go back,’ he said.
‘Neither was I, for a while. Thank you for stopping.’
He nodded and reached for the dry clothes while she drew the towel down one arm.
Kate’s missing sock turned up inside his towel. He passed it across, and they sat with their feet tucked beneath their blankets until they were warm.
Above the recess, the road climbed between retaining walls, its bends following the shape Kate had copied. At the first broad seat Vic stopped pretending he was only waiting for her and sat down. She passed him the water.
‘It looks flatter in the book,’ he said.
‘You wanted a book made of metal. There had to be a disadvantage.’
By early afternoon the retaining walls had fallen away into planted terraces, where rows of trees followed narrow water channels up the slope. Vic noticed a piece of cloth tied round a broken branch and, higher up, washing spread across a rail. He stopped with one hand still on his bag strap, looking for the roof that went with it.
The three arches stood below the houses. A man carried a long bundle through the middle one, bending sideways to keep its end off the ground. Vic watched him shift it and keep walking.
Kate touched Vic’s sleeve. ‘People. We actually found them.’
He had imagined calling from an empty doorway again. Here somebody was already coming towards them, a woman in a faded blue wrap carrying a basket against her hip. She stopped by a garden gate and looked at their bundles, and Kate raised her hand.
The woman answered at once. Kate tried hello, then said it more slowly; the reply came too quickly for Vic to separate a word.
‘Sorry,’ he said, opening his hands. ‘We don’t understand.’
She looked past them down the road, then pointed towards the arches. As they turned, she called them back and put her basket on the wall, indicating the empty space beside it before going into the house.
‘I hope that means sit down,’ Kate said, lowering herself beside the basket. ‘If she wants us somewhere else, I’ll move when she comes back.’
Vic joined her, glad to let someone else decide where they should go next.
The woman returned with a jug and three thick clay bowls. Steam rose as she poured. She blew across her own drink and offered them the others.
Vic took a cautious mouthful, expecting water until the sharpness made his mouth fill. A little sweetness followed, and he drank again before lowering the bowl enough to thank her. The heat travelled down into him, reaching places the climb had not warmed. Beside Kate’s shoes, the basket held small yellow fruit, some split along their skins; he looked from those to his drink and wondered whether she had made it from them.
‘Oh, thank you,’ Kate said.
The woman watched her take a second mouthful, nodded and sat beside her. Down by the arches the man had set his bundle against a wall. Somebody in an apron was pointing at its end and talking loudly. Their host called down to him; whatever he shouted back made her laugh.
Kate laughed too. Vic smiled before he had looked to see why. The woman shook her head at the man and took another drink.
Kate put her route sheet on her knees. The woman recognised something in it at once, touched a crooked little square and pointed to her own house. Kate touched her chest. ‘Kate. This is Vic.’
Kate brought out the exercise book.
‘We’re looking for people,’ Kate said.
She opened it at Martin’s name. Beneath it she drew herself beside a taller figure, pointed to herself and then to the empty place on the wall. The woman put her bowl down. Kate said Martin’s name slowly.
Their host looked along the road they had climbed. She asked something, one hand lifted towards the water, and Kate nodded before stopping herself.
‘I don’t know what I’ve just agreed to.’
Vic turned to Helen’s entry and drew himself with his sister beside him. Her figure came out looking like a child. He could not even draw Helen recognisably.
Kate added an envelope and offered the book. ‘We want to send a question.’
The woman called down to the man by the arches. He shook his head and carried his bundle through a doorway.
Kate lowered the book. ‘Was that about this?’
Vic could not tell her.
The woman turned back and noticed the bronze beneath Vic’s open shirt collar. Her gaze stopped there. She touched two fingers to her own neck and spoke, repeating a short sound he tried unsuccessfully to say back.
He brought out the partly used cartridge. ‘Someone who works on these?’
She held out her hand. He gave it to her, and she turned the gauge towards herself. This time her gesture was precise: past the arches, along the terrace, to a roof projecting above an open workyard. She pointed at the cartridge again before handing it back.
Kate looked towards the roof. ‘We could take the book there. Whoever works on those must see people coming through.’
‘We can ask about both,’ he said, putting the cartridge beside the open book.
She had recognised the collar. They had a workyard to try, even if Vic still had no better way to explain their question.
Kate broke their bread and offered her a piece. She accepted, pulled it apart to look inside, then tasted a corner. A crumb caught on her wrap. She picked it off and ate that too, nodding towards Kate as though answering a question. Kate offered her the rest of the piece.
By the time they had finished the bread, light was going off the upper terraces. Their host pointed to a lean-to where baskets stood beneath a slate roof, then rested her cheek against her folded hands.
‘I’d like to stay,’ Kate said. ‘We could try the workyard in the morning, when we’ve had some sleep.’
‘So would I.’ He looked up at their host and thanked her, pointing towards the lean-to before lifting his bundle. This time he thought they had understood each other.
The lean-to smelled of the yellow fruit. Their host brought two thick blankets that had been somebody else’s for a long time, and a lamp of her own, smaller than theirs, and left them with a hand raised at the door.
Vic went out once more before it was fully dark, to look at the way they had come. From the woman’s wall the terraces fell away to the arches, and beyond the arches lay a square he had not seen from the road, where lamps were being lit in the low stone buildings around it.
Between two of them stood something with a windscreen.
The glass reflected a tiled roof and the last of the sky. Its wipers had stopped halfway through their sweep. Vic’s hand tightened on the coping as he tried to see the rest of the vehicle.
‘Kate.’
She came out with the blanket round her shoulders and followed his hand. For a moment they stood looking together.
‘It’s got a number plate,’ she said.
