Water I can read. People take me longer.
Give me a river and a staff gauge and I’ll tell you what it did last night and what it means to do by morning; I’ve made a living at it for nineteen years, the last seven weeks of them on the North Yorkshire coast, where the becks run brown and fast off the high ground in a hurry to reach the sea. What I could not tell you, standing at the back of a pub called the Sloop on Halloween with a glass of cider I hadn’t wanted, was what any of these people meant by anything.
“This is Ruth,” Tamsin had said when we came in, steering me by the elbow like a trolley with a stiff wheel. “Ruth Ellery. My lodger. She measures rivers. Be nice.” They had been nice. They’d also gone on talking over my head about people I didn’t know and a night I didn’t understand. I was forty-one, newly separated, seven weeks into a year I had promised myself I would spend entirely on my own, and the only person in the room who hadn’t been at Leeds with everybody else.
The Hunt, Tamsin had explained on the walk down, was simple. Names went into a hat at nine. Pairs came out. Each pair got an envelope and a route through the town after dark, with clues in her capitals along the way, and the first pair back to the bandstand on the front by midnight with the right answer word won a carved swede. You photographed every card and left it where it was. “It’s the last one,” she’d said, and then, quite fast, “so you might as well see it,” and I had understood that she was being kind to me and also that she needed me there for some reason of her own.
At nine she stood by the fire to draw. The hat was an ancient black felt witch’s hat, and a small, precise woman called Sunita held it for her with both hands. The first pair out was Sunita herself and her husband, Pete, which nobody seemed to find surprising. Then two women, whose eyes went to each other across the room the way your eyes go to a plate you’ve just dropped, and who left within the minute without finishing their drinks. Then Tamsin dipped again and read, “Bryony Kinsella, and—” and looked at the slip again and smiled at it in a way I didn’t trust, “—Ruth Ellery.”
That was when I saw Sunita’s hand.
Tamsin had turned to the room to read our names. Sunita, holding the hat, took a folded slip of paper from the cuff of her cardigan and let it fall in among the others, neat as posting a letter, and settled the hat against her hip again. Nobody else seemed to be watching. Everyone was looking at Bryony, who had put both fists in the air and shouted, “The NEW ONE. Yes. I’ll take her,” and was coming across the room towards me. We were out of the door before the hat was empty.
I assumed it was part of the game.
Bryony cooked at the Sloop. She had rolled her sleeves up past the elbow for the draw and her forearms were a map of small white burns, oven-door and splatter, and she talked the way she presumably cooked, with everything on at once. By the time we reached the harbour she had told me that she was thirty-eight, that she had known Tamsin since the first week of their first year, that she had been on the losing side of seventeen Hunts, and that she had watched me through the kitchen hatch eating a toastie alone at the end of the bar every Thursday since September and had wondered whether I was sad or just reading.
“Reading,” I said.
“Liar,” she said comfortably, and tore our envelope open on the harbour wall.
It took us an hour and three cards to get out of the town. The first sent us to the fish quay; the second to the noticeboard outside the lifeboat house, which sent us back the way we had come; the third was taped under a bench on the front with a brass plaque to someone who had LOVED THIS VIEW, and Bryony read it aloud with her face lit blue by her phone.
FOLLOW THE WATER UPHILL UNTIL IT ARGUES WITH YOU.
“Hob Mill,” she said at once. “Up the beck. It’s a museum. I do the teas on open days.” She produced a key from her coat pocket and dangled it. “She gave me this last week. Said I might want it. That woman plans a draw like a heist.”
The path up Skelby Beck runs through a narrow wooded valley, steep on both sides, where the streetlights stop after the first bend and the dark comes down like a lid. Bryony had a torch. I had my phone, which lost its signal at the second bend, as I’d known it would, because I had walked this beck in daylight in my second week to find the gauge and had stood looking at the single bar on my screen and thinking, well, nobody will ring you here.
I heard the water before I saw it.
It had rained on the moor for most of the week. At six o’clock the gauge below the mill had read one point three metres; I knew because I had checked it on my phone in the pub toilets, the way other people check the football. Down here in the dark the beck was louder than one point three. It had a deep, steady roar under the surface noise, a sound with weight in it, the sound of a lot of water going somewhere in a hurry.
The gauge board stood in the shallows below the mill, white, marked off in black. I made Bryony hold the torch on it while I read it, and then read it again, because the first time I didn’t like it.
“One point five two,” I said.
“Is that bad?”
“It’s twenty-two centimetres in four and a half hours. It’s coming up faster than they forecast.” I wrote it down in the yellow notebook I carry for readings, from habit, with the torch beam shaking slightly on the page. “It’s interesting,” I said, and she laughed and said I was going to fit in fine.
The mill stood where the valley pinched, a tall grey stone building between the hillside and the beck. The millrace came along the valley side towards it in a stone channel, fast and smooth, ran under a narrow wooden footbridge and on through an iron grille set across it to keep branches off the wheel, and a few metres further on dropped through an iron sluice gate onto the wheel itself: a black wooden wheel twice my height in a pit of black stone. On open days the volunteers set it turning for the visitors and stopped it again at four.
It was turning now.
We both stopped on the path. In the torchlight the wheel came up out of the dark and went down into it again, slow and enormous, its paddles streaming, its axle groaning on every turn like something old being made to walk. Water sheeted off it into the tailrace below in a white noise that filled the whole valley.
“That’s not right,” Bryony said, and it was the quietest she’d been all night. “They stop it at four. There’s a sign. The trust chairman does it himself.”
“The gate might not be seating,” I said. “When the race is this high, a gate that isn’t shut properly lets enough through to turn it.” It was true. It was very probably what had happened. Knowing that didn’t stop the skin on my back from crawling while the great wheel turned and turned with nobody there to make it.
Tamsin’s next card was on the mill door. THE WHEEL ONLY DOES WHAT IT’S TOLD. ASK WHO TELLS IT. We photographed it. Bryony unlocked the door, and we went in out of the roar into a different noise, a deep wooden grinding that came up through the floorboards from the wheel shaft, and the smell of flour dust and cold machinery and old apples.
“The sluice,” I said. “The gate tells the wheel.”
“Then it’s out there.” Bryony hauled open the loading door, and the wind and the water noise came in together. It gave onto a little stone yard at the edge of the race. The sluice control stood at the far corner of the yard, a cast-iron wheel on a post above the gate. A little upstream the footbridge crossed the race, and something white was tied to its rail with garden twine, flapping. Tamsin’s last card.
And on the footbridge, a light.
Someone was coming onto the bridge from the far bank, a dark shape in a long coat with a light held out in front of them. I took it for a bike lamp until it came closer and I saw the teeth: a turnip, hollowed and cut into a grin, lit orange from inside, bobbing over the black water. The figure reached the middle of the bridge and stopped, and the face turned to the open loading door, where Bryony and I stood with our one torch. It stayed turned. I counted, because I couldn’t do anything else. Four seconds. Five.
Then it went back the way it had come and into the trees on the far bank, and the light went out among them, and there was only the roar. My phone had no signal and still knew the time: 22:47.
“Bryony,” I said. “Who else is out tonight?”
“Us.” Her voice was thin. “The Lowes always get the harbour. Fran and Nadia’ll have the church; Nadia’s got the tower key. That’s everyone except—” She stopped. “Owen,” she said. “Owen’s late. But Owen wouldn’t— He’d say hello. He’d shout.”
There was another card on the footbridge.
We found it when we went out onto the bridge for Tamsin’s. It was tucked into a crack in the handrail where the figure had stopped. The writing was slanting and joined-up, in black ink, nothing like Tamsin’s capitals, and it said, Seventeen Hallowe’ens. I kept every one. Under that, smaller: Next: where the first one ended.
“Okay,” Bryony said. “Okay. That’s creepy as hell.”
“Where did the first one end?”
“The first Hunt? The pier. We were second-years. Tamsin taped the last card on the end of the pier, and when we got there it was gone. The wind must have had it. Nobody finished. Nobody won.” She looked down the valley as if she could see the sea from here. “She still goes funny about it. And the pier’s been shut for years.”
She photographed the card and tucked it back. Rules.
Tamsin’s own card was tied to the downstream rail a little further along, and the wind had turned it to face the race. You had to lean out to read it. Bryony handed me the torch, put one hand on the post and leaned out over the rail to turn it, and her boot went.
The edge boards were green with a year’s slime and slick with spray. Her foot shot out from under her and she went down on her hip and under the rail in one movement and into the race with a splash I barely heard over the water. Her fist closed on the card as she went; I saw the twine snap.
Everything I know about moving water arrived at once. A race is a channel built to be fast. The water in it was coming off a beck in spate, at eight or nine degrees, and a few metres below the bridge it ran through the iron grille, and beyond the grille were the open gate and the turning wheel. Cold water takes your breath before it takes anything else. Nineteen years of safety briefings came back in a single line, in a trainer’s bored voice: Don’t go in after them. You’ll make two.
I jammed the torch into the rail so it pointed at the water.
“FLOAT!” I was shouting before I’d decided to. “On your back! Face up, don’t fight it!”
She surfaced, gasping, and tipped back, arms out. Good. Good woman. The current took her down the race on her back and slammed her against the grille, and held her there. I saw the water pile up against her chest, saw her grab the bars one-handed, saw her head go back to keep her face out of it. The grille was saving her from the wheel. The weight of the whole race was pinning her to it.
“Hold on! Hold the bars, keep your face up!” I ran for the sluice.
The wheel on the post was stiff. Of course it was stiff; it was iron and it was old and it was wet. I put my whole weight on the rim and it gave a quarter turn and stuck, and I braced a boot against the post and hauled, and something in my shoulder made a noise, and the iron rim tore at my palms, and the wheel turned, and turned, and I felt through my hands the gate grinding down into the water. The roar changed pitch. The race above the gate began to back up and spill sideways over the low overflow wall into the beck, and the current along it went slack, and below me the great wheel slowed. It groaned. It turned once more, a paddle rising out of the dark, streaming water, and stopped.
There was a lifebuoy on the mill wall in a red box. I don’t remember getting it out. I remember throwing it beyond her, the way they teach you, so that the line came down across her shoulders. I remember her arm hooking through the ring, and the line in my torn hands as I walked her along the slack water to the iron ladder in the race wall. She came up it and over the top on her hands and knees and lay on the stone with her cheek against it and coughed up the beck, and I knelt beside her and put my hand flat between her shoulder blades and felt her shaking, hard, right down her spine.
“Does it,” she said, between coughs, “does it still count, if I took the card?”
She was holding it in her fist, soaked to pulp. Through the mess I could just read Tamsin’s capitals: YOUR WORD IS WHATEVER STOPS THE WHEEL.
“Sluice,” I said. “It counts.”
She looked at the pulp in her hand and started to laugh and couldn’t stop, and the laugh turned into her teeth chattering so hard I could hear them. I fetched the torch from the bridge and got her inside.
The volunteers’ office was a room off the mill floor with a wood-burner, a kettle and a cupboard of fleeces that said FRIENDS OF HOB MILL across the back. Bryony knew where the matches were. I lit the stove. There was no signal, there was no one to ring, and so I did what the leaflet says, because I have read the leaflet, I have written a version of the leaflet: shelter, off with the wet clothes, wrap the person up, warm the middle of them and not the hands and feet, no hot water, no rubbing.
“Clothes,” I said.
“Buy me a drink first.” But her fingers wouldn’t work the zip of her coat, so I did it for her, my palms stinging, and then her jumper, which came off heavy as a drowned animal and showed a long raw graze across her shoulder where the grille had caught her, and her boots, and her jeans, which took both of us and some swearing. She stood in the firelight in her underwear with her arms wrapped round herself and her lips the wrong colour, and I wrapped her in two fleeces and a dust sheet and sat her on the bench in front of the stove and put the kettle on, and she shook, and shook, and held the mug of tea I made her in both hands without managing to drink it.
“You’re seeing a doctor tomorrow,” I said. “You swallowed half the beck.”
“Yes, miss.”
“Still cold,” she said through her teeth, ten minutes later. “Ruth. Still really cold.”
The leaflet had a line about body heat, too. I considered it for the time it took me to decide I didn’t care how it looked. I took off my own coat and jumper and sat down behind her on the bench in my vest and opened the dust sheet and the fleeces and got in with her, and pulled it all closed round both of us, and put my arms round her middle with my front against her back.
She was icy. It went through my vest like a hand. I held on.
For a while there was only the stove muttering and the water outside, quieter now the wheel had stopped, and her shaking, gradually, gradually, coming down. I could feel her ribs moving under my forearms. I could feel the exact moment the cold in her back stopped taking warmth out of me and started giving some back.
“You didn’t jump in,” she said.
“No.”
“Everyone in films jumps in.”
“Everyone in films is an idiot. Then there’s nobody left on the bank.” I put my chin on her shoulder. “You floated. You held on. You did exactly the right thing.”
“I was terrified.”
“So was I.” Then, because the room was small and warm and dark and she couldn’t see my face, I said the rest of it. “I left my marriage in April. Fourteen years. He was a good man, and somewhere along the way we’d turned into two people being polite to each other in a kitchen. And while I was leaving I finally said out loud a thing I’d known since I was nineteen and never told anyone, not even him. I’m bi. It wasn’t why I left. It was just the first true thing I’d said in years, and I liked how it sounded. So I took a job at the other end of the country and promised myself a year on my own, to find out who I am when nobody’s watching. And then Tamsin dragged me down a hill, and here I am.”
She didn’t answer straight away. Outside, the beck went on with its argument. Then she turned round inside the blankets, slowly, until she was facing me, her knees bumping mine, her hair dripping on my collarbone, and looked at me from a few inches away in the orange light.
“How’s the year going?” she said.
“Badly.”
“Good,” she said.
Outside, on the gravel, something moved.
We both went still. A footstep. Another. Someone was walking slowly along the front of the mill towards our window, and stopped. Right outside. The stove light must have shown through the curtain. Whoever it was stood there, and did not knock, and did not call out, for long enough that I heard Bryony stop breathing beside me.
“The lantern,” she whispered.
The footsteps went on, away down the path towards the town, unhurried, until the beck covered them.
I got up. I don’t entirely know why; I think I’d had enough, for one night, of things happening to me in the dark. I took the torch, said, “Stay there,” and went out through the mill to the loading door.
The yard was empty. The race lay black and slack behind the shut gate. There was nobody on the bridge. Far down the path, between the trees, a light was going away from me towards the town, already small, and white: the plain white of a torch, nothing like that orange grin. I watched it until the valley turned and took it.
Then I went onto the bridge and put my torch on the crack in the handrail. The card in slanting ink was gone.
When I came back in, Bryony had pulled the dust sheet up round her ears. “Well?”
“Nobody. And someone’s taken the card.”
She looked at me for a second. Then she held the blankets open. “Come back in,” she said. “You’re letting the warm out.”
I got back in beside her. She was warmer than I was now. When I settled, she was close, and she didn’t move away, and neither did I.
“What’s the reading?” I said. My voice came out lower than I meant. It was a stupid thing to say. It was what I would have asked about a river.
I kissed her before she could answer.
Her mouth was cold at first and then it wasn’t. When I drew back she said, “Rising,” and pulled me in again, and gave it her whole attention, her hands coming up out of the blankets to hold my face, and I answered her and felt something in me that had been held shut since April give, and swing, and open. The dust sheet slid off her shoulders and I didn’t pull it back. I put my hands on her bare waist instead, and her skin had warmed under them, and she gasped, surprised, against my mouth and pressed closer, all of her, the length of her body against mine through my vest, her heartbeat going hard where her chest met mine. I wanted her. That was all; that was everything.
She pulled back an inch. “I want you,” she said. “I’m saying it so you know I’m not concussed.”
“I want you too.” I touched the edge of the graze on her shoulder, very lightly. “And not an hour ago you were in a millrace, and you still can’t feel your feet.”
“My feet aren’t invited.”
I laughed into her neck. Then I kissed her again, slowly, my hand spread on the small of her back, and let myself have this: the warmth coming back into her, the weight of her against me, her fingers in the hair at my nape.
“Not here,” I said at last. “Not shivering, on a bench, in a fleece that says Friends of Hob Mill. When you can do your own zip.” I kissed the corner of her mouth. “I want you to pick me with working hands.”
She considered me. Then she grinned, the first proper grin since the race. “Thursday,” she said. “After service. I’ll do you a toastie.”
I said yes.
We went back down the beck at a quarter to twelve, Bryony in a pair of volunteers’ overalls rolled up four times at the ankle and a FRIENDS OF HOB MILL fleece, her boots squelching, her wet clothes in a bin bag; me with my shoulder aching, my palms raw and my hand in hers. I left the gate shut and a note on the office desk saying why.
At the bottom of the valley the streetlights started again. Somewhere below us a bell was knocking on a boat in the harbour, swinging against its own rope in the wind. Bryony said we’d lost, obviously; the Lowes always won. I said that next year somebody should write the Lowes a route they couldn’t win.
“There isn’t a next year,” she said. “Last one. Tamsin said.”
I took the yellow notebook out of my pocket, turned to a clean page and wrote in capitals, the way Tamsin did it: NEXT YEAR. CLUE ONE.
I couldn’t think of a clue. I stood under the first streetlight with the pencil in my hand and nothing to write, and Bryony took the pencil from me, wrote one word underneath in letters that ran downhill, and put the notebook back in my coat pocket herself, so that I would have to wait until I got home to read it.
