Chapter 1

Salt Water

At ten to six, Élise went down the ladder at intake four with the probe in her jacket pocket, because it was Tuesday and on Tuesdays you read the sector's four points before the day pumps started.

The rungs were greasy. They had been greasy for eleven years. She had asked three times for them to be scraped down, and three times she had been told that scraping was not on the schedule, and the fourth time she had stopped asking and had got into the habit of going down with her palms flat on the uprights rather than gripping the rungs, which was slower and did not slip.

Down there it was four degrees colder than up top. The water in canal four came to thirty centimetres below the platform, black, still, with a thin scum against the concrete. Élise took the probe out of her pocket, unwound the cable, checked that the cell had no deposit on it and lowered it until the wire marked in red was level with the surface.

She waited out the thirty seconds.

3.1.

She drew the probe up, rinsed it with distilled water from the small flask clipped to her belt, wiped the cell with the clean cloth, and started again.

3.1.

It was not that she doubted the instrument. It was that Wies, in the first year, had made her do everything three times, and the third time had lodged itself in her hands and never left.

3.1.

She wrote the figure in the notebook, with the time to the minute, and stayed crouched on the platform for a moment.

Canal four had read 0.4 for as long as she had worked on it. It went up to 0.6 in August when there was no rain, and came back down in September. Once, in 2146, after a week of north-westerly wind, it had gone to 0.9 and people had talked about it for three days.

She put the probe back in her pocket and climbed the ladder.

The second point was eight hundred metres away, at the Zuidvliet fork, and she rode there on the earth bank along the canal, in a day that could not make up its mind to break. The sky was low and dry. No wind. A heron went up in front of her, heavily, and settled again forty metres on.

She leaned the bike against the post, opened the cast-iron inspection chamber, lowered the probe.

3.9.

She rinsed it. She started again.

3.9.

The third time she left it down longer than she needed to, for no reason, looking at the water. She had the taste in her mouth before she had understood it: that smell, of salt mud and cold metal, which was the smell of the Oosterschelde on the other side of the dyke and had no business here, five kilometres inland, in a freshwater canal that four pumps had held at its level for two hundred years.

3.9.

She wrote the figure down. Before closing up she ran a finger round the inner rim of the cast iron and looked at it. Sand. Very fine, very pale, in a film, the kind you find on a step after a flood. She leaned over: the water below was not black like the water in canal four. It was cloudy.

She stayed crouched for a minute, elbows on her knees, looking at a bottom that could not be seen.

Then she closed the chamber and got back on the bike.

Wies Delacre was on the station walkway with a mug in her hands, as she was every morning, and what was in the mug had not been coffee since 2141 but everyone went on calling it that.

Élise came up the steps, held out the open notebook and waited.

Wies read. She was sixty-one years old with forty years on the station; she read notebooks the way other people read a face. She said nothing. Élise watched her turn the page, go back, compare it with the previous day's reading, then with the one from the week before.

The silence lasted long enough for Élise to hear pump two change note below, which happened when the level dropped eight centimetres and was not an interesting piece of information that morning.

“Do it again at ten,” said Wies.

“All right.”

“All four points.”

“All right.”

Wies shut the notebook and handed it back, and drank a mouthful of what was not coffee, and Élise saw her hand.

It was not shaking. It was worse than that: it was set too exactly on the mug, all five fingers, the way you hold something you have decided not to spill.

The morning went on, because a morning goes on.

Joren was nineteen, he had been at the station five months and he still had not grasped that when he was asked for a forty-five bearing he was supposed to fetch it from the drawer marked forty-five and not the one beside it. There were five drawers. Five. Élise sent him back twice, and the second time she followed him to the workshop and stood behind him while he opened the right one, and she heard herself say, in a voice that was not quite her own, that in fifteen years he would be glad there were only five.

He looked at her the way you look at someone who has just said an old person's thing.

They changed the bearing on pump three. It took two hours and twenty minutes, an hour of it getting the shaft out, and Élise had grease up to her elbows and some in her hair, and at one point Joren told a story about his sister that was funny, and she laughed properly.

At ten she did the four points again.

4.9 at the Zuidvliet. 4.1 at canal four, eight hundred metres downstream. 2.8 at three. 1.6 at one, which was furthest from the dyke and had never felt anything in its life.

She wrote the figures down and took them to Wies, who looked at them standing, without sitting down, and who did not ask for them to be done again at two. It was the first time in eleven years that Wies had not asked for them to be done again.

They ate standing up in the workshop, as always, because the table in the lower room was for laying out parts and nobody had ever dared take it up with Wies.

There was Zone bread, fish paste in the shared pot, glasshouse tomatoes that were good and that they had every day, and the samphire Joren's wife gathered at the foot of the dyke and that he brought in on Tuesdays in a canvas bag. Élise took three sprigs. It was salty, crisp, faintly of iodine.

She chewed. She looked at the green stem between her fingers.

Samphire grew in salt. It was the only thing it knew how to do.

She put the rest back in the bag.

The one o'clock bulletin came on the workshop set because it came on every day at one, and nobody really listened to it.

There were the levels, the tide times, the tonnages landed at Yerseke, notice of a planned outage on the northern grid between two and five in the morning, and a notice to holders of methanol vehicles concerning the Kapelle station.

Then a technical notice, read in the same tone as the rest:

Eastern Scheldt barrier, Roompot channel. Gate 31: sill seal non-compliant at the survey of the first of September. The gate remains operable. Closure of the channel declared to be in degraded mode. The barrier gates being open under normal tidal regime, no consequence is expected for operations.

Joren was buttering his bread. Wies was in the office on the other side of the partition, and you could hear her chair.

The last sentence was true, and that was what was awkward about it.

The barrier gates stayed raised all year. They were only brought down when three metres was forecast, which happened two or three times a winter, and it took an hour and a quarter to bring them all down. The rest of the time the sea went in and out between the piers as it always had, and whether a gate seated or not made no difference at all. The office that had written the notice was right. Élise, in their place, would have written the same thing.

Gate 31 meant one thing only, and for one day only: the day they had to close, the Roompot would not close.

That was a problem for later, and for other people.

Except that she had 4.9 at the Zuidvliet, sand on the cast iron, and cloudy water in an inspection chamber where she had been able to see the bottom for eleven years.

The salt was not coming in over the top from the sea. It was coming from underneath. It had always been there, under the polders, pushed up by the weight of the Scheldt against land that sat lower than it did; you lived with it, you pumped it, the rain diluted it, and the balance had held for two hundred years because nobody gave it a way through.

Somewhere under the fork, it looked as though it had found one. Where, at what depth, since when, she had no idea and no way of finding out. That was the job of the people who drill.

Two things, then. Two things that had nothing to do with each other, in two different departments, in two different registers, and that nobody in the Zone would see on the same table for a long time.

The first was opening under her feet, now.

The second was waiting for the next spring tide.

It was in eleven days.

And the team that would grout the Zuidvliet fork and the team that maintained the Roompot sills were the same six people, and their list was longer than the year. That was not in the notice either, because it had never been in any notice.

“Élise,” said Joren. “Do you want the bottom of the pot?”

“You have it.”

At two o'clock the storm basin had to be drawn down because the week's meteorological notice was forecasting rain, and drawing down the storm basin meant opening sluice four by a turn and a half.

Élise walked there. It was six hundred metres.

Sluice four had a rack and a six-spoke handwheel, and you had to hold the pawl up with your left hand while you turned with your right, and it took ninety-six turns for a turn and a half of travel.

She did them. She had been doing them for eleven years, six or seven times a month, and she could have done them in her sleep.

When the gate leaf lifted off the sill there was, below, a sucking and then a flat roar.

She set the pawl back, noted the time, and went back.

In the afternoon she filled in the form.

It was a two-page printed form with boxes, a sector number, a space for the instrument reference, another for the calibration date, and at the bottom a six-line frame headed reader's observations, in which she had written, over eleven years, things like deposit on cell, cleaned or reading doubtful, point inaccessible, ladder iced.

She wrote: Continuous rise at all four points since 05.50. Maximum at the Zuidvliet, decreasing downstream. Turbidity and fine sand at the fork chamber. Deep seepage probable. Request a visit from the grouting team.

She read it back. The frame was six lines and she had filled five, which had never happened to her.

She added the sixth: See today's barrier notice, Roompot channel.

Then she crossed it out, because it was not her place to put two departments in the same sentence.

Then she wrote it again.

She slid the two pages into the four o'clock post satchel and went back to the pumps, and they ran until evening, all four, at full flow, lifting out of the polder a water that was turning salt a little faster than they could lift it.

Block Oost had lost its lift in 2144 and Élise climbed the three floors without thinking about it, except on days when she had been carrying something. The third-floor corridor was lit by a ceiling strip that came on when it detected you and held for four minutes. It took forty seconds to get from the stairwell to the door. She had never run in that corridor in her life.

Jonas was standing at the hotplate with his back to her, stirring something in the small pan.

“You smell of grease,” he said without turning round.

“Three ate its bearing.”

“Again.”

He had put the leek in, and barley, and the last of the fish paste, and it smelled of what it smelled of every Tuesday. She put her jacket down, ran the tap and washed her hands and forearms with the grey soap, for a long time, up to the elbows, looking at the wall.

He told her about his day. Something about lorries, two days' delay on a delivery of parts from Zone Brabant, and a man from the next office who had spent the eleven o'clock meeting defending a position nobody wanted and had ended up getting it because the others were hungry. He did the man's voice. He did it well. Élise sat down on the chair with her back against the radiator, which was warm because it was still September, and she laughed twice.

“And you?” he said.

She opened her mouth.

There were four figures to say. It took six seconds. She had them in her jacket pocket, in the notebook, with the time to the minute.

“Nothing,” she said. “Readings.”

He nodded and put the lid back on, and that was that, and she never quite knew why she had done it, except that she wanted a whole Tuesday, a complete Tuesday, with the barley and the leek and the impression of the man from the next office, and that saying the figures out loud in that kitchen would have made them true in a way they were not yet.

They ate. He took her bowl from her to wash it. On the cupboard, the pairing paper was still under the magnet, slightly buckled by the steam, after seven months.

Later, in the dark, he laid his hand flat on her belly the way he did, and she put hers on top of it, and he fell asleep before her, as he always did.

She lay with her eyes open, listening to the sound of the station three pumps that carried when there was no wind, and counting the days to the spring tide, and she came to the same number several times.

The next day she went down the ladder at intake four at ten to six, palms flat on the uprights.

She waited out the thirty seconds.

5.2.