Ten Past Five

He knocked at ten past five.

Two knocks. Not loud. The exact two knocks, at the exact volume, of a man who has been told once by his mother in about 1998 that other people are asleep, and I was awake instantly and completely, the way you only are when some part of you has been lying there for an hour and a half pretending otherwise.

I opened the door in a jumper over the T-shirt I’d slept in, with my hair doing whatever it had decided to do, and he was standing in the corridor in his coat with a flask in one hand.

“Top of the tide’s at half nine,” he said. “It’s over the drains by six. You’ve got about twenty minutes to decide if you’re coming.”

“I don’t have boots.”

“You’ve got boots. They’re outside your door, you left them there because they had mud on.”

“I could be busy.”

“You could,” said Elias, and turned and went down the corridor, and I got dressed in four minutes with my heart behaving like something in a bag.

Here is the thing.

He did this a hundred times. Maybe more. Between September 2019 and the spring of 2021 he knocked on a door at five or half past or once, memorably, at twenty to four, and I got up, every time, in a cottage at Burnham with a bathroom you had to go outside for, and we went out onto the marsh in the dark.

I never once said no. I thought about that going down the stairs.

Outside it was that colour that isn’t a colour, forty minutes before sunrise, the whole sky the grey of a dish of water with a bit of ink in it and the east just beginning to go the other way. Flat calm — after the wind on Monday it was like someone had put a hand on the world. The quay was wet. The gulls hadn’t started.

We went out along the sea wall with his torch off, because he doesn’t use it and never has, and after about three minutes my eyes gave up arguing and did their job, and there was the marsh.

Four miles of it. You cannot photograph it. People try, and what they get is a flat brown field, and what it actually is is a city — creeks and drains and pans and gulleys all branching into each other like something in a lung, and sea-lavender gone over and grey, and samphire beds going red at the end of the season, and the whole thing lying there at low water perfectly still and smelling of iodine and sulphur and cold.

“Careful on the next bit,” he said. “That board’s gone.”

He said it about four seconds before I would have found out.

We got out to where the old duck pit is, maybe a mile and a quarter, and he stopped on a low bank above a drain about five feet across, and put the flask down, and we waited.

And at three minutes past six, exactly as advertised, the water came.

It does not come the way people expect. It does not roll in off the beach like a shampoo advert. It comes round the back — up the main channel from the harbour mouth, three miles east, and then it turns and spreads sideways into the marsh through a network that has been there since before the Romans, and it fills the drains first. So you are standing on a bank looking at four miles of dry brown land with a dark line at the far edge of it, and then you look down, and the ditch beside your boots, which was an empty gully, is full to the brim and running like a tap, and it is not coming from the sea you can see. It is coming from behind you.

“God,” I said. “I forgot how fast.”

“Two knots in that drain. Three on springs.”

“It’s coming from the wrong way.”

“It’s coming from the right way. You’re standing in the wrong place.” He crouched down and put a hand flat in it, that bit of showing off he has never known he does. “Everyone watches the front of it. That’s how they get caught. By the time you can see the front of it coming at you across the flats, it’s already been round the back of you for twenty minutes.”

I stood on the bank with my hands in my sleeves and watched a marsh fill up.

“Is the Point still there?” I said.

“Bits of it. It’s moved about ninety metres west since you were last on it.” He said it the way another man would say a friend had grown a beard. “There’s about forty seals on the end of it now. Grey. They pup in November and the whole lot of it stinks and people come from Cambridge to look at them.”

“We had a photograph taken on the Point.”

“I know.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Somewhere,” said Elias, to the water, and did not offer any more, and I let him have it, because it was six in the morning and because I have one of my own in a box in York.

It takes about fifty minutes from the first thread to the whole thing being water, and in that fifty minutes it goes through a stage I have never seen anywhere else in my life, where the high ground is still dry and the low ground is full, so that four square miles of Norfolk turns into a lace of silver channels with black islands between them, and the sky gets into all of it, and you cannot tell what is up.

The geese came off the sand at about twenty past six.

You hear them first — a long way east, a noise like a stadium two streets away — and then they come over in skeins, and skeins, and skeins, twelve or thirteen thousand pink-feet going inland to the beet fields in strings and Vs and ragged knots that break and re-form, and the sound of them comes down on you like weather. It went on for seven minutes. I timed it afterwards on my phone, because I am the person I am.

Somewhere in the middle of it a smaller bird went over low with a fast hard wingbeat and a call like something being unzipped.

“What’s that?”

“Redshank,” he said, without looking up.

“You didn’t look.”

“Don’t need to look.”

“You have never once looked. In seven years I have never seen you look.”

“Well,” said Elias, “you keep asking, and I keep being right, so.”

And I laughed, out loud, on a bank in a marsh at half past six in the morning, and it went across the water and came back off the far bank, and he glanced at me sideways with an expression I had to look away from.

He gave me the flask. It was tea, too strong, no sugar, which is how I have it and not how he has it.

And that is when it arrived — the thing I have been circling for four paragraphs, the thing that had been sitting underneath the whole morning like the water sitting under the marsh.

At twenty-five I thought he was showing me the marsh.

I genuinely did. I thought: here is a man who loves this place, and wants me to see it, and is a bit obsessed, and this is what his enthusiasm looks like at five in the morning. That is what I told myself in 2019, twenty-five years old, lying in the dark in a cottage in Burnham listening to two knocks, and it was lovely and it was flattering and it was not true.

He was not showing me the marsh.

He was standing next to me in the dark for an hour at a time, four or five times a month, for twenty-one months, because it was the only place in the entire world where he could say I love you without having to use the words.

That was it. That was the whole system. He could not say it in a kitchen. He could not say it in a bed. He could not say it to his sister, or his father, or a registrar, or on a Tuesday. But he could get up at four in the morning and drive to a cottage and knock twice and walk two miles out into a salt marsh and stand beside me while the whole thing filled up with light, and that was the sentence. That was him saying it, at volume, every single time, and I had spent seven years not hearing a word of it.

I stood there with his flask in my hands and I could have put it down on the bank and walked into the creek.

Because here is the part I could not get round, and still cannot. If it was a language, then I had learned it. I had been fluent. And it was still not enough, because you cannot ask a marsh to come to your father’s funeral, and you cannot introduce a sunrise to your best friend, and there is no configuration of birds that means yes, she is mine, and I will say so in front of you.

I felt myself get angry and could not immediately find where it was pointed.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve got your hands inside your sleeves like a Victorian orphan.”

“It’s a recognised technique.”

He took his coat off.

He did not say anything about it, and he did not make a thing of it, and he did not hold it out in a way that required me to say yes or no. He took it off and put it round my shoulders from behind, and his hands were at the collar for three or four seconds getting it to sit right, and I felt the heat come off the inside of it, which was the heat of him, and I stood extremely still.

That is the closest we came, and I have never told anybody. Two people on a bank on a salt marsh, one coat, four seconds.

“Elias.”

“Mm.”

“When my dad died.” I said it to the water, because I could not have said it to his face. “You didn’t drive up and drive back, did you.”

The pause was long enough for two more skeins to go over.

“No.”

“How long were you there?”

“Four days.”

“Four days.” I turned round. “You were in Yorkshire for four days and you stood at the back of a crematorium and you never—“ I stopped, because my voice was going, and because I have a horror of that. “What were you doing for four days?”

“Something your mum asked me to do.”

“What?”

“Greer.”

“What did my mother ask you to—“

“Ask her,” he said.

It came out harder than he meant it. I saw him hear it. And then he did the thing that has always undone me, which is that he did not soften it afterwards with three sentences of padding; he just stood there in the cold in a jumper and let it be as bad as it was.

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“No.”

“You’ve got a thing. You’ve got a whole — there’s a thing you know and I don’t, and it’s mine, and you’re standing there with it.”

“Yes,” said Elias.

“Then tell me.”

“Ask your mum first,” he said. “That’s not me being clever. That’s the actual order it has to go in, and if you make me do it the other way round I’ll do it, and I’ll be wrong.”

Behind him the east had gone from grey to a hard white line and then, all at once, to something ridiculous — the whole sky over Scolt going the colour of the inside of a shell, and every one of four thousand creeks in that marsh turning pink at the same time, like somebody had thrown a switch on the world’s most expensive and least practical lighting rig.

He turned to look at it, because he always does, because he cannot help it.

I looked at him looking at it.

And neither of us said one more word all the way home.