Tuesday 1 September 2037. Elbe 1 to Cuxhaven. Two-fourteen minus 19 days.
The master of the Ostervold says she is making thirteen and a half knots. The log on the console says twelve point two, and the deck says the log is being kind. Every forty seconds or so the whole ship gives a short dry cough that reaches my knees before my ears, and then she settles and runs on, pinched.
“Thirteen and a half,” he says again.
It is 07:21. Neuwerk is a low brown line off the starboard bow with the Great Tower standing up out of it, and the gates of the Amerikahafen at Cuxhaven shut at eight. The water goes at 08:15. The gate master shuts at fall minus fifteen, and he has never once shut late: not for a ship, not for the Admiralty’s own launch, not in year three for his brother-in-law’s trawler, which spent that draw on its side on the Kugelbake sand and the next month in court. Eight and a half miles to his gate. Twelve point two knots. That’s 08:03.
“Captain. She isn’t making thirteen and a half.”
“It is the ebb.”
“The ebb’s a knot and a half here, and the log’s already got it. You’re two knots short of what you told me at the light vessel.”
He is a big Danziger with a grey crew cut and a cardigan buttoned one hole wrong, and he studies the log as though it has been talking about him behind his back. Above the radar somebody’s child has taped up a felt-pen drawing of the Ostervold. In the drawing she has four funnels and a sun with a face, and she is going very fast.
She is eighty-one thousand tonnes of Narvik ore on thirteen metres eighty of draught, the last ship of the inbound draw run for two-thirteen, and she is mine until her lines are on the bollards. The rest of the run is strung up the fairway ahead of us: a car carrier the size of a block of flats, two feeders, a tanker in ballast, a Brotherhood pilot on every bridge and every one of them well inside us. Two-thirteen comes nineteen days, four hours and eleven minutes after two-twelve, the way every draw has come after the one before, and in eleven years it has not been a minute out. Nobody waits for the last ship.
Lüder Ehlers put me on her ladder at the light vessel at twenty to six, in a swell that lifted the launch two metres up her side and dropped it again. He held the launch against her plates with the engine and said what he has said for twenty-four years, “Mind the step,” as if a pilot ladder were a tram. I went up eleven metres of wet rope with my bag on my back and didn’t look down. Looking down is how you find out what the launch is doing, and you don’t want to know.
He hasn’t gone home. The launch is off our port quarter, a hundred metres out, orange hull, matching us knot for knot. He puts his pilots aboard and then he hangs about to see whether they want taking off again. He doesn’t have to. On draw days he does it anyway.
The handset on my chest clicks on the Brotherhood channel.
“She’s coughing, Wiebke.”
“I know.”
“Black puff out of her funnel every forty seconds. I can see it from here.”
“Then ring her owners.”
He laughs, one short bark over the noise of his own engine, and clicks off.
Channel seventy-one comes up on the bridge speaker. “Ostervold, Elbe Traffic. Gate master Amerikahafen confirms closing zero-eight-zero-zero. Elbe Roads, berth six, is free if you want it. I need your decision by zero-seven-three-zero.”
The master turns round from the windows. “Roads,” he says. “We anchor.”
The Roads open off the starboard bow past the end of Neuwerk, five ships already lying to their anchors in the deep water of the Rinne with their heads to the ebb, rust and white paint and a coaster’s washing on a line. It would be easy. Thirty minutes and he could be down in his cabin with the door shut, eating his breakfast.
“At a quarter past one the bore comes through the Roads,” I say. “Near three metres of it, if the table’s right. You’ll want your engine then, to hold her head up to it. Will you have it?”
He doesn’t answer. He looks at the drawing above the radar instead.
“In the basin you won’t need it at all.”
“If we make the gate.”
“Then give me what she’s got.”
“She has thirteen and a half.”
“Then I’ll take thirteen.”
He doesn’t move. So I lift the engine-room phone off its hook beside the telegraph, which is not done, and I know it isn’t done, and he knows I know.
“Chief. Pilot. What will she hold? The real number.”
There is a pause with a lot of machinery in it. The chief’s German is better than his master’s, and quicker. “Number two turbocharger surges above eighty. I can give you ninety per cent. Twenty minutes, twenty-five. After that I want her back, or I lose the charge air and she stops dead, and you will not like that.”
“Twenty-five’s all I want.”
“Then you have it.”
I hang the phone up. The master says something in Polish that doesn’t need translating. Then he reaches past me and puts the telegraph over himself, so that the order is his, and I let it be his.
The cough comes quicker for a minute and then smooths out, and the deck takes on a long new tremor, a working note. The log climbs. Twelve five. Twelve seven. Twelve nine.
“Elbe Traffic, Ostervold, pilot. We continue for the gate.”
“Ostervold, Elbe Traffic. Understood. Gate closes zero-eight-zero-zero.” He says it as though I might have missed it the first two times. That is his job, and he is good at it.
Six and a half miles. Twelve point nine. That’s 08:01, and the gate master standing on his wall with his hand on the lever, watching us not arrive. The fairway bends at the Kugelbake, a long lazy elbow round the end of the land, buoyed for ships that have all day. If I cut across the elbow instead of going round it, inside the green buoys, over the edge of the bank on this tide, I save four tenths of a mile. Four tenths at twelve point nine is two minutes. Seven fifty-nine.
“Captain, I’m taking her inside the buoys at the Kugelbake.”
“How much water?”
“Enough.”
“How much?”
“Half a metre under you at the shallowest. Give or take a decimetre.”
He unbuttons his cardigan and buttons it up again on the right holes.
The bell comes before Bendix does.
It is the plumb bell in the Brotherhood house, rung by hand by whoever has the duty this morning, and through the handset it sounds like a saucepan dropped down a stairwell: the clang of it in the muster room, and then the same clang falling twenty-four metres down the shaft to where Bendix sits on a stool at the bottom with his eye to the reading microscope and the handset on its long cord hooked round his neck. Every pilot station on the coast is ringing one now. Every ship in the run has it on the radio. 07:35, to the minute, as printed.
“Moin. Tell’s on,” Bendix says. “Zero-seven-three-five. Glass is clean.”
“Twice?”
“Twice. Crosshair’s on your scratch. Moving.”
He is twenty-three, with a voice made for selling apples off a cart at the Jork market, and when he reads he slows it down on purpose, because I taught him to. He forgets by about the tenth minute.
“Port five,” I tell the helmsman.
“Port five.”
“Midships.”
“Midships.”
“Steady.”
“Steady on one-one-four.”
Forty minutes, from the bell until the water moves. For forty minutes the lean comes on and nothing else does: no water going anywhere, only a brass bob in an oil bath at the bottom of a hole under the Brotherhood house, leaning toward the sea as if something out past Heligoland had hold of the wire. The slope it comes on at tells you how far over it will go. The Office will have its gauge figures by Thursday. A plumb gives you yours by a quarter past eight.
“Five minutes. Point six.”
“Table?”
“Point five.”
Early. Five minutes in, a tenth of a second is nothing. It’s a lorry on the Strandstraße, it’s Bendix leaning on the bench.
“Early,” I say.
“It’s point six,” he says.
The car carrier is in the gate. I can make out the gate master’s hut on the end of the wall, and a man in a yellow jacket outside it. One of the feeders has stopped short of the mouth to let the other go in first, with her tugs fussing round her like sheepdogs, and for two minutes the gate is a car park. Then she goes in, and the mouth is empty.
“Ten minutes. One point two. Table’s one point one.”
“Starboard ten.”
“Starboard ten.”
The green buoys come down the starboard side one after another, leaning on their chains to the ebb, and at thirty-one I don’t leave the buoy to starboard. I put it on the port side, which is the wrong side of it, and bring her across the corner of the bank with the Kugelbake fine on the starboard bow, and Elbe Traffic comes up at once.
“Ostervold, Elbe Traffic. You are south of the fairway.”
“Elbe Traffic, Ostervold, pilot. I know where I am.”
The echo sounder shows the water under the keel in red figures. One point two. One point oh. Point eight. At twelve point nine in this much water the Ostervold squats, digs her stern in and sits down, and I took that off the half metre back at the Roads, so the half metre is after squat, not before. The master is reading the figures off under his breath in Polish. The helmsman is reading them off in Tagalog. I’m not reading them at all. I’m standing with my knees loose and my weight forward, and the ship is telling me through the soles of my boots how much sand there is under her, and she says enough, just.
Point seven. Point six.
Point five.
The Kugelbake goes by on the starboard side close enough to count the gulls on its crossbars. Seven. The tide’s well down its legs, and the timber’s black and green to a man’s height where the water has been all night. Inside it the old stone training wall runs along the edge of the bank with one gap in it, a boat’s length and a half across, that Lüder’s launches use at high water. Nothing else goes through it.
Point six. Point nine. Two metres. Four.
The master goes to the back of the bridge to shout at somebody on the telephone.
“Fifteen minutes,” says Bendix. “One point nine.” A pause, with the paper sound of the card under his thumb. “Table one point six.”
“What does the card say?”
“Nine and a half. Nine seven. I don’t know. It’s early.”
“It’s fifteen minutes. It isn’t early.”
The handset clicks over to Lüder. “Going in, Wiebke. I’ll put the kettle on.” The orange launch comes past us flat out on the port side with Lüder at the wheel in his yellow oilskin and one hand up, and runs for the gate ahead of us with her bow high and her wake slapping the buoys.
The Alte Liebe slides by to starboard with half the town on it already: anoraks and flasks and pushchairs, come to watch the river go out. Somebody waves a newspaper. The last ship always gets a wave.
“Twenty minutes. Two point five. Table two point one.”
“Stop engine.”
The telegraph rings. The cough stops with it, and somewhere below us the chief has his engine back inside his twenty-five minutes, just. The Ostervold runs on under her own weight, eighty-one thousand tonnes of ore, and that much ore doesn’t stop because you ask it to. The tug Neufeld comes off the wall to meet us and takes our bow line at 07:56, and the deckhand on her foredeck catches the heaving line one-handed and doesn’t drop his cigarette.
We pass the Steubenhöft at 07:57. I keep my eyes on the gate.
The gates of the Amerikahafen are two steel leaves standing open forty-four metres apart, and the Ostervold is thirty-two metres wide. Six metres either side, and an ebb running across the mouth that wants to lay her down sideways against the outer wall and leave her there for the sand.
“Neufeld, pilot, full to starboard. Hard a-starboard. Slow ahead.”
“Hard a-starboard.”
The engine kicks once, the cough with it, and the bow comes round into the gap between the two leaves with the tug leaning on her line, and the stern starts its long sweep with the ebb shoving at it. The gate master is on his wall with his hand on the lever. He’s not looking at us. He’s looking at the clock on the front of his hut.
“Midships. Stop.”
“Midships.”
The bow is in. The bridge goes past the west leaf so close I could hand the gate master the felt-pen drawing. The stern comes on, with the ebb pushing at it, and the west leaf gets closer, and closer, and then the ebb loses its grip on her because she’s out of it, in the dead water of the gate, and her stern goes through with three metres to spare.
The gates start to close at 07:59 and forty seconds. They close on our wash. The brown wash slaps the steel, and runs back at us, and goes still.
“Amerikahafen closed, zero-eight-zero-zero,” says the gate master on seventy-one. “Thank you, Ostervold.” He says it the way a man puts a knife back in a drawer.
“Thirty minutes,” says Bendix. “Three point seven. Table three point two.”
The Ostervold’s lines are going out to the bollards, and the steward has come up with a tray of bread rolls with raw mince and onion on them, which is what the Ostervold eats at eight in the morning, apparently. I’ve had nothing since four. I take one and eat it on the bridge wing with the handset in my other hand.
“Thirty-one,” says Bendix. “Three point eight. And the wire’s steady, there’s nothing on the street, I checked the oil on Sunday, it isn’t the oil, I wiped the—“
“Bendix.”
“—I wiped the stage down before the bell, it’s not the—“
“Read.”
“Thirty-two. Three point nine. Table three point four.”
Two-ten was over the table on my plumb. Two-eleven was over it by three seconds, and the Office put that down to an easterly gale and added a seasonal correction to every table after it. Two-twelve was over anyway. I’ve written every one of them in my book, in pencil, with the error beside it, and I haven’t said a word about any of them to anybody, because I don’t call draws.
If it holds this slope, call it ten. Ten times one point nine is nineteen metres off the Kugelbake, where the table says sixteen.
The master has come out onto the wing beside me with a roll of his own. He leans his elbows on the rail and looks out over the gates at the river.
“At home,” he says, “it comes three hours late and it’s a swell. You can sleep through it.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“My wife sleeps through it.” He chews. “She thinks I make it up. All this.”
“Thirty-nine,” Bendix says. “Four point eight. Table four point one.” Then he doesn’t say anything else.
At 08:15 the Elbe turns round.
There’s no wave and no sound, not at first. The buoy off the Steubenhöft leans over on its chain and points out to sea, and the water around the piles of the Alte Liebe begins to slide down them, leaving the wood dark and shining, a hand’s width, then an arm’s. Out in the river the surface goes from grey to a hard dull brown, ribbed, all of it moving one way, faster than any ebb I’ve ever stemmed. A line of foam comes down from Otterndorf on it, carrying a plank and a dead gull and a white fender off somebody’s boat. Then the smell comes up off the water, mud and diesel and something green and old underneath, and on the Alte Liebe nobody says anything at all. Inside the gates the basin lies flat as a plate. The Ostervold doesn’t stir. I’m standing on her bridge wing with my knees soft for a deck that isn’t going to move, holding half a mince roll, and the master beside me has stopped chewing.
“Schiet,” he says, very quietly, which is the only Low German I’ve heard out of him all morning.
On the outer face of the gate a wet stripe is widening, dark on the steel, as the river drops away from it.
At 08:20 the handset clicks.
“Wiebke.” Bendix has slowed down again. He is reading to me the way I taught him, one word at a time, as if each one costs money. “Nine point nine at the slope. Table says eight and a half. It’s still leaning.”
