Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Pennick ·
Most of Her
On a spring tide at four in the morning a district nurse is called to a rented house above a harbour where a woman lies mostly as water, and is asked to read the tide table aloud.
The call came through at 03:40: keeper of a tidal patient would like the nurse before the high water. Pennick keeps such phrases the way inland districts keep asthma registers — without anyone now living being able to say who added them. Alma Reyes had been qualified eleven years and had never been sent to the address above the harbour, though the rota card had carried *Prue — spring tides* in the same aged ink for as long as she could read. The card was not in any duty book. It was in the rota, in the column nobody fills, and it had been initialed each month by nurses whose signatures Reyes recognised.
She climbed in fog with the harbour bell coming up through it at long intervals, and the house at the top of the lane was rented, and the stair smelled of salt, real salt, thicker than the sea outside it. The hall calendar was a tide table, framed. Next to the frame, another frame, and inside it, drawn in graphite over nine years, a curve: her weight, month by month, tracking the moon to within three per cent. Anyone can read a graph; Reyes read it on the stair, twice, the way one reads a gauge.
The bathroom door was open. Two inches. She learned later that it was always open exactly two inches.
The bath was filled to the lip. In it lay Magdalena Prue, and the water rose and fell in the bath, with no tap running and no one in the house touching a thing, and the rise was not breath. Reyes put the back of her wrist to the woman's mouth. The breath, when it came, belonged to the tide, and came on its schedule and not the lungs'.
At high water the skin went faintly translucent, like the inside of the wrist under a lamp, and one could see — not through, only the way one sees sand under clear water — travel in her. Reyes watched a slow line move from the collarbone down and understood that she was watching the tide arrive in somebody. At low water the skin went the other way: patterned like wet sand, and the room smelled of a strand at low water. The hand at the rim of the bath was white with salt, and the wedding ring was crusted over.
On the bed next door, a damp print: shoulders, the length of a body, already drying at the corners. The sheets were gone from the bed entirely. Mr. Prue stood at the washstand with two towels over his arm, counting backward off the tide table — *three hours, forty; two hours, ten* — in the tone of a man giving a stationmaster the time. He said, without turning, that spring tides made it difficult to keep her in a room, and that they had learned to be quick at Towels; and that she liked to be told the time. Reyes looked at the water for a while and then did the only procedure the visit had: she picked up the frame with the tide table in it and read it aloud to the bath, clearly, heights and times, and at each correct time the surface rose a little, the way a sleeping face turns toward a voice.
She had been an hour gone in 1994 — the file has it under an old practice number, typed by a predecessor's predecessor — gone into the water after a dog. She came back with the next tide. The dog, Reyes noted once in a margin, and then pressed the pen harder and stopped writing, was never reported missing by anyone.
The family is divided. There is a sister, Gwen, who comes up the coast twice a year and stands at the bathroom door with her coat on and says that there is still a her to bring back, and that every spring tide she is a little less herself and a little more of something not answering to a name, and that waiting is the coward's triage. Mr. Prue keeps the towels by the stairs and the windows open on the harbour side, and says that the sea tells her when it is her evening, and reads her the news each night, and reports afterward that she understands. They argue about a move inland — Gwen's house is forty kilometres up the estuary, past the last watered reach — and the argument has run for nine years, and neither has ever once said the word the district nurse would look for in a family file.
Reyes initialed the rota card, hers the fourth name on it, in inks going back thirty years, and left the bathroom door, as she had found it, open exactly two inches, and walked down through the fog with the bell behind her.
She has one question filed and one question not. The filed one is administrative. The other is why, on the walk down, with her own ears under the harbour bell, she had kept hearing the tide table read aloud in a voice like wet sand, over and over, patience, patient, at the pace of a bath filling itself — and whether the woman in the bath had been listening, or the water.