"So you're saying it moved four metres in three weeks." I say it flat, because if I say it any other way my voice will do something I don't want it to do.
Deko doesn't answer that. He never answers the question you actually ask.
Three weeks ago we're standing on the same spit of silt, GPS unit blinking, wind coming straight off the Wash and carrying nothing. No gulls. No diesel smell from the sluice gate. Just cold. The job is boring on paper: log the accretion line for the Environment Agency, six markers along four kilometres of estuary edge, twice a month, until the funding runs out. Deko brought a flask of coffee that's already gone lukewarm and he keeps saying the tide table's wrong.
"It's not wrong," I tell him. "You're reading yesterday's page."
"I'm reading today's page," he says, and turns it round to show me. It is today's page. The low tide it lists is forty minutes later than what's happening in front of us, and the water's already gone out further than the sheet says it should for another three quarters of an hour.
We log marker four. The mud there has a skin on it like the top of cold custard, and where I press the ranging pole in, it doesn't spring back. It closes over.
Now, alone, marker four isn't where the coordinates say it is. I check the unit twice, walk the line I logged, and the little steel post with its faded orange cap is sitting nine metres inland of where I hammered it in three weeks ago, on ground that the tide chart says should be underwater at this hour and isn't. I keep thinking it's eight metres, then I check my own notes and it's nine. I've had that wrong twice now telling this to people.
Deko stopped answering his phone eleven days ago. His flat's still got milk in the fridge, according to his sister, who rang me because I was the last name in his call log. She mentioned in passing that his dog had been left with the neighbour, some terrier called Nelson, and I keep thinking about that dog for no reason I can explain, whether it's eating, whether the neighbour likes it. I told her Deko probably went up to his mum's in Boston without saying. I don't think that.
I think about the last morning instead. Marker six, the furthest one out. Deko stood a long time looking at a stand of reed that wasn't on last month's map and said, "That's new," in a voice like he was being polite to something.
I didn't look where he was looking long enough. That's the truth of it. I was writing down a number.
Today the reed bed is bigger. Not much. The kind of bigger you'd only notice if you'd stood exactly here with a clipboard and a bad flask of coffee three weeks running. The channel that used to run past marker five has silted to a trickle, and the bank on the far side has crept in to meet it, the way a wound closes from both edges.
I find marker six last. It's not upright anymore. It's lying flat, cap-down, half swallowed, and the silt around it isn't grey like everywhere else. It's disturbed in rings, fine ripples pressed outward from the post like something set down a stone and the water hasn't finished settling. Except there's no water here. Hasn't been for hours. The air over it has that stillness that isn't the absence of wind so much as wind that's decided not to come this way.
I kneel to pull the post free and my hand closes on something under it that isn't rusted steel. It's a flask, dented, lukewarm coffee still sloshing inside, lid screwed on tight the way Deko always screws it, cross-threaded, because he never lines it up right the first time.
"Curlew" by JuliaC2006 is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.