Chapter One: The Ledger Room

The harbour office kept its tide ledgers the way a church keeps its registers: in leather, in longhand, in a room too cold for the paper to curl. Reva Okonwe had taken the clerk’s post in March, mostly because the interview had lasted four minutes and nobody had asked her to smile.

Her job, in its entirety, was this. Twice a day the automated gauge at the end of the north jetty recorded the water’s height to the centimetre and printed it, obediently, onto a slip of thermal paper that faded within a year if you didn’t transcribe it. Reva’s task was to transcribe it, by hand, into the same ledger her predecessors had used since 1809, in a hand as close to theirs as she could manage, because the harbourmaster’s office had decided sometime in the nineteenth century that a tide record was a legal document and legal documents did not change format merely because the technology recording them had.

She did not mind the copying. She minded, a little, the room, which held eleven thousand days of tides in bound volumes along three walls and smelled permanently of the glue that held their spines together. But four minutes had gotten her the job and she was not going to complain about the smell of glue to anyone who might reconsider.

It was on a Tuesday in her sixth week that she pulled volume forty-one to check a disputed measurement from 1927 and found, tucked between two pages that should have held nothing but numbers, a slip of paper in a different hand. Not thermal paper. Cream stock, gone the colour of weak tea, with a tide reading written on it in ink rather than pencil — a habit no clerk had used in this office within living memory, because ink could not be corrected and every clerk eventually needed to correct something.

The reading was dated three days ahead of the volume’s other entries. She checked twice. Three days ahead, and the number matched, to the centimetre, what the automated gauge had recorded on that date — a date that, according to every other page in the ledger, had not yet happened when this slip was apparently written.

Reva put the slip back exactly where she had found it and went to make tea, which was what she did whenever she needed forty minutes to decide she had imagined something.