The socks come out smelling of salt. Tamsin tries another rinse. This time there is a tiny silver fish in the drum, looking as offended as she feels.
She carries it downstairs in a cereal bowl. The laundry room has changed. Where the vending machine stood, a woman in rubber boots is wringing a blue jacket over a stone trough. Steam rises from water that extends through the back wall and far beyond the building, into a grey estuary. On the bank, sheets hang from trees with no leaves.
Tamsin puts the bowl down.
“Not again,” she says.
The woman stops wringing. “Do we know each other?”
“You know my brother. Iain. He came through here three years ago.”
Three years ago the same estuary had appeared in the same room. Iain had gone through carrying a basket of towels, because someone on the other bank had called for help. The towels came back. He did not. The building management called it a structural event. The police called him missing. Tamsin received the basket and a discount on her rent for the month.
Now his blue suit hangs from a branch outside, the trousers pinned beside the jacket. She knows the patch inside the cuff. She sewed it after he caught his heel on a nail in their mother’s shed.
“Where is he?”
The woman takes off her gloves.
“Working upriver.”
Tamsin grips the edge of the trough. For three years she has rehearsed different versions of this conversation. In some she cries. In some she strikes whoever comes back. In none does she stand in her slippers with a fish beside her.
“Get him.”
“I can’t. Not before the tide.”
“There’s always something.”
The woman reaches for the jacket again. “Eda,” she says. “If we’re going to quarrel, you can use my name.”
Below them, the apartment building’s pumps start. Tamsin knows the sound: a steady thrum that comes after heavy rain. The trough’s water falls an inch. Outside, mud begins to show around the sheet trees.
Eda looks toward the bank. “What’s that?”
“Drainage.”
“Of what?”
“Apparently you.”
Four people come running across the mud with baskets balanced on their heads. Behind them, the water drops again. The sheets sag. One person slips and loses a basket into the shallows. Eda steps over the trough, but Tamsin catches her sleeve.
“You’ll go and leave me with his suit.”
Eda pulls free. “Those are my children.”
She goes out. Tamsin follows, the cold mud squeezing through the open backs of her slippers. The fallen worker is a grown man with a crooked grin and a bleeding elbow. Two younger women help him up. A fourth person, small and broad, has already recovered the basket.
“My mother means everybody,” the man tells Tamsin. “You get used to it.”
Eda points them toward the laundry room. The pumps deepen their note. Behind the people, the estuary drains into a dark cleft where the apartment wall should be.
Tamsin’s phone has no signal on the mud. Back inside, she calls the building’s emergency line. The operator wants a water depth, an apartment number and a photograph. Tamsin says she needs the pumps stopped.
“They’re protecting the lower floors.”
“They’re draining a river.”
“Are you reporting sewage contamination?”
Tamsin looks at Eda. The woman has begun hauling sheets off the trees, passing them along a chain of hands. Without the river, the mud is tightening around their roots. The branches creak.
“I’ll send the picture,” Tamsin says, and does.
The operator goes quiet. Then she says an engineer is being called. She cannot give an arrival time.
Tamsin runs upstairs for the laundry trolley. Her brother’s suit is on the last tree. She pulls the jacket off its branch, folds it across her arm and stops at the smell: soap, wood smoke and a bitter green scent she does not know. It is the smell of somebody else’s life.
Eda takes the trousers down.
“He sent these back once,” she says. “Your side didn’t open.”
“He could have tried again.”
“He did.”
“With a suit?”
Eda’s face becomes careful. Tamsin hates the care. She knows what follows it from telephone calls, from the policeman with the wrong form, from friends who begin sentences with at least.
“The first year he tried to return himself. It was low water here. We found him on the flats. He was very ill.”
Tamsin folds the trousers. Her fingers work without her.
“He got better,” Eda says. “He has a room now. He mends the sluice boats.”
“He always could mend things.”
“Yes.”
“Except he never finished.”
Eda smiles despite herself. Tamsin looks away. She has wanted someone to know Iain, and now someone does, at a cost she hadn’t considered.
The nearest sheet tree gives a sharp crack. Eda ducks as its lowest branch hits the mud. Tamsin drops the folded trousers into the trolley. They begin running the remaining baskets inside. Each is heavier than it looks. Wet cloth pulls at their shoulders; the little fish has jumped out of the cereal bowl and is sliding around the apartment drain. Tamsin tips it into the trough.
The engineer arrives wearing a raincoat over his dinner clothes. He stands at the door until Tamsin takes his hand and sets it against the trough’s cold stone.
“That wasn’t here an hour ago.”
He looks outside. A woman on the bank waves urgently, then points to the cleft.
He calls the operator. Tamsin hears him say he is shutting down the basement system and will remain on site. Then the pump note winds down. Water rises through the mud. The sheets’ loose edges begin to float.
Eda and her workers carry the last baskets out. The estuary has turned pale near the horizon. It is moving away, although nothing that Tamsin can name is moving. The far trees are becoming smaller. She remembers this from the first time. Iain had looked small before he disappeared.
“I’m coming,” she says.
Eda blocks the gap beside the trough.
“You’re in slippers.”
“I’ll borrow boots.”
“And then?”
Tamsin has no answer she can bear to give. Stay until Iain comes home. Bring him back. Make him explain three years in which she has kept his belongings, renewed enquiries, paid the storage rent.
Eda reaches into her coat and brings out a folded letter.
“He wrote this for the next opening. I meant to find you before we started work.”
Tamsin doesn’t take it.
“He isn’t coming, is he?”
“Not across this tide.”
“You keep making it sound temporary.”
Eda lowers the letter. “I don’t know how long he will stay.”
The floor shifts under Tamsin’s feet. She looks back. The engineer is kneeling by the doorway, holding the building’s ordinary laundry-room door open. Its bottom edge has begun to pass through the trough like a blade through smoke.
“Now,” he says.
She snatches the letter. Eda steps back onto the mud. Tamsin wants to ask whether her brother is happy, but she can hear how much she would resent the answer. Instead she asks Eda to tell him the storage bill comes due in November.
“Write it,” Eda says, and hands her a pencil.
Tamsin writes on the back of a laundry receipt. She adds her new address, although Iain has nowhere to send a letter except here. At the bottom she writes, Mother’s shed is sold. You don’t have to mend the door.
Eda takes the paper. The stone trough becomes faint enough that Tamsin can see the vending machine behind it. Then it is gone.
The engineer has one wet foot. The floor is dry except around the trolley, where the blue suit has soaked through. Tamsin thanks him. He asks her to forward the photographs; his report will need them.
Upstairs she hangs the suit over the bath. The patch in the cuff has been repaired again, this time with small, irregular stitches in green thread. She opens the letter. Iain has written six pages. On the second he has drawn a boat, then crossed it out and tried a different angle. She reads until the paper softens in her hands.
On the fifth page he asks her to stop paying for the storage. He has named the broken tools he left behind, remembering every one. She puts that page on top, where she can find it when the office opens in the morning. The suit drips into the bath until she goes to bed.
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