Chapter 1
Forty-One Dead Voices
I have typed the voices of forty-one dead people, and not one of them had ever said my name until the eleventh of January, at twenty past two in the afternoon, with the rain going sideways off the Ayle and my tea gone cold at my elbow.
That is the whole of it, really. Everything else in this book is me finding out what those four words cost.
My job, if you want the plain version, is to sit in the upper room of the old Pilot House at Marrenford Reach and turn sound into paper. The Ayle Sound Archive holds nine hundred and six recordings of people who lived on this estuary: fishermen, pilots, a lifeboat coxswain, three midwives, a man who could name every bird by its wingbeat and nothing else, and a great many women who were interviewed in their kitchens at the age of eighty and asked, gently, to say the worst thing that ever happened to them into a microphone the size of a lollipop.
I listen. I type. I mark the pauses. I do not clean anybody up.
That last one is the rule, and Orrin Sculthorpe repeats it to me perhaps once a fortnight, standing in the doorway with a mug in his cotton-gloved hand like a man reciting a psalm he is fond of. You type what is there, Nell. Not what is likely. Not what is kind. If she coughs, you put the cough. If she says something that is not true, you put it down true to her saying it, and you note it, and you let the next person decide.
