Alder

Cass did not go to registration.

In six years of school he had never once walked out of the gate before the bell. He was not the sort. He was the sort who put his hand up when the register reached the wrong name and quietly said the right one. But there was a talking creature the size of a kitten buttoned inside his coat. There was a sea rolling in over the playing fields that only he could see. It turned out that when the world went strange enough, the register stopped mattering all at once, the way a house rule stops mattering when the house is on fire.

So he walked. Past the bike sheds, past the caretaker unbending a fence with a mild look on his face, out through the gate and down the hill towards home, with his heart going and his collar held shut against the wind and a small weight breathing at his chest.

"You've stopped," said the Keeper, muffled, somewhere near his top button. "Why have you stopped."

"I haven't stopped."

"Your heart has. It went like a drum and now it has stopped. I can feel it. I am lying against it."

"I'm fine," said Cass, who was not, and started walking faster.

The town looked the way it always looked, which was the worst of it. Ordinary Tuesday grey. Wet slate roofs and wheelie bins and a delivery van double-parked with its hazards going, and over all of it, thin at the edges and thickening towards the middle, the tide. It lay in the low places first. It pooled in the gutters and the shop doorways and rose slowly up the lamp-posts, pale and restless and bright, and everywhere it touched it took the colour out. The postbox on the corner had gone the flat grey of a thing half rubbed out. A woman walked straight through knee-deep forgetting with two bags of shopping and did not so much as shiver.

"They really can't feel it," said Cass. It was not quite a question.

"No."

"Not even a little."

"Not even a little. It is the kindest thing about the tide, and the most terrible." The Keeper shifted against him. "It never hurts. Nobody drowning in it has ever once been cold."

Cass had a name for it already, had had for over a year, and hearing his own private word given back to him in that ancient weary voice made the back of his neck prickle. He had thought he was the only one who called it a tide. He had thought he was the only one who had needed to.

"You call it a tide," the Keeper said, as though it had felt the thought move through him. "We called it the Wash, once, when there were enough of us left to call it anything. Same water. It has worn a hundred names and drowned every one."

He came to the corner of Wexford Road and stopped again, properly this time, because something small and dreadful was happening in his coat.

The Keeper had gone rigid. Then it made a sound Cass had not heard it make, a short indrawn hiss, the sound you make when you have been holding something heavy for a very long time and your fingers finally fail.

"What," said Cass. "What is it."

"The mitten," said the Keeper.

Cass fumbled his coat open. The little green creature was curled tight around the fading keeping it had shown him that morning, the worn grey thread of a thing, a child's red mitten and the small cold hand that had once worn it. Except now it was not fading. It was going. Cass watched it thin between the Keeper's claws like breath on a cold window, there and then less there and then, gently, with no drama at all, gone. The Keeper's claws closed on nothing. For a moment it simply held the shape of holding.

"I had it since Tuesday," the Keeper said. Its voice had no self-pity in it, which was somehow much worse. "I held my end the whole while. It made no difference in the end. The child let go." It uncurled, slowly, and looked at its own empty claws as if faintly surprised to find them empty. "There. Now you have seen one go. Most people go a whole life and never see it. Count yourself unlucky."

"That's it? It's just, that's it?"

"That is it. Somewhere a grown woman will never once wonder what became of a red mitten she lost at five, because there is no longer a mitten to have lost, nor a morning she wore it, nor the cold. All perfectly tidy." The Keeper's leaf-green scales had dulled a shade, as though the losing had cost it colour too. "You want it to be louder. Everyone does, the first time. It is never loud. That is the whole trick of the tide. It takes the thing, and then it takes the shape of the space the thing was in, and then there is no space, and so there is nothing to be loud about."

Cass stood on the corner of Wexford Road with his coat open to the wind and found that his eyes were stinging again, over a mitten, over a mitten belonging to a stranger who would never know they had lost it. He thought that was probably the most foolish thing he had ever cried about. He thought he would very likely go on crying about exactly that sort of thing for the rest of his life, and could not for the life of him see how to stop, or why he should want to.

"You keep them," he said. "That's what you do. You hold the other end when the person can't."

"I hold the other end when the person does." A pause. "When both of us hold, it stays. I cannot keep a thing alone, no more than you can clap with one hand. It needs the loving and the guarding both." The Keeper looked up at him with its held-water eyes, and for a moment there was something in them Cass could not read, something that might have been hope and might have been fear and was probably, he would think later, both. "Which is why a boy who can keep a whole person entirely by himself should not exist. And does."

Cass said nothing. He buttoned his coat back up over the little creature, carefully, the way you'd tuck a blanket, and walked on.

They went down through the middle of town, where the tide ran deepest, and the Keeper told him to keep to the high ground of the pavement and out of the doorways, and Cass did, weaving along the crown of the road like a boy avoiding puddles, which is what any grown-up would have seen if any grown-up had been able to see anything at all.

Outside the shut-down building society on the market square there was a bench, and on the bench the tide was up past the armrests, and in it there was a hole.

Cass felt it before he saw it. It was like the pause in a song where a note should be. The bench was empty and the tide lapped over it, bright and slow, and there was a place just above the middle of it, a person-shaped absence, a nobody-sat-here that pulled at his eye the way a missing tooth pulls at your tongue. He could not have said what was missing. That was exactly the point. There was no longer anything there to name.

"Don't," said the Keeper sharply, feeling him slow. "Don't stare into the holes. You'll get a headache that lasts a week, and worse than a headache, if you keep at it."

"Someone sat there," said Cass. "Someone used to sit there. Every day. Didn't they. An old" His throat closed. "An old man. He sat right there."

The Keeper went very still against his chest.

"How," it said, quietly, "do you know that."

"I don't know how I know it. I just" Cass pressed his hand flat to the front of his coat without meaning to, the way you'd steady something. "It's like the frames on our stairs. When they took my grandad down there was brighter paint where he'd been. That's all that's left of him now. A cleaner patch of wall. That bench has got a cleaner patch of nobody, and I can see it, and I want to be sick."

For a while the Keeper did not answer. When it did, its voice had changed, gone careful, the way people go careful stepping out onto ice.

"There are perhaps five people in this whole country," it said, "who could stand where you are standing and know that a man is missing from that bench. Not that a bench is empty. That a man is missing. Do you understand the size of the difference." It did not wait for him to. "The rest of them would sit down on him."

Cass looked at the person-shaped hole in the shining tide, and something rose in him that was not sadness. It came up hot and level and certain from somewhere under the sadness, and it steadied him better than any comfort could have. It was the thing he felt at night saying a dead man's name into the dark. It was the thing that had got him out of bed and down to school and out of the gate again. Somebody has to know he was here, Cass thought. Somebody has to. If it is only me, then it will have to be me, and I will not sit down.

"Can you get him back," he heard himself say. "Can you pull him back out."

"No," said the Keeper. And then, because Cass had gone rigid against it, and because it was very old and had refused a great many people a great many times and knew the exact weight of a no, it sighed, and said, "But I can show you what pulling looks like. Once. It will cost me, and it will not last, and I want you to watch it and understand why, because it is the first lesson and the hardest and everyone gets it wrong. Set me down. On the armrest. Away from the hole."

Cass crouched and set the Keeper on the dry end of the bench, above the tide, and it sat up on its small clawed feet and closed its eyes and became, briefly, something other than a tired green creature.

Its scales lifted. Each one caught a light that was not the grey daylight, an under-light, a deep clean light like the light off water at the bottom of a well, and Cass understood all in a rush that every single scale was a thing it had kept, a whole kept thing, hundreds of them, layered like the years in a tree, and that he was looking at something so old the town beneath it was a single afternoon. The little body did not grow. It did not need to. It simply stopped hiding how much of it there was. The market square with its shut shops and its wheelie bins seemed to lean in and hush. The Keeper reached out one claw, not towards the hole where the man had been, but past it, down, into the bright tide itself, as though reaching under the surface of a stream, and it took hold of something, and it pulled.

The tide fought it. Cass saw the effort go through the creature like current through a wire.

And a laugh came up out of the water.

It was an old man's laugh. It was warm and creaky and it broke in the middle the way a proper laugh does, an old man laughing at something genuinely funny, laughing so that you knew at once he had laughed like that a thousand times on that bench in the sun, at the paper, at the pigeons, at his own bad jokes, at the whole ridiculous business of being alive on a Tuesday. It filled the square. For one impossible second the tide drew back off the bench and there was warmth on it, and the ghost of a shape, and the laugh, and Cass's whole chest cracked wide open, because it was not his grandfather's laugh, it was some other lost grandfather's laugh entirely, and it did not matter even slightly, it was every bit as good, it was a whole person, it was someone, held up out of the drowning for one second into the light.

Then the Keeper let go, and the laugh sank, and the tide slid back over the bench, and the hole was a hole again.

The scales settled. The under-light went out. The small green creature sat on the armrest breathing hard, greyer than before, suddenly and only tired.

"There," it said, when it could. "That is what pulling looks like."

Cass could not speak. He was crouched on the pavement with the empty tide lapping at his shoes, and he wanted, with an ache that frightened him, to do that. To reach down into the smooth blank water and haul someone's grandfather up into the daylight by main strength and hold him there.

"Why did you let go," he managed at last. It came out furious. "You had him. You had him. Why did you let him go back?"

"Because there is no one left to hold the other end." The Keeper's held-water eyes were steady on his, and gentle, and did not spare him one inch. "I can pull all I like. I can pull until it kills me. He does not stay unless someone on this side is holding too, loving him, missing him, keeping his name. And there is no one. He outlived the last person who did. So I can lift him for a heartbeat with all my strength, and no longer, because I have only ever had the one end." It let that sit. "That is the lesson. Not that keeping is hard. That keeping alone is not keeping. It is only postponing."

Cass thought of his mother setting her own father down next to the marmalade. I don't know, love. One of your projects. He thought of himself, every night, in the dark, holding a thread that no one else in the entire world was holding but him.

"Then I'm postponing," he said. Very quietly. "Aren't I. That's all I'm doing."

The Keeper looked at him for a long moment, and did not lie to him, which Cass would remember for the rest of his life as the first genuinely kind thing anyone had done for him since Grandad went.

"Come," it said instead. "Pick me up. I am too tired to walk and it is going to rain, and there are things I must ask you, and I would rather not ask them sitting on a dead man's bench." It let Cass gather it back into his coat, and settled against the drumbeat of his heart with what was almost a sigh. "You did not scream this morning, and you have not screamed now, and you asked the right question both times, which is more than most manage in a lifetime. You have earned one thing off me. Ask it."

Cass walked on down towards the river of forgetting that Ferry Street had become, and thought about what he wanted most to know, and was surprised to find it was not what he was.

"Your name," he said. "You never told me your name."

The Keeper was quiet.

"Names are not nothing," it said. "You worked that out yourself, this morning, without being told. You would not give me yours, and you were right not to. In the old country a name given was a keeping made. It was a thread you handed someone and trusted them to hold." A pause. "You are asking me for a thread."

"I'm asking your name," said Cass. "You already know I'm the sort who holds on. You've seen the sort I am. I don't let go of things."

And the Keeper laughed, a small dry surprised rustle, the first time Cass had heard it laugh, and something in the sound of it, ancient and amused and just faintly warmer than it had been a second before, told Cass he had said exactly the right thing without meaning to.

"No," it agreed. "No, you do not. God help you." It settled deeper. "Alder. My name is Alder."

"Alder," said Cass, trying it. "Like the tree?"

"Like the tree. The one that grows down where the ground is too wet for anything sensible. Roots in the flood. Stands in the water its whole life and does not rot in it, when every other wood would soften and go." Alder's voice had gone somewhere far off. "They used to build on us, when they had to build on nothing. Whole cities, on alder driven down into the drowned ground. You would not think the soft grey tree by the river was the one holding the houses up. It is, though. It is always the one nobody looks at." A beat. "My mother named me. She had a sense of humour. Walk. It is starting."

It was starting. The first fat drops came down, and the strange thing was that they came down through the tide without disturbing it in the least, real rain falling into unreal water, and Cass turned up Ferry Street with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets and Alder's small weight over his heart, and the tide climbed.

It climbed as they went. On the market square it had been up past the bench. On Ferry Street it was up to the shop signs. By the time they turned into his own road it was over the tops of the parked cars, high and bright and hushed, and the ordinary houses stood in it up to their windows like a row of wrecks on the sea floor. No light showed through the drowning. The deeper in he went the deeper it got, and it was deepest of anywhere in the whole grey town, Cass saw, with a slow cold turning in his stomach, over one particular house at the far end of the road, rising up its pebble-dashed front and pressing at the dark glass of an upstairs window that was his own.

Alder went rigid.

Cass felt it happen, felt the small body lock and the breath stop, and he stopped too, at his own gate, in tide up to his chest that he could not feel and could not breathe and would not have drowned in, staring at his own house going under.

"Whose house is that," said Alder. Very low. Every trace of the tired amused old thing was gone out of its voice. What was left was something Cass had not heard in it before, and did not like at all, because it was fear, and old things are not supposed to be afraid. "Cass. Whose house is that."

He had never told it his name. He was quite sure he had never told it his name.

"It's mine," said Cass. "It's my house. My mum's in there."

For a moment Alder said nothing. The rain came down through the shining water. Somewhere inside the drowned house a kitchen light was on, a small brave yellow smudge deep under the tide, and Cass thought of his mother at the counter with the radio going, buttering toast for a supper she'd eat alone and never think to wonder why the second place was set, and something in him had already decided, was already moving, before Alder found its voice.

"Do not go in there," said Alder. "Whatever you do. Whatever else. That is not a house any more. Something in that house is holding the gate open, do you understand me, that is not the tide finding its level, that is the tide being called, the whole of it, to this one door, and I have not seen the like in longer than this town has stood, and we cannot, you and I, we cannot go in, we have to get you away from here, there is a place, there are people who can —" It was talking fast now, the words tumbling, the way even very old and dignified things talk when they are frightened. "Cass. Are you listening to me. We cannot go in that house."

Cass had his hand on the cold wet latch of his own front gate.

"My mum's in there," he said again. "And my box is in there. Everything I've got left of him is in that box, in that house, under all that." He looked at the drowned yellow light of the kitchen, and the pressing dark of his window, and he was not afraid, or not only afraid, but steady again, the way he had gone steady on the dead man's bench. "You said keeping alone is only postponing. Fine. Then I'm not doing it alone any more, because now there's two of us, and I'm not leaving the last of my grandad at the bottom of that to be tidied away."

"Cass —"

"Hold on," said Cass. "Both ends. You told me. So hold on."

And he opened the gate, and went in.