The tide table

Source: an original fiction extract.

“On Tuesday afternoon, Rosa took the harbour office keys from her uncle and walked down to the slipway. He had asked her to pin up the new tide table before the evening boats returned. The paper was folded inside her waterproof jacket. At the office door she stopped to watch a boy drawing circles in a shallow pool with a stick. Farther out, a fishing boat leaned against the mud. Rosa had lived above the harbour for sixteen years, but she had never been responsible for anything that happened below the kitchen window.

The office was a narrow wooden room, squeezed between the net store and the sea wall. Salt had furred the corners of the windows. On the desk, a radio muttered through a mouthful of static, while a row of keys glittered on hooks like small, patient fish. The old tide table curled away from its pins. Rosa touched the paper and it cracked softly, as though the room had been waiting a long time for someone to disturb it.

She was smoothing the new sheet against the board when a man came in. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows and he held a coil of blue rope. 'Your uncle about?' he asked. Rosa said that he had gone to the dentist. The man looked at the table. 'That's last month's.' She laughed, certain that he was joking. Then she saw the date. Her uncle had handed her two folded sheets at breakfast; she had put one beside the toaster and one inside her jacket.

For a moment she considered saying that she had not finished. The man was already turning towards the door. Beyond him, the boy with the stick had moved farther down the slipway. Rosa could see the dark water gathering in the channels around his shoes. 'Wait,' she said. Her voice sounded louder in the small room than she had intended. She took the sheet off the board and explained what she had done. The man put down the rope. 'Good thing you looked,' he said, and went to call the boy back.

Rosa ran home for the other sheet. When she returned, the boy was sitting on the wall and the man was fixing a frayed end of rope. This time she read the date aloud before pushing in the pins. The man listened without smiling. Outside, water had filled the pool where the boy's circles had been. Rosa checked the sheet once more, locked the office and put the keys into a different pocket from the paper.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the age and atmosphere of the harbour office. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.