Wyl Menmuir - The Many

Ethan waves the same hand back out in the direction of the sea.

‘And if the tide doesn’t get you, the chems will. You want to stay healthy past forty, alive past fifty, you’ll remember to stay well out of the water.’

Timothy opens his mouth to respond, but Ethan has lowered his gaze back to the deck and returned to his work on the boat, and it seems clear to Timothy the conversation is over.

As he passes back towards the village, Timothy sees someone has hung, over the railings between the beach and the road, a row of jellyfish that are drying in the cold breeze, tattered and dirty, like snow that’s been walked over too many times.

‘We ought to move down there. Let’s do it. Now, before it’s too late.’

Lauren laughs and throws a tea towel across the tiny kitchen, from where she is washing dishes, towards Timothy, who is sitting on the only worktop, finishing the glass of red wine she has left there. Timothy catches the tea towel and gives it a puzzled look before setting it down next to him by the hob.

‘Before we get entrenched. You know. Before this place gets its claws into us. Just think of the place we’d be able to afford down there.’

‘With whose money, mister? And anyway, it wasn’t all postcard stuff, there was something weird about it,’ Lauren replies and nods towards the towel he has set down and again towards the plates on the draining board. ‘I see my subtle hint failed again. Pick that up and give me a hand.’

Timothy balances Lauren’s glass on the tips of one of the stove’s four-pronged burners and jumps down from the worktop. He drapes the towel over his shoulder, walks up behind Lauren, puts his hands around her waist and kisses her neck.

‘And no distractions either. Not until we’ve finished in here. You. Tea towel. Draining board. Full concentration. Now.’

Timothy feigns a look of reproach and picks up a plate from the crowded draining board. By the harsh light thrown by the bare bulb in the tiny kitchen Lauren is striking, and her neat bobbed hair throws dark shadows on her pale cheeks.

‘And what, right now? Just because you like a place we’ve been doesn’t mean we should move there. I’ve still got the rest of the year to go, and if you think Morgan will let his prize cow go without putting up a fight I think you’re naïve,’ Lauren says, and hands him a bundle of cutlery dripping water and soap bubbles, which he receives onto the tea towel in both hands.

‘Morgan can screw himself,’ he says without conviction. Lauren is right. He has held the job at Morgan’s for just under a year, and to throw it away now would be foolish even by his standards. A rising star of the profession, or so Morgan tells him whenever he comes back with a new contract signed and sealed, or another client waiting with his chequebook open and his pen poised.

‘Umm, hmm?’

Lauren flicks soap bubbles up at him and he flicks back with the tea towel. After putting her wet hands up in a motion of mock defeat, she pushes him gently backwards through the door into the sitting room of their new flat. He lets himself be overbalanced back onto the sofa, and pulls her with him.

Afterwards, he reaches up and takes a throw from the back of the sofa and lays it over the two of them. Lauren is on the brink of sleep, her head balanced on his chest, and Timothy listens in the darkness to the sounds of the city as they rise up from the streets and in through the window.

Some hours later, Lauren slides off the sofa and Timothy watches her stretch as though he is not there at all, and then she silently picks up the clothes from the floor and chooses some more to wear for the day from the wardrobe that stands in the corner of the room. He watches her half-silhouetted as she dresses in that economical way she does and he marvels at the way her body fits into the thin woollen sweater she puts on. When she is gone, he rises from the sofa and transfers himself to the bed, taking the journey of four feet they had not managed to make the night before.

Sometime later in the morning, Lauren returns from her lectures and climbs into bed with him. The snow is thick on the pavements and roofs outside and they spend the rest of the day under the thick covers. At some point between the waking and sleeping as the afternoon wears itself out, she pulls him over onto his side so their foreheads and the tips of their noses touch and stares into his eyes and they stay like this for what may be minutes, but may also be hours.

TIMOTHY IS STANDING on the deck of a vast ship, an expanse of thickly painted deck, as wide as a football pitch or wider. No birds perch or roost on the railings, though there are gulls wheeling far above in the white sky. He walks across the deck to the side facing the shore and can see the shape of the coast, unfamiliar from this angle. There are fields marked out by their boundaries and clumps of trees, and he wonders whether it is the distance that keeps him from seeing any sheep or cattle grazing. At this distance, the entrance to the cove is hidden from him and blends into the landscape, but he thinks he can see the village rising up the steep hillside, and above it the white beacon on top of the hill. This is the only sign there is life here, other than the sea road that follows the contours of the coast as far as he can see in one direction and that comes to an end at the far side of the village. Beyond the village, the landscape is indistinct.

To his left, though far off, rising up from the deck of the ship there is a tower, sombre and tall and featureless aside from the broad expanse of glass that obscures the bridge, where the captain and crew would have looked down, over their cargo. The reflective glass stretches all round this tower, so the captain would have seen, too, the broad curving route he ploughed through the sea, though now the boat is stationary, fixed in place. He can feel the massive engines far beneath him, inert and cold.

There is no movement from the tower and no noise other than the wind in his ears and the screaming of the gulls overhead. The gulls turn in wide arcs above him and take turns to dive down towards him, warning him off, warning him to stay clear, though as far as he can see, there is no way off the ship.

The huge plate-glass windows of the bridge reflect the grey sky and Timothy has a strong sensation, though there is no sign of anyone else there, that he is being observed dispassionately, of something or someone behind the glass looking down onto this tiny figure far below on the deck. He feels there could be someone, or a bank of someones, standing behind the glass watching to see what he will do next, with clipboards lowered, making notes on his progress or lack thereof. Or maybe it is the blank gaze of someone or something still asleep, something passive that he should not disturb. The intensity of this feeling grows as he stares up at the tower, and with the gulls diving closer with each pass, he looks around for shelter, but there is no hiding place.

The offshore wind is cold and there is no protection from it on the exposed deck. He does not feel like moving towards the tower despite the shelter it might offer from the wind biting at his face. From where he stands, leant against the railings, he sees, between the ship and the land, small boats circling, like fish in a glass bowl and he has the sense if he threw something, anything, down into the water below, they would turn towards him, to the disturbance in the water. The sensation that he is looking in on something is overwhelming.

Timothy is suddenly anxious about what lies beyond the ship in the other direction, of what he will be able to see from this platform from the other side of the deck that faces out, away from the land. He has a strong feeling there will be nothing there when he gets to the other side, no horizon to see, no waves, no features at all, that this boat represents the very edge of something. He turns from the railings and starts to walk across the huge deck to the other side and, as the sense of anxiety increases, the walk becomes a run. He trips several times over hatches and iron rings anchored into the deck on his way across and beneath him he can feel the gaping emptiness of the cargo holds and beneath that the emptiness of the sea. When he reaches the guard rail and looks out over the other side, he breathes again, relieved to see, far below him, waves that are evidence the sea continues beyond, though when he follows the scene up from the point where the ship’s hull meets the water, he finds he cannot distinguish between the sea and the sky, and the empty expanse feels oppressive and close.