Wyl Menmuir - The Many

Timothy wakes and, for a few moments in the darkness, he wonders whether he is still aboard the ship, somewhere deep within its hold, and he lies still and waits for some sensation of the boat moving on the water beneath him. The feeling of oppression stays with him and he cannot shake the sensation that the boundary marked out by the container ships is important somehow.

Timothy has been here several weeks now and he wonders sometimes whether he is causing more damage to the house than he is improving it. He coughs. It is a cough he has developed from the clouds of plaster that sit heavy in all the rooms, dust that has found its way into his lungs and beneath his fingernails and eyelids. The feeling of oppression, he realises, had been there before his dream. His throat is dry and he feels the house pressing down on him.

To shake off the feeling, he gets out of bed and walks down the staircase, running his hands along the wooden struts of the walls. They are the thin ribs of the house, exposed as he has peeled back layers of wallpaper and then crumbling plaster from the walls. He heads for the kitchen, pours himself a glass of water from the sink and sees someone has slid an envelope beneath the back door and it stands out white against the slate floor. Ethan has reconsidered the offer he made weeks before and they are to sail the following morning. He looks at the clock on the kitchen wall and sees it is just gone four in the morning. Too early to continue his work on the house and too late to return to sleep. In any case he cannot face returning to the dream he has just left, and instead he puts on his running clothes and walks out to stretch in the darkness that will last another hour yet at least. As he leaves, he tucks his phone into the pocket in the back of his running shorts. He will call Lauren later, when he can get reception. He runs out into the dark and the mist of the early morning. Lauren will still be asleep, warm and ensconced in duvet. There is still some way to go before he can call for her to join him. He will not tell her his worries for the task that is still ahead, or the scale of the work that still faces him in the house, nor that it feels to him in some way like a thin soil that crumbles between his fingers as he touches it.

On his run out of the village, he takes a detour past the beach. There is a light on in the cabin of one of the boats and by it he sees Ethan’s jacketed torso haloed on the deck of the Great Hope. Ethan’s head is down, his face hidden in the dark shadow of a cap as he works at something on deck. Timothy thinks about approaching him and asking him again about the line of container ships and whether they can pass out that way when they head out. But already the dream is losing its intensity and he is sure by the time it is light he will have shaken whatever it is that is pulling him out to them. Ethan is absorbed in his task and the sound of the waves on the beach means Timothy would have to shout above it to get his attention. He will ask Ethan about it later perhaps.

‘WHAT’S OUT THERE?’

This is the evening before they are due to sail, when they stand on the deck of the grounded boat and Ethan talks Timothy through what they will be doing the next day.

‘Out there? You mean in the water?’ Ethan replies. ‘What’s left when there’s nothing worth catching. Dogfish. Jellyfish. Dead things or dying things you wouldn’t put a fork to.’

‘Why do you, then…?’ Timothy starts to ask, but changes tack. ‘No, beyond the ships. Why do you stay this side of them? Is it a safety thing?’

Ethan, backed into a corner, can think of nothing to say in reply and, instead, goes back to running the edge of the net along the palm of his hand. Checking the nets usually calms him, but now his thoughts are out on the water, out beyond the line of ships.

In the sky’s gradual lightening before dawn, half an hour or so after they have passed out from the protection of the rocks at the mouth of the cove, Ethan steers the boat on a heading away from the rest of the fleet and mutes the radio. The morning air is calm and the dark sky above them shifts from a band of darkest blue to a light yellow and then to a deep orange on the horizon. The outlines of the container ships are silhouetted in the darkest band of orange, where it starts to gradate back to the deepest blue of the sea below.

Ethan observes from the small cabin of the Great Hope as Timothy stands on the foredeck trying to find his legs. He has not said a word to the newcomer since they cast off, and Timothy looks unsure as to whether he should stand or sit, and he settles for an uncomfortable position somewhere between the two, with his leg braced against the side of the boat, one hand gripping the guard rail hard, his knuckles white and the rest of his hand pale already in the freezing sea air. Timothy is about Perran’s height, though he has none of the same thinness around the neck and face, nor the same thick head of hair, but for all the differences between the two, they might be related. Something in the way he holds himself perhaps, or something in his eyes. Ethan checks their heading again, makes some adjustments and tries to shake off this transplanting of Perran onto the newcomer.

As they head out towards the ships, he concentrates on the spaces in between them, and tries, unsuccessfully, to block them out of his mind. After an hour or so, in which the ships grow in stature, at first steadily and then with increasing speed, they come up close alongside one, as though it has drawn the smaller vessel in, the larger body exerting its own gravity. The ship looks as though it is rooted straight down into the seabed for all it moves in the water. It looks to be a fixed point, as steady and solid as any of the houses in the village. Ethan has never sailed this close to the sentinels, let alone passed between them to the other side. Until recently he has never even thought of going out between them, not since the ships arrived a little short of ten years ago.

First the letters, then the ships.

Letters from the department start to arrive shortly after Perran’s death, edicts and instructions for the new fishing grounds worded in archaic and obscure language. It is left to Clem to interpret these missives, and he reads them aloud to the fleet as they congregate on the beach, and then he tacks each of the letters to the noticeboard in the winch house.

‘Pursuant to the department’s previous notification of the revised fishing grounds, boundaries will be marked for the purpose of controlling fish stocks in restricted zones and for the containment and management of harmful waterborne agents,’ Clem reads.

Clem is standing on the step outside the winch house, a head higher than the other fishermen. Looking at him brings to mind a sepia photograph Ethan has seen in a frame on the wall of the winch house beside the noticeboard. The photograph shows a stern priest standing alone on the beach as the boats cast off. The priest wears full canonical robes and holds in one hand a chain and censer that is leaking smoke. He is swinging the censer out in front of him with one hand and the other is raised to the departing fleet in a gesture of benediction. Ethan has always felt sorry for this man in the photograph, standing alone on the grey stones, looking out of place.

‘Motorised and sail-driven vessels, of classes one to four inclusive, are not to be permitted to come within 500 feet of boundary markers, and owners of vessels straying into the restricted zone will be subject to prosecution under the following Acts…’

Ethan has stopped listening to Clem and instead turns to look for the reaction of the other skippers and crews around him. They are, as usual, silent for the most part, though some are talking beneath their breath, or kicking the stones under their boots. One or two have already started to walk away from the beach.