Wyl Menmuir - The Many

Ethan is still standing on the deck and seems unsure of what to do next. He is looking out of the boat for something or someone. For a moment Timothy wonders if Ethan is looking for him, but his tiredness keeps him walking in the direction of the house he now refers to, even to himself, as Perran’s.

Timothy is still unable to feel his hand from where he caught it on the cable block. He pushes his way through to the edge of the crowd and is glad when he has some space again for himself, to be away from the gaze of the buyers and the villagers.

There is another person standing on the outskirts of the commotion on the beach, a woman he has seen before, dressed in a long, pale grey coat, as dissimilar to the grey of the stones on the beach as it is possible to be. She is looking out over the proceedings as though she is watching a play, at a distance and with detached amusement. As Timothy passes her, she raises her eyes to him and a fraction later she smiles a thin conspiratorial smile, a look that suggests they share something. The woman has grey eyes, paler even than her coat, and he is taken aback by them, more so than he is by the events of the past few hours. Her look is that of a lighthouse beam on a dark night that illuminates the sea around for a fraction of a second and then passes on, and the look they share is over almost as soon as it starts. The woman in grey returns her gaze to the men shouting down by the boat. Timothy continues his climb up the beach and a few yards further on turns back towards the scene. He sees two of the men in the crowd looking back up the beach towards the woman, and as they do she nods at them in affirmation or encouragement and they push their way forward through the small crowd towards Clem.

When Timothy looks back again as he reaches the road he sees the deal has been concluded and now the crowd is split between those still interested in the fish in the crates coming out of the hold and those now dispersing. Some of them are staring up the beach towards the place where he stands. Clem and the crews of the fishing boats are now in this group, and he feels their gaze follow him as he makes his way up through the village.

Timothy reaches Perran’s and falls into his bed fully clothed. He lies there for a while and a tiredness that is both physical and mental drapes itself over him like a thick blanket. He fights for a few minutes to stay awake and to recall all that has happened since he left the shore in the early morning, but it is like fighting an incoming tide and eventually he falls asleep and into a dream in which he is diving a long swan dive down from a high concrete platform into a clear sea. He passes down through the warm and cold streams of the sea’s subtle strata, until the light that floods the surface gives way to darkness, until the unbearable pressure crushing down on him collapses his lungs and arteries, and he swims down further into the depths. Until the unbearable cold of the deep becomes warm again at the openings in the deepest flooded valleys. He dreams of the vents where life still clings on to the hydrothermal streams that escape the earth’s core, of the shrimps, the crabs, the biosludge that survived the great oceanic apocalypse, and feels the heat of the vents sear the skin on his sunken face as he leans in closer to look. As he swims back towards the surface, his collapsed lungs burn and expand, and as the darkness and the pressure give way to light again, he swims through a lane of translucent fish, packed so close he has to fight his way through them, so close there is no longer water, just fish, packed closely, and he knows however hard he thrashes against them he will make no progress, and eventually, when his muscles give out, when his lungs stop their burning, he lets himself slip down into the mass of fish and the translucence becomes darkness and he dreams of nothing more until he wakes in a weak, fading afternoon light.

Sipping from a glass of water to ease his parched throat, Timothy leans forward against the cold bedroom window and looks down towards the beach. The crowds have dispersed and the vans are gone, but he can still hear noise from the beach, a celebration, and the sound of loud conversation and of glass clinking carried up to him in the early evening on-shore breeze. As the darkness grows he can hear a song or a shanty being sung, a drunken song to which they all know the words and which ebbs and flows on the wind, and the party continues. As he looks down through the village, with his head against the now clouded glass, Timothy has the feeling, that despite the closeness of the people in the houses below and those gathered on the beach, he is profoundly alone here.

Later, when he is in the kitchen fixing a meal, he hears a noise much closer to the house, from the darkness in the front garden. He feels exposed standing in the kitchen. The light from the single bare bulb above spills onto him, and the windowpanes frame squares of darkness and he can see nothing of the garden beyond. He searches through the toolbox, which has taken up permanent residence on the kitchen table, for a torch, and goes out into the garden, though by the time he is out of the house, the noise he heard has stopped and there are no sounds either from the village below. He sweeps the garden with the torch beam, walks down to the gate and finds, laid out on the top of the stone wall that borders the garden, a package wrapped loosely in paper. He unties the string wrapped round the parcel and finds, within, a neat stack of the fish he and Ethan had caught earlier that day. He looks at them for a while in the torchlight, lays the torch on the wall and picks one from the pile, gently with both hands. In the torch beam he sees the translucence of the scales has already started to turn milk white. He looks at the small offering for a while and leaving the fish where they are, he returns to the house, and digs out from his toolbox a trowel, the only tool he has that will do the job. In the darkness, lit only by the light from his kitchen window and the torch, which he lays on the grass next to him, he digs a small grave for the fish beneath the tree furthest from the house, and buries them there, under the tattered streamers which hang from its branches.

ETHAN HAD SPENT much of the money he made from the catch on drinks for the other crews who stayed on late into the night. He had paid off a few debts too, but he was aware, as he did so, of the other debt he owed. And whether it was to Perran or to Timothy to whom the offering should be made, he was still not sure. Perhaps it did not matter as long as he offered them up. After the party had died down and the villagers had dispersed and rolled their ways back up the hill to their houses, he had returned to the Great Hope to retrieve the fish he had held back.

It had seemed important at the time. Like it was the right thing to do, though the terms had been for all the fish, every one to come off the boat, the same as it was the first time. As part of the deal, one of the two men who accompanied the woman in grey had handed him a legal-looking document several pages long and asked him to sign, as soon as the other buyers had started to leave the beach. Ethan made a show of looking through the wad of papers, a document that seemed unsuited to the place it had ended up, too clean and delicate against the contrasting dirt and oil of the beach and the roughness of Ethan’s hands. He recognised the insignia of the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture on the cover sheet and as he skimmed through the papers the text swam before his eyes and he found he could not coerce what was written there to reconcile itself into words and sentences he could recognise. He had rubbed his eyes a few times, with no effect on the legibility of the document, but tiredness had won out and he had proffered the contract back to the man. The man pulled a pen from his suit pocket and handed it over, indicating, with its nib, a space on the last page. Ethan was surprised to see his name already printed there, and surprised too that there was at last something on the document he could read clearly. He pressed the document up against the hull of the Great Hope and signed it, soaking some of the pages on the other side with diesel and grime from the boat. When he handed the papers back, the second man stepped forward and took a roll of cash from his pocket. He handed it over to Clem, who pocketed his share before handing the rest over to Ethan. Ethan climbed up the ladder to unload the fish.