Wyl Menmuir - The Many

When Ethan pulls back into the cove, Clem is on the beach and he walks down towards Ethan’s boat as he grounds. They pull the boat up out of the water together, though Clem says nothing to him and he cannot find anything to say to Clem.

That night Ethan dreams of a storm in which all the boats pulled high up on the beach are dragged down the stones into a boiling sea, breaking them free of the lines that hold them to the iron rings set into the sea wall. The boats are gone faster than he can chase them and he can only watch from the coast road as they disappear, though whether it’s the dark or the waves into which they break and dissolve he’s not sure. He watches as the boats surface briefly in among the furious waves, and stares into the thick darkness as they are pounded against the rocks before they are dragged back. When he wakes, the stillness of the night unnerves him and he leaves the bed just so he can hear the sound of his feet on the floor.

TIMOTHY BUCHANNAN WANDERS from room to room. In the morning light the house looks no more promising than it had the night before, when his pocket torch had illuminated before him peeling wallpaper and huge shadows of stains on the walls and ceilings.

When he arrived it was late, and after wading through the detritus in the hall, the kitchen, the living room, he had made his way up the stairs where he found in one of the two bedrooms a narrow, metal-framed bed and laid down the sheet he’d brought with him and on top of that a sleeping bag, and slept.

Now, with more light to help him view the extent of his foolishness, he walks again through the house, taking in the dirt of the kitchen and the dense smell rising from the filthy carpets, carpets that peel back where they meet the walls.

‘I’ve not been down there myself,’ the agent says. ‘It’s been sitting on file for years. The gentleman who dealt with it originally has moved on from here, so there’s not much I can tell you.’

The agent sounds apologetic, but also a little bemused, as though he cannot quite understand why someone would go to such lengths to find a property in this particular part of the country, so far from anywhere. Perhaps, Timothy thinks, the agent has a slight hangover. He is young, probably in his early twenties, and he does not yet fit the suit and tie he is wearing. It is the suit of an older man.

‘Do you have any photographs?’ Timothy asks.

They are sitting in an office as grey as any Timothy has seen before, fifteen floors above street level. As he had walked into the corridor after leaving the lift, he had smelt fresh paint and the office itself carries with it a sense of impermanence, as though the walls might be taken down and reconfigured around them at any moment. As though, next week, this whole floor of the building might be replaced with a trading floor or the offices of a corporate bank. The grey walls mute what light falls in through the large plate-glass window, a window that looks out over another office block across the street, and the room is dominated by a wood-effect desk, empty and expansive. The agent is searching through a grey metal filing cabinet for information on the house.

‘No. No photographs here,’ he says. His head is almost entirely concealed inside one of the deep metal drawers. ‘A few old postcards of the cove, the village, some funny-looking rocks. You say you’ve been there before though?’

He emerges from the depths of the drawer with a thin manila file in his hand. He opens the file and, holding it at the bottom two corners, empties its contents onto the desk and picks up the sheet at the top of the pile.

‘Deceased estate,’ he says. ‘Empty for… ten years now.’

The agent is scanning quickly through the paper and is clearly bored.

‘In need of renovation, it says here. I wouldn’t like to say what that means really.’

Timothy wonders whether the agent is trying to get rid of him.

‘No real description of the property either. Furnished, so you’ll have to clear it out yourself. No structural survey available.’

He flicks through some of the other papers and makes a few notes in his pad before looking back up at Timothy.

‘At this price though, you can’t really go wrong.’

After finding nothing that would suggest there is central heating, Timothy gathers together some of the paper he finds strewn about on the floor, compresses it into balls, and heaps the paper in the grate in the living room. He looks around for something to burn, for when he has a flame going. There are two flimsy wooden chairs beneath the window. He gives one a kick and it splinters without complaint. The thin chair legs he arranges in a pyramid over the paper. It is a mistake. The house is a mistake. In the light, the shabbiness is far from rustic or endearing, though he will tell Lauren later it is going to be perfect for them.

When the paper balls and other scraps he has assembled in the fireplace take, after several attempts to get them lit, he stands, stretches some of the remaining cold out of his muscles and pulls back a pair of stained, orange floral curtains from the window. For the first time that morning he smiles. Laid out beyond the rows of houses below him is the ocean, calm as a millpond, and a lightening sky that fades to a deep blue where it meets the horizon. As he looks out, he draws his fingers the length of the window frame and feels flecks of paint peel off beneath his fingertips. There is a thin line or crack, barely perceptible, that runs up through the window and he adds it to his mental list of things he needs to fix. He has the sudden urge to go outside and breathe in the sea and the sky.

Later in the morning, he leaves the fire burning small chunks of furniture in the grate and takes from the Volvo a canvas bag, which holds some clothes and his trainers. He changes in the kitchen and stands outside admiring the view again for a few minutes before setting off. He works his way down through a tangle of streets and runs out along the road parallel to the waterfront, his head tilted slightly to the left so he can see the water as he runs. After a couple of miles he is warm again and slows to a stop, stands and looks towards the flat horizon, his hands hanging by his side as his breathing and heart rate slow. As he looks out over the sea, he feels the need to immerse himself in the water. It is a thought he realises has been there since he arrived in the car the evening before, that he would swim in the sea. Perhaps he will start a habit he could continue long into the future, like the swimmers he has watched so often while running along the towpath beside the Thames and around the Serpentine, who day after day and year after year lower their ageing bodies into the water, drawing from it something he felt he wanted. Maybe this will become an obsession he can cultivate, a story that others will tell about him.

‘Of course, you know Timothy. You’ll see him diving in off the rocks out past that last house over there if you’re up early enough to catch him. Seriously. Every morning, day in day out since the day he arrived. Runs at first light, strips off and swims out through the surf, rain, wind, snow, sun. Plenty of times we thought we’d find him washed up on the rocks, but he always comes back fine. He’s a strong one. Knows the sea better than he knows his own wife, I reckon.’

But he is getting ahead of himself. The village is now out of sight behind him and there is no one to be seen and he takes off his trainers, socks and running shirt. He sees himself diving from the rocks straight into the water and striking out with a confident front crawl, but as he climbs down the rocks and gets closer to the edge, he sees the sea is green and shallow for several feet before it drops off into darker water.