Wyl Menmuir - The Many

Ethan busies himself unloading his boat, but looks up when he hears raised voices on the beach. Rab and one of the men in suits are stood, face to face, a little way off from the boats.

‘It’s all the fish,’ the incomer is saying. ‘Not just the ones you feel like handing over.’

‘One fish,’ Rab says. ‘One fish is all. One fish out of how many? Two hundred? Three hundred?’

Ethan lowers his gaze to the dogfish that lies on the ground between the two men. It is barely visible against the dark beach. The man leans in close to Rab and speaks to him in a voice too low to be overheard. When he is finished, Rab looks up briefly towards the Great Hope , before stepping away from the fish and looking away down the beach, while the man kneels and pulls out a clear plastic bag from a pocket in his suit. He puts his hand into the plastic bag, picks the fish up, and inverts the bag, tying it at the top. He handles the fish carefully, as though it is something precious, but holds it away from his suit as he brings it back towards the boats.

‘Is that all of them?’ he asks Clem as he lays the fish into one of the crates. ‘The agreement is for all the fish. I don’t want to hear you’ve been holding any back. That’s what the full payment’s for.’

He talks quietly, and Ethan feels a threat sitting behind his words. Clem nods to the man and says yes, they have all the fish now, and in response, the man reaches into his suit jacket pocket and hands over a roll of cash.

‘Who are they anyway?’ Ethan says, as the two men walk off up the beach towards the woman in the grey coat, who has not moved from her place by the car. ‘They looks more suited to a funeral, or an office, than buying fish off the boats.’

‘You want to keep your thoughts to yourself,’ says Clem. ‘She bought the whole catch, and you won’t complain when you get your share. Or maybe it’s nothing to you. Either way, I’d stay quiet about it.’

The other cars and vans have already started to move off, though a few people have stayed around to see the fish come down off the boats. The two men have the white boxes of fish in stacks beneath the now open shutters in the van and have opened each for the woman to look into. The woman in grey kneels for a while by each box before indicating the men can seal them up and load them into the van. There are many boxes in the stacks and she looks each one over carefully, as though she is looking for something in particular, and the two men look impatient.

Later, as they unload their gear from the boats, Ethan looks up again to see whether they are still there. The woman is no longer there, waiting in her car perhaps, and the two men are securing the last of the crates next to the van. He sees Timothy there too. Not standing with the men loading the van, but standing close to them, by the railings above the beach. Timothy is trying to conceal his shock at the state of the black fish. He looks transfixed by the sight of the mutated haul, and the men loading the boxes onto the van cover the remaining crates sitting on the roadside with a tarpaulin. Ethan feels a flash of compassion for Timothy and turns back quickly to folding his nets and stowing them. He sees the other crews have seen Timothy there too and they are looking up at him with new expressions.

The others finish up on their boats quickly, and head over to the pub to celebrate their catch and Ethan considers joining them, but instead finds himself walking up again towards Perran’s, though when he gets there he sees no sign of Timothy, only the evidence of his continued work on the house.

Later, when he gets back to his own house, Ethan falls onto his bed and into a deep sleep. In his dream he is sailing the Great Hope over a glassy sea. The deck is clear of all the paraphernalia of fishing and the boat looks refurbished and renewed, newly painted and smooth. He is not at the helm and there is no sound of an engine, though the boat moves through the water and out into a wide sea. He is looking over the side of the boat into clear water when he sees the flank of a great creature pass beneath the boat, muscular and immensely long. He looks round, but there is no one else on board to tell and no method he can think of to record this happening. He returns his gaze to the water, in time to see the creature’s great flukes pass by beneath, and he watches it retreat and become formless, a fading shadow merging itself with the darkness of the deeper water.

The next day, Perran’s house is shut up and the battered car is gone. With Timothy absent, the house seems to look no different to the way it had before he arrived, as though it has relaxed back into its former state. Ethan watches for Timothy’s return all that day and all the next and does not go back out to sea, as though Timothy has taken his desire to fish with him in the boot of his car. Sensing the change in Ethan, the other three skippers start to head to the pub instead of to their boats. They blame the shortness of the days, the shortness of the prospects, and the weather, but really they need little excuse and for two weeks most of the village forgets about Timothy Buchannan.

BY EARLY JANUARY, the Great Hope has returned to the water and is the only boat sailing from the small cove. The other skippers remain at the bar and tell each other stories of catches they themselves have never made and of storms they have only watched from the shore.

Ethan spends long hours carving furrows into the dark sea, furrows that close over behind him as he passes. Each time he leaves the beach, he does so with a sense of determination that quickly weakens. Some days he drops his nets, but mostly he just motors out and cuts the engine, glad to be away from the village and from the talk. With nothing else to occupy him, his thoughts return over and again to the memories Timothy’s arrival have drawn up. When he is forced to return to the village, when the cold has crept down inside his jacket and fixed itself there, or when the light on the fuel gauge calls out to him, he heads back in and avoids looking at the rocks on either side of the entrance to the cove, for fear of seeing, as he has seen so many times in his head, the flash of bright yellow that had led the fishermen to Perran. It seems to him that Timothy’s arrival has brought Perran’s death back to the village somehow, though he is unsure how this could be.

He keeps watch on the chimney at Perran’s and on the coast road, for the sight of the newcomer’s battered car, hoping his return will bring with it fish, even if they are pulled up mauled and half-dead. He imagines the fish will sense Timothy’s return as he drives back towards the village. He sees them dragged up in great numbers from whatever depths at which they hide, in currents below the reach of the chemicals, and that Timothy will drag with him, as though with an invisible net, a broad lane, tight with shifting, seething bodies, that twists unseen alongside him as he comes back into the village.

But as he looks out over the expanse of sea towards the coast, he sees no sign of Timothy’s return, and no sign of the shadow the fish cast on the surface of the water, no sign of their struggle as they fight against the currents.

He realises then he is not fishing but hunting, and he watches for Timothy the way a hunter waits for a stalked deer. He watches the bare landscape for Timothy’s return and forgets the purpose with which he came out on the water.

On a day the sun does not manage to rise fully above the horizon, shining a weak light between the land and dark clouds overhead, he sits on the deck on a crate and feels the swell of the ocean beneath the boat. He is watching a figure move across the land. It is a while before he realises it is Timothy running out along the coast road, a pale figure against the dark fields.