Wyl Menmuir - The Many

He winds his way down the two further tight rows of houses that separate this street from the sea, and finds himself passing a café that fronts onto the beach. Three men sit at a table in front of the closed café door, talking to another three who are making repairs to a trawl net spread out before them on the concrete walkway. The men continue their conversation as he approaches, though they all turn to watch him walk past. Timothy walks away and, rather than retrace his steps past the café to the metal staircase, he sits on the edge of the walkway and lets himself down onto the stones. The distance to the beach is further than it looked from the top and, half-falling, half-scrambling down the sloped sea wall, he lands awkwardly and looks around to see if anyone has noticed. The men repairing their nets are still watching him and he hears raised voices from the men at the café tables, though he cannot see them from where he is now standing on the beach.

Further down, a man in his late fifties or early sixties sits outside the stone building on the edge of the beach and Timothy approaches him. The man wears a pair of faded yellow waders, a thin jumper and a woollen cap. He is smoking. By the scattering of cigarette butts that fills the spaces in between the stones around the shack it seems he smokes often. He is feeding the edge of a net through his hands and cutting out knots with a stubby knife and his eyes are fixed on the gap in the cliff walls, looking out to the small patch of open water it reveals.

‘You’re the one took on Perran’s place then,’ he says, without turning towards Timothy.

It’s a statement rather than a question, and one that echoes the steady animosity he felt in the stares of the men by the café, and the others he has received from the few people he has passed in the street since he arrived.

‘Shorter than I thought you’d be, the way they talk about you down here.’

Timothy frowns and looks to see the man is smiling to himself though he maintains his gaze towards the sea.

‘They love a story here. Love a story,’ the man says. ‘You didn’t expect a welcome party, did you? Know how they feel about incomers. Oh, they’ll stop staring eventually. When they forget there was a time you weren’t here. Not likely to happen anytime soon given what happened to Perran and you moving in there. It’s not a thing they’ll easy forget.’

There is a pause and Timothy thinks he has been dismissed. He makes to move away.

‘Their memories aren’t as long as they think. You get stuck in and they’ll forget you, give it a few years. Other way they’d forget you is by getting yourself back up country. That’d work too.’

Timothy cannot think of what to say in response, and when he speaks, it is with a voice he does not recognise as his own, as though he has acquired a new accent since he has arrived here, one he was unaware he has developed.

‘Perran?’ he asks.

The older man shakes his head. It’s not time for stories now obviously. Timothy changes tack.

‘You look as though you’re waiting for someone. I thought all the boats were usually back in by now,’ he says. Watching for the boats has become a routine for Timothy, watching from the empty front bedroom of the house.

‘Another thing you might be held responsible for, you’re not careful,’ the older man says. ‘Got crews that don’t want to fish. Most of them have been no further afield than the pub the last few weeks. Only one of them out at the moment and he’s not fishing, just using up fuel, I reckon.’

Timothy starts to head down the beach.

‘Clem,’ the older man says before Timothy goes out of earshot. ‘And the man you’ve got spooked, that’d be Ethan. I reckon you owe it to me to get him back on track, trouble it’s causing me.’

The tide is low. Timothy walks down the beach as far as the shoreline and the dark band of seaweed, driftwood and plastic shrapnel that marks the boundary between land and sea. There is no such distinction between sea and sky and the only marker he can find of the horizon are the container ships, which sit still, pictures hung on a featureless wall.

At the edge of the beach, Timothy makes his way out of the cove on the rocks and round to the right, mindful this time of the tide. He does not know why it surprises him that he cannot now find the rock on which he and Lauren had clung to each other ten years previously. The memory he holds is clear, unequivocal, and he now considers for a moment he has created an elaborate fiction of this event, that it never took place, at least not in the way he believes it did. Eventually, among the jutting, knife-edge rocks he finds a slab, smoother and flatter than the others, and sits on it looking out to sea, though he is still shaken slightly by the thought this may not be the same sea he and Lauren looked out on ten years previously.

He does not know how long he has been considering this thought, sitting on the flat rock, when he becomes aware of the boat, limping its way back towards the cove entrance. It is close in to the shore, close enough for him to see detail and to hear the engine spitting and hacking. He can see he has been spotted too, and the man on-board watches him openly, rudely even, through the small window of the wheelhouse. Timothy finds he cannot look away and stares back. He raises a hand, but the man on the boat does not return the gesture, and continues to stare at him until the boat passes out of sight as it enters the cove. Clem’s words return to him, something about a debt he owes, some effect he’s had on some fisherman he has never met, a slight for which he must atone, for which he has already been found guilty.

The tide has turned and Timothy turns his eyes away from the faint off-white wake left by the boat, dispersing slowly in the calm sea. He scrambles back around the shoreline and down the rocks onto the beach again, and sees Clem is unhitching the boat he had seen making its way back in. Clem sees him walking up the beach towards the hard standing and Timothy raises a hand, though Clem has already turned away from both the boat and from him and is climbing the metal staircase up towards the coast road.

He moves in close enough to read the boat’s name painted on the transom. From a distance the Great Hope had looked like a boat from a picture postcard, all bright blues and whites. Up close it is ragged and the paint is peeling in thick strips from the cabin roof and walls, but she shows her age most below the waterline, where the scars of a life spent being dragged across the stones run deep in the thick metal hull. Timothy walks round the stern, to where a man in waders is hauling a net over the side of the boat onto the concrete.

‘Give you a hand?’ he calls up. ‘You must be Ethan.’

Ethan stops, with half the net overboard, and stares down with an expression Timothy does not recognise. It is not animosity or anger. Fear maybe, and something else, which if he had to put a name to it might come out as hunger, though he knows as it crosses his mind it is not the right word.

‘I’d like to see the village from out there sometime,’ Timothy says, pointing out towards the sea. ‘If you’re ever short handed, you know, I could…’

‘You shouldn’t swim out there,’ Ethan cuts him short. ‘Not if you like breathing.’

Timothy flinches and looks around, hoping Ethan is talking not to him, but to someone else he has not yet noticed.

‘I wasn’t,’ he starts to reply, and Ethan waves a hand, dismissing whatever it is he is about to say.

‘I saw you swimming a mile out over there a couple of weeks back. You’re green if you reckon on swimming in these waters. The tide’ll have you off those rocks before you know it and we’ll be fishing you out a few days later or picking what’s left of you off the beach. After she’s had her way with you.’