Wyl Menmuir - The Many

WYL MENMUIR was born in 1979 in Stockport. He lives on the north coast of Cornwall with his wife and two children and works as a freelance editor and literacy consultant. The Many is his first novel.

A THIN TRAIL OF smoke rises up from Perran’s, where no smoke has risen for ten years now. Ethan spots it close in, a few hundred yards from shore, as he scans the houses, a regularity of grey spirals where there should be a break in the line. He turns to see if Daniel has seen it too and shouts back at his wheelman to keep his eyes on the course until they’ve cleared the rocks and made land.

He’s as calm as he can be. He lowers his gaze and busies himself on the foredeck, kicking the empty creels and crates back into place and combing the nets laid highest for snags, waiting to feel the boat grounding through the soles of his boots.

Clem is waiting for them as they approach, knee-deep in water that could be a lake for all it is moving, holding the winch cable. He moves aside and shouts up to them a greeting or a curse that is drowned in the engine noise as Daniel brings the boat in too fast onto the beach. Ethan takes a step forward and steadies himself against the gunwale, fires a final insult at Daniel and throws a line over to Clem. By the time it has fallen into Clem’s hands, the winchman has secured it to the cable in a fluid motion and is climbing up out of the water towards the machinery.

The boat’s engine cuts out and the winch takes up the drone. Daniel doesn’t wait for Clem to bring the ladder as the Great Hope pauses beyond the wave line or even for the boat to clear the water. He throws his bag onto the beach and jumps down into the water before the winch takes up the slack. He walks up over the grey stones, bag slung across his back, and Ethan decides against calling him back to finish the job. There’s little enough to do and Daniel is right to want to be well away from him.

From where he stands on deck, Ethan looks past his wheelman at the smoke still rising from Perran’s place. Perran, who would wait at the window for first sight of the lights of the fleet, who would run down the beach and stare as the lights attached themselves to grey shapes and the grey shapes became boats. Perran, who coupled the boats to the winch, careful and slow, and as he did this, Ethan would look over the gunwales to see the thick brown thatch of hair on the boy’s head. Ethan’s fingertips trace unconsciously the smooth crisscross of railroad scar lines on his right arm.

‘Unnatural calm,’ Clem says, as Ethan climbs down the ladder.

So Clem has not noticed the smoke at Perran’s. Clem’s eyes are, as they should be, fixed on the horizon from the moment he arrives at the beach in the early morning, and he won’t look back towards his home until he’s re-launched the boats late on. Ethan takes up a guide pole and follows the Great Hope up to the flat, pushing it back on course as it grates its way across the stones.

Ethan’s is the first boat back and the others will limp in throughout the morning, all holds empty, he’s sure of that. There’s been no talk from the small fleet above the radio static. No talk until a catch is made. It’s a rule. Sure as not setting sail on a Friday is a rule, sure as talking low when you spot a petrel close in is a rule, sure as not moving into Perran’s is a rule.

He would like to say his father had taught him the rules, but the truth is he learned them mostly by observing them as his father and the other men in the fleet went about their business. His memory of his father is of being told over and again the seas will be empty before he’s old enough to take the helm and he remembers being told the story of a man who is cursed to fish an empty ocean for as long as he lives, the shore just in sight but never any closer. In spite of the direction he points the boat, the winds and tides conspire to push him away from the land. It’s one of the few stories he can remember his father telling. Aside from this oft repeated prophesy he recalls him mostly as a silence, sitting at the window until he cast off again, or poring over the arcana of his profession, charts marked with fishing grounds long past, charts that were scored heavy with notes, advice, warnings. When he was allowed out on shorter trips on days the sea was calm, they were marked by his father’s silence, by his insistence on silence.

In the wake of his father’s doom-heavy story, and the absence of any elaboration, the young boy had been left to dream of a bloody exodus of the sea. In this dream fish climbed, one silver back over another, out of the foam on stunted fins, limping and bleeding over the razored rock he limped and bled over himself gathering mussels and kelp. He had dreamt of fish in numbers he had never seen and never would see, beached, panting and piled in deep drifts, staring glass-eyed over a carnage of a haul. It turned out his father was wrong. The seas were as full as ever; it was the number of edible things in it that had changed was all.

There were still fish enough to catch back then. Few and far between and hard fought over, even by the crews in the cove, but when the boats came in most times they carried catches up from their holds and there was a living to be made. There are pictures of them framed on the walls of the pub and in albums shut away in dresser drawers and in cupboards across the village. Grainy photographs of men sat on the sea wall smiling, gutting gurnard, dogfish, conger, turbot, and laying them out in neat rows in ice-filled crates. Ethan has come across them when he has searched for photographs of Perran, though he has found none, and it is hard sometimes now to bring to mind his face.

Four boats work out of the cove now. Dragged down the grey stones by Clem’s rusting skeleton of a tractor, and winched back up on their return. Four where there were fourteen. And the remains of the others corrode slowly, long since stripped of tackle and anything useful and waiting to be dislodged one by one in the winter storms and reclaimed by the sea.

In the early afternoon, four men converge outside the small café on the seafront.

‘You see the smoke up at Perran’s this morning?’ Tomas asks.

‘It’s emmets,’ says Rab. ‘Has to be. Who else’d move in there? No one who knew him.’

‘Have you seen them?’ asks Jory.

‘Him,’ says Tomas. ‘Him. Just one of him. Julie saw him arrive last night, late on, in a beat-up estate car he’s parked out back and then this morning he’s stood in the garden, just staring out like he owns the place.’

Rab looks across from over his mug of tea.

‘Been up for sale how long now?’ Tomas continues. ‘Looks like this time it stuck. Course it’s gone to an emmet.’

‘How long do you give him then?’ says Rab, but no one takes up the bet and they return to their drinks and to their own thoughts.

‘What’s with you then?’ Tomas asks Ethan. ‘Sore you’ve lost another wheelman? Maybe teach you not to be a shit to them, you ask me.’

Ethan looks at them across the table, finishes his drink and places the mug down as careful as he can. The others around the table shrug to each other as he shoulders his coat and leaves.

Ethan starts out along the sea road towards his house, but after a few steps turns back and instead winds his way up through the village to the highest row, to the houses almost at the tree line. There are lights on in many of them now, though when he gets to Perran’s there’s no sign of anyone there aside from the smoke that continues to rise from the chimney.

The first Ethan sees of Timothy Buchannan is a battered estate car parked on the grass behind the house, at an angle that leaves half a metre of the tailgate spilling over onto the track that runs behind the row of houses. He looks in through the windscreen, which is spattered with the evidence of a long drive. On the passenger seat is a disarray of plastic bags and part-eaten food, the crusts of a sandwich and crisps spilling out of their packets onto on a map, a cardboard coffee cup dribbling dregs onto the seat upholstery. A newspaper and a blue walking jacket are strewn across the back seats and the boot is full. He can see a toolkit and some cardboard boxes with food, cloths, sprays, bottles, piled in together as though the car was packed in a hurry.