She noticed, a little vaguely, that he wasn’t glowing as much as she was. But her glow filled up the bed and she could hear the dark humming and the goldfish swimming.
Moments passed as she swam among the emotions and the memories in the night. When she opened her eyes she was aware that she was smiling.
She could see his face in the dark. His face revealed nothing except a faint sense of misunderstanding.
She stammered on about how lovely it had been. She asked if he wanted another drink. He muttered something about a child of the stars. She thought he said something about his children in cars.
A moment later he was in the bathroom, had come back, was hugging her, then kissing her, then wearing his coat. He said something about the singing of flowers in summertime and she agreed that they should meet again sometime.
Then he went out. She listened to his footfalls down the hall and out into the anonymity of the world.
TWENTY-THREE
She had a wash and pottered about the room. She kept telling herself that she’d had a lovely evening. She had gotten to know a bit more about people. Then she realised with a slight shock that she did not know his name. She stood still as she took in this fact. I expect that he probably doesn’t know mine, she thought.
TWENTY-FOUR
Outside in the street a tramp went past. He was urinating on the pavement, zigzagging his liquid on stone. He sang incoherently, but loudly, to himself.
TWENTY-FIVE
She brushed her teeth and flossed. She took two capsules of barbiturates, and climbed into bed.
TWENTY-SIX
The room was quiet. Sleep began to invade her but she wanted to invade herself before she fell into the spaces in her mind. She felt round and round on a moving point. She moved her fingers to the patterns on the wall. She traced abstract lines and the waves came in unstable colours. The Eumenides had risen from the window panes. Her hair waved with theirs. The satisfaction that imploded came on the soft tang of the absurd, which made it all the sweeter. She imagined all of her favourite lovers to be there with her.
When she relaxed on the pillows she found not only sleep waiting for her. She felt that the room, with its potted plants and the flowers and the goldfish bowl, had experienced some kind of meaning with her.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The goldfish wound its ceaseless way in the mysterious membrane of water.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The spaces within her were still large and frightening. But as she fell asleep she constructed a poem in her mind, which she would never write.
Meanwhile, the room watched her.
And then the lighting of the lamp.
THESE SILVER FISH
Anne O’Brien
Artwork by John Robertson
THESE SILVER FISH
Anne O’Brien
‘I’ve got something, Kaj. Big. No. Not big. More than one.’
‘I’m coming.’ Her son throws down his rod and runs towards her, feet pounding the concrete.
‘I can’t hold them.’
‘Let the line out.’
She passes the rod to Kaj. It bends as the fish dart left and right, leaving trails of bluish light behind them. He reels them in until they are close to the pier. When they come to the surface, it’s clear these are no tinkers but three or four pounds each. They flash emerald against darker stripes, silver underbellies glinting.
The rod curves in a moon and up they come, one, two, three, four. Kaj’s face is tight with concentration. On the fifth, the rod tip snaps, dangling like a broken arm. With the sudden slack, the last mackerel escapes; the other four lie on the concrete gulping air, tails beating a frantic drum.
As the boy unhooks the fish, she drops the bucket into the sea to fill it. He grips a mackerel with a bloodied tea towel, raises his hand and brings the brass-topped priest down between its eyes. She sets the dead fish in the bucket; the forks of their tails clear the rim. Their bodies stiffen but for one that continues to twitch long after it is dead. She places the net over the bucket. They’d learnt their lesson at the start of the summer when seagulls stole their catch. Mackerel were scarce then, but now, the rich pickings of late summer have drawn big shoals up the coast of Jutland.
Kaj takes her fishing spot – where there’s five there’ll be more. She props herself against the wall as he casts again. The heat of the stone is warm on her back. This could be their last long summer with the boy but, as usual, Olaf is back at the holiday house his grandfather built, touching up paintwork and filling holes in the unpaved road with buckets of stones brought back from the beach.
‘Who else will do it?’ he’d said over breakfast.
It’s always about the house. Each generation has borne only one child, a custodian. One day, he reminds her, it will all pass to Kaj.
Olaf is fussing even more than usual. At the beginning of July, the neighbouring house, the last one before the moor, changed hands. The first they knew about it was when they saw the photo in the estate agent’s window, a red ‘SOLD’ slashed across it. There’d been no For Sale sign, no visits.
For weeks, he’s been pacing his land, prodding the earth with a stick and poking amongst the wild roses, searching for the markers that say this far and no further, placed by his father over forty years ago.
Olaf was twelve years old when the neighbouring plot first sold and a concrete house was built. Before that, their summer house had long views across the moor with its heathers and stunted trees. The heathers are beautiful, but they shelter hugorme, whose venom can kill a small animal and even bring a grown man down.
The mackerel gives a final shudder. Though it’s sunny, she shivers too, remembering the day at the start of the holiday when a hugorm came right up to the back door, past Olaf who was clearing weeds on the patio. As it reached the lintel, it raised its head, its tongue tasting the air. She recognised the male of the species, by the silvery black zigzags running down its back.
She’d shouted, but the snake continued towards her, unafraid, right into the kitchen. She grabbed the broom and flicked it away. It moved through the air landing outside the back door. Olaf split it in two with the blade of his spade. Its wine-red blood stained the patio, as shocking as a human’s.
Kaj continues to cast and reel in. He’s picking mackerel off a shoal that’s come into the harbour to feed. There can be thousands in a shoal but they move as one. She’s read that the placing of their eyes helps each fish pace itself against its neighbour. They are born knowing exactly what to do.
Along the pier, men start to arrive on black bikes with buckets hanging from handlebars and rigged rods strapped to the crossbars. Word must have spread. She knows some of them by sight. There’s a couple of old fellows, brothers who come on Honda 50s. Next, the tall trawlerman from the vast Hirtshals-registered boat which is berthed on the pier’s east side.
The boat’s been there for three days. With Kaj, she’d watched it come in, seen the seagulls shift from their perch on the roof of the fish-processing plant to swoop down and pick at the rolls of net on the back of the boat. The sky filled with flashes of wings and their cries as they tried to get a grip so they could pull at small fish or torn crab claws stuck in the net. As the trawler laboured to the side of the pier, the tall man jumped down. He’d stood, feet apart, ready to take the weight of a thrown rope which he coiled around a bollard. Machinery cranked as nets unfurled. A second man joined him and together they’d pulled until the net stretched the length of the pier, plastic floats thudding the concrete. The spread nets revealed more bits of fish and the seagulls dropped and pulled and rose, fighting mid-air, taking scraps from the beaks of young gulls, whose brown feathers marked them out.
The trawlerman leans his bike by the wall and calls to the boy.
‘Mange?’
‘Syv hidtil.’
Seven, too many to eat. Maybe the trawlerman will take some home. It was him who’d shown Kaj how to unhook a fish by pushing the barb down, twisting it and then pu
lling it back. He doesn’t respond to her tentative Hej but stands and chats with the boy, talking rigs, and spinners, the merits of psychedelic greens and yellows. She hears him say how the rigs look like the små fisk the mackerel devour.
‘Makrel,’ he says. The guttural Danish better suits the feisty fish. He points to a silver arrow streaking across the surface as the boy catches another. The trawlerman carries no spare weight. His hands are large but skilful at tying hooks to lines, at gutting fish. She knows his father fished before him, his grandfather too. Fifty years ago, the town only had fishing and the fish-processing plant. Now it’s full of galleries and gift shops which close in the winter, to reopen in May when the leaves unfurl on the branches of birch that they cut and place in tall pots by the doors, ready for the first visitors who come with the late spring.
Over the past three days, the trawlerman’s been down to check the nets, lifting them in sections to look for tears. He carries a wooden needle and a ball of nylon; the needle flies faster than any woman’s crochet hook as holes are mended and he moves on. The nets are picked clean by the gulls and ready to be winched onto the boat. She’s seen how he watches the weather, eyes fixed on the horizon. The catch has been auctioned, now there’s only the waiting.
The boy and the trawlerman fish side by side.
She closes her eyes and pictures Olaf with the metal detector, scanning above the wild roses that are too dense to penetrate, alert for the bleeping that will signal the presence of the metal stakes his father drove into the land to mark the boundary in the summer of seventy-two, when the neighbouring house was built. Olaf’s told her the story many times; how his father watched the diggers start on the foundations, his rage mounting. The new house was raised quickly, with concrete blocks placed one on the other, like a child building Lego. Somehow that was worse. Not that his father would have accepted any building, but it might have been easier with a house made of wood.
‘Vi behøver ikke at se på det,’ his father had said, the day he took a spade and started to dig, to build a ridge that would obscure the house from their view.
There was a heatwave that summer. All the other holiday houses had emptied, their occupants taking to the beach. Olaf told her how his mother stood at the window as the mound grew and the hole on their land deepened. July turned into August and his father continued digging, more urgently now. He’d wanted the new ridge planted before they returned to the city – before autumn winds could blow the soil away. The more he dug, the less sandy the soil, and that was good. The crater deepened and soon all that could be seen was the top of his head.
She hears the trawlerman’s voice and opens her eyes.
‘Vi skal smide den i havet,’ he says when her son lands a too-small fish. The seagulls gather, ready to swoop and catch it before it hits the water. But the trawlerman leans over and gently drops the fish into the sea. It floats on its side for a moment, then dives.
A few more casts and the trawlerman lands his first string of mackerel. Sunlight glints off his knife as he deftly unhooks and guts them. The gulls catch the discarded heads he tosses to the sea.
She can’t recall a single day when Olaf joined them fishing or lay beside them on the beach. There’s only a week left before they’ll pack up and head back to the city and still he’s at the house, scraping peeling paint on the north-facing facade and picking over the story of his father.
Last night, he told her again how he’d stood by the wheelbarrow as his father filled it from the deepening hole. The skin on his father’s back had turned blackish brown and hung loose on his bones. Olaf helped as much as he could, pushing barrow-loads of soil to the new ridge. For each shovelful he threw on top, more than half slid back down.
The day it happened, his mother had made a jug of hyldeblomstsaft, poured a tall glass, and given it to Olaf.
‘Take that out to your father and tell him we’re off to the beach.’
Olaf told her how he’d held the glass in both hands, his eyes on the swaying liquid, stepping carefully so it wouldn’t spill. Then, how his throat and chest burnt as he ran back to the house and, sent by his mother, to the nearby hotel – the only place with a phone. He’d gasped out words, the taste of iron in his mouth.
‘Min Far. Jeg tror han er død.’
Seventeen minutes, it took the ambulance to arrive, sixteen minutes too many.
She feels cold, she’d dozed off. The trawlerman has gone and, though his bucket is full, Kaj fishes on. The sea has an oily look, streaked red from the rays of the setting sun, as if some deep-sea creature has bled onto its surface. A small fishing boat passes close to the pier, blue paint flaking on its sides. Seagulls follow in its wake. The yellow-clad fisherman raises his hand to return Kaj’s wave. The boat heads out through the arms of the pier, leaving the still waters of the harbour and setting its course for deeper fishing grounds. Kaj’s eyes follow it, until it is little more than a blot on the horizon. She watches, sensing him pull away from her, a dragging she feels deep in her belly, like the outgoing tide sucking the sea back over shingle.
The marker at the end of the pier lights up, ghostly green. She gets to her feet and they pack up the fishing gear. In the car, Kaj sits beside her, gripping the bucket between long, skinny legs. Water sloshes as she drives the rough road to the holiday house.
Back at the house, he spreads a newspaper at the kitchen sink and begins gutting the mackerel. At the start of summer, she’d cleaned them. Now Kaj does it alone, gripping his knife and, in a single movement, slitting the belly, right up to the gills. He pulls the innards out and rinses the cavity. The smell of fish is strong. On the third, he stops and calls her over. With the pressure of his hand on its back, the biggest mackerel has disgorged its last meal; a tiny silver fish, perfectly intact, emerges from between its parted lips.
She looks out the window, beyond her son. Across the patio, the spade is propped against the wall of the tool shed. The hips have set on the wild roses, red and firm, like miniature apples. Another summer has been and gone. Once they leave for the city, autumn will be brief and soon winter will come.
Olaf, exhausted, sits in his father’s chair by the stove. The skin on his arms is crisscrossed with scratches from his search for the boundary markers amongst the roses. Some run deep.
‘The new owners came by today,’ he says. ‘They plan to build a new house. They only wanted the plot.’
She knows it will be a relief to him when they pull down the concrete house; a relief but not the end.
‘I was thinking,’ he says. ‘There’s no reason we shouldn’t have a bit more shelter. Now would be the time to build up the ridge; before they start.’
Her heart flips. She slows her breathing, parting her lips to let the air escape. Words, like the silver fish, work their way up her throat and lodge there.
This far, she wants to say. This far and no further. But she doesn’t and the only sound is Kaj as he slices and rinses the fish.
PANIC ATTACK
A. L. Kennedy
Artwork by Coco Crampton
PANIC ATTACK
A. L. Kennedy
You can’t even touch a woman, not in the slightest. You cannot. Times have changed and that’s what they’ve changed to, apparently.
Ronnie is not completely happy with the crowd at King’s Cross station.
Times . . .
Ronnie is not a large man, not tall. If he raises himself and stands up off his heels he makes it to about five foot seven and his build is slender. He doesn’t run to fat, but he doesn’t precisely run to muscle, either. Still, when he walks, he seems bigger than is strictly logical. He sways largely with each step – not so’s you’d think that he’s drunk, but so’s you’d definitely notice that he’s there. He can’t sit, or just placidly wait, or prop his shoulder in against some handy surface and be idle, because the preservation of his bigness lies in motion, his blur of expansion. His shoes are always the heaviest Doc Martens he can find and in mild disarray. They don’t – not
quite – make him look as if he’s newly come from a factory floor – God knows there aren’t many of them any more and the ones that are left are pin-clean – nor climbed out of a coal pit – none of them left – but nevertheless his feet can suggest to the world that he’s got stamina, inhabits an industrial-grade existence. He maintains a dull finish on his toecaps, treats them with dubbin, not polish – they are clean, I keep clean – and has the air, the bearing, of a man who can comprehend sweat, one who can hold things the right ways and put them to craftsmanlike use. His arms maintain an extra bit of bend at the elbow and are braced out from his sides to let him occupy more space in the manner of a tiny, invading army.
You always know that Ronnie’s there. He’s a one-man bridgehead.
And this isn’t an accident – he’s been practising being there since he was eight, maybe nine at the latest. He’s got it down pat by now and doesn’t notice, not often, that his body makes so many efforts additional to the norm, or that – why not? they probably deserve it – he leans in on other men during conversations, hovers a grinning breath too close. When he walks, he might be forcing his way through a clumsy gathering, a mob, while also kicking up leaves on a bumpy, country pathway, or else hoofing tin cans down an alley.
That kind of thing.
He occasionally thinks, has this persistent imagining of himself wearing brownish, lived-and-worked-in clothes – thick cloth, simple jacket and trousers and some kind of muffler – not a scarf, a muffler, an old-timey muffler – and he is swinging his big boots through leaves and heading down over the rise of a lane.
And there’s a house at the foot of the slope, an alone and peaceful house, and it’s known to me and a kid’s there by the opened kitchen door and he’s going to run out in a minute and hug my legs. He’s that kind.
Ronnie is jigging on the spot and searching his pockets for nothings, acting out an impatience he doesn’t feel, while examining an indicator board that is, as it happens, being quite evasive about his train. There is fulsome information available on a number of other trains scheduled to depart much later than his own: platform numbers, confirmations of timeliness, even instructions to board. His service is simply listed as existing.
A Short Affair Page 8
