The Sing of the Shore

by Lucy Wood

  In the middle of summer, more tourists come and the park is full. Nathan says that people look over at their caravan kind of funny but Ruby knows what Nathan is like. Really, he’s glad that no one tries to speak to them. The hotplate is working better now, and the damp is drying out. In the mornings, the skylarks rise up into the air as if on ladders.

  Then, one afternoon, they come back and find their door flung wide open. There’s a man inside painting the walls. He has headphones on, and he whistles, glances round, then gets back to work. He paints straight over the mould and the midges, so that there are tiny bumps where they’ve been sealed in. It seems that their caravan is now needed as overflow for the holiday season, and they realise with a jolt that in the panic of finding somewhere to live they’d signed no contracts, been given no guarantees. Ruby goes to find the owner to demand an explanation but it’s impossible to get hold of him.

  They move to an annexe in town. It’s almost the end of summer. The geese fly back from their breeding grounds inland. The annexe belongs to a man who is recently separated. At first his wife slept in the spare bedroom, then she lived in the annexe and then she moved out completely. She obviously wanted to do it in stages. When the family move in, the annexe is, as Ruby says, cold enough to freeze the balls off a swinging cat. Northerlies blow straight through the thin walls. There are still some of the wife’s things lying around. Next to the bed, there’s a shelf with her glasses on, a half-open book and a mug of freezing tea. Ruby tips the tea away, then puts everything in a bag and puts the bag under the bed. Under the bed there is a white shoe and a tightly rolled-up newspaper. Nathan finds her toothbrush by the sink. Lacey puts on a pair of silver clip-on earrings.

  It’s not a bad place: the window looks out over a chestnut tree and they find a brittle pack of cards in a drawer and teach Lacey to play blackjack and shithead. But sometimes the husband wanders in without knocking and paces through the small rooms. Or he sits on the sofa for a long time, doing nothing but staring at the wall. The family stay very quiet and retreat into the kitchen. Then only Nathan’s coughing seems to startle him into getting up and going away.

  The bag under the bed fills up. They find her hairbrush under the sofa, a T-shirt folded against the back of a drawer. The bathroom smells of her spicy perfume. Ruby finds Lacey under the bed, looking through the wife’s book and frowning. The husband starts coming in more and more but now he is busy doing things: he paints the walls and does something to stop the damp coming through. The house smells of paint and clean carpets. They don’t like it; they don’t like the smell of the paint or the way he whistles as he’s working. Why didn’t he do all this last autumn, when they first moved in? They watch and wait. One day draught-proofing appears round the windows; another day there’s a picture hanging above the sofa. Ruby shakes her head and bites at the skin around her nails. The picture is too much. They are already half-packed when the wife comes in, laden with bags. The husband is right behind her. The wife puts down her suitcase and looks around the room. It was never going to be for ever, she says.

  The next place is a cabin at the bottom of an overrun garden. Bindweed chokes the windows. There are spiderwebs over the door. Every morning a gull taps rhythmically on the glass with its beak. It wants the flash of silver on the sink’s plug, but can never seem to get any closer. The cabin was built for children who now prefer to spend their time drinking White Lightning in pool clubs and sand dunes. It’s almost as big as the annexe, but the beds are narrow built-in bunks – something they didn’t notice at first and now it’s too late. At night, Ruby leans down from her bunk and watches Nathan and Lacey sleeping. Sometimes she reaches down and touches them gently on their shoulders.

  There are dark shapes on the walls where pictures used to be stuck – shapes of birds and rainbows imprinted on the fading wood. There is a crap dolphin that looks more like a canoe. On good days, the cabin is warm and there is the sweet tang of pine trees. On bad days, the pine trees block out the sun, the windows steam up and drip onto the bunks, the tiny fridge shudders and stops, and there is the uneasy sound of gunshots from nearby fields. There are more bad days than good ones.

  What follows is a dire stint in a shoddily divided house, crammed in with two families who seem to thrive on cacophony: yowling dogs, labyrinthine disputes, endless music broadcast from phones and laptops. The house has been split into three but to get to their rooms upstairs they have to go along the hallway of the downstairs flat, and across the kitchen of the middle one. The dogs go off whenever they open the kitchen door, and there are often parties that are so sudden and surging that it’s impossible for Ruby and Nathan to get through them. Once they are trapped in the hall for two hours, until Ruby works out a way of getting in via a half-open upstairs window. Lacey stops going to bed, and instead lies on the floor, watching the parties through a crack in the boards. It’s a dismal few months, and they feel more embroiled in the lives of the two families than they do in their own; but they’ve learned the words to all the songs by Elvis; how to calm an agitated greyhound; how to pass through rooms and doorways without being noticed at all.

  They spend a few weeks in an empty bed and breakfast, with a landlady who cannot sleep and who soothes herself by walking up and down the stairs, her knees clicking like dice. Then another week in a dilapidated roadside hotel; another in a dim room above a pub, with a strange oil painting of a stag on the wall, which vibrates to the jukebox and the mirth and the brawls.

  Living out of bags that must be packed and unpacked constantly is, they soon realise, a complete bastard, so they decide to go back to the caravan. The one they stayed in before is available again; for some reason no one else wants it. The geese move back inland for the summer. Inside, the paint is still almost fresh. The crack in the front window has been fixed. A single hotplate that is theirs and theirs alone is a sudden luxury, a miracle even. It’s warm – the wind has shifted and is coming from the south. Lacey sits outside and plays solitaire with the cards she took from the annexe. Ruby sticks up adverts for her sewing. Work has been slow for her recently but Nathan is always busy – he goes out early in the mornings and works his way back and forth along the fences on the outer farms. There is always broken fencing. At night his cough is no louder than the breeze that pushes in around the door.

  Then winter comes. At first they think they’ll be able to manage. They get hold of an extra duvet and some thick material to line the curtains. In the evenings, they warm their hands over the hotplate. I guess you can get used to anything, they say to each other. But it’s a ruthless winter. The windows freeze on the inside. The three of them huddle in one bed. Lacey keeps waking up and saying she can hear a gull tapping on the window. Nathan’s cough gets worse. When Ruby finds mould growing on Lacey’s jumper there’s nothing left to do but pack up their bags.

  It’s not that hard to find a new place. Ruby has heard about a village just outside town, where the houses are full all summer, then empty all winter. Some of the houses are advertised as winter lets. The family move into a small cottage in a row of other small cottages. It’s the kind of place they used to talk about living in one day. The doors are painted green and there’s wisteria or clematis or whatever the hell it is growing all over them. The village is very quiet apart from the thrum of the sea in the distance. There’s no sound from either of the houses next door: no footsteps on the stairs, no doors opening and closing. The curtains stay half-drawn. At night there are two lights from windows in the distance. Empty dustbins clatter in the wind.

  For some reason they can’t settle. A gate scrapes and Nathan goes out and fixes it. Now it’s really quiet. Lacey wakes up in the night and thinks she’s in the caravan. She goes into the hall and pees on the doormat. The fridge hums softly. The furniture and plates and curtains are almost too nice to touch and the family try not to touch them too much. They use the same three plates over and over. When Lacey breaks hers, Ruby shouts: shitting hell, Lacey, those are good plates. She tries to stick
it together but it doesn’t stick. Lacey goes and sits under the table and Nathan sits with her.

  One evening, the house alarm goes off when Nathan comes in from work. They try to stop it but the electrics are complicated. After twenty minutes it turns off, but for a long time afterwards Ruby and Nathan pace and look out of the windows. It happens again the next night, and the next. They sit in the kitchen with their hands over their ears as the alarm blares over the village.

  After six weeks there’s a message on the answerphone. A woman’s voice bellows a greeting to the house’s owners: she’s glad that they’ve finally decided to come down for Christmas, they should let her know as soon as they arrive so that she can drop round and see them. Should she bring trifle or mousse? The red light on the phone blinks. Nathan plays the message again. He doesn’t like mousse or trifle. It’s the first they’ve heard of the owners coming down. There were no timeframes when they moved in, but surely winter lasts until at least February. Ruby curses the owners in long and complicated ways. Nathan says that maybe they’ll have to stay in a bed and breakfast and then come back once the house is empty again. But all the bed and breakfasts are booked and double the price around this time of year. They don’t have to rush – they’ve got over four weeks to work something out, but they want to go as quickly as possible; they don’t want to leave it so late that they have to witness the owner’s arrival, the awkward crossover in the doorway.

  They pack up. They can’t remember why they used to imagine living in such a place; they can’t connect that old dream with themselves at all. The alarm wails out one more time as they go. Lacey sticks a finger up at it and doesn’t get told off.

  Nathan has found a place they can stay. A shop in town has a flat above it that’s available. The shop sells CDs and records and rents out films. Ruby and Nathan used to go there a lot. They’ve lived above shops before and had a good time. In the day there is bustle but at night it’s mostly quiet. Shops are always heated and the heat rises into the flats. There is one bedroom and the sofa in the living room folds out for Lacey. It’s snug and grungy, with the smell of old cigarettes and cooking – just what they like. There’s no worrying about expensive plates here. There are always footsteps and voices and cars, and bright lights along the road at night. The roof is porous and lets in westerlies, dandelion seeds, hibernating butterflies, the sound of the Friday-night drunks calling up the street like mournful geese.

  But the shop gets steadily quieter. A few months pass, and then a year. One afternoon Ruby notices a sign outside that says ‘Clearance Sale’. No one has mentioned anything to them. Apparently people aren’t renting out films from shops any more. Ruby and Nathan can’t help remembering all the times they used to go in and pick out a film, then post it back through the door on Sunday mornings. They don’t understand why people would rather click a button and stay indoors. Sometimes it seems like the world is moving on without them. The stock in the shop empties and a ‘For Sale’ sign goes up. They spend a sad hour packing their bags. They fold the bed up into the sofa. Lacey rips a corner of wallpaper, writes something behind it and sticks it back down with spit.

  There is nowhere else to go except back to the winter-let cottage. They unpack their bags. The snowglobe and the ornament of a shepherdess they had in the old flat don’t look right here and end up banished to the back of a cupboard. The owners have left a half-eaten box of chocolates from their last Christmas visit and Ruby tries one. It’s strawberry and stale. The gate Nathan fixed before seems to have bust again, and creaks quietly in the wind.

  One night Lacey comes into their room and says she can smell fire. Nathan and Ruby rush downstairs and there’s a smouldering ember from the stove on the carpet. They stamp it out for a long time, then stay up until morning, clutching each other’s hands, watching the carpet for smoke. The ember has burned a black mark right through to the floorboards.

  Winter ends and they wait for word from the landlords. But no word comes. Spring turns into summer and then winter again. Ruby spends an afternoon ringing up to find their post – they are due final bills from old rentals, bank statements and God knows what else. Automated messages tell her the same thing each time: her details can’t be located and will need to be found and looked into. The messages always promise that someone will get back to her. They start receiving supermarket offer sheets almost every day, addressed to old tenants and old owners of the house. Lacey draws circles around all the things she wants: half-price lemonade, bin liners, pasta shaped into thin, contorted faces.

  They stop thinking of moving. Nathan puts up a shelf in the bathroom. Ruby paints one wall of the kitchen blue. Lacey lines up snail shells along her bedroom window. At night there are no other lights, and it’s the calling of owls, not beer lorries or people or discos, that makes its way through the windows. The gate scrapes in the wind. They sleep lighter and wake much earlier than usual. The days become much longer. One night they see a meteor shower that rends the sky with silver. I guess you can get used to anywhere, they say to each other. After all, it’s the most beautiful place they have ever lived – surely it’s ridiculous to feel unsure about it, to miss the thump of music on Saturday nights, the smell of old cigarettes, the strange darkness of pine trees.

  Overnight, the cottage sells. There hasn’t even been a ‘For Sale’ sign outside but Nathan says he supposes it was all done over the internet. They’ve never got round to owning a computer or an expensive phone. Sometimes it seems like the world is moving on without them. Estate agents and surveyors prowl around. Nathan takes down the shelf and they paint over the blue wall in the kitchen. The wooden counters and draining board are bleached with watermarks and they spend a terrified few hours trying to scrub them off. What kind of sadist has a draining board you can’t get wet? Ruby says. She had learned to love that stupid wood. They rub a damp teabag along it to stain the watermarks brown and make them blend back in. It seems to work. Slowly and systematically they erase themselves from the house. Nathan unpins Lacey’s drawings and fills in the holes. Ruby patches up the burn mark in the carpet and does it so well that it looks as if they have never been there at all.

  They move back to the caravan. It’s the end of winter. They miss stairs and, for a while, a single hotplate does not seem like enough. The wicker chairs are as comfortable as ever. Nathan adjusts the table so they can all fit round it and play with the deck of cards. They are teaching Lacey whist, and arseholes and presidents. The wind cuts across the cliff like a scythe. Some days it brings with it the coconut smell of the gorse. Some days it rocks the caravan like a bloody cradle. They put bricks either side to balance it out. Really, you can get used to anywhere, they say to each other.

  Nathan goes out and mends the fences on a farm he worked on only a year before. It seems that fence posts nowadays are rotting out sooner and sooner. Ruby mends the frayed seats in the caravan and hums a song by Elvis. Lacey digs out the chunk of coal she buried three summers ago. It’s just the same as she left it: glossy and heavy and exactly the same size as her palm.

  The mildew on the caravan is creeping back, and the corner of the window has a hairline crack that looks to be spreading. The two-a.m. couple fight and make up again. The thrift is just beginning to bloom. The sand martins come back to nest in the crumbling cliffs.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my agent Elizabeth Sheinkman and my editor Helen Garnons-Williams for their encouragement, advice and enthusiasm. Thank you to everyone at 4th Estate. Thank you to the Roger and Laura Farnworth Residency at Warleggan, which gave me two weeks to write in such peaceful and beautiful surroundings. Thank you to Jos Smith and Anneliese Mackintosh for their help and advice. Thank you to Mum. Thank you to Ben, as always, for everything.

  Grateful acknowledgement is also due to Arts Council England, who supported this book with a writer’s grant.

  Also by Lucy Wood

  Diving Belles

  Weathering

  About the Author

 
Lucy Wood is the critically acclaimed author of Diving Belles, a collection of short stories based on Cornish folklore, and Weathering, a debut novel about mothers, daughters and ghosts. She has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, and was runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Award. She has also received a Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and the Holyer an Gof Award. Weathering was named one of the New York Times’ Top 100 Books of 2016. She lives in Cornwall.

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