The Many

by Wyl Menmuir

  4

  Ethan

  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.

  From a distance, Timothy’s progress is barely visible, and he inches across the landscape, as though he is swimming alone in a wide featureless ocean with no sense of scale against which to measure the distance he gains.

  Ethan is overwhelmed by the desire to shout out across the water to him, to warn him off, though he knows the distance between them is too far, and he wonders whether all hunters feel this impulse when they see their quarry. He watches until Timothy disappears where the road dips down, and though he waits and continues to stare at the coast, he does not see him again, and it occurs to Ethan that he has fabricated this event, that he has been out on the water too long to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

  5

  Timothy

  ON HIS RETURN, Timothy’s thoughts are all renewal and progress.

  When he arrives back from his run, he stands between the house and the car, which he had parked two hours earlier. Not wanting to disrupt his new enthusiasm, he gets in at the passenger door and changes back into warmer clothes, then looks out through the windscreen at the kitchen door. He is not ready to go back into the house yet. Instead, he walks slowly down through the village to the row of houses where he remembers he and Lauren had stayed. They had decided on their destination by moving their fingers together over the map, his hand laid over hers, as they skimmed their fingertips across the coast until they found a place with a name that pleased them, a place where they could spend the time together just being themselves. He cannot now remember the name of the hotel in which they stayed, though the rudeness of their host is still fresh to him, as is the way in which he ushered them out of the bar area as soon as they arrived.

  ‘No room here,’ the landlord says as they enter, loud enough to stop the conversations going on across the room and for all eyes to turn towards them. They wonder whether they have got the wrong place. They freeze on the threshold, half in and half out of the bar, with their two bags slung between them, and the landlord waves them away and goes back to wiping the bar down with a cloth, eyeing them from beneath thick eyebrows.

  Outside, they are getting back into the car when they see the landlord appear again from a fire exit at the side of the building. He waves them over and when they do not come straight away he hisses something at them and waves again, this time with more urgency.

  ‘Come on. Quick. Can’t let them in there know I’ve got rooms empty. I’ve told them there are none free,’ he says. He stares at their mud-spattered clothes with open disgust as they approach across the car park.

  ‘That’s okay, it’s obvious there’s a mistake,’ says Lauren.

  ‘No. No mistake. You just come in this way. I’ll leave this door propped open and you can come and go through here. It’s forty up front now and ten more if you want breakfast tomorrow.’

  He leads them through the side door into a dimly lit hallway and they stand together awkwardly cramped in the small corridor as Timothy fumbles in his pockets for the money. Timothy has the vague suspicion they are being mugged and that they will be ejected from the side door the moment he has handed over the cash. There is a door tiled with small panels of obscured glass a little way into the corridor which leads through to the bar area and the landlord pushes them past this and to the foot of a flight of stairs.

  ‘It’s up there, top of the stairs. Walk quiet, mind.’

  Lauren and Timothy exchange glances, but they are too tired to argue and they have handed over their money now. From what they had seen of the village as they drove in earlier that day, they are going to struggle to find a room anywhere else. They start up the stairs and the landlord follows closely behind. At the top he gives them a key, attached to a heavy and oversized wooden key fob.

  ‘You’ll find everything you need in there.’ He points to the furthest left of four doors which lead off the landing ahead. ‘That one’s yours. Bathroom’s through the door on the right. Don’t worry about the other two, they’re mine. Don’t make too much noise on the floor. Them down there can’t know you’re here. Breakfast’s at six and you’ll need to be gone by nine.’

  He turns to go and halfway down the staircase turns and hisses back up, ‘And use the side door.’

  ‘Can we come down for supper?’ Lauren asks.

  The landlord comes part way up the stairs towards them.

  ‘I’ve already told you, steer clear of the bar, we’re closed for food. You’ll find no food here, not this time of the evening. I told you, I don’t want you causing trouble.’

  And with that he is heading back downstairs. Timothy wants to follow the landlord and hand the key back to him, but he has already turned the corner through the glass door and they decide going into the bar would be a bad idea.

  At Lauren’s insistence they jam a chair under the door handle when they turn in to sleep. It is dark outside now and there is nowhere else for them to go. As Timothy opens their bags, Lauren walks around the room and touches all the curtains in turn, the bedspreads, the lampshade on the bedside table that sits between the two single beds. All share the same pink floral pattern, a pattern that clashes with the garish swirls of the orangey-brown carpet. They lift out the side table and lamp and push the two beds together, trying not to make noise for fear they will bring the landlord back up the stairs. Lauren arranges the single duvets so they will cover both of them.

  Above th
e beds, a small, gaudy painting of the Virgin Mary, all blues and golds, stares down at them with sad eyes from beneath her oversized crown. The paint is peeling from the picture and the face of the child she carries is obscured. Timothy and Lauren kick off their shoes and climb into bed still fully dressed beneath the textured nylon sheets. They laugh beneath the floral covers at the strangeness of the place and listen to the dull sea of chatter from the bar beneath.

  The next morning, they wait to be served breakfast in the empty bar area surrounded by the dark wood tables off which shines a harsh morning light.

  ‘Could you do me two poached eggs on brown toast?’ Lauren asks the barmaid, who looks to be about sixteen. The girl stands in between them and the window out onto the road, which throws her into a harsh silhouette.

  ‘We don’t have brown bread, just white. And we don’t have poached eggs. We’ve got scrambled or fried.’

  They wait until the girl has left the room to laugh, though they cannot be sure she has not heard them. When their breakfasts arrive, both Timothy and Lauren leave them untouched. The food sits, surrounded by a halo of grease, on plates that have been washed too many times to serve food anyone would want to eat. When Timothy returns from his morning run, he finds Lauren has once again blocked the bedroom door with a chair and he waits as she gets out of bed and pulls on a t-shirt to let him in. Keeping the game going, he steps inside and replaces the chair. They are trespassers in a strange place.

  Timothy walks along the street twice before he realises the hotel is no more. He finds the building from the screw points where the sign had been affixed to the wall, and it looks to him now as though it has been split into two, maybe three houses. There are more doors and windows than there had been, clumsily punched through the old walls. Through one of the windows he sees there are still tables and chairs in a room too large for a house and he figures there is still a pub here, though there is no real sign of that from the outside.

  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 dista
nce 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.’