The Many

by Wyl Menmuir

  Ethan knows that the other three crews will be watching their passage through binoculars from their cabins, and almost certainly discussing his diversion over the radio. ‘Ethan’s lost it again’ will almost certainly be the topic of conversation. Tomas will be the most vocal on this subject, as the group’s malcontent, as the one who has threatened over and again to leave. Rab will be shouting Tomas down as he always has done, saying Ethan should do what the hell he wants. And Jory will be peacekeeping and keeping whatever opinions he holds to himself.

  Though he has never seen so much as a single light on within any of them since the day they arrived, Ethan half-expects to be hailed by one of the ships, to hear a siren or a horn blast, warning them to turn back, or for floodlights to fire up. He drops the boat speed to reduce the noise they make as they pass beneath the ship’s high walls, but there is no warning or any sign at all they have been seen, just the sound of a colony of gulls that must roost on the sills of the ship’s windows and doorways. From the sound of it the colony is a large one, and the birds’ shrieks have grown louder the closer to the ship they have come. Disturbed by the boat, a host of the birds lifts up from the deck far above them. After their initial dispersal into the sky, the birds start to congregate above the boat, so that, between the high walls of the ship to one side and the flock above them the morning light is reduced to a kind of dusk. A few of the larger birds make circles around the Great Hope, and they spiral down towards the small boat in uneven loops. As the birds grow bolder, flying down to within metres of them, Ethan sees Timothy edge around the side of the cabin until he is in its shelter. The noise of the shrieking gulls becomes unbearable for a few minutes, and the birds become a heavy cloud which sits just metres above the boat. Timothy, looking nervous and apologetic, moves into the tiny wheelhouse until the number of birds above them starts to thin out, and they back off from their diving attacks. Many of the birds follow the Great Hope when it clears the ship, as though they are seeing off an intruder, but they too lose interest as the boat makes its way further out. When Ethan opens up the engine again, the few birds still following turn back towards the container ship. After a while the gaps between the ships close in again behind them and half an hour later Ethan cuts back the engine and emerges from the cabin.

  ‘What happens now?’ Timothy shouts back down the deck towards him. ‘It wasn’t so hard, was it? No one opened fire on us. No monster waiting for us on this side. No chasm opened up, dragging us down to the depths.’

  Timothy’s voice sounds odd and out of place as it breaks the silence and Ethan can see speaking has made him uneasy. Up until this point Timothy has been silent, following Ethan’s lead, and Ethan does not tell him they have both broken rules now.

  Ethan moves towards Timothy so he does not have to raise his voice against the wind.

  ‘What happens now is we lower the nets, wait a while, pull them up. Then we lower them back down and pull them up a few more times and then when we’re tired we go home. If we’re lucky we’ll take back a few dogfish for our trouble.’

  Ethan too, though, is looking around to see what difference if any there is between where they were before and where they are now.

  ‘If we get bored, we pull the nets early and go move some lobster pots around by the cove,’ he continues. ‘Not that the pots deserve the title. Empty nets. Empty pots.’

  They fall back into silence, until Ethan has to talk Timothy through lowering the net, and when he does speak, he surprises himself with the kindness of tone he uses. Timothy starts to lower the gear, and Ethan can see him, as clear as anything, catch a hand or a sleeve in the netting and pull himself over the side, as clear as he can see the man standing on deck before him. He pushes Timothy to one side and takes control until the nets are in the water. He’s doing better than some of the local boys Ethan has taken out on the Great Hope before. He’s not crouching in a corner puking his guts into a bucket, and that’s something when the swell is long and slow as it is now they have moved out from the still water around the ships.

  Ethan lowers the largest of the nets, a long gillnet he uses when the boats aren’t in close quarters, and while they wait, both men look out towards a horizon that is not punctuated by the presence of the container ships. As he looks out across the ocean, Ethan has a sudden sense of vertigo, and not just an awareness of the distance below the two men down to the sea bed, but horizontally too, as though, if the world tipped, there would be nothing to stop them falling for as far as they could fall, and he brings his gaze back into the boat. Timothy observes the silence and Ethan observes Timothy and tries not to see Perran in him. Despite Ethan’s earlier suggestion, they stay out on the water throughout the short day and way on into the evening, and neither man questions the other, as though they are each pushing the other on.

  It is the early hours of the next morning when Ethan first catches sight of the shoal, lit by the moon in a cloudless sky. The fish appear at first as a lightening of the sea beneath the boat as of a cloud scudding beneath the waves, their scales catching the moonlight. Ethan is leaning on the gunwale smoking and he nudges Timothy with the toe of his boot, to raise him from where he has fallen asleep leant against the wall of the cabin. The shoal is broad and moving fast, close to the surface, and Ethan works quickly to bring the boat round to face it as the fish pass beneath the boat.

  The net, when they raise it, comes up heavy with pale bodies and both men work hard at getting the catch onto the deck. The fish they pull are colourless and long, and their scales, when Ethan lifts some of them with his knife, are translucent. Ethan holds one of the fish up and he sees its eyes are pale too, as though it does not see and has never seen, and it is dull and lifeless, though it has been less than a minute since they raised the net. Beneath the skin, the outlines of organs are visible, shadows in the pale flesh. As he picks up more of the fish, he sees, in some of them, that thick bunches of roe show through the distended skin of their underbellies.

  The two men process the fish into crates, handling each one gently. When they are finished, they stand at the open hatch, looking down into the hold at the catch.

  Ethan drops the net a second time and again it comes up full, and of the same fish, and the two men work until the hold is heavy with bodies. When they have finished, Ethan stares down again through the hatch. The fish in boxes laid one on top of the other remind him of the silver fish of his dream, though these are calm and still in the bottom of the boat.

  Ethan does not call it in immediately. But when he does, the radio lights up.

  ‘You’ve been in for more luck then? Dogfish again?’

  The sound of Clem’s voice across the radio sounds harsh in the confines of the small cabin.

  ‘No. They’re . . . well, I don’t know for sure. None like I’ve seen before,’ Ethan replies. ‘There’s plenty of them though. More of any fish than I’ve seen before.’

  As Ethan describes the fish to Clem, he watches Timothy walking back out onto the deck and opening up the hatch door to look down on the catch. Ethan finds he is willing the man to cover up the hold and to step away from the hatch. He is only half-listening to Clem on the radio as he watches Timothy through the scratched window, and he lets the wheel go while he rolls a cigarette on the dashboard in front of him.

  ‘There’s rumours you’ve been fishing off grid,’ Clem is saying over the radio. ‘If you have, I don’t care and, moreover, I don’t want to know about it. Just get yourself back in and get that catch in with you. I’ll have buyers here by the time you’re back.’

  Clem signs off the radio and Ethan calls out from the cabin for Timothy to take the wheel. Timothy looks bewildered and Ethan points towards the shore.

  ‘See that marker on the hill, point her at that and we won’t go wrong.’

  He knows it is not a fair thing to say. There’s no way Timothy can see the marker on the distant land, which is a uniformity of greens in the distan
ce, but Timothy nods uncertainly and looks towards the line Ethan has indicated. In the early morning light, as they draw close to them, the ships loom large again, and Timothy steers a course that keeps the container ships an equal distance on either side this time. Even so, as the boat passes between them, Ethan hears the sound of the gulls rise in a great crescendo, and he sees them take flight from the ship they had passed close to earlier. The noise of the birds starts to cover even that of the engine and a huge flock follows the Great Hope in towards the shore.

  For much of the return journey Ethan wedges himself in the wheelhouse doorway, talking on the radio and taking more questions from Clem and the other skippers, though none of them makes any further mention of the Great Hope’s excursion beyond the ships. Between bursts of activity on the radio he looks over towards Timothy at the wheel and feels a new sensation, one he can’t explain to himself.

  By the time they make the shore, there is a line of vans along the sea road and a crowd is waiting for them on the beach. Ethan finds he is scanning the figures gathered on the shore and even before he sees the woman in the grey coat, standing on the outskirts, he knows she is going to be there. As the boat nears the shore her eyes burn holes in the bow, or perhaps, he thinks, she is looking towards him, and he lowers his eyes to avoid her gaze.

  8

  Timothy

  FROM WHERE HE stands on the deck of the Great Hope, Timothy can see a small crowd standing on the beach, disturbing the uniformity of the grey stones, as the boat turns into the mouth of the cove. He looks back to see whether Ethan has noticed, but the sun, which has just crested the horizon, sits low on the line and reflects off the windows of the cabin and he can see nothing of the other man. Timothy returns his gaze to the shore. The coast road, usually as empty as the beach, is crowded too, with cars and vans, and it looks as though a travelling market has made camp in the village.

  The noise from the people gathered on the beach takes over from the retch of the boat as Ethan cuts the engine and they drift the final few feet to the shore. He can hear raised voices, aggressive and demanding, and as the noise resolves itself into individual voices, he understands several men and women on the shore are shouting each other down, arguing over the catch they are bringing back in. As they draw in, the large bulk of Clem pushes through the crowd and the people on the beach fall back. The arguments continue behind him, though in lowered tones.

  Clem waits for him to come forward on the deck, winch cable in hand, and he throws it up for Timothy to secure to the thick loop of rope. The metal block catches awkwardly on Timothy’s hand and he drops it and fumbles with the heavy chain, unsure of what to do, and Ethan comes forward too and takes it from him. Ethan looks nervous of the attention they are receiving and keeps his eyes lowered from the crowd on the beach, going through familiar actions to arrange the gear on the boat. Timothy finds again that he has no useful role to perform and he stands back while Ethan works on. Since they made their catch, neither man has spoken of it to the other, nor of anything else, and aside from the chatter from the radio, they have returned to the beach in a silence that seems to Timothy somehow less aggressive than the silence in which they left the beach.

  After Clem pulls the Great Hope clear of the tide line, Timothy hears the winchman warn some of the men and women gathered on the beach to stand clear, and he brings a ladder to the side of the boat. Timothy lets himself down and then wonders whether he ought to return to help Ethan with whatever he is doing. After standing a moment at the foot of the ladder, Timothy decides to leave Ethan be. The other man is probably glad to have the space to himself again.

  A group of men he recognises as crew from the other boats has gathered by the Great Hope, waiting to receive the boxes of fish as Ethan lowers them down. They push their way through the crowd and create a barrier between the boat and the men from the vans, who are moving in too, forming a semicircle around the vessel. The buyers remind Timothy of wolves in a pack, vying for the best position, closest to the kill. He wonders where they all came from and whether they are going to start pushing and shoving to get to the fish first as the pile of crates grows, but the fishermen’s warning glances seem enough to hold them back, and they ignore the barrage of questions about the fish and their condition. A few of the men gathered fire questions at Timothy, though he is too dazed by the scene and the clamour to answer. When he does not answer immediately, they return to arguing among themselves and Timothy can hear money being discussed and the prices being pushed back and forward, and he sees Clem at the centre of it all, looking calmly on as the price rises.

  Ethan is still standing on the deck and seems unsure of what to do next. He is looking out of the boat for something or someone. For a moment Timothy wonders if Ethan is looking for him, but his tiredness keeps him walking in the direction of the house he now refers to, even to himself, as Perran’s.

  Timothy is still unable to feel his hand from where he caught it on the cable block. He pushes his way through to the edge of the crowd and is glad when he has some space again for himself, to be away from the gaze of the buyers and the villagers.

  There is another person standing on the outskirts of the commotion on the beach, a woman he has seen before, dressed in a long, pale grey coat, as dissimilar to the grey of the stones on the beach as it is possible to be. She is looking out over the proceedings as though she is watching a play, at a distance and with detached amusement. As Timothy passes her, she raises her eyes to him and a fraction later she smiles a thin conspiratorial smile, a look that suggests they share something. The woman has grey eyes, paler even than her coat, and he is taken aback by them, more so than he is by the events of the past few hours. Her look is that of a lighthouse beam on a dark night that illuminates the sea around for a fraction of a second and then passes on, and the look they share is over almost as soon as it starts. The woman in grey returns her gaze to the men shouting down by the boat. Timothy continues his climb up the beach and a few yards further on turns back towards the scene. He sees two of the men in the crowd looking back up the beach towards the woman, and as they do she nods at them in affirmation or encouragement and they push their way forward through the small crowd towards Clem.

  When Timothy looks back again as he reaches the road he sees the deal has been concluded and now the crowd is split between those still interested in the fish in the crates coming out of the hold and those now dispersing. Some of them are staring up the beach towards the place where he stands. Clem and the crews of the fishing boats are now in this group, and he feels their gaze follow him as he makes his way up through the village.

  Timothy reaches Perran’s and falls into his bed fully clothed. He lies there for a while and a tiredness that is both physical and mental drapes itself over him like a thick blanket. He fights for a few minutes to stay awake and to recall all that has happened since he left the shore in the early morning, but it is like fighting an incoming tide and eventually he falls asleep and into a dream in which he is diving a long swan dive down from a high concrete platform into a clear sea. He passes down through the warm and cold streams of the sea’s subtle strata, until the light that floods the surface gives way to darkness, until the unbearable pressure crushing down on him collapses his lungs and arteries, and he swims down further into the depths. Until the unbearable cold of the deep becomes warm again at the openings in the deepest flooded valleys. He dreams of the vents where life still clings on to the hydrothermal streams that escape the earth’s core, of the shrimps, the crabs, the biosludge that survived the great oceanic apocalypse, and feels the heat of the vents sear the skin on his sunken face as he leans in closer to look. As he swims back towards the surface, his collapsed lungs burn and expand, and as the darkness and the pressure give way to light again, he swims through a lane of translucent fish, packed so close he has to fight his way through them, so close there is no longer water, just fish, packed closely, and he knows however hard he thrashes against th
em he will make no progress, and eventually, when his muscles give out, when his lungs stop their burning, he lets himself slip down into the mass of fish and the translucence becomes darkness and he dreams of nothing more until he wakes in a weak, fading afternoon light.

  Sipping from a glass of water to ease his parched throat, Timothy leans forward against the cold bedroom window and looks down towards the beach. The crowds have dispersed and the vans are gone, but he can still hear noise from the beach, a celebration, and the sound of loud conversation and of glass clinking carried up to him in the early evening on-shore breeze. As the darkness grows he can hear a song or a shanty being sung, a drunken song to which they all know the words and which ebbs and flows on the wind, and the party continues. As he looks down through the village, with his head against the now clouded glass, Timothy has the feeling, that despite the closeness of the people in the houses below and those gathered on the beach, he is profoundly alone here.

  Later, when he is in the kitchen fixing a meal, he hears a noise much closer to the house, from the darkness in the front garden. He feels exposed standing in the kitchen. The light from the single bare bulb above spills onto him, and the windowpanes frame squares of darkness and he can see nothing of the garden beyond. He searches through the toolbox, which has taken up permanent residence on the kitchen table, for a torch, and goes out into the garden, though by the time he is out of the house, the noise he heard has stopped and there are no sounds either from the village below. He sweeps the garden with the torch beam, walks down to the gate and finds, laid out on the top of the stone wall that borders the garden, a package wrapped loosely in paper. He unties the string wrapped round the parcel and finds, within, a neat stack of the fish he and Ethan had caught earlier that day. He looks at them for a while in the torchlight, lays the torch on the wall and picks one from the pile, gently with both hands. In the torch beam he sees the translucence of the scales has already started to turn milk white. He looks at the small offering for a while and leaving the fish where they are, he returns to the house, and digs out from his toolbox a trowel, the only tool he has that will do the job. In the darkness, lit only by the light from his kitchen window and the torch, which he lays on the grass next to him, he digs a small grave for the fish beneath the tree furthest from the house, and buries them there, under the tattered streamers which hang from its branches.