The Many

by Wyl Menmuir

  9

  Ethan

  ETHAN HAD SPENT much of the money he made from the catch on drinks for the other crews who stayed on late into the night. He had paid off a few debts too, but he was aware, as he did so, of the other debt he owed. And whether it was to Perran or to Timothy to whom the offering should be made, he was still not sure. Perhaps it did not matter as long as he offered them up. After the party had died down and the villagers had dispersed and rolled their ways back up the hill to their houses, he had returned to the Great Hope to retrieve the fish he had held back.

  It had seemed important at the time. Like it was the right thing to do, though the terms had been for all the fish, every one to come off the boat, the same as it was the first time. As part of the deal, one of the two men who accompanied the woman in grey had handed him a legal-looking document several pages long and asked him to sign, as soon as the other buyers had started to leave the beach. Ethan made a show of looking through the wad of papers, a document that seemed unsuited to the place it had ended up, too clean and delicate against the contrasting dirt and oil of the beach and the roughness of Ethan’s hands. He recognised the insignia of the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture on the cover sheet and as he skimmed through the papers the text swam before his eyes and he found he could not coerce what was written there to reconcile itself into words and sentences he could recognise. He had rubbed his eyes a few times, with no effect on the legibility of the document, but tiredness had won out and he had proffered the contract back to the man. The man pulled a pen from his suit pocket and handed it over, indicating, with its nib, a space on the last page. Ethan was surprised to see his name already printed there, and surprised too that there was at last something on the document he could read clearly. He pressed the document up against the hull of the Great Hope and signed it, soaking some of the pages on the other side with diesel and grime from the boat. When he handed the papers back, the second man stepped forward and took a roll of cash from his pocket. He handed it over to Clem, who pocketed his share before handing the rest over to Ethan. Ethan climbed up the ladder to unload the fish.

  Standing waist deep in the hold and passing the crates up to Rab, who had climbed on board to help him, Ethan had removed a couple of the pale fish from each of the crates and placed them into the one of the empty boxes down in the shadow of the hold.

  When all the crates were unloaded, he came up onto the deck and saw the grey woman was still staring down towards the Great Hope from the road. In the space between the boat and the woman in grey looking on, the two men in their suits looked incongruous carrying the crates of fish and they struggled with them on the stones, watched by the villagers.

  As the last of the crates had made its way up to the van, the grey woman had exchanged words with the two men. One of them held his hands out away from his suit as though he was worried he would contaminate it. The other was leaning against the van and had the ankle of one of his legs resting above the knee of his other leg and was wiping his black shoes with a handkerchief he had pulled out from his suit pocket. All three were looking down towards the boat and towards Ethan. He wondered whether they were going to return to the beach and insist on inspecting the empty hold, but after a few raised words that carried across to him, they did not return to the boat. Ethan wondered whether she suspected he had held some back, and as he was clearing the boat, he threw some nets down over the box in which he had stored the fish for Timothy.

  10

  Timothy

  TIMOTHY IS SURPRISED when Ethan seeks him out a few days later and asks him if he will come out on the boat again. He considers it for a while. The house is disintegrating under his care and Lauren is due to arrive in less than a month.

  That evening at sundown, he makes his way down to the shore, and he reaches the beach to find it busy again, this time with the crews preparing their boats, and a larger gathering than he has seen before amassed around them. As he passes between the boats that crowd the mid-tide beach, Timothy is aware of the sideways glances of those standing around. The earlier hostility he had felt is no longer there and it has been replaced by interest – intense interest and scrutiny. The villagers still avoid speaking to him as he walks by. His nods towards those whose eyes he catches are returned hurriedly, before each in turn averts their eyes.

  Clem is the only person on the beach who speaks to him directly, and in a voice loud enough to be overheard.

  ‘Problem for most of them is they have to pass the pub to get to their boats, and most times the pub wins out,’ he says, and there is a volley of insults from the fishermen and laughter too, a sound Timothy realises he has not heard since he arrived in the village.

  Clem then lowers his voice.

  ‘All change now though. The haul you brought in last. Regular golden hen you are.’

  Timothy stares at Clem, trying to figure out the meaning of this last statement, but Clem has already moved away, heading down the beach with a stack of crates, which he passes up to one of the boys standing on the deck of the nearest boat.

  Timothy spots Ethan arranging crates of nets on the deck of the Great Hope, and he watches the fisherman as he organises the crates, like he is completing a puzzle to allow the two men room enough to walk on the crowded deck. When Ethan looks up and notices Timothy, he gestures to him to come up.

  Timothy is unable to interpret the look Ethan gives him as he climbs aboard the Great Hope. It’s the same look he saw on the other man’s face as when they pulled up their catch of silver fish. He steps off the ladder onto the deck and has the feeling that in some way the Great Hope is, itself, a net of sorts and, somehow, that he is starting to become caught up in its folds. The afternoon is wearing itself out and the crews make ready to leave.

  ‘Bremming tonight,’ says Ethan, the first words he has spoken to Timothy since he came on board. ‘Good sign.’

  They leave the cove and, as they pass the rocks, Timothy understands what Ethan means. With the light fading fast, he sees, in the boat’s wake, burning phosphorescence that dances just below the surface where the water has been disturbed. He watches it in the eddies and small currents caused by the boat’s passing until it tails off, as the wake calms and the water becomes dark again. After a while, the darkness is punctuated only by the lights of the small fleet of fishing boats and the occasional brighter flash of a searchlight as one of the crew works on the foredeck. As they make their course over the water, these thin lights spread out from each other like the long fingers of a hand flexing. One of them Timothy loses in the darkness, and the others stay close to the Great Hope, and the lights of the small, silent waterborne community dance unsteadily on the sea’s surface.

  11

  Ethan

  AFTER THE CATCH, no one, not even the other crews, had asked Ethan about his excursion beyond the container ships, as if they did not really want to know the answer. Their celebrations that night had been strained with all that was unsaid. No one wanted to talk about the fish themselves, though the catch warranted discussion, nor the circumstances in which they had come to be landed.

  ‘Catch is a catch,’ a few of them had said, and others around had nodded in agreement, as though that was all that needed to be said on the matter. Timothy, on the other hand, was discussed in detail. Ethan had noticed the stories about the newcomer had started to transform, to transfigure somehow into fictions of redemption, and the more beer that was drunk, the wilder the stories of his influence became. But of the Great Hope passing outside the fleet’s boundary lines, Clem was the only one who came close to asking.

  ‘Lucky catch,’ he had said. This was after most of the others had gone home and the two men surveyed the beach that was littered with the cans and bottles of their impromptu party. ‘Wouldn’t want to interrogate it too closely though, for anyone’s sake.’

  Clem had stood up from his seat by the wheelhouse and pushed his hands into his jacket
pocket, perhaps waiting for Ethan to comment or perhaps waiting for his words to sink in. In place of an answer, Ethan had proffered Clem another beer from the crate by which he was sitting, and Clem had shaken his head and walked off up the beach, leaving Ethan alone in the dark, two hours before the sun threatened the horizon.

  ‘Who was Perran?’

  Timothy looks startled by the question that has slipped out, breaking the silence, and Ethan watches him as he wishes it back into his mouth. It is out though and contains, within it, an accusation that Timothy has been misled somehow.

  The boat feels small now and Ethan’s feelings of warmth towards Timothy compete with the feelings of guilt he drags up, with the acute anxiety Timothy brings on board with him. As they stand side by side on the deck, Ethan thinks how it would take only a few steps and a shove to tip the other man into the water, and how few questions would be asked of him later if that were to happen. They are a long way from shore and he is stronger than the incomer, he is sure of that, and more stable on his feet on the shifting deck.

  Timothy has decided to return to silence, as though he sees the point of the rules now it suits him, as though the silence is fine with him after all. He is looking out of the boat, back towards the shore, his fingers fretting at the bare wood where the paint is peeling away.

  ‘What will you gain by knowing?’ Ethan asks finally, though whether he asks the question out of pity or despair, he is not sure.

  He is unwilling to encourage Timothy, but it is clear to him Timothy now has nothing but the question burning out through his eyes, and the urge to push the incomer over the side comes back to Ethan stronger than before. He wonders whether Timothy even knows why he is asking, where the question came from, why it has taken hold of him.

  The two men hold each other’s gaze, until the boat slides down the face of a wave and both men lose their footing on the deck and stagger about, reaching for handholds. The sea is choppy now, the waves starting to build themselves up into a confusion of white horses, and the wind has picked up too. Timothy’s knee, braced against the side of the boat, buckles. Ethan sees he does not anticipate the wave, which breaks over the side of the boat, and as Timothy scrabbles again for a handhold, Ethan looks away over the side of the boat, as Timothy falls down hard on his knees on the deck.

  As they prepare to cast the nets, Ethan looks over at Timothy and wonders whether he is going to answer the question Ethan now wishes he had not asked. Ethan is aware of each sharper intake of breath from the other man, though he can’t make out whether Timothy is trying to articulate an answer to the question himself, or is trying to withhold the question of his own that is fighting to resurface.

  Later, after they have dropped the nets several times and the nets have come up empty, Ethan and Timothy stand on the side of the deck. It is Ethan who breaks their silence again.

  ‘There’s a midden behind the winch house on the beach, you know? In between the winch house and the wall. Have you seen it?’

  Timothy shakes his head.

  ‘Whelk shells. Masses of them. You ever eaten whelk?’

  Timothy shakes his head again.

  ‘Tastes like nothing, just grit,’ Ethan says. ‘There’s folk here know hard times is all I’m saying. You understand?’

  Timothy shakes his head. He is lost. Ethan stops talking for a while, rolls and lights a cigarette and the smoke whirls around their heads before it is lifted into a sky that is now heavy with rain.

  ‘After Perran was born was a hard time. His mother died bringing him into the world and he had to bring himself up more or less. Village raised him you could say, and he was theirs as much as he was his father’s. It was a hard time.’

  Ethan stops talking then and stares out across the water for a while, and when he turns back, Timothy is still looking at him, waiting.

  ‘Always been on boats, from when he was a crawling babe, stowed down with the oilskins when we went out. No way for a child to be brought up, but it kept him in sight see?’

  Ethan looks to see if Timothy is listening to him and pauses a moment to roll another cigarette. He lights it, takes a deep pull on it and continues.

  ‘Never let him out of sight. And where better for him than on a boat, where we could keep watch on him? There were some as said a boat was no place for a child, but if ever there was a boy born of the sea it was Perran. And when he wasn’t on the water he always kept an eye out for the boats. Watched them leave, watched them come back. Wasn’t long before we came to rely on him being there. Like he was a good luck charm. Each of the skippers would put a hand on the top of his head before they sailed or left the beach. It was natural he was given the job down there, hauling up the boats when they came in, dragging them down to the water when they launched. Paid him with a cut of the catch, treated him fair. He moved into that house you’re in as soon as he could. Can’t say I blamed him.’

  Ethan watches from the café where he sits with his sometimes crew, drinking as he watches the other skippers gather on the beach. He watches as one of them laughs at something Perran says and then runs his hand roughly over Perran’s tangled hair as he passes him and they both laugh again, and Ethan feels a thin lance of pain in his chest. Perran who understands the sea as if he was born to it. Perran who guides the boats in and out, who comes and goes as he pleases. Perran who lives alone and not in his father’s house, who has joined this adult world before he should have, as though the rules don’t apply to him.

  Ethan looks up and sees Timothy is still watching him, his gaze steadier than the rest of his body, which still jars and jolts with each wave that comes up against the boat. Waiting for more. There’s challenge in Timothy’s eyes for him to finish the story, and though he raises a hand to indicate to the other man he is done for now, Timothy stands his ground.

  ‘There was a storm, see, and Perran was out on the rocks when he fell in, so they reckoned. Couldn’t swim any better than the rest of us can, and that night it was fierce out. He washed up half a mile from the village, and a crew saw him on their way back in. We boarded his house up after that. You’ll understand if some of us weren’t crazy about it when you moved in.’

  Ethan breaks Timothy’s gaze, and moves forward suddenly, pushing past him to get to the lines for the nets they have cast. He feels anger rise up within him. He feels that Timothy is rubbing at a delicate fabric beneath his fingers and that whatever lies beneath this thin lining is starting to show through, as though the threads are starting to work themselves loose. As he starts to pull the nets in, he can feel, in their lightness, that he is pulling up nothing from the water.

  12

  Timothy

  TIMOTHY FEELS UNSURE what it is he has done to deserve this unasked-for gift. Whether it was joining Ethan on his boat when he could find no other crew, or encouraging him to strike out beyond the boundaries of the fleet. He wonders whether Ethan feels he is somehow responsible for the catch they made out there, that in some way his involvement that has brought new hunger to the fishermen, though he knows he played no part in it.

  The only thing he knows for sure is Ethan now considers the matter closed. He has explained Perran. But Timothy’s question remains, like a scar, or an itch that refuses to calm itself, an itch that has not accepted it has been scratched. Timothy cannot shake the feeling he is being lied to, and that Ethan’s exposition conceals within it a veiled threat.

  The wind is up now. It has come on quicker than Timothy thought possible, and spray from the tips of waves he cannot see blows in over the sides of the boat. There is no more fishing to be done, and the Great Hope’s hold is as empty as when they had left. Ethan has returned to the wheelhouse now and Timothy feels the cough of the engine through the soles of his feet as they turn back towards the shore, into the oncoming waves. He is unprepared for the first as it breaks over the bow and is glad he is holding the guard rail such is the shock of the cold and the force
with which the water hits him. He wonders momentarily whether Ethan is pushing them on into the waves in the hope one will wash him overboard as it breaks over the deck. He pushes the thought from his head and concentrates instead on anticipating the next wave. The boat heaves from one peak to the next now, lurching forward and unable to find a rhythm, and waves break over the boat with no warning or sign of their approach. Timothy feels sickness rise up from his feet and radiate in towards his core from hands that are now starting to freeze. He looks back towards the wheelhouse hoping Ethan will swing the boat up out of this rough furrow so he can move back without fear of going overboard, but Ethan is busy pushing them on towards the shore, or is ignoring Timothy’s plight on the deck. He looks out of the boat to the sea all around and tries to catch sight of the others, but the dancing lights have all disappeared now, and he wonders whether the other crews turned back before the sea had worked itself up like this.