The Many

by Wyl Menmuir

  Timothy edges himself backwards, his hand still gripping the guard rail, avoiding being drenched by the waves breaking over the sides. A crate that has worked its way loose from where it was secured slides across the deck and back. He is aware that this is not a storm, but just what the fishermen would call heavy weather.

  Eventually, he manages to pull himself round into the shelter of the wheelhouse and sits himself down on a crate. There is barely room for two in the cabin and he is not sure he wants to be with Ethan in any case – Ethan, whose mood changes as quickly and erratically as the sea. He will sit out the weather on deck, in the lee of the wheelhouse. The journey back to shore drags and Timothy shivers as water soaks up beneath his coat and into the sleeves of his jumper. He tries to concentrate on keeping an eye out for the other boats, but there is still no sign of them, and the violent rocking of the boat overcomes him and he vomits, his head between his knees, onto the deck, over and again.

  13

  Ethan

  AS THEY RETURN towards the cove, Ethan jams the wheel, comes out from the cabin and watches Timothy for a while. Timothy is in a deep and uncomfortable sleep, wedged against a coil of rope on the thin walkway between the foredeck and the cabin. He shows no sign of waking, though Ethan checks a few times the closer they get to shore, and even as the Great Hope is dragged up the beach on the winch Timothy does not stir. Before he jumps down from the boat, Ethan lays an oilskin over the sleeping man. Then he makes his way up through the village towards Perran’s. He is aware he might be seen, though the chances of it getting back to the incomer are slim.

  At the side of the house, he tries the door and it opens. He is surprised, and stands for a moment with the handle held gently, before pushing through into the house. He has reached this point before and turned back so many times over the past ten years.

  Inside, he has to check himself that this is the same house he knows, though he has only been inside once before, and under different circumstances. The shapes of the house – its walls, joints, lintels – are familiar, but inside looks different in the light and everything else is a reimagining, like a portrait in which the artist has seen his subject only at a distance and in poor light. It is an unfinished canvas and in places he sees the blank workings of the structure showing through. It feels raw and uncomfortable, but a different raw from the one he felt before. He is struck by the thought that the Perran he knew is being erased.

  Ethan watches from behind the curtain in the front room as the procession of villagers winds its way up past the house towards the service that is to take place on the hilltop above. There is no priest now, but those who knew him best will talk of Perran, of who he was and what he meant to them. There are some who will understand Ethan not being there, others will not. They will talk not only of Perran’s absence, but of his too. Ethan can think of nothing he could say to the crowd gathered around the beacon and when the last of the procession has passed the house, he waits a while to see whether anyone else is following behind before turning his back to the window. As he waits for his breathing to calm, he tries to make out details in the darkness. Someone has been in and closed all the curtains and at the door of the living room his hand hovers over the light switch, but he lets it drop back to his side. He works his way slowly through the house, room by room in the darkness, learning the shapes and feel of the place. He treads carefully, slowly, so as not to disturb the furniture, though there is little enough of it to avoid, just a few darker shapes against the darkness. The stairs are steep and uneven, and as he makes his way up, he feels he is going to fall backwards.

  Upstairs, he moves from room to room off the small landing until he finds the one that had been Perran’s. It is at the front of the house, with a window overlooking the village, and beyond it the sea. Ethan stands for a while in the doorway, and sees, by what light enters through a gap in the curtains, a bed and by it a small table with a few items, indistinct in the darkness, a chest and little else. He looks around, to fulfil the purpose for which he came here, looking for some memento to take, a token that will allow him not to forget the events that brought him to this moment. There is nothing obvious. There are no small trinkets lying around, no personal belongings sitting on chests or tables, as though the house is resisting Ethan’s attempts. He considers moving something, just to mark his time there, but finds he is unable to bring himself into contact with any of Perran’s belongings, or anything that was connected to him. Instead, he sits on the bed for a while and feels the metal cold against his legs where they come into contact with the frame. He sits as waves of panic rise and crash over him, and stays hidden in the darkness of Perran’s room for as long as he can stand it. When the feeling threatens to overwhelm him, he stands from the bed and walks quickly back through the house, crashing down the steep stairs, and out through the kitchen door. By the time he reaches the garden his breath comes in ragged coughs and he stands and breathes in the cold air and looks out through the branches and leaves that are left on the trees, to the cove below and the sea which he knows is there but can no longer see.

  He leaves, retracing his steps, as though Timothy might be able to sense he was there if he strays from the path he had trodden on the way in, and part of him wants to close his eyes as he does so and superimpose onto the house the Perran he knew. Part of him wants to close his eyes and to see nothing. As he walks down back through the garden, he sees, beneath the tall tree, a patch of earth newly turned over, neat and sad, and feels he has come across something that ought not to be disturbed.

  Walking down the hill into the village, he watches seagulls tacking silently into the wind, broad wings outstretched, sometimes gaining ground, sometimes being pushed back and circling round to try again.

  14

  Timothy

  WHEN TIMOTHY COMES to, the first thing he is aware of is the stillness of the boat, and it takes him a while in the darkness to work out they are back on the beach and Ethan has gone. The boat and the beach around him are quiet. Timothy’s clothes are soaked through and sit heavy and cold against his skin, and he stays where he is until he feels strong enough to pull himself up. He pushes aside the heavy oilskin and steadies himself against the wall of the wheelhouse, shivering, before limping up the hill towards Perran’s.

  Inside, he sheds his wet clothes and wraps himself in a blanket. He tries for a while to light the fire, but when the balls of paper and thin bones of wood he has put into the grate eventually take, the wind driving down the chimney pushes the smoke back into the room. As a grey cloud starts to fill the room he stamps through to the kitchen, fills a glass from the tap, and throws water over the small fire before retreating upstairs and dressing himself in several layers of clothes.

  Throughout the night he remains cold, but eventually he returns to sleep and to a dream that he is standing by the water’s edge. The sea is still and reflects the sky above – a perfect mirror image – and Timothy has the feeling he could walk forward onto the water, as though he might be stepping not into something liquid, but onto a solid veneer that only has the semblance of water. He feels something compelling him forward and he steps out and is only partly surprised to find the water does not rise up over his shoes, but remains beneath his feet. Even so, he edges forward carefully, moving slowly away from the shore. He has to force himself to stare ahead and to continue moving and it takes him some time moving in this way to come level with the mouth of the cove. At this point he looks back towards the village across the water and wonders why he had not noticed this phenomenon before, and why the villagers milling around on the beach or those who are walking up on the coast road do not seem to have noticed either, and show no interest in him as he walks out to sea. He continues to walk away from the village in the direction of the ships on the horizon. Behind him, he is aware he is leaving footprints that fade only moments after he has passed, as though he is creating in his path a short wake. He looks down to his feet to see the footprints
as they are being created and immediately wishes he had not. Wanting only to look down to his feet, he cannot help but look beyond and below them to the vast depths beneath him, the space between his body and the seabed, hundreds of yards below. Timothy is suddenly aware of the surface he is walking on. Now he has seen the void beneath his feet he cannot unsee it, and he turns and starts to run back towards the shore, though even before he looks, he knows it will no longer be there. The land has dropped away and the only things that mark the difference between the surface upon which he is running and the sky are the container ships, that now form a complete, though expansive, circle around him. He picks one of the ships as a focus and runs towards it. He is not sure how long he runs, but at some point he is aware of another presence in the empty landscape. It is a house, sitting alone in the vast expanse, and he runs towards it. The house resembles Perran’s house, though it is Perran’s house as a child would render it. White walls and a tiled roof. A door, flanked by a window on each side. He realises he is still running and has to slow as the house becomes suddenly much closer. When he enters, he sees the interior of the house consists of only one small room. Inside, there is a kitchen table covered with a cloth, and a chair at which he sits as he surveys the rest of the room. Against one of the walls is a cabinet along the shelves of which thin china plates lean. Beneath one of the windows is a porcelain sink and he stands to look at it more closely. The delicacy of the sink terrifies him, and as he looks around he notices the walls too are thin – terribly thin. He knows, beyond doubt, he could push a finger or a hand through any of the surfaces in the house without any difficulty, that he could tear the walls as he could tissue paper, to see what lies beneath. To avoid the temptation he pushes his hands deep into his pockets. He looks to the windows, and though he knows it was light when he entered the small house, he sees it is now dark outside, and the darkness is all but total. The room in which he sits radiates light, though he can see no source for this light, and it spills out of the windows to form a pool of brightness around the house. The ground around the house, he sees, is dark and contaminated and he can just make out through the windows steep walls rising up around him, walls that could be those of a quarry or of an immense scrapyard. He knows, without looking any further, that these walls rise to great heights around the house and he knows too they are what block out all the light from the sky above. The bright light emanating from the house flickers and falters and Timothy hears a roaring noise, as of a huge band of pressure approaching. He looks up and out of the window again and he sees that what he had identified as steep walls around the house are actually made of water, an impossibly tall, dark wave. The water seethes and he can see within it the detritus it has ripped up from the ground on its long journey to the small house, and buried far within the wave he can make out some of the forms of the village and the coastline around, contained now within the crushing weight of thousands of tons of water. He sees, within the wave, the long bows of the container ships, weightless in the wave’s body, and, though he cannot make them out clearly, he is sure he sees, suspended within its structure, the shapes of arms, legs and torsos too. As the wave approaches at what feels like impossible speed he feels the water draw all the heat from within the house, and the cold that penetrates far within him feels final and complete. Yet despite its speed, the water seems at the same time frozen, or slowed down, and the time it takes to reach the house is an age in and of itself, and he knows he must wait, looking out at the wall of water until it reaches and engulfs the small house. He wakes breathless and sweating in the cold of the bedroom and when he tries to move, he finds he is too weak to rise from the bed.

  He lies like this for the next two days and nights, sweating and shivering. Unable to find any comfort in the bed, his sleep and dreams converge with his waking. Sometimes, in moments of drifting between the two states, he hears voices around his bed. Some of the voices are patient and concerned and others are angry and rave wildly at him, and others still are indistinct and he cannot work out from them what emotion the speakers are expressing. For the most part though, the voices sound to him like those of bureaucrats and he feels they are trying to impart to him information he is unable to absorb. He cannot make out from any of the speakers any words, just the sentiment of the words, just the impression they are important and that he should be paying attention. At one point he wakes, or dreams, he is not sure, to hear an argument taking place around him, an argument in which he feels he is the centre. And as his fever rages, he tries to follow the shadows of the speakers around the room, and the harder he listens to make sense of the voices, the further ahead of him they slip. Later, after it has been quiet again for some time, he hears the voice of one person talking to him and it is a voice that is familiar to him, though he cannot grasp to whom it belongs, and, over the deafening sound of his own breathing, he hears the words of the question that has been in his head for some time now. On waking one time in the pitch dark, he feels a more solid presence in the room, a figure sitting at the foot of the bed watching him. He knows it is Ethan and he tries to get some words out, but his throat is too parched by now, and no words escape. The effort of trying to talk pushes him back into sleep, and when he wakes again there is no one in the darkened room and he is unsure whether the glass of water sitting on the bedside table has been placed there while he slept, or whether it has been there the whole time.

  When the fever breaks, the question is ringing loud in his head, too loud for him to ignore now, as though it had risen to make itself heard over the dull roar of the argument that raged around him during the worst of his sickness.

  When he gets up he is still weak and he pulls a blanket around himself and stumbles downstairs into the kitchen. Standing on the linoleum floor, he lifts a large cardboard box from one of the kitchen surfaces and places it on the kitchen table. He runs a hand over the packets and tins looking for anything he has that is still edible. Among the disarray there is a half-full bottle of gin that came with him when he arrived. He pulls it out of the box and sets it down on the table in front of him, and when he has surveyed the rest of the box, he pours himself a glass.

  The first taste of the gin makes him gag. He does not know how long it has been since he last ate, but the liquid burning its way down his throat takes his mind off the question in his head for a moment, and he drinks down the rest of the glass and pours himself another. Some time later, he has the urge to be in the company of others after being so long without conversation and he pulls on some clothes and walks down through the village.

  15

  Timothy

  ‘WHO WAS PERRAN?’

  It is Timothy’s opening question and he slurs it as Tomas approaches the bar. It is the first thing he’s said all evening other than a few words he exchanged with the barman when he entered.

  He has been there over an hour, working his way slowly through a beer, when the skippers of the fleet arrive. They acknowledge him, and the barman too, nodding towards them as they head towards a table as far away from the bar as it is possible to be in the small pub. By the time Tomas approaches the bar, the request has been waiting to be said for too long, and it comes out blunt and unlovely.

  For a while it seems as though Tomas is going to wait for the barman to pour the pints and return to the others without answering him, but after the drinks are all gathered, he leaves the tray untouched in front of him and rests both hands on the edge of the bar. He then sits on one of the high bar stools and leans slightly towards the drinks, as though he is addressing them and not Timothy.

  ‘You’ll not hear about Perran from anyone here,’ Tomas says quietly and turns again to go, and Timothy is considering begging him for more information when the other man turns back towards him.

  ‘We held a eulogy for him at that table over there when he didn’t come back in, but you’ll not hear a word of it from anyone here,’ Tomas says, though he says it kindly. ‘Nor any of the words that were read out for hi
m up on the beacon after. Nothing I can tell you, nothing any of us can tell you.’

  ‘And what about Ethan?’ Timothy asks. ‘He took it hard.’

  ‘Ethan blames himself. Figures he was the part of the reason Perran went out onto the rocks that night. Happened not long after they started to draw closer together again, like things were about to change for the better then. Figured he was the jinx that sent Perran down. Though whether he still believes that, or that he could have said anything else that would have kept him off the rocks that night, I’m not asking him, and I suggest you don’t bother him about it either.’

  Tomas looks down at the tray for a moment.

  ‘Afterwards, Ethan wouldn’t believe he had gone, not for a long time. Kept a watch on Perran’s place these ten years gone. I guess he’ll have to give that up now.’

  He continues to talk, but Timothy is no longer listening. He has the feeling he is no longer on land and that the village itself is a sea. He feels he has found himself surrounded by boats with their nets already cast into the water, spiralling in towards him in ever decreasing circles, and he knows he must retreat to Perran’s house. He steps down from the barstool onto a shifting floor and his knees buckle beneath him. Arms flailing and the sensation of being caught and released. Asking the question over and over again. Pushes and shoves and raised voices, the voices muddled and indistinct. Glass shattering on the stone floor and he is caught and held. Being carried, by two, maybe three. Arguing and flailing. Cold air on his face. Sweating and cold. Silence. Sleep.