The Many

by Wyl Menmuir

  He works his way through the upstairs and as he inspects the broken windows in the front bedroom he sees there is something different about the scene below, something unusual about the village in front of him. From where he is, he can see that the mouth of the cove looks like it belongs to another place altogether such is its transformation, as though it has been entirely rearranged overnight. Wanting to be anywhere but inside the house, he makes his way back downstairs and locates his spare waterproof on a hook behind the door in the kitchen. The coat has escaped the violence and he pulls it on over his clothes, and leaving the house behind him, he walks down through the village.

  It is only when he comes out from between the narrow rows of houses fronting onto the beach that he sees the sea has risen overnight and the beach has been entirely drowned, though there has been no storm and no warning of high tides. The water has risen up above the height of the concrete wall that separates the beach from the village. The roof of the winch house is still visible, and sections of railing that run along the boundary between the beach and the road poke up out of the water. The café, too, is now an island floating in the sea. It looks as though it has been unhitched from the land and stays where it is only for lack of movement in the water or air. The coast road, too, is under water along the sea front, and the waves lap at the foot of the houses on the other side of the road. At either end of the submerged beach, the road rises out of the water, as though a section of it has been dipped into the dark water for treatment. As Timothy stands on the steps of one of the houses that face directly onto the sea and looks out on this newly created scene, he sees the lights of the fleet converging on the cove mouth from their night’s fishing.

  Timothy looks around to see if there is anyone else there to witness the flood. At first it appears he is alone, though he sees to his left, where the coast road emerges from the water, a blue car with dark-tinted windows is slowing to a halt just a few feet from the water. As he watches, the passenger door opens and a figure steps out of the car. It is the woman and, though she looks straight towards him, if she sees him she does not acknowledge it. She looks perturbed by what she sees and she stands for a while examining the scene. Timothy waits and watches for her to get back into the car and reverse up the hill on the narrow road, but she remains where she is, as though she is trying to unravel a complex problem.

  He plays through in his mind a scenario in which each morning he wakes to find the sea has risen another few feet overnight and has claimed another portion of the village until it reaches Perran’s house and the waves lap at the door.

  For a while, the only observers of this scene are Timothy and the woman in grey, and when the villagers start to emerge from their houses, both of them retreat, she to behind the tinted glass of the car beside which she is standing, and he to Perran’s.

  When he arrives back at the house he tries to assess the damage there with a more objective eye. He walks again from room to room, righting pieces of furniture, working out which pieces he can salvage. In the living room, after lifting the large bookcase back against the wall, he picks up books from the sodden floor, their pages splayed out, as though they want to soak up as much as possible of the chaos that ran through the house the night before.

  Timothy works on reclaiming the house for the rest of the day and sees no one. He assumes the rest of the village is preoccupied with the damage caused to the seafront. Working through the house, he starts to pile his newer furniture together on the patch of grass outside the front of the house that is still yellowed and flattened from the furniture he had removed from the house weeks earlier. When the pile reaches head height he fills some of the empty drawers and cupboards with newspaper and sets light to it. The chemical-soaked furniture takes quickly and burns with a dark acrid smoke that sticks to the back of Timothy’s throat. He looks down towards the beach, but the attention of the village is still turned towards the high waters below and the fire and its fume-heavy smoke go unnoticed.

  As Timothy watches the fire spread he feels a strong emotion rise up within him, surging to the surface, though even as it does he knows it is not because of the damage to the house, or the hostility of the village. As the fire builds, he feeds it with the books that are beyond repair. He stands as close to the flames as he can bear in order to dry the tears as they form and wonders what he has done to bring this down on himself.

  19

  Ethan

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING the village descends again to the beach to find the waters have fallen away as suddenly as they had risen. Ethan, when he emerges from his house, is drawn down to the seafront like all the others, and he finds the beach crowded by the time he gets there.

  The water was calm as they had entered the cove the day before, and from the sea, the village had looked like a different place entirely. They had secured the boats to the railings that ran in a line, like a fence bisecting a field of snow; the only indication there was when they returned of the boundary between the beach and the road.

  The state of the café on the front shows the violence of the water’s retreat. Anne and two girls who help her out in the café stand huddled together outside the entrance amid the debris of tablecloths, salt cellars and menus that have been dragged out of the building by the retreating water. The door hangs uselessly, wrenched from its hinges. Further below scattered across the beach are the café’s chairs and tables. The two girls look to be the only thing holding Anne up, and they are talking to her in low voices, words he cannot hear. The sound of their voices is comforting and, not wanting to interrupt them, he walks around them in a wide arc.

  The winch house is still standing, though it is as though the sea has tried to suck out its contents through the door. The machinery within has been uprooted and now blocks the doorway in a twisted confusion of metal. Ethan hears the sound of metal on metal from inside, and he looks in to see Clem has climbed in over the machinery blocking the door and is shifting things around in the darkness of the hut. As he gets closer, he sees that Clem is picking up whatever is loose and lying about on the floor and hurling it against the machinery, inflicting more damage on what is already damaged.

  The waves on the shore are playing with empty crates and creels, pushing them up onto the stones and pulling them back again. The cove is littered with plastic bags, polystyrene blocks, floating on the oil-slick water, and they are slowly being sucked out through the mouth of the cove with the tide. Clem’s tractor, too, has been dragged down from its place at the top of the beach and it now sits a few metres out into the cove. Only the steering wheel of the tractor and the back of the driver’s seat are visible.

  The Great Hope lies on the stones listing over to one side, as do the other boats that returned the day before. All the boats left on the beach have been dragged as far down the beach as the chains securing them to the railings will allow, and they strain on them like dogs against their leashes. All the loose ropes and chains attached to the dividing wall are also outstretched and are laid out in a series of parallel lines down the beach and on into the water. Ethan feels if he picked one of the lines up, he could pull the sea and the sky towards him.

  It takes him a while to understand what is wrong with the scene, and at first he thinks he must be mistaken, but as his eyes follow the outstretched cables and ropes down towards the beach, he sees it is no longer the same beach, and the stones that make it up are no longer the same stones. It is as though while the space remains the same, it has been filled with items that are similar but not the same. He feels as though everything has been replaced by someone who knows this place well, but who has had to reconstruct it from memory. He looks around and the feeling compounds itself and although when he focuses on any one thing – the rocks at the mouth of the cove or the stones on the beach – and they match the image in his memory, he suddenly feels like a stranger in this place.

  As he looks down on the beach he starts to feel panic welling up in him. And i
n between the outstretched ropes, pulling their way to the sea, he sees the first cracks. Thin black lines that run the length of the beach from where they emerge out of the water, up through the stones towards the concrete wall. The lines are barely perceptible and he wonders whether he is actually seeing them at all. He looks around to see if anyone else has noticed, but the villagers are going about their business and show no sign they have seen anything more unusual than the devastation left by the high tide.

  He looks around for Timothy, as though Timothy might be the only person who might understand what he is experiencing, but Timothy is nowhere to be seen.

  20

  Timothy

  TIMOTHY GOES THROUGH the house laying down sheets over the bare floorboards and, using the remaining dustsheets, he covers what remains of the ruined furniture and the walls as best he can.

  He sits on the narrow mattress and fills the canvas bag that has been lying beneath the bed since he arrived. The bag has escaped the damage and he shoves in all the clothes that are not beyond repair and takes it down to the car, though as he emerges from the house he notices the passenger window has been smashed, more damage he had not seen before. He fishes out a shirt from the canvas bag, wraps it round his hand and clears the broken glass from the window frame and from the seats as best he can, though even as he does, he can see pools of broken glass accumulating in the seat well and around the handbrake. The damage does not appear, at first glance, to extend beyond the broken window and when he has cleared most of the glass, he places the canvas bag on the passenger seat and gets in at the driver’s door. He sits there for a while, looking back at the house with its door left swung wide open. There’s no point closing it. His shoulders sag and, feeling an emotion start to pass over him, the first tentative waves that lap at the shore as the tide turns its force upon the land, he twists the key.

  The engine coughs, tries to turn over and gives up. He tries again and this time it coughs again, but more weakly, and the third time he tries it gives no response. He is calm at first and then the frustration rises in him faster than he thinks possible and when he opens the door to get out, he pushes it outward with enough force for something in the hinges to give. He leans against the door and then pushes it again with his full weight behind it and feels the mechanism break completely and he leaves it hanging from its frame like a broken arm.

  Timothy walks between the house and the car several times, pacing between the two open doors, unable to pick one. Eventually, he reaches in through the smashed window and picks the bag from the passenger seat of the car and takes it into the house again.

  Back inside, he places the canvas bag back on the bed, returns downstairs, pulls one of the remaining chairs over to the window in the front room and spends the rest of the day staring out at the sea.

  The next day he walks down into the village and places a card on the noticeboard outside the village store, which is far enough back from the seafront to have escaped the high waters and is still open for business. Then he walks back up to Perran’s and takes up the same position by the window again.

  21

  Timothy

  THERE IS A knock at the door and Timothy stirs in his chair but does not move. There is another knock.

  ‘Heard you’ve got car trouble.’

  The voice comes in through the kitchen, through the door he has not bothered to close. Timothy stands from the chair by the window and walks through to the back of the house where he finds Tomas, who is appraising the wreck of Timothy’s car. Timothy stares, wondering whether Tomas has come to gloat, or to see how the damage to the house looks in the light of day. In the nights since the break-in he has pictured all four of the skippers at the front of the mob that stormed the house, tearing down pictures and furniture.

  But Tomas does not look as though he is there to gloat. He looks concerned. At the state of the car, and at the state of Timothy, who has not washed or shaved for three days now and has barely eaten either. He is aware from Tomas’s stare that he does not look like a well man.

  ‘There’s no fixing this one then?’ he says.

  Tomas’s grin is friendly and suggests he knows there isn’t. Two nights of heavy rain have fallen in through the open doors and windows, which has done nothing for the old estate, and it looks as though it has already started to sink into the verge behind the house. Tomas indicates the bag of tools he’s brought up with him and waits for Timothy’s go ahead. Timothy tries to conceal his surprise, but he nods and Tomas reaches in through the driver’s door and pulls the catch for the bonnet beneath the steering wheel. He brings the bag of tools round to the front of the car and disappears beneath the bonnet, and Timothy stands at the kitchen door and fixes them both a coffee. As he drinks, Timothy becomes aware of how cold he had become sitting by the window for so long, despite the blanket he had pulled round his shoulders. There is some warmth in the sun that falls onto the back of the house and he stands on the step feeling the light rest on his face. Eventually, Tomas’s voice rises up from within the silent engine.

  ‘She’s dead. Simple as that. She won’t get you a mile let alone make the kind of journey you’re looking to do.’

  He comes out holding a piece of the engine in his hand and passes it to Timothy apologetically before returning to close the bonnet.

  ‘Best you could do for her is point her in the direction of the sea and take the handbrake off, I reckon,’ he says and smiles. ‘I’d offer to take her off your hands, but she’s a pile of junk.’

  Timothy looks down at the blackened item in his hand. He is unable to identify it as something that plays an essential part in the running of an engine and he rolls it over back and forward in his hand, watching a streak of grease or dirt spread out across his palms and fingers. He hears Tomas is still talking to him and tunes back in.

  ‘I could sort you something else out if it’ll help?’

  He nods at Tomas, who is packing his tools back into their bag and, as the fisherman starts to walk back into the village, he thanks him and Tomas raises a hand in response.

  Later that afternoon, Timothy hears a car pull up outside Perran’s, and then the reedy sound of its horn. Since Tomas had left him, Timothy had changed into the remaining clean clothes from the canvas bag and shaved in cold water from the kitchen sink, the only tap that seemed to be working. He feels slightly more human for it. Hearing the horn again, he walks through to the kitchen and sees Tomas waving at him through the windscreen of a car that makes the broken Volvo look practically new. The car Tomas has brought up to Perran’s looks as though it has been welded together from thin sheets of metal that have been dragged up from the wreck of a ship. The bonnet and roof are almost totally clear of paint and the windows, too, look as though they have been scoured over and again with wire wool.

  ‘She’s a bit of a beach wreck, a bit sandblasted, but she’s a runner,’ Tomas says and he slaps the roof as if to prove his point. As he does so, the engine note dips a little and Timothy wonders for a moment whether it is going to give out completely, but it picks up again a few seconds later and Tomas’s grin towards him broadens. Timothy looks in through the side window, shielding his eyes from the glare from the white sky reflected in it. The interior is all plastic leather effect. It is ripped and worn through in patches and cheap yellow foam sticks out from the gashes in the seats. Beneath the plastic steering wheel, wires of varying colours hang loosely and the handbrake sticks up from the floor, bare metal. He stands up and looks at Tomas across the roof. Tomas is still grinning.

  ‘Looks as though someone’s rolled it a few times,’ says Timothy, running a hand over the uneven roof panels.

  ‘That’s possible,’ replies Tomas. ‘It’s my sister’s. She’s got no use for it now. Never was the most careful driver. Could be why she lost her licence, come to think of it. Either way, she doesn’t drive it any more and you’ll not find much else here. Just sits down on the
front most times, hence the slightly washed-out look. She’s a runner though and yours if you want her.’

  He waits for a response from Timothy and when it does not come, he continues.

  ‘There’s not a garage for miles and if there’s another car going in the village, I’ll be surprised.’

  Timothy walks around the outside of the car and plays the buyer, though he knows there’s little other choice. He flinches when Tomas gives him the price. Tomas shrugs his shoulders and gives him a look that tells him take it or leave it. Timothy pays with what cash he has left and after showing him how to start the engine by crossing two of the loose wires hanging beneath the dashboard, Tomas walks back down into the village, leaving the car ticking over on the road at the back of the house.

  When Tomas has gone, Timothy gets into the driver’s seat and feels the body of the car sink beneath him, though whether it is the springs beneath the seat or the car’s suspension that cause this he cannot tell. He checks the switches for the lights and the few other controls on the plastic dashboard, though the lights do not seem to work at all and only one of the windscreen wipers functions, scraping slowly across the windscreen. He pushes a few buttons on the stereo and succeeds in getting only a loud static howl through one of the speakers. Standing on the doorframe, he looks around for an aerial and finds a rust-edged hole where one might have been. He gets back in and pulls his jumper sleeve up over his right hand and tries to clear the windscreen with it, but ends up smearing dirt around it, and when he reaches his hand round onto the outside of the windscreen, he can feel beneath his fingertips the scars left by the sand the wind carries with it from miles and miles away, from another country or another continent.