by Tom Vowler
He saw that her left ankle was swollen, probably sprained on the cliff, or turned over in the water. He would put some ice on it. He replaced the blanket and fetched a towel, drying sections of her hair gently, before propping her head up with a cushion.
The dog watched him as he crossed the room. He poured another whisky and drank this one slower, following in his mind the warmth as it spread within him. He reckoned on it being around eight, perhaps a little later, and he tried to remember what plans there had been for the evening, what jobs he’d been minded to attend.
The wood could last the night, if he was careful with it. He’d fetch more when it got light. Turning the armchair out a little, so he could see both the fire and the girl, he let himself fall into it, thinking that if she didn’t need checking on he could happily sleep there until the morning.
He thought again about a phone call, at least to report it, but the fire and the whisky were like anvils on his shoulders, and it was all he could do just to watch her. There had been a line into the house for the first few years, disconnected when he couldn’t pay the bill. It perhaps cost him work, not having one, but he managed. He would walk to the village first thing.
It was almost dark in the room when he woke, the fire aglow but silent. The lambent sweep from the lighthouse crossed the far wall in cadenced relief. He half-remembered and looked to the sofa, saw the shape of her, this selkie of the sea. She was groaning, delirious perhaps, and the noise had been something unfathomable in his dream. He remembered he hadn’t got the ice for her ankle, and it took all he had to rise from the chair. He put a lamp on and felt her forehead, which was warm but not hot. When he came back from the kitchen she was awake.
He held out the ice, which he’d put in a sock.
‘Your ankle,’ he said.
She looked confused but not afraid.
‘You were in the water,’ he said.
He could see she was thinking about his words, like they were a riddle to be solved, and there was embarrassment in him now, for knowing her intention, for reminding her. She scanned the room and then herself, lifting the blanket a little.
‘I had to take them off.’ They were wet.
She seemed to accept this, but it was hard to know. He had never been able to tell a woman’s thoughts, knew not to try. She pulled the blanket up to her chin, but without panic.
‘Where am I?’ she said.
Her accent had a trace of something hard on it, Russian perhaps.
‘In the house on the cliff, along from where you climbed down.’
She turned on to her side and winced, touching her ankle while trying to keep the blanket in place.
‘I don’t think it’s broken,’ he said. ‘Sprained, most likely. I have some painkillers. And this.’ He held out the sock again.
Kneeling at the end of the sofa he asked if she minded and she shook her head. The swelling was no worse than before and he held the ice there while she watched.
‘Can I have some water?’ she said.
He gestured that the ice was more important.
‘I can hold it in place with my other leg.’
He left and came back with a filled pint glass and she drank hungrily.
‘Try to sip it,’ he said.
He put the box of pills where she could reach them, realised the folly of this, and eased two out from a strip.
He wondered what time it was, how long he’d slept.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.
She shook her head but then seemed to think about it some more.
‘A little.’
‘There’s some stew.’
In the kitchen he saw it was 1am. The tide was up and he could hear its rhythmic roar, the crash each wave made, the guttural growl as it turned back on itself, raking the shingle. He remembered his boots, how well they fitted, the years they had left in them.
It had been so long since someone else had been in the house, and then not at night, and he didn’t know what to think of it. He hadn’t felt hungry until he smelt the food, the microwave turning the portion he’d left for himself last night. He tore some bread off, took it in, the dog eyeing him.
Passing the food to her, he saw that it didn’t work, the mechanics of it.
‘Have you some clothes I can borrow?’ she said. ‘So I can sit up.’
He left the food on the coffee table and went up to the bedroom, found the smallest shirt and jumper he had. Downstairs, after handing them to her, he hung her wet clothes on the back of two chairs, turning them to the fire, and left her alone. He took some cheese from the fridge, put it on the last of the bread and sat down.
He wondered how long he should stay out here, reckoned a few minutes to be sure. It occurred to him that the kitchen was a mess, more than normal, and after eating the bread he put some things away, filled the bin. He thought to put the radio on, to fill the silences, but knew the signal would be weak this time of day. There’d been a television once, though he’d not replaced it when it had broken.
Outside the living room he coughed to announce himself. With a little effort the fire returned and he stacked a couple of logs in its centre, the dog replacing him as he stood.
‘What sort of dog is that?’ the girl asked.
‘A lurcher, with a bit of something else.’
She looked confused and he thought of the word mongrel, but figured on her not knowing it.
‘Cross-breed,’ he said and she nodded.
He saw that she’d eaten some of the food and now gripped the water in both hands. She looked odd, sitting up in his clothes, and he had to check whether he was dreaming, decided there was too much continuity for this.
‘Do you want me to call anyone?’ he said. ‘There’s no phone, but I can walk to one.’
She shook her head and he thought there was perhaps fear in her eyes for the first time. He’d assumed there would be someone, despite her intentions.
‘No one in the village?’ he said.
‘I don’t live here.’
‘The person you’re staying with then?’
Another shake of the head. So far he’d only thought about her physical condition, what damage being in the water might have done.
‘I can call a doctor in the morning.’
‘My ankle?’
‘Your ankle will heal. I thought someone to talk to.’
Shame bloomed in her and he wanted to take it back.
‘But, yes,’ he said. ‘A real doctor, to make sure you’re OK. Are you in any pain, apart from your ankle?’
She said that she wasn’t, but that she felt weak.
He sat back in the chair and felt the fatigue everywhere, as if some vast gravity was at work, could feel his body, his hair, rimed with salt and sand. He tried to think clearly, about what day it was, what tomorrow held. He was due at the yard early, a big order to fill this week. It was all cash in hand, and nothing if you weren’t there. Brutal work, it was, especially in the summer, though he didn’t know from one month to the next when he’d be needed. The other two were brothers, their father the yard’s owner, so he was only brought in for bigger orders. Between jobs he would go to the village once a week, ring the owner to ask if there was anything.
When not at the yard he maintained a few of the boats in the harbour, men he’d got to know from fishing, from the pub where he sometimes went. Men with sea in their blood, for whom life on land was never entirely trusted, true solitude found only on the water, where a living could still just about be eked out. Hardship etched in every feature; skin inked not in adornment, as it was these days, but from pragmatism, such artwork often the only way to identify a water-dwelling corpse. And their ancestors, sailors who had an image of Christ tattooed on their backs to deter the first mate taking the whip to them.
Payment for his work – mending nets, painting a hull, removing algae – came with guarded civility, as if he had more in common with these modern fishermen. An outsider, from the family who arrived with lavish plans. The
y paid him with cash, a few pints, allowed him to occupy the fringes of their revelry after a good catch, sea shanties filling the night.
He had been told, as every newcomer who frequented the pub had, of the plague visited upon the village in the 17th century, carried by fleas brought in on cloth from London. In an act of selflessness, the village entered a lockdown, nothing coming in or going out until the epidemic had passed. A year later and more than half its population had succumbed, names writ large in the church. Supplies were still needed, so an exchange site on the outskirts was created, goods left one week, payment in sterilised coins the next. Such solidarity was not diminished by time.
Less edifying tales were also told, of the coast still possessed by the wraiths of wreckers, folk who profited from a place of serrated reefs and busy shipping routes, the luring of storm-ailed vessels to their demise an industry of its time. And the smugglers, rejecting of the duty imposed upon them, shifting contraband through labyrinthine tunnels, supplying a complicit community. You did what you had to.
He should like one day to earn a proper living, to know what was coming in. To buy a boat of his own, run trips to the island or get some lobster pots. Bend the world a little to his own will. There had been a small skiff when he first moved back, abandoned on the beach below, and he’d hauled it up one winter, worked on it in the outbuilding, and the project sustained him, gave him purpose. Once seaworthy he liked to row it out early or late in the day, like some crepuscular thing, the ocean his alone, and he would tie a baited line to the rowlock, sit back and watch the house as it lost or gained form. He rarely caught anything this way, was content not to, but to somehow be bound to the first humans to fish.
The girl was examining the painkillers.
‘Take them,’ he said. ‘And then no more for four hours.’
He realised his own head hurt, knew he couldn’t afford to get ill.
‘You can stay here tonight,’ he said. ‘If you’ve nowhere to go.’ He hadn’t planned to say this, the words a surprise.
‘Will your wife mind?’
He looked at the dog. ‘It’s just us,’ he said. If she felt threatened by the absence of someone else, she hid it well.
‘I always wanted a dog,’ she said. ‘As a child. Our mother said they take too much looking after.’
‘She’s no trouble.’
‘My friend had one, but it was taken by a bear.’
He looked nonplussed at her, wondered if her brain had gone too long without oxygen.
‘In Romania we have lots of bears. It smashed through three doors to get to it, carried the dog off to the woods. My friend heard the cries for 10 minutes.’
His mind formed the image, found it both gruesome and comical.
‘Do they ever take people?’ he said.
‘Just the tourists. If you go up in the mountains, you enter the food chain, and not at the top. They are fast, faster than people. At least if you are with someone, you only have to outrun them.’
He took a moment to get it, enjoyed the humour of it.
There was the silence again and he tried to think what to say. Upstairs he’d wondered what he should bring her to wear on her bottom half, but could think of nothing, so brought down a towel for her to wrap around.
It felt strange to feel responsible for something beyond himself, beyond the dog, even if only for the night. There was something natural in him that kicked in, and he thought, yes, everyone must have this capacity, but then he thought of men he’d met who hadn’t. Who were built otherwise. And then he remembered that once he wasn’t so different from those men.
‘The fire should last now,’ he said. ‘You should try to sleep. I’ll check on you later.’
He called the dog, but it ignored him and so he let it stay.
It was light outside, an hour or so past dawn, he reckoned, and he cursed. He should already be at the yard, and would be down a morning’s pay even if he left now. Beyond the garden, out over the cliff, a pair of fulmars rose from the sea fret and tacked into the south-westerly. His limbs were heavy, like he’d spent a night out on the boat, and then he remembered, checked with himself it had happened.
When sleep had come, it was riven with images of his time inside, when all you could do was shut yourself down, like a hibernation, but one you remained primed in. Each time he woke, he had checked on the girl, reconfigured the blanket, made sure her ankle was raised. She’d removed his jumper and had both arms stretched outwards, as if she were poised to dive off the sofa. He felt her head again, tried not to wake her. By the second or third time, the fire had burned out and he left it, the dog following him upstairs.
He thought this morning how easy it would’ve been to have ignored her, mind his business. To hear a week later of a body washed ashore in the next cove, to read who she was in the paper. There was a time when he’d have felt nothing, watching her submerge and not surface, and it troubled him that this was no longer the case. A man he’d once shared a cell with drew a bladed toothbrush into another’s cheek and he had felt nothing at the sight. A mouth made twice its size. It was just an event, this laceration of the flesh, like any other thing that happened. Yet the girl’s situation, despite it being of her choosing, had given rise to something else and he had risked his life for it. Not that she had seemed grateful. And perhaps on recovering she would simply repeat her efforts, his actions only prolonging her misery.
He heard the girl in the hall. She was working her way along the wall, trying not to put weight on her ankle. She’d put on her trousers, though he could see they were still damp. His jumper looked even bigger on her this morning, the arms traipsing like a straitjacket.
‘I need to pee,’ she said.
He looked up the stairs, but said nothing. She gave out a huff, sat on the bottom stair and worked her way up backwards.
‘Would you like some breakfast?’ he said, but her attention was on the stairs and their negotiation.
He needed to make a decision about work. The girl seemed in no hurry to leave – owing mostly to her ankle, he supposed – or to contact anyone, and despite there being little of value in the house, he had no desire to leave a stranger alone here for any time. He would walk to the village and call the yard, say he was ill. There would be no sympathy, only a reminder that others could replace him if he made a habit of it. If the girl left soon, he’d go in this afternoon.
He heard the bathroom door shut.
‘I’m taking the dog out’, he called up.
After making the call, he went back to the house, but continued along the path past it, to give the dog more of a run, to collect his thoughts. The owner of the yard had merely said tomorrow, and he knew what was meant by this. There was no recourse, no debating it: an employer who asked no questions – who cared nothing for your past – held no obligations towards you.
The dog had something’s scent now and lagged behind. He looked back at the house and for a moment was fifteen again, oblivious to the true savagery of life, thinking that some glorious future awaited once the tumult of youth had been navigated. He recalled coming here on family holidays, before they moved down, their father taking them rock pooling, exploring miniature shape-shifting worlds, microscopic life amid tendrils of seaweed, scrambling over lichened rocks, the house on the cliff something that caught their eye even then.
He could see how nearer the cliff edge it was after three decades of erosion, waves tireless in their undermining, water channelling its way along faults in the rock, later expanding as ice, rupturing from within. The house would never sell again, the subsidence irreversible. Ten years, the structural engineer had told him after his mother’s funeral, perhaps a little more. They could lay grids of steel tendons over the cliff-face, calcify with concrete where possible. The cost, though, would be his alone, the local authority prepared to bolster the base with boulders, but little else.
There was an offer – enough to do something with, perhaps even to buy a caravan up the coast – a firm buildin
g apartments for affluent surfers, second homes for business types, sky-stealing grotesques. The coast as a playground. They’d expanded either side of the village in the last few years and had a plot directly behind the house, two fields back. He hadn’t understood at first, why they offered anything at all, realising later that week they would raze it to the ground, this blight that affronted the view. He’d given it serious thought, for there would be no insurance when the first bricks joined the beach, no relocation by the local authority. But the harder the company pushed, the more resistance he felt, the fight something to sustain him. Letters still came every month or so, but he’d stopped opening them.
He called to the dog and this time it came, passing him, stopping to drink from one of the rivulets, and he chased it on, in case something’s carcass lay upstream. Few rivers went quietly to their end, and he liked how they overshot the cliff edge here, announcing to the sea their return, water’s great migratory cycle, always finding its way, returning to itself. And the waves surging in to unite with the fresh water, their advance a mathematical artillery, as was everything in nature, patterns repeating. Spits and dunes formed this way, subject to the earliest laws.
The fret had cleared now and he could see out to the island, its silhouette from this angle a leviathan rising through the water, its lithe body segmented, head turning unflinchingly inland. It was all that was left of the old land, a reminder that the sea always triumphed in this incessant struggle, millennia of resistance by the land undone, only this granite outcrop enduring. Its stone walls built by convicts bound for the Antipodes, hived off in secret.
He scanned the beach below, harbouring a fantasy that his boots might lie undamaged somewhere along the tideline and not a mile or more apart, sidling like crabs on the seabed. Remembering his efforts of last night a great fatigue gathered in him, and he headed back to the house.
