On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  But the seals’ favourite playgrounds were the hundreds of wrecks that lay scattered over the sea floor from just beyond the low-tide line to the deep waters off the coastal shelf. Whalers, cargo vessels, tramp steamers, the yachts of the rich and famous of their day: they had all found their way to the bottom of the seas around the Cape.

  The wooden ships had almost all crumbled away, although occasionally the cross mast of an old whaler would appear from the preserving sands after a storm.

  But the big cargo vessels were still there at eighty feet and deeper, sunk by shifting cargo or collisions in fog, or swamped by rogue waves.

  Through the ghostly interiors of these old ships the seals would chase each other, breaking off to pursue the plentiful shoals of fish. Leo could not follow them on the deeper dives, but down to forty or fifty feet he was now able to hold his breath for ninety seconds or more.

  At those depths and with that endurance the daily search for food became easier. He picked up scallops, clams and oysters from the Wellfleet beds and smashed them open at night on the rocks, slurping back the flesh and salty liquid in single gulps.

  Running his hands over the scallop shells took him straight back to his teenage days working on the boats out of Mornington. But the memories, although clear, were carefully preserved like the butterflies he had collected as a child and pinned into display cabinets. As with the photographs in the family album, the rule was look, but don’t touch. His past was another world.

  The search for food was continuous. Leo found most of it in the shallows or among the tidal pools at night. Crabs were the best and easiest food. He found the smaller ones hidden beneath seaweed in the tidal pools and caught them easily, breaking their hard shells on rocks and scooping out the raw white and brown meat. The larger king crabs lurked in cracks and crevices beyond the tide line, and were always to be found around the wrecks. If he was lucky he could spot the tell-tale tracks on the seabed that led to their hiding places and catch them as they scuttled for safety.

  And there were lobsters, the Cape’s most famous seafood, down there in hundreds of pots up and down the coast, tethered to their marker buoys. They lay between thirty and fifty feet below the surface, within easy reach of his diving abilities, but he didn’t dare risk putting an arm into the narrow aperture of the traps. Lobsters could move with surprising speed in the confines of their cage, and faced an intruder with claws strong enough to break a wrist or finger.

  So he left the lobsters alone, as he did the remnants of picnics that he found along the beach and in the dunes where he would hunt for birds’ eggs. There were sandwiches, half-eaten apples, discarded hamburgers by still smouldering barbecues, and candy bars left carelessly in the sand waiting for the army of volunteers who would arrive in the morning to clean up with their shiny waste sacks and pointed sticks.

  He could have gorged himself on the leftovers, but the thought revolted him. The one exception was bananas. If there was so much as an old banana skin to be found Leo would seize it with delight and strip off the remaining shreds of fruit. Then he would chew the skin into a pulp, sucking the moisture out and reducing it to a fibrous pellet which he would spit out with great satisfaction.

  His mother had always told him that bananas were the one food that man could survive on for years, packed as they were with the right balance of vitamins and minerals.

  ‘Never mind that apple-a-day nonsense,’ she would say. ‘Eat a banana a day and you’ll live longer.’

  Otherwise he lived off mussels, clams, and seaweed. It was some time before, after many failed attempts, he caught his first fish. It was in the evening, and he had watched a flock of seagulls swooping into the sea with loud cries about 100 yards from shore. Thirty or forty birds repeatedly dived into the churning water and emerged with small sprats and young herring in their beaks, swallowed them whole in flight and then plunged back to renew the feast. Leo swam out and dived beneath the crowded shoal, surfacing to find fish everywhere around him. He immediately caught a herring, digging long fingernails into its squirming flesh. He eviscerated it there and then, ripping out the backbone and eating the flesh while treading water.

  JULY

  SEVEN

  A couple of weeks after the funeral, with what her neighbours and friends thought indecent haste, Margot Kemp had begun her preparations to leave Cape Cod and start a new life back in Scotland. The realty agent had told her she could expect a reasonable price for the house, probably from someone who worked at the Institute. She had made arrangements to take a house near her parents in Perth. The next step was to apply for a primary-teacher’s job.

  Sam watched her mother go through the process of divorce from the Cape, cancelling membership of the gym, placing small ads in the Herald for pieces of unloved furniture, parcelling up old clothing for the local Salvation Army shop.

  Margot seemed happy. ‘We’re slowly lifting the anchor, darling. Then we’ll raise the mainsail and sail home across the sea. You do understand, don’t you? We can’t stay here, not after all this.’

  ‘I know, Mum.’

  But she didn’t know. She wanted to stay with her school friends, in the only place she had ever known. Anyway, what about Beano? There were strict quarantine regulations about dogs. How long would he have to spend in a cage somewhere before he could join them? How was an American dog like Beano going to like it in Scotland? Come to that, would she like it there? The one time she had visited her grandparents, she found the food horrible. At around five in the afternoon they served a huge meal of cakes, waffles, sandwiches, sometimes fried sausages and a large pot of tea, and that was it – no supper. And Grandma smelt of stale talcum powder and Grandpa farted all the time.

  The curtains had been taken down in the front rooms, Sandy noticed as he walked through the garden gate and up the path to the front door. He hesitated before ringing the bell. He felt nervous. Inside, he found Margot in the midst of packing. There were open suitcases in every room and boxes strewn across the floors. She had what looked like a yellow duster tied as a bandana around her head.

  She told him that she and Sam were leaving in a week’s time, taking the direct Boston–Edinburgh flight. She didn’t look him in the eye as she said this, but threw the remark over her shoulder while bent over a packing case. She said it as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a widow to leave home for a new life without waiting for her husband’s body to be found.

  Margot knew what Sandy was thinking. She knew what they were all thinking, even that nosey priest who kept coming round and asking how she was.

  ‘I’ll be bloody glad to shake the sand of this place off my feet, that’s how I am, Father,’ she had told him. It wasn’t quite true, of course. Despite the social snobbery and the stultifying boredom of the off season, she loved the violence of nature that gripped the Cape every winter. The summer landscape of beach, dunes and foreshore disappeared as the wind swung to the north-east and drove in the storms that clawed at the base of the wide summer beaches and the dunes beyond.

  That was what she would really miss. Here in this north-eastern corner of America they had real weather: three-foot-deep snowfalls; storms that roared in off the Atlantic out of nowhere and just tore away a whole beach, shifting it up or down the coast. In Scotland, the tides just went in and out four times a day, and nothing ever changed.

  Sandy sat down on a packing case and waited for a break in Margot’s frantic activity. Eventually he coughed politely.

  ‘This may not be my business, Margot…’

  She straightened up, stretched, arched her back and grimaced, but didn’t look at him. Whatever it was he had to say, she didn’t want to hear it.

  ‘Sandy, if you’ve come to tell me I can’t leave right now, then join the queue. But I can’t stay. I’ve had enough. This place is full of ghosts for me. I’ve had good times, maybe, but there are bad memories, very bad memories.’

  Sandy couldn’t think of another way to do this. He had thought about a letter
, a phone call, even using his column to write a parable, but none of them seemed right. Knowing Margot, it wouldn’t work this way either, but what the hell.

  So he went straight in, and told her there was talk among the fishermen down in the harbour bars about a bearded human face among the seals.

  She stopped packing, and looked at him for the first time since he had arrived.

  ‘Come on, Sandy. Give me a break.’

  ‘I just think you should know, that’s all.’

  She sat down and lit a cigarette, breaking her Number 1 house rule. No smoking in the house. Ever. Except now. Sandy was the second person to have told her this crazy story.

  ‘Know what, Sandy?’ she said. ‘Telling me that my husband, my late husband, is somewhere out there in the ocean, does that help me? Is that what friends are for?’

  She was right, of course. It was crazy to have mentioned it. The whole thing was crazy.

  Margot was angry.

  ‘You ask those fishermen, and they’ll tell you there are mermaids out there. They’ll tell you the sea can swallow a ship at night before the captain has time to get out of his bunk. They’ll tell you about squid the size of a house grabbing men off the deck with tentacles as thick as tree trunks. Fishermen have been telling these bullshit stories for centuries, because it glamorises their job, makes them heroes battling the dark forces of the unknown. We all know it’s nonsense, so why come here to my house now repeating that crap?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sandy. ‘I just thought you should hear it from me rather than from someone else. People are talking about it. Sam will hear the stories, and I thought it best you knew.’

  Margot stood with her hands on her hips, cheeks flushed, breathing hard.

  ‘It’s OK. I understand. It’s just that I don’t need this right now. I’m trying hard to keep everything together, but it’s tough. Sam doesn’t want to go, and I’m desperate to get out of here. Half the Cape thinks I’m a wicked witch for sounding off like that at the service, and now you come in with a story about some merman, if that’s the right word.’

  She sighed, kicked a suitcase shut and unwound the yellow bandana.

  ‘Why don’t you get us a drink? There’s a bottle in the fridge.’

  They sat down on the deck, a bottle of wine in a cooler between them. It was a warm evening, and Margot was wearing shorts and a v-necked T-shirt without a bra, he noticed.

  ‘You think I was wrong to say that stuff about Leo at the service?’

  It was the second time she had asked him this.

  ‘Like I said, I’m with Jenny. You spoke your mind. Leo would have approved.’

  ‘That’s not quite a straight answer, is it?’ She laughed. ‘You’re too diplomatic, Sandy, too nice. Look, I had to say it. What other chance was I going to have? Anyway, that stuck-up Bonner woman deserved it. Fancy firing a man for giving a few interviews and making a few speeches. And he always praised the Institute. You know he loved the place.’

  Of course Sandy knew that. He knew that Leo Kemp had been an exceptional scientist whose weakness was always to view conventional wisdom as part of the problem, not the solution. He also knew that Leo was dead. He wished he hadn’t mentioned those ridiculous rumours.

  ‘What are your plans when you get to Scotland?’ he asked.

  ‘The first thing I’ll have to do is get Sam into a school for the autumn term. In St Andrews maybe.’

  ‘Where you met Leo?’

  ‘Yeah. My good-looking Australian scientist, giving interviews about talking seals, and there was I, a little primary-school teacher.’

  ‘Love at first sight?’

  ‘Bollocks. He saw me in the bar of the Cross Keys with a crowd of other teachers and thought I had great boobs. That’s what he told me.’

  ‘So it was love at first sight.’

  They laughed, and she poured another glass.

  ‘Maybe I’m mad. It’s cold, grey and rainy back there. Half the year you live in darkness, or it feels like it. In the winter you get about four hours of real daylight.’

  ‘So why are you going back?’

  ‘It’s family, isn’t it? Sam and I need to put some roots down. She’s sixteen. In two years she’ll be at university. And it may sound very practical and unfeeling, but I really am not up to doing the grieving widow act here on the Cape.’

  The doorbell rang. Margot sighed and got up to answer it.

  A group of Leo’s students, headed by Gunbrit Nielsen, stood in the doorway carrying a large bunch of lilies. They had come to say goodbye. They filed in and sat self-consciously amid the packing cases, saying how sorry they were and how much they would like to keep in touch.

  Margot thanked them as she busied herself cutting the stems and putting the flowers in a vase. Behind the platitudes and the awkward pauses there was a sadness among the class that left Margot feeling strangely elated after they had gone.

  ‘He really touched their lives, didn’t he?’ she said.

  Sandy drove home wishing once again that his friend had not said quite so often: think the unthinkable, embrace the impossible.

  Weeks before every birthday and Christmas Sam would draw up a long list of wished-for presents, in careful order of priority. Now she had drawn up a list of conditions for her departure, and presented it to her mother for signature.

  Beano’s quarantine was to be as short as legally permitted; Mum had to keep her promise that they would come back every summer; wherever they lived in Scotland there had to be a garden for at least two of those big floppy-eared rabbits she planned to keep as pets; she wanted a brand-new bike; and finally Sam insisted that they say goodbye to some of the places on the Cape that they had enjoyed together as a family.

  They rented bikes and cycled the sea path from Falmouth to Coldharbor; they took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and biked over to Oak Bluffs, a honky-tonk town that likes to think of itself as the hippy answer to the stuffy villages of Edgartown and Vineyard Haven.

  In Oak Bluffs they took photos of each other standing in front of one of Leo’s favourite places on the Cape, the memorial statue of a Union soldier erected in 1891 as an act of redemption and forgiveness by a Confederate soldier, one Charles T. Strachan of the First Virginia Regiment. Leo always said that anyone with even a vague knowledge of American history would understand what a powerful statement that was at that time, and how much better one felt about the human race having looked at it for a few minutes.

  They ate the classic Cape Cod lunch at a little restaurant overlooking the harbour: a bowl of chowder and a grilled lobster, with a Budweiser for Margot and a Coke for Sam.

  The final day of their farewell tour was spent in Provincetown, looking at the art galleries and ending with an argument about whether or not to make the long climb up the 252-foot Pilgrim Monument tower. Margot protested that she was tired, and that 116 steps were a hell of climb for a view of what, exactly?

  But it was a clear day, and Sam insisted. She had come here with her class when they were doing a project on the Pilgrims, and this, the tallest granite tower in America, was a reminder that it was here in Provincetown that they had first landed in 1620. They spent five weeks anchored in a sheltering bay off what is now the harbour, and it was here that history was made with the publication of the Mayflower compact, drawn up to quell the rumbling dissent among indentured servants on board who, having survived the sixty-five-day crossing, now wanted their liberty and full rights. This they were granted in a document that was a forerunner to the US constitution. Therefore Provincetown could claim a more important stake in US history than Plymouth, to which the Pilgrims sailed having failed to find fresh water on the Cape.

  At least, said Sam, that was the way they told it in Provincetown. Plymouth probably had a different view.

  Margot listened to her daughter’s breathless history lesson and hoped that the Scottish school system was going to give her as good an education as she had clearly received at High School in Falmouth.


  ‘Come on, Mum. There’s a great view of the town, the beaches and the whole outer Cape, plus you can see Boston on a clear day, thirty miles across the bay.’ Sam was reading from the information chart at the bottom of the tower.

  ‘Who wants to see Boston on any day?’ Margot grumbled as they began the long climb.

  But it was worth it. The view was panoramic, and you could peer through telescopes down at the ant-like figures in town and on the beaches. Beachcombers, dog-walkers, joggers and sunbathers populated the sands that stretched away into the hazy distance. On a small spit of sand running out several hundred yards to sea, probably flung up by some recent storm, were a score or more seals, some in the water, some hauled up dozing in the sun.

  Margot swung the telescope lazily over them. They were mainly harbour seals, with a few greys among them. As they rode the waves together they would occasionally vanish beneath the surface, having sensed the presence of fish beneath them; Buck had told her that the average seal ate forty pounds of fish a day. Maybe the fishermen were right, thought Margot. Maybe they did need to be culled.

  A patch of sea mist rolled, in shrouding the seals and leaving visible only their faint outlines. Margot tightened her grip on the telescope, focusing on the blurred shapes shifting gently in the swell about thirty yards away. A seal in the water in those conditions and at this distance might easily be mistaken for a human, she thought. As the mist cleared and they came back into clear view she realised how easy it would be for a fisherman to make that mistake.

  There were no human heads or bearded faces anywhere out there…except for Leo, of course. He was there somewhere, floating on the tides, pulled hither and thither by the currents and the wind. What would his body be like now? Bloated, blackened flesh, unrecognisable as the husband she had known, peeling off in chunks and being eaten by sea creatures? Eyes scooped out by the waves leaving sightless sockets staring at the sky? She shivered at the thought.