Sandlands

by Rosy Thornton

  I plucked up courage to talk to Agnes about it this afternoon. I thought, she’s always so matter-of-fact and never takes offence, so I’ll just ask. Aren’t you ever lonely, I said, living by yourself in the house? She gave it some thought, in that far-off way she has, and then said no. And then she added something I thought was strange to start with, but kind of made sense afterwards when I puzzled over it on the bus home. She said, ‘Not as lonely as I’d be if I were somewhere else.’ And I decided what she must mean was, at least in the house she’s got her memories around her whereas anywhere else she’d have nothing at all. I picture them as physical things, her memories – real and tangible. Except in sepia, like antique photographs.

  It’s twenty years, she says, since her parents died, and I gather she’s been on her own there all that time, pretty much. I asked her if she had any brothers or sisters, but I don’t think she heard me. She’d drifted off again, so I just left her clean pants and nightie on the stand by the bed and crept out quietly.

  When I got home it was dark as well as foggy, and I went round switching all the lights on, even in rooms I’m not going in, and the television, too, just for the companionship. Rubbish soaps and a no-brain game show – but at least it was human voices. I might even Skype Dad tonight, crappy broadband or not. Sleep tight, Mum. Love you.

  Yesterday it rained absolute buckets, hardly stopped all morning, though at least it cleared the fog and I actually got outdoors and along the estuary for a quick walk after lunch. The dunlins and sandpipers seemed as relieved as I was to be out and about, blinking in surprise at the sunshine and shaking out gleaming if slightly battered-looking feathers. But then this morning the fog was back with a vengeance, and I haven’t been outside all day, beyond standing at murky bus stops. It’s just been house, bus, hospital, bus, and house again.

  Even up on the ward I didn’t get to talk to anyone, except to say hi to the ward sister. Agnes was asleep, but pretty restive and sounding distressed; I heard her mutter something about drowning. The sister said it was probably the opiates she’s on, but it’s no surprise if she dreams she’s drowning, poor thing, with all that fluid clogging up her lungs.

  Back here, I had a look at Agnes’s paintings. I didn’t mean to – I really wasn’t snooping or anything. It’s just that I was wondering what she might like me to take up to the hospital for her, like maybe one or two of her books or even a sketchpad and pencils, so I went in the studio to see what I could find, and her canvases were all in there, stacked against the back wall. There are dozens of them. And here’s what’s peculiar, Mum – they are all of the mud. I don’t just mean she only paints pictures of the mudflats. That would be fair enough, since it’s what’s out there. But they’re not of the marshes or the reed beds or the sky or the wildlife; there are none with a boat on, or a fisherman, or the trees in the distance, or the Maltings. All she does is paint the mud itself, over and over and over again. Maybe she likes the colours and the endlessly changing patterns. Maybe she wants to focus on one thing until she’s got it completely mastered – as if you could ever master that untamable, shifting mud. But I don’t know... there’s something about it that feels a bit disturbing, a bit obsessional. I must admit it gave me the creeps; I had to go and make myself a sandwich.

  More fog today – and no sign of the doctors being any closer to letting Agnes out of hospital. I’m starting to go stir-crazy, rattling around all alone in this house. I spent half the morning pacing the bedroom. I’ve tried reading but I can’t settle to anything, and there’s never anything on telly in the daytime.

  I found myself looking again at all her stuff – Agnes’s old stuff from when she was a kid, that is: the cloth doll and her drawings and the snaps of her as a small girl. And she is small, in all of them – every one. It hadn’t exactly struck me before. Like I mentioned, she’s no older than eight or nine in any of the pictures in the bedroom. And, OK, so maybe that’s when it happened, the accident or illness or whatever it was that put her in her chair, so she had to move to her bedroom downstairs. That’s what I decided before. But there are no photos at all anywhere else in the house – just a framed one in the studio, I noticed, which looks like it’s of her mum and dad. Did they stop wanting pictures of her, after it happened, do you think? If so, it seems so dreadfully sad. It’s just as if Agnes stopped dead in her tracks, right there and then; as if she’d stayed eight years old forever, or simply ceased to be.

  There are other things, too. On the dressing table there’s one of those old sets with a jewellery box and hand mirror and hairbrush, with the lid and backs all matching in pink mock mother-of-pearl, the way a little girl would love. I bet they were Agnes’s prize possession. And there are hairs still trapped in the bristles of the brush: dark hair like in the photographs, like she must have had before she went grey. I picked it up and turned it over and over, and honestly, Mum, there was something about those trapped child’s hairs that made my own stand on end.

  It’s partly that it’s so personal, I suppose, touching the hairs from someone’s head, such an immediate, physical connection, even across all those years. As if I could turn round and Agnes would be there at my elbow, except in a pinafore dress and pigtails. But it’s also creepy because it makes no sense. Why would she leave behind her cute pink vanity set? Why wouldn’t she take her hairbrush with her when she moved rooms?

  I’m going to go bonkers out in this place by myself, I know I am. I’ve got the bedroom window opened wide now, as wide as it will go, even though it’s freezing. I wanted to let in some air that doesn’t feel stale and lifeless, as if it’s been locked in here for decades. But all it’s done is invite the mist to come inside, creeping round the frame and over the sill, damp and colourless and cloying. And I can hear the curlews more sharply than ever, keeping up their everlasting anguished lament.

  I had this really vivid dream. There was a child and a dog, and both of them were lost out there on the mudflats. Lost or trapped, and calling out for help. No surprise, I suppose, since I’d been looking at photos of a child and drawings of a dog, and listening to the curlews when I turned out the light. But it was so real – so absolutely vivid. I woke up with my mouth dry and my throat tender and swollen, the way they feel when you’ve cried yourself to sleep. I dragged myself out of bed and closed the window. It was drizzling outside and the cold seemed to have soaked through the whole room during the night, leaving the air grey and heavy. Even with a jumper on under my dressing gown I felt chilled to the bone.

  I needed to look at the drawings again, at Agnes’s childhood sketches of the dog, the same small black spaniel who was lost in my dream. She’s signed them all at the bottom right hand corner, in lumpy childish handwriting. ‘A. Keble’, she’s put, or just her initials, ‘A. K.’ But on one of them she’s written her whole name: Agnes Keble. Yet when I looked closely, there was something funny about the ‘g’ in Agnes, which didn’t loop down below the line the way it should. I think I’d vaguely assumed, when I glanced before, that she’d stuck a capital ‘G’ in among the other, lower case letters. But that would be an odd thing for a child of eight or so to do, it occurred to me now, especially in her own name. And the ‘s’ at the end wasn’t quite right either, hardly there at all. The more I stared at the name the more it looked less and less like ‘Agnes’, and more and more like ‘Anne’.

  Suddenly I was whirling round the room in a fever, pulling out drawers, dragging down suitcases from the top of the wardrobe, opening boxes. I couldn’t help it – I had to know. In fact, with a horrible, crawling certainty, I thought I already did. So many children’s things: the little dresses and shoes and knickers and woollen mittens that shouldn’t be here. Things that Agnes would surely have moved downstairs with her – if they had been hers.

  Finally, at the bottom of a shoebox, beneath a layer of desiccated tissue paper, I found what I was looking for. The red leather dog collar, still with the lead attached, and the tarnished metal tag. A quartered sheet of yellowed newsprin
t, which I didn’t need to open to guess the tragedy that was folded away inside it. And the photographs – the bundle of missing photographs, tied together with string.

  Only the one on top was visible, but that was enough. It showed a dark-haired girl of eight or nine in a dress of checked gingham, her pigtails caught up in loops like big gypsy earrings and holding a laughing spaniel on its lead. The child from the photos on the chest of drawers, the child whose room I’m in. And beside her, in matching checks, half a head taller and maybe two years older, a matching, dark-haired child. Her big sister. Agnes.

  I’ve opened the window again; I don’t care any longer about the cold. It’s coming down now in earnest, but I can’t tell the wet outside from the drench of tears. Out on the salt marshes everything is silent, apart from the pock-pock of the rain as it stipples the mud and in the distance a single curlew, crying out its loneliness through the sheets of grey.

  Mackerel

  The first slice is under the gills, angled in slightly towards the head. You don’t push the knife right through to the board, but let it stop as it meets the resistance of the backbone. Then you spin the fish around and chop off the tail – the dark, spiny, deeply forked tail – before scraping it away sideways onto the worktop with the flat of the knife. Next you flip the fish onto its other side and repeat the cut at the gills, this time pressing down more firmly and sawing slightly to and fro to sever the spinal cord and remove the head, which slides to join the tail on the blue-and-white tiles. Last comes the tricky part. I must have done it a thousand times, but no two mackerel ever fillet quite alike. The tip of the blade goes in at the dorsal line, just above the backbone and a quarter-inch behind the place where the head used to be. You slide it one way and then the other, parting flesh from bone. Then the same thing below, at the centre line of the belly, scooping out and discarding the guts. Turn the fish again and, grasping firmly by the tail end, insert the knife across its width and draw the blade smoothly towards you, lifting the sweet tawny flesh, working more by feel than by eye and prising gently as you go, until the fillet comes springing clear of the pale, elastic bones.

  I’ve got a pair of mackerel tonight, because my Harriet is coming. I know you shouldn’t have favourites, but that’s what Hattie is: my first and favourite grandchild. Long and dearly awaited, she was, and then late arriving when she came, almost two weeks after the due date. ‘Starting the way she meant to go on’ – that’s what Carole always says, with a mother’s rough, dismissive fondness. But Hattie is a considerate girl and never late for her grandma, not even nowadays, and doesn’t assume like some folks that the old have nothing to do all day and won’t mind waiting.

  The knife was Billy’s – not Bill’s, my husband’s, but Billy’s that drowned. Billy the Kid, we used to call him. It was his knife, that he gutted the fish with as they landed them. We found it, later; it had stayed in the boat with the catch when he went over. He had it for his fifteenth birthday, from his dad, but he never reached his sixteenth, and now it’s my filleting knife. The knife has got to be sharp, that’s the key; no use trying to fillet a fish with a blunt edge. I know there are folks who swear by a steel, and there’s other contrivances they’ll sell you these days, with whirligig grinders that turn like corkscrews, but to my mind there’s nothing like a good old-fashioned whetstone. Two or three good swipes along each side before I make a start, and that knife of Billy’s is as keen as the day it was made.

  A quick swab down of the chopping board and I replace them side by side, the four plump, glistening fillets. There’s nothing so fine in all the sea as a mackerel’s skin: the silver-white tinged almost to pink below while up above the silver-green is striped and squiggled with bold black lines, like seaweed snaking in the shallows, or sand patterns left by the ebbing tide.

  I use another knife for descaling: stouter, with a flatter blade. Rasped backwards against the lie of the skin, it sets the scales upright and bristling, and they come away easily, collecting against its edge like slivers of ice when you run your glove along the gate top on a frosty morning. A tool for every task, my own mum used to say, and each one fit for purpose. To snip off the fins, it’s the smaller of the kitchen scissors. To pluck away the last of the tiny, threadlike bones, it’s tweezers – bought as eyebrow tweezers, from Boots the Chemists, but they live in the kitchen drawer with the wooden spoons and the potato peeler.

  She’s a good girl, is Hattie, and she loves her mackerel, though it’s a rare treat now to find one landed on this stretch of coast. When Carole and Billy were small they were the staple catch from May to November, for my Bill and the other men fishing out of Aldeburgh. A mainstay, a livelihood. The water at times was so thick with them, Bill said, it was like looking down into a vat of churning, molten silver. He almost felt as if he might be snagged and run aground in them: more fish than ocean. And of course you think it will last for ever, when the sea offers you riches in such store. So you take the gift and, like a greedy child, you take too much. But they didn’t know, Bill and the others – how could they know, back then, when we’d never heard the word ‘sustainability’? – that they were fishing the mackerel to near extinction in this part of the North Sea. So now it’s mainly the flat fish – dab and sole, plaice and skate – plus sea bass, when they’re running. Sea bass are popular now; they’re where the money is. Any mackerel on the slab is mostly from the Atlantic now, the fisheries in the north and west – except for these two, line-caught up in Lowestoft, a special tea for my little Hattie. I’m doing them the old way, the way she always likes them, dipped top to tail in seasoned oatmeal and fried in a pan of best butter, nicely foaming as they go in but not allowed to brown.

  * * *

  What can I tell you about her, my grandmother? How to encapsulate, how to cut down and trim and fillet for the pan, the weeks and days of her eighty-nine years, lived out within a span of six short miles of the Suffolk sea, but each one filled to the full?

  I could tell you, first, that we all call her Ganny, from when I was tiny and couldn’t say my ‘r’s. I could tell you that the skin of Ganny’s hands is rough and raw from handling crates of fish in winter; I could say she’s as quick and handy with the knife as any backstreet cut-throat, but her touch was soft as a whisper when she used to comb and plait my hair. I could say she’s a quiet subversive, a gentle setter, then breaker, of rules: a licker of fingers dipped in the cake bowl, a dispenser of jam from the jar with a spoon. I could say she knows the words of fifty songs, the old songs, of rope and sail and fishing net, of fishermen and sailor boys and maidens waiting on the shore, of storms and shipwrecks, and a light kept lit upon the harbour wall for a boat that’s never coming home. I’d say she knows the words of every verse, but cannot hold a tune.

  * * *

  The young get about so much more than we ever had the chance to do. We women, I suppose is what I mean, though the menfolk never ventured far afield either, unless you count the fishing grounds of Denmark or Norway, or the war. Hattie’s just back from Italy: picking olives, if you please. You never saw an olive when I was first married to Bill, or olive oil either, except in the chemist’s. I had a little bottle for the stretch marks, I remember, after Carole was born. Now it’s in every village shop, and it does give a nice flavour when you’re frying fish, though to my mind there’s still nothing quite like butter.

  Eight months, it is, since Hattie was last here and sitting at my kitchen table – just newly out of college then, a Bachelor of Arts – and now she’ll be back full of stories to tell, and brown as if she’d been at sea. I wonder if she remembers that her first granddad died in Italy? Though why she’d think of it, I don’t know, when he wasn’t really her granddad at all. Captured by the Italians in the Peloponnese in ’41, Frank was shipped to Italy and set to work on a farm there. Not much more than a smallholding, he said in his letters, with some scrubby vines and a few olive trees. I kept the letters, even later, after I met Bill; one a week, he wrote me, for almost three years. He was killed
joining up with the Allied invaders in the winter of ’44. Funny how things work out. If it hadn’t been for the times, that rush to wed before a tomorrow that might not come, it could have been an Italian farm girl he’d left on her own and pregnant instead of me.

  That was in the mountains in a place they call Abruzzo and fifty miles from the sea, but Hattie’s been up near Genoa, almost on the coast. I found it in the atlas. They’ll have fishing there, but it won’t be mackerel. It will be all the Mediterranean fare: sardines and anchovies and squid, most likely, or setting traps for lobster and prawn. My Bill never laid lobster pots but he always came home with a smile if he happened to snag one in the nets. You get a very good price for a lobster.