The Ephemera

by Neil Williamson

  You live in a small town all your life, you know it intimately. Its streets are as familiar as the rooms of your own house, its buildings, your wallpaper. The tang of brine is the smell of your mother's cooking, and the constant conversation of sea and wind and gulls, the muted, ever-present soundtrack of domestic appliances. It's always the same. You stop thinking of it as a place. You stop thinking about it at all.

  There was a shut-up shop not far down the hill that had appeared surreptitiously like a patch of damp on the bathroom ceiling. Damien couldn't remember it ever being open, or what had been there before, but for years now it had been an unmovable stain on Robin Hood's Bay's decor. Its window displayed a sparse diorama of oddments. Dusty figurines of dolphins and starfish sat on a fan of garish guidebooks. There was other statuary too, dragons and goblins, perhaps a misguided attempt at snagging some of Whitby's Goth trade, sat opposite a collection of cutesy animal figures; kittens in mittens, frogs with fishing rods. It was no wonder the shop had gone bust.

  It was a surprise however when Peter stopped there and pulled out a set of keys. "You wouldn't believe how cheap the rent is," he said, opening the door with his shoulder. "Course its only short term until they find a new tenant for the shop." He stepped through the darkened doorway, and Damien was only able to surmise the grin in his voice. "Been here four years now."

  There was a little flat to the rear of the empty sales space. Peter and Damien squeezed down a hall and a twist of carpeted stairs until they arrived at a cramped little kitchen that clearly hadn't been decorated since the sixties. Peter laid down his instrument. Damien did that same and, while the old man left the room for a moment, took the opportunity to look around. He found he was surprised by how tidy Peter kept the place, and then he was ashamed that he'd assumed that an older man living on his own would have piles of crusty dishes in the sink and unwashed floors. There wasn't much to this kitchen, but what there was was neatly stowed. The economy of space reminded Damien of the cabin of a boat, and he wondered if, unlike the rest of the Knot, Peter did in fact have actual seafaring credentials.

  Peter returned with two glasses, and a bottle which Damien eyed warily. It had no label and looked as if it had been retrieved from the depths of a dusty cupboard. Peter indicated that he should sit, and settling himself on the opposite side of the table, removed the bottle's roughly shaped cork.

  "What's this?" After their short walk Damien had got over the wooziness brought on by the cider, and he wasn't especially keen to reprise the feeling right away.

  "Taste of home." Oblivious to Damien's nervousness, Peter poured a small measure into the glasses. The liquid could have been water, except that it had the palest of greenish tinges to it. Or was it bluish? In the electric light it was impossible to tell. "It's called scouridge. Taste-wise, the closest thing to it, you might say, would be an Islay whisky, but it's much better than that." He picked up one of the glasses and nudged the other towards Damien.

  Damien didn't know where Islay was, or how its flavour might differ from normal Scotch, but his one taste of his dad's Bells last New Year hadn't enamoured him to the drink. He remembered: it had been Rodger that had brought the bottle to Damien's parents' house, and Peter had turned down the offered glass with a barely concealed disregard that had pissed Rodger off. Now, while he liked the idea of Dad's friends treating him at last like an adult, and he didn't want to offend Peter the same way, he didn't have an awful lot of experience with spirits, and he'd already had two pints. Then again, there was barely a quarter of an inch of the stuff in the tumbler. He should be able to swallow that down for politeness' sake. He picked up the glass and a powerful smell hit him, a complex aroma that reminded him of a dozen things all at once: wet shingle and kelp and winkle shells and sea grasses and scurrying white feathers and flying his kite in the blustering wind up on the cliffs, and...

  Damien put his glass down in surprise.

  Peter was watching him. "Familiar, isn't it?" he said. "You see? You do know your home. I told you, it's in your skin. Same as the shanties, son. They might not look like much more than a bit of fun and fancy on the surface, but many of them are based on old stories. Take our Codsman for example, now."

  Damien almost laughed out loud. The Codsman was as silly as they came, a ridiculous fabrication about a jilted fisherman's wife who waited and waited for her husband to return, spurning the advances of the other men of the town. The professions of these men had apparently been chosen by the double entendres they offered.

  Well the tailor came to press his suit

  And to offer her his needle

  But her dress was flattened by the wind

  And his ardour by her thimble

  Damien shook his head. He'd learned in History how facts got stretched and inflated by posterity. "Come on," he said, "if The Codsman is based on a true story, it's nothing more than a woman whose husband ran away. All that stuff about the butcher and the baker and the lampwick was just added to make it funny."

  Peter shrugged. "You think so?"

  "Sure. It's not even that great a song. Even we don't play it very often."

  "It's not the catchiest of tunes, I'll grant you that, son." Peter seemed to be hiding a smile in his beard. "But the audiences do like to join in with the chorus."

  "Only because they get to shout the word 'cock' in a public place."

  Peter actually did laugh at this, and Damien tried not to feel that he was the subject of his amusement. Maybe Peter spotted this, because he raised his glass of scouridge. "Drink up, Damien," he said, and tossed the pale alcohol back.

  Damien brought the glass up to his lips. That smell again, the slipping of shale, the feel of wet rock and limpets under his bare feet. He took a sip. It was cold, slightly oily, but tasted of nothing. The drink was all aroma. Damien pinched his nose and drained his glass. Easy.

  A second later cold fire uncoiled in his belly, reached up into his throat. Damien suppressed the urge to gag, but after another second it had withdrawn, settling choppily in his stomach.

  "All right?" Peter was already pouring them both another shot.

  Damien nodded, not trusting his ability to speak while his tongue still tingled with the medicinal tang. His mouth felt like a shoreline cave, recently sluiced by the high tide. He bet that, for all their cool and their boasting, none of McGregor's clique ever drank anything like scouridge. In fact, for all their talk, they likely hadn't actually drunk in the Dolphin more than a handful of times. Right now McGregor and Heather and the rest were probably in someone's bedroom passing round a bottle of vodka.

  "Place like this," Peter said, "a place built with discretion in mind, is good at keeping its secrets, son."

  "You mean all the smuggler stuff?" Like any kid who went to school in these parts Damien knew all about it. That the village had reputedly been scraped out of the cliff face in such an inaccessible location because it afforded excellent opportunities to avoid the local excise men. That the town was said to be riddled with passages that allowed travel between houses without using the public streets. And true enough, he had heard that some of the older houses had cemented-over trap doors in kitchen floors and bricked-up doorways in cellars. But all of that had been investigated and documented—the gift shops were well stocked with thin volumes by amateur historians. It wasn't what you'd call secret.

  A second glass of scouridge was nudged towards him. Damien watched the liquid slosh and caught a brief whiff of it, and this time remembered a feeling. It was the feeling of being thrilled by the mystery of the world. He remembered, not so many years ago, when he had been eight or nine and had been allowed for the first time to wander a little farther from home, he had spent the summer afternoons exploring the old parts of town. Every weathered house had a secret cellar that housed a smugglers' den. Every oddly regular pattern of bricks was a secret door that, if he could press the right sequence, would open a tunnel to a cave filled with forgotten contraband. Every cliff path was a potential route to a concealed
cove, and a rotted jetty with rowing boats still tied up, waiting for a clipper to drop anchor at night and a coded sequence of lights to be issued in the darkness.

  The feeling he remembered was the potential for magic as he explored every corner for the first time on his own. But that sensation of adventure had waned as Damien had become familiar with his town. Familiarity had bred boredom, then indifference; the contempt was a relatively recent emotion that had come with a teenager's increasing, frustrated awareness of the wider world.

  "But there's more to our traditions than the smuggling," Peter went on. "The men round here have always gone to sea, son. They always go, and they always come home. Their hearts draw them back. That's what our sea songs are about. Going out and coming home."

  Damien thought about that. True that a lot of songs the Knot sang had something of that at their centres—not the popular, well-known ones that all the other bands sang, but the esoteric ones of which Rodger and Peter seemed to have a never-ending supply. More than once Steve had confided that he thought the two senior members had made them up themselves. In these songs the sea was life's great unknown. Man's relationship with it involved forging a path outwards from land, and always ended with a homeward trip. Sailors voyaging to the new world returned with exotic promise, rescuers dashing out in storms came back either as heroes or ghosts, and fishermen forged the same path daily to keep their families fed and clothed. Nevertheless, he could think of an obvious counter-example to Peter's theory.

  "What about The Codsman?" he said.

  "What about it?"

  "Well, he doesn't come back home does he? The wife waits for him to come home but he never does."

  Peter grinned. "Ah, but are you sure you know the whole song?"

  Damien regarded him, genuinely surprised.

  "See Damien, son, there's more to that song than we normally sing. After all the fun of the rest of the song, it's a bit of a downer as you might say." He bent down, snapped his accordion out of its case and hitched it over his shoulders. Damien watched the older man's rough, raw fingers dance over the keys as he played the boisterously familiar melody and crooned the opening of the song's final verse.

  "Well, the lampwick came to bring her light, and to bring her comfort in the night." Peter stopped playing. "You know this far, yes?"

  Damien nodded.

  "Well, this is what follows." He quickly ripped through the rest of the verse and fast-forwarded through the rollickingly saucy chorus that followed, as if it weren't after all the most important part of the song. Then he slowed right and squeezed out a swell and sigh that modulated into a minor key.

  Well, she waited through the day and night

  And the birds alone did hear her plight

  And they lent her feathers dark and spry

  So that she might seek him from the sky

  And although she wandered far and wide

  Of the Codsman there's no sight

  Of the Codsman there's no sight

  So she's waited long and she's waiting still

  And she'll wait forever, good or ill

  And the other shags might stroke her bill

  But she sits there proud and lonely still

  Yes she sits there proud and lonely

  Oh, she turns her back on each dandy cock

  And she waits the day long on her rock

  Til the Codsman sails back home to her

  Til the Codsman sails back home.

  Damien was at a loss for what to say. The additional verses had added an entirely new layer to what he had thought of as an absurdly frivolous song. Peter's rumbling tones had brought the words a delicate melancholy, that as fantastical as it was, made the story oddly moving.

  It took a moment to realise that, if this was now the complete story, his contention still held. "But the Codsman still didn't return, did he?"

  Peter, resting his chin on the top of his instrument, had assumed his characteristic far off look. Damien could actually see the refocusing of his eyes as his attention returned to the kitchen. "Well, who says that the story is done, eh?" He chuckled quietly, then lifted his glass. "Drink up," he said, "and then I think it is time to go. To the Codsman's return!"

  The drink burned as much as it had the first time, but this time Damien didn't gag. He might not have noticed if he had, since for a few moments his mind was occupied by other things: he could now taste kelp and brine, could feel the gritty texture of the sand that had been used to make the glass, could feel the tug and whip of a gale in his hair.

  "Time to be on your way, Damien," Peter said.

  "To where?"

  "Home, and then home."

  "Okay."

  Peter crossed the kitchen. Damien, eyes now round and bright as wave-washed pebbles of glass, saw something he had not noticed before. Between the dresser and the sink, there was the outline of a door in the pine panelling. Or half a door at least. It was very faint because door and wall fit snugly and the grain of the wood had been chosen to mask it, but the join was clear enough to him now.

  Peter produced a long hook from his pocket, slipped it under the door and pulled. The door opened with a painful crack. Peter looked back at him, and Damien understood what was happening.

  "We're going in there?"

  "Not us, son, just you." Peter's laugh creaked like timbers. "I know where my home is well enough."

  That laughter, and something cold behind it, drew Damien forward. Somehow he had moved from his chair to the threshold of this new door, but he didn't remember moving a muscle. He looked through the gap. It was plainly just the entry to a cellar. He could see steps, brick walls, a flag paved floor, but beyond that darkness. And in the darkness ... the scent of the sea.

  "Have you got a torch?"

  "You won't need a torch, son."

  Pressure in the small of his back, a gentle prod forward. A shot of fear. You heard about situations like this, older men locking teenagers in cellars. What did he really know about Peter after all? But the rough shove didn't come. He wasn't sent sprawling onto the stone floor, imprisoned in sudden darkness. And when he turned to look, Peter hadn't turned into some depraved monster.

  "Just find your way down to the end, Damien," the old man said gently. "And come back up when you're ready. I'll leave the door open."

  In the end it was the darkness that drew him, ducking, through the door; the unknown, that thrill of mystery that he had not experienced since he was a kid.

  The cellar was not a cellar, but a passage. It didn't take long, with all the kinks and dog-legs to leave behind the light from Peter's kitchen, but Damien allowed the cold walls to guide him. The walls, and his imagination.

  It was a proper smugglers' tunnel, finished without finesse, where it was finished at all. The further stairs he encountered, leading down, always down, were little more than shelves hacked out of the rock. The steeper sections had rusted cleats and the rotten remains of old rope hand rails. The wider sections had rough pens for stacking barrels and crates. A trick of the acoustics modulated the echoes of his own footsteps into urgent piratical conversation, either in the tunnel just ahead of him or where he had just been, that stopped as soon as he stopped to listen.

  The further down he went, the damper the walls became, and the louder came the sound of the waves. And it was no surprise when he stepped out of a cleft between angled strata of rock onto a thin wedge of beach.

  His heart spun gloriously, like he had finally worked out the combination of bricks to open the secret door.

  There was little here but the rocks and the shingle, and the patient waves that had come and were now retreating, leaving the beach glittering under the moon. From somewhere nearby there came a chatter of bird call—ka-ka-kaak—not a sound of alarm, but a curious domestic noise that made Damien feel as if he were eavesdropping outside someone's house. There was something else on the beach too. A dark mass spread across the shingle. At first he thought it was weed, but it did not glisten the way kelp or wrack would. He
bent down—feathers. A drift of feathers. He picked one up. It was long and black as oil, with a green sheen that revealed itself as he spun it between his fingers.

  This was a magical place right enough. A rarely disturbed secret place. A heart. It wasn't what he would have wanted to find when he was a kid—there was no jetty, no boats, no smugglers' treasure—but why should his childish fantasies have anything to do with the reality of the town's secret centre?

  Ka-ka-kaak. Those gulls again. And closer by, a lower, gruffer sound like a cough and a groan. Damien peered into the darkness, where the shapes of the rock met the rhythmic shimmer of the water.

  One of the shapes moved, or the moonlight moved across it, or ... no, it moved. It rose, it stretched. Slim shoulders flexed, and once identified as shoulders Damien connected them to the sweep of a spine, a full curve of buttock, legs tucked underneath. The pose was instantly reminiscent of a classical mermaid, or an advert for shampoo, and would have been incongruous in this place had it not been for the pitchy lustre of the skin, as dark as the night and the water, and for the great wings that extended finally with that flexing of the shoulders.

  And, at last, for the head, that took an age to slink around on its goosy neck and fix Damien with such a look. It was a woman's face, of course—the eyes white and wide with outrage or loss, or perhaps just incomprehension—but the forlorn sounds that issued from it were not. The empty clack of the long, hooked bill preceded a very human sigh that became a deep, corvine chuff, and a long, frustrated wail.

  Then she—it—folded her wings in, and turned her back on him, facing out towards the sea once more, and Damien lost her in the gloom again.

  The journey back to Peter's kitchen was a blur of frustration. After that initial glimpse, all he wanted was to stay on the beach and see her again, but there had been such a clear note of dismissal in her turning away that he felt compelled to leave. In the passage, that dismissal was a pressure at his back that propelled him like water in a pipe until he emerged, breathless, into the electric light and the solid reality of the kitchen.