Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  Half the page containing his location was crowded with the fingerprints of mountains. Only the coast was unhampered by their contours. He eased the car off the brown turf and nursed it several digressive miles to the coast road, where a signpost pointed left to Windhill, right to Baiting. Northward had looked as though it might bring him sooner inland to the motorway, and so he took the Baiting route.

  He hadn’t bargained for the hindrance of the wind. Along the jagged coastline all the trees leaned away from the jumpy sea as though desperate to grasp the land. Before long the barren seaward fields gave way to rocks and stony beaches, and there weren’t even hedges to fend off the northwester. Whenever the gusts took a breath he smelled how overworked the engine was growing. Beside the road was evidence of the damage the wind could wreak: scattered planks of some construction which, to judge by a ruin a mile farther on, had been a fishmonger’s stall. Then the doggedly spiky hedge to his right winced inland, revealing an arc of cottages as white as the moon would be when the sky went out. Perhaps someone in the village could repair the car, or Grant would find a room for the night—preferably both.

  The ends of the half-mile arc of cottages were joined across the inlet by a submerged wall or a path that divided the prancing sea from the less restless bay. The far end was marked by a lone block of colour, a red telephone box planted in the water by a trick of perspective. His glimpse of a glistening object crouched or heaped in front of it had to be another misperception; when he returned his attention to the view once he’d finished tussling with the wheel as a gust tried to shove the car across the road, he saw no sign of life.

  The car was panting and shivering by the time he reached the first cottage. A vicious wind that smelled of fish stung his skin as he eased his rusty door shut and peered tearfully at the buildings opposite. He thought all the windows were curtained with net until he realised the whiteness was salt, which had also scoured the front doors pale. In the very first window a handwritten sign offered ROOM. The wind hustled him across the road, which was strewn with various conditions of seaweed, to the fish-faced knocker on a door that had once been black.

  More of the salt that gritted under his fingers was lodged in the hinge. He had to dig his thumb into the gaping mouth to heave the fish head high and slam it against the metal plate. He heard the blow fall flat in not much of a passage and a woman’s voice demanding shrilly, “Who wants us now?”

  The nearest to a response was an irregular series of slow footsteps that ended behind the door, which was dragged wide by a man who filled most of the opening. Grant couldn’t tell how much of his volume he owed to his cable-knit jersey and loose trousers, but the bulk of his face drooped like perished rubber from his cheekbones. Salt might account for the redness of his small eyes, though perhaps anxiety had turned his sparse hair and dense eyebrows white. He hugged himself and shivered and glanced past his visitor, presumably at the wind. Parting his thick lips with a tongue as ashen, he mumbled, “Where have you come from?”

  “Liverpool.”

  “Don’t know it,” the man said, and seemed ready to use that as an excuse to close the door.

  A woman plodded out of the kitchen at the end of the cramped dingy hall. She looked as though marriage had transformed her into a version of the man, shorter but broader to compensate and with hair at least as white, not to mention clothes uncomfortably similar to his. “Bring him in,” she urged.

  “What are you looking for?” her husband muttered.

  “Someone who can fix my car and a room if I’ll need one.”

  “Twenty miles up the coast.”

  “I don’t think it’ll last that far. Won’t they come here?”

  “Of course they will if they’re wanted, Tom. Let him in.”

  “You’re staying, then.”

  “I expect I may have to. Can I phone first?”

  “If you’ve the money you can give it a tackle.”

  “How much will it take?” When Tom’s sole answer was a stare, Grant tried, “How much do you want?”

  “Me, nothing. Nor her either. Phone’s up the road.”

  Grant was turning away, not without relief, when the woman said, “Won’t he need the number? Tommy and his Fiona.”

  “I know that. Did you get it?” Tom challenged Grant.

  “I don’t think— ”

  “Better start, then. Five. Three. Three. Five,” Tom said and shut the door.

  Grant gave in to an incredulous laugh that politeness required him to muffle. Perhaps another cottage might be more welcoming, he thought with dwindling conviction as he progressed along the seafront. He could hardly see through any of the windows, and such furniture as he could distinguish, by no means in every room, looked encrusted with more than dimness. The few shops might have belonged to fishmongers; one window displayed a dusty plastic lobster on a marble slab also bearing stains suggestive of the prints of large wet hands. The last shop must have been more general, given the debris scattered about the bare floor—distorted but unopened tins, a disordered newspaper whose single legible headline said FISH STOCKS DROP, and was there a dead cat in the darkest corner? Beyond two further cottages was the refuge of the phone box.

  Perhaps refuge was too strong a word. Slime on the floor must indicate that it hadn’t been out of reach of the last high tide. A fishy smell that had accompanied him along the seafront was also present, presumably borne by the wind that kept lancing the trapped heat with chill. Vandalism appeared to have invaded even this little community; the phone directory was strewn across the metal shelf below the coin box in fragments so sodden they looked chewed. Grant had to adjust the rakish handset on its hook to obtain a tone before he dragged the indisposed dial to the numbers he’d repeated all the way to the box. He was trying to distinguish whether he was hearing static or simply the waves when a man’s brusque practically Scottish voice said, “Beach.”

  “You aren’t a garage, then.”

  “Who says I’m not? Beach’s Garage.”

  “I’m with you now,” Grant said, though feeling much as he had when Tom translated his wife’s mnemonic. “And you fix cars.”

  “I’d be on the scrap heap if I didn’t.”

  “Good,” Grant blurted, and to compensate, “I mean, I’ve got one for you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “It’s a Cavalier that wouldn’t go uphill.”

  “Can’t say a word about it till I’ve seen it. All I want to know is where you are.”

  “Twenty miles south of you, they tell me.”

  “I don’t need to ask who.” After a pause during which Grant felt sought by the chill and the piscine smell, the repairman said, “I can’t be there before dark.”

  “You think I should take a room.”

  “I don’t tell anybody what to do. Invited you in as well, did they?”

  The man’s thriftiness with language was affecting Grant much as unresponsive pupils did. “Shouldn’t they have?” he retorted.

  “They’ll do their best for you, Tom and Fiona. They need the cash.”

  “How did you know who they were?”

  “There’s always some that won’t be driven out of their homes. A couple, anyway.”

  “Driven.”

  When competing at brevity brought no answer, Grant was about to add to his words when the man said, “You won’t see many fish round Baiting anymore.”

  Grant heard the basis of a geography lesson in this. “So they’ve had to adapt to living off tourists.”

  “And travellers and whatever else they catch.” The repairman interrupted himself with a cough that might have been a mirthless laugh. “Anyway, that’s their business. I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

  The phone commenced droning like a fly attracted by the fishy smell until Grant stubbed his thumb on the hook. He dug the crumpled number of the holiday cottage out of his jeans and dialled, rousing only a bell that repeated itself as insistently as the waves for surely longer than his fellow stude
nts could have disagreed over who should answer it, even if they sustained the argument with a drink and quite possibly a toke to boot. No doubt they were expecting him to arrive ahead of them and set about organising as usual. He dropped the receiver onto its prongs and forced open the arthritic door.

  He might have returned to his car along the sea wall, the top of which was nearly two feet wide, if waves hadn’t been spilling over much of its length. There appeared to be little else to describe to any class he would teach; rubble was piled so high in the occasional alleys between the cottages that he couldn’t even see behind them. The bay within the wall swarmed with infant waves, obscuring his view of whatever he kept glimpsing beneath them: probably the tops of pillars reinforcing the wall, except that the objects were irregularly spaced—the tips of a natural rock formation the wall had followed, then, although the string of blurred shapes put him in mind of a series of reflections of the moon. He was no closer to identifying them by the time he reached the Cavalier.

  He manhandled his suitcase through the gap the creaky boot vouchsafed him and tramped across the road. He was hesitating over reaching for the knocker when the cottage door sprang open. He was bracing himself to be confronted by the husband, which must be why the sight of the woman’s upturned face was disconcerting. “Get in, then,” she exhorted with what could have been intended as rough humour.

  Perhaps she was eager to shut out the wind that was trying all the inner doors, unless she wanted to exclude the smell. More of that lingered once Grant slammed the door than he found inviting. “Let’s have you up,” the woman said.

  She’d hardly set one shabbily slippered foot on the lowest of the narrow uncarpeted stairs that bisected the hall when she swung round to eye him. “First time away?”

  “Nothing like.”

  “Just your case looks so new.”

  “My parents bought me a set of them when I started college.”

  “We never had any children. What’s your name, anyway?” she added with a fierceness he hoped she was directing at herself. “You know ours.”

  “Bill Grant.”

  “Good and strong,” she said, giving him a slow appreciative blink before stumping shapelessly upwards to thump the first door open with her buttocks. The rumpled sea widened beyond the small window as he followed her into the room. He’d passed a number of framed photographs on his way upstairs, and here above the sink was yet another gray image of a man, nondescript except for the fish he was measuring between his hands. As in the other pictures, he was her husband, Tom. His presence helped the furniture—a barely even single bed, a barren dressing table, a wardrobe no larger than a phone box—make the room feel yet more confined. “Anything like home?” Fiona said.

  It did remind him somewhat of his bedroom when he was half his size. “Something,” he admitted.

  “You want to feel at home if you go anywhere. I know I would.” Having stared at him as though to ensure some of her meaning remained, she reached up to grab his shoulders with her cold swollen hands as an aid to squeezing past him. “We’ll call you when it’s time to put our snouts in the trough,” she said.

  He listened to the series of receding creaks her descent extracted from the stairs, and then he relieved his suitcase of the items he would need for an overnight stay, feeling absurdly as if he was preparing for a swift escape. Once he’d ventured across the tiny strident landing to the bathroom, a tiled white cell occupied by three dripping sweaters pegged on a rope above the bath and by a chilly damp that clung to him, he sat next to his pyjamas on the bed to scribble notes for a geography lesson based on Baiting, then sidled between the sink and the foot of the bed to the window.

  It seemed his powers of observation needed work. The whitish rounded underwater blobs were closer together and to the middle of the sea wall than he remembered, unless any of them had indeed been a version of the moon, which was presently invisible above the roof. Perhaps he would soon be able to identify them, since the waves were progressing towards relative calm. He left his bulky bunch of keys on the windowsill before lying down to listen to the insistent susurration, which was occasionally interrupted by a plop that led him to believe the sea was less uninhabited than the repairman had said. He grew tired of craning to catch sight of whatever kept leaving ripples inside the sea wall, and by the time Fiona called “Ready” up the stairs, an invitation reminiscent of the beginning of a game, he was shelving towards sleep.

  He must have been near to dreaming while awake, since he imagined that a face had edged out of hiding to watch him sit up. It might have been dour Tom’s in the photograph, or the moon that had crept into view above the bay, possibly appending at least one blob to the cluster along the sea wall. “I’ll be down,” Grant shouted loud enough, he hoped, to finish wakening himself.

  He wasn’t expecting to eat in the kitchen, on a table whose unfolding scarcely left room for three hard straight chairs and a stained black range crowned with bubbling saucepans and, beneath a small window that grudgingly twilighted the room, a massive stone sink. He’d thought a fishy smell that had kept him company upstairs was carried by the wind, but now he realised it might also have been seeping up from the kitchen. He was exerting himself to look entertained when Tom frowned across the table at him. “She ought to have asked you to pay in advance.”

  “Oh, Tom, he’s nothing but a youngster.”

  Grant was a little too much of one to appreciate being described that way. “Can I give you a cheque and a card?”

  “And your name and address.”

  “Let’s have you sitting down first,” Fiona cried, stirring a pan that aggravated the smell.

  Grant fumbled in the pocket of his jeans for the cheque book and card wallet. “How much am I going to owe you?”

  Tom glowered at his soup bowl as though ashamed to ask. “Thirty if you’re here for breakfast.”

  “Of course he will be, Tom.”

  “If he isn’t sick of it by then.”

  Grant wrote a cheque in his best blackboard handwriting and slid it with his guarantee card and driving licence across the table. “Grant’s the word, eh?” Tom grumbled, poking at the cards with a thick flabby forefinger whose nail was bitten raw. “She said you were a student, right enough.”

  “I teach as well,” Grant was provoked into retorting. “That’ll be my life.”

  “So what are you planning to fill their dim little heads with?”

  “I wouldn’t mind telling them the story of your village.”

  “Few years since it’s been that.” Tom finished scrutinising the cheque and folded it twice to slip into his trousers pocket, then stared at or through his guest. “On a night like this there’d be so many fish we’d have to bring the nets in before dawn or have them snapped.”

  “Nights like this make me want to swim,” Fiona said, and perhaps more relevantly, “He used to like taking the boat out then.”

  She ladled soup into three decidedly various bowls, and watched with Tom while Grant committed his stained spoon to the viscous milky liquid. It explained the smell in the kitchen and tasted just not too strongly of it to be palatable. “There are still fish, then,” he said, and when his hosts met this with identical small-eyed stares, “Good. Good.”

  “We’ve given up the fishing. We’ve come to an arrangement,” said Tom.

  Grant sensed that was as much as he would say about it, presumably resenting the loss of his independence. Nobody spoke until the bowls were empty, nor indeed until Fiona had served three platefuls of flaccid whitish meat accompanied by heaps of mush, apparently potatoes and some previously green vegetable. More of the meat finished gently quivering to itself in an indistinguishable lump on a platter. Grant thought rather than hoped it might be tripe, but unless the taste of the soup had lodged in his mouth, the main course wasn’t mammalian. Having been watched throughout two rubbery mouthfuls, he felt expected to say at least, “That’s good too. What is it?”

  “All there is to eat round here,�
� Tom said in a sudden dull rage.

  “Now, Tom, it’s not his fault.”

  “It’s people’s like his.” Tom scowled at his dinner and then at the guest. “Want to know what you want to tell the sprats you’re supposed to be teaching?”

  “I believe I do, but if you’d like— ”

  “About time they were told to stop using cars for a start. And if the poor deprived mites can’t live without them, tell them not to take them places they don’t need to go.”

  “Saints, Tom, they’re only youngsters.”

  “They’ll grow up, won’t they, if the world doesn’t conk out first.” With renewed ire he said to Grant “They need to do without their fridges and their freezers and their microwaves and whatever else is upsetting things.”

  Grant felt both accused of too much urban living and uneasy about how the meat was stored. Since no refrigerator was visible, he hoped it was fresh. He fed himself mouthfuls to be done with it and dinner generally, but hadn’t completed the labour when he swallowed in order to speak. “At least you aren’t alone, then.”

  “It’s in your cities people go off and leave each other,” muttered Tom.

  “No, I mean you aren’t the only ones in your village. I got the idea from your friend Mr. Beach you were.”

  Tom looked ready to deny any friendship, but it seemed he was preparing to demand, “Calling him a liar, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t say a liar, just mistaken,” Grant said, nodding at the wall the cottage shared with its neighbour. His hosts merely eyed him as though they couldn’t hear the renewed sounds beyond the wall, a floundering and shuffling that brought to mind someone old or otherwise incapacitated. “Rats?” he was compelled to assume.

  “We’ve seen a few of those in our time,” said Tom, continuing to regard him.

  If that was meant for wit, Grant found it offered no more than the least of the children he’d had to teach. Some acoustic effect made the rat sound much larger as it scuffed along the far side of the wall before receding into the other cottage. Rather than risk stirring it or his hosts up further, Grant concentrated on downing enough of his meal to allow him to push away his plate and mime fullness. He was certainly full of a taste not altogether reminiscent of fish; he felt as though he was trying to swim through it, or it through him. When he drank a glass of the pitcher of water that had been the solitary accompaniment to the meal, he thought the taste was in there too.