Fen

by Daisy Johnson

  * * *

  For a week she cooked up feasts that lasted her the radio-filled nights, sent carefully formed hellos to the lighthouse up the coast, where they didn’t get the blusts half so bad. Coded jokes to the ships that locked onto her signal in their short passings. During the light shifts she read two books at once, swapping them page by page, made up crosswords to fill in when she forgot the clues; went through the clutter, tidying in her own way. Occasionally she went out with her rod and stood quiet, looking down for a silver snicker nosing up to the rocks. Had no better luck than before.

  She’d been waiting for a day warm enough, and, when it came, danced out, tripped on the stairs, sent her collection of washing bottles rolling from her arms, and then stripped, yodelling, on the rocks directly at the base of the lighthouse. She fixed a thumb and finger round her nose, aimed, brought her knees up to her chest.

  She felt the fish as she was swimming back up. It sent a thin lance of electricity through her leg and then another along her belly so she hit forward with mouth open and hands hunting to bring it head down onto the rock. She came up empty-handed, fingers opening and closing around air. Cooled her burnt belly on the stone, then turned to see the colour of the fish lilting away and down.

  She washed: soaped everything twice, yarring at the knotted mass of hair till it hung out, sat thoughtful to let the clean soak in. Thinking on a fish.

  The next time the tide eased, she got ready to go to town. Stood in front of the mirror and looked at the strangeness of herself. Made up from sea findings; the things left behind. It would be easy to never go anywhere. Leaving felt a feat, a heroic endeavour. She steeled herself: wellied up, walked over the rocks, down and along the beach into town.

  At the Fords’ boatyard Mr Ford was alone, sat on an overturned bucket, not doing much only looking. There were boats half painted and some were storm-broken or had been left to rot. There were seagulls resting or fighting for scraps.

  I want to rent a boat, she said, just for a day.

  He turned his face in her direction and moved his chin from side to side.

  Too much, she said when he spoke and he turned his face back and forth and wrung his hands and said another number.

  She watched his face, the way it settled after he spoke, and knew he was saying things silently to her, just as everyone in the town did.

  When they were done she said: you’ll take it down to the water for me? And the price rose again, dipped and rose and was settled on.

  She liked the boat, its sturdy lines, the way it nodded obligingly when she settled at the motor end, arranging the sandwiches and the rod and the much-mended net in the bottom. Some of the men on the dock waved and even their waves meant something about a woman living alone in a lighthouse. She raised her finger to test the wind then turned it towards them, though they didn’t seem to notice. Some days, she thought, she invented whole battles, whole wars which nobody else understood. Other days she was certain that the way a man picked up his pint glass meant something, the way a child dug in the sand or a woman hung out her washing. Everything was a threat, or promise, or a joke aimed loud enough in her direction she’d be certain to hear it.

  She rode the boat until the shore was only a kind of line, and the lighthouse some sort of punctuated afterthought – an exclamation mark perhaps.

  She tried a number of places that she knew were good from watching the fishing boats; docked the engine and settled back with her boots on the side and the rod running between them. What she caught was different from anything she’d ever hitched out from the side of the lighthouse, brighter and with bigger ideas. Most she threw back. They were not what she was looking for.

  She sat there through the whole light shift. Ate her sandwiches one-handed, gutted some of the bigger fish and spread their innards on the water lid to call down to her fish, watched the big boats hauling in, each eye of their nets pupilled with a half-living silver thing, bucking and moaning. She waited longer than she ought, the sky darkening towards her, then reeled in and sat back to move the rudder.

  The boat’s narrow nose turning, she saw, barely in time, the slick of something at her elbow, bent to look. The fish’s belly coming topside, rolling the way it had that first day. She did not reach for the net or move towards one of the hooks she could have driven down, only put her hand into the water.

  The fish snickered under, back-flipping, rose again, laid its side along the bone of her wrist. She felt – though her teeth were clenched for it – no jut of electricity. Then the fish went low, gone.

  She understood everything, pacing the small rooms, walking the circle of the walkway up top, the thought of the years the fish had lived taking any want to sleep from her. The hours loomed into one another; she invented histories: its birth in the shallows of a river; its forced tries at life there, the gulping up of stones to suck from the river base; its journey downstream until the water salted, until it felt the waves. It was only later – two bottles of wine from Lionel’s delivery gone, and her saying everything she was thinking out loud – that she thought maybe everything she’d guessed about the fish was wrong; that it was, rather, a sort of metamorphosis. She went down to the slick rocks, drunk enough now to cry or laugh or fall in, and yelled her knowledge of the creature out into the cold foam. The way it could have stung her and did not; the way it moved with an almost human intelligence. Not a food source or a pretty thing to watch but, maybe, a friend.

  In the morning she remembered only snapshots of thoughts, her mouth sanded thick, eyes gummed. She woke herself properly in the sea, and knew then that the fish was the same as her. She would not catch or eat it; she would protect it if she could.

  There was money in places all over, taped to the underside of chairs and tables, shoved deep under the mattress, single notes shuffled away between the pages of books. She gathered it without much logic, remembering another place and dashing off. She imagined Bovary was marked with her well-worn pathways. The radio spasmed something out: a joke about tide lines or wind direction. She let the dial go down with a click till it was off, put on her wellies and shoved a handful of notes down the sides of them just in case, carrying the rest in the old satchel. She was too excited to worry much about town, about the people or anything else.

  At the yard Mr Ford and Leo stood, headless, beneath an overturned and hoisted-up boat, working on the innards. She whistled them out.

  Remember the boat you rented me? she said. I want to keep it longer. I want to keep it for a while.

  The old man wiped oil from his fingers onto his chin in mock thought, worked the price till he was sweating and she was numb with rage and excitement. In the end, with them watching, she had to stick a fist into her left welly and pull out a handful.

  She started away from them, swinging her arms, and then turned, came back. They had not moved any, were watching her return.

  You got anything to drink?

  The old man seemed to think about it for a long while. Went inside and came back carrying a bottle. There was no label on it and he had no glasses with him, but after he’d drunk she took it, swung it up. The boy had some too, eyes bulging round the rim. She stood. She wanted them to ask, that was it.

  Have another, shall we? she said, and took it from the boy’s hand and raised it again, closing her eyes into the tilt, passing it to the old man.

  I’m celebrating.

  She initiated the third round of the bottle, feeling a little shaky at the pressure of the words coming out, at the waxy sheen of their faces looking. She spun on her heel and took off away, almost losing her footing, and then, at a sound, looking over her shoulder at them –

  What?

  What you celebrating? the boy repeated, his father’s face turning slowly from her to him and back again.

  She thought about it. She wanted to explain everything to them. She wanted to tell them she’d had a mind to catch it but now she needed the boat only to watch it, to be near it. She did not have the words for that much
. Only drew the silence out, knew it a mistake before it came, but drew, anyway, the silence out into words: I’m celebrating a fish.

  * * *

  Most days she took the boat out, stripped off her clothes, shrieking for the September cold, and jumped in, pretending there was no need for lungs until there was, feeling the fish mouthing about her like something laughing. Other days, she brought out tastes to try on it, dropping in the scatterings of steak or pitta bread and watching the pursed lips break the surface.

  She cooked the feasts in the dark shift – the radio only half-womanned, the beam dusty – and then carted out the leftovers in the morning. She felt she could get used to anything, and did: the force of the cold and of drying in cold air; the salt that crusted her hair; the weight of sleeping barely hours or not at all; the days when the fish did not show, and she, thinking the worst, sat rocking and looked to the frothing nets of the nearby boats for a long shape. There was no knowing where it went in the hours without her. Some dark shifts, turning the radio to barely a hum, she wished she was the type to go, sit in the pub. She was not and besides: there was the lighthouse. Whose needs were so basic and childlike she did them as thoughtlessly as she did her own – it had never seemed like something hanging round her neck until now; weighted, bawling.

  She was out hunting cockles when the truck came bouncing down the spit-path, throwing up clods of damp brought up from the beach. She straightened with hands on hips, said: I’m not due a delivery.

  I left some stuff off your last. Thought I’d drop them by, Lionel said, and cocked his open mouth at her. He was thin with a paunch and a slouch and a give in his body and a face smooth as a child’s.

  There were two other people in the cab of the truck. The boy leant out on the bone of his arm; the girl very still, staring straight out the windscreen at her.

  Kind of you, she said, and took the crate from him, felt, for a moment, the pressure of his hands holding on.

  On the way to the truck he called: heard about your fish.

  The girl made a low sound and the boy beat the butt of his fist against the metal and then withdrew. They reversed, turned at the end of the spit and started back towards town. She stood looking after it until it was gone.

  When the tide was out she dragged the boat off the rocks, onto the beach and then pushed it out until it was deep enough to ride. When she came to the fish it was sculling the surface, lipping up at her when she leant towards it. Not far away one of the oil-slicked fishing boats was again pulling in great tides of dead and she sat and watched: the smeared bodies moving around the deck; the faces always turned in her direction. She did not strip her clothes off to swim – pulled the boat’s anchor up long before the sky was darkening, turned towards home. The fish swam alongside her for a while and then fell back and down, like something shot.

  That dark shift, she took a blanket up top and walked round and round, looking out. Shapes and shadows and the somethings the beam picked out looked like armies growing from the sands or snorkelled heads rising from the water. In the dying hours of the shift, there were explosions of sound and colour from the spit-beach – red and yellow sparks that went up and then came back towards the beach. Kids and firecrackers maybe, but she put it down as a warning.

  The next day she decided she would not go looking for the fish. The sea was flat as a rock face and busy for it. There were more boats than normal, some fishing and others seeming only to float without occupation. On the beach, dogs ran, streaking beneath the heavy rain; sodden couples stood looking out at the indent of her lighthouse, waterproofed families trooped back and forth like sentinels.

  As the light shift neared its end, she got ready to drag the marooned boat out to the wave line.

  There were two trucks this time, juddering up and down over the rough, straight path, bumper to bumper, pulling to a stop in front of her where she stood next to the boat.

  You forgot something else? she said.

  Lionel sighed and twitched before her, jerking the back of his truck down to pull the bag forward. Sloppy work. Sloppy work, he said.

  There were faces in both trucks looking out at her. She didn’t take the time to count them. A dog came skittering down and barked at her. Lionel kicked it away with the toe of a boot.

  I’ve got everything I need now, she said. I’ve got everything.

  OK. He moved from foot to foot, tongue against the bridge of his lip. OK, OK. You going out in that boat? You going out in that boat there?

  She shrugged.

  Lionel walked away, sidling, kicking sand. He climbed in and the trucks jerked away. One of them leant on their horn until they were out of sight.

  She stayed up top that afternoon. The sky was changing colour and looked, she thought, like something yawning up out of a place it had been stuck.

  When she came out onto the stone ridge it was night and the beach was empty. The tide was out. She went to the boat and took a hold of the side and pressed her knee beneath its base to push it forward and then there was the sound, murmuring behind her, of a truck riding the beach.

  She turned and watched it. It was pulling a dead weight behind it: a fishing boat, a hulking carriage wrecked and stained.

  She saw easily, awfully, how this was only the first, that there were other vans, other boats behind. Yes, she could hear their rumble too now. They would catch the fish: most of them drunk, looping the net round twice to hold it firm, beating it once on the gunwale though this did little good, and that man sweating by the time the fish is dead. There would be a measure of superstition after that: leaving it on the deck rather than putting it on ice, keeping their distance or going gamely close, while the others watched, to prod or kick it. They would take it to the pub. That would be the best place to show it to the rest, bringing it in above their heads, getting drinks for their troubles, taking it out to the kitchen and scoring the sides to let in the heat. Barely enough for a bite each and with the taste of marshes and fen earth, but more of a ritual than anything else, as potent as taking church bread onto your tongue.

  Back inside she saw headlights pass through the windows, angling over the white walls. There were matches in one of the cupboard drawers, but she collated everything in her head before she struck one: leaning book towers and shards of material and everything else collected and ordered and known over the years. She could hear the rough breath of rutted wheels catching on damp sand; the sound of doors opening and closing. She scraped the match hard over the bridge of the box and turned it loose against the curtains. She did not stay to eye the burning of it or even think much on it as she humped the shallow edge of the boat across the last of the uncovered sand and then jerked a leg over. Behind her, in the dark, their echoing curses boomed like waves.

  There was no way to know direction, a blind driving-off with only lights behind to tell her she was at least heading away: the beam of the lighthouse, and – soon – the lesser, changing light of the flames through the windows.

  She trailed the motor out to the right spot, let the anchor spool away, looked towards the shore, looked for the shape of the boats coming with intent towards her, but nothing there.

  She pulled her socks off, stood somehow serenely balanced to remove trousers and T-shirt. She swam down, breath potent between her ribs. She lost light all the way down until it was dark enough only to feel the motion of something brushing at her leg.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THANK YOU TO:

  Everyone at Eve White, particularly Jack Ramm.

  Everyone at Jonathan Cape, most especially Alex Bowler.

  All the readers: Sarvat Hasin, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Tom de Freston, Susie Campbell, Gabby Penfold, Jess Oliver, Matt Bradshaw, Sam Thompson, Christine Lane and Becky Riddell.

  All the Johnsons.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as all
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  Epub ISBN: 9781473523647

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  Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

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  Copyright © Daisy Johnson 2016

  Daisy Johnson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Jonathan Cape in 2016

  www.penguin.co.uk/vintage

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library