by Wyl Menmuir
Ethan is making his way in along the coast when he sees a man, his bare skin pale against the rocks on the shore a mile or so from the village, lowering himself into the dark water. He watches as the man stands thigh-deep in the sea and then he drops suddenly and his torso disappears and Ethan loses sight of him for a moment, though it is only a few seconds before he sees him climbing up the rocks towards the road.
When Ethan pulls back into the cove, Clem is on the beach and he walks down towards Ethan’s boat as he grounds. They pull the boat up out of the water together, though Clem says nothing to him and he cannot find anything to say to Clem.
That night Ethan dreams of a storm in which all the boats pulled high up on the beach are dragged down the stones into a boiling sea, breaking them free of the lines that hold them to the iron rings set into the sea wall. The boats are gone faster than he can chase them and he can only watch from the coast road as they disappear, though whether it’s the dark or the waves into which they break and dissolve he’s not sure. He watches as the boats surface briefly in among the furious waves, and stares into the thick darkness as they are pounded against the rocks before they are dragged back. When he wakes, the stillness of the night unnerves him and he leaves the bed just so he can hear the sound of his feet on the floor.
2
Timothy
TIMOTHY BUCHANNAN WANDERS from room to room. In the morning light the house looks no more promising than it had the night before, when his pocket torch had illuminated before him peeling wallpaper and huge shadows of stains on the walls and ceilings.
When he arrived it was late, and after wading through the detritus in the hall, the kitchen, the living room, he had made his way up the stairs where he found in one of the two bedrooms a narrow, metal-framed bed and laid down the sheet he’d brought with him and on top of that a sleeping bag, and slept.
Now, with more light to help him view the extent of his foolishness, he walks again through the house, taking in the dirt of the kitchen and the dense smell rising from the filthy carpets, carpets that peel back where they meet the walls.
‘I’ve not been down there myself,’ the agent says. ‘It’s been sitting on file for years. The gentleman who dealt with it originally has moved on from here, so there’s not much I can tell you.’
The agent sounds apologetic, but also a little bemused, as though he cannot quite understand why someone would go to such lengths to find a property in this particular part of the country, so far from anywhere. Perhaps, Timothy thinks, the agent has a slight hangover. He is young, probably in his early twenties, and he does not yet fit the suit and tie he is wearing. It is the suit of an older man.
‘Do you have any photographs?’ Timothy asks.
They are sitting in an office as grey as any Timothy has seen before, fifteen floors above street level. As he had walked into the corridor after leaving the lift, he had smelt fresh paint and the office itself carries with it a sense of impermanence, as though the walls might be taken down and reconfigured around them at any moment. As though, next week, this whole floor of the building might be replaced with a trading floor or the offices of a corporate bank. The grey walls mute what light falls in through the large plate-glass window, a window that looks out over another office block across the street, and the room is dominated by a wood-effect desk, empty and expansive. The agent is searching through a grey metal filing cabinet for information on the house.
‘No. No photographs here,’ he says. His head is almost entirely concealed inside one of the deep metal drawers. ‘A few old postcards of the cove, the village, some funny-looking rocks. You say you’ve been there before though?’
He emerges from the depths of the drawer with a thin manila file in his hand. He opens the file and, holding it at the bottom two corners, empties its contents onto the desk and picks up the sheet at the top of the pile.
‘Deceased estate,’ he says. ‘Empty for . . . ten years now.’
The agent is scanning quickly through the paper and is clearly bored.
‘In need of renovation, it says here. I wouldn’t like to say what that means really.’
Timothy wonders whether the agent is trying to get rid of him.
‘No real description of the property either. Furnished, so you’ll have to clear it out yourself. No structural survey available.’
He flicks through some of the other papers and makes a few notes in his pad before looking back up at Timothy.
‘At this price though, you can’t really go wrong.’
After finding nothing that would suggest there is central heating, Timothy gathers together some of the paper he finds strewn about on the floor, compresses it into balls, and heaps the paper in the grate in the living room. He looks around for something to burn, for when he has a flame going. There are two flimsy wooden chairs beneath the window. He gives one a kick and it splinters without complaint. The thin chair legs he arranges in a pyramid over the paper. It is a mistake. The house is a mistake. In the light, the shabbiness is far from rustic or endearing, though he will tell Lauren later it is going to be perfect for them.
When the paper balls and other scraps he has assembled in the fireplace take, after several attempts to get them lit, he stands, stretches some of the remaining cold out of his muscles and pulls back a pair of stained, orange floral curtains from the window. For the first time that morning he smiles. Laid out beyond the rows of houses below him is the ocean, calm as a millpond, and a lightening sky that fades to a deep blue where it meets the horizon. As he looks out, he draws his fingers the length of the window frame and feels flecks of paint peel off beneath his fingertips. There is a thin line or crack, barely perceptible, that runs up through the window and he adds it to his mental list of things he needs to fix. He has the sudden urge to go outside and breathe in the sea and the sky.
Later in the morning, he leaves the fire burning small chunks of furniture in the grate and takes from the Volvo a canvas bag, which holds some clothes and his trainers. He changes in the kitchen and stands outside admiring the view again for a few minutes before setting off. He works his way down through a tangle of streets and runs out along the road parallel to the waterfront, his head tilted slightly to the left so he can see the water as he runs. After a couple of miles he is warm again and slows to a stop, stands and looks towards the flat horizon, his hands hanging by his side as his breathing and heart rate slow. As he looks out over the sea, he feels the need to immerse himself in the water. It is a thought he realises has been there since he arrived in the car the evening before, that he would swim in the sea. Perhaps he will start a habit he could continue long into the future, like the swimmers he has watched so often while running along the towpath beside the Thames and around the Serpentine, who day after day and year after year lower their ageing bodies into the water, drawing from it something he felt he wanted. Maybe this will become an obsession he can cultivate, a story that others will tell about him.
‘Of course, you know Timothy. You’ll see him diving in off the rocks out past that last house over there if you’re up early enough to catch him. Seriously. Every morning, day in day out since the day he arrived. Runs at first light, strips off and swims out through the surf, rain, wind, snow, sun. Plenty of times we thought we’d find him washed up on the rocks, but he always comes back fine. He’s a strong one. Knows the sea better than he knows his own wife, I reckon.’
But he is getting ahead of himself. The village is now out of sight behind him and there is no one to be seen and he takes off his trainers, socks and running shirt. He sees himself diving from the rocks straight into the water and striking out with a confident front crawl, but as he climbs down the rocks and gets closer to the edge, he sees the sea is green and shallow for several feet before it drops off into darker water.
The February water is a shock as he lowers himself into it and he wades in as far as the ledge, where the water rises up to hi
s thighs. He stands there a moment, and looks out to sea. He could turn back now and he would have been in the water and maybe that is all he needs to do. He pushes himself off into the deeper water, breathes in sharp and hard and against his will, and feels the muscles in his chest contract as the water rises up above his stomach. He tries to turn himself back towards the shore as the freezing water comes up over his shoulders. And then he is in up to his neck and he is kicking hard back towards the ledge, pulling air back into his lungs. The rocks in the ledge cut his knees and shins as he pulls himself up into the shallows and he climbs out of the water on feet he can no longer feel and makes his way back to the small pile of clothes, clothes which are surely further away than they were when he took them off.
He dries himself as best he can with his running shirt, puts it back on and tries to stop the uncontrollable shivering that is now taking hold. As he pulls his socks on over numb feet, he sees they are cut and bleeding. He jumps on the spot a few times and wraps his arms around his chest and then sets off back towards the village.
By the time he reaches the door of the cottage he is limping on feet he feels now only as a formless ache. Inside again, he wraps himself in a blanket from the car and sits in front of the fire on a patch of threadbare carpet. As his feet warm up again, he rubs the soles of his feet on the threads of the carpet where coals had rolled off the grate at some time and burned through.
It is a blazing hot, late October afternoon, too hot for the time of year. It’s almost six months since he first met Lauren, and their first holiday, three days out of season on the coast, a precursor to him asking her to move out of her flat and into his.
They are too early to book into the small hotel so they park the car in the car park and head straight down to the shore. When they arrive, Lauren looks dubious. The beach has an industrial look about it. Grey stones over which lies a thin coating of diesel, dropping steep down towards the sea, which looks unnaturally calm under the same film of oil. There are a few rusting hulls on the hard standing below the road, and bisecting the beach is a chain which runs up into the mouth of a stone building, in which he can see a heavy winch, and everything looks shut up, closed down. The beach is overlooked by a tangle of houses, packed together in tight rows above, silhouetted by the late morning sun.
Lauren gives him a look and he asks her to trust him. He knows what he’s doing and he will find the right place. Before they set off that morning, he had spent an hour with an Ordinance Survey map spread out across his kitchen table scouting the beach and the perfect spot. He tells her a story about an orienteering and camping trip with school when he was twelve, though leaves out the part where he and a small group of friends became lost and, with the light fading, had flagged down a car to ask for directions. Somewhat sheepishly, they had ended up accepting a lift to the gates of their campsite from the elderly couple who had stopped for them, accepting too the handful of sweets that had been dug out for them from the glove compartment to see them through the cold night.
They make their way round to the right of the beach and Timothy helps Lauren up over the rocks, towards the mouth of the cove, and they have to jump over small inlets where water rushes beneath and into the land and Lauren looks nervous.
‘Trust me,’ he says and takes her hand again.
A tiny sandy beach hidden among the rocks, a speck of yellow on the map. It is there too, out of sight of the mouth of the cove, though when they arrive, the waves have already covered the sand and painted it light green. Instead, they spread a blanket on the rocks overlooking the submerged beach and look down into the green water. The picnic, he remembers too late, has not made it beyond his mental shopping list, and what food they have brought with them is still in the boot of the car. They sit on the rocks and eat the fruit gums he has in his pocket and drink what is left of Lauren’s bottle of water and she lies back against him and they talk and stare out at the white peaks on waves as far as they can see, peaks made whiter by the bright sunlight.
Timothy will not later remember the argument that ensues when they turn back towards the cove to find themselves now cut off by the rising tide, but cannot forget the hours in which they slowly back closer and closer to the cliff face as the sea rises around them.
At first they laugh. They are going to end up like one of those couples from up country who are caught out by the tide and have to be rescued by helicopter. Their rescuers will be a dedicated and earnest team who will try to hide their true feelings about the waste of time and money the couple represents. They will both be embarrassed and apologise profusely, and feel admonished and exhilarated. But when they try their phones, neither of them is able to get a signal, and they are overlooked now by no one. There is not even a boat other than a container ship way, way out, sitting static on the horizon.
The sun disappears over the top of the cliff face and what is left of the afternoon’s heat soon dissipates. Timothy wraps Lauren in his coat and puts his arms around her, partly to keep her warm and partly for his own warmth. Later, he decides to attempt the cliff. It is only a few feet higher than he can reach up and he makes it halfway before a ledge beneath his feet crumbles and he slides down and he is glad he did not bring more of the cliff down with him. He puts his arms back around Lauren, and she complains to him about his getting mud on his jacket. They cling together on a flat rock a metre square and the tide peaks a few inches below their feet.
It’s a hungry, frayed couple that walks back up the beach towards the hotel, several hours after the time they had arranged to check in.
Later in the day, aware what food he has brought with him, beyond the remains of the sandwiches he packed for travelling, is packed in boxes in the boot, Timothy goes out to the car and retrieves a waterproof coat from the back seat and walks down between the tight rows of houses to the shore. He pulls his collar up against the fine rain now blowing in from the sea and as he passes along the narrow streets, he feels he is observed through the curtained windows, though at a distance, as a nurse would observe a patient. As he approaches the village shop, he slows. Outside the shop is a huddle of people, two women in striped aprons and beside them two men and another woman. They are deep in conversation and when they see him their conversation ceases and five heads turn towards him. He feels foolish under their gaze and smiles apologetically, as though he has found himself in the wrong place or has taken a wrong turning. Unwilling to submit to their stares any further, he turns away from them and takes a footpath that continues down the hill between two of the houses closest to him.
When he reaches the beach, he finds the same grey stones, the same stacks of empty lobster creels and long coils of frayed rope in tall piles by the sea wall, topped with a mat of green through lack of use. The same quietness too. There is no one else on the shore, though he can see a boat in the middle distance, beyond the entrance to the cove. And as he looks back up towards the house – his house – he can see no signs of life, no walkers with dogs or runners pounding the coast road, no couples nesting down into the beach out of eyesight of their parents, no doors or windows open in the houses between here and the bare hilltop above the village.
He sits on his heels a few feet from the water, watching the almost imperceptible lapping of the sea on the stones, and feels a wave of anger cross him, anger he had hoped had been excised by the run and the shock of his immersion into the sea. He picks up a handful of the smooth grey pebbles and hurls them into the still water. He watches the ripples as they spread out, intercept each other, distort and fade back to stillness. It is a mistake.
3
Ethan
THROUGH GAPS IN curtains and in stolen glances as they come within sight of Perran’s, the village watches Timothy as he passes on his walks and runs, and as he carries out, over the period of several days, the tattered contents of Perran’s house. They watch as he drags out a filthy carpet, which they see he has hacked at to make it small enough to roll and carry. H
e emerges from the house with arms full of dusty wallpaper and curtains and struggles under the weight of a rusting refrigerator as he hauls it out through the kitchen door to join the pile of furniture in front of the house. Some of the younger villagers speculate Timothy will set light to the pile like a beacon, as they do on the hilltop above the village once a year midwinter, though he never does and the teenagers don’t have the bottle to do it themselves. As Ethan thinks on it, he wonders whether he might have done so at one time.
Those who remember Perran well look past or above the pile of furniture, and think they do so out of respect for him, though it is more for their sense of disgust and shame at the state of the items they see laid out in the harsh winter light, and they do not talk of it. The pile of rubble in the garden increases in size, and then, as rapidly, reduces until it is gone, and all that’s left of it are small ribbons of linoleum, coloured paper and plastic, which catch in the branches of the hedge at the foot of the garden like tributes to an old god.
They see Timothy at Perran’s windows as he strips back paint from the sills, as he breaks up tired furniture in the garden, and as he runs out and back along the coast road. They count the minutes or sometimes the hours he is gone and obsess over where he might be until he returns and talk about him in the café and the pub. Ethan tries to keep his eyes on the horizon, away from Perran’s house, and avoids being drawn into conversation about the incomer, though he follows him more closely than any of the others. He avoids everyone during this time and sticks to his solitude and his boat, torn between staying to watch what Timothy will do next and the desire to be far away from him and from the memory of Perran.