by Wyl Menmuir
The regulars wait for Timothy to appear in the pub and they are affronted when he stays away. They see him standing in front of Perran’s house, looking out to sea, and sometimes down by the rocks on the shore’s edge. He is fodder for rumour and they know so little of him, and stories emerge as to who he is, this newcomer who arrived late one night and shut himself away in Perran’s house, gutting away at it as hard as the men in the photographs gut fish on the beach wall.
They lower their voices when Ethan is close by, he notices, out of respect, or awkwardness, he is not sure, but he hears the stories as they spread. Timothy has come to resurrect Perran. He has come to destroy Perran’s house, to erase his memory. He’s come because that’s what upcountry folk do, to replace the drudgery of the city with that of the coast. He has come to save them from themselves, or to hold up a mirror to them and they will see themselves reflected back in all their faults and backwardness. He has come to change them, to impose himself on them, to lead them or to fade into their shadows.
When the boats leave in the evening, the crews see the lights on at Perran’s and when they return in the morning darkness they see the lights are on still, when there are no others lit in the village, and they speculate as to who he is and what he is doing here.
Timothy’s car disappears sometimes for days at a time and the village counts the hours until it returns, usually late at night, sometimes with lengths of wood strapped to the roof, with boxes in the boot, and always fuller than when it left. A few weeks after Timothy first appears in the village, the car returns with a trailer, on which arrives a table, two small wardrobes, a small bookcase and a chest of drawers.
The first time Ethan sees Timothy Buchannan up close is out past the village on a blowy mid-morning, early December. Ethan had seen Timothy leave Perran’s by the side gate and now follows him at a distance further up the hill. He loses sight of Timothy and almost walks past him, but sees the bright blue of his walking coat a few minutes later. Timothy is crouching beneath one of the field walls off the track at the top of the hill, protecting himself from the rain-heavy wind. With the hood on his waterproof up, he is talking into a mobile phone, his voice raised against the wind, and Ethan hears fragments of the conversation as he walks past.
‘It, it still needs work . . . Yes, a bit . . . Okay, a bit more than a bit, a lot . . . How are you feeling? And? When are you going to come? Yes, it’s getting there. Yes, still some to go . . . I know, I know, you too.’
Timothy has not noticed Ethan’s approach and Ethan slows his pace as he continues up the track away from the village.
‘No, it won’t be ready by then. I’ll come back for a few days and we can spend it together. Promise. I know. I want you to be here too. Just a bit longer, I’ll make it right.’
There is a silence and then ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ Timothy unfolds his limbs from their crouch by the wall and emerges from behind the stone wall, waving his phone in the air as though he will be able to catch a signal from the passing wind.
Ethan walks a way further before turning back on himself and down towards the village again and when he passes the wall again he sees Timothy has gone.
The afternoon finds Ethan on the beach looking out at the container ships three miles off shore; skeletal for their lack of cargo, idle sentries to an empty coast. The ships come in and out of view as pulses of rain and cloud push through to the shore, whipping up the spray and the waves. He cannot settle and alternates between looking out at the horizon and glancing up towards Perran’s, as though a magnet drawing his gaze that way is being turned on and then off again by a bored child.
Clem, keeper of the boats and their crews, has refused to operate the tractor and they are confined to the shore, as the container ships are confined to their positions on the horizon. There are children in the grounded boats now, some in the derelicts, crawling over the rusted and storm-damaged hulls, and some in the working boats, swinging themselves up onto the roofs of the cabins and throwing loose pieces of tackle at each other across the gaps in between the boats.
They don’t play in the water any more. There’s no playing or swimming in the water, not if you don’t want to end up sick, or sterile. A profusion of biological agents and contaminants is how the Department for Fisheries and Aquaculture described it in one of their many communications, a note which is now affixed with the others, mouldering on the notice board in the winch house.
After Perran died, there had been talk of Clem taking over his house, it having the clearest view of the boats returning and Clem’s having none. But Clem resisted, said Perran’s place needed rest after the grief the house had seen. He didn’t say it would feel like bad luck to move in there and no one else pressed the case. Anyway, he had a radio and they could raise him on that of a morning if they needed to.
Later in the day the worst of it has passed, leaving behind light rain and a low tide. The waves are untidy and unsettled by the memory of the earlier storm and a group of children is gathered on the beach, armed with sticks. They are crowded round a huge jellyfish washed up onto the stones. It is spread flat, about six feet across, transparent and run through with thin red veins. The children bounce stones off its back and dare each other to touch the body, though the furthest they dare go is to poke at it with their sticks.
Clem is already pulling the first of the boats down the beach behind the tractor and the crews are in various stages of preparation, having spent much of the afternoon in the pub. Where there are jellyfish, there are fish behind. The crews take any sign they can.
Only Ethan is launching alone. After Daniel he hasn’t found anyone else willing to go out and he’s back to fishing alone and each launch now is marked by an argument with Clem. Whether or not Ethan can handle the two-man boat without help, whether he should go out at all, whether he is clear enough, focused enough to fish, and he tells Clem damn you to hell and operate the tractor. Clem, for his part, doesn’t put up too much of a fight. He’s said his piece and Ethan’s not the first fisherman to ignore his advice. The other three skippers know Ethan well enough to steer well clear.
Standing up on the sea road, Timothy looks down onto the beach, his coat collar pulled up around his ears, and Ethan wonders what type of omen this is, what effect the incomer’s gaze will have on the trip.
As the boats leave the mouth of the cove, they sail through a bloom of jellyfish, iridescent clouds of them gathered in the churning water. And though the boats sail out a fair way from the shore and the bloom thins, they don’t clear it, and every man curses under his breath in the knowledge of what is to come.
No fish, no fish, no crabs, no shrimp nor shark, just jellies. Jellies tangled in the nets, that burn and sting and leave criss-cross patterns on arms and hands, long white welts from fronds that stick and burn and scar. It’s been a right of passage in the village since before Ethan’s father was a boy.
Ethan, Rab, Tomas and Jory are on the far rocks at low tide gathered round a thin, stringy jellyfish washed up on the rocks. Its network of nerves shows blue through the transparency of its body. Ethan wants to back down now, but they have already discussed this. It is his turn, the last of the four. Rab and Jory, as the strongest, hold him until he stops struggling. Then Tomas pulls up the sleeve of Ethan’s shirt on his right arm and he and Jory hold the arm still while Rab puts a hook through the jelly and holds it up in the breeze. Jory and Tomas hold the arm tight and Rab raises the jelly up and draws its long fronds back and forth over Ethan’s naked arm. The breeze is offshore so it doesn’t carry the sounds of the screams back towards the houses, and instead his cries drift out over the waves and mingle with the shrieks of the sea birds.
No fish, no fish, no shrimp nor shark, just jellies. Ethan, one hand on the wheel, the other steadying himself against the cabin wall, looks out to the spaces in between the sentinels, the unmoving container ships, tied to their positions by miles of red tape issued and reissued endlessl
y by a faceless, disembodied authority. It makes him think of Timothy, of his arrival into their lives, of his imposition on them. He fights the temptation to point the boat out between two of the container ships and push out through to the other side where the fishermen do not go, away from the memories Timothy has brought in with him, away from Perran.
The radio crackles into life.
‘Idler, this is the Idler. We’ve got a catch.’
Though it is Jory talking over the radio, Ethan sees only Timothy in the words that spring out over the static. He near as runs back to the helm and pulls the Great Hope round in the direction of where Rab and his crew are already lowering their nets and he makes his course windward of them, jams the wheel in position and sets about at the back of the boat to lower the net he’s got in place.
He drops and pulls the net twice empty and it is only the sight of bodies being pulled up into the boats around him that keeps him shooting it again. The third time he raises the net he knows he has landed something by the change in the drag and the weight just before the bulk of the net surfaces, dark bodies thrashing about in the bottom of the gathered net amid the jellyfish. He swings the catch up over the deck with the pole, and drops it down gentle as he can and unfolds the net, avoiding the fish as they arch their backs on the deck.
He shifts the jellyfish to the side with the pole and flicks them back over the side of the boat before he inspects the catch. The dogfish look burned, as though with acid, their eye sockets elongated and deep, showing through to the bone at the edges and there are white lesions down the side of each body. Their rough black skin is dull and flaked away in patches, the fins thin and ragged where there should be muscle, and he looks each one over quickly before dropping them down into the hold. By the time he is finished, he’s tired to the bone and several times he drifts too close to one of the other boats and they shout over to him to shift before he holes someone.
The radio is busy with chatter and the sound is as unfamiliar to Ethan as is the catch in the hold. Ethan does not join the others comparing catches, though he lifts the hatch several times to check the fish are still there. He rests a while and stares out again beyond the container ships while the others drop their nets over and again, though their luck is out now and none of them catches anything more before they give up and head back to shore.
There are several cars and vans parked up on the coast road when they arrive back into the cove and Clem radios in to tell them he has sold the fish before any of the boats make the shore. Ethan wonders who would buy this half-dead catch the sea has thrown up. Not restaurants, he’s sure of that. Perhaps the pharmas, hoping to extract god knows what from them. Either way, he is glad he did not have to conduct the deal and, as the fish are being lowered down from the deck, he asks Clem who the buyer is. Clem nods his head up to a dark blue executive-type car parked up on the road. Two men are standing by a silver van parked beside it and stacked beneath the shuttered hatch in the side are several white industrial boxes. The two men are watched by a woman dressed in a long grey coat and they exchange words. The three of them look out of place in the village, the men in suits too light for the season and at odds with their surroundings as they ferry the crates down to the beach.
After the boats have all been pulled up above the high tide mark, Ethan sees one of the younger fishermen is sitting with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, on the hard standing, shaking and retching onto the concrete floor in between his feet.
They stay out on the rocks late into the night, through Ethan’s long hours of vomiting and sweating and swearing at the other three boys, who alternate between laughing at his self-pity and bringing up water to cool the burning on his arms. After he has screamed long enough, and asked them and pleaded, scared about what will happen if they do nothing, he holds his arm out and the other three boys piss on the rows of white welts criss-crossing his forearms and though he swears and curses at them, he thanks them too for the relief from the pain it brings him.
‘Santo here got tremors after he caught a jelly, didn’t he?’ says Jory grinning when he sees Ethan looking over at the boy. ‘Dropped off the net as we pulled it up and wrapped up nice round his arm like a bracelet, and he didn’t like it too much. I’ve told him, piss on it. Told him we’ll all piss on it, but he won’t listen to me. Thinks I’m a sick bastard.’
‘Who am I to argue with that?’ Ethan says.
Jory shoots Ethan a look, grins again and returns to pulling out his remaining crates from the hold and passing them down to Clem, and Ethan looks in to see whether the other man has fared better. Jory’s fish are in no better state than the ones Ethan brought back. Larger than they have seen in a fair while, but in bad shape all of them, half-dead before they were even landed. Ethan feels they have done these fish a service, by bringing them to an end, by pulling them out of the dark streams and channels into which they have strayed. Jory is happy with the catch. Says they all should be. They’re to be paid for the catch sight unseen, and once they’re in the van they’re someone else’s problem. What they do with the fish from there is their own business, that’s clear enough.
Ethan busies himself unloading his boat, but looks up when he hears raised voices on the beach. Rab and one of the men in suits are stood, face to face, a little way off from the boats.
‘It’s all the fish,’ the incomer is saying. ‘Not just the ones you feel like handing over.’
‘One fish,’ Rab says. ‘One fish is all. One fish out of how many? Two hundred? Three hundred?’
Ethan lowers his gaze to the dogfish that lies on the ground between the two men. It is barely visible against the dark beach. The man leans in close to Rab and speaks to him in a voice too low to be overheard. When he is finished, Rab looks up briefly towards the Great Hope, before stepping away from the fish and looking away down the beach, while the man kneels and pulls out a clear plastic bag from a pocket in his suit. He puts his hand into the plastic bag, picks the fish up, and inverts the bag, tying it at the top. He handles the fish carefully, as though it is something precious, but holds it away from his suit as he brings it back towards the boats.
‘Is that all of them?’ he asks Clem as he lays the fish into one of the crates. ‘The agreement is for all the fish. I don’t want to hear you’ve been holding any back. That’s what the full payment’s for.’
He talks quietly, and Ethan feels a threat sitting behind his words. Clem nods to the man and says yes, they have all the fish now, and in response, the man reaches into his suit jacket pocket and hands over a roll of cash.
‘Who are they anyway?’ Ethan says, as the two men walk off up the beach towards the woman in the grey coat, who has not moved from her place by the car. ‘They looks more suited to a funeral, or an office, than buying fish off the boats.’
‘You want to keep your thoughts to yourself,’ says Clem. ‘She bought the whole catch, and you won’t complain when you get your share. Or maybe it’s nothing to you. Either way, I’d stay quiet about it.’
The other cars and vans have already started to move off, though a few people have stayed around to see the fish come down off the boats. The two men have the white boxes of fish in stacks beneath the now open shutters in the van and have opened each for the woman to look into. The woman in grey kneels for a while by each box before indicating the men can seal them up and load them into the van. There are many boxes in the stacks and she looks each one over carefully, as though she is looking for something in particular, and the two men look impatient.
Later, as they unload their gear from the boats, Ethan looks up again to see whether they are still there. The woman is no longer there, waiting in her car perhaps, and the two men are securing the last of the crates next to the van. He sees Timothy there too. Not standing with the men loading the van, but standing close to them, by the railings above the beach. Timothy is trying to conceal his shock at the state of the black fish. He looks transfixe
d by the sight of the mutated haul, and the men loading the boxes onto the van cover the remaining crates sitting on the roadside with a tarpaulin. Ethan feels a flash of compassion for Timothy and turns back quickly to folding his nets and stowing them. He sees the other crews have seen Timothy there too and they are looking up at him with new expressions.
The others finish up on their boats quickly, and head over to the pub to celebrate their catch and Ethan considers joining them, but instead finds himself walking up again towards Perran’s, though when he gets there he sees no sign of Timothy, only the evidence of his continued work on the house.
Later, when he gets back to his own house, Ethan falls onto his bed and into a deep sleep. In his dream he is sailing the Great Hope over a glassy sea. The deck is clear of all the paraphernalia of fishing and the boat looks refurbished and renewed, newly painted and smooth. He is not at the helm and there is no sound of an engine, though the boat moves through the water and out into a wide sea. He is looking over the side of the boat into clear water when he sees the flank of a great creature pass beneath the boat, muscular and immensely long. He looks round, but there is no one else on board to tell and no method he can think of to record this happening. He returns his gaze to the water, in time to see the creature’s great flukes pass by beneath, and he watches it retreat and become formless, a fading shadow merging itself with the darkness of the deeper water.
The next day, Perran’s house is shut up and the battered car is gone. With Timothy absent, the house seems to look no different to the way it had before he arrived, as though it has relaxed back into its former state. Ethan watches for Timothy’s return all that day and all the next and does not go back out to sea, as though Timothy has taken his desire to fish with him in the boot of his car. Sensing the change in Ethan, the other three skippers start to head to the pub instead of to their boats. They blame the shortness of the days, the shortness of the prospects, and the weather, but really they need little excuse and for two weeks most of the village forgets about Timothy Buchannan.