by Emma Timpany
I felt nervous as I approached, like I was imposing.
I reached out. Its fleece was much softer than I’d imagined, not coarse or oily as I’d expected, though dirty and caked with sand. The animal was small, mostly leg. Maybe still a lamb, yet. It turned its head ever so slightly in to my hand, I thought, when I scratched between its ears, but otherwise gave little response.
Its eyes were glassy. I took my hand away, and it didn’t seem to notice.
‘Come and look,’ she said.
She brushed some of the red-tinged wool away from its rear haunch. The sheep flinched a little, but otherwise didn’t move. There was blood in its fleece, and skin carved smoothly from its hip, all the way down its leg, as if it had been peeled back by a cleaver. The muscle, deep red and glistening, was dirty and sandy as well.
And then I realised that the stones beneath my feet and behind me were darkened, blood-slicked. The bleeding seemed to have stopped now, but the evidence of it was ample, and the amount of it slowly weeping down through the ground was probably significant.
She too had noticed, had picked up her feet to see the crimson dotting her soles.
I craned my neck up the dizzying distance to the top of the cliff.
‘Must have fallen going after the … whatever. Parsley,’ I said. ‘What do we do?’
‘I … don’t know,’ she said. The confidence that had flown her around the coast path seemed to have disappeared, and she seemed as surprised by that as I was. Her voice was quieter now. ‘Go and get someone, I suppose? They’ll know what to do in the village. Or at least, they’ll know someone who does. We could get that guy, the one driving the quad bike?’
I scratched the sheep behind the ear again, and again it sort of nudged into me, its tongue drooping slightly from its mouth.
‘Let’s hurry, though, yeah?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘How long do you think we have?’ I asked, glancing at the incoming tide.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It comes in all at once. How high do you think it comes up in here?’
Inside of the recess, I saw a clear line drawn on the rocks up above our heads, smooth and dark, where the water reached when the tide came in.
‘Too high. I … I could run?’
‘No,’ she said.
The tide didn’t appear to be coming in quickly, but it was.
‘What should we do?’ I asked. ‘What should we do?’ I was an outsider, an incomer, an emmet, and I was left frozen by that feeling – my hand slapped away from the cow parsley.
And for a second it seemed she felt the same way, and we stood dumbly, the three of us, and waited.
The sun shone down into the crevice and the tide rose up from below, the water licking now at the bottom of her cut-off jeans and the sheep’s belly.
She stooped, wrapped her arms around all four of its young legs, hesitated, and then stood. The sheep, which had been still this whole time, came alive the second the exposed flesh of its leg, made cold by the sea breeze, pressed against her lightly-freckled shoulder and painted it a dark red.
I was stunned by her boldness, and if the young sheep’s sudden struggling, the kicking of its legs to break free, hadn’t caused it to start slipping from her grasp, I might have just stood, witnessing, until she was gone.
But instead I stepped forward and took the animal from her, its kicking easier for me to manage, even as it began to bleed again with each frantic pump of its leg, the blood sliding slow down the inside of my arm, the side of my chest. It screamed at first too, a plaintive, cracking baa that sounded both completely alien and far too human.
With the water now suddenly up past our knees, and then almost to our hips, it was a lot harder to walk in to the shore than it had been to walk out.
Then the lamb began to calm, and quieten, and by the time we rounded the corner to set eyes on the beach, it had ceased most of its protests save for the occasional, weakening kick, and moved no more than it had when we’d first seen it.
‘Do you think it’ll be okay?’ she asked.
I kept walking.
The few people on the shore stood still and watched us walk in, like they were expecting us. I heard someone shout something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I worried they’d think we were somehow responsible. I worried that we somehow were, that we’d made ourselves responsible for this by getting involved, especially as I now wore the red evidence of my interference down my side, blood that would not have been lost if we had left the lamb alone.
But she pressed on, forging through the rising tide, and I followed, easier, in her wake.
Eventually, the water began to fall lower and lower on our legs, and then we were on what remained of the beach. We stood there not knowing what to do next for maybe seconds or maybe minutes. Nothing seemed to move. And then someone was walking across the beach out to meet us. Very young. Still a boy. He had a black, Cornish flag T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, dirty jeans, and work boots with worn tongues that hung away from them like from the mouths of dying animals. His hair was the colour of hay, sun-bleached and coarsened by the salt wind, and his cheeks were crimson, chapped.
‘’Ere,’ he said, and held out his arms. He was Cornish, at least, which I felt made him an authority. ‘Give ’e ’ere.’
So I surrendered the sheep, and the boy held it with a practised ease, and then he placed it gently on the back of his quad bike and fastened it firmly down with some straps and rode off the beach and away up the hill. We stood and watched until the bike crested the hill and passed out of view.
We packed up our things and held them at arm’s length, so as not to bloody them, and headed back up the path. It was still sunny out. Still twenty-five degrees. Still a beautiful day.
We showered for a long time back at the holiday let, and sat out on the balcony. I looked over the quiet village – the white buildings, ashy streets and ruddy brown stone walls occasionally disturbed by a flash of colour, the orange of a child’s inflatable boat, the yellow of a snorkel, or the sky blue of a beach towel some other tourist was carrying back contentedly from the main beach.
‘Anywhere else you wanted to take me today?’ I asked.
She shook her head. She got up, and leaned over the balcony a while, and shook her head again. She walked back inside, and the door closed behind her.
HOME BETWEEN SEA AND STONE
TIM MARTINDALE
IRON ON iron, iron on stone. Arthur’s gaze wanders to his father working – his hammer rising and falling as he chips away at the lump of granite before him, worn creases moving in his leather apron. Sharp flakes of stone fly off and make a bid for freedom out of the open shed. An old acrid smell like gunpowder lingers in the air.
Arthur is supposed to be on magpie duty. The swallows have arrived and made their nest under the corrugated metal roof of one of the empty masons’ huts. They dart in and out with food for the just-hatched chicks, scything low over the meadow beside the yard, catching flies on the wing. It’s a hot, humid day in July and long grasses and wild flowers nod against heavy dark clouds, even as the sun bathes the quarry in soft clear light; it glints off the quartz in the granite stacked in piles around the yard, the spray of water from the saw and the blue sea beyond. Occasionally Arthur sees his father look up as if he were admiring the queer beauty of it all. He thinks of winters here, when the wind howls through the yard, perched as it is on the edge of a deep quarry, the quarry’s mouth yawning out to sea and the gusting breath roaring out of it.
Arthur sits on the edge of a crate of stone slabs, legs dangling, catapult aimed across the yard, ready to defend the remaining swallows from the clutches of the hated magpies. They grabbed two from the nest last week.
‘They haven’t flown all the way here just to have their young pinched by some bloody thievin’ robber birds,’ his father had declared one day, laying a big hand on Arthur’s shoulder and handing him the catapult.
Days are long in the quarry in summerti
me. In wintertime Arthur is busy keeping the fires burning that warm the masons in their draughty sheds. Weeks slip by and he feels he’s hardly thought about anything much at all. But, watching his father, he wonders if he’ll grow old and stiff there, hammering away day after day till he goes grey, hard and cold like granite.
Out of the corner of his eye Arthur spies a kestrel hovering out over the quarry. Drawn to the edge, he leans ever so gently into the wind, feeling the gulf in front of him, and imagines himself being lifted with an upward draught and, like a feather, being borne out to sea. Looking out to where ships lie at anchor in the bay, he loses himself for a moment amongst the swaying masts.
‘Think you can fly, quarry boy?’ Startled, he almost loses his balance, but bony fingers grip his arm and pull him back. Michael. Arthur isn’t yet sure if he is friend or foe. There is something dangerous about him.
The sun had barely risen that same morning when Arthur ran into Michael for the first time. He had climbed down the cliff to the beach to go wrecking early before work. The quarry was like a beast with a huge stomach, mouth agape to the sea. It needed to be fed a lot. The cutting saws, the pumps to keep the water at bay, the forge to keep the tools sharp, the fires to keep the men warm, all ate up coal. Then there was the timber: props for tunnelling and blasting, rollers for hauling on, struts for resting the stone on whilst the masons worked. Arthur asked his grandfather once, ‘How come God gave us Cornish so much sea to sail on and no trees to build boats with?’
‘If God gave us everything we needed there’d be no reason setting sail in the first place,’ was his grandfather’s matter-of-fact reply.
Now and again a shipload of coal arrived from Wales, or timber from Norway, but mostly the quarry consumed wreckage. A lump of coal as big as his father’s fist earned Arthur five shillings, a plank of wood twenty. Not that it was always easy getting hold of it. There was competition on the beach, especially after a big storm. Fights broke out sometimes. Arthur saw Will Carne, the smithy’s son, come back with a black eye once. Arthur had heard stories of Michael, who lived down on the beach, an upturned fishing boat for a house. Gone in the head, they said. Lost his father and brothers all in one night when their fishing boat was wrecked. Mother ended up in the workhouse. He was tall and gangly but stronger than he looked from hauling wreck all day long. He’d trade a pot or a plank for a fish or a knife or anything else he needed to survive.
A big piece of timber bobbing about on the tide had caught Arthur’s eye. He stopped and had a quick look around. He wasn’t alone. Michael was crouched on a rock at the sea’s edge, knife in hand. He’d been cleaning out limpet shells for breakfast. He saw Arthur; they both glanced at the wood. Suddenly Michael leapt onto the sand and then he was running. Arthur’s head was screaming to get out of there, but he found himself running hard for it too. And he could really run. He reached it first and threw himself onto the wood. With a great heave, he pulled it out of the water. Michael was on him in a heartbeat. Still knee-deep in the shallows, Arthur started to swing and jab the plank wildly.
‘Come any nearer and I’ll bash yer head in,’ he yelled, his voice more high-pitched than he intended. Michael eyeballed him, not saying anything. A long time seemed to pass. Eventually he lowered the knife, closed it deftly with one hand and dropped it into a pocket in trousers which didn’t quite reach his ankles. Feeling foolish, Arthur lowered the plank.
‘What’s yer name, crazy boy?’
‘Arthur Trewin.’
Michael nodded. ‘S’pose I be letting you keep that plank this time, but next time you come wrecking in my patch, I swear I’ll kill you.’
‘You aren’t owning this beach,’ Arthur blurted out. He was trying hard to show he wasn’t afraid, but his voice and arms were shaking. Michael’s eyes narrowed.
‘Where you from?’
‘Mousehole.’
‘Fisherman?’
‘Quarryman,’ replied Arthur, puffing his chest out.
‘How old are you?’
‘Fourteen.’
Michael didn’t look convinced. ‘Don’t you want to go to sea?’ he said darkly, spitting on the sand.
Arthur shrugged. His mouth went dry and his voice caught. ‘Father’s a quarryman and we lost Uncle to the deep and you know …’
Michael’s face was turned to the sea but Arthur saw a flicker of pain cross it.
‘Well, she’ll get you one way or another.’ With that Michael was off, leaping across the rocks and disappearing around the point under the cliffs.
Arthur gazed after him for a while before his eyes were drawn to the fishing boats making their way out to the grounds, the sun climbing up behind them, sea and sky turning black to blue like a bruise. With a heavy heart he began his climb up the cliff to the quarry, clasping his hard-won wreck.
*
‘You idiot, I could have fallen,’ cries Arthur, shrugging Michael’s bony grip off and moving away from the quarry edge. ‘What you doing up here anyway?’
Michael scowls, stands back to look Arthur up and down and takes a long drag on a roll of smouldering tobacco.
‘How can you stand it? Working yer guts out all day, making some quarry-owner rich?’
‘It’s good enough for Father.’
‘Then he’s a fool, too.’
‘You take that back,’ Arthur shouts, fists clenched. He takes a step towards Michael then hears his father banging on the wall of his shed. Poking his head round he sees the foreman striding up the yard, face turning scarlet about a late order.
‘Better make yourself and your friend scarce for a bit,’ warns his father. ‘Foreman’s on the warpath.’
‘Quick, this way,’ Arthur hisses to Michael, as he disappears over the edge and down the quarry face. ‘Mind your bloody step. Some of the rungs are rusted out.’
They climb down the ladders until they land on the first ledge, all overgrown with fern and gorse, made when the quarrymen blasted out huge blocks the size of houses.
‘That’s a peregrine’s nest.’ Arthur points to a mess of congealed blood, feathers and guano. ‘You can see the bones of its last kill.’ Michael nods, quiet and serious. Arthur’s gaining the upper hand. He’s in his territory now. They scurry down the last set of ladders and jump into the long grass below.
The quarry’s been like home for Arthur since his mother died of cholera. Eseld was her name. Arthur’s father carved her stone himself, chiselled a bird under her name, a chough; she had loved to watch them on the sea cliffs. Now, in the summer when it’s warm and there’s not much work to keep Arthur occupied, Father often sends him off to explore the quarry workings. Sometimes Arthur climbs down these ladders to go swimming, even though the quarry bottoms are dark and cold and no one knows how deep.
Arthur and Michael stare into the inky depths.
‘Do you believe in mermaids?’ asks Arthur. Michael nods. Something strange has come over him and he stares transfixed.
‘They say the quarrymen dug too deep and they reached caves that run underground to the sea and it’s in these caves that the sea spirits live. That’s where the dead go,’ Arthur confides as if passing on a secret. His grandmother told him that, after his mother was taken.
‘Dare you to swim.’
Michael hesitates.
‘Coward.’
Michael starts to tear off his clothes and Arthur joins him. ‘Last one in’s a rotten egg!’
They’re laughing now, with a mixture of fear and excitement. Their naked bodies are white as pearls in the black water, as quarry dust, dirt and sand fall away from them.
It is a two-mile walk home along the coast path. Arthur walks alongside his father as he does every day. The day is still warm and the sky is hanging heavy over the sea, like a big rain is coming. Sweat is running down his father’s face in rivulets, and Arthur thinks for a moment that his father’s crying, but he hasn’t ever seen him cry, even after his mother went.
They are often quiet and weary but today Arthur chatters a
way about Michael – how he lives in a boat on the beach, catches rabbits and gathers mussels for his tea, how he swims like a fish and how he lost his father and then his mother went away. Arthur sees his father grow sad and distant then, so to distract him he asks if he can take Michael some vegetables from the garden – his teeth and gums are no good – and can he go and camp out under the boat? His father lays his hand on his shoulder and says gently, ‘Not tonight, boy. I reckon there’s a storm brewin’, don’t you? Another day, when the weather be fine.’
From the path Arthur can see the fishing pack rounding Carn-du on the way home from the western fishing grounds. They look so free to him, like a flock of wild geese, with rusty brown lug-sails full of wind and grace. Yet nothing makes Arthur’s heart sing more than the sight of the three-mast barques and the great tall ships returning from the Mediterranean or the Americas. Now, one of those great leviathans appears, making fast headway riding a sou’westerly and so he breaks into a run and races the ship home. He leaps with giant steps over great lumps of granite strewing the path. The smell of summer gorse fills his nostrils and cormorants swoop low over the rocks. Tiny vegetable plots and gardens on the cliff edge pass by in a blur.
As he draws round the point, stops to catch his breath and let his father catch up, his heart lifts again, as it always does coming home. He gazes down onto the village nestled snug in the cove, smoke curling up from the houses into a dusky blue sky, fishing boats packed tightly in the tiny harbour, men’s voices rising on the still evening air, as fish are being unloaded, sails furled, nets strung out to dry. Arthur and his father come down the hill past the row of old boys sitting out in their sea caps, catching the last of the sun.
His father turns his back on the sea to go into the cottage. Arthur pauses, torn between thinking he should keep his father company and help in the garden and wanting to go and see what the boats have brought in. With a nod and a knowing smile, his father says, ‘You go on now, son, but make sure you’re home before the weather breaks.’
Down on the quay a strong arm hoists him up onto the deck of the Our Boys, amidst boxes of cod, sole, turbot, ray, ling and gleaming silver mackerel. Boys leap from boat to boat, eager to swap stories and compare catches. A friend of Arthur’s bounds up to him saying they’d come close to a French privateer on the way home and one of the navy ships fired warning cannon and escorted the Our Boys as far as Plymouth.