Cornish Short Stories

by Emma Timpany

  A box is thrust into Arthur’s hands to pass down to the quay. Someone starts to sing and the song passes from boat to boat, rising like a sea swell. The womenfolk are leaning over the railings calling and counting out the crews – sons, husbands, and fathers. The crews are tight and disciplined and they proudly unload the boxes, clean the deck, coil the ropes, even tie extra knots, smirking to one another, enjoying making their sweethearts wait. One of the seasoned deckhands elbows Arthur in the ribs and points to where dark clouds are gathering out in the bay.

  ‘That storm will have every man and woman warming their drunken cockles in bed before long, you mark my words, boy,’ he says with a wink. Arthur thinks of Michael then, sheltering under his boat with a hard sea at his back.

  When night comes, the rain lashes Arthur’s window as he lies curled in bed. The candle flickers in the draught and the wind claws to get in. He remembers how his mother used to sing to him at night. She comes to him again now, through a fog of drowsiness.

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ she says, treading softly on small bare feet. She climbs in, pulls him close to her warm body, and sweeps the hair from his hot brow.

  ‘Will you sing the knight song?’ Arthur asks his mother. It’s an old English song she used to sing to him at night. The words of the last chorus swim through Arthur’s half-slumber.

  There’s a yellow moon swinging over the sea like a lantern and a boy’s sleeping face. A boy alone, with an upturned fishing boat for a home, the wind howling and the sea raging around him.

  THE HOPE OF RECOVERY

  ELAINE RUTH WHITE

  THE JUNE sun fizzed then dissolved as the sea rushed over her face.

  Suspended for a moment in that sliver of space between exhilaration and anxiety, an unfamiliar thought washed through her mind. This time, would she come back?

  She should not have been going alone. She knew that. So did the Porthoustock fisherman she’d persuaded to take her.

  He’d no love of divers, that was for sure. More than once, just for sport, they’d cut the orange-buoyed ropes securing his costly lobster pots, pots he’d never get to retrieve. Sometimes they’d take the buoys as trophies. Or to decorate their gardens. Other times, believing themselves noble saviours, they would release his catch of lobster and crab, making it that much harder to put food on the table through the winter months. The £150 plus fuel costs she’d offered him ‘righted some wrongs’, he’d said. But she knew from the deepening sun-cuts in his face that, despite the wrongs and the money she offered, his agreement was not without conscience.

  She carried out a solo buddy check, silently mouthing the mantra designed to keep her safe: BWRAF – buoyancy, weights, releases, air, final OK. She mentally noted the presence of the sharp, serrated knife strapped to her calf in case she became entangled in abandoned fishing net. She slid her left hand down her right shoulder strap, checking the security of the underwater camera clipped to the D-ring on her buoyancy jacket and the torch that would help her find what she was looking for. Then, placing the regulator in her mouth, she crossed her arms over her chest and let the weight of her air tank tip her backward from where she sat precariously on the side of the boat. And she fell.

  Breaking back through the surface, as she’d done a thousand times before, she touched the tip of her right index finger to the tip of her thumb, and made the familiar OK signal to the boatman.

  ‘Forty minutes,’ he warned.

  She signalled OK again, before giving a thumbs down – the signal for descent – and slowly let the air out of her buoyancy jacket, slipping under the water, leaving only pools of exhaled breath on the surface.

  She loved this place.

  Shore diving had long been banned from Porthallow Beach – Pralla to the locals – the result of destructive, disruptive behaviour by groups of loutish divers. Boats were now the only, more expensive, option to scuba-dive these waters. But it had always been worth it.

  Porthallow Cove was sheltered from westerlies and in any case, today saw nothing more than a gentle force 2, meaning no white horses racing toward the shore. Nevertheless, it didn’t do to forget the cove was perilously close to Manacles Reef, with its ferocious currents and gigantic submerged rocks that had bitten their way into many a ship’s hull.

  Diving the Manacles, a badge of honour for many, was restricted to slack water, that hour between the ebb and flow of the tide when the sea idled before roaring back into life. Only a fool would push their luck too far. But it happened, and the Manacles had taken many a life. Sailors. Fishermen. Travellers. The unwise. The unlucky. Churchyards on the peninsula testified to the tragedies, as well as the courage of the Cornish men and women who’d risked their lives trying to save passengers and crew alike. Many were saved, but many more perished, like those lying cradled in one grave in St Keverne, its monumental granite headstone bearing the stark word: Mohegan. But none of this was on her mind now, as looking down she gasped at the emerging beauty. It was just as it had always been, like diving an aquarium.

  Porthallow Reef, at little more than ten metres depth, and on such a bright day, was crystal clear. Scattered below, littering the quartz-glittered granite, sparkling like jewels in the penetrating sunlight, were round white sea urchins, with shells so much lovelier in life than dried out in baskets outside souvenir shops. And purple snakelocks anemones, their sting the reason she always wore lightweight neoprene gloves, even when the water temperature was balmy, for Cornwall, at 18°C. Long-legged spider crabs clambered like alien creatures over the sand and silt seabed. Camouflaged cuttlefish scuttled and merged into the tall swaying kelp that was furred with plankton. Outlines of flatfish were visible in the sand beneath which they hid. Tiny velvet swimming crabs danced on their rear legs, waving their claws and daring the world to take them on. Transparent shrimps flitted round dark mouths of inlets where conger eels lurked. Dogfish darted in and around. Silvered mackerel, wrasse, multi-coloured cuckoo fish – so much life …

  Her throat tightened.

  She checked her air gauge and watch. Six minutes already gone. Releasing more air from her jacket she completed her descent, hovering in neutral buoyancy two metres from the seabed. At this depth it was shallow enough for her air to last a full forty minutes, giving her a safety margin before the sea began to suck back through the reef. Kicking gently with her right fin, she turned her upper body to the left and began to track her intended route.

  Except for the seasons, the terrain here did not change much, not even after a storm. That was something they’d both loved: revisiting familiar territory, knowing which nooks were home to a crab or lobster, which shelves or gullies housed a conger eel. The natural world seemed timeless. Only the wrecks would change, as the salt water eroded their twisted metal skins, sculpting them less over decades.

  The sea around Cornwall had provided ample scope for one of their favourite arguments: where were the best dive sites? They’d dived the globe together. Thailand. Egypt. Mexico. Australia. Sri Lanka. But always they’d come home to these waters, where visibility was never as good, wildlife never as colourful, nor water temperatures something to relish. But there was always something magical about the waters off the Lizard. Always something to bring back.

  Nothing made a dive more special than discovering ‘treasure’: a John Dory photographed on a night dive, its startled spines caught large in the torchlight, a discarded urchin shell from a drift dive out from Penzance, a piece of clay pipe from a German U-boat off Pendennis headland. But the best things they brought back were the stories.

  The one they’d loved and laughed over most often was their find on the wreck of the SS Volnay, a merchant ship lying off Porthallow. Destroyed in 1917 by a German mine, she’d carried, amongst other things, munitions – many shells and detonators remaining live despite almost a century submerged.

  It was usual for divers to be dropped onto the wreck’s bow, or more often, onto what remained of her boilers. On one dive they’d found a perfectly intact lump of coal tha
t had been intended to fire her engines. It was the size of a very large house brick, and looked like a diamond-shaped bar of black soap, the date of cutting and manufacturer’s name in relief on its face. Delighted with their find, they’d taken it back to the cottage they shared in an out-of-the-way hamlet near Cadgwith and left it to dry. That winter, short of cash and coal for their ancient Cornish range, they’d lit newspaper and wood from an old dining chair. Then, not expecting to succeed, placed the salvaged coal into the flames.

  Within seconds it had burst into life, flaring as if enraged it had ever been lost, left for so long, never fulfilling its purpose. She’d marvelled at its defiant spirit, arguing it proved the old adage ‘where there’s life there’s hope’, but Sarah had laughed, roundly mocking her, saying she was full of romantic nonsense: more likely it was traces of cordite that had become welded into the side of the coal when the ship went down.

  They’d loved to find ‘treasure’, never knowingly destroying anything in the process, unlike those who used explosives to rip apart the bodies of the wrecks, desecrating what were often war graves, looting whatever they could find. When she dived with Sarah, they took nothing more than the discarded or inadvertently dropped. Watches were a common find, as were sunglasses and bottles and once, lying in the barest patch of sand surrounded by a group of bemused hermit crabs, a sealed case stuffed with packs of white powder, dropped in haste, no doubt, at the sight of an approaching coastguard vessel.

  The seabed held the remnants of so many lives. For that reason, wreck dives were the most special. She understood the desire to retrieve something, return something that had been taken away; she understood the compulsion to restore the balance, right the unfairness. Sometimes the simplest piece of broken cup or plate could feel like the most precious find, when it came with the knowledge that at some point in the distant past, a hand had held it, or lips sipped from it. Whether because of the lives attached to them, or the submerged worlds they’d become, wrecks held a special magic.

  Meghan shook loose the memories and began to move slowly, carefully, so her fin tips didn’t disturb the sand and silt – a sure way to destroy the visibility. She knew why she was there, her purpose had been firm in her mind from the minute she’d made the decision, but just for a moment, she wanted to revisit everything she’d seen five years ago on their first dive together. She wanted to recapture the awe, the magic, their whole falling in love with the place.

  She believed she would remember the route instinctively, that despite the years that had passed she would know exactly where she was heading, how long it would take. As she focused on navigating her way through the thick kelp, a sudden shadow passed overhead, momentarily blocking the light. She looked up sharply, her breath quickening, briefly using her air more rapidly. She squinted against the light, trying to make out the strange silhouette above her, not recognising its shape. Then she gasped. It was a sunfish. Usually found in the tropics, she knew the odd, disc-shaped creature visited these waters, but she’d never seen one. They were a marvel. Female sunfish could lay more eggs than any other vertebrate in the world – up to 300 million each season – a massive vessel of potential life.

  Forgetting everything else, she turned to stay in its shadow, grasping for the carabiner clip of the camera attached to the D-ring on her buoyancy jacket. As the sunfish began to move beyond her, she finned harder, thankful the waters were giving less resistance than they might if she were swimming against an onshore current. But despite her efforts, the sunfish moved out of sight. Disappointment raked briefly before she instinctively checked her air gauge and watch; she had thirty minutes of air left if she remained at a depth of twelve metres, but her depth gauge indicated she was in deeper water – sixteen metres. Her trajectory had been to travel north-east to south-west from the boat. But the distraction of the sunfish meant she had changed direction. Porthallow Cove was now behind her and New York, if she kept going for 3,000 miles, in front. Her destination was little more than a couple of hundred feet from where the boat had dropped her and she’d been confident she could navigate by terrain from the route they’d always taken. But, no longer on that route, she’d lost her way.

  She turned a full 360 degrees, but could spot nothing familiar. The waters at her new depth had grown darker, more turbid, taking on a gloomy, grey-blue tinge. The outlines of the rocks that had given such definition before were now much less distinct. There was less colour. Less life. She checked her depth gauge again: eighteen metres now. Her breath came faster, filling her lungs and using air more quickly. With increased depth came increased atmospheric pressure and the neoprene of her suit began to compress, causing the fin on her right foot to loosen and try to break free. She grasped at the strap, pulling it tighter, at the same time remembering angry words from the past.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Sarah had spat, ‘how good a metaphor it is, or its place in feminist literature; a fin is a fin, not a flipper! Flipper’s a dolphin! ‘Diving into a Wreck’? I doubt the woman ever dived in her life!’

  ‘It’s Diving into the Wreck. Maybe get your facts straight before you have a go about stuff beyond your limited comprehension,’ Meghan had retorted, grateful the poet hadn’t committed the ultimate sin of referring to a diving mask as ‘goggles’.

  ‘A wreck, the wreck. Whatever.’

  It was how they used to fight. With words aimed at soft but well-known targets. Words that were sometimes clever, sometimes cruel, and usually stirred by something stupid. For the past two years, Meghan had lain awake at night regretting every harsh word ever spoken between them.

  At the time it had driven her mad, the way Sarah fixated on one detail, one notion, one word, then would rant intransigently. Most times Meghan had been able to switch off to it, but not about that; she loved Adrienne Rich’s poems and that one particularly meant something to her beyond the interpretations. She’d read it to Sarah, wanting to share an intimacy, wanting her to find the same depth in the piece.

  But Sarah never got it, couldn’t see beyond the concrete. Or refused to. Instead, she’d focused on that one small detail and exposed it mercilessly. It was the same when Sarah got sick, that picking at words.

  ‘Necrotising fasciitis eats. Leprosy eats. This thing doesn’t eat. It grows. It spreads. It colonises. It doesn’t eat.’

  That was her way of dealing with things. Get angry. Yell. Fight. But despite the fight, Sarah sank into the cancer, as it grew and it spread and it colonised.

  Meghan blinked away the past, as the sea around her became a cold, dark violet that edged an uncompromising blackness. Her unplanned descent continued. With increased depth, each lungful of air took more from her tank than she’d allowed for. As she sank, she felt the weight of the lead around her waist, the steel tank on her back. As if in a dream, her left hand reached for the inflator valve on her buoyancy jacket that would lift her from the deepening waters. But she didn’t press it. She hovered there, unmoving, staring into the gloom. So easy, she thought, it would be so easy now. The weight would keep her down. The current would take her deeper, further out; thirty, forty metres. They’d never find her. It would spare them the funeral at least, that grotesque farce where nothing of a life is truly revealed. Nothing of the person is really there.

  Salt water stung her eyes. Instinctively she pressed the heel of her hand to the top rim of her mask and tilted her head; breathing out through her nose to clear her mask of what her training led her to believe was seawater. But it wasn’t the sea that had leaked in, and her vision continued to blur until she could no longer make out her surroundings. There were no shapes. No colour.

  But there was a sound, faint and distant, but distinct. It sounded like a bell.

  There’d been stories of a bell being heard by divers when they visited the Manacles Reef. It was said to be that of the SS Mohegan, which sank on only her second voyage. She’d hit the Manacles Reef on 14 October 1898 with the loss of 106 of the 197 on board. The wreck of the Mohegan lay twenty-four metres down
, gripped in the massive jaws of rock pinnacles, starkly covered in spongy, white dead man’s fingers.

  Logic should have told her the sound could not be a bell. More like it was the creeping effect of nitrogen narcosis, a side effect of breathing compressed air at depth. No bell would ring down here. But she was no longer in a place where logic worked well for her.

  She strained to hear, to judge its distance. Sound travels much faster through water than air, making it hard to judge direction. As she swam, the light continued to fade with her increase in depth. She heard it again. Straight ahead. Or was it to the right?

  At once she felt tired. And heavy. It felt as if the weight was in her heart, not in the belt around her waist. She closed her eyes. She could sleep now. She could just drift away and sleep.

  Sleep had not come easily since she’d first felt the lump in Sarah’s breast. They’d agreed it was probably nothing, but best to get it checked. Sarah, at only thirty, had always behaved as if she were immortal, always being the one who would want to take the biggest risks, make the deeper dives. She’d always been the one to take on the world. Meghan had never been that brave, but Sarah had given her the courage to face most of her fears. And while Sarah turned on the cancer with a warrior-like strength, with the belief that any enemy could be fought, though not necessarily beaten, Meghan had dealt with it the only way she could – by pretending it didn’t exist, that it would just go away and everything would be fine. At times she still couldn’t bring herself to believe that Sarah was really gone and had been for two years: two years in which Meghan had existed in a fog that sometimes seemed lighter, sometimes darker, but never disappeared.