The Silver Dark Sea

Everything about Maggie makes him sorry.

He covers the lobsters back over, secures the tarpaulin to keep them safe.

* * *

On Fridays, the boat doesn’t come back. It takes nearly three hours to dock at the three smaller islands, making the journey to the mainland nearly five hours long, in the end. It’s too much to return the same day. So tonight, the Morning Star and its crew will stay overnight in the mainland’s harbour with the stacked lobster pots and fishing fleet. That’s a pungent harbour, ten times bigger than Parla’s. It has the ferry office, a youth hostel, a small museum of fishing life, The Bounty Inn with its picnic tables and a trailer which sells cockles in paper cones. The gulls are bold, beady-eyed. Some will take a chip right out of your hand, and laugh as they eat it – ark-ark!

Nancy knows all this.

She sits cross-legged on the sea wall. She looks at the quayside, the dark sand and the Star.

Ferry day, in Nan’s head, is her day – or her family’s. Her father runs the boat. He runs the whole harbour and has to write down which boats come in and out, and he has to listen to the radio each night to hear what the weather will do. If it’s too rough to sail, he runs a red flag up a pole. Nan likes that flag. It is the same height as her bedroom window, and it goes snap in the gales as if it’s talking to her. He marks down sightings of whales, too, and rare birds. But Nan’s father spends most of his time caring for the ferry. He polishes the brass bits, scrubs down the deck, sponges the green mould from the life-rings that hang on her sides. Sometimes, the ferry is hauled out of the water and run up onto rails as if she were a train. This is the boat’s dry dock. Nan has stood beneath her as the Star’s rested there, and looked up. It feels like looking up a fat lady’s skirt.

The ferry will leave any minute.

She squints. The winch lifts the crate from the quayside. It swings a little so that her father puts his hands up against it, guides it across. Jonny operates the winch from the boat. Nan isn’t too keen on Jonny. He once called her a rat, as if she couldn’t hear, and Rona doesn’t like him much either. Creepy Jonny Bundy which sounds like a nursery rhyme.

Rona. Nan studies her. She can see a beaded chain on her sister’s left ankle and her toenails are painted bright pink. Rona is watching the crate because her cakes are in it. She makes cakes for her tea room at the lighthouse, but she also makes them for a café on the mainland – a café with dried starfish in its window and deckchairs outside. Nan has been there, with their mother. Last summer they went. They had banana bread and a coconut slice, both made by Rona two days before. In loud voices they said how good the cakes were, how they were the best they’d ever had in all their living days and everyone should try some so that the café would order more.

Nan’s favourite cake in the world is a chocolate brownie. Definitely. For her sixth birthday she had a plate of brownies, with actual cherries in. That was her best birthday yet.

Her father and brother are on the Morning Star.

Her mother and sister are on the quayside, watching it.

Ferry day is our day. The gangplank is pulled up, on board. The ferry begins to shudder, the water behind it starts to churn and very slowly the Star turns from the quay. She can see Alfie Moss, waving. She can see her brother Sam, too – his yellow hair which she is sometimes jealous of. Kitty is also on board – her skirt is blowing and she wears sunglasses so that Nan can’t tell what she is looking at. Perhaps she is looking at Nathan, but he is not looking at her. His hands are in his pockets, and he’s looking at the ground. Maybe there’s a shell, there? Or a beetle? He looks at the ground for a very long time.

* * *

There is a track which leads from Crest towards the most northerly part of the coast. At the cliff edge, there’s a fence – wire that sags, rotting posts. There is a sign by a break in this fence which reads Do Not Use In Wet Weather – but Maggie has often used these steps when the rain has been so heavy that it has bruised her. She’s used them in a thunderstorm. She’s used them at night.

They are slick, black steps cut into the rocks and which lead down to a small harbour. Uneven steps, and steep. Once, perhaps, they’d been used for smuggling since the lighthouse’s beam never reaches them and they can’t be seen from the sea; but they are not used for that now. They wind down into darkness and end, abruptly, on a slab of rock. This slab is the quayside. It is lost entirely at high tide and so it is both rough with barnacles and velvety with weed, and Maggie is careful when treading on it. She comes here three times a week, or more: Pigeon is kept here.

Pigeon. Named by Maggie herself, long ago.

So she can always find her way home.

Maggie started early today. She dressed in the half-dark, made a flask of tea, put a head-torch on and made her way down those steps. She looked east, as she readied the boat. She looked through the harbour’s narrow opening and saw the dawn – pink, grey, the last blue of night.

And she’d hauled on the cord to start the outboard motor, thrummed across the water, past Sye and Bundy Head. A cool, early morning. The smell, always, of fish and diesel fumes. She’d felt the motor’s vibration, heard the quiet slosh at her feet of water that had come aboard in various ways – off the pots, or rainwater – and it is the same every time. It does not change – how Pigeon smells, how the silence rushes in when she turns the engine off. There are the same rituals as there always were, and she finds a comfort in them. Pigeon is familiar. So are the orange fibreglass buoys, the sound of the sea against the boat’s sides, the gulls that follow hopefully, the ghostly loom of the lobster pots as she pulls them up from the dark.

Nothing changes on Parla. That’s what she was told, when she first came. It stays the same – just so you know … And Maggie had loved that. She’d loved the idea of a safe, strong, unchanging life. Just Tom, and her, and the water.

But then he died. And everything changed. Nothing changes here proved, in fact, to be the greatest of all lies. He died and so much died with him; countless more things were lost. She learnt this: that grief changes more than you ever thought it could. All certainty goes away. All strong things stop being strong. Tom was there and then he was not: and so what could be relied upon? Nothing felt safe any more: a lone sock felt symbolic; an embrace from a friend seemed like a trap; letters had no meaning or too many meanings so that sorry for your loss felt coded, impenetrable, too hard to understand. Maggie believed, for a time, that she was being lied to. She’d eyed others, looking for that lie. Nothing can be trusted – to be kind, or safe, or to stay with her.

I will not feel or care for anything. I will rely on nothing.

But no-one can live like that. Maggie tried to be self-reliant, and hard – but she could not fully. She had to give shape to her days. She had to hold her hand out or she’d sink, she knew that. And it was routines that Maggie turned to. Tentatively, she sought comfort in small, necessary, practical things – so she’d make proper coffee in a cafetiere, clean the bath, pluck tomatoes from her plants and inhale their bitter smell. She’d pull the cord on Pigeon as she used to when Tom was still living. She’d bind the claws of lobster with coloured elastic bands.

And this place. Coming here.

Maggie is walking, now. She has left the half-moon harbour; she is walking down the island’s western coast. The wild west, Tom called it: bare, fully exposed. No other islands lie to the west of Parla; from here, there is only the open sea. And centuries of storms and thundering water have battered it – picked off rocks, and scooped out caves so that this coastline echoes. The sea booms; the birds wail. She hears them now, as she walks.

This was her routine, too: she’d walk on this coast at every low tide. For two years Maggie would come, twice daily – so she has come to know each stile, each thistle patch, each rabbit hole. She knows each track through the gorse, how the word Tom! bounces back to her from every dank cave wall. And in the early days, before she believed that he was truly gone, and not returning, she’d step down the wooden staircase onto Lock-and-Key and tread across its sand. For it is on this beach that a whale stranded itself, where the best shells have come, where there has been driftwood so smooth and bleached by the waves that they looked like bones and it’s here that Maggie has found pottery shards and a piece of glass that had been so worn, so turned over and over by the sea that it had been rolled into a ball. A marble as green as an eye. There is a fence, too, on which those lost rubber boots have been hung – boots that have been washed ashore without their other, matching halves – so they look out to sea forlornly. And if something of worth – something she’d loved, and still loved – was to wash ashore, she has always believed it would be here. This beach.

Lock-and-Key. Named because the headland to its south is shaped, or partly, as the beach is. It has the same outline, but inverted. One might fit the other … If you squint. So she was told.

Maggie steps down the staircase now.

The row of rubber boots is still here – still waiting.

Tom. Who knew all the beaches. He knew each cave, each promontory. Tom was Parlan entirely, and so he knew the history of houses, the names in the graveyard, how puffins fly, how to coax the lugworm out, how to read the weather by clouds or a sheep’s positioning, how to cook mussels in garlic and white wine. So many stories in his head – of love and loss, of the old pig farm. Maggie had been in awe of this.

You’re lucky, she’d told him.

I feel it. Kissing her.

She was told time would help. People said it to her, meaning well: give it time … But time does not help. All that happens with time is that you grow tired – so hugely, indescribably tired. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was in the gold band on her finger but he was not in the house, not in their bed. And she began to grow tired of walking on this beach: walking on this beach meant she was looking at each sodden piece of cloth, each inch of rope, each footprint in the sand thinking is that his …? She would hurry towards new driftwood. She’d make her way to each line of faded plastic in case it held a clue. And one dusk – one awful, half-lit, winter dusk – she’d thought she’d seen a person lying on Lock-and-Key. In the gloom, she saw it: a dark and indefinable shape at the water’s edge. So she ran. She dropped to her knees as she reached it. She plunged her hands into the shape, gasping, swearing, saying Tom with sand in her mouth and tears in her eyes – and it was weed. Just weed. Two metres or more of tangled wrack which had fooled her, briefly, in the evening light. And she knelt by that weed, and sobbed. He is not coming back to me. He is not coming back to me. She knew, she knew. She knew he was not. She had to admit this, kneeling there.

Maggie never wants another moment like that moment – no more crouching next to weed. No more Tom! – sand-tasting. And so for four years she has tried to live a small life. A safe life. No changes.

No hope, and no loss.

But now this … A man. A man has come ashore. Nathan says just passing and she spills her yellow paint, and for one tiny, impossible moment …

Maggie closes her eyes. The wind finds her hair and it tugs, tugs.

I have to see this man. She must. He is not Tom; she knows he is not. But he is a new, rolled mass of weed; he is a new indefinable shape that she must kick at, at least, to make sure of. For otherwise, she will always be thinking what if …?

She will see him tomorrow.

This human driftwood. This jetsam that washed up with more unwanted things.

* * *

He is sleeping again. He is upright but his eyes are closed. Tabitha smiles, and takes the empty mug from his hand.

People are children again, when they sleep. Their frown lines go and their worries do, so that they lie as they would have lain in their childhood beds. She’s seen it enough. Her brother-in-law, Jack Bundy, was a fierce, bad-tempered piece by day but she found him sleeping in the armchair once, and his left hand was near his face as if trying to hide himself or, even, suck his thumb. He’d looked like a boy, not a middle-aged man. And if Jack Bundy could look sweet-natured …

She brings the blankets around her patient. She wonders, briefly, who else has done this for him – for whoever he is, he’ll have had a mother. Does he have a wife? There is no ring. No white mark where a ring has been.

Amnesia. It’s a new one for her. Nearly half a century since she became a nurse, and how many amnesiacs has she met? She will have to research it – books, online.

Tabitha pads through to her kitchen.

It is small, square. It is dark, too, for its single window looks out onto a bank of grass. A sheep has been here this morning – she can see its fresh droppings, berry-bright. Tabitha exhales, picks up the phone. The task she must do is motherly.

Hello? It is answered after two rings.

Em, it’s me.

What do you want?

I have a request …

There is silence from her sister.

Well – it’s this …

* * *

The quayside is empty, and still. Nancy cannot see anyone now – just their black cat and a gull that walks like a man in a waistcoat, his hands behind his back. The gull has eyed the cat; the cat, in turn, is treading in the shadows, keeping her distance. As a kitten, she got pecked at; her ear is split at its tip.

Nancy shuffles forwards, drops down onto the sand. There is a shell here – blue, and chalky inside. She brings it right up to her eye and looks at it. It is joined, with two halves and when she presses those halves together the shell clacks, like a mouth.

She makes the shell say hello to the cat. Hello to the mean-looking gull.

What have you there, little Nancy?

The voice makes her jump. She turns. It is old Mrs Coyle with her walking stick and her butterscotch breath. She has made her way down from the white house, near the sea wall. There is a line of sweat between her nose and mouth. Mrs Coyle dabs at it.

Another lovely morning. All this lovely weather!

She tucks the tissue up her sleeve.

May I join you?

They sit side by side on the harbour’s bench. Nan swings her legs. It’s a shell.

And a fine one, too. A mussel shell. Look at that blue …

I found it down there.

Well, they’re common enough. Have you eaten mussels?

Nan shakes her head. She likes doing this, as she has glass bobbles at the end of her plaits which knock against each other. She shakes her head more than she needs to.

Your brother could find you some, I’m sure. Whilst he’s out walking.

Nan picks at some grit she finds in the shell. She is not sure what to say to Mrs Coyle, or what to say about mussels, so she says Sam found a person on Wednesday night. He was washed up at Sye.

So I heard.

Daddy says he probably fell off a boat.

Does he? Perhaps.

Nan looks up. Do you think he did?

Fell overboard?

She nods.

Well, perhaps. It’s nine miles to the mainland, which would be a very long swim.

She squints at the ferry. Is he a ghost, maybe?

Oh I think he’s real enough. Your brother carried him! So did the Bundy men. If he was a ghost how could they carry him?

A pirate?

No pirates.

Nan studies the shell. I think he’s a pirate.

No, no. I don’t think so.

Who do you think he is, Mrs Coyle?

Abigail smiles. Me? She stays quiet for a moment. She takes the tissue out, dabs her nose and pops it back again. Then she leans towards Nancy and says do you like stories?

Stories?

Yes. I thought most children liked stories.

Only good ones.

Ah! Very wise. Have you heard of the Fishman?

She looks up from her shell. A Fishman?

The Fishman. A man who has the tail of a fish, but he can also grow legs and come ashore?

Nan stares. He’s a fish? A fish who grew legs? She looks down at the shell, wide-eyed. Maybe she has heard the story. Maybe Alfie told her in the playground once. And there is a book on her shelf – a pink spine, with thick cardboard pages – which has a mermaid in it, and so she turns and says like a mermaid?

Abigail considers this. Yes, in a way. But it’s always a man in the stories – a strong, bearded, good-looking man.

The mussel shell goes clack.

My husband saw him, once. At Sye.

Nan’s eyes grow like moons.

Jim was young, but he remembers it. Says he looked up from the beach and saw a man swimming – a man with dark hair, and a very solemn face. Then he went under, and where he had been swimming there rose a huge, silvery tail …

Mr Coyle saw him? Properly?

He did.

And this is him? This man is the Fishman he saw? But he’s got legs now?

Abigail smiles. Why not? Humans think they know everything but there is so much more.

They are watched, as they talk. One of the oldest and the youngest inhabitants of Parla, side by side on the wrought-iron bench.

Dee Lovegrove stands in her bedroom. She has taken a pillowcase off the radiator, and she folds it by the window. Outside, she can see them. Nancy is wearing her denim dungarees with the heart-shaped buttons. She insisted on plaits this morning but one is already escaping its band and there’s mud, Dee notes, on her knees. Never, ever tidy. Nan discards clothing like petals, sticks her fingers into all manner of dirt. It was sheep dung last week, and diesel the week before. Little Nancy Lovegrove. Dee feels a pang of love. It is the sudden punch of it that she always feels with her children – Nan’s reddened knees, or how Sam puts his sunglasses on, patting the sides to make sure they’re in place. Today, Rona had looked so beautiful, standing on the quayside with her arms full of cakes and Dee had watched her step back from the crate, shield her eyes against the sun. Dee had thought, she’s mine. All grown up.

And her other boys, too. After Sam, there came the twins – as alike as shoes are. In the first few years of their life, it was Dee and Dee alone who knew who was who, and it was their ways that told her, not how they looked. Ben would gaze past her, as he lay on the changing mat; he’d watch a bee or a bird’s shadow on the bedroom wall – whilst Austin’s eyes would be on her, and her alone. Austin spoke first by three weeks. Yes, Dee knew who was who.

A pang, too, for those boys. Where are they now? Backpacking. Sticky with mosquito repellent, drinking beer with foreign names. Meeting girls, no doubt. Austin claimed he would not shave again till he was home, and Dee tries to imagine it – that wriggling tot on the flowery changing mat being able to grow facial hair at all. Ben wants to get his eyebrow pierced. How did it happen? Be safe, boys. Drop me a postcard, sometime.

But they fly. It is what the fledged birds must do, and she’s always known that. The nest can’t always be full.

She looks at Nan. Nancy aged six and three-quarters, who is far from fledged, thank God. There are the great surprises in life, and then there is Nan who was conceived after half a bottle of sweet sherry and a fumble on the sofa when Dee was nearly forty-four. She’d thought it was her menopause until she was sick in the footwell of the car. The risks … Ed had been nervous. But a life had been made so the life must be born. And now that life is swinging her legs on the bench outside.

Above them, and above the stone wall, is the sea. Wide, wide water. In the far distance is the white dot of the Morning Star and the trail of white water she leaves in her wake. It will be a house of girls tonight – just Dee and her youngest daughter. She wraps her arms around herself. Her other son, too, is on the Star – her second oldest child, with his stoop and silences, with his migraines which make him whimper with the pain. Sam, who loiters near Crest, runs along the coastal path or stays in his room, lifting weights. He does not do much more than this. No speaking, no letting go of the old ghosts. He trawls his self-blame as boats trawl their nets; it gathers everything, and slows him down, and one day she fears he’ll go under.

* * *

At Lowfield, the nurse is outside. She stands in her garden and watches the wind, as it blows through the grass. The nettle patch at Litty whitens, for the undersides of the leaves are paler than their tops. She loves these small moments.

In comes a car with a broken exhaust.

Emmeline parks, and climbs out. She leans into the back of the car and lifts out a large black plastic bag; the plastic has stretched and greyed in places where Emmeline’s fingers have been. Here.

Perfect. Tabitha goes to it. The bag is passed over as a child might be – with the nurse’s hand going underneath it, bringing the bag to her chest. I’m sorry I had to ask, but it’s all I could think of.

I’ll want them back.

You’ll get them back. Of course you will.

And I don’t want them torn. Or damaged.

They’re already torn and damaged – aren’t they?

Emmeline sniffs, ignores her. Has he said anything yet?

Not much.

His name?

No. Thank you for these. And Tabitha goes inside.

In the kitchen, she unties the bag and reaches in. There is a cream shirt, a blue jumper with a hood. Socks. T-shirts. They are clothes that Tabitha partly remembers. They were Tom’s – fraying, stained or worn-out clothes that he’d kept at his mother’s house. For once he’d met Maggie, he’d wanted to make room for her clothes – in his wardrobe, up at Crest.

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