The Silver Dark Sea

Rona straightens herself, sees them go. In her arms she carries six plastic, airtight boxes. They are transparent – they hold scones, chocolate cake, iced gingerbread, a cheesecake with grated limes, flapjack with apricots, and a huge, powdered Victoria sponge that’s filled with homemade jam. She rests her chin on the uppermost box, shuts the car door with her foot.

On the quayside itself are the island’s men. Edward Lovegrove, of course. He wears a luminous jacket with matching trousers and a baseball cap with Skipper on it. He takes the cargo – suitcases, bicycles, cardboard boxes – and puts it in a crate that rests next to the boat. Anything else? He calls this out and Rona quickens her step. Yep, Dad! Her car keys are hanging from the back pocket of her jeans and they jangle as she hurries.

There are other men in bright-yellow clothing – the crew, the men who have worked on Morning Star for years, or all their adult lives in some cases. George Moss – late fifties and not yet greying – stands at the end of the gangway, a rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as if throwing a dart. He sees his wife and son coming. Alfie waves cheerily. On you hop, George tells him. Hester’s hair is wild-looking, today – the curls are tight like springs and he loves it like this, wants to push his hands into it and grip those curls at their roots. He winks at his wife as she passes.

Sam Lovegrove and Jonny Bundy are also in fluorescent yellow. They are both on board, making the ferry’s final checks – securing lines, checking lists on clipboards, handing out brown paper bags just in case the water gets rough. Sam has not slept properly for two nights now and it shows in his face. There are shadows under his eyes; the sunburn has lessened against his pale skin. Jonny is by the winch. He leans over the side of the boat, watching Ed pack up the crate. Rona, he thinks, is looking good today. She always looks good – but those jeans are tight and when she peers over the side of the crate to make sure her cakes are packed well, and safely, he can see down her top for a moment. White lace – very nice. She has sunglasses pushed up into her hair.

Nine twenty-five. Ed shouts, last call! Kitty hears this and kisses Nathan. She carries an overnight bag, steps onto the gangplank. She pauses to say something to the skipper who laughs, touches her shoulder. Two tourists are the last ones on – clanking with binoculars, sour-breathed from the seasickness pills they have taken, sad to be leaving Parla for city life.

Sam lets them pass. Then, at that moment, puts a hand on either side of the gangplank and leans down from the deck. George?

The older man treads out his cigarette, looks up.

Has Maggie been? Haven’t seen her yet.

He nods. On the far side. Under the tarpaulin.

She must have come early.

She was waiting for us. Maybe seven thirty? She’s done herself proud, though. One of them is a monster.

Sam steps back. He goes to the far side of the ferry. Sure enough, he finds the black plastic crate with tarpaulin on it, and he crouches down beside it. Slowly, he peels the covering aside. The lobsters shift as he does this. Their smell is fishy and cold. They are midnight-coloured, their claws tied with elastic bands, and he wonders what time Maggie went out to get them this morning – first light? Maybe it was still dark when she went. Maybe, he thinks, she’s not sleeping either, and he imagines her, in that little boat – hat and gloves, setting out at dawn. The birds would still have been roosting. Perhaps the first sign of daylight was a pink glow in the east and she would have seen it – on her own, in that boat.

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 …