The Silver Dark Sea. Susan Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ