Fen (17 page)

She decked herself out: the black slicker salt-wrecked round the cuffs and base; hat flaps clipped back; rough-handed gloves; green boots to the knee. There was something splendid about it: dressing up to fish.

Nothing the first day. Hours and hours of nothing but one wriggling usurper she threw back, disgusted. She stomped sorely inside and cooked, in a rage, the chicken she'd been saving for a special occasion.

Didn't bother with the costume the next day, only took the chicken bucket out in her bare feet and dungarees.
She caught a lot else with the gristle, threw some of them back, cut the rest into mouthfuls and put them on the hook to try the fish's tastes. Nothing. She kept her eyes open, dangled her extremities in to entice it – to make it think she had a message to give; gave up as disgruntled as before.

She womanned the radio all night without feeling tired at all, sluiced and scrubbed the walkway up top in the early light shift, mopped the lens on her tiptoes so the water ran down and onto her face. Later she tidied the book piles into alphabetical perfection, rearranged the cushions, put the shelves into systems.

In the morning, she heard the sound of the van driving down the straight rocky path that ran along the spit. Went out to meet it.

You busy? Lionel said, shifting forward.

Yeah. She took the first crate, upping it on her hip. She did not know why he always asked; she felt always busy: out every morning sifting for goods through the sands, scanning the water for something left behind. He didn't think magpie work amounted to much; he didn't know any better.

Not stormy though, Lionel said, not really, is it?

No. Not stormy, she said – though it had been.

They could say what they wanted about a woman lighthouse keeper. They could say anything they liked, and they would.

*  *  *

For a week she cooked up feasts that lasted her the radio-filled nights, sent carefully formed hellos to the lighthouse up the coast, where they didn't get the blusts half so bad. Coded jokes to the ships that locked onto her signal in their short passings. During the light shifts she read two books at once, swapping them page by page, made up crosswords to fill in when she forgot the clues; went through the clutter, tidying in her own way. Occasionally she went out with her rod and stood quiet, looking down for a silver snicker nosing up to the rocks. Had no better luck than before.

She'd been waiting for a day warm enough, and, when it came, danced out, tripped on the stairs, sent her collection of washing bottles rolling from her arms, and then stripped, yodelling, on the rocks directly at the base of the lighthouse. She fixed a thumb and finger round her nose, aimed, brought her knees up to her chest.

She felt the fish as she was swimming back up. It sent a thin lance of electricity through her leg and then another along her belly so she hit forward with mouth open and hands hunting to bring it head down onto the rock. She came up empty-handed, fingers opening and closing around air. Cooled her burnt belly on the stone, then turned to see the colour of the fish lilting away and down.

She washed: soaped everything twice, yarring at the knotted mass of hair till it hung out, sat thoughtful to let the clean soak in. Thinking on a fish.

The next time the tide eased, she got ready to go to town. Stood in front of the mirror and looked at the
strangeness of herself. Made up from sea findings; the things left behind. It would be easy to never go anywhere. Leaving felt a feat, a heroic endeavour. She steeled herself: wellied up, walked over the rocks, down and along the beach into town.

At the Fords' boatyard Mr Ford was alone, sat on an overturned bucket, not doing much only looking. There were boats half painted and some were storm-broken or had been left to rot. There were seagulls resting or fighting for scraps.

I want to rent a boat, she said, just for a day.

He turned his face in her direction and moved his chin from side to side.

Too much, she said when he spoke and he turned his face back and forth and wrung his hands and said another number.

She watched his face, the way it settled after he spoke, and knew he was saying things silently to her, just as everyone in the town did.

When they were done she said: you'll take it down to the water for me? And the price rose again, dipped and rose and was settled on.

She liked the boat, its sturdy lines, the way it nodded obligingly when she settled at the motor end, arranging the sandwiches and the rod and the much-mended net in the bottom. Some of the men on the dock waved and even their waves meant something about a woman living alone in a lighthouse. She raised her finger to test the
wind then turned it towards them, though they didn't seem to notice. Some days, she thought, she invented whole battles, whole wars which nobody else understood. Other days she was certain that the way a man picked up his pint glass meant something, the way a child dug in the sand or a woman hung out her washing. Everything was a threat, or promise, or a joke aimed loud enough in her direction she'd be certain to hear it.

She rode the boat until the shore was only a kind of line, and the lighthouse some sort of punctuated afterthought – an exclamation mark perhaps.

She tried a number of places that she knew were good from watching the fishing boats; docked the engine and settled back with her boots on the side and the rod running between them. What she caught was different from anything she'd ever hitched out from the side of the lighthouse, brighter and with bigger ideas. Most she threw back. They were not what she was looking for.

She sat there through the whole light shift. Ate her sandwiches one-handed, gutted some of the bigger fish and spread their innards on the water lid to call down to her fish, watched the big boats hauling in, each eye of their nets pupilled with a half-living silver thing, bucking and moaning. She waited longer than she ought, the sky darkening towards her, then reeled in and sat back to move the rudder.

The boat's narrow nose turning, she saw, barely in time, the slick of something at her elbow, bent to look. The
fish's belly coming topside, rolling the way it had that first day. She did not reach for the net or move towards one of the hooks she could have driven down, only put her hand into the water.

The fish snickered under, back-flipping, rose again, laid its side along the bone of her wrist. She felt – though her teeth were clenched for it – no jut of electricity. Then the fish went low, gone.

She understood everything, pacing the small rooms, walking the circle of the walkway up top, the thought of the years the fish had lived taking any want to sleep from her. The hours loomed into one another; she invented histories: its birth in the shallows of a river; its forced tries at life there, the gulping up of stones to suck from the river base; its journey downstream until the water salted, until it felt the waves. It was only later – two bottles of wine from Lionel's delivery gone, and her saying everything she was thinking out loud – that she thought maybe everything she'd guessed about the fish was wrong; that it was, rather, a sort of metamorphosis. She went down to the slick rocks, drunk enough now to cry or laugh or fall in, and yelled her knowledge of the creature out into the cold foam. The way it could have stung her and did not; the way it moved with an almost human intelligence. Not a food source or a pretty thing to watch but, maybe, a friend.

In the morning she remembered only snapshots of thoughts, her mouth sanded thick, eyes gummed. She
woke herself properly in the sea, and knew then that the fish was the same as her. She would not catch or eat it; she would protect it if she could.

There was money in places all over, taped to the underside of chairs and tables, shoved deep under the mattress, single notes shuffled away between the pages of books. She gathered it without much logic, remembering another place and dashing off. She imagined Bovary was marked with her well-worn pathways. The radio spasmed something out: a joke about tide lines or wind direction. She let the dial go down with a click till it was off, put on her wellies and shoved a handful of notes down the sides of them just in case, carrying the rest in the old satchel. She was too excited to worry much about town, about the people or anything else.

At the yard Mr Ford and Leo stood, headless, beneath an overturned and hoisted-up boat, working on the innards. She whistled them out.

Remember the boat you rented me? she said. I want to keep it longer. I want to keep it for a while.

The old man wiped oil from his fingers onto his chin in mock thought, worked the price till he was sweating and she was numb with rage and excitement. In the end, with them watching, she had to stick a fist into her left welly and pull out a handful.

She started away from them, swinging her arms, and then turned, came back. They had not moved any, were watching her return.

You got anything to drink?

The old man seemed to think about it for a long while. Went inside and came back carrying a bottle. There was no label on it and he had no glasses with him, but after he'd drunk she took it, swung it up. The boy had some too, eyes bulging round the rim. She stood. She wanted them to ask, that was it.

Have another, shall we? she said, and took it from the boy's hand and raised it again, closing her eyes into the tilt, passing it to the old man.

I'm celebrating.

She initiated the third round of the bottle, feeling a little shaky at the pressure of the words coming out, at the waxy sheen of their faces looking. She spun on her heel and took off away, almost losing her footing, and then, at a sound, looking over her shoulder at them –

What?

What you celebrating? the boy repeated, his father's face turning slowly from her to him and back again.

She thought about it. She wanted to explain everything to them. She wanted to tell them she'd had a mind to catch it but now she needed the boat only to watch it, to be near it. She did not have the words for that much. Only drew the silence out, knew it a mistake before it came, but drew, anyway, the silence out into words: I'm celebrating a fish.

*  *  *

Most days she took the boat out, stripped off her clothes, shrieking for the September cold, and jumped in, pretending there was no need for lungs until there was, feeling the fish mouthing about her like something laughing. Other days, she brought out tastes to try on it, dropping in the scatterings of steak or pitta bread and watching the pursed lips break the surface.

She cooked the feasts in the dark shift – the radio only half-womanned, the beam dusty – and then carted out the leftovers in the morning. She felt she could get used to anything, and did: the force of the cold and of drying in cold air; the salt that crusted her hair; the weight of sleeping barely hours or not at all; the days when the fish did not show, and she, thinking the worst, sat rocking and looked to the frothing nets of the nearby boats for a long shape. There was no knowing where it went in the hours without her. Some dark shifts, turning the radio to barely a hum, she wished she was the type to go, sit in the pub. She was not and besides: there was the lighthouse. Whose needs were so basic and childlike she did them as thoughtlessly as she did her own – it had never seemed like something hanging round her neck until now; weighted, bawling.

She was out hunting cockles when the truck came bouncing down the spit-path, throwing up clods of damp brought up from the beach. She straightened with hands on hips, said: I'm not due a delivery.

I left some stuff off your last. Thought I'd drop them by, Lionel said, and cocked his open mouth at her. He was thin with a paunch and a slouch and a give in his body and a face smooth as a child's.

There were two other people in the cab of the truck. The boy leant out on the bone of his arm; the girl very still, staring straight out the windscreen at her.

Kind of you, she said, and took the crate from him, felt, for a moment, the pressure of his hands holding on.

On the way to the truck he called: heard about your fish.

The girl made a low sound and the boy beat the butt of his fist against the metal and then withdrew. They reversed, turned at the end of the spit and started back towards town. She stood looking after it until it was gone.

When the tide was out she dragged the boat off the rocks, onto the beach and then pushed it out until it was deep enough to ride. When she came to the fish it was sculling the surface, lipping up at her when she leant towards it. Not far away one of the oil-slicked fishing boats was again pulling in great tides of dead and she sat and watched: the smeared bodies moving around the deck; the faces always turned in her direction. She did not strip her clothes off to swim – pulled the boat's anchor up long before the sky was darkening, turned towards home. The fish swam alongside her for a while and then fell back and down, like something shot.

That dark shift, she took a blanket up top and walked round and round, looking out. Shapes and shadows and
the somethings the beam picked out looked like armies growing from the sands or snorkelled heads rising from the water. In the dying hours of the shift, there were explosions of sound and colour from the spit-beach – red and yellow sparks that went up and then came back towards the beach. Kids and firecrackers maybe, but she put it down as a warning.

The next day she decided she would not go looking for the fish. The sea was flat as a rock face and busy for it. There were more boats than normal, some fishing and others seeming only to float without occupation. On the beach, dogs ran, streaking beneath the heavy rain; sodden couples stood looking out at the indent of her lighthouse, waterproofed families trooped back and forth like sentinels.

As the light shift neared its end, she got ready to drag the marooned boat out to the wave line.

There were two trucks this time, juddering up and down over the rough, straight path, bumper to bumper, pulling to a stop in front of her where she stood next to the boat.

You forgot something else? she said.