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Wave follows wave follows wave. Perpetual. Never-ending. Constant. Forever, they break against the shore and push the sand and dunes and cliffs back bit-by-bit. Each one looks the same – they all rise, all fall, all break – but they’re different: different water, different wind and breaking on different sand as the tide shifts. Then, sometimes, a wave sits up, speeds up – pulling energy from the one before it, swallowing the one behind it – and hits so hard against the shoreline that it seems the sea’s energy is spent, that it will remain flat and calm forever more, that the tide will ebb away in shame and never come in again.
It would always come back in though. That’s what they said, the old men who sat in the fishermen’s lodge and watched over it all. Each of their heads was covered in a cobweb of white hair. Their faces were the granite of the old town, not the glass, steel and copper-cladding of the new.
The lodge was new though: a converted shipping container provided by the council and the development company when they converted the old lodge on the corner of the harbour into a seafood restaurant. The new lodge was tucked away in an out of the way part of the quay and disguised in aged planks and topped with a mast and crow’s nest so as not to offend the view from the apartments and townhouses they’d built along the harbour front.
But inside, it already had an ancient authenticity about it. It was in the creaking of the wingback chairs, the smell of tobacco, and the precision with which the peppermint-coloured ropes were coiled into boxes or hung on hooks. It was what made William hesitate outside the door of the lodge and resent the empty tub in one hand and impotent rod in the other.
The door stuck as he went in, and end of the rod clattered off the doorframe. The spinner he’d left on the end of the line caught on his sleeve. He felt it snag his skin, but the old men were turning to him now so he couldn’t react.
‘That you is it, boy?’
‘No, it’s Capt’n Ahab, look!’
William forced his burning cheeks into a grin. He could feel the cooking oil, garlic and bleach from his work clothes tainting the sweet pipe smoke smell of the lodge.
‘Catch anything?’
‘No. No, I was just testing the rod out. It’s new.’
‘New? Looks ready for the bin.’
‘It’s just to get started.’
He tried to pull the spinner from his arm.
‘He did catch something: himself.’
‘A fisher of men!’
The old men all laughed.
‘Come on, boy. Put the kettle on. We’re gasping.’
William boiled the battered kettle on the plug-in hob and made the usual drinks. He passed them out to hands that were strong and worn, like ancient bark. His own were soft and puffy from dishwater against them. While they drank, the old men talked about the grounds they were going to work that day. There were gill nets over the Banshoals reef that needed to be hauled and then shot again. Tangle netting, drifting, long-lining; pots, hauls, bait; reading tides, currents, winds: to William, it seemed mysterious, coded, and elemental.
Inevitably, the old men’s talk turned to memories of the grounds back in the days of success. They spoke of mackerel shoals covering the bay like oil slicks, boats almost sinking under the weight of crawfish catches and ray so easy to catch they practically jumped aboard. Spots long forgotten where their fathers had caught Dover sole, turbot and bass.
‘You don’t get catches like that now.’
‘Can’t remember the last time we caught a bass.’
‘Lucky to get anything at all.’
The tonnage prices for fish were written out hopefully each morning on a blackboard. Above it were the sun-faded photos and their buckled frames that had hung in the old lodge and had moved with the old men. They showed the old town the men spoke of and of the time before them, their own grandfathers’ time: beaches covered in pilchard boxes, so many it would have been impossible to get to the water without treading on fish; the harbour overflowing with boats, boats with sails packed like sardines bow to stern, port to starboard; wizened men in flat caps with pipes hanging from their mouths on horse-drawn carts full of nets.
While they talked, William lost himself in the tides and currents of his coffee. He thought of the way the lure and line had skimmed the surface of the water earlier and the feel of that first cast; the fear and excitement and then amazement that it had worked. The lure had disappeared as he flung the rod forward and let go of the line then suddenly arched back into his vision before it splashed into the water. Just like the library book had said it would. He had burst out laughing when he reeled in and the lure jumped out of the water towards the rod like something alive. He had lost two weights by forgetting to lift the bail of the reel before casting, but that didn’t matter. This was just a practice really, it didn’t count. He was bound to catch something next time. He’d bring it to the lodge. Then he’d be able to speak to the old men about fishing without their wry smiles and patronising.
A couple of the men nudged him, and the coffee spilled over onto his fingers.
‘Don’t fall in for Christ’s sake!’
‘Knowing him, he’d drown.’
‘Next time you make a tea, boy, make sure you put a life jacket on.’
They all laughed, again, and shook their heads, again.
‘Now, we’d better get on or we’ll miss the tide.’
‘Come and give us a hand, boy.’
If his shifts in the restaurant matched to the tides, William would help the old men prepare the boats to go out or unload them on their return.
‘Bring down the mackerel lines, boy.’
‘He’s brought bloody anchor rope, look. He asked you for mackerel lines.’
‘There. Beside you. The ones with the feathers. The mackerel feathers. Good grief. I’ll get them myself.’
William was allowed in the lodge to listen to the stories, to help prepare the gear and take it down the pier, but that was it. He wasn’t allowed on the boats. If he ever got too close to the edge or it looked like he might venture down the quay steps, the old men – like the gulls when the promenade bins were emptied – would fly into a panic.
‘You stay up there.’
‘Leave the crates on the top. We’ll get them. Stay on that bloody quay.’
‘Don’t come any further for God’s sake.’
These men – men who had faced wars, poverty and seas William couldn’t imagine; men who’d beaten sharks, Nazis and storms; men who laughed at lifejackets as health and safety gone mad – wouldn’t allow women, whistling or William aboard their boats. William’s family had been marked as bad luck, Jonahs. It had started with his great-grandfather, Arthur, whose picture was on the wall of the lodge. He had been a gunner at the old battery on the headland and had drowned trying to rescue barrels of rum floating down the coast from a wreck. Following generations of the family had then been blamed for barren seasons, lost nets, fish price slumps, diseased catches and lost boats. Williams’s father had died in a mine cave-in. He was the only person in the tunnel. A tunnel that had stood safely for a hundred years. He was the last person to die in the mines before they were gradually closed. His mother had been swimming off the beach when she was hit by a tourist in a self-drive boat. The inquest said she’d been knocked out then dragged along under the boat for thirty to forty minutes and back into the harbour before anyone noticed. ‘Deeply unlucky incident,’ the coroner had said. ‘Tragic, but simply bad luck.’
William looked out to the beach where buoys and rope now cordoned off the swimming area and the boating area.
‘Watch what you’re doing, boy. It’s like you’re in a dream today.’
‘Damn it. Look, this net’s torn.’
‘They’re not as strong as they used to be.’
‘They don’t tan them anymore.’
‘Remember the smell of that tanning vat in the old net lofts? I remember going in there as a boy when my mother worked in there. I used to love it.’
‘It looked lovely with all the nets hanging up and the old boys in there mending them and smoking. They used to give us hell for trying to climb up the nets.’
‘Good old days, they were.’
‘That’s when we knew we were doing alright: when the old boys said we could store our nets in there.’
‘What is it now?’
‘Surf shop, I expect.’
‘Restaurant. Tommy Lugg’s boy owns it. That’s where you work, isn’t it, boy?’
The men all looked at him reproachfully as he nodded at his feet.
‘Want to do something for us while we’re out do you, boy? There’s a box of old rope offcuts in the lodge. Splice some of them in where the net’s ripped. We’ll give you a few quid.’
‘I don’t know how to do it.’
‘Bloody hell. There’s no hope for this next generation. We’ll teach you how to do it another day.’
William nodded. They’d promised this before.
‘We’d better get going.’
William watched the boats leave then he went into town. Even out of season the cobbled high street was busy with shoals of tourists. The owners of the shops – many of them were the children of the old fisherman – studied these tides with the same voracity as the old men did those of the bay. They positioned their traps – baited with post cards, souvenir tea towels or fish and chips – where they thought the current would bring the crowds. They camouflaged the outsides with nets and buoys. Some had sand covering the bottom of the window displays, metal fish dangling from fishing wire, old oars, surfboards that had never seen the water and imitation ship’s wheels to give the tourists enough of a taste, enough of a hint of authentic nourishment that they would venture in where they could be hooked. One window had a “fisherman’s gansey” like the ones the old men wore. He pressed his face against the glass to read the price tag. It was more than the market rate for a tonne of sardines.
He cut down an alley to avoid the crowds. William kicked aside the packaging overflowing from the bins. Mussels from Thailand. Salmon from Canada. Frozen cod from China. The old men couldn’t provide enough fish regularly to supply the restaurants. For months the only full nets in the harbour had been the ones that held the plastic footballs outside the shops on the promenade. The old men had always talked of the death of the industry, but recently the talk had become less romantic, less exaggerated, less proudly martyred and was now accompanied with the scratching of palms and loud swallows. Whenever there was the first sniff of a decent catch, the bottom trawlers came in overnight and tore the shoals out from under them. The fish the trawlers caught was landed further north, iced and trucked away. It never got near the town unless it happened to come back breaded in the Co-op. The waitresses at the Old Net Loft would tell customers that all the fish had been caught in the bay that very day while chefs rushed to defrost prawns under the tap. Each night, the manager brought the taking into the kitchen to count. William and the other KPs watched in awe as she counted out the wads of notes. It was the same across the whole town. Since finishing school, he’d worked in most of the takeaways and restaurants. The pubs too. The small clique of owners – most of them school mates of his parents – all liked the way William worked hard and never complained about his wage. They all kept him in the back though, away from the customers. They knew it wasn’t worth the risk to have a Jonah at the front of house. In the summer, he fried chips and baked pasties alongside Polish, Czech and Lithuanian teenagers. In the winter, he scrubbed pans and emptied bins alongside strange men and women who somehow survived in the boom town with nothing but zero-hours contracts and food bank permits. Everyone William had gone to school with had left the town. They’d gone to university, to work in the big cities or moved to the cheaper towns inland of the bay.
The alley came out at the end of Pilchard Lane, and he decided to wind his way up through there. There were no lights on up in the flat. It was empty again. There was a new sign by the street level door with instructions on how to book it. Fisherman’s Rest, they called it now. Boutique holiday accommodation. He thought of the damp creeping up the walls to bloom on the ceiling corners, the tidal sneezing of the pipes, the floorboards that buckled underfoot and the leaks in the window that turned the curtains to sodden kelp. But then there was the feeling of carpet on bare toes, the oven and sink. All replaced now, he suspected. He pressed the key box by the door but it didn’t give.
He climbed up the hill with the houses thinning from terraces to estates beside him, gardens slowly growing bigger until they turned to farms. He went past the industrial estate at the top of the town that the old men talked of as the Steeple Woods of their youth. His car was parked in a layby just inside the town sign. William put the fishing gear carefully into the boot and sat in the driver’s seat. He turned the engine on and faced the heaters to demist the windows. The petrol gauge was below a quarter of a tank, hovering just above the red. It was hopefully enough to turn the engine over and keep the battery topped up for a couple of weeks. He’d need the heater and lights more as winter set in.
William picked through the bags on the passenger’s seat and in the foot well. There was a bit of sunflower oil left. Enough to fry the fish when he caught it tomorrow. The bread and cereal would last to payday on Friday if he rationed it carefully. Later in the week he could fry the fish without oil if he had to. At the restaurant they cooked fish in parsley, chilli and garlic or ginger and spring onion or wine and cream. The old men talked of malios; pilchards marinated in fish sauce, vinegar, bay leaves and onion. Plain was probably better anyway.
He read over the letter from the Department for Work and Pensions again. They’d found him a room in a house in the big town inland. He went through the sums again. If he could keep his hours up at the restaurant over winter, then he could afford the rent, but not the fuel to get to work. He didn’t want to leave the town anyway.
He put everything back into the bags and switched the ignition off. William got out of the driver’s seat and into the back. He locked the doors, took off his jeans and jumper then pulled the blankets up around him. He double-checked the door was locked then went back under the blankets. He lay and watched the light fade until he could no longer see the briar and brambles in the hedge. He thought again of the line pulling through the water. The excitement and fear he’d felt when the line suddenly felt different, like it was pulling against him. He had reeled in the extra weight, barely able to breathe, until he could see the black shape at the end of the line being pulled through the cloudy water. It was big too. But when it broke the surface, it was only a string of weed.
But it wasn’t just him. No one was catching anything. He knew he was being blamed though. The longer the boats had gone without a good catch, the more reminders and hints of his Jonah status there were. Soon they’d ban him from the lodge. He just needed one fish.
William pulled his jeans and jumper back on and got the fishing gear from the boot. He walked quickly until he was running down the hill into town. He went past the Old Net Loft which was closing. Waiters and waitresses wiped tables and stacked glasses, but a table of one of the trawler crews was still there. They travelled down to the town to celebrate when they had a big catch. Masses of plates were laid out before them, empty wine bottles and a bill plate overflowing in tips. They laughed and slapped each other on the back.
William went on. He crossed the promenade, passed the lodge and went along the quay then down the steps onto the rocks. The tide was on its way out so he could get down onto the lowest rocks, almost the seabed. He pushed the pieces of the rod together, mounted the reel and threaded the line through the bail and the eyelets then tied a spinner to the end.
His first cast felt good. The lure went far, and the action felt right, flowing like it was built into his genetics to do it. He let it sink then turned to wind it back in. It came back empty. He cast again. Nothing came back. He cast again and again into the dark. His finger ached from holding the line. A deep gully ran across it now. He kept going, stepping forward off the rocks onto the sand as the tide ebbed further. The lure started coming back with seaweed on it. He hauled in bigger and heavier pieces of kelp until the lure got stuck and he had to cut the line.
‘You’re pulling it in too slow,’ he heard from above him on the quay. ‘Reel it faster and it will be higher in the water out of the weeds.’
It was one of the old men. William climbed over the rocks and the steps to him.
‘And you’re releasing too early in the cast. Didn’t anyone ever teach you to fish properly?’
William didn’t answer but started to pack away the gear.
‘Didn’t you go out?’ he asked the old man.
‘The others went, but I didn’t bother. There’s no point. That bottom trawler went through earlier and hoovered up anything that was out there. It’s a waste of fuel to go out now.’
‘Maybe they didn’t get anything,’ William said but remembered them celebrating in the restaurant.
‘No, with the sonars and fish finders they have, they can’t miss them. They take whole shoals. They leave nothing behind. Sick, old, young, babies; they take them all. They’ll be nothing out there tonight’
‘Why do they harbour up in Newquay and not here?’
The old man laughed and looked like a mischievous child.
‘Years ago, when they first started coming down here, they used to shelter in our harbour. This was back when the stores and lodges were on the quay itself where the car park and kayak place is now. There was a toilet there too for the fishing crews. It was very basic: just a row of bench seats with a gully under them that brought water down from the pack house, through the toilets and out off the end of the quay. There were no drains or anything there then, you see.
‘Well, one day these trawler men came in with a ridiculous catch. Shoals and shoals of fish wiped out. The seabed all ploughed up. We tried saying to them that it stood to reason if you took them all there’d be none left to breed, but they didn’t care. They actually laughed. They were onto a quick buck. We were ready to give up but then a bunch of us thought we’d teach them a lesson.’ He giggled again. ‘When they’d unloaded the catch – tonnes and tonnes of it – they all went in the toilet before they went off to the pub. Some of us went down and bunged up the sea end of the gully so that the water built up under the toilets then we set light to a load of newspaper and floated it on tins down from the other end. These great big trawler men all came out screaming and bawling that their arseholes were on fire!’
The old man laughed so hard that he went into a fit of coughing.
‘It never made no difference though,’ he said. ‘They still do it, but it showed them we cared about it at least. Anyway, boy, I’m off home to bed. You’d best get home too. You’ll never catch anything here now. The tide’s gone out too far.’
The old man left, and William packed his lures and line back into the carrier bag. He slowly walked back along the promenade to the high street. He wouldn’t go back to the lodge tomorrow. Perhaps he could find someone to buy the rod. He could take the bedroom inland and find a job there. They must have cafes and pubs where he could get some work.
He stopped outside the Old Net Loft. It was closed now. The chairs were stacked on tables and the floor had a fresh mopped sheen. His reflection looked ridiculous among the oars and nets of the window display. He saw he was out of place.
He wasn’t the only one leaving anyway. The old men had talked about the ridiculous valuations they’d had on the harbourside cottages they’d been holding out in. William thought of the trawler crew laughing at the table earlier. Of the money that they’d counted out so nonchalantly. Of the money that was stolen, really, from the old men who’d built up and maintained the fishery. Of the money – thousands and thousands of pounds every night – counted out by the restuarants. Of the plastic crab pots and lifebuoys on display. Of the future shoals not given a chance to be. Of his hands chapped and raw from dishwater. He spat at the window. The phlegm hit the glass and ran down it. William laughed. He spat again and laughed again then took the thick end of the rod and drove it through the glass.
An alarm in the restaurant screamed and bawled. A window somewhere in the street opened. A door too. Footsteps approached. He threw his hood up and ran. He ran down the street, through an alley, between bins, down steps and out onto the quay where he crouched between stacks of crab pots. He laughed. The old men had refused for once to hide them away in the lodge like the council told them to. He panted and looked down at the water which lapped at the harbour wall. And there, in a clear patch of moonlight, was a glistening bass. A huge bass right there below him. He stayed there, among the ancient pots, and watched the tide come back in.
