The Silver Dark Sea Read online

  SUSAN FLETCHER

  The Silver Dark Sea

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Fishman of Sye

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  The North Wind

  Chapter Three

  The Seals with Human Hearts

  Chapter Four

  The Giants and what became of them

  Chapter Five

  The Loss of the Anne-Rosa

  Chapter Six

  The Message in a Bottle

  Chapter Seven

  The Wild Sheep and the Stormy Night

  Chapter Eight

  The Man of Sea Shanties

  Chapter Nine

  Kitty and the Jellyfish

  Chapter Ten

  The Silvered Nights

  Chapter Eleven

  The Puffins and the Mother

  Chapter Twelve

  The Blonde and the Bounty Inn

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Imps at the Farm called Wind Rising

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Sly Tide, or the Perigean Spring Tide, or the Highest Tide of all

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Claw and the Prediction

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Nurse and the Wasted Heart

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Twins, the Fishman, and the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Son

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Widow and the Man from Sye

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Stranger, Celia and the Night-Time Sea

  Chapter Twenty

  The Woman with the Inland Life

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  From the reviews of The Silver Dark Sea

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Fishman of Sye

  Once, there was a man. He was bearded and kind. He lived on an island in a stone-walled house with a tap that dripped, and a small peat fire. He had no friends to speak of. All his family were gone.

  In his youth, he had been strong. He’d carried hay bales in one hand and lifted bags of grain up into the highest rafters. His farm had been neat and his pigs were fat; his shoulders browned in good weather. A handsome man, also. He loved a girl with sun-coloured hair and sometimes she’d smile as she passed him, so that his heart fluttered and his mouth ached. But above all else, he was shy. He’d blush when he heard her name; he’d stumble and not speak for days. She is too pretty, he thought to himself. And in time the sun-haired girl went away. She married another and the seasons blew on. Time passed. His beard greyed.

  In the evenings he’d think of her. He’d sit by the fire and say I am old, now. How did it happen? The years had gone too quickly. His life had flown by, leaf-dry.

  No children, no wife.

  What a small life …

  One night he was so sad he could not sleep. The loss kept him wide-eyed. He lay on his back, stared at the ceiling; the sea unfolded in the dark. And the day that followed, he left his home. He walked to the north of the island where the grass was wind-bent, where the skies were fast and the sea thundered. Why was he here? He didn’t know. But the wind tugged at his coat and foam skittered across the cold sand and the gulls above him called out no! No! He found himself on a stony shore.

  I am so tired, he thought. I am so tired of being me. I am tired of being alone.

  He thought of all the wasted years. Why had he never spoken of love? Why didn’t I tell her? Or see the wide world? He hadn’t stepped off the island, not once. It all seemed too late, now – too late.

  He cried. He wept like a child.

  But then he opened his eyes.

  He opened them and saw a curious thing.

  There was a man in the water. Not driftwood? Or weed? No – it was certainly a man. He bobbed, on the waves. He had black hair – wet, bluish-black – and a beard, and very pale skin. His eyes were round like a seal’s were. He did not blink or turn away.

  Who is …?

  Who might swim, in such waters? With these waves that were crashing like glass? And with a north wind blowing as strongly as this? Yet this sleek-haired man did not struggle. He was not drowning or asking for help. He simply floated. He seemed to smile, as he floated there. And then he raised his arms – he raised them above him, pressed his palms together as if he was in prayer – and he threw those arms forwards so that his fingertips broke the water and his head and body followed in an arc. He dived into the sea, and was gone.

  Briefly, there was nothing.

  Then, in his wake, there was a tail – a huge, silver-flashing tail. It raised itself up, like a mirror. And it sank down where the black-haired man had been.

  The pig farmer stood very still.

  He blinked, shook his head. A fish? Or a man? Neither? Or both? And at that moment, at that precise moment, as the sea rushed onto the stones at Sye and as a lone gull settled on the rocks nearby, he heard a voice very clearly. It was not a human’s voice. It did not feel as if someone was standing next to him; it was a deep, soft voice that seemed to be all around him so that the farmer turned, and kept turning.

  It said this: there is hope.

  The voice came off the cliffs. It rose up from the stones. He looked, but there was only the foam, fizzing, and the white lace of broken water where the tail had been.

  That night, the farmer sat by his peat fire with a rug wrapped around him. He knew what he had seen. He’d seen a kind, human face and then a fish’s tail. He also knew what he had heard.

  In the days that followed, he spoke of it. Do you know what I saw? At the cove called Sye? Some laughed at him, of course. But others listened with shining eyes for their own hearts were tired, or partly so, and they longed for this to be true. Hadn’t there been a legend, once? In a leather-bound book? They thought so. There had been a story just like the pig farmer’s story – of kind eyes and a raised silvery tail.

  Oh, how they wanted to believe it. They longed for this half-man, half-fish.

  They wanted to hear there is hope for themselves as they stood by an evening sea.

  The storms, in time, passed away. Winter moved into a dappled spring. And one day, as the farmer rubbed the bristled backs of his pigs, he heard a voice behind him. A woman’s voice – warm and shy. Excuse me? Hello?

  Her hair was no longer sun-coloured for she was older, also. But he knew who she was.

  They married. She mended the broken tap in his house so that it did not drip. She rubbed his joints with linseed oil in the evenings and he combed her long, snow-white hair. He told her about the Fishman of Sye. I saw him – with my own eyes … And she nodded, believing him. For what wasn’t possible? What could not come to be? She had spent her whole life missing him – and she was with him, now.

  They lived long lives together. Happy ones, too – they would sit outside his house as the sun lowered and whisper of their happiness. My darling wife … My love. They are buried in the churchyard, side by side. They are in the furthest corner, near the blackthorn trees, and if you are ever on that island you can see them if you wish to, lay some flowers down.

  * * *

  There is hope.

  It’s strange, as all myths are. It is a familiar story, too, for many parents have whispered the tale of the Fishman to their children at night, or at bath-time, or on car journeys to pass the hours. He is ageless, they say, and cannot die. He lives as the fish do, in the quiet, thick-green depths, but sometimes he will surface and look over to the land. Even now, there is an islander who says he’s seen the Fishman – his loving smile, his scales that catch the light as he dives. Others say, too, that if you ever feel comforted, or if you ever hear there is hope or wo
rds like it – all will be well or you are not alone – as you walk by the sea or as you lower one foot down into a boat, or as you watch the tarpaulin on the log-pile shake in the wind, or as you go to draw the curtains in the evening and pause because the last light on the water is beautiful, like gold, or as you find your boots reflected in the wet, firm, low-tide sand it means the Fishman is passing. He is offshore, watching the island. It means he knows you are hurting – and he does not wish you to be.

  It was hard to have faith in that part. When I heard there is hope on a coastline, it was my own self, speaking – me, as my own comfort, trying to keep myself afloat. But what harm does it do, to believe in such stories? Mostly I think that it is better to.

  One

  There are stories that come from the sea and those are good stories. They are the best I have heard, by far. I know stories, but none are better than those I was told in coastal homes, with sour-smelling oilskins drying by the fire or the pale chalk of whale-bones standing on their ends. I smiled into my hands, as I listened. A brown-eyed man would ask have I told you about …? I’d reply no – tell me … And we’d lean forward towards each other so that our chairs creaked. Salt on the windowpanes.

  Stories of loss, mostly. Of the love that came before that loss.

  I crawled inside them, cave-like, and held my breath as I looked up.

  There were too many stories to count. The sea brought them in, daily. Like the wide, glassy straps of weed that came ashore on the highest tides, they caught the light and beckoned me. A story? I’d come closer and kneel. I’d stare, as they were told. And they were always more beautiful than I thought they’d be when I first heard them, or found them in the sand.

  That’s how I imagine it. It’s the best explanation I can give. There were so many stories on that island that it felt like they came in on the tide. Every day, there was something. On every pebbled cove or beach there were gifts left by the sea – plastic bottles, nylon ropes, shoes, a tyre, cottonbuds, the spokes of an umbrella, a sodden child’s toy. Worthless? To some, maybe. But they were treasures, to others. A parched curve of driftwood could be dragged home and kept; a message in a cola bottle might change a life. At the beach called Lock-and-Key, there were lone wellington boots set upside down on its fence-posts – boots that had been washed up on that beach and were useless without their other, missing halves – and I’ve heard them called unsightly, this row of coloured boots. But I came to like them. I ran my hand across them when I walked on Lock-and-Key. I felt like I was one of them – weathered, and waiting. Fading and softening and watching the sea.

  That’s me, perhaps: the forager. I’d be drawn to the shards, to what life leaves behind. As if I had nothing, I gathered what other people would pass by or step over – a mussel shell, still hinged, or a length of sky-blue rope. I trod along the line of weed and plucked, bird-like, at the shinier things. And in that same way I hoarded all the stories that reflected the light and dazzled me – like the whale that answered the foghorn, or the phosphorescent night. There was a tale of grief I heard – with puffins in it, of all things – and I fell upon that tale as if it were unsalted water, water I could drink. It nourished me, somehow. A tale, too, about a single lantern that bobbed on the horizon every Christmas Night.

  So yes – it was like beachcombing. It was all treasure to me. In my kitchen, I kept shells; I stuck briny feathers in vases. And in my head I laid out the stories the islanders told me – the caves, the Fishman, the flakes of silver, the seals who are wiser than humans, the girl who floated like a patchwork star.

  I was born inland. I grew up where the wildest water was a puddle, or a filmy pond in a park. Stories were harder to come by there. Trees bowed with the rain, and I found sparks of beauty in a flowerbed or a pigeon’s trembling, iridescent neck but it was not enough. I hungered for more – I sensed, always, that there was something more than this life that I was living. And then I fell in love when I thought I never would, and I came to live on an island so that the lines by my eyes deepened and my hair thickened with salt and ghostly-white crabs flitted over my feet and buried themselves in the damp sand, and every sea was different from the sea that had come before it – pummelling, or silent, or brown-coloured and flat. And the man I loved would tell me his stories. In time, others did. They poured whisky into my glass and settled beside me. They opened old books, said look … I have known people who believed absolutely that a gull could talk our language, and that the souls of their drowned friends could be found in the rattle and foam.

  I heard her voice in the water. I did.

  And I’ve felt his hand on my hand, on that boat. You have my word.

  I do have their words – I do. I swagger with the weight of my wordy, priceless stash. And when I re-tell their stories now, I know that some people mock me or mock the island, and they shake their heads at the impossibilities – a Fishman? OK, right … I understand that – for I was, briefly, like them; I too have had my private doubts. But so much has been lost and found. So many things have come to pass that have no explanation and I half-wonder if you cannot believe in such stories unless you have lived or stayed in a house by the sea – until you have lost washing to a sea breeze or been bruised by the rain drumming on your anorak hood whilst trying to guide a dinghy in, in the blackest night. Until you have waited for a boat that does not come. Or until that boat is found but its crew is not. It is another way of living and not all can stand it. There is the word salt-bitten; it comes when hope is lost.

  No, you cannot trust the sea – even now. Even with our satellites that tell us where we are. Even with our sonars, radars and computerised charts. Even with our space travel and vaccinations and our atom bombs and cloned sheep, and even though we can make a new human life in a Petri dish, we still cannot reach the furthest sea floor. We cannot breathe underwater or decode whale song. We cannot find a body, when it goes overboard. We may know that a human heart has ventricles and can be shocked into beating again, but we do not have the words for what immense and extraordinary emotions it can feel – what heights and depths, together. Love is too small a word – too small.

  Abigail Coyle used to tell me, we only know the foam … A sweep of her arm, over the sea. And I’d walk home understanding her.

  We do not know it all. That’s what I’d tell myself, when standing waist-deep in water. When I sat on a boat I’d think of what was beneath me – the deep, deep chasms, the secrets and the dark.

  This island is small, neatly shaped. Its cliffs are high as towers and streaked with white from the roosting birds. These cliffs echo with bird calls and to look up at them from a rocking boat is to feel tiny, and cold. Feathers come down and settle by your feet. They drift on the water like dreams.

  There aren’t many trees, on this island. Nor are there many houses, but there are some; they all have missing tiles, damp window frames and peeling paint. Their names are blunt: Wind Rising, or Crest. Calor gas bottles stand by back doors.

  There is litter on the beaches. The wheel-arches of cars are brown with rust.

  Strands of grey fleece shake on wire.

  There is a lighthouse, too. It stands at the north end of the island and swings its slow, pale beam over the fields, the bedroom walls and the night-time sea.

  Let us call it Parla. Names do not matter, as they never truly do in the tales I know. What matters are the people themselves – the souls who have lived on this island and how they have felt on its sand and rocks. Many generations of firm, resolute people have mended their nets here, or pressed their knees onto sheep as they’ve sheared them. The men have caught gannets for eating; women have gathered seaweed at low tide, with baskets strapped to their backs and their skirts hitched up. They have fed their children kale and sour milk, sang their sea songs, and they’ve lived in fear of God and the waves. That was years ago. But there are still photos – blurred, soft-edged.

  Now, the Parlans live by other means – sheep, tourists, sponge cakes, crafts that they sell on the int
ernet and send to the mainland in protective wrap. One woman knits teacosies and baby clothes; another paints in an attic room with skylights that close themselves suddenly in the gusty, north-westerly winds. No-one eats gannets these days. But they still have their own vegetable patches, and still reach for eggs under downy behinds. They still stand on the headland from time to time with their arms held out, and let their coats fill up with the wind. They still drink too much, or some do. They know the moon’s cycle as their forefathers did.

  And the sea. They still know the sea or as much as any human can. It is part of them, in their blood; it shapes their lives as the sea shapes a stone over the months and years. Some cannot sleep inland. They cannot be where there aren’t sea sounds – for Parla is never, ever quiet. Even in calm weather there is the lap lap lap against the quayside or the clack of mussel shells as the water rises over them. At Tap Hole, when the tide is rough or at its highest, the sea sprays through the single hole in its roof – a puff and a splattering, like a whale’s breath. Near the harbour, there are cliffs which are curved to make a bowl of water so that the sea is trapped, or nearly; it says stash, stash, as it tries to get out. The water here is weedy. There is an oily shine to the sea, at The Stash – and rubbish. Once, a rubber duck – and no-one knew why. A well-travelled duck, they called it. George Moss took it back for his son and it sits by their bath, even now.