A Witch In Winter (14 page)

‘Welcome to Castle Spit,’ he said, holding out his hand towards me. I grabbed it, he heaved me out of the boat, and there I was, on Seth’s grandfather’s island.

The overwhelming impression was of land barely holding out against the sea. It wasn’t quite as barren as it looked from the mainland – a few stunted shrubs survived in pockets between the rocks – but they were twisted by the winds and crusted with salt. Huge rocks, like granite teeth, jutted up against the sky, and gulls crouched on top, crapping on everything, cawing in a way that sounded very much like mocking laughter.

Only here and there was a note of cheer – a pale purple flower blowing in the wind caught my eye. It seem [ eyoloed impossibly fragile to be growing in such a hostile environment.

I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself against the wind. One look back at Winter, bathed in sunshine and chocolate-box pretty, then I followed Seth up the path.

‘Who’s she?’

As openings go it wasn’t encouraging. There’d been no answer to Seth’s knock at the small granite cottage. We’d spent some ten minutes rapping our knuckles sore on the painted wood, until eventually Seth said, ‘Well he can’t be out,’ and tried the door. It seemed to be locked. Seth rolled his eyes. ‘Oh for crying out loud. Who’s going to burgle him out here?’

The cottage only squatted, small and defiant beneath the shadow of the lighthouse tower. Then from behind us came a croaky, unused voice.

‘Who’s she?’

We turned around with a jump and behind us, on the path that led up from the rocks, was an old man in a yellow sou’wester, holding a rod in one hand and a brace of dead mackerel in the other. He had a grizzled white beard, pitch-black eyebrows, and eyes of the same slate grey as Seth, with deep-set wrinkles that spoke of years spent squinting against the sun and sea wind. As he stumped down the path towards us I saw his cruel limp and the battered crutch clamped under his right armpit.

‘Oh hi, Grandad. This is Anna.’

‘Huh.’ He elbowed past us and gave the door a hefty kick. It opened with a screech of damp wood and he pushed through, kicking it shut in our faces. Seth, seemingly unperturbed by this welcome, caught the door with his foot and held it open for me, and we passed through into a low, beamed room that seemed to be everything: kitchen, living room, bedroom. There was even a chamber pot beneath the unmade bed in the corner of the room, so it looked like it might be a toilet as well, some of the time. The whole place stank of smoke, fish and paraffin. Oh, and unwashed old man. It made Wicker House look like a palace.

On the opposite side of the room from the fusty bed was a Rayburn. The old man hobbled across to it, threw open one of the covers, and banged an empty cast-iron skillet on the hot plate. Then he flung the fish down with a slap on the stone sink by the window and, taking up a knife that was lying on the counter, began to sharpen it on a whetstone.

‘Anna, this is my grandfather, Bran Fisher.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. My voice sounded ridiculously faint and squeaky. I felt profoundly uncomfortable, but Seth was already kicking off his boots and opening the window to let some air into the room.

‘Don’t do that, you young oik, d’you want me to freeze?’ Bran grumbled. He stumped over and slammed the window shut, flipping the catch with the point of his knife. ‘What are you doing here anyway? And
her
.’ He stabbed with his knife in my direction before turning back to the fish.

‘Didn’t you get my message?’ Seth flopped on to a threadbare armchair, setting the springs squeaking in protest.

‘Message? What’s wrong with speaking to a body, like a civilized human being?’

‘Oh for Pete’s sake, Grandad, what do you expect if you never check your phone? I asked if Anna and I could talk to you about the fishing industry.’

Bran didn’t reply at first. Instead he set his knife to the fishes’ gills and severed their heads with a sickening crunch. Dark blood trickled onto the stone drainer.

‘Why?’ he said at last.

‘For a History project. We’re doing an essay about the local fishing industry. It was Anna’s idea,’ he added. Bran snorted.

‘What industry,’ he said, rather bitterly. It was a statement, rather than a question. Seth shrugged.

‘Well, I did say it was for History.’

The remark seemed to tickle Bran’s sense of humour and he laughed; a rusty, creaking laugh that ended on a wheezing coughing fit, leaving him red-eyed and spluttering.

‘History is about right, eh young Seth,’ he said, and with a swift, barely discernible movement of his knife he whipped up and down the backbone of the two mackerel, and flung four neat fillets on the sink. There was a sudden spitting crackle as he threw a knob of butter into the smoking skillet, then the mackerel fillets. The room filled with a deeply savoury smell that drove away the stench and made my mouth water. I suddenly realized I’d had no breakfast, and licked my lips involuntarily. Bran snorted again.

‘Well, she likes fish anyway. And you.’ He jerked his head at Seth. ‘I never yet knew you to turn down a meal – you’re a young streak of skin and bone like I was at your age.’

‘If you’re offering.’ Seth grinned from the depths of the armchair. He seemed totally unfazed by his grandfather’s hospitality, or rather lack of it.

‘Oh, aye. Not come to see me for a month and then turn up when there’s food on the table. That’s the young for you.’ He ground salt and pepper into the pan and then slapped the fish on to two chipped plates, setting them on the table with a crack.

‘You must fight over this one.’ He indicated one plate with a nod as he started shovelling fish from the other into his mouth with a fork. ‘I’ve no more clean plates to waste.’

‘Clean’ was pushing it. Both plates had visible traces of other meals, and oily thumbprints on the rim. But the fish smelled good and Seth jumped out of the armchair and pulled up a stool for each of us. Bran didn’t offer us any cutlery, so we ate with our fingers, picking at the hot but [t td ptery fish and juggling it from hand to hand until it was cool enough to eat. Finally Bran wiped his mouth, rinsed his plate under the cold tap, and said, ‘So it’s fishing you want, is it?’

I nodded and Seth added, ‘Whatever you can remember really, we can get the basic stuff from the library and the museum but anything you can tell us would be great.’

Bran made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a snort of disgust.

‘Remember? There’s precious few left that do remember. It’s all pleasure boats and fiddling
line-caught scor-lops
now.’ His gruff voice took on a mincing London twang. ‘When I was a lad it was man’s work, real man’s work. There were plenty killed on the trawlers, and plenty more maimed, and it was a hard life with fish widows in most towns. But you could be rich in three days if you happened on the right shoal. That was before all these quotas and fishing limits.’ He spat into the fireplace.

‘What about your grandad’s day?’ Seth asked.

‘That was different again. Small boats mostly, more channel fishing and day fishing. Lobster, as well as fish, of course, then as well as now. My grandad was a great one for his lobster pots. Shellfish, too. The Victorians dearly loved a whelk.’ He gave a crackling laugh and slapped his thigh. ‘But Winter was a fishing port long before my grandad’s day. They’ve been landing catches here since 1066 and before. There was even fishing families on Castle Spit, time was.’

‘Here?’ I said in surprise.

‘Oh aye. I know the Spit isn’t much to look at but it supported people for all that. There were three families here once. You can still see the ruins of their cottages.’ He heaved himself out of his chair, clutching at his leg with a groan. But he shook off Seth’s arm and hobbled over to the mantelpiece, where he took up a foul-smelling pipe and knocked out the ashes into the fire. ‘But the Spit was a different animal then, before the sea levels rose. Time was, you could walk out most days and the causeway only submerged at the highest tides. Now it’s under water twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and damn near impassable in winter.’

‘What’s causing the sea levels to rise?’ I asked timidly. ‘Is it global warming?’

‘Some say. I’ve got my own notions.’ He gave a derisive sniff and lit the pipe, puffing until the smoke filled the little room. Seth coughed.

‘D’you know what, Grandad, I’m opening the window no matter what you say.’

‘You can go outside if you don’t like my pipe,’ the old man said. ‘Fresh air do you good, at your age. At mine it’s as like to kill me as not.’

Seth snorted.

‘If anything kills you it’ll be that pipe, not an open window. I don’t think a bit of a breeze is going to harm someone who spends ei [whon. Bught hours a day fishing off the rocks. But I’m sure Anna would like to get some sunshine anyway.’

He led me outside and we sat in the sun on a little stone bench at the front of the cottage. The air was wonderfully crisp and fresh after the stench of the cottage and I breathed in great lungfuls as though I could store up a supply for our return. Seth saw me and smiled.

‘Sorry, it is a bit close in there, isn’t it? It’s Grandad’s disgusting pipe and his diet of fish, mainly. I don’t mind the fish so much, but the smoke makes me want to retch.’

‘I thought you smoked?’

‘I do. Well, I did. I’m trying to give up, which makes it all the harder to have Grandad puffing away in my face. I gave up before, but then Caroline smokes like a chimney so I started again when I was going out with her. Now I’m trying to give up again.’

‘Does he know?’

Seth shrugged. ‘Possibly. Probably not. I doubt he cares much either way. You don’t smoke, do you?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

‘How did you know?’ I asked. Was it some good-girl stamp on my face? To my surprise Seth blushed and looked down at his bitten nails.

‘What?’ I prodded.

‘Your hair,’ he said, looking a little sheepish.

‘My
hair
?’ I said in surprise, flicking a lock of it forward over my shoulder for examination. It looked just like everyone else’s – dark and ordinary in comparison to Caroline’s spectacular blonde tresses.

‘Not how it looks, you fool. The smell – it doesn’t smell of smoke.’ He gave my shoulder a friendly shove, but something in the movement, in our closeness, made me shiver and he looked away.

‘Sorry, sorry, I keep telling myself not to—’ He stopped and there was a moment’s tense silence. To break it I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

‘I was warned off you, you know. When I first came to Winter.’

‘What!’ It succeeded in changing the subject, that was for sure. Seth’s incredulous expression hovered between annoyance and laughter. ‘By who?’

‘By …’ It probably wasn’t fair to drop June in it. ‘By some girl, I forget her name. She told me you drank, smoked and had a tattoo, and …’ I stumbled over the last. I’d been going to mention June’s final comment, but then I remembered what she’d said, and Seth’s reluctance to discuss his past this morning, and thought better of it. Seth r [of ify">

‘Oh, I see, that’s why you noticed my tat! What was the other thing you were going to say?’

‘Oh, just, some other thing … I can’t quite remember.’ I ended lamely. His face hardened.

‘Let me guess; I got in trouble with the police for beating someone up, right?’

‘Um.’ I curled inside at his grim expression but there was no way out. ‘Yes.’

‘God, you do one stupid thing …’ His face was bleak, defeated. ‘I’m never going to live that down. Was that really the first thing they said about me?’

‘They also said you were the school’s official babe-magnet?’ I offered up. It worked and he cracked a reluctant smile.

‘Well, I suppose that’s one step above a bare-knuckle thug.’ He sighed and ran his hands through his hair in a gesture that looked weary and desperate. ‘Shall I tell you what happened?’

‘Not if you don’t want to.’ I felt horrible and wished I’d never brought the subject up.

‘You’re only going to wonder, if I don’t.’

That was true, and I nodded.

‘It was the year after my dad died – not that that excuses anything, I’m just explaining the context. I was fifteen and not – not coping very well, if you know what I mean. It was a Saturday and me and some mates went down to a fishermen’s pub, down by the harbour. It’s that one on the end of East Street.’

I nodded. I knew it, it was the kind of place where heads turned if you went in there, and piles of sick appeared outside on Sunday mornings.

‘We’d drunk – a lot – and the landlord, Reg, called time. But this fisherman from up the coast was pissed off that he hadn’t got his order in and started to go on a bit, you know, saying Reg was favouring locals – generally acting like a bit of a dick. I like Reg, he’s a friend of my mum’s, and I made some comment – I forget what – but just basically saying this guy was being a tosser. It was stupid but I was drunk and … well, that was it basically; I was drunk. And of course this fisherman started in on me, threatening to rip my balls off and use them as lobster bait, all this crap. I was kind of laughing it off and he was getting more and more annoyed. And one of his mates said, “Steady on mate. His dad was Fred Waters.” Meaning, I suppose, that this guy should cut me a break because of what happened to Dad, or something like that.’