The Fish Ladder (4 page)

My heart pulsed at the base of my throat; my mouth was dry. I was still so tired. One hour’s sleep was not so much and I was jittery with adrenalin. We were three miles into the North Sea, the murderous estuary to the west. At some point the man was likely to leave – I had hoped this would happen while I slept, leaving me to follow him, leisurely, off the peninsula. But no, it would be he who followed me. I didn’t believe he had come along the beach, but the sand was too slow, and tiring at best, exhausting to walk along. The road would be in full view of him. In spite of this I decided to remain visible – he seemed settled for a while – and make distance. When I reached the road of tiles, I ran.

Because most of me suspected the man to be harmless, I could not find the necessary edge. My fight-or-flight-mechanism was folded, resting, just below the surface, and I could not access it. I was irritated that I was running away from a place that I had come so far to see. I simply could not believe the literary irony of not getting to the lighthouse, which was wonderful, full-bodied with black-and-white hoops, like an Everton mint, its decommissioned light held in a liquorice cage with diamond sugar panes. I knew that, if I was a man, and I was ten years younger, I probably wouldn’t care. I was irritated that my long blonde hair and slight frame rendered me vulnerable, unexpected. I wished I’d brought a hat.

A hare appeared; huge, brown, with unmistakable black ears, the slightly devil eye. It seemed so large that it filled the road. I stopped. Quite unperturbed, it loped off in the direction of the river. Had it come from the beach? What a thought. And I was happy – suddenly everything was all right. If I hadn’t run away from the madman, I would never have met the hare. I followed it. The riverbank, so recently a place of terror, seemed, under the warm sun, quite lovely. The light on the water rendered it accessible, possibly this was also an effect of the receding tide. Even as I watched, a cargo ship entered the river mouth, brightly coloured and flat as cardboard, bound for Hull and full of purpose. On the far bank, impossibly far away, was a town, rows of towers and cubes, something made on a children’s TV show, from matchboxes and toilet rolls. Not Hades, but Cleethorpes.

I walked along a narrow track through short bright grasses following the path of the hare. Every so often it reappeared before me, in exactly the same aspect, facing west, towards the river. Its hazel eye seemed to appraise me, before it turned once again and loped off, apparently as tame as a cat. Suddenly all around me were oystercatchers. I heard them before I saw them and laughed out loud when I did. They floated like an articulated carpet, like something from
Arabian Nights
, washing over the sand and onto the riverbank, pouring through grass, across the track, opening to circumvent a stone, or a bit of wood, and closing around it on the other side, their shifting pattern hovering above a movement smooth as castors. And their funny, chirruping, pulsing whistle – soft as mechanical birds’. I supposed they had gone to the river, because quite suddenly they disappeared, and it was as though they were never there.

I saw a fisherman ahead of me. Broad-shouldered, yet slender. My eye was drawn by the movement of his back. I could avoid him, he hadn’t seen me, but I was not afraid. I continued to walk along the path. He was reeling in his line. He glanced at me and nodded. There was a smile implied in the gesture and humour in his expression, although that could just have been an effect of the sunlight, his eyes half closed against it. I returned the greeting, inclining my head fractionally, a Japanese quality to this silent exchange of nodding courtesies. I thought of the willow pattern, the blue-and-white plates, although they were from China and the figure on the plate carried a whip. The fisherman looked at the tip of his rod, and fiddled with it, the movement slightly exaggerated; I had probably surprised him. I knew that he was checking the whereabouts of the hook, and that this was for my benefit. So I looped behind him, allowing him room to cast. I walked on without looking round.

The hare had gone, the riverbank was not my demesne, so I made my way up to the road, then retraced my steps along the beach, towards the mainland.

I was curiously disappointed as I passed by the prefab buildings. It seemed silly, now, to have been afraid, to have abandoned my journey. I found the car. Noticed immediately that one tyre was low, and liquid seeped from underneath the engine. I reached down, touched the liquid; it was clear and had no smell. Water. That was something, then. I glanced at the wheel on the front driver’s side, examined the tyre. It was soft, but not too bad and there was no obvious damage to it. I listened, but there was nothing, no hiss of air. The cap had been removed. So. Not a puncture. I opened the door and reached for a bottle of water; it was misted with condensation. I flicked the switch that released the bonnet. With one hand I held the bottle as I drank, long, slow, cool. With the other, I raised the bonnet. I flexed my foot against the bumper, watching for the movement of the water in the radiator reservoir. It seemed OK. I checked the container that fed the windscreen wipers. Tipped the rest of my bottle into it.

A man appeared. I hadn’t heard him approach and there was no sign of a car but, at this point, nothing surprised me. He was about sixty, heavy set, wearing baggy denim dungarees and a pair of Crocs. No socks, no shirt; indeed, he appeared to be naked beneath the dungarees, the sides unbuttoned to reveal pale flesh, but he wore a navy-blue-and-white bandana around his head, Hell’s Angel fashion. Presumably to hide his encroaching baldness if the few wispy tufts that were visible were any indication of what was underneath. A large pair of binoculars hung around his neck, gold sovereign rings gilded the fingers that rested there. A twitcher.

‘Someone’s let your tyres down,’ he offered, surprisingly well informed. ‘And there’s liquid coming out of your engine.’ The pitch of his voice was light but nasal and this, in combination with his elongated Hull vowels, created an incongruously effeminate effect in such a big man. I noticed a large hooped earring.

‘I think it’s from the air conditioning,’ I said. He was standing in the long grass at the side of the car park, and seemed unwilling to step onto the tarmac.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Well. I can see that you’re on your own, so I’ll leave you in peace. Not disturb you.’ And he set off in the direction of the beach. I smiled to myself, trying to work out what he’d have said if I’d had company, but was nonetheless touched by his gentle grace, and the implied understanding of what it is to be alone. I looked around me. How many pairs of eyes? What a curious place. I got into the driver’s seat. I was about to turn the key in the ignition when I saw the hare again. Or rather, a hare. It was cropping grass on the bank ahead of me in more or less the place where the man had stood a few moments earlier. The word
psychopomp
formed in my mind. Meaning spirit guide.

I turned the key. The hare looked up at the sound, enquiring, deer-like, but unruffled. It went back to pulling at the grass. I put the car into reverse, and left.

Notes on
Humber

Mersey

Mum unfolded a sheet of newspaper and spread it on the table in front of us.

‘I’d like to see this; I’m certain Evie would enjoy it.’ It was half of a page cut from the
Liverpool Daily Post
and showed a photograph of a figure on a beach. There was a seagull standing on its head. The headline read:
Fate Of Iron Men Decided Tonight
, although the cutting was a few years old. It referred to Antony Gormley’s installation,
Another Place
. Evie peered briefly at the picture, then went back to taking the order for breakfast on a spiral-bound waitress’s notepad. I said I’d like toast, as it was the only thing she felt comfortable making, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Are you sure they’re still there?’ I asked.

‘I should think so,’ said Mum. ‘I don’t think anyone will move them now. We could have a picnic. And see anything else that you think might be of interest.’ I looked at Mum and then back at the newspaper cutting.

‘Anything?’

‘Anything that you think we might like to see.’

I wondered how long Mum had been waiting for this moment. ‘It’s very close to the Convent,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Well, I remember you’d said it was somewhere near there. If you wanted us to have a look at it we could.’ Mum had that slightly too wide-eyed expression that she always wore when she had an ulterior motive, or was planning some kind of surprise. Evie came back in with the toast.

‘Would you like to go on a picnic?’ I asked her.

‘You said we were going to the cottage today.’ Evie was frowning. This was true.

‘What if we go to the cottage tomorrow? We can spend another day with Grannie.’

Evie agreed to the picnic, although warily, as though uncertain whether or not she had been cheated. She helped us to make sandwiches, pack apples, find the chocolate. We filled a flask, containing more chocolate, and then the three of us set off for Liverpool.

I parked the car close to the beach. Tall fences and razor-wire barriers marked one edge of the car park. On the other side were the docklands. Empty metal cranes clustered over cargo containers that were heaped like giant boiled sweets. Dunes the colour of sackcloth spilled beneath the fence, flowing north in rumpled bolts, until the coast bent them out of sight. Ahead of the dunes, in the river mouth, was a wind farm, but the blades were still. There was a boating lake, an oval lagoon, but it was empty. The only thing that seemed to move was the coarse, springing grass that grew all around us and pulled, tentatively, against the wind as though taking part in a tug-of-war. I felt edgy, as if I was on display, a Master of Ceremonies, although of what I couldn’t say. Even the fact that we’d brought sandwiches seemed significant, somehow indicative of a need for self-sufficiency, a desire to remain apart. I tried to push the feeling away from me and enjoy the day for what it was. A picnic, after all, was an adventure; but Evie, for reasons of her own, became uncooperative, insolent, and would hardly move from the car. Suddenly Mum, who had been tapping ahead with her walking stick, turned on Evie.

‘This isn’t about you, this is Mummy’s special place, and you are spoiling it!’

I looked at Mum.
Mummy’s special place
. I was oddly thrilled to hear Mum fight my corner, even against my daughter. Even so, we couldn’t get Evie out of the car park. She wrapped herself around one of the few trees planted to act as a windbreak. I was aware of the pressure inside my head. Eventually I snapped
:

‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ while trying to recall if it was illegal to shout at your children in England, or just bad form. We glared at one another.

‘This is a magic place,’ I said, feeling as if I was falling down a hole. ‘On the other side of the dunes is a portal to another world.’ Evie looked unconvinced. At the edge of the boating lake signs the size of postcards read:
Beware of Blue Green Algae. Do Not Touch the Water. Danger
. About five hundred yards away – painted brightly and hedged in with shrubs to protect it from the wind – was a children’s playground. It had snagged at the edge of Evie’s vision and, I finally realised, was the cause of her dissent. Beyond stretched the dunes, characterless and dull, over which the calico sky was drawn down like a blind, a lighter area overhead denoting the position of the sun. We had to pass through the dunes to get to the beach. The playground was the only thing Evie could see that was of interest to her. But she had liked the word
portal
. I wasn’t sure why I’d said it. I wondered if Evie knew what it meant, or if I did, for that matter. It had sounded vaguely sci-fi, indicative of travel.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Just come with me through that gap in the sand and you’ll see. If you don’t like it we can come back and go to the playground.’

‘You promise?’

‘I don’t need to promise. You know it’s true. In fact, we can go there anyway. Just come with me and Grannie first.’

A boardwalk led to the gap through the dunes. I wondered who swept it, who maintained the space, and how often they needed to do it.

Portal.

Evie let go of the tree, her eyes lingering briefly on the upright posts of the playground, the only brightness in the muted landscape, then looked towards the dunes with as much apprehension as though she were going for an injection. Mum was already halfway there, the steadfast click of her walking stick on the wooden path a tortoise challenge to Evie’s hare. Evie let go her breath then ran after her.