The Fish Ladder (5 page)

I walked behind them, aware of the push of the wind from the north, and caught up with them as they came to the gap. On either side of the pathway the dunes were fenced in, grown over with spiky grass and lilac sea holly. There were more signs saying:
Erosion, Keep Off
, which Evie ignored, running to the top of one dune and scudding down the other side. Mum and I walked through the gap, the three of us arriving at the same time, each of us surveying the beach.

Another Place
is an installation of one hundred life-size casts of the artist Antony Gormley, although it took us a while to see them. Gradually the immobility of the figures intensified before the shift of the sea and the slowly revolving sky. The metal men became apparent, one by one, stretching into the distance. Their rows dis­­appeared into the grey water, neither waving nor drowning. Mum, with a gentle smile, absorbed the fact of them. Evie saw one, pointed, and ran to it, and then another, and then quite suddenly became aware of the extent of them, realised that they were all around her, and that the beach was dominated by them. She stopped running, and turned back to me, her laughter breaking free.

When I first came here, the ‘Antonys’ were new, austere, automaton-like. I was surprised how little time it had taken to soften them, rust rising to the surface of their cast-iron skins in a patina that looked like lichen. Their extremities had eroded, were becoming vague. Some of them were buried knee-deep in sand while others stood on previously hidden plinths. There was an echo of the upright timbers of Spurn Point, although they lacked the physical function of the groins, and were entirely without altruism. Yet they seemed united by a resolution to remain between the sea and the land. I stood next to one of the metal men and tried to follow his gaze. Looking out to sea. My task this summer, the task I had set myself, was to look back. To turn my back on the sea, on what it might mean, and walk back on myself. Out there was another place, the whole of life not lived, and, at some point, although very distant, I hoped, was death. But I didn’t want to look at the setting sun, or even the rising sun, as it dropped into or lifted out of the sea. I had unfinished business to attend to.

Taliesin was a poet whose story is told in
The Book of Taliesin
, one of the sacred texts of
Wales. Before he was a poet he was an ordinary boy whose name was Gwion Bach. Late one night a great lady, who was also a witch, took Gwion from his parents’ house. The witch had a son who was both dull-witted and ugly. She wanted wisdom for her child so that he might be made welcome at court, and also to compensate him for his appearance, about which she could do nothing. But she could do something about his stupidity, for there was a famous spell, which she made. The spell had to be stirred for a year and a day and the first three drops, when it was ready, would bestow the Grace of Inspiration. The rest would turn to poison. So because her son was lazy, as well as dull and ugly – and anyway grand people never do these things for themselves – she took Gwion from his parents’ house so he might stir the cauldron night and day.

The witch told Gwion, in no uncertain terms, that he must never taste the spell. But on the last day, which was the first day of the second year, three drops of the boiling liquid spat onto Gwion’s thumb, and burnt him. He was so hurt, so shocked, and so very, very tired that in his confusion he forgot about the witch’s words and put his thumb straight into his mouth to soothe it, thereby tasting the spell intended for her son, and in one vast, eternal, tiny instant, Gwion became wise. He knew, without being told, everything there was to know. And the first thing he knew was that the witch would kill him.

He ran away from the castle as fast as he could, the cauldron exploding behind him. But the witch, who was gathering herbs, felt the betrayal as surely as though a great door had closed far beneath her. She came after him. When he saw her, Gwion turned into a hare, and ran. But she became a dog, a great grey long-limbed hunting dog, and she followed the hare and turned him until there was no land left for him to cover.

So Gwion became a fish, and he slipped through the reeds into a lake, where he hid from her. But the witch became a she-otter, all needle teeth and oily pelt, and she chased Gwion all around, until he jumped from her, became a bird, and flew.

She turned into a hawk. No sooner had Gwion gained the blue heights than he saw her beating over him. He caught sight of her curving talons, saw her wing feathers fanned like knives, and heard her
arr-wah
cry. He watched as she retracted her wings, the wind spiralling a tunnel around her, its voice caught humming and whirring through her feathers, and all the time she came falling, faster and faster still until the fear in his heart was so great that he felt it must burst. Yet at the moment that she reached him and righted herself, her wings releasing the song of the wind, her thorny toes clasped air.

Gwion was dropping away from her, a golden grain of wheat, too fine for her scissored feet to hold.

He came to rest in a barn, amid a heap of grain.

The witch became a black hen, high-crested, with yellow claws, and she scratched at the grain; Gwion’s terror was so great, and at last she found him. Ate him. She could feel that he was inside her, and she was glad.

But Gwion wasn’t dead, although he was at the end of his strength. He knew that he was inside the witch, and used all that he had left to make one final shift. He became a baby. He grew inside her into the most beautiful child the world would ever see. The witch determined to kill him as soon as he was born. But when her time came upon her, and she looked at the lovely little boy, she knew she couldn’t do it. So she threw the baby into an old leather bag, and tossed it into the sea.

There was a poor man fishing at the mouth of a river. He had caught nothing all day long and had decided, very sadly, to go home. Just then he saw the leather sack, which had caught against a pole in the weir, and he fetched it, and opened it. He took the boy ashore, this special golden child, and lifted him gently onto the back of his horse, heaping up the blankets, all he had with him, to make a bed. And of course the man and his wife had no children of their own, so they kept him, and they loved him, and called him Taliesin. Which means: Radiant Brow.

As the child grew up he told astonishing tales. His voice was as pure as water, and he became a famous bard, singing at the court of King Arthur, and other things, which we don’t need to know.

What matters for this story is that the life of Taliesin, the only life he knew, began at the mouth of a river.

The first time I came to this place was by accident. Or rather, the first time that I came here knowingly. I had been to the read-through of a play. I was tired and cramped from being indoors, my eyes sticky from staring at the page. I had longed to walk on a beach. As Liverpool is a port it seemed obvious that if I headed north then sooner or later I would find one. So I had left the writer, the cast and the director, with their curling sandwiches and their vending-machine coffee, and had driven from the City Centre, past the Cunard, East India and Exchange buildings until the seafront gave way to the fragmented, potholed road, cracked and meandering, which ran alongside the docks. My car hugged the walls and fences and the razor-wire security until finally the road opened out, the city became residential again, and I saw a sign:
Antony Gormley’s
Another Place. And because I didn’t know about the metal men, and had forgotten about wanting to be on a beach, I grew curious, and I followed the signpost, and it brought me here.

Now, I had been adopted as a small child and I knew little of the circumstances of my birth. Mum and Dad had told me that I was conceived as the result of an
indiscretion
during my mother’s engagement, and that my mother had married her fiancé shortly after I was born. But – and there was always a
but
– the condition for this gesture, this saving from disgrace, had been the giving up of the evidence, the discarding of the cuckold’s horns. I remembered asking if that meant I was a bastard, as I had been called the name at school, my cheeks more pink with worry over using a bad word before my parents than any possible revelation about what the word might mean, and then Mum saying that ‘illegitimate’ was the proper way of saying it, though I wasn’t, not any more, because they had adopted me. That was the story that Mum and Dad told me, one night, when I was eleven years old, after I had finally plucked up the courage to ask. We never discussed it again. How, or where, it had all taken place, there was nothing written down, other than the district of my birth, unavoidably preserved on my birth certificate along with the name of my birth mother and a thin blue line, a hyphen, that represented my father.

So on that day I had come to the beach for what I presumed was the first time in my life and found it familiar. In fact I was overwhelmed by the idea – not just that I had been there before – but that I had been born there.

A few years ago salmon were found in the Mersey for the first time in two hundred years. The fisherman who found Taliesin hoped for salmon, which is why there was a pole in the weir. A net was strung across the river mouth, at the place where the river meets the sea, to catch them as they returned to their breeding grounds. Before they stopped coming, when the effluent pouring into the rivers made the water too dirty to sustain them, salmon were common. In
The Water-Babies
, Charles Kingsley tells of a petition from the children in an English workhouse begging not to be fed salmon more than twice a week. In days gone by this magnificent fish was considered food for the very poor. It still is: Alaskan tinned salmon even now cross the seas to Africa, complete with a book of recipes, the shelf-life of a can, six years.

In addition to being their breeding grounds the high pools to which salmon make their way are also, for the most part, their graves. As the disintegrating bodies of the parent fish fragment and float back towards the sea they sustain the tiny smolts. It is a curiously sacramental death. Birth. Dark there, under the sea, the cool fresh easing towards them, the late spring floods bringing a scent, a peaty memory, diverting them from their diet of prawns. How do they know when to respond? What calls them?

On that day, I’d had a sense. I’d felt a pull, a draw, as though something were listening. I’d felt it in the space around me. It was so strong that I had turned in my tracks, away from the shore and away from the Antonys, and walked back, towards the land. Later, I wondered if the cleaning up of the Mersey had contributed to my feelings on that day. I wondered if I was able, finally, to perceive something that until then the dirty water and chemical spill had smothered. Drowned. Or perhaps the time just happened to be right; everything in alignment, a coincidence.

So I had walked towards the children’s playground, the one that had so captivated Evie. There was an ice-cream kiosk, and two ladies waddled towards it along the same boardwalk path, a young girl between them in a green crocheted dress, a matching hat, her eyes wobbling behind thick lenses. Above and behind them hundreds of knots whirred in their two-tone winter plumage. The knots vanished briefly, then reappeared, with the slight tilt of a Venetian blind as their underbellies, which were the colour of the sky, made them momentarily invisible, although the air still crackled with their passing.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘is there a hospital around here?’

‘There used to be,’ said one of the ladies, and pointed through a gap in the sea wall. ‘It’s just up there.’ It was a convent, they told me, and the sisters still lived there, but it wasn’t a hospital any more. Quite grand, it had been, a sort of private nursing home.

‘I see. Thank you.’

I followed their directions and came to the house. Inside the hallway was a brass plaque dedicated to the Sisters of Mercy,
who have cared for the sick in this place for over one hundred years
. No longer a hospital, but a guest house with a reception, which was empty. There was a bell, which I chose not to ring. Behind the desk there was a door into the main house, with a Yale lock. But it was on the latch. I eased inside.

The house opened around me, and grew larger, or perhaps I grew small in relation to it. There was a rectangular stained-glass window above a staircase; I felt certain that I knew it, that I had seen it before. I found a chapel, and what I took to be a baptismal font although it could have been a holy water stoup. A grille divided the house from the nuns’ residence, and a few aged sisters sat in the pews, white as doves, tucked into prayer. An electric candle stand illuminated a painted metal relief of Our Lady, and I thought of school and Physics, the simple circuits and fairy-light bulbs.

‘Can we help you?’ As I turned and walked back into the hallway I almost knocked over two of the sisters.

‘Oh! Yes. I’m sorry. There was no one in reception.’ The sisters waited. One of them was about my own age, while the other was ancient, the crown of her veiled head barely reaching the shoulder of the younger nun. I found myself thinking of a pepper-pot.

‘I was wondering if it might be possible that I was born here?’ The nuns seemed unfazed by the question.

‘Yes,’ the younger one replied, ‘it is. In fact, if you were born in a hospital, in this part of Liverpool, then there was nowhere else. What’s your name?’

‘We can look up your records,’ said the older nun, ‘though I’m sorry that they’re not of the best.’