The Catch
The man in the corner shop sold Naomi a bottle of milk, a loaf of unsliced bread, six brown eggs, a paper bag full of battered onions and two mottled avocados, so soft they almost burst when she picked them up. He started to argue as he counted out her change.
“You’re not allowed to say the word “love” in pubs,” he told her, elbows on the dusty counter, picking at a scaly spot on his right arm. “And they’ve banned mince. It’s too confusing. Funny what they get away with.”
“I don’t know if you can be right about that.”
“See what I mean? Nobody knows what the rules are. Change from one day to the next. I heard they’re going to reclassify football as ballet, to please the Austrians. And you’re not allowed to drive if you own a dog.”
“Why not?”
“It’s unfair to the dog.”
“Sounds made up.”
“Downright ridiculous,” said the man, shaking his head. His cable-knit sweater was pea-soup green, stretched to accommodate his belly so the checks of his shirt peeped between the strands of wool. His thick neck was pitted with acne scars, and his cheeks dimpled when he smiled. Naomi had no idea if he was taking the piss or not. “They do just make it up, don’t they? As they go along. But it’ll all be over soon. Now we’ve got a bit of a chance alone.”
“None of that’s real,” said Naomi, aware of how weak a rebuttal that was. There wasn’t much you could do with a simple no. She wanted to make an affirmative case but she knew she’d be rolled over. “The EU hasn’t banned mince. I saw mince in the shops in Amsterdam when I was there last month.”
“Well, it’s alright for them, isn’t it? Them that make the rules. Whatever they want, they get. It’s us that has to suffer.”
“There’s mince in this shop right now.”
“I’d like to see any striped-shirt French policeman try to pluck the mince out of my shop. I’d shove his baguette where the sun don’t shine.”
“There’s mince in shops in London, too.”
“Meat or fruit?”
“Both, probably.”
“There you go,” said the man, with enormous satisfaction. “You don’t even know what kind of mince. I told you it’s bloody confusing.”
“I can look this up on my phone.”
“Won’t get reception in here, love. Now, the thing we worry about is the fish. Made it illegal to fish in our own waters.” The man snorted. “Go down the beach if you want a look. We’ve been running our little trawlers out to sea for thousands of bloody years. We’ve got men in this village whose great-grandfathers were sailmakers going back to William the bloody Conqueror.”
“We’ve got to manage the supply, though. We can’t all take as much as we want.”
“The truth is you don’t care, love, and I say that with the greatest respect. You come down from London. You’ve got opportunities on the television. It doesn’t matter to you what becomes of a tiny place like this.”
“I grew up here.”
“They’re your fish too, then. You ought to take some pride in that.”
“I think we have to move with the times,” said Naomi, looking at the chunks of rubbery toffee glistening behind the counter. She remembered being seven, buying one for a handful of pennies, losing a baby tooth in it and getting back a dollar under the pillow. “You can’t expect to live the same way you did under William the Conqueror.”
The man shrugged.
“That’s the trouble with modern youth,” he said. “No respect for tradition.”
-
“When I lost your dad,” said Jenny, “I was younger than you are now. Straight over the side he went, and there I was, practically still in my wedding dress. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I got your name out of a magazine, you know. Thought it sounded foreign.”
“I don’t have to marry the first guy who crawls in my bed. We might get back together. We might not. Pavel has career goals to think about.”
“You can be anything you want to be.”
“I need time to adjust,” said Naomi, flicking dust from the handle of the Van Gogh mug. Normally it sat at the top of the cupboard, forbidden to other guests, awaiting her arrival. The splash of milk she’d asked for had been doled out reluctantly, as if her mother was expecting a shortage. “To recalibrate. I know my mental health isn’t exactly where I want.”
“One missed step and he was gone. I dreamt about those wide, staring eyes, salt water filling that lovely mouth. He must have known what he was giving up.” Jenny shivered, though the roaring fire had banished most of the cold. The room was full of embroidered cushions, bowls of dried flowers, cut-out shots from magazines pinned to the tea-coloured wallpaper. “But I keep myself busy. You can’t let life get you down”
“And I need a proper job. They really don’t let me on the television all that often, you know.”
“I was so thrilled to see you throw the book at that nasty man. He had no right to talk to you the way he did.”
“It’s just a game, mum. People trying to get at each other. Nobody really means it.” Naomi sipped her tea. “The paper wants me to write something about this town, you know. A man-on-the-street sort of thing. They want to know why people here think the way they do.”
“Nobody cares what we think.”
“They do now. They’ve learnt about consequences. The world hasn’t gone exactly the way they wanted it to go.”
“Well, I think it’s wonderful,” said Jenny, nibbling around the edges of a gingersnap. “Did you know in Portugal it’s illegal to eat biscuits by a lake? Worried about ducks choking, you know. And if a gypsy knocks on your door and asks to use your toilet, you have to let him.”
“I’ve told you that’s not true. I’ve told you a hundred times. I’ve asked you to find where it says that in the law.”
“It’s the human rights of the gypsy, I suppose, but they do make such a mess.”
“I’m probably not going to write anything,” said Naomi. “I’m not even sure what questions I could ask. It’s all poverty tourism anyway.”
“And I’m sure it’ll work out for Pavel.”
“Maybe. The situation’s tricky. He doesn’t know where he’ll end up.”
“Your father was so proud the first time he went out with the fleet,” said Jenny, staring into the depths of her tea, her pale eyes fixed on something far away, as if the cup were a thousand miles deep. “Bringing something home to his lovely family. Hands all flayed by rope, dragging our supper from the sea. Came home bleeding the first day, but he wasn’t worried. His dad had done the same. He knew the way it was supposed to go.”
“He never got the chance to toughen up.”
“You could write about some of the old stories. People forget, these days.”
“It’s all written down on the internet. Tourist boards love that kind of thing.”
“We used to have our own language,” said Jenny. “So we could tell tax collectors we didn’t speak any English. Your dad knew a few words.”
“Hard to see the angle.”
“He would have taught you the stories if he’d been around. The dancing maiden up on the hill, who was turned to stone for making love on the Sabbath. The sea-cave where Saint Piran trapped the Devil by driving an iron spike through his tail, and you can hear him howling to this day. The mermaid who cursed the harbour at Padstow to be swallowed by the sands. This is your history we’re talking about.”
“What they really want is to be reassured we’re the same species. To understand the rational basis for the decision.”
“You’ll never know what you missed out on.”
“They fantasise about re-education camps,” said Naomi. “Honestly, I can see the appeal. But I get what you’re saying. Local myths make us who we are. We have to preserve our British institutions.”
“They want to make it a crime,” said Jenny, “to look at the ocean at night, through a telescope. In case you spot any migrants. Health and safety’s ruining this country.”
-
The tide was out and the boats in the harbour lay forlorn on the mudflats, looking more abandoned than they were. A Greek restaurant, painted white to mimic Santorini, sat empty next to a crowded pub. Pensioners poked their noses out the windows of ivy-wreathed stone cottages, muttering darkly about the coming rain. Naomi wondered what the property values were like. Authentic strawberry ice cream sold from a garage. White vans draped in tarpaulins. Spidery palm trees stunted by British winter.
She walked out to the end of the breakwater and stood there for a while, confronting the bleak sea. Probably the tourist trade would pick up again in the summer. She thought about diving in. A shock of cold, and then nothing. Blackness and submersion. You’d feel suspended in between galaxies, hanging in that water. She wanted to light a cigarette but it was too rainy and she’d made a resolution to stop.
She turned and looked back at the village, sprawling up the green hillside, the solemn, judgmental facades of houses rallying to condemn her. Who are you? What are you doing back here where you don’t belong? Why don’t you have a proper job? What treasure are you going to pull out of the sea? The church spire loomed behind them, a tall, awkward stranger trying to hold them back.
She heard a foghorn, and a distant cry.
A boat was coming in.
-
“It’s a tragedy what happens,” said the man in the green sweater, who’d run into them in the pub and invited himself over to their table. They sat below a huge oil painting of the Battle of Trafalgar, smears of cannonfire blending with spray and smoke. “There one minute. Gone the next. Just enough time for you to understand the transition.”
“My Henry went the same way.”
“Does seem to be a bit of an occupational hazard,” said the man. He’d introduced himself as Thomas, and spoken about the history of his little shop for what had seemed to Naomi like a very long time. She felt like an anthropologist, embedded among a savage tribe, fascinated and disgusted in equal measure. It wasn’t for much longer. She had a New Year’s party planned, back in London, that would spiritually cleanse her.
“Young fellow this time,” Thomas said. “Didn’t know the ropes. The old chaps are more cautious, I expect.”
“It’ll be hard on the mother,” said Jenny. “I’ll bake her something.”
“And all for such a small catch. The bureaucrats in Brussels make them throw half of it back. Meanwhile the fisherfolk down in Normandy are rolling in sardines. Don’t even eat them, you know. Sleep on them. Frenchman loves a slippery mattress.”
Naomi sipped her ale. The pint sat before her, enormous, unfinishable.
“I saw the boat come in,” she said.
“A sorry scene.”
“It was odd. I thought I heard a baby crying.”
Thomas coughed into his drink.
“Probably a gull,” he said.
“Exactly like a baby, though. Amazing how it carries across the water.”
“Remarkable things, gulls. I hope you’re enjoying your stay, then? Not here too long? Cornwall’s depressing in winter. Expect you’ll want to get back to the city lights.”
Naomi thought about the ratty apartment she shared with a fifty-eight-year-old vegan who scowled at her whenever she ate meat, and the courtyard full of broken prams, and the landlord who’d screamed at her for half an hour when she’d put too much yoghurt in the garbage. “It’s not so bad,” she said.
“You know pineapples?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t call them that any more. Have to call them ananus comosus. Know why?”
“I do not.”
“Not technically either a pine or an apple,” Thomas said. “Brussels is big on truth in advertising. Now, the French already call it ananus, so no trouble there. Only we say pineapple, because we’ve got the creative spark, right? Find a new way to describe things. We see it’s a bit like a pine, it’s a bit like an apple. And they want to make us suffer for it.”
“Ingenious.”
“I did quite a good blog post about it.”
“You know William the Conqueror was a Frenchman.”
“And the bloody Saxons were Germans. But Cornwall,” said Thomas, “is a Brythonic culture. Solid as oak. The truest folk of Albion. We were here before everyone else.”
“It really did sound like a baby. I don’t know if a bird could make that noise.”
“It could have been an albatross,” said Jenny.
“King Arthur was a Cornishman. It’s time we all thought a little bit more about that.”
“I suppose I’m wondering about the economics,” said Naomi. “Even if we do get out, and that’s still up in the air, we’ll have to negotiate. Hard to have it all one way. France has got its own ancient traditions.”
“We’ll just win.”
“I don’t know.”
“No continental alive can outfox a Briton over the bargaining table. We’ll devise some stratagem. Slip into Brussels dressed as bears and scare the living daylights out of them.”
“I’m sure we’ll work it out,” said Jenny.
“Tangle them up in their own regulations and drive them into the mud.”
“But how big’s the market for fish, really? Haven’t we moved to a service economy? We can get Indonesians to farm them and ship them halfway round the world.”
Thomas sucked his teeth, his face briefly turning hollow.
“Trouble with this country,” he said, “and I don’t mean to offend you, but we’ve got no faith in ourselves any more. And it’s people like you from the television who’ve dribbled this doubt into our ears.”
“I only did one panel.”
“And that’s why I’m being nice,” said Thomas. “You haven’t finished your pint, I see. I was just thinking about another.”
-
After lunch they walked up to the old church on the hill. Jenny exchanged a few friendly words with the vicar while Naomi stood by, looking at the epitaphs carved into the wall. Sailors and Puritans, men who’d defended their country in wars so old they seemed like punchlines. She felt a sense of vertigo, like the building was perched on the edge of a cliff and about to topple over, the weight all concentrated in the wrong end.
They went out into the garden, planted with tropical flowers brought back from some forgotten voyage of discovery, and sat on an old stone wall to look at the sea. They ate boiled eggs and leftover Christmas ham, cold roast potatoes sprinkled with cheese, and passed a tin flask back and forth, taking very small sips to keep out the chill. Naomi waited for her mother to speak. She could sense there was something that needed explaining.
“Look out there,” said Jenny at last. “There’s a story I told you when I was young.”
“You told me a lot of stories.”
“But now they’re trying to take it away from us. Making it illegal to remember. I have to pass it down.”
“I’ll do my best to listen.”
Jenny stared at the mist-shrouded horizon, at the boats like beetles crawling towards the edge of the world. Her fingers drummed against the stone wall. Naomi wondered what she was seeing out there. The breeze flattened the grass and crept down the back of her neck, and she could feel speckles of rain on her forearms. She sipped more whiskey and let her mother think.
“I’m not going to tell this very well,” said Jenny. “Your father was the man with all the words. But there used to be a kingdom out there.”
“A kingdom.”
“Before the time of the Saxons, this was. Even before the Romans. A kingdom of song and mystery, governed by white-robed priests, defended by knights in silver armor who kept the trolls and boggarts at bay. The king ruled from a wooden throne beneath an oak, his beard plaited into the roots so he could never leave his seat. They called it Lyonesse.”
“Okay, that’s beginning to sound familiar. I think I remember from bedtime.”
“For thousands of years they lived in perfect peace. But one day the king had a daughter instead of a son, and the king’s daughter was greedy. Her mother was of the sea giants, and she demanded her brethren build her a castle of glass, so she could see her beauty reflected in every surface.”
“Problematic.”
“They did as she commanded, and soon a city grew up around the castle. Men called it Ys, and was the most beautiful city in the world, full of philosophers and perfumers and architects, courtesans and acrobats and bards. Every night was a carnival, a celebration of the princess’s glory. But still she was not satisfied.”
“Yep. Sure. That’s what women are like.”
“So she summoned the greatest men in the world to her court, and had them put to death when they failed to entertain her. Dukes and princes, scholars and warriors, fell one by one to the glass axe of her executioner, until men became afraid that she would depopulate the world of its heroes and bring about a new age of misery.”
“Amazing that you told me this. I expect it’s had long-term effects.”
“Until one day a bearded man in a red cloak arrived at her palace, and promised her a night she would never forget. He took up a set of pipes, and the whole court saw they were fashioned from human bone. But the tune he played was so jolly that they forgot their scruples, and began to dance. They danced so long and so hard that the earth shook, and the very foundations of the kingdom quaked.”
“Was he the devil?”
“And the city of Ys sank into the sea, and the whole of Lyonesse with it.”
“I bet he was the devil.”
“But some say the princess turned into a morgen, a mermaid. And she still dwells down there, in her castle of glass, surrounded by all her fishy court. And lost sailors go down there to dance with her forever.”
Naomi waited, letting the rain moisten her hair. There didn’t seem to be any more to the story.
“It always turns out he’s the devil in stories like this,” she said.
“I know you want to believe what you believe. But maybe now you’ll start to see why we have to remain ourselves.”
“Look, it’s getting cold.”
“Come with me.”
“To the pub?”
“There’s someone I want you to meet.”
-
They came in the door with a tray of pineapple upside-down cake in a china dish, dripping with syrup, a tea-towel over it to protect it from the elements. Naomi had to stoop under the lintel. The cottage had been built for an era when people weren’t as well-nourished.
The room was full of elderly relatives, dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs, passing around sandwiches and gossiping in low tones. A framed picture of a smiling young man sat on a table by the window, surrounded by teacups and flowers. The bereaved mother sunk into an armchair, red-eyed, looking small and desperate.
She was cradling something in her arms. Naomi couldn’t make out what it was.
“We won’t be too long,” said Jenny, putting the cake down next to a plate of muffins. “You didn’t know Derek. I know it’s a grim way to spend a holiday.”
“I don’t mind.”
“But I want you to see how it works with your own eyes. The ocean takes away. And it gives back.”
Nobody spoke. But there was a kind of telepathy in the room. Naomi felt like the old women must be communicating by scent. The mother’s eyes flickered in her direction and Naomi froze, paralysed, afraid that she was going to have to say something.
She heard the clink of a teaspoon.
The bundle was passed to her, along a chain of hands. She didn’t know what it was until she heard it start to cry.
The baby’s eyes were hidden in folds of clenched flesh, screwed up tight as if it were rejecting the existence of the external world. Its mouth gaped open. She recognised the thin, plaintive cry, like something very loud coming from a very long way away. It wasn’t anything like a gull.
She accepted it from Jenny. She held it in her arms, somehow not scared of dropping it. She felt it wriggle in the blanket, trying to slip out of its cocoon. She looked at its pudgy little fingers, clawing at the air.
And saw the webs.
“There are compensations,” said Jenny.
“What is it?”
“They come up in the nets sometimes. We give them to whoever needs them. And sometimes at night, out on the boats, you can hear the bells of the drowned city, and the sailors dancing with the morgens.”
The baby felt very heavy in Naomi’s hands. It tilted its head, and a patch of silver scales gleamed below its chin. She saw the slits of gills, minute, vestigial, fluttering in the dry air.
“They grow more like us as they age,” said Jenny. “We’ve always been grateful.”
“How long has this been going on?”
Jenny shrugged.
“What the French do when they catch them,” she said, “I don’t know. Sell them to the Arabs, or make them into a stew.”
“It can’t be legal to keep them.”
Naomi’s lips were pale. Jenny took the baby back from her, swapping it for a curried-egg sandwich in a napkin.
“It’s what we’ve always done,” she said, kissing the baby’s nose, trying to get it to smile. “That’s why you have to know where you come from.”
-
Naomi stood on the breakwater, watching the sea. She was meant to go back to London tomorrow. She had appointments to keep. Friends who wanted to see her. Interviews to set up. At some point she needed a long phone call with Pavel.
The sun was going down.
She barely felt the cold. She felt an odd tingling sensation in the tips of her fingers, and her neck.
She began to undress.
The lights of the houses were blinking on, one by one. She imagined the faces behind them, the secluded scenes of domestic bliss. Old women by the fire looking out to sea. She felt like they were spurring her on.
She stood in mist, in twilight, rough stone at her feet, encapsulated in a globe of darkness. A tongue of orange fire lapped at the horizon, and went out. She could hear almost nothing. The cries of night-birds and the roar of the waves.
She thought, briefly, about London.
