4. Miles
Miles
There's no feeling on God's earth to touch a good market morning. I'll arm-wrestle any man who says otherwise. I'd stand him a pint first, mind. Only decent to buy a fellow a drink before you put him right.
Saturday, early spring. The quay laid out under a sky scrubbed clean as a new plate. The stalls went up before the light did. Trestles and awnings, the wet slap of fish onto slate, the hiss of the tea urn. Bryn's wireless playing something tinny and hopeful under it all.
The crates came up off the boats still cold from the hold. Mackerel and pollack and a few good crab waving their last objections. By the time the town came spilling down the hill, there wasn't a soul on the harbour I hadn't already got a word out of.
That's the job, near enough. Half of running a market is the fish. The other half is seeing to it that everyone goes home convinced they got the better of you. Whether they did or not.
"Mrs Pascoe. You're a vision this morning, and I'll not hear it argued." She's eighty-one and comes down the hill at the same hour every Saturday whether she wants fish or not. A woman has to have somewhere to be disappointed in people.
"No, I'll not charge you for the bit the gull had off the end. That's between me and the gull. We'll settle it privately. Like gentlemen."
She told me I was a disgrace, a charmer, and her favourite of the harbour boys. In that order. That's the warmest thing Edith Pascoe has said to a living man since before the war.
I weighed her hake heavy and called it light. She knows I do it. I know she knows. We've run that play between us fifteen years, and I'd not give it up for money.
Old Pengelly came by to tell me the weather was turning. He's been telling the harbour the weather is turning since about 1971. He means to be right one day through sheer persistence.
His grandchildren I let loose on the stall. The twins. Partly because their mother needs the half hour. Partly because there's no finer entertainment going than two seven-year-olds trying to sell crab to strangers.
They tried to overcharge a vicar by a sum that would have bought the boat. Then they tried to undercharge a man from the bank by rather more. They dropped a pollack on my foot and told me it was my fault for standing there.
I had to step round the back of the awning so they'd not see me laughing. A man loses all authority the moment a child sees it land.
A coachload of walkers came down off the moor at half nine. All red cheeks and good boots and that holiday hunger that'll buy anything you put a story on. So I put a story on the crab.
By the time I'd finished, that crab had been hauled from the deep by my own near-frozen hands, at a personal risk I made sound positively operatic. They took the lot. More crab than four hill-walkers can responsibly account for. Off they went up the coast path delighted with themselves.
That's the only honest way to sell a man too much crab. You let him feel he's had an adventure.
It was in the thick of it that I saw Nessa Treloar counting coppers.
She had the baby on her hip and the other one hanging off her coat. Doing the sum mothers do at a fish stall. The one where the answer keeps coming out wrong no matter how you hold it.
Her man's boat had been laid up a fortnight with a cracked something-or-other. A fortnight is a long time when the money only ever comes in the size of the last catch.
I'd sooner watch a man weep than watch a woman do arithmetic she's already lost.
"Nessa. You're just the person." I had a parcel made up before she'd looked up. The tail ends and the odd shapes. The perfectly good fish that won't sit pretty on a slab.
"Do me a kindness and take this off my hands. I overbought, I always do on a Saturday, and if Sian catches me carrying it back up she'll have my guts for the fryer. You'd be saving my life."
"Miles." She gave me the look. Folk in a small town learn the look early. "How much?"
"How much. She asks me how much. For doing me a favour." I pressed it into the pram before she could get her purse up. "You can pay me in gossip. Tell me something scandalous about the new people on Fore Street and we're square."
She told me the new people had painted their door a different colour. We agreed it was a disgrace. And up the hill she went, with fish enough for the week and her chin a good deal higher than it had been.
Not one soul on the quay was any the wiser. That's the entire point of doing it.
A kindness with a witness is half a boast. You do the thing, you make a joke of the thing, and you let the person keep the one thing nobody can buy them back. The feeling of having got away with it.
That's the trick of me, if there's a trick. There isn't. I like them. The whole salt-stained, gossiping, weather-bitten parish of them.
An alpha's meant to be all teeth and territory, to hear some tell it. All bared throat and bristle. Nobody told me, or I wasn't listening. What I've got runs the other way.
I want the harbour fed and the harbour laughing. I want my pack housed and warm and home. Give me a quay full of people in a good mood and I'm a king with the sea for a crown.
And the whole while, under the racket, I kept one box back.
The best of it. Two fine fish off the Kittiwake's morning, the ones I'd have got proper money for. Wrapped clean. Set in the cool under the trestle where no chancer would think to look.
For her.
I didn't turn it over too hard. A man's allowed to want her fed without convening an inquiry into himself about the why of it.
Freya Bevan, home. I still couldn't quite hold the fact of it. Four days, and the bay had a different weight to it. A charge in the air, the way there is before weather comes.
We'd none of us said it aloud over Hudson's stew. We'd all three felt it. The gap in the house going quiet, the way a held breath goes quiet.
I've loved her since we were children. In the easy, sunny way I love most things. Which is to say without ever once getting in the queue behind Rhys.
Rhys has loved her since we were children in the other way. The way that takes a man's whole chest and won't give it back. That's his to tell or not.
I only know the shape of it from the roof we share. Twenty years under it, and you learn the outline of the thing a man won't say.
So I kept the best fish back, and I sent it up the hill with the lad who does the deliveries. No note. A note would have been a question, and we'd agreed she sets the pace.
Let her think it was the town. Let her think it was nobody. A gift that asks for nothing is the only sort she'll let past the door.
And I had a feeling, even then, that getting anything at all past Freya Bevan's door was going to be the work of this spring.
That was the morning. Generous, loud, golden. The best of me handed out across a wet stone quay till there was none of it left over.
It's a particular hour, the end of a market. The crowd thins and goes home to its dinner. The light pulls out long and low across the water.
And the quay that was the whole bright centre of the world for one morning remembers what it is. A wet shelf of stone at the edge of the sea.
I like that hour the least of all the hours God makes.
I've never once said so. You can't, is the thing. There's a job that comes with a face like mine, and the job is to be the weather everyone else gets to complain about cheerfully.
The harbour runs on a hundred small certainties. Under the tides and the lifeboat and the price of diesel, somewhere down the list, sits Miles. Miles will have a word. Miles is grand.
Nobody sat down and decided it. It settled on me the way these things settle, early, and I let it.
The winter my father went, I worked the market three days after the funeral. Stood right here and sold fish and made the quay laugh, because the quay needed its Saturday and I was the one who gave it. Not a soul thought to wonder how the lad doing the laughing was getting on.
The lad doing the laughing is, by definition, getting on fine.
I don't hold it against them. It's the bargain I struck without being asked to sign it. You hand the warmth out, all of it, every Saturday of your life. In return you get to be the one nobody worries about.
There are worse bargains. I've just never worked out one part of it. What I'd do with a worry of my own, should one ever turn up with nowhere to go.
The grin's a muscle the same as any other, and at the end of a market mine ached clean through. I packed the empty boxes down the stall in the gone-gold quiet, the smile off my face at last. Alone with the gulls and the slap of the water.
I didn't hear Hudson come up. For a big man he arrives like a change in the light. On you before you've clocked it.
He didn't say anything to start with. He set a mug down on the trestle by my hand. Hot and strong and stewed to the precise insult of strength I take it at. He's known how I take my tea twenty years and never once got it wrong.
Then he started stacking the empty boxes alongside me. Unasked. The two of us working down the stall the way we've worked down a thousand things since we were boys.
After a while, not looking at me, he said, "Long morning."
Two words. But Hudson's two words land like a hand set square between the shoulder blades.
He'd gone and chosen the only two in the language that let on he'd seen it. The thing I keep the grin pulled down over. And he'd done it without making me stand out in the open and name it.
"They always are," I said, "when you're as sought-after as I am. It's a burden, Hudson. The cost of being beloved. I bear it for all our sakes."
"Mm," said Hudson. Which from Hudson is a full and reasoned paragraph. The bulk of it disagreeing with you, fondly, and not minded to let it go.
We stacked the last of them down. He didn't ask was I alright. That was the kindness in it.
The honest answer some evenings is not quite, and there's nowhere on a quay at dusk to set that answer down. He just stayed. Drank his own tea. Let me be a man with the smile off for the length of time it took to clear a stall.
Up the hill, two good fish were sitting on a step for a woman who'd not asked me for a thing and never would. I found I was glad clean through just to have given them. No one to see me do it. No thanks coming back down the road.
That's me, I suppose. I hand it out, I keep none for myself, and the keeping-none has never troubled me a single day.
It troubled me a little that evening. Just for the length of a cup of tea. In the last of a gold light. With the one man on the whole harbour who'd ever thought, unprompted, to bring me one.