10. Miles
Miles
The gale came in overnight from the south-west, and by morning the whole fleet was tied up and the whole harbour was in a mood.
A blown-out day is the hardest shift I work. People think it's the fishing. It's never the fishing. Fish are reasonable. A harbour full of fishermen with no sea to go to is a kettle on a low flame, and somebody has to go round all day lifting lids.
So I went round lifting lids.
Edith Pascoe first. Her cat had taken one look at the weather and gone up the chimney breast, and Edith's opinion was that the cat could stay there and reflect.
I fetched it down anyway. Got a scratched wrist and a cup of tea I hadn't asked for and the information that I was a fool, which from Edith is payment in full.
Then Dilys, whose doorway floods in a southwesterly the way it has flooded in every southwesterly since the war, and who greets the water each time with fresh astonishment.
I sandbagged the step. I heard the full story of the guttering on Fore Street, which has now entered its third volume.
I admired the right things in the right order.
Then the berth row. Pasco and young Trevithick had got into it about whose lines had chafed whose.
Two big men shouting in the rain over forty pence of rope.
It's never about the rope. It's about a blown-out week and a payment coming due and nowhere to put the fear.
I know that one from the inside. So I waded in loud and daft, an arm round each, and turned the whole thing into the story of the time Pasco moored to the ice lorry by mistake.
Inside five minutes the pair of them were united in the great work of laughing at me.
That's the trick, if you want it. Make yourself the smallest man on the quay and everyone else grows an inch, and growing men don't swing.
Tam had me in the harbour office at midday. Ostensibly about the visitor moorings. Actually because Tam keeps a kettle and a count of his harbour, and other men keep neither. He poured without asking. He watched me over the mug the way he's watched the water for forty years.
"Busy morning," he said.
"Blown-out day. You know how they run."
"I know how you run them." He let that sit just long enough to mean something, the old devil, and then the phone went, somebody's tender adrift off the moorings, and the moment closed over like water.
I was glad of the phone. The one man on the harbour with the eyes to see straight through me, and when the phone rang I was glad.
Nessa came down after that. She asked, in a roundabout way, whether a fortnight's blow meant the prices would jump.
She meant something else entirely, so I answered the something else.
Told her the boat fund was wintering well, her man's repair nearly square, the spring sure to pay for itself.
All of it nearly true. I trimmed the nearly off before serving.
She went up the hill lighter. The twins got underfoot.
The walkers' coach came anyway and walked into a wall of weather.
They had to be talked into the Mermaid's Arms and a crab sandwich apiece. I consider that a rescue at sea.
By dusk I'd been twelve people's good mood since breakfast. I walked up to the cottage wrung out like a bar cloth, and did the usual with it. I hung it up at the door with my oilskins and went in shining.
The fire was good. Hudson had a net across his knees and the patient look he wears for mending.
Rhys was at the table with his bit of applewood, down to the fine work now, sanding by feel with his eyes half shut.
Stew on. Rain on the glass. The kind of evening men pray for.
I came into it talking, because that's the wage I pay for my place in it.
Or that's the wiring. I've long stopped being able to tell the difference.
I gave them the cat. I gave them Dilys versus the sea, round one hundred. I was well into the berth row, doing both voices, building to Pasco and the ice lorry, which is guaranteed material, never once failed me in fifteen years.
And nobody was listening.
Not unkindly. Hudson was counting meshes with his lips moving.
Rhys was somewhere inside the wood. They were tired men at the end of a long day, in the one room on earth they're allowed to be tired in.
The room had gone soft and quiet around my voice the way a room does.
And I heard it. I heard myself, performing a gale to an empty house, and the punchline went to nowhere, and for two full seconds the silence stood there looking back at me.
Here's the thing I know about that silence.
It's where I live. Under the patter, under the grin, under being the weather.
There's a room in me that nobody has ever once knocked on, because I built the rest of the house so loud that nobody knows the room is there.
That's not their failing. It's my masonry.
But on a blown-out evening, wrung to nothing, when even your own pack's love has its eyes down, the door of that room stands open a crack.
The draught off it goes straight through a man.
Hudson looked up. A second too late, the way you look up when you've heard a sound stop rather than start.
"Ice lorry," he said, prompting, kind.
"Lost my thread." I stretched, big and easy, the full performance. "It'll keep. I'm for checking the lines."
"Lines are fine," Rhys said, to the wood.
"Then I'll be quick."
Nobody argues with a man who minds lines.
That's the beauty of a working harbour. There's always a true-sounding reason to stand alone in the dark.
I went out into mine with my collar up. The gale took all the shine off me the moment the door shut, and it was a mercy, the way taking off wet boots is a mercy.
The quay at night in a blow is the most honest place I know.
Black water slamming the wall and not meaning anything personal by it.
The boats working at their ropes. Spray coming over the parapet on the big ones, regular as breath.
I stood at the end by the light and let the weather be louder than I was.
It's the only rest I ever found that works.
And I did the thing I do out there, which is nothing.
No audience. No round to work. Just a man and a wall and the sea carrying on its one long argument with the stone.
I never heard her coming. The gale ate her footsteps whole.
"You're wet through," said Freya Bevan, at my elbow, and I went a foot in the air.
She had a tin under one arm. She'd taken to walking the day's spare loaf down to the cottage of an evening, part of the long polite war over who owed whom, which Hudson has been losing on purpose for weeks.
She'd found the cottage and been sent on by the fire, I gathered.
Or she'd seen me from the top of the quay.
She didn't say, and her hood was up, and the light off the lamp made a small golden glow on her face.
"Evening for it," I said, shine going up like bunting. "Come to see the show? The sea's on form. I've been giving it notes."
She looked at me. Not at the bunting. Through it, the way she looks at a sauce that's lying to her.
"Miles," she said. "Are you alright?"
I want to describe what that did, and I find the tools aren't really there, because nothing in the kit has ever been needed for it.
I am thirty-four years old. I have been the harbour's good mood since I was a boy.
I could not, standing on that wall, remember the last time a living soul had asked me that question and stood still afterwards, waiting, actually wanting the bill.
"Grand," I said, right on time. Lifelong professional. "Bit damp. Nothing a fire won't…"
"Miles."
The second one did it. Just my name, flat and patient, the way you'd say it to a man standing on a ledge.
The wind took the rest of my sentence away and didn't bring anything back to replace it.
I stood there with my mouth open and nothing in it.
A first, the harbour would tell you. Somewhere a record was being chiselled.
"Long day," I said, finally. Quietly. Hudson's words, I noticed, even as I borrowed them.
"Blown-out days. Everyone needs their lid lifted, and I'm the lad with the hands for lids.
It's grand. I like it. I'm built for it.
" The truth was coming out sideways now and I couldn't seem to angle it back.
"It's only that you do twelve of them, and you come home, and you've nothing left to be, except the thing again.
So I came out to be nothing for a bit. That's the whole confession.
You can see why I lead with the cat material. "
She didn't laugh. She didn't do the other thing either, the soft horror, the poor-Miles, which I could not have stood, which is half of why the room in me stays shut. She stood and took it in the way she takes in a delivery, checking the weight of it against the docket.
"I used to do that," she said. "In the city. There was a yard behind the kitchen with the bins. Best room in the building."
"The bins."
"The bins never wanted anything." She set the tin down on the parapet between us and opened it.
The end of a loaf, the proper end, the one cooks keep for themselves, still warm enough to fog the air.
She tore it and handed me half like it was nothing, like it was rations, like we were two hands on the same watch.
"Eat that. You've been twelve people today, and I'd put money you've fed eleven of them and skipped yourself. I know the look. I invented the look."
I ate the bread. The wind dropped a notch, or seemed to. The sea went on with its argument and left ours alone.
"You won't say anything," I said. It wasn't really a question. "To the others. There's nothing to say. It's a wet night and a tired man."
"I won't say anything." She looked out at the black water, and then she said the other thing, the one I took home with me.
"But you should know it doesn't cost extra.
Asking the funny one if he's alright. I always thought it would, when I was on the other end.
It doesn't. It costs nothing at all, and nobody ever spends it, and that's the whole stupid trouble with everywhere. "
We ate the bread and watched the water, and somewhere in the middle of it, without planning to, I told her about my father.
Not the whole of it. The shape of it. That he'd been the same trade as me.
The loud warm centre of the same quay. And that the winter he went, I'd stood on his patch three days after we put him down, and sold fish, and did the voices, because the harbour needed its Saturday and there was no one else to give it.
"And everyone said wasn't I doing well," I said.
"Wasn't I marvellous. Wasn't I just like him.
And they were being kind, and they were right, and I've been doing well every single day since, and do you know, not one of them has ever asked me to stop. "
"You could stop," she said. "For a minute. Off duty. I'm not the harbour."
"You are a bit. You're the new wing."
"I'm serious, Miles."
"I know you are." And because she was, I let the grin down.
All the way. The whole rig of it, the thing I don't do in front of anyone.
I stood there on the wall in the wind with my actual face on.
Tired. Thirty-four. His son. She looked at it without flinching, and she didn't hand me anything for it, no there-there, no fixing, and the not-handing was the gift.
The first conversation in fifteen years where I wasn't catering.
We stood on the wall a while longer and finished the loaf between us, not talking, while the gale wore itself down to a sulk.
Then she pulled her hood straight and went up the hill to her warm little flat.
I went back to the cottage. Hudson looked up when I came in and clocked something, crumbs or weather or the set of me, and said nothing. The fire was still good.
I lay awake a long time, listening to the wind take the roof's measurements.
Thirty-four years of keeping the harbour's spirits, and the books balanced the whole time, because I never once let anyone see there was an account. One woman on a wet wall with a tin of bread, and she'd found it in under a minute.
She asked if I was alright.
She asked. Actually asked, like it was nothing.
Yet, to me, it meant everything.