The Fish Ladder (10 page)

Traeth Porth Dinllaen

Two weeks after the Spanish school holidays started, in an explosion of fireworks for the Feast of St John, the British school holidays began. The first to arrive on the beach at Porth Dinllaen, in early July, were a handful of Scottish children. They were closely followed, a week or so later, by children from the British independent schools. Finally, almost a month after we had got here, the state-educated Welsh and English children joined the beach party. Now, in early August, the rock pools which had been Evie’s exclusive domain became, at low tide, cluttered with warriors armed with plastic buckets and Day-Glo fishing nets. The older children carried spools and lines. Bits of bacon or gooey winkles served for bait.

Evie’s preferred method for luring crabs was with a nylon drawstring bag, one that had come in a box of washing powder, and was intended for use with the detergent. She placed a boiled potato, soaked in bacon fat, inside the bag, then attached this to a hook and line. I had snapped the barb off the hook with a pair of pliers and now watched as a brick-red crab, a pointillist crown etched onto its shell, nipped the potato with a bone-coloured claw. Evie transferred the crab into a bucket of seawater with a careful sweep of her arm. A number of children clustered about; they exuded a mixture of excitement and awe, curiosity and envy as Evie tried to shake the crab free of the bait with determined, jerky movements, finally taking it between finger and thumb and slowly twisting it until it released the potato, its nut-cracker pincers open, pointing skyward.

The rock pools formed a narrow peninsula that bisected the curve of the bay like an arrow drawn over a bow. At its sea-facing tip the stones were caramel-coloured and smooth, the barnacles and seaweed polished away and stopped from coming back by scores of feet and bottoms, giving easy access, a slide if you were brave enough, to a plunge pool that opened, in its turn, onto the bay. Evie and the crab were surrounded by admirers. I watched her for a while. She looked up at me, and smiled, and I pointed at the bay, and then at the rock pool and mouthed
You stay here
! She nodded, widening her eyes in an
as if!
gesture, her hands opening like flowers, and I slipped into the mermaid pool. I swam between two rocky islets known as the Oysters, then pushed into the open water, registering the drop in temperature as a spiral around my body, the cold digging into my arms and neck like cheese-wire. I swam a tentative breaststroke until I located a ribbon of warmth, then stretched out into freestyle. The surface of the water was criss-crossed with these warmer paths, as wide as carpet runners, a reminder that the Gulf Stream ran near by.

We were waiting on the beach for Rupert, who was coming to join us for a week. The previous night, while Evie brushed her teeth, I had told her of the visit. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror, singing ‘I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine’ by Mack David. Toothpaste foamed over her chin, and dropped onto her foot. I was glad I hadn’t told her sooner. Later, she had gone to the swing at the end of the area of trimmed field that was our garden, because it was the only place near the cottage that had any cover, and she had phoned Rupert. She twirled around with her arms about the ropes, the phone pressed to her ear. Behind her was Garn Fadryn’s triangular cone, the first of the heather glowing like coal. Rupert must have said something about wanting to catch mackerel because she’d laughed, and said: ‘Actually, Daddy, we’re all a bit mackerelled out.’

The mackerel had arrived a couple of weeks ago. Our friend, Mike, had bought an old fishing boat, and he and his friend Anthony took us to the edge of the bay. A family of seals balanced on exposed rocks, their bodies curved like smiles, their heads and flippers raised to catch the sun. Evie had drawn fish after fish with a line and spool, no bait, just a spinner. She held the line between her thumb and forefinger and knew at once when she had a bite. A cheeky herring gull, following the boat, swooped down and nipped one of Evie’s mackerel behind the gills as she drew it from the water, and she had handed me the spool, saying: ‘Faster, Mummy!’ She was determined not to give up her prize. Anthony was a surgeon, and he showed her how to lift the fish heads through ninety degrees, killing them softly with a quiet ‘pop’, and Evie was fascinated, and solemn. She wasn’t comfortable about removing the hook. Later Anthony showed her how to gut them, placing the tip of his knife at the opening in the belly, pushing out the insides with his thumb, and washing the fish in seawater.

One evening I had a phone call from Endaf, a local builder. He had caught more than he could eat and asked if we would like some of them. I drove down to his house with a carrier bag to find him sitting on a deckchair in the garden, a plastic crate at his feet. A monkey-puzzle tree towered over us.

‘How many do you want?’ he asked me.

‘Oh, just enough for supper. Two.’ He frowned. ‘Three?’

‘Ah, take more than that. You can freeze them.’

‘I don’t know, Endaf, that’s very kind. Twelve?’ and he had nodded as I started to pick up the fish one by one.

‘Oh for God’s sake don’t count them!’ he said, and disappeared into the house. When he came back he held a black refuse sack, and he filled it with handfuls of fish. When I got home I waved to my neighbour, Joan, and she took half of them. The rest I stuffed into our little box freezer.

As the days rolled by we barbecued mackerel in salt, pan-fried them in custard powder, poached them in milk and wild dill collected from the shore. Evie stuck fish heads into a stargazy pie that neither of us felt like eating, and we smoked them on shavings of apple wood and then whipped them into paste, with crème fraiche, and lemon, and pepper. Even hearing the word
mackerel
now made me queasy. We were at the
sleek and glossy
phase of our holiday, it happened every year, when our blood became more fish oil than iron, our hair and skin soft and shiny despite the constant exposure to salt.

Later, after the phone call, we read
Swallows and Amazons
together. Evie squealed with delight at the part where the boy Roger swam with one foot on the bottom, because she too ‘swam’ with one foot on the bottom, and I could sense her, in that moment, resolving not to. We were curled up in the big cabin bed, and I had said that she could sleep there, for tonight, although tomorrow she must go back to the crog-loft, to her futon nest of cushions and pillows, to the place where adults never went, because the ceiling height precluded it. At some point in the night her hand reached out, her palm flat against my neck. And then she shifted and pushed both feet into my solar plexus, to the place under my ribs where she had grown. She smelled, mysteriously, of peaches.

Evie kept asking when we were going to the airport. She seemed unable to retain the information that we weren’t. My friend Bronwen was arriving at Liverpool at the same time as Rupert, on her way to visit her parents in North Wales. She had offered to give Rupert a lift, and would stop over for one night.

Keeping to my warm ribbon, I swam across the harbour. A flat tender was moving towards the beach. Ken, who owned two fishing boats, which made him important in the life of the village, stood in the middle of the tender, his hands on his hips, while another fisherman sat at the back of the boat with his hand on the tiller. I stopped by one of the mooring buoys, treading water, and lifted my arms so they could see me.

‘You want a lift?’ asked Ken.

‘No, I’m all right. I just didn’t want you to run me over.’ I held onto the side of the boat with both arms. My legs drifted beneath it. I was trying to remember what Dad had told me about the fluid mechanics of flat-bottomed boats, and vortices in shallow water. Dad had been an engineer. Dad would have known what was happening. A cloud covered the sun and a breeze lifted the hairs on my forearms into barbs, wet hair flicking across my mouth. Ken allowed me a head start before re-engaging the motor. A current had wrapped about me, or the tender had drifted into it, and for a moment I appeared to be going nowhere. When I reached the far side of the harbour I touched the sea wall. My hand was splayed like a starfish. I noticed the way the orange lichen spread like rust over the rocks above the water, and how the stones beneath the waterline were indigo. And then I noticed the white band where my wedding ring should have been. I put the hand quickly back into the water, took it out again, and re-examined it.

The ring had gone.

I didn’t allow any thoughts to form about this discovery but turned quickly and went back the way I had come, including the detour through the current where Ken’s boat had been. The ring had come from Tiffany’s in New York. It was made of twenty-two princess-cut diamonds and weighed about four and a half carats. Rupert had given it to me when Evie was baptised. We didn’t get married until Evie was five, when we found ourselves travelling through Las Vegas. We had used the ring as a wedding ring because we had forgotten to buy another. And anyway, I didn’t want another ring.

Rupert would be here in a matter of hours.

When I reached the rock pools I stood in the shallow water by the place where I had entered the pool. I looked again at the white band around my finger. The noise of the children, the waves and the wind was shut out by a growing anxiety. Rupert would read this as a sign, I was sure of it. An indication of how I valued our relationship.

I had lost the first ring he ever gave me within a few hours of receiving it – also, as it happened, on a beach – in Mexico. We had searched for that ring for over an hour, but the shell-white sand had swallowed it. I stared at the toffee-coloured Welsh beach, unable to believe what I had done. At the rock pool a group of children was gathered around a young girl in a sarong, who was covered head-to-foot in wet clay, her hair dreadlocked into ropes. It was Evie. She was pointing to a place beyond the rock pool where a squashy seam had been revealed by the tide. The sun broke through a tear in the cloud and a movement on the sea floor distracted me. I bent down, my chin just below the water. Dancing rays and spots of light were bouncing around a barely discernible shadow-circle, like a child’s illustration of the sun. It was the ring! It must have come off my finger as I entered the water. I would never have seen it, against the sand, without this coincidental, actual sunburst, that bounced white light through the stones. I reached for the ring and the sea filled my ears, covered my head. It was as hard as a drawer full of knives. I stood up, looked at the ring, brushed away the sand. Then I pushed it over my fattest, middle, finger.

When Evie noticed me standing in the shallow water she grinned, and the clay, which had dried into a ghostly mask, crackled like the face of Methuselah, and I was incredibly happy, and yet also afraid, although I couldn’t, in that moment, have said why.

At four o’clock the fishermen began stacking crates of blond whelks onto acrid, flat bed trailers. There were spider crabs for the Chinese restaurants in Manchester. Some lobsters nosed about beneath a net, litmus blue and lively. The fishermen dragged the trailers off the beach behind rusted Massey Ferguson tractors that hummed with a metallic riff. Evie spotted Rupert and Bronwen almost as soon as they passed through the Bwlch, tall figures in urban travel clothes, their city shoes incongruous on the sand. I imagined the trapped, reconstituted air of the plane escaping as their coats flapped in the breeze. Evie had already tucked in her chin and was running as fast as she could towards them.

When I reached them, Rupert and Bronwen were laughing. Behind them, at the Bwlch, a crowd of people were clustered around a Land-Rover. Gulls hopped and shuffled inquisitively along the ridge-tiles of the nearest cottage. Evie’s eyes were round and two little waves at the top of her nose indicated a frown, despite her joy at seeing her father. Bronwen was holding a plastic carrier bag.

‘They were four for a pound,’ said Rupert. Of course, of course, today had been the Mackerel Race to raise money for the RNLI, when anyone who had a boat set off at the crack of a starting pistol to catch as many mackerel as they could in just three hours. Evie was staring into the pungent, slippery bag as though it contained the head of a seal.

Later, we all lay on a woollen blanket in the garden, our eight legs making a star-shape, our heads clumped together on cushions. The charcoal on the barbecue was turning to powder, although it gave off more heat than ever. White wine knocked the edge off the night. Cold blades of grass tickled my ankles and feet.

A solitary flash caught my eye. As though someone had drawn a chalk line then erased it. I looked at the place where it had been, and saw a second streak, fading, even as it passed. Soon they were coming every few seconds, the Perseids, they happened every August. High above, behind the shooting stars, was the Milky Way, and it really did look like a glass of spilled milk, thrown across the sky, and sinking into velvet. We stayed outside as long as we could, laughing and pointing at the stars, until the blanket and cushions grew damp with condensation, and the cold drove us indoors. We made up the cabin bed for Bronwen. Evie disappeared into the crog-loft, into her tangled den of pillows and toys, and arranged herself so she could see the fire. Rupert and I slept in a wooden shepherd’s hut in the garden.

The next morning I woke before dawn. I pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans and sat on the steps of the shepherd’s hut, aware of the shift as the darkness began to fade, my eyes adjusting from night to day vision. Because we were in the west, the sun was up a good while before it finally appeared over Snowdon. It was cold in Garn Fadryn’s shadow. The stars dimmed, then disappeared, till only Venus, the morning star, was left. I liked to watch the sky brighten behind the Garn although I could not see the summit, still enclosed in its envelope of mist. Locally the hill is known as Madryn, from
modron
, meaning mother.