The Fish Ladder (3 page)

Crossing the central ridge of the Pennines felt exciting – the M62 was the highest motorway in England – the journey surprisingly swift. But then the road passed along the northern bank of the Humber. In Hull the docks spilled on, mile after mile. I began to wish I’d brought a map. Although I knew where I was going: to the place that separated the sea from the river. If I followed the river, I’d get there. And yet . . . I hadn’t thought the place would be so far beyond the city.

A flat landscape opened to the east, definite against the imperfect darkness. I passed through a hamlet: picturesque, sleepy. A triple-stretch white limousine parked jauntily on the village green. A farmyard crammed with Romany caravans where a wooden windmill powered the nodding head of a life-sized puppet clown. A nuclear power station. Wind farms. The detritus of extremities. I thought of Dungeness, where the filmmaker Derek Jarman spent his final years in a black pitch shiplap cottage, and dragged a garden from the blue-grey shingle as his once keen eyes foundered, then failed. There is a photograph of him as a smiling Canute, wrapped in a cloak with a necklace made of fishing floats, pitching himself between the land and the sea, ordering back the waves. Or perhaps it was King Lear. A fighter, against the dying light, the creeping sea. Despite the echo Dungeness seemed far away. Smaller, and harder. There was a softness about this new landscape, a vastness, which I had not anticipated.

I reached the village of Easington, and the signs for Spurn Point itself. There was a car park, although to use it seemed extravagant, given that there was no traffic, but I did so anyway. Next to the car park was a mobile-home park. I locked the car, went back, checked it. Was irritated with myself for doing so. It was, after all, not yet two in the morning. Who would come here now? I walked through farmland, past a number of houses, and was surprised by how many lights were on. I hadn’t thought the place would be so populated, and had imagined that those who did live here would be sleeping.

I tried to suppress a panic, a rising fizz of anxiety. I felt sure it was to do with the unexpected proximity of so many other people, and the consequent vulnerability of walking alone out to the point. It was like walking the plank. I had acknowledged the possibility of meeting the odd birdwatcher, though at that time of year, and in a place so remote, I had believed it to be unlikely. And yet, behind the pulled curtains, I felt eyes fixed on television sets, sweating cans of chilled lager warming in the summer night. Young mothers with sleepless children, shift workers, the very old. I sensed their wakefulness.

Headlights approached: a police Range Rover. It stopped and the occupants – dough-faced, currant-eyed – peered at me; I raised a cautious hand. What were they looking for? Smugglers? Suicides? Vice? They seemed satisfied that I was none of these although did not reciprocate my wave. They drove on, out towards the point.

Where the arm of sand first lifted out from the body of the land – so that both the river and the sea became visible – there was a collection of prefabricated huts, of corrugated iron and precast concrete. A number of cars were strewn, rather than parked, outside them. There was an old BMW, its chrome lines glinting, its windows misted from within. One of the buildings, a Nissen hut, seemed to have been a café serving visitors to the point, but the signs looked old and abandoned. Yet the cars implied that someone still lived there, that there were other inhabitants of the fringe. My plan had been simply to walk out across the spit, to the tip, where the river met the sea, and then lie down, somewhere beyond the lighthouse, and sleep. I had thought that I could spend the following day there, exploring, absorbing, before going back to Mum’s. But I hadn’t comprehended how little darkness there would be. None, in fact. There had been a shadowing, a filling in, soon after midnight, but since then the sky had gradually lightened. At first dark blue, it was now streaked with lighter bands. It was easy to see the pale curves of sand ahead, the colours slowly emerging, like those in a developing Polaroid. The police passed by again. In just a few minutes they had completed the journey that I had driven through the night to undertake.

I walked over to the river mouth. Its shore was flat and fecund, green marsh, brown mud. There was a popping sound, as though a hundred mouths sucked bull’s-eyes. Marsh gas, I supposed. And the Humber. As wide and real as death. A few miles upstream a single-span suspension bridge joined Lincolnshire with the East Riding of
Yorkshire; it was a popular place for suicides. I wondered if any of them floated out this far, had washed up on this shore. I was afraid to look at the water, afraid of what I might see. A bloated dog, pale limbs like chair legs pointing at a sightless sky. Or worse.

My unease was accentuated by a sound, and one so distinctive that I would have known the place if I were brought back blindfold. It was a deep vibration, a plainsong, a confluence of many voices. At first I thought it was an accident formed by the architecture of the air, by the river-wind running against the sea-wind. And that may have been so, but in the paleness of the night I could see the instrument in which the notes were caught: the electricity poles that ran out to the lighthouse, and the cables strung between them. Any electrical current that passed through the wires was silent, or at any rate its gentle hum suppressed below the song, which was ceaseless, low, continuous as madness.

I turned away, and walked over to the other side of the spit, to the beach.

The more space I put between myself and the wakeful inhabitants of the mainland, the better I felt. The sea shone pearl-grey, opaque, and the sky lightened above it with a bloom as soft as a plum. Sunrise seemed imminent but I knew it wasn’t for another hour. A rusted raffia-and-metal chair retrieved from the sea and set up on the sand attested to the presence of fishermen, or birdwatchers, but not now. I liked being alone. I settled into my gait, happy that mine were the first footprints in sand as new as snow.

Over the years there had been attempts to stop the spit from breaking, to protect it from the combination of long-shore drift and the river’s passage that formed it, destroyed it, and will form it again. These various schemes now presented themselves as so many abandoned works. Ballast, in concrete blocks. The ribs of groins, each one made from a single tree, the bars of a giant cage along the shore. The horizontal planks had long since washed away, or been removed, as the futility of what they were attempting became apparent. The remaining upright posts had the gravitas of gods, each one as thick as a man, and twice as tall. I thought of Easter Island, the unseeing heads that guarded the land. Or the skeleton of a Viking ship, its king and cargo turned to ash. I was delighted by the place, forgot about my fear, and was still running about between the forest of posts when the sun lifted out of the sea, orange into an indigo sky. I was surprised by the warmth as it lit my face. As though a stranger had reached out and touched me, in greeting, or reprimand. And shadows! Long, spidery shadows. Suddenly, to the right of me, I saw my own. Tall, and spectre-thin, my long hair blown sideways, my arms incidental above endless scissor legs. And suddenly my face was wet, tears from nowhere, my shadow. My shadow! I stood between it and the sun, it flooded from my feet along the earth and, for a little while, I knew I was alive. This moment, these moments, of recognition, they come so rarely; without hindsight, without forethought. Time passing even as we enter it.

I became accustomed to the day, relished the light wind, the turning tide, the water easing back. And now, outlined by the shadows, I could see each beach-combed fragment, each piece of rope, of driftwood, old toy, bit of net, and pram. Absolutely nothing unexpected. And then a ruin! A cottage, a bothy; without roof, or doors, or windows, half sunk into the sand. It must have been built on the spit, when the spit was somewhere else, and as the snakelike course shifted, the house, long abandoned, had ended up on the beach, disappearing under the water with each spring tide. I explored the bothy, its rooms cobwebbed in sand, but I wanted to get on and it was tiring, walking on the beach, my feet sinking with every step. I headed into the low dunes and was thrilled by snapdragons and sea holly, convolvulus and sea pinks. Saxifrage, pink – everything pink.
Rosa rugosa
flourished, arching sideways like a bramble, self-seeded from someone’s garden; and then a yellow star-shaped flower, hypericum. I was enchanted with the softness of the landscape.

I saw the lighthouse. Something from a children’s tale. And then I saw him. The man. At first I thought he was fishing. He stood, or rather acted, halfway between me and the lighthouse. I couldn’t be sure of his age. I didn’t want to get close enough to look. He could have been anything between twenty-five and fifty. I realised he hadn’t seen me so I dropped into the long grass, aware suddenly how tired I was. He looked like Frank Auerbach, the painter, thick-set, wavy hair, energetic, strong. And yet he ran at the sea like a dancer, stopped – almost on tiptoe as his arms flew forward – and then hugged himself, ran back, but backwards, never once taking his eyes from the sea. He picked up a rock, ran again at the water’s edge, hugged the rock to his chest, and then hurled it. It was this movement, I now saw, that I had mistaken for casting, for fishing. He was throwing. His arms fell, free of their burden, and he paused to see where the stone had landed. It was in the water. But he was still only for a moment. He seemed to rail at the sea, lift his arms in despair, or supplication, then run again, repeating his strange dance. And then again, another rock, hugged to the water, thrown, watched, the same backward, erratic movement. Every so often he reached the sea empty-handed, seemingly because he hadn’t found an appropriate stone in the time he allowed for each circuit, and that’s when the arms flew outwards, followed by the hug.

I was curious, yet afraid of him. I tried not to think about Virginia Woolf’s novel
To the Lighthouse
, that told the story of a family and their holiday intention to visit a lighthouse; but they didn’t actually get there until the First World War had happened, and some of them were dead, and the children grown up, and it was all too late. I had no desire to pass this man to reach my destination. And I was so very tired. The dunes were full of indentations, clearings among the sea holly and marram grass, protected from the wind. Keeping one eye on the man, I moved behind him in an arc. A dusty green car was parked by the road, at my side of the lighthouse, and I thought it likely that it was his. The only footprints on the beach had been my own. There was a track leading from the road to the beach, between me and the car. There were no footprints in the dunes. So he’d either driven here, or walked, but either way he hadn’t come over the ridge of dunes, or along the beach, which left the road, and the riverbank, as the spit was only a few yards wide at that point. And he was a creature of the most compulsive habit.

I retreated back into the dunes, keeping more or less equidistant from the track, the beach and the road, and scooped a hollow with my fingers in the warming sand, at the place furthest from where I felt he was likely to pass. I lay down in it, curled up, foetal. I could not see anything but grass and sky. I was below the lip of the dune. I could not see the man. Which meant, I supposed, that he couldn’t see me.

The soft sand blew constantly. I closed my eyes. I remembered an event a few weeks earlier when I had met up with Rupert in London. We were staying in a hotel and I had woken early. I had walked over to the window and, while Rupert slept, had watched the hard summer light pick the shadows from the street below, first drawing detail, brickwork, cobbles; then bleaching it, until everything glowed and hazed with the promise of heat. I had watched a man come out of a mews house, as though to leave for work: he wore a suit, a flare of white indicating his shirt, too bright to see if he wore a tie. He had a cup in his hand, which surprised me. And then I realised: he was a smoker. I imagined a child in a high chair at a kitchen table, the mother or au pair in attendance. As he lit the cigarette, everything about him seemed to come together, his very atoms coalesced, formed a cloak about him, a swirl of testosterone. I watched him relax into himself, becoming a man, and for a while I had remained there, curious.

Later, I had walked past the house and seen that it wasn’t a home but an engineering consultancy. This made more sense of his distraction, his abstraction, and also of his desire for the cigar­ette – when you want something, and you can’t have it, there is tension inherent in the situation. I wondered what had happened to this man on the beach, what had brought him to this place, this erratic dance, this compulsion. But I was unable to hold the thread. Sleep worried at the fabric of my consciousness, loosened it, pulled at it before lifting it, so that it blew and dipped across the sand like a child’s favourite blanket, carrying my thoughts away with it.

I woke up an hour or so later. The satiety only sleep can give. Sand covered me in shallow drifts; my hair was full of it. Warm in the hollow basin, heavy-lidded. I sat up. Cautious. I was incredibly hungry. I had brought food with me, but I was already ill at ease, and would remain so until I knew where the man was.

I walked to the tip of the dune, bending forward to reduce my height, the lighthouse to my right, the beach to my left and ahead of me. And there he was, still throwing rocks. I caught now the O of his voice, no words, the wind had shifted. It was as though nothing had happened (nothing had happened). Perhaps he was a little slower, but not much. I wondered, for the first time, how long he’d been there. Did we arrive more or less together? Or had he been there all the while that I drove, over the Pennines, along the estuary, under the deepening sky? But I didn’t really want to know, not now, possibly not ever. I wanted to be free of him, away. I was very much afraid of him, afraid of his unquiet mind, and I felt this fear coiling in my intestines.