The Pull of the Shore
Zoë Wells
The girl is worried because there’s a storm coming, and she didn’t think to write Storm on her fingers. She wrote “Yes” and “No” and “Please” and “Why,” and even “Go Away” and “Alone,” though those two are on her right hand, because she uses them less. But now she hasn’t the words to say what she wants, to warn her grandfather so he’ll know what to do; so she pulls the sleeves of her shirt down, tight, over her fingers, pinching the seams with her thumbs so they resemble flippers, and she follows him down to the shore.
Mikhail unwraps the first layer of newspaper from around the raw cod fillets and scrunches it, feeding it to the fire. It’s a clear day, or as clear as it ever gets. The wind has dropped and there are patches of blue that wane in and out of existence, but there’s still a chill around his face, and he doesn’t dare take off his boots yet.
“Back when I was your age, I used to come down here with my brother, and we’d buy the fish straight from the boats as they came in,” he says, and the girl nods.
“You wouldn’t have liked that though,” he adds.
She looks at him, then points to a finger. Why.
“Oh, well, fresh fish. You know.” He makes some rough gestures in the air. He realizes he isn’t quite sure himself what he meant by this. “Guts. Deboning. It’s not the kind of thing young girls like.”
She makes no move to respond, does not lift her fingers to point. Instead, he watches as the girl goes and sits by the brambles. She has a book in her canvas pack but doesn’t read it, just holds the thing, her thoughts somewhere else. When I was your age. As though anyone could remember the specifics of being a child, whether his memories of being nine were really those, or simply borrowed, an amalgamation of his childhood. Time expanded then, quickened now, but what he hadn’t considered was how even the view of the past would shorten – how you always seemed to have the same amount of memories, but spread out over fifty years instead of ten. He places the cod in a tin foil tray and lowers it onto the coals.
He looks over at the girl as she crouches, reddened knees pushed forward. She’s left her book to one side, her attention fixated on something beneath her. He remembers finding all kinds of flotsam on this beach. He had a sea glass collection once and imagines that she too might have seen a tell-tale glint out the corner of her eye. But then there’s a fluttering of a breeze, and the leaf that she was looking at jumps to the next stone over. Brown, dried up, red in the middle. A dull thing that has fallen too early in the season. Her mouth dangles open as she watches it move across the rocks.
He prods the pan with a fork. The cod is cooked. He takes it out of the embers with a tea-towel folded over his hand, twice, and calls over to her, “Lunch?”
The girl looks at what he’s holding, still and sullen.
“Not a fan of fish?” he asks.
She points to a word on her hand, but he’s too far away to read it, and by the time he’s made his way over, makeshift oven glove in one hand, rucksack in the other, her attention has once again drifted, her hands returned to her side.
Her dad had told him that she’d eaten pretty much everything back in the day, bar the usual exceptions like mushrooms. Mikhail had answered that he didn’t like mushrooms either, so this wouldn’t be a problem. But then his son-in-law had continued, and said that when she’d stopped talking so much, she’d stopped eating, and everything had spiraled down from there, until now, when she’s here, and he is staring at her staring down, only just beginning to realize what the next few weeks might hold.
He opens the bag and takes out a couple slices of rye bread, butters them until they’re almost white. He adds a squirt of ketchup on top, before transferring one of the cod fillets onto it. The creation balances on his knee, as he sits cross-legged, wiping his hands on his jacket before taking a bite straight down the middle of it.
She is done with the leaf, and her head feels calmer now, so she takes her hands out of the sleeves. There is brown bread and red ketchup that Mikhail has left laid out in front of him, and she feels his oppressive stare as she picks up two slices, makes herself a ketchup sandwich. He nudges the white butter and white fish towards her, but she closes the red sandwich instead, and pulls the coat back up over her, so she is only touching it through the fabric. She chews rapidly until each bite is a paste, then lets the mush sit in her mouth for as long as she can manage before she has to swallow, so she can breathe easy again.
When walking back up to the house, she holds onto the corner of his brown leather jacket because she likes the color of it and the sheen of the material. Though she doesn’t say this; so the man beneath the jacket smiles at the gesture, unknowing.
*****
She has left her book by the bushes, not on purpose. When she realizes, days later, she wonders whether it will decompose, and whether the roots will suck it up too, the very words of it, the way that trees do sometimes with bodies. The thought of it made everything loud, so she switched on the kettle. She liked the sound of it, settling in a cloud over her, muddying all other noises. She’d read about a tree that had been planted over a grave, and that they’d only realized the mistake when somebody found bones in it. A whole tooth locked into the wood. She’d read about how sometimes murders were solved because the blood and bone beneath the ground fed the flowers above, until you had a clearing that was healthy and blooming and full of life, with death lying quiet beneath. She wondered about what might happen to the book she’d left, and if she came back later, would she find the words inked into the leaves, or chapter titles in patterns in the brambles.
And was it only the living plants that did this, or other things too, the dead ones that made up ropes and twines? Would the fibers in her jumper start to eat away at her if she forgot to move for too long, or the duvet suck away her marrow in the middle of the night? And what if that’s what happened to them – to people, when they died, the ones that you never got to see the bodies of? Who slipped away suddenly and unexpectedly to a better place, and where nobody could quite explain to you what had happened. The kettle started to boil and sputter, the sound cutting bright into her thoughts, harsh white. Maybe the duvet was a better place. Maybe her jumper.
“Making tea, are you?” Mikhail says, walking into the living room, which was also the kitchen, and the hallway, the guestroom. She shakes her head. He looks at the kettle. It finishes its run and clicks off. “Oh, okay then. Well, since you’ve boiled it anyway, do you mind if I make myself one?”
She shakes her head again and moves out of the kitchen, a swift motion mirroring his into it, like it was practiced, a kind of ballet, so they’re never closer to one another than a couple feet. He makes two cups of tea, just in case, milk but no sugar, and sets the two mugs down on the coffee table. She eyes the cream liquid but doesn’t pick it up. Mikhail takes out his woodwork box from underneath the table, and gets to carving another small trinket, unsure yet of what he’s making. The bend of the wood will tell him what this piece will be soon enough.
His father used to bring back scrimshaw when he was younger, usually chess pieces carved from ivory. Though pine hasn’t quite the same splendor, Mikhail has long thought it worth the sacrifice to be sat here, in the dry, instead of beneath the deck of a whaling ship. The call of the ocean outside, and he could just sit here, ignoring it, whittling. Still, he likes making boats best of all. Usually he’d carve the ribbing, then soak and nail the planks on, each individually, and in that moment the boat would seem to him almost life sized, and he would become a friendly giant, gently holding the whole project together. Then he’d make the gunport covers and hooks for the sails, and sometimes small cannons or windows, boxes and furniture for a cabin no-one would see. He’d thread twine up the rigging, and fashion sails made of cloth handkerchiefs, leftover from when his doctor had warned him to change to the disposable type after a series of chest infections.
He’d paint the hull, sometimes green, sometimes red, and when it was done, if it was good, he’d hand it over to one of the fathers down by the pub, and maybe a week or so later he’d see the boat sailing, not lonely, on the lake, new owner watching from the shoreline. If it was no good though, he’d go down to the pebble shore and launch it out himself. If the ocean gave it back, he’d push it out again, again, and so it would continue until she took it for herself, the boat disappearing into the black, or breaking against the rocks.
The phone rings. He checks the green backlit screen for the caller ID. His son-in-law. He picks it up.
She watches as he puts the phone to his ear, or not quite – holding it a little away, his brow furrowing at the noise.
“Was wondering when you’d check in,” Mikhail says.
“No, all good,” he continues. Then looking at the girl: “Right?”
He tries a wink but it just makes him look more aggravated.
“Yes, she’s here with me now. We were just having tea, settling down for the evening.”
“Yes, she’s got it.”
“No.”
“Right.”
The girl is getting bored of listening to Mikhail, and so she sits on the floor and starts to pull at the green threads of the rug. She tugs them out of line, then tries to pull at the next one along, to get them back into place, but ends up with two lumps of thread instead. If she does this enough, she thinks it’ll start to look like the grass has come inside.
“Look I really think it’ll be fine.”
She looks up. Mikhail has his hand on his forehead, and his elbow on the kitchen cupboard. He exhales.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be curt.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
Mikhail holds the phone out to her. When she doesn’t take it, he presses the speakerphone button and sets it on the floor next to her.
“Hi sweetie,” her father’s voice says.
“Are you doing alright over there?”
“Is granddad taking good care of you?”
She nods to both questions. There’s a moment’s silence on the other end of the line, then he clears his throat.
“I can’t hear it when you move your head over the phone. Can you say something? Maybe tap something out?”
She picks at the skin around her thumb, then bites at it.
“Okay,” he says.
“Well.”
“I love you.”
“I hope you’re alright.”
“Can you pass me back to granddad please?”
And she passes the phone back, and Mikhail switches off the speakerphone so she can’t hear her dad anymore, but she can still hear Mikhail, who says “I wish you wouldn’t call me granddad. No, I know, but it makes me sound so old,” into the phone. And she understands, because the girl doesn’t like it when people use her name either. So she goes over to the countertop and flicks the switch on the electric kettle, and Mikhail comes over and flicks it off. “I can’t hear him over the sound,” he says, so she goes and hides in her tuckaway, a space in the hallway cupboard she has made hers with all the colors she trusts, and waits until the phone is down again and she can hear the schick schick of the knife across wood, curls falling onto the ground.
*****
The girl writes Storm on her palm, then thinks and adds a question mark, so he’ll know it’s a question, but when she shows it to Mikhail she realizes it’s not the right word. Even now she can’t quite explain what she means without these special phrases, the ones her father taught her. She knows this Storm is wrong because when she shows it to Mikhail he looks outside the window and says, “Looks clear to me.”
She shakes her head. No.
“Trust me, I know these things. My father was a sailor. He taught me all those tricks they have, like how to recognize the shoreline without seeing it, just based off the sound it makes, the waves hitting the beach. Isn’t that interesting? Sometimes it sounds, well… mossy, foamy. And that means that you’re by breakage. Sometimes it’s sharp, and that’s the cliff-face, and you don’t want to go there. When it hits snow it sounds wet – yes, I know, water is wet, but if you heard it…”
He stops, not quite trailing off, just stopping, as if he’d just realized that he was speaking in sentences, speaking at her not to her. Because he’d looked down at her and seen that she was staring, unblinking, at him. Big child’s eyes, almost a hard stare, like she was saying shut up shut up shut up you old man, nobody cares, nobody asked. Only she had the words Shut Up and No on her fingers, and the whole time she never pointed to them, never motioned. Just held her open palm, the word Storm. He wants to tell her that there’s no reason to be worried – hell, he used to be afraid of it too. Her mum was, too, when she was her age. The mind conjures images of the sea rising up, taking the house with it – it’s hard not to when every sound is the sea, every part of life comes back to it. When the fear struck her, he would take her up the hill, he would bring her above the waves, higher in the sky, so that they could look out, his daughter’s hand in his, as he would say: “Look how far away it is. Look how safe we are. More bark than bite, that sea is; she won’t wash us away that easy.”
But he will not say this. He hasn’t the words. So he checks the sky again and repeats “Looks clear to me. Nothing to be worried about.”
****
The lighthouse is smooth on the outside, brick hidden beneath cement. From a distance it looks like a helter-skelter, halted in production, waiting for the final lick of paint and life. The keeper’s house used to jut from the side of it, but a storm had taken the roof off in the twenties. By the time the village had put together the funds to fix it, the keeper at the time had settled into his new home at the bottom of the hill. He found he liked the quiet of the cottage more, so chose to stay put, and so did the next keeper, and the one after that, as did Mikhail, in his own time; each keeper making the choice to leave the lighthouse lonely on the hill.
Even the sheep won’t come this far, the buffeting winds too harsh for idle grazing, with Mikhail himself having to bend to beat it. The door is cold metal, the walls cold brick; the furnishings are sparse, with empty shelves and clattering cupboards, and a sudden, great, spiral staircase pulling away from them in hypnotic swirls, as Mikhail and the girl enter and look up in accidental synchronization.
Mikhail shows the girl the hammock that the old keeper, or his assistant, would sometimes sleep in, folded up and tucked into a cupboard now.
“He would have been an ex-sailor, and he’d have got used to the swing of it. It was pretty common at the time, bringing a hammock home on leave, or after retiring I guess.” He shows her the hooks in the ceiling beams, rusty with disuse and the salt draft that scurries into every corner of the room. “You can find some of them in the village houses too.”
She pointed to a finger. Why?
“Why the hooks?”
She shakes her head.
“Why what? Why sleep at home?”
She goes to point No, and then looks at her hands. She tries to block out some of the letters on one finger and then on another, to make a word from the letters left, but can’t manage the tactile gymnastics required to speak. The more she tries, the angrier she gets, until she puts her hands back in their sleeves, and then back into the pockets of the little red raincoat, and stands there, and waits. Instead of asking if she wants to see the view, he starts on the staircase.
Maybe why are we here – why are you showing this to me, old man? Mikhail pushes up the sleeves of his jumper. Why would anyone send a nine-year-old to spend time with a lighthouse keeper? They’re not famed for their people skills. Doesn’t matter if the lighthouse barely needs to be kept, there’s something off about it. The lighthouse keeper is a liminal man. He spends all day on land, staring at the sea. He guides others without seeing them. At best, his closest friends are the shadows passing in the night; at worst, they are simply concepts, the knowledge that a ship must be manned, that a boat floating by will have someone on it, steering it, looking back at the lighthouse keeper.
Mikhail runs his hand along the dark wooden banister as they head up, feeling for splinters. The girl mirrors him, following him just as his own daughter once had. They step out into the bright windows of the top tower, and he drops her hand to shield his eyes. He walks to the light, gives it the once over, checking for damage or dust or debris. He does not know what he checks for, really: the lantern is a farce, almost as much as its aging keeper. A powerful electrical light, rigged on a timer, a small engine that spins it round, and the man who keeps it has become nothing more than a glorified handyman. The ports moved on, the boats aged and were made new again, and with each generation the lone sailor with his tools became more reliable than the man in the tower, radar and maps and all kinds of things replacing everyone in time. But even still, there is a comfort to be found here, in the old motions of things. He looks out at the sea and breathes. His shoulders ease. She sits beneath the railing, turned away from him, kicking out. Her legs dangling into empty air.
****
When the words on her fingers start to rub away, the girl doesn’t seem to notice the change. She still points to the smudge of black and Mikhail squints, trying to remember what had been there before. Sometimes he guesses. Mostly he imagines what she’s said. He builds a voice for her in his mind, something familiar. But it is wrong, older than her, and it carries a too familiar tone. He recognizes it, then finds he cannot bear to hear his daughter’s voice, even imagined from his granddaughter’s throat. So his questions slow, and then stop, and it is days before he realizes that he, too, has become a kind of mute, the heavy silence telling him what he already knows: that any word would be too much, and yet no words are ever enough.
He takes himself to the pub as a reward when his latest boat is finished, and the girl comes with him. Since she won’t take his hand, he walks a few feet in front of her and turns every few steps to make sure she is still with him. The inside of the pub is warm but uncrowded, the usual weeknight crowd there. Before they left, he rang his friend Ole, and heard his own voice escape him in uncertain tones as he asked if he was free for a pint. This same Ole now waves at them from across the bar. He is older than Mikhail remembered – it always surprised him before that the man could be a father already, but now his face seems to have caught up with his life. He works at the only bank for miles, but like everyone here dresses in a fisherman’s jumper, play-acting a life long gone.
After the men embrace, Ole leans his face down to the girl’s level. “And who’s this then?”
“This is my granddaughter,” Mikhail says, and tells him her name.
“Ah, of course, the famous granddaughter,” he says, not unkindly, but even the girl can hear there’s something else to it. Pity, maybe. Discomfort.
Ole tries to smile through it. Ole grins too large. Ole leans forward to scruff her hair, and when she steps back, he shrugs and straightens up, and he keeps talking to Mikhail, asking him about her, and the summer, and how’s life and the house and the fishing. The girl scoots back again, his voice loud, the ground sticky, the room bright, packed, and so she puts her hood up. Mikhail says that it’s been good, a little less quiet than usual, and how’s his boy, how old is he now? Well he’s got a gift for him, either way. He unzips his bag and produces the carved sloop, the word Lion inked onto the hull.
“Well he’s not so into lions as much anymore, but I’m sure he’ll love it just the same,” says Ole, taking it. He gestures for a round and pays for the both of them. “He grew up I guess. Never can quite keep track of them, can you?”
Mikhail nods in agreement. “Sometimes they can be whole other species.”
“But I’ll miss it when he’s all grown up, you know. When he leaves.”
“True,” Mikhail says, and it’s then that he notices that the red coat isn’t next to him anymore.
He turns around. There’s no child by his knees.
Ole tells him not to worry, that she probably just slipped to the bathroom, but when Mikhail continues to fidget at his seat, picking at his fingers, Ole is the one who gets up, asks the woman coming out of the bathroom if she saw a little girl in there. She answers No, and there’s a sudden uneasy lightness to the air, like a tilt, like the ground falling out beneath Mikhail.
Ole and some of the others fan out to cover the center of the village, all on the lookout for Mikhail’s little girl, and the man himself makes his way back to the house. But it takes all of a minute for Mikhail to check the three rooms – bathroom, bedroom, living room, and not a trace of her. There’s white noise all around him, pooling in him. Mikhail checks under the bed. He’s wondering where he would hide. He’s wondering where she would hide, but he is not thinking of this she, he is thinking of her mum, he is thirty years ago looking for his little girl, her blue check jacket and brown booties. He sees the lighthouse. He walks, heavily, pushing his way past the wind. He pictures her burning her hand on the light, or dangling over the gate, tripping down the stairs, crumpled in the foyer, and when he cranks the iron door open and sees no body, he is in parts relieved and in a small part worse for it, because at least then he would have found her.
The lighthouse kitchen is empty. The shelves are empty. The cupboard is empty. He takes the steps two by two, and it’s like there’s a wind in his ears, buffeting his head from within, and when he reaches the top and shields his eyes against the light, he pauses for a second. He can feel his pulse in his hands, and he realizes that he is breathing too much, drowning in oxygen, taking in great gulps of it one after another. He holds onto the ledge and focuses down on the ground, holding onto the beat of where is she where is she where until it steadies, and he is calming, and it is just enough that he can look out across the field, past his house, towards the lights of the village, and look for those silhouettes, for the tell-tale red coat.
She can’t have gone far. He keeps hold of that thought. He stands and keeps watch for five, maybe ten minutes, until he’s sure that she can’t be outside. He sees Ole and the others, watches them knocking their way through the doors of the village. The whole while he thinks of where he would’ve run to, at her age. But he can see the pebble beach. He has checked the lighthouse entrance, the kitchen, the cupboard – the most stable feeling part of the building, the only place you could almost block out the sounds of wind and rain during a storm. He can look out at the sea right now and find comfort in it. Black and white turning into the blue of waves crashing, receding, continuing on their way. The movement and bare colors of it soothing, wrapping around him like a blanket. Something she has never spent more than a second looking at.
He dispels the image of himself as her, and thinks, instead, directly, of her, the distance she takes, the spaces she finds. He takes the steps down and out of the lighthouse, and walks down the hill again, towards the house.
He opens the front door to the cottage, and this time he is calm, he knows what he is looking for. He puts his hand to the kettle, feels that it is freshly boiled. And when he shuts the front door, he can hear the faint mumbling, and he sees that the spiral cord of the phone is reaching through into the cupboard. He opens the door.
There’s a pile of blankets and towels, but only the brown and red ones. Beneath them, there is a small girl, the phone lying close to her, not quite touching, and through it her father speaks to her. He bends down, and waits to see her reaction, and when she doesn’t motion, or make a noise, the grandfather sits himself down, just outside the cupboard. He places his hat, scarlet, onto the pile that she has buried herself under, and together they listen as the phone continues talking, telling mundane stories. Her dad tells her what he did today, and the day before, and he talks about how much he misses her. He tells her memories, and the whole time she sits and listens and is quiet. But her father knows she’s listening, just as he knew who it was when he first picked up the phone and heard nothing but shallow breaths.
After a moment the grandfather stands up, walks into the kitchen, and weighs down the switch on the kettle. He sits on the sofa and takes a new block of wood out, and the rhythmic schick schick melds with the sounds of the house, wrapping throughout, blocking out the world beyond.
Zoë Wells
Zoë Wells is a writer, poet and translator. Her writing has been featured in a number of publications, including STORGY, Poetry Wales, Bandit Fiction, Hypertrophic Press, and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She teaches creative writing through the Geneva Writers’ Group, and is based in Switzerland.