The Sing of the Shore

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2018

Copyright © Lucy Wood 2018

Cover images © Shutterstock

Kind permission to reproduce an excerpt from A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words by Robert Morton Nance (1963) granted by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies.

Lucy Wood asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008193393

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008193423

Version: 2018-02-14

Dedication

For Ellie and Georgina

Epigraph

The sing of the shore:

the sound made by waves breaking, varying with the nature of the shore – sand, pebbles, boulders, scarped cliff, or reefs and ledges of rock – and thus giving the experienced fisherman an indication of his position when fog or darkness make land invisible

– From A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words by Robert Morton Nance

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Home Scar

The Dishes

Dreckly

One Foot in Front of the Other

Way the Hell Out

Salthouse

Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict

The Life of a Wave

Standing Water

A Year of Buryings

Cables

The Sing of the Shore

By-the-Wind Sailors

Acknowledgements

Also by Lucy Wood

About the Author

About the Publisher

Home Scar

The sea was what his father called a cowshitty sea – a brownish, algae green, that meant it would be good fishing, even though it sounded like it would be bad fishing. But when he said something was bullshit, like the landlord raising the rent, or not fixing the oven, or mentioning that he might put the flat up for sale, then that was definitely something bad. Except when he was in the pub, in a group, and then it could be said and the laughter would be low and raucous as seagulls. To Ivor, it was all in the same murky category as words like restive – Ivor is a very restive boy, his teacher would say into the phone, is everything alright? Apparently that didn’t mean that he was calm and easy.

The beach had been scraped and dragged by the winter storms. It was almost March now and where there had been sand there were stones, and where there had been stones there were channels that kept their water long after the tide had gone back out.

Crystal and Gull Gilbert were throwing stones at a limpet on a rock. The rock was covered in a rind of barnacles and there were anemones deep in the cracks; dark red and glistening like sweets.

Crystal picked up a handful of stones and threw them. One of them hit the limpet but it didn’t move. She went up and pressed her hand against it. The limpet grated a few millimetres across the rock. ‘That one up there looks empty,’ she said. She was pushing the limpet, but staring at a house on the cliff.

‘Let’s do something else,’ Ivor said. The week billowed and sagged around them, like a tent that might stay up, or might at any moment collapse. It was a school holiday. They’d already wrecked Crystal’s TV and been forced out of Gull Gilbert’s house by his brother, who had a girl hidden in his sour, dim bedroom. Ivor had seen her feet sticking out from under the bed.

He put his hand in one of the pools. Sea gooseberries rolled in the wind, scattering like a smashed chandelier. The ripples in the pool were dark and bright. Crystal’s hair was the same dark, dry colour as charcoal – you could rub your hand over it and get an electric shock. Sometimes it got tangled and clumps had to be cut off with scissors. She was the biggest person in their class, bigger even than Gull Gilbert, and could put a safety pin through the skin on her elbow. Last year she’d pushed over a teacher.

‘We’ve been in there already,’ Gull Gilbert said. He picked up a stone with two hands and swung it through the air. There were blotchy freckles on his wrists and neck. He never wore a coat. He picked up another stone. He was frowning like he always did when he was concentrating. He would throw for hours until he hit his target in exactly the way he wanted. When he was concentrating, you knew exactly what he was doing. When he wasn’t, anything could happen.

‘We haven’t,’ Crystal said.

‘Let’s go back into town,’ Ivor said. There was an indent in the rock, shallow and easy to miss at first, where the limpet had been before it moved. It was exactly the same size as the limpet’s shell and it had the same rough curves, the same fluted edge.

‘I want to go in that one.’ Crystal pushed her foot in the sand and turned a fast, lumbering pirouette.

Gull Gilbert put his stone down slowly.

Ivor closed his eyes and leaned into the wind. If he did it right, it was like falling without ever hitting the ground. The cold found its way through his jumper, puckering the folds of skin. Goosebumps, goose barnacles, sea gooseberries. There weren’t as many geese as there used to be, his father said. He had mended Ivor’s jumper with lumpy stitches.

They’d already tried most of the other empty houses. There was the white one with the blue door, which had a porcelain doll on the windowsill that stared at them with its cracked face. The ceilings were streaked with yellow and the whole place smelled like a stale tin of biscuits. They would prise up slates and scratch their names underneath, pick at the bare walls until the plaster flaked off like confetti, and lie on the stiff, damp beds. But this time all the lights were on and someone was standing in the kitchen.

The big house with the red roof had people in it as well – there were bags and suitcases by the door, and the sound of voices and laughing. Sometimes they would go in there, sit on the leather chairs and read the tourist leaflets, then open all the cupboards to see if anyone had forgotten to pack anything – they’d found watches, cigarettes, a silky dressing gown that they’d taken turns wearing. Once, the oven had been left on by accident and Gull Gilbert had turned it off, then, after a moment, turned it back on again.

And then, just as they were testing the door of the stone house, the cleaning man had driven up and shouted something. Crystal had run first, then Gull Gilbert, Ivor struggling behind, his armpits streaming, that shivery almost-laughing feeling in his throat and bladder.

The wind dropped and Ivor tipped forward. The sand creaked under his knees like polystyrene. He opened his eyes. The others had already gone. Their footprints crossed the beach, sloppy as leftover cereal. Water rose up and filled each print, stretching them until they disappeared.

They were circling the house when he got up there. Gull Gilbert was trying the front windows, which faced out to sea and were rimed with salt.

Ivor lifted the doormat and looked under. There was nothing there. Sometimes the keys would be in locked boxes on the wall and you had to know the right combination to get in. There were a thousand different combinations, maybe a million. You could try all day and never get it right. Sometimes people left back doors open. Sometimes you could slide old windows down. Or, if you watched long enough, you might see someone hiding a spare key – behind flowerpots, underneath paving slabs, pushed into the thumb of a glove.

He let the doormat drop back down. What they should do was go into town and get some of those coins out of the wishing well. Then they could sit in a café and order drinks and talk about things, even though he couldn’t imagine what drinks they would order, or what things they would talk about.

There was a grinding sound and Gull Gilbert swore. The grinding got louder, then, suddenly, Crystal was standing inside the house.

Ivor went round the back. One of the windows was open – the bottom pane had been forced up and there were splinters of paint and wood on the ground. A saucepan crashed onto the floor somewhere, something kept clicking, there was a drift of gas, then nothing.

He climbed in. The house was cold in that deep, quiet way that meant no one had been inside it for a long time. The window went into the bathroom, then the bathroom went out to a narrow hallway lined with pictures. The pictures showed the same three faces over and over – a man and a woman and a boy who was sometimes a baby, sometimes older.

Gull Gilbert was methodically checking each room. ‘There’s a load of crud in here,’ he said. ‘Shoes and shit.’ He disappeared into the bathroom, then came back out. ‘Where’s all those small, wrapped-up soaps?’

‘It’s not one of those places,’ Ivor told him.

‘What?’

‘Where different people come every week. It’s not one of those places,’ Ivor said. He kept looking at the pictures on the wall. The family were eating together round the table, they were walking outside on the cliffs, they were sitting on a rug on the beach.

‘There’s weird food they’ve left behind back here,’ Crystal shouted.

Gull Gilbert jerked round, almost skidded. ‘I’ll pay you to eat it.’

‘How much?’

Crystal was in the kitchen. The fridge was open and there was a pot of something on the table that smelled bitter and plasticky, like dentists’ gloves. She was chewing on a strand of her hair. Whenever she got it cut, there would be a smooth, pale strip of skin on the back of her neck. In the lunch queue, she’d slipped her hand up Ivor’s sleeve and held her palm against his shoulder blade. But that skin had been rough and almost scorching.

‘How much?’ Crystal said again.

Gull Gilbert went over and examined the food. ‘Twelve,’ he told her.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘You won’t have it tomorrow.’

Gull Gilbert was pacing the room with long strides. ‘I’ll pay you every week. Over the summer.’

Crystal reached out towards the pot, then stopped. ‘I won’t be here in the summer.’

The sea sounded like gunshots through the house. ‘Again?’ Ivor said, too loudly.

The last time Crystal had gone away, it had been to Cyprus, and it had been for a whole year. Before that, it was somewhere he’d forgotten the name of, for six months. One day she was here, the next she wasn’t. It was because her parents worked at the Dishes. They had to go to places where there were other Dishes. She’d been born on an island called Ascension, which meant going up in the air and not coming back down.

‘How long for?’ he said, quieter this time.

‘I’ll pay you two pounds right now,’ Gull Gilbert said.

Crystal’s hand went back towards the pot. ‘Three,’ she said.

Ivor took a step backwards then turned and kept walking until he was out of the room and in the hallway. Something moved in the glass of one of the pictures and he glanced round quickly, then realised it was just himself. He went into the front room and stood by the window. The sea was rock-coloured and surging. There was the familiar feeling in his chest – tight and untethered at the same time, like a straining balloon. They said it was his asthma and gave him an inhaler to use. But asthma was what happened when you’d been running or fighting, it wasn’t what happened when you were standing still.

Along the window there were yoghurt pots crammed with sand and shells and bits of smooth blue glass. The bits of glass were so small; it would have taken a long time to find them all.

Gull Gilbert might leave too. Then he wouldn’t have to move up to the big school next year like everyone else. Any time he felt like it, he could wave goodbye to his grandparents and go and live with his father, who worked in a town with shops so huge you could walk around in them all day, and eat in them, and stay in them until it was night.

Ivor reached out and gently knocked each pot over, until the sand and the stones and the glass spilled down the wall and onto the floor.

He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there before he saw Crystal and Gull Gilbert outside. They were running towards the path, shouting back at him that it was boring, it was a bit bollocks. They were going back into town. What they wanted was helium, cheap biscuits from the out-of-date food shop, that sticky hairspray that smelled like the bottle of drink they’d found washed up on the beach last summer.

His father was kneeling in the grass by the front door. The road out the front was full of parked cars, cats sleeping against wheels, a skip loaded with rubble and cracked sinks and flowerpots. At the bottom of the street there was a wedge of sea, strung between the houses like a wrinkled sheet.

Ivor opened the gate and his father looked up and then back down again. There was a bike strewn in pieces around him – handlebars, wheels, a seat with a split like the skin of a tomato. His father picked up the chain and held it for a moment. There was a bottle of oil on the grass and oil on his hands.

Ivor pulled at an oily dandelion. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he said.

‘Fixing it.’ When his father was kneeling like that, the top of his head showed through his hair and there were bright blue veins, so thin they looked like they might break, behind his ears. But when he looked up there was the same face as ever – creased eyes from squinting into the sun, cheeks that scraped when they touched against Ivor’s, the bent top tooth like a door off its hinges. There was a hole in his eyebrow with a ring in it, which he’d got when he was sixteen, just before Ivor was born.

‘Why are you?’ Ivor said.

His father ran his hand down the back of his neck. ‘Dean’s brother asked if I could. He’s paying me.’

‘Can you?’

‘There’s loads of bikes when you think about it,’ his father said. ‘Think how many bikes there are that need fixing.’

Ivor ripped at the dandelion. ‘Can you?’

‘Almost everyone has a bike. They always need fixing, don’t they.’

The window in the flat above them opened and TV and laughing came out. A seagull lifted itself off the roof and circled the chimney, barking sharply.

Ivor leaned against the wall until the pebbles dug into his spine. His father was turning the bike wheel with his finger. Ivor took his inhaler out of his bag and puffed it. He moved his arm into the shape of a gun and aimed at the seagull, bang bang. He would never hurt a seagull. Bang. If his father could fix the bike then there would be a lot more bikes he could fix, almost everyone had a bike. But if he stopped turning the wheel, got up and went inside without saying anything, then he couldn’t fix the bike.

Then it would be like that time the hotel management changed and they could stick their longer shifts with no extra pay up their arses. And when the car park closed where his father gave out tickets and they played guess who would be fattest when they stepped out of their car. Or when everyone stopped coming on his walking tours because whenever he took people out onto the headland, where the cliff suddenly sloped and there was the beach for three miles and the rocks in horseshoes and waves galloping in and everything was silver, his father would just stand there shaking his head and say, fucking delectable, absolutely fucking delectable.

The bike wheel kept turning like it was a clock slowly being wound.

‘Did you ring Mev yet?’ Ivor said.

‘Did I do what?’

‘Did you ring Mev.’

Still the wheel kept turning, grating softly each time.

‘She said she needed to know,’ Ivor said.

‘What?’

‘About the restaurant. She said she needed to know.’ Before Mev moved away, she used to stay over, and in the mornings Ivor was allowed to get in their bed and keep sleeping. But that was last year, when he was a little kid.

‘I know,’ his father said. ‘I told you that.’

‘Why don’t we?’

‘What?’

‘Go and live with Mev and work in her restaurant.’

The church bells near the beach tolled five times. ‘That’s a hundred miles away, Ivor.’

It was almost dark. If his father could fix the bike, there would be potatoes frying in oil and tomatoes sliced with sugar on them. ‘So?’ Ivor said.

And for dessert they would shake up cans of cream and spray them straight into their mouths.

The bike wheel went round and round.

His father got up, put the screwdriver down carefully on the grass and went into the house without saying a word.

Ivor pushed the window up until his wrists burned. The frame shuddered and jammed, then finally opened.

Below him, the cliff was slumped and worn, the rock underneath pale as a shinbone. Green waves crumbled onto the beach, then pulled back against the stones like a rasping intake of breath. A surfer drifted in the darker water.

He climbed inside, checked the window wouldn’t fall shut behind him, then checked again. When he looked back out, the surfer had gone.

It was colder than before. The quiet was thick as dust. The floorboards creaked softly under his feet. That morning he’d put on his coat, found the shopping list and money his father had left next to the sink, and walked down the road into town. He’d got to the shop, picked up a basket, then put the basket down and kept walking until the road turned to the path along the cliffs, and then the house, and then the loose back window.

He moved slowly through each room, opening empty drawers and cupboards, running his fingers over a shelf of maps and books, a crackling bunch of dried flowers. There were patterned plates and glasses that looked like they’d hardly been used, and bowls that were too small for anything. There were leaflets heaped by the door and he picked some up, read something about window cleaning, something about gardening services, then he put them back down where he’d found them.

There were three pairs of sandals by the front door, three raincoats, three wetsuits folded over hangers. Ivor looked them over one by one. Nothing had sand on it, or mud, or crusts of salty rain. There was no torn and snapped umbrella, no piles of old newspaper, no takeaway pots flattened and ready for the outside bin. There were no tangled keys, no stacks of bills hidden behind the microwave. He looked under every bed but there were no cardboard boxes, reinforced with gaffer tape, waiting.

Nothing moved except Ivor. No clocks ticked. There were three yellow chairs round one of the windows and he sat in each one, then got up and watched the dents he’d made spring slowly back to smoothness. He opened and closed the curtains. He turned on the lamp. His trainers left faint treads of sand. There were some clothes in the small bedroom – not many, just a few shirts and a jumper – and he unfolded each one, studied them carefully, then folded them back up, matching the creases exactly.

In the bathroom, he opened the cabinet above the sink and took out the bottles and jars. He opened the lids one by one and dipped his fingers into the creams, then scooped up talcum powder, leaving behind shallow indents and the half-moon shapes of his nails. He tipped up a bottle and white tablets fell onto his palm. When he tipped them back in, one tablet stuck to his skin. It was small and perfectly round. He thought about swallowing it, then shook his head and lifted his hand to drop it back in. But now that the thought had appeared, there was nothing else he could do. It was like locking and unlocking the door three times, or touching the wing mirrors of every red car.

His breath fogged up the mirror and he wiped it away with his sleeve, but it stayed on there for a long time after he’d left.

Every day his father would go fishing. His lines and nets were always by the door. He would leave early, depending on the tide, and there would be the sound of him in the kitchen, packing his kit, the thump of the car boot. He would hum that song he liked where the tune went so low it was as if his chest was vibrating.

When he came in to say goodbye he would put his hand on the top of Ivor’s head and it would be warm and smell like bait. Ivor would pretend to be asleep. When he went downstairs, his breakfast would be on the table: milkshake, cereal that had soaked up everything, a plate of crackers to dip in. His father always said he’d only be gone a few hours, but he was never only gone for a few hours.

Ivor came down off the cliffs and glanced back once more in the direction of the house. There were bits of chipped paint on his hands from the window, and bits of talcum powder under his nails. He rubbed them off and crossed the beach towards the road. His father was down at the edge of the water. His silhouette was like a hawthorn bending. His line was arched over the sea and there were a couple of cans by his feet.

‘Did you get the shopping?’ his father said. Cold radiated off him, and he pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up against it.

Ivor stood as close as he could without knocking anything. The sky over the sea had turned dark yellow, like a very old piece of paper.

The line tensed and began to buckle, and his father gave his can to Ivor and put his hand on the reel.

‘I forgot,’ Ivor told him. He took his father’s other hand and blew on each stiff knuckle.

His father played out the line. The bones in his fingers made popping noises under Ivor’s mouth. ‘Remember when your breath smelled like those onion crisps for a week?’ his father said. ‘I almost took you to the doctor.’

‘Remember when you ate that whole sweetcorn and your beard smelled like butter?’

The line tensed some more, and it was important to watch it, and bring it in slowly. Now his father needed both hands.

The line went tighter and tighter, then slackened. His father took the can back and sipped it. ‘I’ll catch us something,’ he said. He still held the record for catching the biggest fish in town.

The dark yellow turned to dark blue. A ship flashed on the horizon. Somewhere the oystercatchers whistled and scolded like boiling kettles.