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THE SHOAL
THE SHOAL
A new collaboration by Lawrence Dyer and DF Lewis
(written during September 2007)
Ewan wasn't intending to go around via the seawall, he was in a hurry -- after all, he had to grab a bite to eat and then get back to the shop. So why was he now taking the long way round from where he parked his car every day to the wooden seaside villa he lived in?
The wind was strong and as he reached the top of the steep earthen slope of grass and wildflowers that was the seawall he was rocked back by the full force of the cold air. He squeezed moisture from his stinging eyes and threaded his way down the other side between the tall clumps of alexanders that grew there. Across a short run of saltmarsh he could see people at the edge of the high tide.
It wasn't especially unusual to see people there. On the seaward side of the earth barrier it was a nature reserve that attracted birdwatchers and walkers. Even at this time of year when the wind was strong and temperatures were low. It was the stance of the people that caught his eye. Many of them were crouching at the edge of the sea, just above the reach of the rolling waves whose energy was dissipated into the saltmarsh with each surge forward. Crouching? What were they looking at?
He made his way across the marsh, thoughts of having lunch and getting back to work gone from his mind. And then he was behind them, twenty or so people strung out along the edge of the high-tide bank of shingle littered with broken driftwood, sun-bleached food containers and fragments of rope. What were they looking for?
But he could feel it too, though he could not say what it was, exactly. It was like something was out there, just out of view, and if you crouched down and looked into the waves you just might spot it.
Echoing the stance of the majority, he found himself participating in an instinctive fanning out among the flotsam; perhaps each of the frozen crouchers believed the others could see something.
But Ewan could see something for himself. The wind was not the only sound, not the only maker of movement.
***
Elaine Urquhart glanced at her watch: Ewan was late coming back. Not for the first time that week she considered she would have to let him go... Her gaze flitted around the displays of her gift shop -- china cats, fridge magnets, sets of place mats, postcards of muddy local views... She realised only too well that not many novelty-seekers came to this part of the coast, following the recent proletarian fad to swarm abroad upon cheap packets. Meanwhile, bird-watchers and other naturalists were more interested in the bookshop down the road from her than browsing through a cornucopia of manufactured trinkets of transience that was her particular Aladdin’s Cave. Even straightforward walkers did not seem to have much need for such seaside trivia. She would certainly have to let Ewan go, even if things did pick up. He would probably have some weak excuse when he came back late from lunch again. Most of the locals, she had soon recognised, were not particularly bright buttons, Ewan being no exception. She was once a glamorous power-dresser in the city; now she was selling children’s pastels to draw with, something they could get much cheaper in Smiths. How did she end up here in the back of beyond?
She reached among the spider-webbed flotsam in the dark recesses behind the counter and painstakingly retrieved her Award for Excellence in Business (represented by what was esoterically known as the Pepys Medallion), reminding her of the city and the chattering classes of which she was once part. Lifting the hem of her skirt she tried to wipe off the dust and muck, but it was encrusted in the folds of the zephyr-like figurine. Each setback had seemed a minor one, a rallying point to move forward from, insignificant in itself. But setback had bred setback, until... here she was. She would have to try more bird books and maps, she decided, make a window display perhaps, compete with the bookshop. But, as her eyes flittered over the small stand of untouched nature books already languishing in a corner of her shop she realised she had no energy left for any of it... What this place needed, what she needed, was something big to happen, something that would put her back in the centre of things.
***
Exhausted, Ewan pushed back the pile of open text books and charts, sending several large tomes somersaulting onto the floor with a thump that stirred him back to some sort of reality. He looked at his watch. Damn! He should have been back at the shop an hour ago. Elaine would be annoyed with him again, threatening to sack him as she so often did. He hated the way she looked at him on such occasions, as if he were a mere object amongst the colourful trifles on display for the visitors who too seldom set the bell above the door jangling. He had never told her about his Phd in marine biology, not that it would have made any difference, for she seemed to despise everyone around her regardless of what they might have to offer. Picking up his jacket he headed for the door of his wooden villa; he knew he could not afford to lose his job.
But today thoughts about Elaine Urquhart's treatment of him melted quickly away as he strode along the shingle path outside, for he was still heady with the excitement of what had happened back on the shore. Once the wind had died down and the people drifted away he had hurried back home where he had resorted to what he did on any occasion of an anomalous sighting, delving into his private library of marine creature records and books, trying to match up what he had seen with what others had seen and recorded in their scientific notes. But even as he had done so he had known it was futile. Searching through his books was a kind of programmed response he indulged in whenever anything new came up, a pat reaction intended to bring comfort and take the edge off his acutely painful excitement. But this time it had not calmed him -- could not calm him. For he realised with a jolt that he could not say he had actually seen very much at all -- he could not really claim that he had seen anything useful. It had been much more about what he had felt...
Feelings needed to be dwelt upon, but not immediately described, not initially categorised even as feelings. A real scientist now turned scientist manqué, Ewan needed to gain wings as a child-like human being with blurred indestructible edges, so as, later, to be able more safely to land unseen among a detritus of empirical flotsam and then secretly itemise these findings via wild hypothesis towards conclusive theory. His outward airy-fairy slowness of demeanour hid a very sharp operator beneath and this smarter side of Ewan simply knew that Elaine Urquhart was very much a similar individual as himself. She was not just the business woman burnt out on too many cocktail parties in the city now turned remaindered soft-sell coastal recluse yearning for relief from the rat race at the expense of her standard of living. Ewan’s astuteness had indeed recognised the baggage behind the baggage. Elaine had not let slip a tiny thing about her past. He had spotted the crazy jagged-edged life of the city behind the dull eyes that wanted to forget such a life. He had earlier dowsed, too, for even bigger riches within the woman, and, in some inexplicable way, this process was associated with his current mood following today’s sighting of -- of what? An undefined shoal of some sort, perhaps. A brightness he was trying not to explain but to contain.
He fathomed that one thing Elaine lacked was a similar astuteness about the nature of Ewan. She was inferior in scrying him compared to how he could scry her. There was safety in the mental fire-wall he knew he possessed. But how did such protection stop anyone probing him but, at the same time, not prevent his own antennae probing out? .... He really must stop moidering -- as his Scottish father used to say -- and get back to the shop! He had already assumed he had shaken off his feelings about (or for?) Elaine ... so why did they keep creeping back?
***
That day’s walkers had to cope with adverse weather. The day had started non-descript, if windy, but now, with the onset of a dull dank dusk, there was a sudden shaft of humidity (as part of a renewal of wind) amid the beginnings of a thunderstorm that seemed unnatural in view of the otherwise prevailing chilliness. Often on this part of the coast, the elements were very much mix and match ... and contrast: its own climate: rarely covered by the men in sharp suits in front of maps on TV screens.
Jock Clarke, having arrived earlier in the day from an area of the country that got more mention, headed towards the Clay Pigeon pub, hunching his shoulders against the relentless whining wind, as he relived, with some mystery of forgetfulness, the unexpected gathering on the bank to ‘see in’ the shoal. He was accompanied by his wife -- to him a featureless woman in peggy duffle-coat and plodding wellingtons.
Inside, the pub was unusually quiet, and at first he thought it was empty, but then he picked out, one by one in dark corners and gloomy places under the heavy beams -- old timbers from shipwrecks -- the people who had been scattered along the shore. They sat in silence, mostly cradling pints of beer. It was strange the way he often bumped into the same people down here, mostly Scots like him, but also a few Welsh and Irish, a mixture of bird watchers and nature lovers who seemed to congregate on this south-eastern shore on an almost yearly basis. It was strange, the more he considered it. It was as if the Celtic peoples were returning to the land that had once been theirs, back in the sixth century, before the Saxons came, before this place became the land of the East Saxons, later shortened by the passing of the years to 'East-Sax' and in modern times to Essex -- now a land that only dreamed of its past.
"Well, the Scots are here in force again!" He spoke the words jocularly to his wife, but she merely nodded as they approached the bar and from the depths of her duffle-coat muttered "Aye."
But that wasn't it, he instinctively knew. Why they came here had nothing to do with Celts reclaiming the land of their ancestors. It was something else, something he couldn't put his finger on. He put his wife in a corner where she would sup her stout quietly and returned to the bar to try ordering.
"Oh Mr Clarke," a soft Scots voice spoke beside Jock as the barman stood waiting for him to order. He felt a hand on his arm. Looking down he saw a face he recognised from a previous year, one of his countrywomen, though he did not remember her name.
"Will you buy me a drink?" the old woman asked, looking unblinkingly into his eyes. "I think I need one."
"Well, aye, I suppose so. But are you not here with your husband?" Jock recalled seeing the woman in the past with a man who dressed as she did, in a much-cracked waxed coat and green stalking boots, though her husband had lacked the assorted fairy brooches that adorned her lapel.
"Nooo," the woman crooned. "James has joined them, he's gone now."
"Gone? I don't understand."
"He's gone away with them." She looked at him as if informing him of a simple matter of fact. "He's gone away with the sea-folk..."
Jock stared at her. "The sea-folk?" he repeated woodenly.
"Aye, the folk who live under the waves."
Jock stepped away from her. Had she gone mad?
***
Ewan burst into the shop, his usual feigned simplicity cast aside; he was ready for a confrontation. "Look, Elaine," he began. "I know I'm very late but --"
He stopped when he saw the way she was looking at him -- or rather looking through him, the way her eyes seemed to focus on something still and remote. She was gently smiling, with sadness or happiness he could not tell at first, and her hands were knitted tightly together, as if in prayer.
At first he could not take in what he saw. Elaine Urquhart smiling, Elaine Urquhart looking almost humble, not berating him for being late?
"What's happened?" he asked, his voice gentle now, an unexpected wave of compassion overtaking him in the face of her soft sad silence.
"It's started," she began in a voice Ewan could not recognise. "I think he's finally here..."
Then Ewan saw that it was not sadness in her face, but a kind of remote ecstasy.
"Who is here?" he asked, barely aware that he had asked the question.
For a few moments she did not answer, her eyes still fixed on that remote point beyond Ewan, beyond the shop and the backs of the beach huts opposite. In the silence Ewan could hear the calls of the local children riding their bikes up and down outside. When Elaine did speak her voice was full of awe. "It is the Lord himself. Lord Abernawavy, the greatest British entrepreneur that ever lived..."
Ewan's face contorted as a tide of emotion welled up inside him, taking him completely by surprise. "What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded. He was shouting now, completely out of control, and he didn't know why. "What utter crap! What was in the sea wasn't some ridiculous businessman!" He banged his fist down on the shop counter. "It was the White Whale itself -- the one everyone's been searching for for three hundred years! The long-lost, damned-to-hell-extinct White Whale itself!"
A grumble of thunder seemed to accentuate the ensuing pause.
“Ewan, I’ve got to let you go. You have no sympathy with...”
She fanned a finger upon its arm in an arc of vicarious betrayal by her shop assistant for the stock-take she would now need to embark upon to prove some intangible point beyond her earlier focus upon a named business-man she used to know in the city.
“Elaine...” He had softened his earlier tone, grown unsure of his own ground regarding the White Whale. This was the first time he had addressed her with ‘Elaine’. “What we've seen in the sea - the shoal,” he continued, “the shoal is made up of pinpricks of coloured light – in marine biology they, call them ‘plankton pixels’ – and they tend to shape into things each of us want to see -- that has to be it. I for one am convinced I saw the White Whale. Melville symbolised this in his mighty novel...”
Elaine Urquhart was staggered. Here was a gormless local making references to things surely quite beyond his nous. That was almost more shocking than anything else.
***
The Clay Pigeon was full of undercurrents of conversation, in even softer tones (if grumblier) than Ewan’s new approach to explain things as more low-key even while they still panned out in real time within his mind.
Ewan and Elaine had in fact arrived together at the bar, unnoticed by Jock, because he was still chin-wagging with locals in the vicinity of the counter-kegs. Ewan and Elaine used the same corner-table as Jock’s duffle-coated wife, Megan, so as to continue their conversation from the shop amid a remarkable genesis of empathy between them, all fire-walls forsaken. Megan had by now been furnished with her stout which she sipped forlornly as she eyed the strange couple who had unofficially joined her. They ignored her attention ... as if she wasn’t there at all. She heard them talk of esoteric matters, although she would never have used that word to describe these matters. An esoteric word. She glimpsed aurally (rather than heard) references by the couple to shoals and whales and mermen ... and flotsam that actually lived and breathed although appearing, on the surface, to be items of ill-cut lumber and other household waste from the caravan-people who also populated the area. Not locals as such, more travelling undergrunts or usurpers.
As she listened, Megan began to feel more and more comfortable with these strangers, which surprised her rather, all the more when their conversation felt so much above her. They seemed 'posh' -- as she would have described them to Jock -- above her station in life, part of a world she didn't understand and even despised. Yet she felt increasingly warm and happy in their presence, listening to the swelling and subsidence of their conversation, to the rise and fall of the tide of their expressed thoughts. And it was very like a tide. She could almost hear the sound of the waves through their mutterings and chatter; what they said became much less important than the rising and falling of their voices. She felt as relaxed as on a summer's day, on the beach with her parents when she was a child, the shoo and hiss of the breakers a calming background story that soothed and modulated the pulsing of her blood until her heart beat almost at one with the waves.
Ewan had never felt like this about Elaine before. He had never imagined there was so much to her until that moment in the shop when she had opened up about her dreams and about what she thought she had seen. She had tried to cover it up again, it was true, by telling him she would have to 'let him go', but he quickly saw that she hadn't the strength to make it come true, that she didn't want to make it true. At least not any more. Not since the coming of the shoal. Ewan did not know if there was any connection between the two things -- there certainly couldn't be, it made no sense -- and yet he felt instinctively that the connection was there. How could ‘plankton pixels’ change people? He didn't really believe it could be plankton anyway; that didn't add up when he thought about it; it was just another of his explanations provided to give comfort in the face of uncertainty and the chaos of not knowing. He still didn't know, and the long conversation he had had with Elaine before she fell into a comfortable stillness -- a conversation about flotsam and things in the sea and unexplained forces -- had brought them no closer to understanding what was happening in the outside world. Yet, in their inner world they had somehow reached an understanding of their own, a meeting of emotion rather than minds, and now Ewan slipped his hand into hers and felt the reassuring squeeze that told him he had judged her mood correctly.
When Jock returned from the bar with a second pint of stout for his wife he was surprised to see her occupying a table with two strangers -- two strangers who seemed very much in love to judge from the way they sat close to each other, hand-in-hand. More surprising still was the way Megan leaned towards them along the side of the table. Now divested of her duffle coat she looked different somehow, more like she had thirty-five years ago when he first met her through a mutual friend standing outside the pencil factory where she had worked. The years of his grudging toleration of her, his indifference to her life and what she wanted from it, seemed stripped away, though he could not account for it, and he saw again the strong-pretty-giggling girl he had ‘fallen for’ that day. Yet she was not giggling now, she seemed to be staring in rapt admiration at the couple on the other side of the table.
Confused, he plonked down the pint glass in front of her. "Megan," he said, to draw her attention away from the couple. When she did not stir he spoke more firmly. "Megan!"
Her gaze turned to him and it was like a spotlight being turned into his face. But not the painful glare of intense light, rather the warmth of a love and emotion he had not felt with her in decades. Reeled in by this sudden force, unable to help himself even if he had wanted to, he drew down towards her, sat beside her, his hand in hers. He too could hear the shoo and hiss of the tide now, it was battering at his ears and at his mind, absorbing him into its glow and power. There was a moment of harmonious stillness at that corner table in the pub, then with a mutual exchange of affectionate looks, the two couples reached across the table to each other and a moment later all four sat hand-in-hand, staring into each others' eyes.
Outside, across the huddle of low houses, across the litter-scattered road beyond, across the slew of long sea-grass bent in the wind, there, on the other side of the seawall, something in the high tide was swirling and thrashing at the heavy iron lid of the sea-drain, lifting it, coming through it, finding a way into the land.
***
Alexanders seemed to flourish in this part of coastal and saltmarsh Essex. John Evelyn wrote in 1699: “The gentle fresh sprouts, buds, and tops are to be chosen, and the stalks eaten in the spring; and when blanch’d, in winter likewise, with oyl, pepper, salt, etc by themselves, or in composition: They make also an excellent vernal pottage.” And edible plants and the pottage were something that haunted Ewan as, later that night, he clumped about the shingle beach (no doubt innocently crushing such plants) in search of novelty sea-sparklets that had kept him awake, as if calling to him through a thin veil of aborted dream. His head was still swimming with drink, but that served to anaesthetise him against the shooing darkness, or seemed to do so at first. It was an autumnal pottage where all things (including bits of living fish and mammals) were disguised as vegetable ingredients, including a misplaced understanding of flotsam or fauna that had encouraged an almost fibrous growth of emotional bonding between people, a vaguely touchable understanding that really should have warned them later to renew their firewalls. Ewan and Elaine, in particular. Jock and Megan, too. Very sad but there was never really any future in mutual imaginings with the other sentient and non-sentient creatures that the four of them had tried to bring to bear upon their own selves in pursuit of life’s shared hopes and aspirations.
So not only edible plants, but living ones, too. Ewan stared into a sweatily dank yet cold darkness that seemed to be made visible by wave-sounds and thundery grumbles. There were things that touched his face gently. Caring touches? Dangerous touches? He failed to know for certain. A huge white shape suddenly looming – or, rather, blooming as a white stain into black. Human-fleshy at one moment, but blubbery or teeming with ambergris at the next. And as Ewan merged into the night’s other flotsam during a few seconds of exquisite deliciousness in which he felt its tendrils invade his body and claim him as part of it, he heard the fearful bark of what sounded like an officious businessman -- but a bark which was soon overtaken by that of a seal or walrus; then there swarmed closer the chattering classes of Pepys and Evelyn, the stride of horse traffic, a kaleidoscope of ancient novelties, the tinkling of bright eyes ... and Ewan now knew for certain that Elaine had finally let him go.
A new collaboration by Lawrence Dyer and DF Lewis
(written during September 2007)
Ewan wasn't intending to go around via the seawall, he was in a hurry -- after all, he had to grab a bite to eat and then get back to the shop. So why was he now taking the long way round from where he parked his car every day to the wooden seaside villa he lived in?
The wind was strong and as he reached the top of the steep earthen slope of grass and wildflowers that was the seawall he was rocked back by the full force of the cold air. He squeezed moisture from his stinging eyes and threaded his way down the other side between the tall clumps of alexanders that grew there. Across a short run of saltmarsh he could see people at the edge of the high tide.
It wasn't especially unusual to see people there. On the seaward side of the earth barrier it was a nature reserve that attracted birdwatchers and walkers. Even at this time of year when the wind was strong and temperatures were low. It was the stance of the people that caught his eye. Many of them were crouching at the edge of the sea, just above the reach of the rolling waves whose energy was dissipated into the saltmarsh with each surge forward. Crouching? What were they looking at?
He made his way across the marsh, thoughts of having lunch and getting back to work gone from his mind. And then he was behind them, twenty or so people strung out along the edge of the high-tide bank of shingle littered with broken driftwood, sun-bleached food containers and fragments of rope. What were they looking for?
But he could feel it too, though he could not say what it was, exactly. It was like something was out there, just out of view, and if you crouched down and looked into the waves you just might spot it.
Echoing the stance of the majority, he found himself participating in an instinctive fanning out among the flotsam; perhaps each of the frozen crouchers believed the others could see something.
But Ewan could see something for himself. The wind was not the only sound, not the only maker of movement.
***
Elaine Urquhart glanced at her watch: Ewan was late coming back. Not for the first time that week she considered she would have to let him go... Her gaze flitted around the displays of her gift shop -- china cats, fridge magnets, sets of place mats, postcards of muddy local views... She realised only too well that not many novelty-seekers came to this part of the coast, following the recent proletarian fad to swarm abroad upon cheap packets. Meanwhile, bird-watchers and other naturalists were more interested in the bookshop down the road from her than browsing through a cornucopia of manufactured trinkets of transience that was her particular Aladdin’s Cave. Even straightforward walkers did not seem to have much need for such seaside trivia. She would certainly have to let Ewan go, even if things did pick up. He would probably have some weak excuse when he came back late from lunch again. Most of the locals, she had soon recognised, were not particularly bright buttons, Ewan being no exception. She was once a glamorous power-dresser in the city; now she was selling children’s pastels to draw with, something they could get much cheaper in Smiths. How did she end up here in the back of beyond?
She reached among the spider-webbed flotsam in the dark recesses behind the counter and painstakingly retrieved her Award for Excellence in Business (represented by what was esoterically known as the Pepys Medallion), reminding her of the city and the chattering classes of which she was once part. Lifting the hem of her skirt she tried to wipe off the dust and muck, but it was encrusted in the folds of the zephyr-like figurine. Each setback had seemed a minor one, a rallying point to move forward from, insignificant in itself. But setback had bred setback, until... here she was. She would have to try more bird books and maps, she decided, make a window display perhaps, compete with the bookshop. But, as her eyes flittered over the small stand of untouched nature books already languishing in a corner of her shop she realised she had no energy left for any of it... What this place needed, what she needed, was something big to happen, something that would put her back in the centre of things.
***
Exhausted, Ewan pushed back the pile of open text books and charts, sending several large tomes somersaulting onto the floor with a thump that stirred him back to some sort of reality. He looked at his watch. Damn! He should have been back at the shop an hour ago. Elaine would be annoyed with him again, threatening to sack him as she so often did. He hated the way she looked at him on such occasions, as if he were a mere object amongst the colourful trifles on display for the visitors who too seldom set the bell above the door jangling. He had never told her about his Phd in marine biology, not that it would have made any difference, for she seemed to despise everyone around her regardless of what they might have to offer. Picking up his jacket he headed for the door of his wooden villa; he knew he could not afford to lose his job.
But today thoughts about Elaine Urquhart's treatment of him melted quickly away as he strode along the shingle path outside, for he was still heady with the excitement of what had happened back on the shore. Once the wind had died down and the people drifted away he had hurried back home where he had resorted to what he did on any occasion of an anomalous sighting, delving into his private library of marine creature records and books, trying to match up what he had seen with what others had seen and recorded in their scientific notes. But even as he had done so he had known it was futile. Searching through his books was a kind of programmed response he indulged in whenever anything new came up, a pat reaction intended to bring comfort and take the edge off his acutely painful excitement. But this time it had not calmed him -- could not calm him. For he realised with a jolt that he could not say he had actually seen very much at all -- he could not really claim that he had seen anything useful. It had been much more about what he had felt...
Feelings needed to be dwelt upon, but not immediately described, not initially categorised even as feelings. A real scientist now turned scientist manqué, Ewan needed to gain wings as a child-like human being with blurred indestructible edges, so as, later, to be able more safely to land unseen among a detritus of empirical flotsam and then secretly itemise these findings via wild hypothesis towards conclusive theory. His outward airy-fairy slowness of demeanour hid a very sharp operator beneath and this smarter side of Ewan simply knew that Elaine Urquhart was very much a similar individual as himself. She was not just the business woman burnt out on too many cocktail parties in the city now turned remaindered soft-sell coastal recluse yearning for relief from the rat race at the expense of her standard of living. Ewan’s astuteness had indeed recognised the baggage behind the baggage. Elaine had not let slip a tiny thing about her past. He had spotted the crazy jagged-edged life of the city behind the dull eyes that wanted to forget such a life. He had earlier dowsed, too, for even bigger riches within the woman, and, in some inexplicable way, this process was associated with his current mood following today’s sighting of -- of what? An undefined shoal of some sort, perhaps. A brightness he was trying not to explain but to contain.
He fathomed that one thing Elaine lacked was a similar astuteness about the nature of Ewan. She was inferior in scrying him compared to how he could scry her. There was safety in the mental fire-wall he knew he possessed. But how did such protection stop anyone probing him but, at the same time, not prevent his own antennae probing out? .... He really must stop moidering -- as his Scottish father used to say -- and get back to the shop! He had already assumed he had shaken off his feelings about (or for?) Elaine ... so why did they keep creeping back?
***
That day’s walkers had to cope with adverse weather. The day had started non-descript, if windy, but now, with the onset of a dull dank dusk, there was a sudden shaft of humidity (as part of a renewal of wind) amid the beginnings of a thunderstorm that seemed unnatural in view of the otherwise prevailing chilliness. Often on this part of the coast, the elements were very much mix and match ... and contrast: its own climate: rarely covered by the men in sharp suits in front of maps on TV screens.
Jock Clarke, having arrived earlier in the day from an area of the country that got more mention, headed towards the Clay Pigeon pub, hunching his shoulders against the relentless whining wind, as he relived, with some mystery of forgetfulness, the unexpected gathering on the bank to ‘see in’ the shoal. He was accompanied by his wife -- to him a featureless woman in peggy duffle-coat and plodding wellingtons.
Inside, the pub was unusually quiet, and at first he thought it was empty, but then he picked out, one by one in dark corners and gloomy places under the heavy beams -- old timbers from shipwrecks -- the people who had been scattered along the shore. They sat in silence, mostly cradling pints of beer. It was strange the way he often bumped into the same people down here, mostly Scots like him, but also a few Welsh and Irish, a mixture of bird watchers and nature lovers who seemed to congregate on this south-eastern shore on an almost yearly basis. It was strange, the more he considered it. It was as if the Celtic peoples were returning to the land that had once been theirs, back in the sixth century, before the Saxons came, before this place became the land of the East Saxons, later shortened by the passing of the years to 'East-Sax' and in modern times to Essex -- now a land that only dreamed of its past.
"Well, the Scots are here in force again!" He spoke the words jocularly to his wife, but she merely nodded as they approached the bar and from the depths of her duffle-coat muttered "Aye."
But that wasn't it, he instinctively knew. Why they came here had nothing to do with Celts reclaiming the land of their ancestors. It was something else, something he couldn't put his finger on. He put his wife in a corner where she would sup her stout quietly and returned to the bar to try ordering.
"Oh Mr Clarke," a soft Scots voice spoke beside Jock as the barman stood waiting for him to order. He felt a hand on his arm. Looking down he saw a face he recognised from a previous year, one of his countrywomen, though he did not remember her name.
"Will you buy me a drink?" the old woman asked, looking unblinkingly into his eyes. "I think I need one."
"Well, aye, I suppose so. But are you not here with your husband?" Jock recalled seeing the woman in the past with a man who dressed as she did, in a much-cracked waxed coat and green stalking boots, though her husband had lacked the assorted fairy brooches that adorned her lapel.
"Nooo," the woman crooned. "James has joined them, he's gone now."
"Gone? I don't understand."
"He's gone away with them." She looked at him as if informing him of a simple matter of fact. "He's gone away with the sea-folk..."
Jock stared at her. "The sea-folk?" he repeated woodenly.
"Aye, the folk who live under the waves."
Jock stepped away from her. Had she gone mad?
***
Ewan burst into the shop, his usual feigned simplicity cast aside; he was ready for a confrontation. "Look, Elaine," he began. "I know I'm very late but --"
He stopped when he saw the way she was looking at him -- or rather looking through him, the way her eyes seemed to focus on something still and remote. She was gently smiling, with sadness or happiness he could not tell at first, and her hands were knitted tightly together, as if in prayer.
At first he could not take in what he saw. Elaine Urquhart smiling, Elaine Urquhart looking almost humble, not berating him for being late?
"What's happened?" he asked, his voice gentle now, an unexpected wave of compassion overtaking him in the face of her soft sad silence.
"It's started," she began in a voice Ewan could not recognise. "I think he's finally here..."
Then Ewan saw that it was not sadness in her face, but a kind of remote ecstasy.
"Who is here?" he asked, barely aware that he had asked the question.
For a few moments she did not answer, her eyes still fixed on that remote point beyond Ewan, beyond the shop and the backs of the beach huts opposite. In the silence Ewan could hear the calls of the local children riding their bikes up and down outside. When Elaine did speak her voice was full of awe. "It is the Lord himself. Lord Abernawavy, the greatest British entrepreneur that ever lived..."
Ewan's face contorted as a tide of emotion welled up inside him, taking him completely by surprise. "What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded. He was shouting now, completely out of control, and he didn't know why. "What utter crap! What was in the sea wasn't some ridiculous businessman!" He banged his fist down on the shop counter. "It was the White Whale itself -- the one everyone's been searching for for three hundred years! The long-lost, damned-to-hell-extinct White Whale itself!"
A grumble of thunder seemed to accentuate the ensuing pause.
“Ewan, I’ve got to let you go. You have no sympathy with...”
She fanned a finger upon its arm in an arc of vicarious betrayal by her shop assistant for the stock-take she would now need to embark upon to prove some intangible point beyond her earlier focus upon a named business-man she used to know in the city.
“Elaine...” He had softened his earlier tone, grown unsure of his own ground regarding the White Whale. This was the first time he had addressed her with ‘Elaine’. “What we've seen in the sea - the shoal,” he continued, “the shoal is made up of pinpricks of coloured light – in marine biology they, call them ‘plankton pixels’ – and they tend to shape into things each of us want to see -- that has to be it. I for one am convinced I saw the White Whale. Melville symbolised this in his mighty novel...”
Elaine Urquhart was staggered. Here was a gormless local making references to things surely quite beyond his nous. That was almost more shocking than anything else.
***
The Clay Pigeon was full of undercurrents of conversation, in even softer tones (if grumblier) than Ewan’s new approach to explain things as more low-key even while they still panned out in real time within his mind.
Ewan and Elaine had in fact arrived together at the bar, unnoticed by Jock, because he was still chin-wagging with locals in the vicinity of the counter-kegs. Ewan and Elaine used the same corner-table as Jock’s duffle-coated wife, Megan, so as to continue their conversation from the shop amid a remarkable genesis of empathy between them, all fire-walls forsaken. Megan had by now been furnished with her stout which she sipped forlornly as she eyed the strange couple who had unofficially joined her. They ignored her attention ... as if she wasn’t there at all. She heard them talk of esoteric matters, although she would never have used that word to describe these matters. An esoteric word. She glimpsed aurally (rather than heard) references by the couple to shoals and whales and mermen ... and flotsam that actually lived and breathed although appearing, on the surface, to be items of ill-cut lumber and other household waste from the caravan-people who also populated the area. Not locals as such, more travelling undergrunts or usurpers.
As she listened, Megan began to feel more and more comfortable with these strangers, which surprised her rather, all the more when their conversation felt so much above her. They seemed 'posh' -- as she would have described them to Jock -- above her station in life, part of a world she didn't understand and even despised. Yet she felt increasingly warm and happy in their presence, listening to the swelling and subsidence of their conversation, to the rise and fall of the tide of their expressed thoughts. And it was very like a tide. She could almost hear the sound of the waves through their mutterings and chatter; what they said became much less important than the rising and falling of their voices. She felt as relaxed as on a summer's day, on the beach with her parents when she was a child, the shoo and hiss of the breakers a calming background story that soothed and modulated the pulsing of her blood until her heart beat almost at one with the waves.
Ewan had never felt like this about Elaine before. He had never imagined there was so much to her until that moment in the shop when she had opened up about her dreams and about what she thought she had seen. She had tried to cover it up again, it was true, by telling him she would have to 'let him go', but he quickly saw that she hadn't the strength to make it come true, that she didn't want to make it true. At least not any more. Not since the coming of the shoal. Ewan did not know if there was any connection between the two things -- there certainly couldn't be, it made no sense -- and yet he felt instinctively that the connection was there. How could ‘plankton pixels’ change people? He didn't really believe it could be plankton anyway; that didn't add up when he thought about it; it was just another of his explanations provided to give comfort in the face of uncertainty and the chaos of not knowing. He still didn't know, and the long conversation he had had with Elaine before she fell into a comfortable stillness -- a conversation about flotsam and things in the sea and unexplained forces -- had brought them no closer to understanding what was happening in the outside world. Yet, in their inner world they had somehow reached an understanding of their own, a meeting of emotion rather than minds, and now Ewan slipped his hand into hers and felt the reassuring squeeze that told him he had judged her mood correctly.
When Jock returned from the bar with a second pint of stout for his wife he was surprised to see her occupying a table with two strangers -- two strangers who seemed very much in love to judge from the way they sat close to each other, hand-in-hand. More surprising still was the way Megan leaned towards them along the side of the table. Now divested of her duffle coat she looked different somehow, more like she had thirty-five years ago when he first met her through a mutual friend standing outside the pencil factory where she had worked. The years of his grudging toleration of her, his indifference to her life and what she wanted from it, seemed stripped away, though he could not account for it, and he saw again the strong-pretty-giggling girl he had ‘fallen for’ that day. Yet she was not giggling now, she seemed to be staring in rapt admiration at the couple on the other side of the table.
Confused, he plonked down the pint glass in front of her. "Megan," he said, to draw her attention away from the couple. When she did not stir he spoke more firmly. "Megan!"
Her gaze turned to him and it was like a spotlight being turned into his face. But not the painful glare of intense light, rather the warmth of a love and emotion he had not felt with her in decades. Reeled in by this sudden force, unable to help himself even if he had wanted to, he drew down towards her, sat beside her, his hand in hers. He too could hear the shoo and hiss of the tide now, it was battering at his ears and at his mind, absorbing him into its glow and power. There was a moment of harmonious stillness at that corner table in the pub, then with a mutual exchange of affectionate looks, the two couples reached across the table to each other and a moment later all four sat hand-in-hand, staring into each others' eyes.
Outside, across the huddle of low houses, across the litter-scattered road beyond, across the slew of long sea-grass bent in the wind, there, on the other side of the seawall, something in the high tide was swirling and thrashing at the heavy iron lid of the sea-drain, lifting it, coming through it, finding a way into the land.
***
Alexanders seemed to flourish in this part of coastal and saltmarsh Essex. John Evelyn wrote in 1699: “The gentle fresh sprouts, buds, and tops are to be chosen, and the stalks eaten in the spring; and when blanch’d, in winter likewise, with oyl, pepper, salt, etc by themselves, or in composition: They make also an excellent vernal pottage.” And edible plants and the pottage were something that haunted Ewan as, later that night, he clumped about the shingle beach (no doubt innocently crushing such plants) in search of novelty sea-sparklets that had kept him awake, as if calling to him through a thin veil of aborted dream. His head was still swimming with drink, but that served to anaesthetise him against the shooing darkness, or seemed to do so at first. It was an autumnal pottage where all things (including bits of living fish and mammals) were disguised as vegetable ingredients, including a misplaced understanding of flotsam or fauna that had encouraged an almost fibrous growth of emotional bonding between people, a vaguely touchable understanding that really should have warned them later to renew their firewalls. Ewan and Elaine, in particular. Jock and Megan, too. Very sad but there was never really any future in mutual imaginings with the other sentient and non-sentient creatures that the four of them had tried to bring to bear upon their own selves in pursuit of life’s shared hopes and aspirations.
So not only edible plants, but living ones, too. Ewan stared into a sweatily dank yet cold darkness that seemed to be made visible by wave-sounds and thundery grumbles. There were things that touched his face gently. Caring touches? Dangerous touches? He failed to know for certain. A huge white shape suddenly looming – or, rather, blooming as a white stain into black. Human-fleshy at one moment, but blubbery or teeming with ambergris at the next. And as Ewan merged into the night’s other flotsam during a few seconds of exquisite deliciousness in which he felt its tendrils invade his body and claim him as part of it, he heard the fearful bark of what sounded like an officious businessman -- but a bark which was soon overtaken by that of a seal or walrus; then there swarmed closer the chattering classes of Pepys and Evelyn, the stride of horse traffic, a kaleidoscope of ancient novelties, the tinkling of bright eyes ... and Ewan now knew for certain that Elaine had finally let him go.