Time and Tide E-Book

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 177

Beschreibung

An anthology of stories and poems chosen for performance at the Sosltice Shorts Festival 2019, in Greenwich, Maryport, Hastings, Peterhead, Clydebank, Holyhead and Lisbon.How do tides affect our lives? How has that changed through history?An exploration of making a living on or by the sea – fishermen and pirates, wreckers and dockers – and making a new life across the sea – escaping pograms and wars, and the endlessly travelling – and of paddlers and wild swimmers.

Leseprobe

Contents

Stories

Metharme

CB Droege

Listen, Noah’s Wife

Roppotucha Greenberg

The Fisherman’s Wife

Linda McMullen

Ballast

Diana Powell

The Surgeon’s Mate

Maria Kyle

A Madras Crossing

Elizabeth Hopkinson

Man Overboard

Emily Bullock

Remittance

Kilmeny MacMichael

Fisherfolk

Juliet Humphreys

Diaspora

Neil Lawrence

Sea Change

Diana Powell

Casting the Stones

Cathy Lennon

Herr Dressler

Eoghan Hughes

Hingland

Pauline Walker

The Dowager Duchess of Berwick-upon-Tweed May or May Not be Bottling It

Rob Walton

The Wreck of the Kyllikki

Cindy George

The Professor’s Daughter

Barbara Renel

Granmama’s Paradise

Holland Magee

The Answer My Friend...

Paul Foy

Turquoise

Sheila Lockhart

Time Poems

Arrival

Valerie Bence

In the Shadows, on the Shore, Leith

Jane Aldous

Of Gráinne Ni Mháile

Thomas Tyrrell

A Conjuring Poem

Simon Whitfield

False Light

John Richardson

Church Mary Sounds the Sea

Jenny Mitchell

Napoleon

Nick Westerman

Clearance

Christine Ritchie

How Women Came to Tristan da Cunha

Claire Booker

The Sinking of Mrs Margaret Brown

Michelle Penn

The Fisherman’s Daughter

Claire Booker

When You Regret Wishing for Something Thrilling

Emma Lee

The nth Wave

Math Jones

Frocks of Passage

Mandy Macdonald

Overlord with Declan

Elizabeth Parker

Sisterhood of the Seas

Alison Lock

Half a Dozen Oranges

Mandy Macdonald

Tide Poems

The Arctic Diaries

Melissa Davies

The Lookout Men

Melissa Davies

Halibut

Melissa Davies

Værøy

Melissa Davies

Seaweed

Melissa Davies

Bird Wife

Melissa Davies

Verticals

Kate Foley

The Watchers

Elizabeth Parker

Mother Fish

Ian Macartney

Woman from North India on Bostadh Beach

Elinor Brooks

Points of Interest

Olivia Dawson

We Dig the Pig

Angel Warwick

Ovčice, Croatia

Ian Macartney

When Will We See the Sea?

Joy Howard

I Nearly Drownded, Daddy

Vivien Jones

On a Day Like This

Savanna J A Evans

Delivery

Holly Blades

First Light

Laura Potts

Casting a Daughter Adrift

Emma Lee

Hawser

Sarah Tait

Bosun’s Locker

Sarah Tait

No Tearaways

Ivonne Piper

Sea Lessons

Ness Owen

City of Water

JN nucifera

Crossing the Black Water

Reshma Ruia

Tulpaner och Liljekonvaljer

Carl Alexandersson

Paddling

Lynn White

Tide Film Texts

Open Water

Susan Cartwright-Smith

Modality

Julie Laing

Stories

Metharme

CB Droege

I stand at the prow of the ship, one more in a long, long line of ships. I’m watching the stars, listening to my daughters, thinking of home. Days tend to run together out on the sea. Then the months run together. Then the years. Then the decades, the centuries. Without age, without change, everything runs together. The boats change little, and still seem very similar to the boats of my girlhood. Yes, they have electronic fish finders, computerised maps, and satellite phones, but in the end, they’re still just a small group of (mostly) men in a floating machine, trying to get as much fish as possible in as short a time as they can. They compete with other ships; they sing ribald songs; they get in fights; they miss their families; and, sometimes, they drown. So it was three millennia ago, so it is now.

I think of my mother. Her ivory skin, and cold hands. There is so much of her in me. My beauty, my immortality, both come from her. It’s been hundreds of years since we spoke. I don’t know where she is, though I’m sure a tour of the world’s most respected museums would turn her up, probably in the centre of a great, vaulted chamber, flanked by lesser creations than herself. The museum’s curator knowing he has something very special, but never quite knowing what she is, who she is.

I think of my father. His rough hands and suspicious eyes. Mortal, he’s long gone, of course, but I owe everything I have, and everything I’ve lost, to his skills and his prayers – and his lusts.

The captain of the ship approaches to stand beside me, and consider the stars also. I’m new here, but I’m also very old, and the others on the ship seem to understand that. As usual, they show me great deference and respect, even if they don’t know why. I don’t look like the type to work on a fishing ship, I never have. I should be performing on a stage somewhere, or posing for photographs, but the men always seem to know, to sense, that I belong on the sea. No captain has ever turned me away when asked if I could join his crew.

‘It’s a nice night for the stars,’ he says. Small talk. Prattle. No reason to be rude, though. If there is one thing I’ve learned over three thousand years on fishing ships, it’s that politeness goes a long way to keeping a ship functioning.

‘It is,’ I say, putting a smile into my voice.

‘Thinking of home?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’ I say, ‘Always.’

‘You can’t go back, you know?’

I turn to look at him then. His sharp-featured profile reminds me of my husband, a sculptor and a leader of men, like my father. A man whose selfishness and hubris defined the most important moments of his life and his death, also like my father. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed the similarities, but it always feels like a fresh revelation.

‘No, I can’t,’ I say, ‘but how would you know that?’

It is his turn to smile at the sky. ‘No one can, right?’ he says. ‘No matter where we go, when we return, home has changed, we have changed. That place in our minds that we call home: that’s the only place it exists.’

One of my daughters comes to alight by his hand on the railing and caws at him. He shoos her away without malice. ‘What is with the gulls, this run?’ he asks idly.

‘They follow me,’ I tell him.

He chuckles, thinking it a joke. He turns to look at me. His face is aged and craggy, toughened by the wind and sun and salt. Nothing like my husband.

‘Have you tried?’ I ask him.

‘Once or twice,’ he admits with a frown and a shrug. ‘Never worked.’

‘I’ve never tried,’ I tell him. ‘I knew, the moment my home was lost to me.’

‘Want to tell me about it?’

I search the man’s face for motive, but find nothing. What would I tell him? The truth?

‘My husband was murdered,’ I begin.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says with a frown.

‘It was his own fault,’ I say. ‘He betrayed very powerful men and they took their revenge.’

‘I see,’ he says, clearly unsure of how to react. Not the story he was expecting, perhaps?

‘The true tragedy is my daughters,’ I tell him, holding out my hand for one of them to perch, and I stroke her feathers, holding her close to my face. ‘They’ve never been the same since.’ I kiss her lightly on the brow.

He has no words for me this time. He stares at my daughter, frowning. I lift my hand, and she rises back to join her sisters in their eternal circling.

The captain and I both turn back to the stars. After a very long moment, he says, ‘I hope, someday, that you and your girls find peace.’

‘Someday,’ I agree, but I don’t believe it. I don’t know what it would take. Three thousand miles and three thousand years from home, if we haven’t found peace yet, we never will.

The Captain stays to watch the stars with me for a few minutes longer, but he is weary and his head droops. Unlike me, he needs sleep. He bids me goodnight, and walks back toward his cabin. I watch the stars, listen to my daughters, and think of home. And I wonder how we can ever find peace.

Listen, Noah’s Wife

Roppotucha Greenberg

He’ll install a foghorn to sound every night. Contain yourself. Slip into the dreams of the river: how it knocked on your window, how the elephants’ trunks stretched above the waves, and the last helicopters hummed and gulped and mourned the land. No, you chose not to go into the ark, and rightly so. But you remember how it was built, every timber frame and righteous prayer. How YouTube spoke from on high, and he listened, but not to you. And all the pipes of the house agreed and burst. And you made clumsy footprints on the lino and let the tap drip.

Up in the green water, he’ll complain that you never kept the Lego tidy. They’re using it to patch up the ship every time another animal escapes. They’re down to bits with wheels, ice-creams, and the mysterious ones with playdough in the bumps. It’s lopsided, trying too hard, more submarine than ark really. Your giant face is below them, the torrents above, all the birds are cooing, and the dishes are piling up. You still want to help? He still wants to save? Soft. Turn your thoughts into jellyfish bubbles.

Other families had it worse. Husbands joining the army, how would you like that? Wives turning into many rhinoceros. But this is home: brackish waters, pasty arguments over newspapers good-only-to-wrap-fish-in, mizzle. And the little shares and likes of other people’s hate, drip-dripping into your marriage. And the day of the bad joke, and the day the TV reared and threatened to swallow its young.

Stay still, let the barnacles rest on your thighs and the octopi snuggle in your hair. Hear the anglerfish speak. Let the small particles of you fall into the bathypelagic zone, like snow. He thinks the flood is real, but it’s only a myth. Dark as myth, dirty as myth, full of drowned fish. It will soon recede, and the new land will rise about you in stiff peaks. And the blank light that coats your world now will shatter into colour.

The Fisherman’s Wife

Linda McMullen

When I met my husband, he was a modest clerk at a promising company. I learned too late that was not the same thing as being a promising clerk at a modest company. Soon after we married, he was dismissed. That’s what he said…

….as if he hadn’t been sacked.

He took up his father’s trade and became a fisherman. I found myself bitterly regretting that I had fallen for his charming words hook, line, and sinker. So, there we were, netting nothing. Living in a piss-pot.

I amassed the leavings from his catch – miniscule shrimp, fish too small to fry – and tossed them in a pot. I added salt, onions, and kitchen-garden herbs, and sold the stock to a restaurant. His fish sales and my earnings just kept us.

One day – amazingly! – my husband caught a fish with the prince’s missing ring in its mouth. The poor dullard wanted to simply return it! I encouraged him – using my wifely wiles – to seek a reward. He resisted. I persisted. He finally agreed. He came home with a few coins and a new fishing net.

Idiot.

I ‘appropriated’ his coins and bought milk, paper, ink, glue, and a pen. I sold the milk to the neighbours for their skinny children. I collected the now-empty bottles and affixed handmade labels: Missus Hannah’s Fish Stock. Then I hiked to the hotel and sold the stock at a tidy profit.

My husband called it dubious.

I called it enterprising.

I bought more milk bottles and sold the milk as before. I labelled them Missus Hannah’s Famous Fish Stock and touted their robust flavour to the overpaid cooks in gentlemen’s kitchens. They were happy to spend a little money to save time. The bottles sold for ten times what the restaurant paid.

My husband said: That’s not right, Hannah.

And I said: If it weren’t worth that, they wouldn’t pay it.

And so my business grew, and I moved us into a cottage at the edge of town. Fish stews were all the rage among the gentry in those days; I hired a boy to walk among the piss-pot neighbours we’d left behind, to swap milk for the fishermen’s remainders. I bought a cauldron. My husband suggested uneasily that my acumen resembled sorcery. I suggested briskly that he take a long stroll off a short pier.

Soon we could afford a proper house, and a plot of land next to it; I grew my own onions and herbs. I built a shed to store the produce and house a kitchen: there, the boy and I could tend several cauldrons at once.

I began producing vegetable stocks, too.

My husband retreated to the piss-pot. He began spreading some wild story that I thought I was greater than God, but, truth be told, I didn’t care. I was quite happy to leave him to flounder.

Ballast

Diana Powell

Let me speak to you about the sea – how I always loved it.

I dressed up in my brother’s clothes to go there.

Took my mother’s shears, and put them to my scalp, and closed the blades to.

Dug up the coin my father stashed for his ale, put it in a purse tied round my waist, then left.

I headed for the nearest port, signed up on the earliest ship. They didn’t look too hard. They wanted hands, even those undersized and smooth. I wondered if there were more like me on board.

There weren’t; not then.

I wondered, too, if I would meet monsters. They were said to live in the farthest reaches, beyond the edge of any map. They had the faces of devils, the might of giants and the ways of foul beasts. I did not expect to see them closer to shore, closer to me.

The sea. I licked my tongue across the rim of it, as soon as I could taste. I clenched my toes in the yielding bottoms of its shallows, before I could walk two steps.

And when I swam out into it, soon after that roiling gait, I felt the welcome of it on my skin. I was born different, my mother always hinted, for I was one of those who kept the caul around me, even after she had pushed me forth. Perhaps it was this that marked me out – floating in the birth-water longer than most, my lungs seasoned to it, my limbs free.

Something else it meant, she said, as she presented me with its desiccated scraps, when I was grown enough for reason – death by drowning would not be my fate.

‘Keep it safe. Or sell it if you need money!’ Our superstitions shifted with the wind and need. Still, I hid it deep, in that leather purse, rather than add its value to my own daily bread or drink. It seemed the right thing to do, considering my destination, my ambition. And yes, when I finally stood on deck in the middle of a distant ocean, and saw how the water there owned a different nature from the one caressing the shore and my body, I gave thanks to the sea gods for it, and any extra charm they might bestow.

And I thought the men around me would be glad, too, if they knew. There was none as superstitious as a sailor, I soon learnt. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought, now that I had eyed the measure of that deep. ‘Let them fear their Jonahs, keep to their lucky days, pray to their favoured saints.’

Yet I laughed to myself over the predilections of such muscle-bound, full-of-themselves creatures that the ‘weaker’ sex must always obey. So much for men.

Men – that brother I’d grown up with, the father who’d sired me – I thought I knew enough of them. But perhaps these sailors were a different caste from those who stayed land-locked and lubberly. A breed with strange ways, as well as those odd, fateful imaginings.

Still, I discovered a fondness for the garments they wore. I liked the hug of the breeches round my legs, dependable, instead of fooling me, like a wayward skirt. I liked the boots, wide and flat, so that my gait was firm and square instead of the dallying mince a woman must dance. Better still, away from land, all footwear was shed, the easier to climb and cling to the slimy deck, rope and masts. I remembered the clenching of my toes in the sand, and felt that freedom again. It was there, too, in the looseness of the smock, letting my skin and lungs breathe. And there was another advantage – how it, together with the jerkin I wore, was a useful shield for the swell of my breasts. Still, there was little enough to hide; I had always been of boyish build. And I used other wiles to aid my disguise – gave myself out as a shy young lad, even a bit slow in the head; excuses to keep to myself. It worked well enough that first voyage, kept on working, even when war came.

A new ship followed, a new captain, a new purpose, sending us back to our own coast. Strange, that the worst weather the sea could offer came to us then.

The storm hit us somewhere off the tip of the land, chaining us to port, instead of easing our fury in the promised fight. Was that it? Was that what the men felt? Some brimming, boiling need, waiting to be assuaged? I knew something of it, of course, with my brother the other side of the bed, the sounds from my father the other side of the curtain. But this…?

I wasn’t with them when they went ashore, claiming the post of watch, as I so often did – another excuse for staying apart. But I saw their return, the women pushed and dragged, heard the cries, guessed the blood. And I saw from their clothing that most were nuns, and learnt from the talk of the pillage of a convent and its nearby church. And I thought I, and they, these Holy ‘Virgins’, had now seen the worst of men. What other horrors could they unleash, after that?

There are as many ways of falling as there are of walking, running, flying.

I saw them all that day. We had set sail, could linger no longer, even though the weather was bleaker still. We were needed for the battle, as if the sea would acquiesce to man’s need. Instead, it rose higher, twisted lower, thrashed deeper than I had ever seen it. And the ship, too low, too heavy in the water, on account of the extra cargo, was happy to sink into it, without protest.

So let me tell you about falling.

They began one by one. Two of the greatest hulks taking an arm each of the fullest woman, as if it were no more than a question of weight, of ballast – the abbess I guessed she must be, on account of that indulgent girth. No matter who, they dragged her to the side, shoving her up, then over. The first… A languid tumble, that one, head over heels; her mind, perhaps, not grasping what was happening to her. So, somehow, in the descent, her bulbous flesh could do what it would never do on land, as if there were something in the air giving spring to her fleshy limbs.

A scramble of arms and legs, the next one, as if she were trying to climb frantically back up an invisible mast, back into the arms of those who had thrown her; those who looked down on her, and laughed.

Some stayed stiff, arms tight to their sides, legs and feet close together, and plummeted like an arrow, hardly furrowing the water beneath. Others curled up, like the baby born too soon I once saw, a sister or brother I should have had.

I thought – They will stop. That’s enough. The load has lightened, surely. The boat has risen in the water.

It was then that I heard the rumour of the men, whittled out between their laughs and their shouts. It was not that the weight was more or that their worth was less than a cask of rum or a sack of grain. No, their fate was sealed simply on account of what they did not conceal in manly clothes, under the protection a charm – their sex; as if the crew had suddenly recalled their strongest superstition – A woman on board brings bad luck to a ship.

I thought – No, you cannot do this. I cannot do this – I must do something. I must call the captain. I must…

What? Declare that I was a woman, too, and had sailed with them in the calmest seas, the best of times?

Instead, I just kept on watching. And they kept on falling.

There was one who hit the side of the ship on the way down – I heard the crack of her head, even above the wind and the waves. I saw the slide of her downwards, and hoped she might be lucky, and had died there and then.

There was another who hit the side gently, and managed somehow to grab the rigging, and haul herself up. I wanted to cheer her on, until I saw the face of the man waiting for her. Then I found myself whispering ‘Go back.’ Wasn’t the fate of the sea better? Wasn’t drowning to be preferred?