Chapters (50)
When the military had first come to claim and divide the sea, her father and some of the other fishermen had tried to tell them that the fish moved with the seasons and that leaving them a portion meant nothing. They had claimed to understand, before imposing stricter and stricter conditions, frustrating the fishermen into giving up. Their number dwindled after that, the community scattered. The carcass of her father’s boat lay in the boatshed, under a tarpaulin skin. Her brother forced to work on other people’s boats on the north coast for weeks at a time before returning home exhausted, only to leave again after just a few days.
Nefyn’s eyes flickered upwards to the cliff and the cottage as a light pierced the gloom. Their home clung precariously to the cliff edge above, the sea digging deeper, undercutting the land on which it stood, tipping the house slowly towards it. Her brother would be up now, moving around in the cold, pulling his jumper over his head. Making tea.
Nefyn stopped, her dark eyes scanning the strandline, the daylight growing around her. She bent to pick up an urchin, its paper-thin form luminous in the blue light. She examined it in her fingers for a moment. Its surface was punctured with lines of perforations like the plates of a skull. Her father would say that the tide took the foolish, the reckless and the unlucky. Nefyn had often wondered which one he had been. Her mother had already left them by then, before her father had ventured out to sea on the cusp of a storm. He was found underneath his boat, his body tangled in fishing lines, blue and bloated, his breath whisked away. Perhaps he had been unlucky, she considered, or perhaps the sea had tried to show him all she could and had finally run out of patience.
There was nothing she wanted this morning. She dropped the urchin, listened as it rolled away. She could hear the tide turning, the undercurrents quickening. The sugar kelp which she hung in a ruffled belt on the cottage door had not dried out in days, meaning that this stillness could not last much longer. Something was changing. She could feel it. She turned and walked back up to the cottage, knowing that a storm was near.