The Fish Ladder (7 page)

Mum and Dad had met when they were children. Dad lived in a Cheshire village, defined by a Norman castle, in a community divided by Church and Chapel. Mum lived a couple of miles away, in the industrial township of Runcorn, but they had attended the same primary school. Mum left school at sixteen, and all I really knew about her early life was that she had once run a hundred yards in 11.4 seconds, that her mother was the District Nurse, and that her father had a car with white wall tyres. Most of the stories, although it was Mum who told them to me, were about Dad.

He had proposed to her when he was twenty-four, and Mum was twenty-two, at the top of Tryfan, in Snowdonia. On a clearer day the mountain might just be visible, across the estuary, from the playground where we now found ourselves. Certainly, if you look the other way – north-west from the summit of Tryfan – you can see Liverpool Bay. It is a deceptive and formidable mountain. Mum would tell how she and Dad had skipped up the Heather Terrace, a prettily named, if scant, footpath, through the eponymous heather, that was pocked with steep drops down to the valley. At the summit were two stone monoliths, about ten feet high, known as Adam and Eve. After agreeing to become husband and wife, Mum and Dad had held each other’s hands, and then leapt from one rock to the other, a distance of just over a yard. Then, apparently, they got lost in mist and almost walked off a precipice on their way back down.

I followed Mum’s gaze as she drifted with the swing, now moved only by the breeze. I wondered if she realised that Tryfan was across the estuary. A few summers earlier, at Mum’s request, Rupert and I had carried Dad’s ashes back to the mountain, passing them between us, taking it in turns, and then tipped them out and left them, blowing furiously between Adam and Eve.

When Evie was ready to leave the playground Mum asked if we might visit the Convent. When I first told her that I had found the place by chance, she had simply said, ‘Well, we always knew you were a Catholic,’ and this had silenced any further discussion. This trip to the beach, this picnic engineered by Mum, was something new, and unexpected. We set off in the direction of the house.

The sisters were welcoming, just as before.
You’re the one that was born here? Marie Therese? Come in!
I glanced at Mum but she didn’t react to the use of the discarded name. When Sister Maria explained to Evie that this was my first home, Evie suggested that we all move in. Mum seemed wholly at ease as she chatted and laughed with Sister Maria and the older nuns. They talked about recipes for fruit cake. When it was time for us to go Evie crammed her pockets with biscuits.

Careful directions from Sister Maria brought us to a cemetery. It was within a field, far enough from the sea to prevent the water from permeating the graves. A cluster of yew trees, poisonous to the cattle, creaked safely inside the walls. The sisters’ plot was in the farthest corner, and marked by two large headstones. I scanned the memorial list of names and stopped at
S. Marie Therese Fay, Canoness of the Augustinian Order
. Evie made a shrine from things she had brought from the beach: bottle tops and razor shells, bladderwrack and sea cabbage. Stones. We planted sedum, careful not to crush its squashy leaves and winking suns. We hoped it took. Mum clapped her hands to bring warmth back to her fingers, then took Evie’s hand in her own. The flat sky lightened marginally as the sun slipped beneath the cloud line. We told a decade of the rosary, and then went home.

Notes on
Mersey

Afon Geirch

Evie wiggled a forefinger through the widening gap at the top of the car window. She was striving to point something out to me and she couldn’t express herself fast enough.

‘Look, Mummy! Look!’

Three fox cubs bounced down the hillside, hot loaves knocked out of their tins. As I slowed the car to a stop they righted themselves. A wire fence, tufted with wool, acted as a buffer against a roll into the road. Their faces heaped together, as neat as party sandwiches. After appraising the car and the two of us inside it they circled back where they had come from, ululating, warbling, snout to brush, repeatedly glancing behind them, the next shunting tumble not far off. We marvelled till the cubs were lost – it was over before there had been time to steal a picture – and when they were gone there was just the Jew’s harp buzz of the wind in the grass and the dropping notes of skylarks. We had stopped the car on the natural border to the Llŷn Peninsula in the midst of three peaks known as the Rivals, which gives a combative and brotherly ring to the Anglicisation of Yr Eifl, meaning the strides. Below us, at the bottom of the hill, was Nefyn Bay.

Evie called this place the Misty Moor, after a line in a children’s prayer:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, hold my horse while I leap on, hold him steady, hold him sure, till I win o’er the misty moor
. She called it that because the Rivals were usually covered in cloud, even on the hottest days, though on this day the sky was clear but for the odd tugged wisp smoothed over the tops. The island of Anglesey was visible to the north, Cardigan Bay and the mountains of Mid-Wales to the south, and the Wicklow Mountains, across the sea in Ireland, stretched out like a knotted string on the western horizon. Behind us, to the east, the cantilever of
Yr Eifl’s peaks gated off Snowdonia. Ahead, the road spooled towards the volcanic cone of Garn Fadryn. Somewhere on Garn Fadryn’s flank, very small, not yet visible, was our cottage. The Llŷn Peninsula floated before us, towing its islands with it, the sea and the sky continuous, indistinguishable one from another.

We pulled up outside the cottage, one of four houses on a crossroads. Tony, who lived in the house opposite to ours, waved from the armchair in his glass porch. He spent most of his days, and nights, in this armchair, a tank of oxygen at his side. I was about to speak to him when Evie clambered over the rendered wall on her way to our front door.

‘Be careful!’ The wall had a crack in it from top to bottom and had split into free-standing halves. The pieces gave perceptibly whenever anyone vaulted it. According to Tony it had been like that since the summer of 1984 when, thirteen miles beneath the mountain, the European Plate had eased its position relative to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The subsequent earthquake had measured 5.4 on the Richter Scale and remains the most significant seismic movement on record in the British Isles. It had rattled teacups and crumpled chimneys as far away as Liverpool. There was some debate about whether or not ours was one of them. When I first bought the cottage, which is a traditional two-room bothy, the inglenook fireplace was concreted in. I asked a local builder to try to reveal it and Tony had come over in his vest and slippers to watch the work and have a beer. There was no foundation to the house, only mud beneath black tiles. A few inches below the surface an underground stream ran out from the centre of the fireplace and on through the only bedroom. The stream was vis­­ible, outside, at either end of the cottage, where it ran clear beneath rusted grilles. The newly revealed inglenook and chimneybreast dominated the room.

‘You want to watch that,’ Tony had said. ‘It started shifting after that last rumble. That’s how come it was rendered in.’ Tony leaned against the mantel and gently scratched his belly with the hand that wasn’t holding the bottle. Geraint, the labourer, looked up from the hole that he had dug in the floor. It was filling up with water from the stream, which no longer ran clear. His spade hit something hard. Emlyn, the builder, climbed down into the hole and the two men eased up a pillow of granite from the centre of the fireplace. It belched free of the mud, they curled their arms beneath it, staggered with it, lurched and slipped towards the door, as though carrying a newborn calf. There was an uneasy moment.

‘That’s the foundation stone,’ offered Tony.

‘What?’ asked Emlyn.

‘It’ll fall down now, for sure.’ Tony shifted his footing to get a better look in the hole.

‘You want to mind you don’t fall in,’ Emlyn said. ‘My insurance won’t cover it if you do because you’re not supposed to be here.’

‘Well, I’ll come back when you’ve put the floor in. Thank you for the beer, flower,
Diolch yn faw
r
!’ and with that Tony shuffled out.

The men persevered. Over the next few days they dug a footing, more than two hundred years after the house was raised on the turf from
random rubble
, which is a technical term in the building trade meaning
anything that comes to hand
. They accommodated the stream within a layer of gravel, and a membrane, and covered it all in concrete. They built a wooden cabin bed for me, and a ladder up to the crog-loft for Evie. The chimney was restored and the stream, visible beneath the grilles at the sides of the house, regained its former clarity. The ‘foundation stone’ remains, where it was dropped, in the garden.

I lit a fire. Even though it was June there was a chill to the stones. The house had been empty since Easter. Over lunch we discussed our project, our plan to find the well at the world’s end by following watercourses from the sea to their sources.

‘Can we count the Mersey?’ asked Evie.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it has to be the same river that we follow, as long as we eventually get to an end.’ Evie thought about this, then nodded her agreement. We could count the trip to the Mersey Estuary as an exploration of ‘sea’. Evie wrote an account of the picnic in her journal. She drew a picture of the beach with the Antonys.

‘What should we do next?’ she asked.

‘I think we should follow the river that comes out at Cable Bay,’ I said. ‘We could go now, and see how far we get.’ Evie pressed her lips together. Having just arrived at the cottage she was loath to go out again, but after the two-hour drive from Mum’s I wanted, dearly, to stretch my legs, uncoil my spine. I put some chocolate and water and a couple of apples in a rucksack. The purple-and-white wrapper caught her eye.

‘Can we eat the chocolate now?’ she asked.

‘Let’s have it when we get there.’

‘Can we eat some on the way?’

I glanced at her. ‘How about we open it when we get to the beach?’

Evie slipped down from the table. ‘All right.’

Cable Bay is the nickname given to a curved beach near our home. Its name in Welsh is Abergeirch, which means the mouth of the River Geirch. A rusted metal pipe runs down to the sea, alongside the Afon Geirch, supported on concrete blocks. All kinds of local stories account for the function of the pipe. One of them involves a telephone cable running under the sea to Ireland and it is this that has given the bay its nickname. The place nearest our home where the road meets the sea is called the Bwlch, so that was where we headed for.

Bwlch
means pass, or valley, and it is a natural cut through the sandy cliffs, a place where boats can be ferried from the beach on trailers tugged by tractors. The shelter it gives from the wind makes it a natural oasis and its banks were stacked with montbretia, the orange lilies dancing over pliant, strap-like leaves, racing along the paths like a Pentecost. Lanterns of green and blue hydrangea ballooned against red and purple tutus of fuchsia. Roses made a scaffold for the softer plants and gave them substance against the wind.

The beach was the reason I had bought the cottage in the first place – or rather, Rupert had bought the cottage. It was his extraordinary wedding gift, funded by a film deal from one of his books,
so I will know where to find you when you wander
.

I had first come to the beach when my father was dying. We had planned to come on a family holiday – everyone knew it would be the last – but at the last moment Dad felt he wasn’t well enough. Evie was still a baby, and she and I came anyway. My brother and his family had gone ahead, and Dad had waved us off. His eyes, that were sometimes the colour of slate, on that day shone blue.

‘Goodbye, my darlings!’ He had stood on one leg outside their house, and raised his walking stick in a yogic salute, Mum standing anxiously behind him, her hands hovering at each side of his body. As I turned the car onto the main road I could still see him in the rear-view mirror, wobbling, happy, laughing. His smile seemed to say,
Go on, my darlings: anything is possible!
Yet the reverse had felt true. I had pushed my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose to cover my tears before glancing at Evie. Like Dad, she too was laughing, constricted by the baby seat, her blue anorak with pink roses rucked above the straps where she’d turned to keep his gaze.