The Fish Ladder (8 page)

When we had arrived in the Llŷn I was unable to settle. I could see no beauty in anything. The hills were too low, the sea was too grey and the sand was a characterless expanse. The cliffs were unstable. Two hours’ drive away Dad was dying; in a few weeks I would never see him again. Yet I was on holiday, collecting shells.

But despite this the location drew me, and after Dad died I found myself returning. On some days the sea’s surface wrinkled like elephant skin; on others it had the opacity of emulsion paint. Sometimes it was as clear as camomile tea, and Evie and I watched the hard ridges of sand below the water from the tops of the cliffs, pointing out the banks of bladderwrack, blue mussels and barnacle beds. The beach, too, rearranged itself, its skirts lifting to reveal clay, pebbles the size of tennis balls, shark’s eggs, which were really dog-fish spawn, hard rectangular pouches with spiralling tentacles at the corners. Chips of red jasper, fists of granite, a cormorant’s skull, smooth as a pen, a spider crab’s pimpled shell, fishing floats, a knot of polyprop rope.

Once, when the tide was low, we found some big square stones. A fisherman said they were the foundations of a castle. A house, near the place, was known as Hen Blas, which means the old place, or perhaps the old palace, and this seemed to be all that was needed to verify the tale. The fisherman said that a minstrel, on his way to a feast, had been warned by a fairy that he met at Nefyn Fair not to sleep at the castle, so he’d slept under a hedge, had moaned all night, but by dawn all the guests had been murdered, and the minstrel was the only one who was saved. But a few weeks after the fisherman told the story the sand came back and the castle, or jetty, or harbour wall, or whatever it had been, vanished.

One icy March the beach was dotted with clams. They pulled themselves across the frosted sand with a single orange digit. Evie and I followed their monorail tracks, trying to remember the words to ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; shouting sing-song, over the wind. We’d picked them up, and taken them home, and then eaten them, every one.

The beach was a book that fell open. Each visit was a different page. I could not read it, neither could I leave it.

Cable Bay was on the north side of a finger of land, and the two beaches were back to back. ‘Our beach’, as Evie called it, Porth Dinllaen beach, was sheltered, but Cable Bay was hit by northerlies, and was rugged, and rocky. Porth Dinllaen had once been a contender for the location of the Dublin car ferry, but the contract had gone to Holyhead, on Anglesey. The beach, as might be supposed from this, edged a wide natural harbour. There was a pub at the water’s edge, the Ty Coch, meaning the red house, and Evie tugged at my hand as we passed it –
Not now, Mummy!

We looped around the headland, stopping to open the choc­olate, and then clambered down onto a pebbled beach. In years gone by geologists had come from all over the world, as far away as Hawaii, wearing hard hats and dangling silver hammers, and specimen bags.

‘Daddy says it’s got some of the oldest rocks on earth,’ Evie said, as though she had been reading my thoughts.

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I think so. It might have been Daddy. Or it might have been somebody else.’ I smiled, because I’d meant the stones. Folds of rock, red and blue, heaped like futons across the gravel, spilled in a stream from Garn Fadryn’s cone, cooled into blocks by the sea. Or maybe the sea came later. A blue pebble caught my eye; I bent and picked it up. It looked like a beetle with red lines to mark its wings, as though it were crammed with fire; like the tadpoles of glass called Prince Rupert’s drops that explode if you snap their tails. I closed my hand around the stone, its surface so smooth it felt soft. It nestled in my palm.
Basalt
is a satisfying word, glassy and seismic-sounding, and I wondered if it might be the right one. Other rocks rose like giant molars, umber and black, yawning from the beach. I thought about the tectonic plates and the rumble under the ground, 5.4 on the Richter Scale. I glanced in the direction of the hill, as though Garn Fadryn herself might answer.

I lay down on the pebbles and closed my eyes, lulled by the sound of the sea through the stones. Each retreating wave was an apnoeic gasp, gravel lungs filled with water, drowning without panic.

Time held me green and dying,

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

The lines popped out of nowhere. They were by Dylan Thomas. I opened my eyes.

I must have fallen asleep. I raised myself onto my elbows and scanned the beach for Evie, my heart scrunching like a ball of baking foil.

There she was, at the edge of the sea, the yellow smudge of her blonde hair bright against the monochrome shore. She was throwing stones at a piece of driftwood. It was rotted and fragile. She pelted the driftwood until it broke, coming apart in pieces like bread on the water. A few yards beyond her charcoal birds, their blunt wings lifted, heads tilted back, vied for the shrouded sun on a rocky islet. The outline of the cormorants formed a mandorla around Evie; she was illuminated like a medieval saint. The sun was veiled behind a haze of cloud and showed as white as the moon, although the dark stones beneath me held the heat. I was confused by this, the warm stones, and the sun-moon, the time and the season slipping. But then Evie turned and looked for me, the driftwood crusts of no more interest to her, and I raised an arm, and could sense her smile, and suddenly she was running towards me, her head angled down, her arms straight at her sides, the small stones skittering at her feet.

A promontory crowned in sea pinks marked the edge of the beach. Cable Bay was the next inlet. The sea churned and gurgled through uneven channels. So we followed a footpath above a seam of grass in an oblique traverse across the cliff. From the top we were able to follow rough steps down to the river mouth.

At the back of the beach the sea had formed a bank of heaped-up pebbles, and the river pooled behind it, forming a kidney-shaped lagoon. Beyond the pool the Afon Geirch looped tightly between banks and beaches. It meandered through a deep wide gulley, back into the land, with sandy cliffs on either side. Montbretia lined the gulley walls, just as at the Bwlch, but where the sand ran to clay the orange flowers gave way to the first uncurling ferns, heads lifting uncertainly from their nests of bracken like hungry pterodactyl chicks. The rusted pipe, that may or may not have once held a cable, and was more likely to have carried sewerage, maintained a straight course towards the sea, the river winding under it.

At the place where the stream was widest there were stepping stones, although they were so steep, and so smooth, as to be un­­­usable. They looked like tortoises. A few yards beyond them a thatch of phragmites reeds and bulrushes partially concealed the water. Between the rushes and the stepping stones was a wooden footbridge carrying the pilgrims’ path that led to the tip of the peninsula. We stood on the bridge, and peered into the flow, shading our eyes with our hands.

‘Look!’ Evie said. ‘Fishes!’ And there in the darkness were the tails of trout, four of them, all in a row, their position sustained by a ripple of fins, and betrayed by the odd flick of a tail. I turned around and looked upstream and found myself staring at a heron. The fountain of white feathers springing from its breast seemed close enough to touch, its gold eye cold as glass. It was so still it could have been a decoy.

‘Evie,’ I whispered. ‘Look!’ And she gasped, we were all three taken aback, bird and people alike, but the heron had no intention of giving up its place, in thrall to the small fat trout.

We left the bridge and continued upstream. Partly because of the thick vegetation, and partly because of the marshy nature of the riverbed, there was no obvious way along the bank. Keeping the stream to the right, we followed it at a discreet distance, clambering to the top of the gulley, which formed a V-shaped cut in the land. On our side of the stream was a links golf course. Fields fringed the opposite bank. But the path across the golf course veered away from the water and into a sunken footway, a path from a time long before there was a golf course – a green lane, a holloway – spun around with gorse and blackthorn so that it formed a prickly tunnel adjacent to the stream. When we reached the end of the green lane the water was over to our right. At the edge of the golf course was a barbed-wire fence. We turned and went back to the footbridge and tried following the stream on its western bank. The western path went through a farmyard, towards the village of Edern, and again it bent away from the water, which now seemed to form a boundary to the farm, and was fenced in with barbed wire on both its banks. The houses of the village clumped ahead of us. I had read somewhere that Edern was the last village in Britain where fairies were seen. An old lady had apparently left a cake out for them, each week on baking day. She had done this until the 1950s. I started to tell Evie about it.

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes?’ Evie was tired, her face smooth, pale despite the sun, the usual animation of her features still, folded away like birds’ wings. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s go back.’

We retraced our steps, and broke out the remains of the choc­olate, and resolved to try again. We would pick up the stream a bit closer to its source, somewhere on the shoulder of Garn Fadryn. But not today.

As the summer unfolded, this became something of a pattern. We would pick up a river along the coast of the
Llŷn
and follow it as far as we could. But there was always a fence, or a field, or someone’s garden, private land, or a bull: something that could not be easily got around. Several of the rivers were enclosed, like this one, with barbed wire along both banks, so that the riverbed was the only pathway. In other places the fence might cross the stream itself. As the land rose higher water skipped through gullies, boun­cing and slipping over rocks and stones, between banks that grew ever more deeply ferned. Occasionally we came across oases of vegetation, watercress and duckweed, nourished to frenzy by the fertilisers that washed off the land. The streambeds were difficult to ascend safely or with comfort. The enclosure of the land was constant, and uniform, and it forced us to go back, or around. It seemed impossible to trace a watercourse without wire-cutters and secateurs.

‘What are they frightened o
f
?’ Evie asked, and I had no answer for her.

Notes on
Afon Geirch

Ffynnon Fawr

At its western tip the
Llŷn
Peninsula is like a pointing hand; a solitary finger gesticulates a warning against the Irish Sea, at the place where the tides converge, and this place is known as the Swnd, or Sound. Sometimes the sea is calm, but when the tides turn the slabs of water heave alongside one another to create whirlpools and vortices, currents that are legendary. A hill crouches on the south side of the headland, cloaked by heather and stubby gorse that forms a pretty, but prickly, mantle. Below the hill, running to the edge of the land, is an apron of baize-like grass and this flourishes, protected from the worst of the weather, kept short and neat by sheep. In the centre of the green-baize apron is all that remains of St Mary’s Church, now a rectangle of four low banks with a half-moon on one of the shorter walls, a ghost of the semicircular apse, although the whole thing has long since, centuries ago, grassed over. Occasional loose stones spill through the banks and people use them to write their names, or make symbols, or the sign of the cross – the round grey rocks on the short green grass encouraging a game as aimless yet seemingly addictive as the idle rearrangement of fridge magnets.

Each summer our family come to the headland for a picnic, and Evie and her cousins use the almost perfect rectangle for a slightly too large wicket, the natural ha-ha created by the grassed-over walls serving as their boundary. At the edges of the green apron, where the land meets the sea, there are cliffs, striated with red jasper and capped with a yellowish, ochre-coloured crystal, peculiar to this place. The children know to stay well back from the drops. There are no beaches in the immediate vicinity, and on clear days the children perch within the safety of the crags and watch the shifting currents below. Often they see seals. Sometimes they see fishermen checking lobster pots at the base of the cliff. And, almost always, they see the island, Ynys Enlli.

We have never been to the island although we’ve looked at it often. All we know of it is the fin of its mountain, the huddled ruins of its abbey. On rough days we have watched the waves break white as sail sheets against an inchoate shore. On clear days we have seen the sun fall full over its back, bleaching it pale as sea-glass. Once, when the haze was slight, we saw Jules Verne’s green ray, were surprised by it, as a last curve of coloured light became visible in the sea air. It flared, acidic lime, almost fluorescent, for the smallest moment, before the sun dropped into the sea, leaving an unlikely crème de menthe afterglow.