Short Story: Herring

Short Story: Herring

He did all the things he always did in the morning: he closed the door between the kitchen and the hall, left the note for the cleaner beside the ivory elephant on the hall table, straightened the mat before closing the front door behind him. He could hear the city before he saw it; the distant slush of the traffic as it moved in one single river eastwards. It had rained again during the night – everything was clear and shiny. But it was so warm, so strangely warm for December. Nothing like the winters they used to make.

He met one of the assistants leaving the Marine Lab as he approached the steps.

‘Morning, Ron. D’you find the records for me, the ones from 1969?’

‘Yeah, whole box of them in there for you. From before I was born!’

‘No need to rub it in. Tell Trev I’ll be down with the results first thing on Monday. Have yourself a good weekend. What did you say her name was again?’

‘Depends on the mood I’m in. See you next week, Sam.’

The building hummed. He liked having the place to himself at the best of times. He brewed up some tea and stood over at the back window of the tiny library, watching one of the long promontories on which the city was built disappearing under mist. Small wonder his boss’s name for Aberdeen was the Gravestone. The rain was coming in from Norway, from the grey wolf of the North Sea.

And these were its memories, written into the pages of the logbooks in front of him. The records of the movements of herring – their yearning into ancient sea roads that swung them from Spain and up round the west of Ireland into Scottish waters and the North Atlantic, the beginning of the ice. Somewhere under the moiling of that grey mantle of sea the fish still flickered, like one single entity; shoals that shimmered into new directions, new journeys.

He poured out the last of the tea and opened the first of the logbooks. 1969. The figures for the herring puzzled him – they were so low, so strangely low. Had it been particularly cold that year? His sight blurred against the stark white of the paper – he was thinking, remembering. He was taking a microscope to the paper, finding a way inside the grey statistics, to the story itself.

‘You’re not going anywhere without breakfast, Samuel Carter!’

He hunched over the porridge, submissive and reluctant.

‘Alan Benson doesn’t have to eat porridge in the morning, nor Clare Sidbury!’

His mother came clumping though from the kitchen and her blue eyes flashed at him.

‘Well, I don’t say much for their chances in life, that’s all I can say. The British Empire was built on porridge and don’t you forget it!’

The back door rasped open and his father appeared in the frame of it – big, beetroot-cheeked, breath streaming from his mouth in great dragons, and snowflakes twirling behind him, big as cats’ paws.

‘No good. The car’s in the garage for the next fortnight. And there isn’t a road for it to go on anyway – it’s eight inches deep in snow and there’s another bundle of the stuff coming.’

His mother turned the dial of the wireless through hissing, a bit of Brahms, distant German, and someone singing – to the sudden clear English steadiness of the BBC. ‘…parts of the country are so badly affected that all the but the more major routes are closed. In rural Buckinghamshire, two schoolchildren had a narrow escape when a quantity of snow fell on them from a church roof. Rail services have all but ground to a halt across England and Wales and the emergency services have sometimes had to respond to 999 calls on foot…’

His heart sang. Her could feel the happiness in his chest, somewhere just under one of his ribs, to the left. He swallowed the last of his porridge without chewing and looked at his mother triumphantly.

‘That means there’s no school.’

‘That means you can stay at home and help your mother and father.’

‘Ah, let the boy be. Kent won’t be covered in snow again like this before he’s an old man. Is there any bacon in the house, my love?’

His father had bent his head down beneath his mother’s shoulder and she was trying to break away, grumbling. But there was a light Sam hadn’t seen in her eyes before when she turned in his direction.

‘Off you go then. But back by dark, mind. We’re not sending out a search party for you!’

He scraped back his chair and smiled; even the porridge felt good inside him. For a moment they both looked at him from the kitchen, his father’s head still bent low on her shoulder, and they all smiled. Then he went up to the attic for his sledge.

It was buried under boxes and apples and papers and a long roll of dark carpet. But there it was, intact, the sledge his grandfather had made him. He smelled it and it reminded him of a pine forest he’d once stood in – a whole pine forest.

He tried to escape then but his mother would have none of it. There were layers of horrible waterproof things he had to put on, and all of them seemed to have at least a hundred and fifty studs to button. He felt like a snowman by the time he got to the porch, and he banged the door too hard behind him, just to let his mother know how he felt.

He’d never seen snow like it in all his life. It was so amazing he had to stop completely halfway down the track, just to listen. The flakes crackled in the branches of the trees as they fell, hundreds and thousands of them. And there was no sound of the road, nothing at all. It was like years and years ago when the Romans were here, when there were no proper maps, when everything was much bigger, when the world was still undiscovered. When he reached the road it was like a white river. He almost didn’t want to step on it, to spoil it – it was so beautiful. But he had to. He was going somewhere.

Two miles west, the sledge hissing at his back and thudding now and again against the back of his ankles. A robin came down once, landed on a branch not four inches from him, and looked at him with its head on one side. He found footprints crossing the road and stopped to bend to look at them. Deer – and somehow the air was still strong with their scent, with the musky dark brown of their hides. He felt he’d gone a lot further than two miles by the time he reached Wooton. It was still asleep – six cottages lying dormant under their weight of snow, for all the world like six snowballs.

His heart was going faster now, even though he didn’t want it to. He was rehearsing the right words to himself, even though he didn’t want to. It was the last cottage on the left, he’d known that for long enough. What if there was no-one at home? But there was a grey fur of smoke curling from the chimney. Slow down, for pity’s sake, he told himself. What’s wrong with you?

He swallowed hard when he got there and all at once he heard a dog, a dog squealing and yabbering and thumping behind a door. Maybe he should just go back, maybe it would all be much easier…

‘What is it you’re wanting?’ A woman with light brown hair in curlers stuck her head round the door and startled him so much he nearly jumped into the neighbour’s garden.

‘Clare Sidbury!’

I’m actually looking for Clare Sidbury was what he’d wanted to say, damn it. But she vanished and he chewed his bottom lip, rattled a dry conker in the left hand pocket of his jacket. He heard muffled voices. She was most likely saying that of all people she’d hoped it might be the last was Sam Carter…

‘Hi!’

She was looking at him and he felt so small. His mouth was dry, there weren’t going to be any words…

‘Wondered if you might like to go sledging. I just happened to be out this way, but if you’ve other things you have to do…’

‘Yes! Yes, I’d love to. You’ll have to wait for me, though.’

He stood outside for a moment, the door still open. He could hear his heart thudding in his head.

‘Come inside and don’t take the whole lot of us to an early grave,’ Clare’s mother said, and he muttered an apology, thinking she might be really cross. ‘Come in and get warm in the kitchen,’ she went on. ‘And don’t worry about MacTavish, he’d as soon lick you to death as anything. Why don’t you both come in later on and have some supper – it is Sam your name is, isn’t it?’

He nodded and realised she wasn’t angry, not really angry, not the way Mrs Henry from maths could be.

‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice croaky. ‘That would be lovely.’

She smiled. ‘All right then. You stand here and melt a minute while Clare gets ready.’

There was something funny about her voice, he thought, something he couldn’t work out. He looked round the kitchen and suddenly caught sight of a collie, lying with its head on its paws and looking at him with unblinking blue eyes. There was a cuckoo clock on the far wall, clacking away loudly. He caught sight of his boots; saw there was a guilty ring of water round them. He was like a snowman.

They left in the end and the snow seemed heavier than ever. He felt so happy he thought his chest was going to burst.

‘My dad says it’ll snow like this for another week,’ Clare said. She was wearing a bright red hat like a holly berry and under it her face was shiny and showed just and no more the dark braids of her hair. He caught the scent of her as she brushed against him and it made him feel all strange and dizzy.

‘Race you to the top of the hill!’ she exclaimed, and jogged his elbow.

They ended up in a heap of breathless laughter, spread-eagled under the snowflakes. When they got up they sat still for a moment, close together, looking at the patchwork pattern of the fields to the edges of the sky.

‘You can see the whole of England,’ she breathed, and he believed her at that moment – he was sure she must be right.

Then they got onto the sledge, Sam at the front and she behind. Her hands held round his waist and for a second, the flicker of a second, he couldn’t catch his breath. Her arms were holding him.

‘Ready?’ he whispered at last, and he felt her head nodding behind him.

‘Ready.’

They didn’t go fast because the snow was too deep, but that didn’t matter. It was just right; they veered off to the left through low trees and went round in a curve. A flock of birds with red wings rose up in front of them and flickered into the distance. Sam felt the breeze on his face and at last they were going straight; the sledge went over a bump and Clare’s hands held tighter. He wanted this never to end; he wanted it to last forever and ever. One last curve down to the top of the field and they got up, breathless and happy, their faces shining.

‘I’ve never sledged before,’ she said, looking right at him.

They stayed until they were too tired to climb the hill another time. They stayed until the grey skies were above them and the snow stopped falling and the wind died completely. Somewhere very far away one single star crackled and sparked like a precious stone. Sam thought that if he were to hold his breath he’d be able to hear a pin drop in Moscow.

‘Let’s go home,’ Clare said, and she reached out to hold his hand.

They walked like that the whole way back, until they were close to her house. The cottages shone through the trees in a sparkling of white lights. They hadn’t said a word the whole way back, but it didn’t matter. It had been a good silence, a silence they understood, a silence that meant more than many words.

And when they went inside the whole house was full of the scent of something, something wonderful he’s never smelled before. Clare’s mother must have seen the look on his face.

‘Herrings in oatmeal!’ she exclaimed, her eyes crinkling with merriment. ‘Just the way we make them up in the north-east of Scotland!’

And Clare squeezed his hand and smiled at him, and shook her hair free. It was as though it was filled with millions of diamonds…

He leaned upwards from the logbook, his eyes blurred. The rain had reached the Marine Lab, was tapping its fingers against the glass. The whole promontory would soon be lost under mist.

Where do things go when they’re gone? he thought.