The Fish Ladder Read Free Page B

ordering back the waves. Or perhaps it was King Lear. A fighter, against the dying light, the creeping sea. Despite the echo Dungeness seemed far away. Smaller, and harder. There was a softness about this new landscape, a vastness, which I had not anticipated.
    I reached the village of Easington, and the signs for Spurn Point itself. There was a car park, although to use it seemed extravagant, given that there was no traffic, but I did so anyway. Next to the car park was a mobile-home park. I locked the car, went back, checked it. Was irritated with myself for doing so. It was, after all, not yet two in the morning. Who would come here now? I walked through farmland, past a number of houses, and was surprised by how many lights were on. I hadn’t thought the place would be so populated, and had imagined that those who did live here would be sleeping.
    I tried to suppress a panic, a rising fizz of anxiety. I felt sure it was to do with the unexpected proximity of so many other people, and the consequent vulnerability of walking alone out to the point. It was like walking the plank. I had acknowledged the possibility of meeting the odd birdwatcher, though at that time of year, and in a place so remote, I had believed it to be unlikely. And yet, behind the pulled curtains, I felt eyes fixed on television sets, sweating cans of chilled lager warming in the summer night. Young mothers with sleepless children, shift workers, the very old. I sensed their wakefulness.
    Headlights approached: a police Range Rover. It stopped and the occupants – dough-faced, currant-eyed – peered at me; I raised a cautious hand. What were they looking for? Smugglers? Suicides? Vice? They seemed satisfied that I was none of these although did not reciprocate my wave. They drove on, out towards the point.
    Where the arm of sand first lifted out from the body of the land – so that both the river and the sea became visible – there was a collection of prefabricated huts, of corrugated iron and precast concrete. A number of cars were strewn, rather than parked, outside them. There was an old BMW, its chrome lines glinting, its windows misted from within. One of the buildings, a Nissen hut, seemed to have been a café serving visitors to the point, but the signs looked old and abandoned. Yet the cars implied that someone still lived there, that there were other inhabitants of the fringe. My plan had been simply to walk out across the spit, to the tip, where the river met the sea, and then lie down, somewhere beyond the lighthouse, and sleep. I had thought that I could spend the following day there, exploring, absorbing, before going back to Mum’s. But I hadn’t comprehended how little darkness there would be. None, in fact. There had been a shadowing, a filling in, soon after midnight, but since then the sky had gradually lightened. At first dark blue, it was now streaked with lighter bands. It was easy to see the pale curves of sand ahead, the colours slowly emerging, like those in a developing Polaroid. The police passed by again. In just a few minutes they had completed the journey that I had driven through the night to undertake.
     
    I walked over to the river mouth. Its shore was flat and fecund, green marsh, brown mud. There was a popping sound, as though a hundred mouths sucked bull’s-eyes. Marsh gas, I supposed. And the Humber. As wide and real as death. A few miles upstream a single-span suspension bridge joined Lincolnshire with the East Riding of Yorkshire; it was a popular place for suicides. I wondered if any of them floated out this far, had washed up on this shore. I was afraid to look at the water, afraid of what I might see. A bloated dog, pale limbs like chair legs pointing at a sightless sky. Or worse.
    My unease was accentuated by a sound, and one so distinctive that I would have known the place if I were brought back blindfold. It was a deep vibration, a plainsong, a confluence of many voices. At first I thought it was an