Firecrackers, Sea, Fishes

By Beth Hurst

Firecrackers

As we pulled onto the pavement outside our house, I could see our neighbours standing in their driveway. My father shifted in his seat and braked slowly.

"It happened this morning," he said without looking at me. "Michael told me a few weeks ago his dad wouldn't last if he kept drinking like he did." Michael was there with his older, fatter brother, the one my mother sometimes pointed out to me when we walked past the bank. The youngest, Ryan, was there, too. He was only two years above me in school but had moved out of the house a long time ago. He once built a den in his back garden out of linoleum cut-offs, wood planks and a roll of beige carpet. The makeshift lean-to was propped up against the crooked trunk of a tree and smelled like damp. Our gardens were long and thin, with a railway at the bottom behind a high fence. Whenever we felt the low rumble of an approaching train, Ryan would shout "off ground" and we'd clamber onto the nearest wall, bench, or rusted swing, to avoid an uncertain fate. Ryan wouldn't ever let me go in his den, because I was a girl, and girls weren't allowed inside. I climbed over the wall of our adjoining gardens with tears in my eyes and scraped knees. When I told my father, he said to call the boy a troglodyte. Ryan didn't know what the word meant, and neither did I. The den remained hidden from me, an unknown territory concealed behind a spotted piece of discarded kitchen floor.

I wished my father had warned me sooner; I wanted to get out of the car and into our house without them seeing, but it was impossible. The three brothers lingered in the doorway where I was used to seeing their Dad smoking at all hours, wrapped in a silk dressing gown. Now there was a police car parked in the drive. My father told me the ambulance had left an hour ago, empty. I wanted to be told what to do, to be given some word that I didn't understand that I could take to the brothers, as a gift. It seemed too recent for me to say sorry, too fresh, with their father's corpse growing colder in the upstairs bedroom with the curtains closed.

As I got out of the car, Michael smiled and waved, and I nodded in a way I hoped was respectful. I got into the house, sat on my parent's bed, and asked my mother if it felt odd to her that behind the long mirror and thin wall lay our neighbour.

"It's just a body," she said.

Later I watched from my bedroom window as the brothers lit firecrackers at the bottom of their garden. Every so often a late-night train rushed past, illuminating the three men for a few seconds before it was dark once more. They drank cans of beer as they made great banging noises and kept me awake late into the night.

Sea

It comes in waves. Some are smaller, barely lapping at the edge. Others are like that time on Mwnt Beach when I turned my back on the sea (mistake) to say something to my parents. The wave curled over my head because I was only eight years old and small enough that the sea could swallow me whole if it pleased. Like that. The last time the water washed over my toes was on a bus when a text message reminded me of the date. This time, there was traffic leading up to the station. Maybe there was a rugby match on. It was Sunday afternoon, but I didn't notice anyone in striped jerseys munching pasties in the station. I was running. For some reason, my mother rang saying she'd meet me there, but I saw her pulling out of the station and driving in the opposite direction. On the train, I thought about the last time my parents had run up the concrete steps to Platform 2, and I tried to remember where I was going, why I was there so late and why I needed one last hug standing there next to the vending machine, and then the sea came.

Fishes

It isn't something she likes talking about, to be fair. She tries to barely think about it most days, and thankfully it doesn't often come up. She makes small adjustments in her daily life to avoid them altogether. It means a longer route through the Market and a detour around the side by the haberdashery with its wall of different coloured wool. It also means a lonely walk through the Galleries, the old shopping centre that wasn't abandoned exactly when the new improved complex opened, but that slowly decomposed over time. It is a ghostly place of faded signs above empty shops and Victorian architecture, but at least by taking this route, she avoids the smell.

If you ask why she thinks this way she'll eventually admit that the smell is the worst bit, closely followed by the texture of smooth cold scales when they've been kept over ice. The thing is, she can't even remember when fish became this big an issue in her life. It wasn't like she lived close to the ocean. That was perhaps the oddest thing – it wasn't all fish or all the time. She likes to stand in Peter's Chippy and watch the pale fillets dip first in the flour then the batter, looking barely like themselves at all.

She can't pinpoint exactly what it is about fish that puts her off. She's never had food poisoning from bad seafood, and though her Dad used to fish once, he never showed her how the hooks ripped through the cheeks of the unlucky ones who couldn't resist the bright yellow bait. She decided one day on her morning run that she should make a list of things she can and cannot cope with. Fish fingers? Yes, fine. Pictures of fish on the internet? ­Easy. Fish counters, raw fillets and fish tanks should be avoided at all costs. Videos of live Octopuses de-limbed and served still squirming – depends on the day. Some things she had managed to evade for years, so she made a plan to go back and try again, just to see. Her doctor had suggested this immersion as a form of therapy the one time she had attempted to explain her predicament. He'd tried to diagnose her but offered little support apart from the advice to breathe deeply, picture a nice sunny beach (which she'd thought was a silly suggestion as beaches were definitely on the avoid list) and count to ten. She kept this guidance in mind as she turned off her usual running route and followed the canal down to the flash.

Scotsman's Flash would be high on a list entitled ‘places to avoid because of fishy-ness'. The smell of stagnant water that she associated with her fear seemed to float over the surface and into her nostrils. She slowed down to a jog and told herself firmly that this belief was ridiculous. The flashes were just an after-effect of the old industry of the area – the gaping holes left after the mines were shut and those that worked there faded back into the community, coal dust under their fingernails. There was no way that fish could thrive with remnants of colliery waste and ash still present in the water. Despite this fact, she skipped quickly over the wooden slats that connected the large lake to the smaller estuary flashes, in case somehow a fish could leap up from the water and gently slap against her legs.

It was too early for the families who liked to pace the outer edge of the lake. For now, the only visitors were Coot and Tufted Ducks that hid in amongst the water grass. She sat down on a bench with an optimal view of the lake and watched the glittering path the sun made over the surface. What was there to be scared of really? Nothing could touch her here, and any Carp were safely contained in the depths. She thought about the network of tunnels way underneath her feet, and her fears began to feel silly in comparison. What were fish when put next to hours of toil in the darkness, not knowing whether you'd make it to the end of a shift? She imagined an air-door boy opening the trap to a sudden rush of black water, the feeling of being beaten with sharp rock edges, and silky scales slipping past. Paranoia is an exaggerated or unrealistic sense of danger about a situation or object. Her doctor's voice floated past. Remember to breathe first, everything is fine. Everything is fine, she whispered.

The whirlpool inside her head was interrupted by two young boys who scaled the hill to the highest part of the bank surrounding the lake. Her breathing slowed to a steady pace. As they got closer, she saw that they carried a bunch of white flowers. When they got to the top of the cliff, they took off the plastic wrapping and threw the individual stalks down to the water below. They fell gracefully, like divers, then floated on the surface. She counted as they threw them…four, five, six. After a while, all the flowers were swimming in the deep water. The boys stood still for a few minutes in silence, then walked away.

Sure that the boys had disappeared into the back of the housing estate, she walked up to the high point to look down at the flowers. The height was dizzying, and the water beneath her seemed to swirl even though there was barely a breeze across the flash. She picked a dandelion from the grass and let it drop from her hand. It seemed to fall in slow motion, then landed gently. Around it, small circles rippled, like air bubbles from underneath the surface. She felt a twinge at the bottom of her chest. There were worse things to fear.